Each month we present a chapter in the history of Scotland. We move forward in time each month.
Reign of Kenneth mac Alpin(continued)What, if anything, marked out the reign of Kenneth mac Alpin from those which went before it? The Scottish Chronicle recorded, though in vague terms, that he invaded Lothian or 'Saxonia' fully six times; it also described how the Britons raided as far east as Dunblane and the Danes as far north as Dunkeld. Clearly Kenneth did not bring a new peace in his time. Even though the bulk of his attention seems to have focused on his southern frontier, there are indications, too, that he experienced trouble in the north. It was only after his reign, according to a note in the Latin king-list of Dalriada, that the reign of the Scots was transferred to the land of the Picts, centred at Forteviot. His own authority, it has been suggested, was acknowledged at most only in the four Pictish provinces south of the Mounth: in Fortriu itself, and in Fife, Atholl and Circenn. Although he was claimed to be King of all the Picts, his sphere of influence was no greater than that of most kings of Picts in the century before him, and considerably less than that of Constantine (789-820) or Óengus (820-34), whose reigns marked the golden age of the Pictish kingdom of Fortriu and perhaps also the peak of Dalriadic migration eastward. The three provinces north of the Mounth - Ce (Mar and Buchan), Fidach (Moray and Ross), and Cait (Caithness and south-east Sutherland) - may have been drifting out of the hands of the kingdom of Fortriu in the reign of Kenneth as part of an internal family struggle involving rivals from the Cenčl Loairn. Though perhaps not yet damaging to Fortriu authority, it was the beginning of a process which would severely test mac Alpin kings in the century after 950. Here was, it seems, an ambitious and ruthless warlord, but not an overly successful one. Nor does he cut a very convincing figure as a national hero, even of legend, in the traditional role of defender of his people. It has plausibly been suggested that both Kenneth's rise to power in Dalriada in the 830s and his difficult consolidation of his authority in the Pictish kingdom after 842 rested on an alliance forged between him and Gothfrith, a king of the Hebrides, whose Norse name suggests that he, like Somerled after him, probably had mixed Scandinavian and Celtic ancestry. Yet power lies as much in the eye of the subject as in the grip of a king, and nowhere more so than in early Scotland; as an early Gaelic law tract said, 'the people make the king'. It has been suggested that Kenneth's reign may have seen a revival of the claim to high kingship first made in the sixth century. Certainly it saw a number of gestures made which may have lent a new aura to Pictish kingship. In 849 the relics of Columba, patron saint of Dalriada but also saint-in-waiting of the Pictish Church, were moved eastward to Dunkeld. It is unclear whether Kenneth founded a new religious centre there or merely completed the work of Constantine begun half a century earlier, but the activity centred on Dunkeld probably marked an increase in the king's influence in Atholl. In the Irish Synchronisms, Kenneth is said to have been the first to possess, not the kingdom of Scots, but the kingdom of Scone and it is in his reign that Scone, which may have been the base of the kingdom of Fortriu and perhaps also the place of inauguration of its kings, seems to have been deliberately cultivated anew as a holy royal centre. The foundations of the eternal triangle, which supported Scottish kingship throughout much of the medieval period, were now laid, but none of them, it is likely, belongs to the reign of the 6rst of the mac Alpin kings. St Andrews, the spiritual home of the kingdom, had acquired a new status at least a century earlier when it had been assigned a biblical saint; Dunkeld, whose venerated Celtic saint would act as a counterbalance to the cult of Andrew, had been first developed as a religious shrine by Constantine; but Scone, scene of a significant battle in Pictish history in 728, described as a 'royal monastery' in 906 and built next to a 'hill of Faith', would become the hub of the mac Alpin dynasty. What was new about the reign of Kenneth and his successor Donald may have been a careful cultivation of the old. Scone and Dunkeld, existing centres of royal and ecclesiastical authority, were given enhanced status. It would not have been a surprising posture for a usurper to take. There is one further clue to this, one of the most mysterious of all reigns in Scottish history. A thirteenth-century source refers to the 'laws of mac Alpin'. What this body of laws contained is unknown. If they existed, their content would have been less important than the act of their promulgation: the notions of a true king and a civilised people would both have been embraced by the 'laws of mac Alpin'. It would have been another gesture, but such gestures were important in early kingship. Another symbolic token, which cannot be proved with any certainty, would have been, as some have suggested, the bringing to Scone of the Stone of Destiny. That inauguration stone would have fitted well into the established rites of inauguration, which marked the marriage of the king to the land and the people he ruled; the proclamation of a law code in the king's name would have renewed the marriage. As with Columba, so with Kenneth: the man and the cult need to be separated.
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