Note 82 — CHAPTER THE THIRD. CONSTANTINE THE SECOND—A. D. 900-943.

Chron. Sax. 945. Midwyrhta, “fellow workman,” is the expression used, which the feudal ideas of a later age naturally rendered fidelis; and an alliance, only lasting for the life of Malcolm, was accordingly transformed into a regular feudal transaction, existing for generations. The earlier authorities, from the chronicle and Æthelward, make no mention of any such thing; and Kenneth the Second appears to have been as ignorant of it when he harried Cumberland in 971, as Ethelred when he wasted the same province in 1000; nor could Simeon of Durham have been aware of such a compact when he wrote that, in 1072, Malcolm the Third held Cumberland “Non jure possessa sed violenter subjugata,” expressions which can scarcely be reconciled with the uninterrupted possession of the province as a feudal fief for 127 years. When John of Fordun compiled his history, he eagerly seized upon the means of escaping the numerous claims for homage put forward in the rival English chroniclers; and Cumberland, in his pages, becomes the counterpart of the earldom of Huntingdon during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Scottish king invariably granting it to the heir, or tanist, who duly performs homage to the Saxon monarch for the fief held of his crown. On one occasion a tanist is called into existence for this sole purpose, and the veracious historian, after fabricating the apocryphal being, is obliged to murder his own creation to account for his not appearing amongst the Scottish kings. The same myth, Malcolm, king of the Cumbrians, unites with Kenneth the Second in witnessing a charter which the latter is supposed to have signed as king five years before he ascended the throne, and is very appropriately placed amongst the eight oarsmen who manned the boat of Edgar in his apocryphal progress on the Dee.—V. Appendix L, pt. 1.