Note (return) — Chapter VIII

Each party occupied separate lodgings in Thurso with their separate followings, and Hanef and his friends, warned by a messenger of the earl's reported design of killing them, forestalled it by attacking the earl first, and they slew him with nine wounds in the cellar of his lodgings. After the affray they crossed over to Orkney, where they fortified the small but massive castle20 or tower of Kolbein Hruga or Cobbie Row, in the Island of Vigr or Wyre, now called Veira, near Rousay in Orkney, and provisioned it for a siege, which lasted the whole winter, and was raised only after both sides had come to an agreement that all questions arising out of the earl's death at Thurso, should be referred, not to the Scottish courts, but to the Norse king, Hakon, in Bergen.