Note (return) — Chapter XI

When the conquerors settled in the land, they enslaved such of its inhabitants as remained among them for a time, and gave to the best coastal lands and lower valley farms the Norse names which they still bear, but they left the heads of the river valleys and the hills mainly to the Moddan family and their Pictish followers and clansmen, who held them tenaciously and extended their holdings, as the Norse became less hostile through inter-marriage, or less strong. Once settled, the Norse exerted such steady pressure on their southern Pictish neighbours in Ross and Moray, and kept them so fully occupied in war or by the constant menace of it from the north, that successive Scottish kings were in their turn left comparatively free, on their own northern frontier, from Pictish attacks, and were therefore enabled to consolidate their own kingdom in the south of Scotland and to beat the English back to the line of the Tweed. Afterwards they were able to turn their attention to the consolidation of the mainland north of the Grampians,3 by first overcoming the Picts in Moray, and then the Norse in Cat, and establishing the feudal system and the Catholic Church.