Each month we present a chapter in the history of Scotland. We move forward in time each month.
The Mac Alpin Dynasty: Success and Failure(continued)Kings based in Scone never seem to have been in a position to use Moray as a dower kingdom. The issue was complicated by two factors. Part of the reason for the confusion in nomenclature - with the rulers of Moray being called jarls or kings by Norwegian courses, kings by Irish chronicles, and mormaers by later Scottish sources - may have been the claim which they made to descent from an alternative Dalriadic kindred, the Cenčl Loairn rather than the Cenčl Gabráin. This rival line may have been new life and status breathed into it by genealogist in the tenth century. By then, however, the mac Alpin dynasty, stemming from the Cenčl Gabráin, may have spoken with two voices on the tribute owed to them in the north. From the time of Kenneth mac Alpin and his son Constantine I, the dynasty had recurrently involved itself in the affairs of Moray, with disastrous results. Three of its kings had been killed in the north or on its doorstep, in 900, 954, and 955. Duncan I would be the next, killed in the north in 1040 by Macbeth, a rival who had greater power there. The problem of Moray thus raises in acute terms the more general problem of the nature of Scottish Kingship. It has even been suggested that Scotland by the late tenth or eleventh centuries saw a bipartite system, reminiscent of the situation before 650 when there two kings of Picts, north and south of the Mounth. Were the descendants of Kenneth mac Alpin dynasty kings only south of the Dee? The answer may lie again in the subtleties of the gradations of kingship. The overriding achievement of the mac Alpin dynasty was that its members were accepted, within a generation or so of the trouble reign of Kenneth, as undisputed high kings, a development significant enough to attract a new name to the territory from which they claimed allegiance: Alba or Scotia.
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