Chapter XI
Reading edition
Results and Conclusion.
Restless energy, and a religion that taught its followers that death in combat alone conferred on the happy warrior a title to immortal glory and a perpetual right to the unbroken joy of battle daily renewed in Valhalla drove the Viking to war.
Headed off on the south by the vast army and feudal system of Charlemagne, this energy in war could be exercised, and its religious aims achieved, solely on the sea, which skill in shipbuilding and in navigation as well had converted from a barrier into a highway to the west.
War, in fact, paid; and, after generations of harrying, many of the raiders concluded that the western lands in Britain were fairer and more fertile than their native shores, and desired to settle in the west.
Finally the feudalism of Charlemagne was imitated by Harald Harfagr in Norway; and, against that, Norse independence revolted and rebelled. The true Viking would be no other man's man, and to secure Harald's feudal power he was driven forth from Norway by an organised navy manned by those of his countrymen who had agreed to accept King Harald as feudal overlord and to pay him tribute. Defeated, as we have seen, at the naval battle of Hafrsfjord in 872, the rebel remnant of the Vikings found their return to Norway barred; and those of them who became pirates in Orkney and Shetland and raided Norway as such, were, in their turn, assailed in these islands by King Harald, and destroyed. Others of them colonised Ireland, the Hebrides, and the Faroes; and from all these islands as well as from Scotland and Norway issued the swarms that settled in Iceland, and afterwards gave us a code of law, our system of trial by jury, much of our legal procedure, and, when crossed with Gaelic blood, produced the glorious literature of the Sagas. But in their exodus, whencesoever they started, what all alike sought was liberty; which, for them, meant the right to do exactly as they pleased to others, and freedom from paying "scat" or dues to a superior lord.
But, if the outward type is rarely seen, its inward qualities remain. What were those qualities?
The late Professor York Powell summed up the character of the Viking emigrant folk in his introduction to Mr. Collingwood's Scandinavian Britain, as follows:—
Blend these qualities with those of the Gael, and what infinite possibilities appear; for the characteristics of the two races supplement each other. Fuse them together in proper proportions for a few generations, the improvident and dreamy with the thrifty and energetic, the voluble with the reticent, the romantic and humorous with the truthful and blunt of speech, the fiery and impulsive with the sober of thought, and how greatly is the type improved in the new race evolved from the union of both.
They came to us not only from Norway direct, westwards across the sea. They came to us also from Normandy northwards through England. The first swarms of Norsemen had brought with them rapine and disorder. Later on the Norman came to the north to curb such evils, and to organise, administer, and rule the land. The Normans succeeded in this as signally as the Saxon barons, introduced under Saint Margaret, Malcolm Canmore's Saxon queen, had failed. David I was by education a Norman knight. At heart he was an ecclesiastic. As Scotland's king, he was, in theory, owner of Scotland's soil from the Tweed to the Pentland Firth, and he disposed of it to his feudal barons, mainly Norman, and to religious foundations on Norman lines, as the Norman kings of England had done there before him, in order to organise and consolidate his kingdom; and his successors did the same.
"Directly and indirectly the Norman conquest influenced Scotland only less profoundly than England itself. In the case of Scotland it was less immediate and obtrusive, but in its totality it is a fact of the first importance in the national history."
It affected Scotland in the latter part of the times which we have considered right up to John o' Groats. Moray was divided among Normans and "trustworthy natives," and the scattering of its Pictish population gave the Mackays to Sutherland, and, largely blended with the Norse, they still occupy the greater part of it. The Freskyns, as "trustworthy natives," were introduced into Sutherland, after many a fight for it, by charter doubtless in Norman form; and Normans won Caithness in the persons of the earlier Cheynes and Oliphants and St. Clairs, who, by inter-marriage with the descendants in the female line of a branch of the Freskyns, possessed themselves not only of the lands of the family of Moddan but of most of the mainland territories of the Erlend line, through Johanna of Strathnaver's daughters and great-grand-daughters.
At a time and in an age when liberty meant licence, the order which the Norman introduced into the north made more truly for real liberty and the supremacy of law, than the individual independence which the Norseman had left his native land to preserve; and though both feudalism and the blind obedience to authority then enjoined by the Catholic Church are no longer approved or required, and have long been rightly discarded, yet they served their purpose in their day, by evolving from the wild blend of Gaels and Norsemen, which held the land, a civilised people free from many of the worse, and endowed with many of the better qualities of either race.