Note (return) — Chapter VII

The first event in the brilliant reign of this boy king was the invasion and plundering of Aberdeen by Eystein king of Norway about 1153,23 in repelling which the feudal Barons of Moray and Angus, including the first Freskyn of Duffus and his son William MacFrisgyn, must have been of service. In the same year Somarled of Argyll and the sons of MacHeth engaged in a joint rebellion, which lasted three years until the eldest of them, Donald, was taken and placed as a prisoner with his father in Roxburgh Castle, leaving Somarled to continue the war alone. This war was put an end to by the release of Malcolm MacHeth, who was created Earl, probably of Ross,24 after another civil war in Somarled's own country had called Somarled back to the Isles; and the young king Malcolm joined Henry II of England in his wars in France. During King Malcolm's absence abroad Fereteth, Earl of Stratherne, and five other earls, of whom Harold Maddadson was probably one, rebelled in 1160; and, on failing in an attempt to kidnap the young king, who had returned to quell the disturbance, the six earls were reconciled to him; and in the same year he subdued another rising in Galloway, and yet another in Moray. The subjugation of Moray is said to have been carried out with the greatest severity. According to Fordun25 the king "removed the rebel nation of Moray men and scattered them throughout the other districts of Scotland, both beyond the hills and this side thereof," though Robertson in his Early Kings expresses the opinion that this clearance took place in the reign of David his predecessor.26 He is probably right, but whenever it took place, it doubtless gave Sutherland the first of its Mackays, originally MacHeths, who were at first refugees from Moray, and ultimately in the thirteenth century are found settled in Durness in the north-western parts of the modern county of Sutherland. It was at this time, too, that the Innes family, afterwards so well known in Caithness and Sutherland, were, in the person of Berowald the Fleming, given their lands in Moray,27 William MacFrisgyn, Freskyn's eldest son, and father of Hugo Freskyn of Sutherland, witnessing the charter, a neighbourly turn which has ever since caused some to believe wrongly that the Freskyns were Flemings.