It’s a claim based largely on the fact the Roman Empire failed to occupy all of Scotland in the first and second centuries. After the relatively brief existence of the Antonine Wall for a decade after 142CE, despite many forays north into what they knew as Caledonia, the Romans had to set their border at Hadrian’s Wall.
Conveniently forgotten are the two conquests of Scotland in the second millennium, namely the English occupation of our land in the 1290s under Edward I, known as Longshanks and the Hammer of the Scots, and the 1650 invasion by Oliver Cromwell (below) and his New Model Army that saw Scotland absorbed into the Commonwealth headed by Cromwell that ended with the restoration of the monarchy a decade later.
Towards the end of the first millennium, it was not from England that the possible conquest of Scotland emerged as a real threat, but from a land across the North Sea: Norway.
We’ve all seen (or seen pictures of) the Up Helly Aa celebrations in Shetland each January, so most Scots will probably be aware that the Norse invasion fleets which history calls the Vikings came to Scotland and waged war on both our islands and mainland.
However, I suspect fewer people will be aware that goodly portions of Scotland were part of Norway on and off for decades, while a sub-kingdom of Norway based on Scotland’s main islands lasted for centuries. Not a total conquest by any means, but at one point in the 12th century it looked very dicey for Scotland – I will show next week what happened then.
In this latest column of my series on the lost ancient kingdoms of Scotland, I will be looking at the Norse-created “Kingdom of the Isles” that at one time or another comprised Orkney, Shetland, the Inner and Outer Hebrides, Caithness, parts of the west coast, and the Isle of Man.
Regular readers know I have already written about Dalriada of the Scoti, Fortriu of the Picts and Strathclyde of the Britons. In the weeks to come I will write about Galloway and finish with Bernicia in the south-east of our country. And a reminder that I am dedicating this series to a great Scot and lover of our history, Alex Salmond.
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Last week, I showed how the Brythonic Kingdom of Alt Clut, with its capital at what is now Dumbarton, became Strathclyde, centred on Govan, after a Viking siege from their stronghold at Dublin in 870 ended with Alt Clut being sacked and its people sold as slaves in Ireland. In retrospect, the raid on Alt Clut was the beginning of the end for Strathclyde, which became part of the kingdom of Alba by 1054.
That 870 incursion was the biggest raid on Scotland by the Vikings, though was not the first. Historians disagree about who the Vikings that raided Britain and Ireland were. It is too simplistic to say the Danes concentrated on invading the east coast of England while the Norwegians made the islands and west coast of Scotland their targets, but that is largely how it worked out.
I think the late Professor JD Mackie got it right in his magisterial work A History Of Scotland when he referred to the Vikings as “Scandinavians”, recognising the difficulties of assigning nationalities to the invaders. After all, the kingdom of Norway did not emerge until the middle of the ninth century.
Historians also disagree about when and where the first Viking raid occurred – in fact, they disagree over a lot of the details of Norway’s invasion and the Kingdom of the Isles, including whether it was a kingdom at all.
Such disputes are largely caused by the almost complete absence of any contemporaneous Scottish records, with Irish, Norse and English accounts the main source of information about the kingdom, such as it was.
The Orkneyinga saga is one principal story about the Norse in Scotland but it was probably not compiled until the 12th century, and deals with the history of Orkney and Shetland. For other islands, such as the Outer and Inner Hebrides, we have to depend on mainly Irish annals – basically lists of main events in a given year, put together by Irish monks. The annals suggest that the first Viking raids targeted the Columban monastery at Iona in 793, 802 and 806, with 68 of the island’s people reportedly killed.
It is likely that Iona’s treasures – such as the relics of the saint and the illuminated manuscript that became the Book of Kells – were moved from the island to Ireland for safety.
One Viking raid gave Scotland a genuine national treasure. Sometime around 800, Vikings plundered Shetland as far south as St Ninian’s Isle, then occupied by Picts.
It is conjectured that one of the inhabitants secreted a hoard of what were clearly significant silver items possessed by local people.
In 1958, they were discovered under a stone slab by a schoolboy who was helping archaeologists excavate the remains of a church building. The 28-piece St Ninian’s Isle Treasure can be seen at the National Museum of Scotland, and has taught us much about the Picts. The Viking raids on the Picts of Fortriu and the Scoti of Dalriada were so brutal that the two kingdoms united to combat them.
It’s not too fanciful to suggest that when Kenneth MacAlpin united the two under his rule in 843 to form what became Alba, it was as much about defence of the two realms as it was about kingship.
By that time, a genuine phenomenon that would change the course of Scottish history had started to occur.
Instead of brief “in-and-out” raids, Norwegians came to Shetland, Orkney and the north coast of the mainland, and later the Hebrides, to settle down and farm and fish.
It cannot be said with total accuracy when this immigration happened, but without doubt the archipelagoes of Orkney and Shetland had been colonised by Norwegians by the ninth century. Mackie explains what happened: “The Norwegian incursions came in three stages.
“First between 780 and 850, there arrived in Shetland, Orkney and Caithness poor peasants who had quitted the barren solid of Riga and More in hope of better land and they may have met with little opposition in a sparsely populated country. Yet along with them, or soon afterwards, came pirate chiefs who attacked wherever opportunity was found.”
The final phase, according to Mackie, happened after King Harold I (Harold Fair Hair) established the kingdom of Norway. The process of unification of the disparate Norse tribes had been going on for decades before Harold confronted rival leaders at the Battle of Harfrsfjord, which is traditionally said to have been a giant sea battle that took place in 872.
Note that this was nearly 30 years after Kenneth MacAlpin united the Scoti and Picts to form one nation that later became Alba, forerunner of Scotland. In other words, Scotland as a nation is older than Norway – and England for that matter.
Historical revisionists have queried even the existence of Harold Fair Hair but he is accepted as a symbol of Norwegian independence, which was only finally secured in 1905, and he is portrayed as the Father of the Nation by the Norwegian royal court itself.
King Harold I either sent away, or at least caused to leave Norway, a number of powerful “jarls”, a leader’s name that survives to this day as “earl”. To avoid confusion I will write of these jarls, who set up bases in the northern islands and Caithness, as earls.
It is important to note that the Norwegian settlers were already converted or in the process of converting to Christianity. It should also be noted that even as Orkney, Shetland and the north coast of the Scottish mainland were being settled relatively peacefully by Norwegians, mostly Danish Vikings were engaged in long-term warfare with the Anglo-Saxons in what is now England.
They captured York, the Eboracum of the Romans, in the 860s and, with a power base in the Kingdom of Northumbria, they battled the Anglo-Saxons for decades.
Meanwhile, Harold Fair Hair was determined to extend his dominions and while there is huge confusion about the history of how it happened, he declared Orkney and Shetland as his lands, adding the Hebrides a decade later.
The two sub-kingdoms were eventually called the Norðreyjar (“northern islands”) and Suðreyjar (in English “the Sudreys”) – meaning the Hebrides and Isle of Man.
At this point in the late ninth century, one of the most fascinating and certainly most interestingly named characters in Scottish history emerged. He was called Ketill Flatnose and whether he was Harold’s appointee to rule lands that were already Norwegian or whether he conquered the islands himself – the various Norse sagas disagree about this – he seems to have been acknowledged as ruler of the Sudreys by the 880s.
In short, he was possibly the first King of the Isles. Ketill’s original name was Bjornsson and, as he is mentioned both in Norse sagas and the Irish Annals of Ulster, there is little doubt that he existed.
He may well have been a “hersir”, a raider with a small force of perhaps 100 men, and was very good at what he did – so much so that he was soon in charge of swathes of what is now Scotland. The best source of information about Ketill was written by the Icelandic chronicler Ari Thorgilsson (1067-1168), a direct descendant of Ketill who relied on family tradition for his story.
But historians cannot agree on who Ketill Flatnose was, what he did, or what legacy he left. No name has been found for his successor, for example, but he was certainly a lord, perhaps even a sub-king with royal connections because his daughter, Aud (nicknamed the Deep Minded), married Olaf the White, self-proclaimed King of Dublin.
Aud certainly existed, and she is remembered as a devout Christian who, after the death of her husband and her son Thorstein, lived in Caithness before moving to Iceland where she became one of the leading matriarchs of that country.
The maddening thing about this period of history is that for the first 40 years of the 10th century, Ketill Flatnose’s descendants in and around Scotland just do not appear in any credible records.
As someone who did not always kowtow to Norwegian royalty, he and his family may simply have been written out of later accounts that were largely aimed at proving Norway’s overlordship of the Hebrides and Isle of Man.
This latter island was very much part of the Sudreys as it had been conquered by Vikings from Norway and possibly Iceland by the late ninth century. The new rulers instituted the Tynwald, a sort of parliament clearly based on the Althing of Iceland, sometime in the 10th century.
I love that the people of Man celebrated the millennium of the Tynwald, which they claim to be the longest continuously sitting parliament in the world, in 1979.
The date was chosen (some said made up) by a panel of “experts” as there are no records of the Tynwald meeting in 979.
Be that as it may, the Isle of Man was acknowledged as belonging to the Sudreys, and thus Amlaíb Cuarán, the next recorded ruler after Ketill Flatnose, is seen as King of the Isles including Man as the second millennium dawned. And what an age it would prove for the Norse in Scotland.