Note 69 — CHAPTER THE THIRD. CONSTANTINE THE SECOND—A. D. 900-943.

An. Ult. 926. Chron. Sax. 926, 927. Malm. Gesta Regum, l. 2, s. 133. The Saxon Chronicle (MS. C. T., B. iv., of the eleventh century) states that the kings met at Emmet, in Yorkshire, and renounced idolatry, a singular compact for a prince who, twenty years before, had presided at an ecclesiastical council at Scone! Malmesbury, who takes his account from an old volume containing a metrical history of Athelstan, “in quo scriptor cum difficultate materiæ luctabatur (et) ultra opinionem in laudibus principis vagatur,” places the meeting at Dacor in Cumberland, adding that Athelstan commanded the son of Constantine to be baptised! Here again the Scottish King figures as a pagan, as he also does in the same writer’s description of the battle of Brunanburgh, where he says that the survivors of the vanquished host were spared to embrace Christianity. There is an evident confusion here between the pagan Northmen, to whom all this is very applicable, and the Christian Scots. It is highly probable both that Sitric “renounced idolatry” on the occasion of his marriage with Athelstan’s sister, and that his son Olave, who ended his life in the monastery of Iona, was baptised through the intervention of the English king, but the same cannot be said of the Christian King of Scotland. From time immemorial, as we learn from Malcolm Ceanmor (Sim. Dun. 1093), it was the custom of the English and Scottish kings to meet upon their respective frontiers; but though the borders of Yorkshire and Cumberland were the most appropriate places of meeting for Sitric and his English brother-in-law, they were on the Danish, not the Scottish frontier; and what should bring Constantine thither to renounce idolatry in his declining years, and baptise his son at the bidding of the English king? Much of the history of this period appears to have been derived from old songs and lays, in which due allowance must be made for the confusion and mistakes incidental to such legendary compositions, as well as for the “genus dicendi quod suffultum Tullius appellat,” especially in the struggles of the transcriber to Latinise the barbarous idioms of the vernacular, alluded to with such contemptuous pity by Malmesbury. The vague and exaggerated expressions of these old ballads were frequently copied literally, and latterly in the feudal idiom, into the dry chronicle of a subsequent era, a fate which has frequently befallen the sole Saxon record of the famous battle of Brunanburgh. In the scanty records of this, the most glorious and least known period of Anglo-Saxon history, it is very evident that Constantine has frequently usurped the place of Sitric,—just as in the Egill’s Saga Olave Sitricson figures as King of Scotland, to the total exclusion of his own father-in-law,—but it would be difficult to do more than point out the confusion. The Anglo-Norman writers, of course, take advantage of the confused and indistinct idea of a treaty between Athelstane and Constantine to turn it to their own account, but they have been far outdone by a modern historian, who has actually described the manner in which the Scottish king performed fealty to Athelstan—More Francico, in set form, as laid down in the Liber de Beneficiis—though it would be impossible to say from what source he has obtained his vivid description of the feudal ceremony, for it certainly is not contained in any of the authorities to which he refers (Malm., 27, 28. Flor., 602. Mail., 147), nor was the Frankish ceremony of homage in force amongst the Anglo-Saxons of that era.