Wealth passed through the secular power centres as it was collected and redistributed. In the major churches, however, it was amassed in large quantities in the form of precious metalwork decorating altars and saintly relics. The concentration of portable wealth at these unfortified sites made them the obvious target of the Scandinavian raiders who began to attack the British Isles, and much of northern Europe, at the very end of the eighth century. At first these attacks, though terrifying, were small-scale, the work of individual warbands under the control of a chieftain. Within two generations, however, great armies with permanent or semi-permanent bases in the British Isles were waging coherent and prolonged campaigns against the major kingdoms. Their impact on native society was immense. Historians wrestle with the difficulty of reconciling the bloody image of the Viking raider and warrior gleaned from the documentary sources with the more peaceful figures who emerge from the archaeological record, the accomplished mariners, resourceful farmers, skilled craftworkers, and enterprising traders. Though raiding, for goods and slaves, was and remained an important aspect of Norse social and economic life, the most important motive in coming to the British Isles was to acquire land for settlement.

From place-names and archaeological evidence, the history of Scandinavian settlement in northern Britain can be pieced together in its various phases from the ninth century to the thirteenth. The earliest and by far the most extensive settlements were in the north and west, but smaller and later settlement occurred around the mouth of the Tay. To begin with, the northern and western settlements appear to have been as opportunistic and uncoordinated as the early raids, but in time certain dynasties had gained sufficient power to take control and turn these scattered communities into permanent colonies. In Orkney the descendants of Rognvald of Møre grew rich and powerful by exploiting their pivotal position between Scandinavia and the rich Norse colonies of Ireland. The thirteenth century Old Norse saga of these earls of Orkney, Orkneyinga Saga, records the traditional history of the family and their success in building on the framework of the older Pictish kingdom to establish dominance in the north, notably through the eleventh-century achievements of Earl Sigurd ‘the Stout’ and his illustrious son by the daughter of the king of Scots, Earl Thorfinn ‘the Mighty’.

Undoubtedly initial land-grabbing was achieved by violence and maintained by the threat of military action, but there is no question of any attempt at genocide. Native leaders who posed a threat would have been removed, but where accommodation could be reached it may have been to the advantage of both sides to do so. Norse sources record a native lord, Dungadr/Donnchad, profiting from a marriage alliance with his new Norse neighbours in Caithness. Sculptural evidence shows wealthy native Christians living in Shetland a generation or more after the Norse settlement. Excavation of major sites such as Jarlshof, Shetland, or the seat of the Orkney earls at Birsay, has contributed to our understanding of life under Norse rule. Other, particularly informative bodies of evidence exist in the hoards of precious metalwork, buried and never recovered in unsettled times, and in the richly furnished graves of the Norse elite in the generations before they adopted the Christian religion of the locals. In the Northern Isles of Shetland and Orkney the indigenous language died out completely as the native population became completely assimilated to the language and culture of their new Scandinavian rulers. In the Western Isles, by contrast, Gaelic survived, not only as the speech of a Norse-ruled population of dependent Gaels, but also, in some areas, as the language of a Gaelic-speaking elite retaining power over their own people alongside politically independent Norse neighbours. By the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the intermingling of incomer and native had produced in the Isles a ruling class who were Gaelic-speakers of mixed Norse and Gaelic heritage, known to contemporaries as Gall-Gaedhil ‘foreign (i.e. Scandinavian) Gaels’.

The birth of Alba and the death of Pictish

In the years when Vikings were first raiding along the northern and western sea routes, the eastern mainland was enjoying a new stability under the dynasty of Urguist (Fergus). The culture of Pictland and its openness to outside influences in this period is reflected in the magnificent cross erected by Custantin (Constantine), son of Urguist, at Dupplin, beside the Pictish royal centre at Forteviot, Perthshire. The Pictish artists have incorporated the latest styles from Northumbria and Ireland to create a unique and distinctive monument to faith and royal power. Traditionally, Custantin is credited with the foundation or refoundation of Dunkeld, which, by the middle of the ninth century, had replaced Abernethy as head church of the kingdom. In 820 Custantin was succeeded by his brother Onuist (Oengus) whose patronage was directed more at St Andrews. Both brothers are also recorded as prominent benefactors of the Church in Northumbria. Their family monopolized the kingship until 839 when the dynasty was dealt a mortal blow with the slaying of the king, Uuen (Eógannán) son of Onuist, and his brother in battle against the Norse along with others ‘beyond counting’.

At the beginning of the ninth century there were kings of Picti and of Scotti, but by the end of the ninth century both had disappeared, and instead the sources speak of a king of the people of Alba. There is still considerable disagreement among historians as to the reasons for this change in terminology. One thing is clear, however: the Norse were prime catalysts. The old regime was crushed by the events of 839 and the kingship lay open to whomever could take control of a desperate situation. The opportunity was seized by one Cinaed son of Alpín (Kenneth mac Alpin). Later sources claimed him for the Cenél nGabráin but his origins are obscure, and quite how he came to power remains unclear. Historians have traditionally seen his reign as a major break in Scottish history, crediting him with the ‘Conquest’ of the Picts and the ‘Union’ of their kingdom and the kingdom of the Scots. The later kings and queens of Scotland traced their ancestry back to Cinaed and it is from him that their reigns are traditionally numbered, but whatever happened in the mid-ninth century, a close reading of the texts suggests that Cinaed’s reign was not the vital watershed that his descendants’ historians tried to present. It is clear that a Pictish identity endured till the time of his grandsons in the years around 900.

Cinaed died in 858 and was succeeded first by his brother Domnall (Donald) and then by his son Custantin (Constantine I). The kingdom was by now under Viking threat from all sides. The Anglian kingdom of Northumbria had been destroyed by the Scandinavian capture of York in 866, and in the west, Olaf ‘the White’, king of Dublin, was vigorously extending his control over Scandinavians in both Scotland and Ireland. He defeated his father-in-law Ketil ‘Flatnose’, ruler of the Hebridean vikings, in 857, and in the 860s campaigned in Pictland. Vital to Olaf’s ambition was control of the Firth of Clyde and to that end he laid siege to Dumbarton. It took a gruelling four months before the stronghold of the Britons was finally sacked in 870. With the ancient power centre destroyed, a replacement was created further up the river at Govan. The Norse connections of the new Strathclyde regime are there exemplified in the remarkable collection of tenth- and eleventh-century sculpture which survives in the old parish church. By the late 870s rival groups of York-based Vikings were once again devastatingly active in central Scotland. History appeared to be repeating itself, as political and social dislocation of the kind which had brought down the Pictish dynasty of Urguist threatened to destabilize the kingship of Cinaed’s sons. Custantin died in 877, killed in a massacre of Picts by Hálfdan of York. He was succeeded by his brother Áed, but within months Áed was murdered by his own followers and for more than a decade the family lost control of the kingdom.

It is important to note that throughout this period contemporary sources continue to talk of ‘Picts’ and ‘Pictland’. Not until the reign of Domnall son of Custantin (889–900) are the Picti and Scotti of the Latin sources superseded by the Gaelic term Albanaig ‘people of Alba’. This emphasis on the territorial term ‘Alba’ may have been a useful distraction from ethnic ambiguities and sensitivities at a time when what was happening was not the replacement of an old Pictish identity by an existing Scottish one, but rather the forging of something new which transcended both. The language of the new kingdom was Gaelic, but in shape it was decidedly Pictish. The boundaries of tenth century Alba were those of ninth-century Pictland: Argyll was not in Alba and the new Scottish kings turned their backs on the ancestral homeland. The territorial organization of the new Alba was rooted in the Pictish period, as reflected both in the retention of a Pictish term of land assessment—pett ‘estate’ (as in Pittodrie, Pitlochry, etc.)—and the continued importance of old centres of secular and ecclesiastical power. Even the form of Gaelic spoken in Alba may betray in its structure the heavy influence of Pictish.

Yet despite the obvious strength of their Pictish inheritance, the inhabitants of tenth-century Scotland had forgotten, or suppressed, the fact that they were the descendants of Picts. Instead they had become the Gaels of Alba and the Picti were written out of history, their supposed disappearance a just fate ordained by God. In the ninth century no less than five languages were spoken in the territory of modern Scotland: the Celtic languages of Britons, Picts, and Gaels; and the Germanic tongues of Angles and Norse. It is more than a little paradoxical that the language which had the greatest number of speakers at that time was the only one subsequently to disappear. The causes of the demise of Pictish are still disputed among historians, but in any period linguistic change is merely a symptom of wider social change. Unfortunately we have as yet only a limited understanding of the turmoil in Pictish society in this period, but there is no reason why the elimination of the Pictish royal dynasty and their supporters should inevitably have resulted in the death of their language: after all the English language survived the Norman Conquest. For whatever reason, the dispossessed of mid-ninth-century Pictland clearly felt there was more to be gained from allying themselves with the culture of the new Gaelic ascendancy than from cleaving to the marginalized remnants of the discredited Pictish aristocracy. Once Gaelic was established as the language of prestige and advancement it was only a matter of time before Pictish was abandoned completely.

The MacAlpin dynasty and the consolidation of the kingdom of Alba

Cinaed’s dynasty re-established their dominance in 889 when Domnall son of Custantin, grandson of Cinaed (Donald II), took the throne. On his death in 900, Domnall was styled rí Alban ‘king of Alba’, the first to be accorded this title in our sources. It was in his reign that the foundations of the new kingdom of Alba were laid, but it was the remarkably long reign of his brother Custantin (Constantine II) which was crucial in ensuring that his legacy endured. Four years into his reign Custantin achieved a major victory against the Norse, the first in the heartland of Alba, and for almost half a century (he retired from the kingship in 943) he maintained the integrity of the kingdom by a combination of military might and diplomatic astuteness. By such means, the kings of Alba played a central role in the politics of the tenth-century British Isles, containing the expansion of the West Saxon dynasty to the south and the Norse to both north and west.

From the mid-ninth century to the millennium recognizable medieval kingdoms were taking shape throughout a Europe galvanized by Scandinavian incursion. As far as eastern Scotland was concerned, the need to participate in the defence of the realm may have been an important factor in the creation of a common culture: the aggression of their neighbours uniting the diverse peoples of Alba in obedience to a single king whose powers were enhanced in this time of crisis. Part of that process was the decline in status of the rulers of the former Pictish regional kingdoms. Authority over territories such as Atholl, Angus, and Mar was delegated by the king to officials known as mormaer (literally, ‘sea steward’). This hereditary office had an important military function and we seen in it the roots of the provincial earldoms of the later Middle Ages. The status of these regional magnates could, however, depend on one’s perspective: as late as 1020 the kings of Alba considered Findláech (Finlay) of Moray no more than a mormaer but contemporary Irish chroniclers labelled him a king.

Blocked to the north, by the native rulers of Moray and the dynamic Norse earldom of Orkney, the kings of Alba sought to expand south. In the course of the tenth and early eleventh centuries, they gradually came to dominate and then absorb the kingdoms on their southern flank. Overlordship of the kingdom of Strathclyde, already long acknowledged, was extended southwards in 945 when Cumbria was granted to the king of Alba in return for supporting the Anglo-Saxons against the Norse of Dublin. With the death in 954 of Eirík ‘Blood-Axe’, Viking ruler of York, the West Saxon kings now ruled to the Scottish border. Quite where that border should lie continued to be disputed as the kings of Alba and the kings of Wessex fought for control of old Bernicia. Lothian was annexed during the reign of Custantin’s son Indulf (954–62) and control over it confirmed in 1018 when the victory of Máel-Coluim son of Cinaed (Malcolm II) at the battle of Carham, near Coldstream, established the Tweed, the ‘line of Scottish exhaustion’, as the new frontier. Máel-Coluim, ‘devotee of Columba’, was succeeded after a long reign (1005–34) by his daughter’s son Donnchad (Duncan). Like three of his predecessors, Donnchad was killed in the north fighting the men of Moray. What was different this time was that on his death the Moray dynasty was able to take control of the lands to the south. Mac-bethad (MacBeth), son of Findláech mormaer of Moray, ruled the whole of Alba 1040–57. The power of the northern dynasty did not outlast him, however, and the macAlpin line reasserted itself when, with English backing, Donnchad’s son Máel-Coluim (Malcolm III) slew Mac-bethad’s successor, Lulach. When he seized power in 1058, the most pressing problems for Máel-Coluim, known as ceann mór (Canmore) ‘Great Head/Chief’, were to quash the resistance of the men of Moray in the north and to withstand the pressure of the Norse in the west. But the rest of his long reign, which lasted to 1093, was characterized by his increasingly hostile relations to the south with first Anglo-Saxon and then Norman England. Matters were not eased when in 1068 he married Margaret, sister to the refugee Edgar ‘aetheling’, princely symbol of Anglo-Saxon opposition to William the Conqueror. Only four years later Máel-Coluim was obliged to give homage to the new English king at Abernethy when William brought his army deep into Scottish territory. The political tensions of the period are reflected in the conflict which ensued when, in 1093, Máel-Coluim and his son were killed returning from raids in Northumbria. The succession was contested between his brother Domnall ‘the Fair’ (Donald Bán) (1094–7) and his English-supported sons: first Donnchad (Duncan II), son of Máel- Coluim’s first wife Ingebjorg, Norse widow of the earl of Orkney; then Edgar (1097–1107), third son of Margaret.