Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time Part 4

On their return to Orkney, Paul asked the Archbishop of York to consecrate a cleric of Orkney as Bishop in Orkney, and the two brothers ruled harmoniously there until their sons Hakon on the one hand and Magnus and Erling on the other, who had been engaged in Viking cruises together as boys, grew up and quarrelled, and, as is usual, drew their fathers into the strife. This strife was provoked by Hakon, and apparently lasted for many years,[8] Erlend supporting his own sons, and driving Hakon abroad to Norway about the year 1090.

Neither Paul nor Erlend seems to have been much in Sutherland or Caithness, in which the representatives of the Gaelic Maormors or Chiefs probably regained power, especially the family of Moddan, and extended their territories.

Meantime King Magnus Barelegs[9] of Norway, instigated by Hakon, and taking advantage of the contentions between 1093 and 1098 of the various claimants of the Scottish crown, Donald Bane (whom he supported), Duncan II, and Edgar, had made his several expeditions, in the closing years of the eleventh century, against the western islands and coasts of Scotland and Wales. In the battle of the Menai Straits in 1098 we find that he had with him young Hakon Paulson, and also Erling and Magnus, Jarl Erlend's sons, though Magnus, who had repented of his early Viking ways, after declining to take part in the fight against an enemy with whom he had no quarrel, escaped to the Scottish court.[10] In 1098 King Magnus had deposed and carried off Jarls Paul and Erlend to Norway, where they died soon after; and in the meantime he had appointed his own son, Sigurd, to be ruler of Orkney and Shetland in their place.[11] But on King Magnus' death, during his later expedition to Ireland, where Erling Erlendson probably also fell, Prince Sigurd had to quit Orkney in order to ascend the Norwegian throne, leaving the jarldom vacant for the two cousins, Hakon Paulson and Magnus Erlendson. The latter appears to have stayed for some years at the Scottish Court and afterwards with a bishop in Wales, and again in Scotland, but on hearing of his father's death, went to Caithness, where he was well received and was chosen and honoured with the t.i.tle of "earl" about 1103. A winter or two after King Magnus' death, or about 1105, Hakon came back from Norway with the t.i.tle of Jarl, seized Orkney, and slew the king of Norway's steward, who was protecting Magnus' share, which after a time Magnus claimed, only to find that Hakon had prepared a force to dispute his rights. Hakon agreed, however, to give up his claims to Magnus'

half share if Magnus should obtain a grant of it from the Norwegian king.[12] King Eystein about 1106 gave him this moiety and the t.i.tle of Jarl; and the two cousins lived in amity for "many winters,"

joining their forces and fighting and killing Dufnjal,[13] who was one degree further off than their first cousin, and killing Thorbjorn at Burrafirth in Unst in Shetland "for good cause." Magnus then married, probably about 1107, "a high-born lady, and the purest maid of the n.o.blest stock of Scotland's chiefs, living with her ten winters" as a maiden. After "some winters" evil-minded men set about spoiling the friends.h.i.+p of the jarls, and Hakon again seized Magnus' share; whereupon the latter went to the court of Henry I of England, where he appears to have charmed everyone, and to have spent a year, probably 1111, in which Hakon seized all Orkney, and also Caithness, which then included Sutherland, and laid them under his rule with robbery and wantonness. Leaving Caithness, Hakon at once went to attack Magnus in Orkney where he had landed; but the "good men" intervened, and an equal division of Orkney and Shetland and Caithness was made between the jarls. After some winters, however, they met in battle array in Mainland, and the fight was again stopped by the princ.i.p.al men on either side in their own interest, the final settlement being postponed until a meeting, which was to take place in Egilsay in the next spring, Magnus arrived first at the meeting-place with the small following of two s.h.i.+ps agreed upon, but Hakon came later in seven or eight s.h.i.+ps with a great force, and, after those present had refused to let both come away alive, Magnus was treacherously murdered under Hakon's orders by Hakon's cook on the 16th of April 1116. The dead jarl's mother, Thora, had prepared a feast in Paplay to celebrate the reconciliation of the two cousins, which, notwithstanding the murder, Hakon attended. After the banquet the bereaved mother begged her son's corpse for burial in holy ground, and obtained it from the drunken earl after some difficulty and buried it in Christ's Kirk at Birsay.

Twenty-one years after, on the 13th December 1137, Jarl Magnus' relics were brought[14] to St. Magnus' Cathedral at Kirkwall.

After making due allowance for the legends which generally cl.u.s.ter round a saint or jarl, and grow with time, and for the desire for dramatic contrast and effect, we must give credit to the writer of the _Orkneyinga Saga_, probably the Orkney Bishop Bjarni,[15] for the vividness and simplicity of his account of St. Magnus' life and of the two most striking episodes in it--his moral courage as a non-combatant in the battle of Menai Straits, and his saintly forgiveness of his murderers in his death-scene on Egilsay; and we must hold him worthy alike of his aureole and of the n.o.ble Norman cathedral afterwards erected in his memory by his nephew, St. Ragnvald Jarl, at Kirkwall, which took the place of Thorfinn's church at Birsay as the seat of the Orkney bishopric. Magnus, it seems, was all through a.s.sisted by the Scottish king, and favoured by the Caithness folk,[16] yet the Saga jealously claims him as "the Isle-earl,"[17] and adds the following description of him:--

"He was the most peerless of men, tall of growth, manly, and lively of look, virtuous in his ways, fortunate in fight, a sage in wit, ready-tongued and lordly-minded, lavish of money and high spirited, quick of counsel, and more beloved of his friends than any man; blithe and of kind speech to wise and good men, but hard and unsparing against robbers and sea-rovers; he let many men be slain who harried the freemen and land folk; he made murderers and thieves be taken, and visited as well on the powerful as on the weak robberies and thieveries and all ill-deeds. He was no favourer of his friends in his judgments, for he valued more G.o.dly justice than the distinctions of rank. He was open-handed to chiefs and powerful men, but still he ever showed most care for poor men. In all things he kept straitly G.o.d's commandments."

As for Hakon, his cousin Magnus' death without issue left him sole Jarl, "and he made all men take an oath to him who had before served Earl Magnus. But some winters after, Hakon ... fared south to Rome, and to Jerusalem, whence he sought the halidoms, and bathed in the river Jordan, as is palmer's wont.[18] And on his return he became a good ruler, and kept his realm well at peace." He probably then built the round church at Orphir in Mainland of Orkney, the only Templar Church in Scotland.

By Helga, Moddan's daughter, whom he never married, Hakon had a son Harald Slettmali (smooth-talker, or glib of speech), and two daughters, Ingibiorg and Margret. Ingibiorg afterwards married Olaf Bitling, king of the Sudreys; and Ragnvald Gudrodson, the great Viking, was of her line, and, as we shall see, in 1200 or thereabouts, had the Caithness earldom conferred upon him for a short time. To Margret we shall return later. By a lawful wife Hakon had another son, Paul the Silent, and it seems certain that Paul was not by the same mother as Margret or Harald Slettmali, and that Paul's mother was not of Moddan's family.

Moddan, Earl of Caithness, was killed in 1040. His mother, daughter of Bethoc, must have been born after 1002. If she was married at seventeen, her son Earl Moddan could not have been more than twenty when killed in 1040, and any son of his must have been born by 1041 at latest. This son may have been Moddan in Dale. Dale was the valley of the upper Thurso River, the only great valley of Caithness, and the Saga states as follows:--

Moddan[19] "then dwelt in Dale in Caithness, a man of rank and very wealthy," and "his son Ottar was jarl in Thurso." Frakark, a daughter of Moddan in Dale, was the wife of Liot Nidingr, or the Dastard, a Sudrland chief, and during the half century after Thorfinn's death Moddan's family seems to have owned much of Caithness and Sutherland, where the Norse steadily lost their hold. We may be sure also that the Celt always kept his land, if he could, or, if he lost it, regained it as soon as he could. Amongst its members this family probably held all the hills and upper parts of the valleys of Strathnavern, Sutherland and Ness at this time, and, from a centre on the low-lying land at the head waters of the Naver, Helmsdale and Thurso rivers, kept on pressing their more Norse neighbours steadily outwards and eastwards.

Shortly after Hakon's death in 1123, King Alexander I and his brother, David I, began to organise the Catholic Church in Scotland, and also to introduce feudalism. Even in the north of Scotland, between the years 1107 and 1153 they founded monasteries and bishoprics, and introduced Norman knights and barons holding land by feudal service from the Crown. Long thwarted in their policy by Moray and its Pictish maormors, who claimed even the throne itself, these two kings pushed their authority, by organisation and conquest, more and more towards the north. Alexander I founded the Bishoprics of St. Andrew's, Dunkeld, and Moray in 1107, and the Monastery of Scone, afterwards intimately connected with Kildonan in Sutherland, in 1113 or 1114.

David I, that "sair sanct to the croun," who succeeded in 1124, founded the Bishoprics of Ross and of Caithness in 1128 or 1130, and of Aberdeen in 1137, and endowed them with lands. The same king[20]

between 1140 and 1145 issued a mandate "to Reinwald Earl of Orkney and to the Earl and all the men of substance of Caithness and Orkney to love and maintain free from injury the monks of Durnach and their men and property," and also in some year between 1145 and 1153, he granted Hoctor Common[21] near Durnach, to Andrew, Bishop of Caithness, whose see was then well established there, and he spent the summer of 1150, while he was superintending the building of the Cistercian abbey of Kinloss, in the neighbouring Castle of Duffus, whose ruins still stand, with Freskyn de Moravia, the first known ancestor of the Earls of Sutherland.[22]

Freskyn, probably about 1130[23] or earlier, had built this castle on the northern estate, comprising the parish of Spynie near Elgin and other extensive lands in Moray, which had been given to him in addition to his southern territories of Strabrock, now Uphall and Broxburn[24] in Linlithgows.h.i.+re, which he already held from the Scottish king. Freskyn was thus no Fleming, but a lowland Pict or Scot, as the tradition of his house maintains,[25] and he was a common ancestor of the great Scottish families of Atholl, Bothwell, Sutherland, and probably Douglas. No member of the Freskyn family is ever styled "Flandrensis" in any writ.

We find in the extreme north of Scotland, in the first half of the twelfth century, apart from the Mackays, three leading families with great followings, which were destined to play an important part in the future government of Sutherland and Caithness, and with which we shall have to deal in detail later on.

First, there was the family of the so-called Norse jarls, descended in twin strains from Paul and Erlend, Thorfinn's sons, owing allegiance to the Norwegian crown in respect of Orkney and Shetland and also holding the earldom of Caithness in moieties or in entirety, nominally from the Scottish king. Secondly, we have the family of Moddan, Celtic earls or maormors, with extensive territories held under the kings of Alban and Scotland for many centuries before this time, but dispossessed in part by the Norse. Thirdly, we have the family of Freskyn de Moravia then established at Strabrock in Linlithgows.h.i.+re, who about 1120 or 1130 received, for his loyalty and services, extensive lands at Duffus and elsewhere in Morays.h.i.+re, and probably about 1196 the lands in south Caithness known as Sudrland or Sutherland, from the Scottish crown.

Of this third line of De Moravias or Morays, two distinct branches settled north of the Oykel. First, we have Hugo Freskyn, son, it is said, but, as we shall see, really grandson, of the original Freskyn and son of Freskyn's elder or eldest son William.[26] This William no doubt fought for, and may, or may not, have held land in Sutherland, but his son Hugo certainly had all Sutherland properly so called, that is, Sudrland, or the Southland of Caithness comprising the parishes of Creich, Dornoch, Rogart, Kilmalie (afterwards Golspie), Clyne, Loth, and most of Lairg and Kildonan,[27] formally granted to him, and he held also the Duffus Estates in Moray, by sea only thirty miles south of Dunrobin.

The second branch was that of the younger Freskin de Moravia, great-great-grandson of the original Freskyn,[28] and ancestor of the Lords of Duffus, who obtained lands, which were mainly in modern Caithness, and also in the upper portion of the valley of the Naver and the valley of Coire-na-fearn in Strathnavern, by marriage with the Lady Johanna of Strathnaver about 1250.[29] This latter portion was immediately north of the land granted to Hugo Freskyn; and the Caithness portion of Johanna's lands marched with Hugo's land on its eastern boundary. Nor must we forget that a large area of the modern county of Sutherland, consisting of part of the present parishes of Eddrachilles and Durness and some part of Tongue and Farr in Strathnavern, was constantly used as a refuge by Pictish refugees of the race of MacHeth or MacAoidh, displaced and frequently driven forth from Moray after the b.l.o.o.d.y defeat of Stracathro in 1130 and in later rebellions as part of the policy of the Scottish kings, and first known as the race of Morgan and then to us as the Clan Mackay.

They chose, indeed, for their refuge and ultimately for their settlements a rugged and sterile land, to which their original t.i.tle was no charter, but their swords. Difficulties, it is said, make character, and nowhere is this proverbial saying better ill.u.s.trated and proved than in the Reay country by its men and women. They have given their own and other countries many fine regiments and distinguished generals and statesmen, and none more so than the late Lord Reay. Their history is to be found in the _Book of Mackay_, a piece of good pioneer work from original doc.u.ments by the late Mr.

Angus Mackay, and also in his unfortunately unfinished _Province of Cat_.

Yet another family, of Norse and Viking lineage, which was settled in Orkney from the earliest Norse times and afterwards in Caithness and Sutherland, was that of the Gunns, who were descended in the male line from Sweyn Asleifarson the great Viking, and on the female side from the line of Paul, and later were by marriage connected with the Moddan clan and with the line of Erlend. They have for nine centuries lived and still live in Sutherland and Caithness, and have been noted alike for the beauty of their women, and for the high attainments and character and the distinction of their men, particularly in the art of war, both by land and sea.

Their descent from Jarl Paul and Sweyn is clear in the Sagas as far as Snaekoll Gunnison and no further. It was as follows:--Paul Thorfinnson had four daughters, of whom the third was Herbjorg, who had a daughter Sigrid, who in turn had a daughter Herbjorg, who married Kolbein Hruga. One of their sons was Bishop Bjarni and their youngest child was a daughter Frida, who married Andres, Sweyn Asleifarson's son, and their son was Gunni, the father, by Ragnhild, Earl and Jarl Harald Ungi's sister, of Snaekoll Gunnison. We suggest later that Snaekoll Gunnison was the father, before his flight to Norway, of a daughter, Johanna of Strathnaver, who inherited the Moddan and Erlend estates, or that she was otherwise Ragnhild's heiress.

The male line of the Gunns, according to a pedigree which the writer has seen, was continued after his flight by Snaekoll who, it is stated, had a son, Ottar, living in 1280. But after Snaekoll's flight his right to succeed to Ragnhild's estates was doubtless forfeited, and they were granted on his father's and mother's death to Johanna on her marriage with Freskin de Moravia of Duffus about 1245 or later, before Ottar's birth.

With the descent of the Gunns in the male line downwards we are not here concerned. But Snaekoll's forfeiture probably cost their male line the Moddan and Erlend lands, which were granted to Johanna of Strathnaver in Snaekoll's absence abroad.

CHAPTER VI.

_The Moddan Family--Jarls Harald and Paul and Ragnvald._

From the short forecast of the future given above, let us turn back to the point whence we digressed, namely the year 1123, when Jarl Hakon Paulson died at the close of the reign of Alexander I of Scotland.

Jarl Hakon was succeeded by his sons, Harald the Glib (Slettmali) and Paul the Silent (Umalgi). Jarl Paul lived mainly in Orkney, while Jarl Harald "was seated in Sutherland, and held Caithness from the Scot king" David I, who was crowned in 1124.[1] All Harald's sympathies seem to have been Scottish, and he was born, bred, and brought up among Scotsmen, or Picts, probably in North Kildonan. He was always there with Frakark, daughter of Moddan in Dale, then a widow, her husband Liot Nidingr or the Dastard being dead; and Frakark and her sister Helga, Jarl Hakon's mistress, "had a great share in ruling the land"; while Audhild, daughter of Thorleif, Frakark's sister, also lived with Frakark,[2] and was the mistress at this time of one of the strangest characters in the Saga, Sigurd Slembi-diakn, or the Sham-deacon. Hakon's son Paul being, as appears certain, by a different mother not of the Moddan line, Frakark and Helga aimed at obtaining the whole jarldom of Orkney for Harald, Helga's son by Earl Hakon. With the object of getting rid of Paul, they went over with Sigurd Slembi-diakn to Orphir in Orkney; and we have the story of the poisoned s.h.i.+rt,[3] made there by Frakark and Helga, and by them intended for Paul, but put on, in spite of their expostulations and entreaties, by Harald, who died of its poison, leaving, however, one son, Erlend, then an infant.

After this, Jarl Paul banished these ladies from Orkney about 1127, and they "fared away with all their kith and kin, first to Caithness, and then up into Sutherland to those homesteads which Frakark owned there,"[4] and tradition[5] locates her residence at Shenachu or Carn Shuin, on the east side of the River Helmsdale near Kinbrace above the road. Possibly, however, they lived at Borrobol, the "Castle Farm";[6]

and there "there were brought up by Frakark Margret, Earl Hakon's daughter, and Helga, Moddan's daughter," and also Eric Stagbrellir, Frakark's grandnephew, and son of her niece Audhild by Eric Streita, a Norseman, as well as Olvir Rosta and Thorbiorn Klerk, both Frakark's grandsons, all of whom come prominently into our story. Audhild's son, Eric Stagbrellir, in the end was the survivor of these, as well as of all males of the Moddan line, and ultimately we hear of no descendants in Cat of any of them save of Eric, and Eric's marriage with Ingigerd, St. Ragnvald Jarl's only child, is the link between the line of Erlend and that of Moddan, which united the Erlend and Moddan estates.

Of the line of Thorfinn we already know the royal origin and descent from Malcolm II's third daughter.

Of the Moddan line the Saga says[7]--"These men were all of great family and great for their own sakes, and they all thought they had a great claim in the Orkneys to those realms which their kinsman Earl Harald (Slettmali) had owned. The brothers of Frakark were Angus of the open hand, and Earl Ottir in Thurso: he was a man of birth and rank." These children of Moddan were probably of royal lineage or kins.h.i.+p, as Moddan, who had been created Earl of Caithness by King Duncan I, was that king's sister's son, and was probably, as we have seen, their ancestor or kinsman. They were also probably descended more remotely from Moldan, Maormor of Duncansby, a kinsman of Malcolm II, but had all been driven back from the coast, save Earl Ottir, who lived at Thurso, and probably owned its valley up to its source in the Halkirk and Latheron hills.

The death of Harald the Glib by poison left Paul _de facto_ sole jarl of Orkney. We are told[8] that "Paul was a man of very many friends, and no speaker at Things or meetings. He let many other men rule the land with him, was courteous and kind to all the land-folk, liberal of money, and he spared nothing to his friends. He was not fond of war, and sate much in quiet." We may be sure that he was little, if ever, in Sutherland, the country of his enemy Frakark. His rule was, however, destined to be disturbed, on the one hand by the Moddan family's plots, and, on the other hand, by a Norse compet.i.tor for the jarldom, Kali, son of Kol and Gunnhild, Jarl St. Magnus' sister, who had been re-named Ragnvald from his resemblance to the handsome Jarl Ragnvald Brusi's son, and was afterwards designated Jarl of Orkney by King Sigurd of Norway, as the representative of the line of Erlend, Thorfinn's son.

With Jarl Ragnvald, Jarl St. Magnus' sequel in estate, and himself afterwards St. Ragnvald, who was much in Caithness and Sutherland, and seems to have held and acquired considerable estates there, begins what is practically a new Saga, which may be styled "The Story of Ragnvald, and of Sweyn" the great Viking. Of these two we have perhaps the finest and most vividly painted pictures of the _Orkneyinga Saga_, full of dramatic touches, full, too, of interesting historical detail.

First, we have a portrait of the young Ragnvald as Kali Kolson in his youth at Agdir in Norway, with his mother Gunnhild, sister of Jarl St.

Magnus Erlend's son, and his shrewd old father Kol. We are told that Kali was "the most hopeful man" or man of promise, "of middle stature, fine of limb, with light brown hair"; how he "had many friends, and was a more proper man both in body and mind than most of the other men of his time, a good player at draughts, a facile writer of runes, and a reader of books, good at smith's work, ski-ing, shooting, and rowing, and as skilful at song as at the harp."[9]

At the age of fifteen, he traded to Grimsby, where many Norwegians and Orkneymen came, and many from the Hebrides; and here he met Harald Gillikrist, who became his firm friend, and confided in him alone that he, Harald, was the son of King Magnus Barelegs, asking how he would be received by King Sigurd of Norway, and obtaining the diplomatic reply that he would be well received by the king, if others did not spoil his welcome. Then Kali returns to Bergen in 1116, about the time of Jarl Magnus' murder by his cousin Jarl Hakon, and after a friends.h.i.+p and a feud with Jon Peterson, which is amicably settled by the marriage of Jon with Kali's sister Ingirid, and of which the description well ill.u.s.trates the manners and law of the times, is made Jarl Ragnvald of Orkney by King Sigurd; and on that king's death in 1126 he is confirmed in the t.i.tle by his friend King Harald, for whom he fought in the battle for the throne at Floruvoe near Bergen, when King Magnus was captured, maimed, and deposed by Harald in 1135.

Jarl Paul, however, refused to part with half the isles; and, acting on Kol's advice, Jarl Ragnvald's messengers apply for aid in obtaining it to Frakark and her grandson Olvir Rosta in Kildonan, and offer them Paul's half share if they will help Ragnvald to secure his half. Frakark, having previously arranged that her niece Margret, the daughter of Earl Hakon and Helga, should marry Earl Maddad of Athole, second cousin to David I, as his second wife, thought that Orkney might be had, with half the jarldom and all Caithness, for Margret's son Harold Maddadson, then an infant in arms.

Ragnvald and Frakark then made common cause.[10] But in 1136 Paul defeated Frakark's s.h.i.+ps in a sea fight off Tankerness in Deer Sound in Orkney, and immediately afterwards seized Jarl Ragnvald's fleet in Yell Sound in Shetland, though Ragnvald and his men escaped to Norway in merchant vessels, to return later on.[11]

Meantime Olvir Rosta, Frakark's grandson, who had been stunned and nearly drowned in the sea fight at Tankerness, in which Sweyn's and Gunni's father, Olaf Hrolf's son, had aided Jarl Paul, burned Olaf alive in his home at Duncansby, Asleif, Olaf's wife, escaping only because she was absent at the time. Further, Valthiof, Sweyn's elder brother, was drowned in the roost of the West-firth, while rowing south to Jarl Paul's Yule Feast. Sweyn Asleifarson, as he was ever afterwards called, then went to Paul's Hall at Orphir to complain of Olvir Rosta. The news of his brother's death, which arrived during the feast, was considerately withheld from him, and he was greatly honoured there; but he roused the jarl's anger by slaying Sweyn Breast-rope, the jarl's forecastle-man, at Orphir, not indeed so much for the murder, as because Sweyn had fled and did not come to submit himself after it to the jarl, and so offended him.[12]

Then follow the stories, well worth reading in the Saga itself, of the raising and lowering of the sails on Ragnvald's s.h.i.+ps and of the mutiny of Paul's followers, and of the dowsing of the beacons on the Fair Isle by Uni, Ragnvald's ally, of Ragnvald's landing in Westray, of his suppression of all opposition to him, of the spies at Paul's Thing, of Sweyn's junction of forces with Ragnvald, of Sweyn's visit to Margret at Athole, and his dramatic kidnapping of Jarl Paul while hunting otters near Westness[13] in the Isle of Rousay, in Orkney, and of the jarl's deportation by Sweyn first to Dufeyra and thence via Ekkjals-bakki[14] to Athole to his sister Margret, who receives him with the utmost show of cordiality, and finally of Paul's abdication in favour of Margret's second son, Harold Maddadson, then a boy of five years of age, with the instructions to Sweyn to tell the Orkneymen that Paul himself was blinded, or, worse still, maimed, so that his friends should not seek him out, and restore him to his jarldom.[15] Such is one version of the story; the other is a more sinister tale, that his half-sister Margret cast Jarl Paul into a dungeon and had him murdered, and, so far as the Saga relates, he left no issue.

Sweyn then returns to Orkney and tells his version of the affair to the bishop, the bishop to Ragnvald, and Ragnvald to the "good men" or _lendirmen_ of Orkney, who express themselves satisfied, and Ragnvald builds the Cathedral he had vowed to St. Magnus in Kirkwall--a strange medley of craftiness, murder, and piety.

Next we have the vivid scene[16] of the arrival from Athole at Knarstead near Scapa, in his blue cope and quaintly cut beard, on a fine winter's day, of John, Bishop, probably of Glasgow, and formerly tutor to King David of Scotland, on whom Jarl Ragnvald waits like a page, and who pa.s.ses on to Egilsay to Bishop William the Old; and the two clerics propose to Jarl Ragnvald that Harald Maddadson, who had already been created sole Earl of Caithness, shall have Paul Thorfinnson's half of the Orkney jarldom, an arrangement which Ragnvald accepts, and which is ratified by the people of Orkney and of Caithness. In due course the boy arrives in 1139, and the tutor selected for him is, of all others, Frakark's grandson, Thorbiorn Klerk, who had married Sweyn Asleifarson's sister, Ingirid, and who was "one of the boldest of men, and the most unfair, overbearing man in most things,"[17] differing indeed but little in character from Sweyn himself "who was a wise man and foresighted about many things; and an unfair overbearing man and reckless towards others," while they were both said to be men "of power and weight," and at this time they were fast friends.

Then follows the story of Frakark's Burning, one of the most purely Sutherland tales in the whole Saga.[18]

Sweyn, to avenge on that lady and her grandson, Olvir Rosta, the burning of his own father Olaf and of his house in Duncansby, openly asked Jarl Ragnvald for "two s.h.i.+ps well fitted and manned," sailed to the Moray Firth, the Breithifiorthr or Broadfirth, as it was then called, "and took the north-west wind to Dufeyra, a market town in Scotland. Thence he sailed into the land along the sh.o.r.e of Moray and to Ekkjals-bakki. Thence he fared next of all to Athole to Earl Maddad, and lay at the place called Elgin and obtained guides, who knew the paths over fells and wastes whither he wished to go.[19]

Thence he fared the upper way over fells and woods, above all places where men dwelt, and came out in Strath Helmsdale near the middle of Sutherland. But Olvir and his men had scouts out everywhere where they thought that strife was to be looked for from the Orkneys; but in this way they did not look for warriors. So they were not ware of the host, before Sweyn and his men had come to the slope at the back of Frakark's homestead. There came against them Olvir the Unruly with sixty men; then they fell to battle at once, and there was a short struggle. Olvir and his men gave way towards the homestead; for they could not get to the wood. Then there was a great slaughter of men, but Olvir fled away up to Helmsdale Water and swam across the river and so up on to the fell: and thence he fared to Skotland's Firth,[20]

and so out to the Southern Isles. And he is out of the story. But when Olvir drew off, Sweyn and his men fared straight up to the house, and plundered it of everything; but, after that, they burnt the homestead and all those men and women who were inside it. And there Frakark lost her life. Sweyn and his men did there the greatest harm in Sutherland, ere they fared to their s.h.i.+ps."

Such is this Sutherland tale of Sweyn. According to the current notions of blood feud, he merely discharged the solemn duty of avenging his father's burning and death by a like burning and slaying of the household of his father's murderers. But his acts were wholly unjustifiable by the law of the time, as he had already accepted an atonement by were-geld from Earl Ottar.

After a round of harrying and piracy, especially in Sutherland, no doubt among the Moddan clan, Sweyn was heartily welcomed home by Jarl Ragnvald, from whom he immediately obtained another fleet for another set of raids on Wales, the coasts of the Bristol Channel and the Scilly Isles. His murder of Sweyn Breast-rope was committed just after an adjournment of the feast at Orphir for Nones in the Templar Church there, and Jarl Ragnvald's gift of the s.h.i.+ps for Frakark's punishment was made while the jarl was piously engaged in completing and adorning St. Magnus' Cathedral at Kirkwall.

The strategy leading up to the Burning is characteristic of Sweyn and his stratagems. He _openly_ asks for s.h.i.+ps and sails in them, and thus is expected to land on the coast. But after a purposely devious course, which has puzzled inquirers into the locality of Ekkjals-bakki, he came overland by Oykel and Lairg and Strathnaver or Strathskinsdale, whence he was not looked for.

Thorbiorn Klerk next has his revenges. First he burnt Earl Waltheof (who had slain his father) in Moray, and next he killed two of Sweyn's men who had a.s.sisted in the burning of Thorbiorn's relative, Frakok, or Frakark, in Kildonan. Jarl Ragnvald with difficulty reconciles Thorbiorn and Sweyn, and they start for a joint raid. Soon, however, they squabble over the spoils, and Thorbiorn puts his wife Ingirid, Sweyn's sister, away, a deed that reopened their feud.[21]

For a series of robberies in Caithness, Sweyn is besieged by Jarl Ragnvald in Lambaborg, now known as Freswick Castle, but escapes by swimming in his armour under the cliffs and landing in Caithness, whence he pa.s.sed southwards through Sutherland to Scotland and Edinburgh, where King David I received him with honour, and reconciled him with Jarl Ragnvald.[22]