The Sea Kings

The Late Norse Kingdoms of Man and the Isles c.1066–1275

R. Andrew McDonald

• Publisher: John Donald
• Year: 2020
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781788851480
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

The archipelagic kingdoms of Man and the Isles that flourished from the last quarter of the eleventh century down to the middle of the thirteenth century represent two forgotten kingdoms of the medieval British Isles. They were ruled by powerful individuals, with unquestionably regnal status, who interacted in a variety of ways with rulers of surrounding lands and who left their footprint on a wide range of written documents and upon the very landscapes and seascapes of the islands they ruled. Yet British history has tended to overlook these Late Norse maritime empires, which thrived for two centuries on the Atlantic frontiers of Britain. This book represents the first ever overview of both Manx and Hebridean dynasties that dominated Man and the Isles from the late eleventh to the mid-thirteenth centuries. Coverage is broad and is not restricted to politics and warfare. An introductory chapter examines the maritime context of the kingdoms in light of recent work in the field of maritime history, while subsequent chronological and narrative chapters trace the history of the kingdoms from their origins through their maturity to their demise in the thirteenth century. Separate chapters examine the economy and society, church and religion, power and architecture.

CHAPTER 1

Islands, Coasts and Peoples:
Man and the Isles in the Early Historic Period

The era of the sea kings rested on foundations laid down over previous centuries during the early historic period, roughly the fifth century to the middle of the eleventh century. This was hardly the ‘dark ages’ of popular imagination. Instead, it was a vibrant and dynamic age of political, cultural, linguistic and religious change, characterised by cultural diversity and the interactions among different peoples, cultures and religions. It is dark only in the sense that the precise nature of many of the changes occurring during this time is obscured by a lack of source materials. Despite this – or, more likely, because of it – the early historic period is the subject of an ever-increasing body of scholarly research, built in large measure around important re-evaluations of the archaeological and documentary evidence, as well as new archaeological discoveries.¹ What follows is intended to provide some brief background on the history of the western seaboard of Scotland and the Isle of Man in the period leading up to the age of the sea kings. The chapter examines the different peoples of the Isle of Man, the Hebrides and Argyll, and then it explores both the cultural and political dynamics that led to the creation of a first Kingdom of the Isles in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries.

Gaels, Picts and Britons

In AD 400 the Roman court poet Claudius Claudianus (better known as Claudian; d. c. 404) composed a praise poem in honour of the Roman Emperor Honorius’s guardian, general and father-in-law, Stilicho (d. 408). In the poem, a personified Britain thanks Stilicho for Roman protection from her enemies, the Scotti (Irish), Picts and Saxons:

Stilicho gave aid to me also when at the mercy of neighbouring tribes, what time the Scots roused all Hibernia [Ireland] against me and the sea foamed to the beat of hostile oars. Thanks to his care I had no need to fear the Scottish [Irish] arms or tremble at the Pict, or keep watch along all my coasts for the Saxon who would come whatever wind might blow.²

Whatever the basis of these claims in fact (a problem which fortunately need not detain us here), the poem nicely encapsulates in a few lines the maritime movements of peoples in the seas around Britain and Ireland that characterised the end of Roman Britain and the beginning of the early historic period.³

About a century after Claudian delivered his oration on Stilicho, the apparent movement of one of these peoples, the Scotti (Irish), provides the context for some of the earliest recorded history of the western seaboard and the islands of Scotland when, according to the traditional version of the early history of the Scots, the Irish leader Fergus mac Eircc and his sons migrated here across the North Channel (the narrow strait separating northeastern Ireland and southwestern Scotland) from northern Ireland around the year 500.⁴ Modern scholarship has, however, called this version of events into question, as archaeologists in particular have had little success in identifying material culture evidence for a sudden arrival of large numbers of immigrants from Ireland in the fifth and sixth centuries.⁵ It is now thought that there was a gradual twoway process involving the movement of Gaelic-speaking peoples back and forth across the North Channel over a long period, possibly leading to the transfer of a ruling dynasty from Ireland to the western seaboard of Scotland. The adoption of Gaelic language and culture by the people of the western seaboard, which probably began long before 500, may be one of the most significant results of that process.⁶

The name Scoti (or Scotti), commonly applied to these Gaelic speakers who settled in the west of Scotland, was first used in fourth-century Roman writings as a new term to refer to the inhabitants of Ireland.⁷ It was not until after about 900 that its use became restricted to Scots in the modern sense. Broadly speaking, Dál Riata was a transmarine kingdom spanning the North Channel and linking the southern portion of western Scotland with Irish Dál Riata (roughly modern County Antrim); Scottish Dál Riata extended from the point of Ardnamurchan in the north to Kintyre in the south (roughly modern Argyll), and embraced the Mull and Islay groups of Hebridean islands, as well as Arran and Bute.⁸ Although it represented an extensive kingdom, Dál Riata was one of several Gaelic kingdoms established in western Britain from Ireland in this period.⁹

The ‘Irish who lived in Britain’ – Scotti Brittanniae, as they were called by Adomnán (d. 704), author of a c. 697 life of St Columba (Colum Cille, d. 597)¹⁰ – formed a series of kingdoms, each with its own ruling family or dynasty and frequently in a state of competition with one another. The term Dál Riata is commonly used to refer to all the Gaelic kindreds of the west who identified as members of this group. Early genealogies tell us that Dál Riata was divided into three, each subdivision being controlled by a separate kindred, each of which traced its origins back to Fergus mac Eircc or one of his brothers. The three main kindreds (cenéla) were the Cenél nGabráin in Kintyre, the Cenél Loairn in Lorn and the Cenél nÓengusa in Islay. By about 700 another group, the Cenél Comgaill, occupying the Cowal peninsula, had split off from the Cenél Loairn, and other groups are also known from other treatises. The power relations between and within groups were therefore in an almost constant state of flux; this represents a major theme in the history of the kingdom of Dál Riata.¹¹

Adomnán’s Life of St Columba refers to the Irish in Britain as being separated from their eastern neighbours, the Picts, by the mountains of Druim Alban, the spine of Britain.¹² The centres of Pictland certainly lay to the east, although the region to the north and west of the Ardnamurchan peninsula, including the Outer Hebrides and the Isle of Skye, also belonged to a Pictish cultural zone in which the Pictish dialect of P-Celtic was spoken.¹³ This area has been regarded as closely linked to Pictland to the east as well as the Northern Isles, but it also appears as rather distinct, leading to the suggestion that it may have represented a peripheral part of the Pictish world.¹⁴ Links with the mainland are clearly indicated by, among other things, the survival of Pictish symbol stones in Skye, Raasay, Barra and Benbecula.¹⁵ Politically there seems to have been not a single Pictish kingdom but rather several kingdoms: the Anglo-Saxon scholar Bede (d. 735) referred to northern and southern regional groupings, and further individual kingdoms within those broad regional divisions are thought to have existed.¹⁶

Episodes in Adomnán’s life of Columba highlight the linguistic divide between the Gaelic-speaking Scots of Dál Riata and the Picts. On two occasions the saint is said to have spent time in the province of the Picts; on one of these, Skye is specifically mentioned as the locale. Both times Columba communicated with the local inhabitants through an interpreter; this has been taken to mean that Columba’s language, Gaelic, was translated into Pictish for the benefit of the local inhabitants.¹⁷

Relations between Scots and Picts were complex and in a nearly constant state of flux from as early as the late sixth or early seventh century. A Pictish conquest of Dál Riata is suggested by an entry in Irish annals for 741, which records ‘the smiting of the Dál Riata by Aengus son of Forgus’ [Unust son of Uurgust, king of Picts, d. 761]; the use of the word ‘smiting’ (percutio) suggests to some scholars a cataclysmic event which may have placed Dál Riata under Pictish control.¹⁸ But the expansion of Pictish hegemony is only part of the story. As Pictish political influence spread west, Gaelic cultural and religious influences were moving east and north. Many of these influences were religious in nature, and we will return to this topic shortly, but there is also evidence of settlement by some of the Gaelic kindreds of Dál Riata in southern Pictland, particularly in the region around Strathearn. As Gilbert Márkus succinctly describes it, ‘During the last decades of the eighth century, Pictish power had embraced the far west, while Gaelic culture had spread to the east.’¹⁹

One of the most significant changes on the map of what would become Scotland between about 800 and 1000 was the apparent disappearance of the Picts and their replacement as the dominant people in the region by the Scots. The Scoto-Pictish polity that emerged from this transformation appears as ‘Alba’ in sources from 900, but no contemporary source explains this transformation. What used to be regarded as the ‘conquest’ of the Picts by the Scots (or the ‘union’ of the Picts and Scots) in the ninth century, under Cinaed son of Alpín (d. 858), is now conceived principally as a drawn-out process by which Gaelic culture and kindreds infiltrating from the west gradually overwhelmed the culture of the Picts in the course of the ninth and tenth centuries, leading to the creation of an entirely new identity in the region.²⁰

The history of the Isle of Man during this formative era is nearly a complete blank. By the first and second centuries, classical authors like Pliny the Elder (d. AD 79) and Ptolemy (d. 160) listed (but did not describe in any detail) some of the islands situated between Ireland and Britain, including Monapia or Monaoida and Mona, probably Man and Anglesey respectively, although there are problems with these identifications.²¹ Conventionally regarded as part of the Gaelic (Irish) world, the situation of Man in the midst of the Irish Sea in fact opened it to both Gaelic and British influences in the post-Roman period. The fifth-century Spanish historian Orosius (d. c. 420) regarded the Isle of Man, which he called Mevania, as Irish,²² and ogham inscriptions from the island attest the presence of Irish speakers there in the fifth or sixth centuries. (Ogham was a script developed in Ireland to represent the Gaelic language, and its transmission elsewhere is understood as evidence of Gaelic-speaking communities.) This accords well with the general picture of Irish influence in the Irish Sea basin provided by other written texts, and there are several references to Irish expeditions, battles and campaigns in the Isle of Man in the 570s and 580s.²³ But there is also evidence for strong British influence as well: Bede, writing about three centuries after Orosius, seems to have regarded the Isle of Man as British (that is to say, Welsh speaking),²⁴ and there are inscriptions on the island that show British influence. One of the most famous of these is the crux guriat inscription (‘The cross of Gwriad’) from Port e Vullen on the north coast between Maughold and Ramsey; Gwriad is a British name and the inscription is dated to c. 800.²⁵

In light of this, it is interesting that Bede grouped Anglesey and Man together as the ‘Mevanian Islands’.²⁶ It may be that an Irish phase in the fifth and sixth centuries was followed by a British phase in the seventh and eighth centuries, but close analysis of the distribution of inscriptions in Man suggests a more complicated picture in which speakers of both languages coexisted from an early period. Politically, it appears that, by the ninth century at least, the island had fallen under the influence of the dynasty of Gwynedd in north Wales. The origins of the Gwynedd dynasty may even have lain in the Isle of Man, since Merfyn Frych, king of Gwynedd (c. 825–40) and ancestor of the Merfynion, the ‘Second Dynasty of Gwynedd’, seems to have come from here; the name of his father was Gwriad, and the inscription mentioned above is taken as a reference to this individual.²⁷ It is difficult to detect much English influence in the Isle of Man in this period. Bede says that King Edwin of Northumbria (616–32) conquered the Isle of Man but the veracity of this statement, as well as the extent of English influence, is uncertain. Some English influence is suggested by two pre-Viking incised slabs from Maughold in the north of the Isle of Man that were carved with English runes.²⁸ The varied cultural influences in the early historic Isle of Man serve to high...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations for Works Frequently Cited
• Note on Personal Names
• Maps and Genealogies
• Introduction: Forgotten Kingdoms? The Sea Kings and Their Age
• 1 Islands, Coasts and Peoples: Man and the Isles in the Early Historic Period
• 2 In Search of the Sea Kings: The Sources for the History of the Late Norse Kingdoms of Man and the Isles
• 3 ‘Islands Scattered about in the Sea’: The World of the Sea Kings
• 4 Warlords and Peaceable Men: Making the Kingdom, 1066–1153
• 5 Unmaking and Remaking the Kingdom: Somerled and His Descendants, 1153–c. 1225
• 6 ‘The Deeds of the Brothers Rognvald and Olaf’: Apex and Adversity, 1153–1237
• 7 ‘The Ill Luck of the South-Islanders’: The Last Sea Kings, 1230–1266
• 8 A Fruitful Place? Economic Activity in the Kingdoms of Man and the Isles
• 9 Men of the Speckled Ships: Ships, Sea Power and Fighting Men
• 10 Kingship in Man and the Isles: Tradition and Innovation
• 11 ‘Devout and Enthusiastic in Matters of Religion’: The Sea Kings and the Church
• Epilogue: Swansongs, 1275–1305
• Exploring the World of the Sea Kings
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Picture Section