Each month we present a chapter in the history of Scotland. We move forward in time each month.
The Mac Alpin Dynasty: Success and FailureThe gains and losses of the period 839-1034 were finely balanced: the annexation of Lothian and virtual control long exercised over at least part of the sprawling kingdom of Strathclyde was set against the conceding of much of the west to the Viking and the inability of kings of Scots to check, still less to undo, the expansion southwards to the Moray Firth of the Norwegian earls of Orkney. The deciding element in the balance sheet might well be the north. The huge province of Moray, which stretched from the Mounth to Ross and from the west coast overlooking Skye to the Spey or perhaps even further east, has however, perhaps the most hidden history of all of Scotland's regions. It is difficult to be confident of assessments of how much power or lack of power the mac Alpin kings of Scots had in Moray. The use of the Orkneyinga Saga of the term 'King of the Scots' to describe ruler of Moray in the tenth and eleventh centuries partly confuses the issue but also indicated how contemporaries other than kings of Scots and their chronicles views them. Some of the Irish annals, too, refer to them as 'kings'. Usually they are referred to in Scottish sources as mormaers. The term mormaer was first used to describe one of the leading magnates fighting alongside Constantine II in the battle of Corbridge in 918. The first firm identification with a region was in 938, when the death of a mormaer of Angus was recorded. Three mormaers are name in 976. It is clear, by the early eleventh century at least, that the mormaers of Moray were not nominees of kings of Scots but inherited the title. It may also be that, just as the system of alternating succession was receding in the line of mac Alpin kings of Scots, it was still accepted practice amongst the mormaer of Moray. The function of the mormaer was a military one, the leader of the 'army' of his province. Yet effectively power lay with him rather than the king in Scone, to whom he owed allegiance. To borrow the language of later medieval Scottish kingship, it is likely that kings of Scots depended on the local power of the mormaers to extend an authority they would otherwise have had into the far-flung parts of their kingdom. And, in the case of Moray, the largest and the most northerly of the mormaerdoms, allegiance must have been nominal.
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