CHAPTER V.

A.D. 889—942

DONALD—CONSTANTIN—LOST BATTLES AND THEIR LESSONS.

The royal vaults at Iona had received another tenant,¹ and Donald, the third of that name, the son of Constantin II., now filled the throne (A.D. 889). The keen eye of Gregory had not failed to mark the virtues of the youth, and on his deathbed, it is said, he recommended him to his nobles as his fittest successor. "Nor did he deceive," says Buchanan "the judgment of that wise king." ² No long time elapsed till occasion presented itself for testing the capabilities of the new sovereign. Across the German Sea had sped the tidings that Gregory was dead, and in a brief space the black galleys of the Norsemen were again seen ploughing the waves, their dragon-headed prows turned in the direction of England.

They arrived off the coast of Northumbria, and for some days they remained inactive, as if uncertain whether to swoop down upon the northern or upon the southern half of the island. Alfred, who was still alive, fearing that the tempest now hanging on the Northumbrian coast might finally burst upon his own dominions, made advances to Donald of Scotland. He reminded the Scottish king of the alliance which had subsisted between the two kingdoms in his predecessor’s time, and which had been fruitful in benefits to both countries, and proposed that the old friendship should be continued, and that each should assist the other, as occasion required, against the enemies which the sea was continually sending forth against both. These overtures were cordially met by King Donald. An armed force was sent to the help of Alfred of England, and there followed a bloody battle with the common enemy, in which the bulk of the Danish invaders were slaughtered. The remnant that survived the carnage have, it would seem, but little heart to go back to their own country, were permitted to settle in Northumbria, on condition of their embracing the Christian faith. These worshippers of Odin accepted without scruple the easy stipulation; but their conversion brought neither honour to their new religion, nor in the end safety to the country in which it opened to them a settlement

Scarcely had this cloud passed away till another rose in the opposite quarter which tested still more severely the spirit of the Scottish king. The clans of Moray and Ross had fallen out and were fighting with one another. It were vain to seek for the cause of quarrel, for it needed but little to kindle at any moment the flames of internecine war on this region of normal disturbance. What added to the gravity of the affair was the circumstance that a body of Danes, lured by the scent of plunder, had joined the fray, and were increasing the effusion of blood which already exceeded what would have been spilt in a pitched battle. On receiving the tidings that his chieftains were quarrelling, Donald turned his face towards the north and marched right into the heart of the tempest. He met the insurgent host,—a ravaging horde of stranger Danes, mutinous Picts, and rebellious chieftains, and he defeated them in two successive battles, the one fought at Cullen, and the other in the neighbourhood of Forres. The well-known stone in the latter locality, which has engaged the attention of the curious for centuries, but which no one has yet indubitably deciphered, is not unnaturally conjectured to be in some sort the memorial of these events, and to mark, it may be, the grave of King Donald. His death is variously recorded, but the preponderance of opinion is that he died at Forres,³ having fallen in the battle, or sunk under the fatigues consequent on the campaign. So says Fordun. Boece, on the other hand, prolongs his life, and makes him visit Northumbria to see how it fared with the Danish colony planted there, and whether those worshippers of Odin, who had been so summarily transformed on the battlefield into the professors of the Christian faith, were conducting themselves as became loyal subjects and good Christians. The old historian John Major hints his concurrence with Boece.⁴ All agree, however, that King Donald breathed his last in the eleventh year of his reign. His career was brief but full of stirring events, and now that it was over he was borne amid the grief of his nation to rest in the solemn quiet of Iona.

Donald was succeeded by Constantin (A.D. 900), the son of Swift Foot. During the reign of the man who we now see mounting the throne the shadow on the dial of Scotland was destined to go back several degrees. His wavering faith and unsteady friendships wrought greater vexations to himself, and brought greater calamities upon his country, than if he had been a bad and not simply a week prince.

The Scottish reigns of that day were short. The throne was beset by too many enemies to permit any long interval of time to part the "Fatayle Chayre" at Scone from the royal sepulchres of Iona. War, or foreign invasion, or domestic treason were never far from the royal seat, and its occupant was given but few years to possess it, and these fully of anxiety, and darkened by the shadow of the all but certainty of a tragic end. But King Constantin was an exception. His reign was prolonged for forty years, and when at last he came to die, he expired on the bed of peace. His reign, as we have hinted, wore a sombre complexion, yet its mistakes and reverses are redeemed by an event that sheds a halo round the man, and gives a singular interest to his epoch. That event was the convocation, in the sixth year of his reign, of a nationally Assembly at Scone for the reformation of the Scottish Church. Our curiosity and interest are intensely awakened by the unexpected occurrence of a reforming Assembly in the tenth century of Scotland. What, we naturally ask, were the subjects discussed, and what the practical resolutions adopted? But instead of full information on these points, we are baulked and mortified by receiving only a few meagre details.

Neither the ancient chroniclers nor the modern historians have appreciated the significance of this convention. They dismiss it in six lines: and yet it clearly indicate a rallying of the Columban forces, all the more remarkable that it takes place in what we have been accustomed to regard as one of the deadliest periods of Scottish history. What further adds to its significance is the fact that this convention at Scone is one in a chain of events, all of which point in the same direction, even the continued corporate existence of the Scottish Church, and its systematic progressive action. First comes the restoration of the Columban clergy to the east and north of Scotland by Kenneth MacAlpin. Next they have their ecclesiastical status and freedom restored to them by King Gregory, and now the Scottish Church, east and west, united in one, and her liberty of action given back, assembles under Constantin to reform herself according to her ancient laws and the Word of God. Looking at it in this light, the convocation records its own history, and refuses to be wiped out from the nation’s annuals, despite that chronicler and historian have virtually ignored it, and all but consigned it to oblivion. Waiving this matter for the present, we shall devote the following chapter to the special consideration of this convention.

Before entering on the political and military events of the reign of Constantin, we must pause here to sketch the civil divisions and arrangements of Scotland which were made about this time. First of all it behoves our readers to bear in mind that the Kingdom of Scotia has not yet made its appearance. The Scots and Picts are there, fusing their blood into one nation, and uniting their realty before one throne, but the territory they occupy is still known as the Kingdom of Alban. What is the extent of the Kingdom of Alban, and where are its boundaries placed? Alban is bounded on the south by the Firth of Forth, and on the north by the Spey. So small was the area, and so restricted the limits of Alban at the opening of the tenth century. Both north and south of the Kingdom of Alban was a broad margin of territory over which the tides of war were incessantly flowing and ebbing. The fealty of the inhabitants of these districts was regulated by the turning and shifting of battle. On the south of the Forth was Saxonia; and when victory inclined to the Scots the men of the Lothians and the Merse recognised their ruler in the occupant of the royal palace at Scone, and did his bidding; but when the Anglo-Saxons proved the stronger, they carried the tribute of their homage across the Tweed to lay it at the feet of the Northumbrian monarch.

It was much the same in the counties on the north of the Spey. The Kings of Norway, having subjected the Orkneys, pushed their conquests southward into Caithness and Sutherland, and onward to the fertile region which is watered by the Findhorn and the Spey. But their dominion over these parts was precarious and transitory, and was always challenged by the Kings of Alban. The Albanic monarch claimed to be the lords superior of these counties, and the Norwegian Jarls, who the Kings of Norway appointed to govern them in their name, had frequently to pay verbal homage, and at times more substantial tribute to the Scottish kings. While these outlying regions north and south of the Alban were in this transition state, neither included in Scotland, nor yet wholly excluded from it, the condition of the inhabitants was far from enviable. Their territory was the battlefield on contenting Kings, and they were continually familiar with war in its most barbarous forms. They escaped from the yoke of one master only to fall under that of another and after a brief space to return into bondage to their former tyrant. So passed their lives; much reason had they to wish that the time would come when their absorption into the Kingdom of Alban would bring them rest. That time was now near.

It remains that we indicate the civil divisions of the Kingdom of Alban. As stated above, this little kingdom, soon to grow into the greater Scotland, was meanwhile included within the modest limits of the Forth and the Spey. It was divided into five regions. On the west was the province of Fortrenn. It consisted of the modern districts of Menteith and Strathearn, and its population, mainly Pictish, was spoken of as the men of Fortrenn. The second region, lying next on the east, consisted of the territory embraced by the Forth and the Tay, Fife and Fotherif. To this was attached the Carse of Gowrie. The inhabitants of this province were eminently the Scoti of Alban. This was the nucleus or heart of the kingdom, and here, at Scone, was placed the royal palace of the Scottish kings. The third province, beginning at Hilef, extended to the Dee and the German Ocean. It included Angus and Mearns; the districts known in our day as the shires of Forfar and Kincardine. There is some doubt as regards the position of Hilef, the starting point on the west of the third province. It is probably Lyff, on the north bank of the Tay, and the present boundary between the counties of Perth and Forfar. The inhabitants were called the Men of Moerne, and had as their stronghold the Castle of Dun Fother or Dunotter. The fourth reign stretched northward from the Dee to the River Spey, and included the modern counties of Aberdeen and Banff. The fifth province extended from the Spey to the mountains of Drumalban, including the present Breadalbane and Athol.

These were the five regions that constituted the body of the kingdom; but we have said the boundaries of Alban were not fixed and immoveable. A successful raid or victorious battle would at times enlarge them beyond their normal lines. When this happened on the north, the county of Moray formed a sixth province, and the ancient Dalriada, lying along the western seaboard, formed a seventh.

These five regions were subdivided into smaller sections, each under its respective ruler. In this division the unit was the Tuath, or tribe. When several Tuaths were combined, it became a Tuath-Mor, or great tribe. When two Tuaths-Mor were united it constituted Coicidh, or Province. At the head of the Tuath was the Toisech. At the head of the Tuath-Mor was the Mor-maer. At the point where the four southern provinces met, was the seat of the capital and the palace of the king. That point was Scone.⁵

We return to Constantin, whom we now find filling the throne. His misfortunes began with the colony of Odin worshippers which had been so unwisely planted in Northumbria, in the belief that the mystic but mighty rite of baptism had extinguished in them all the vices of paganism and replenished them with the virtues of Christianity. This body of Danes, who had come back unchanged from the baptismal font, parted like a wedge the dominions of the Scottish and the English kings, and were a thorn in the side of both monarchs. Their position gave them an importance far beyond their numbers, and their alliance being sought now by the one and now by the other, they were able to turn the scale in the frequent contests waged at this time between England and Scotland. The great Alfred was now in his grave, and his son Edward known as Edward the Confessor, occupied his throne. The two predecessors of Constantin, Gregory and Donald, had remained the incorruptible friends of Alfred and his Christian subjects of England, despite all the seductions and promises of the Danes. No so Constantin III. Departing from the lofty policy of his predecessors, and deluded by the vain hope of enlarging his dominions on the south, he formed a league with the Danes, and set out in the company of his new allies to attack the English, and win new territories over which to sway his sceptre. But this cause did not prosper.

When the two armies appeared on the field, the English host was found to be much smaller than the Scotch, but stratagem supplied the place of numbers. Hardly had battle been joined when the English made a feint of retreating. The confederate Scotch and Danish host, thinking that they had not to fight but only pursue, broke their ranks, and with headlong ardour followed the fleeing enemy. Suddenly the aspect of the battle was seen to change. The foe, which the Scotch believed to be routed, rallied at a preconceived signal, and turned on their pursuers, hewed down their scattered groups, and continued the merciless slaughter till hardly one of the northern army was left to carry tidings to their countrymen of what had befallen them on this bloody field.

Soon after these events Edward, the English monarch, went to his grave, and his son, the warlike Athelstan, ascended his throne. A full decade passed away during which it is impossible to see what is transacting in Scotland. When the veil is lifted disaster has again returned and a deeper gloom is brooding over the little kingdom than the former reverse of its arms had brought with it. The Scottish king, forgetful of his former error, and heedless of the lesson the bloody chastisement was meant to teach him, has reentered the same ill-omened path, and is contracting alliance with the enemies of his nation and religion. The suspicions that cling to Athelstan touching his father’s death, led to conspiracies against him among his own subjects, and the Northumbrian Danes, seeing in his perplexities their own opportunity, marched southward and seized upon the city of York. The Scots permitted themselves to be drawn into the quarrel. The illusion of a kingdom on the south of the Tweed, fairer and more fertile, if not so large, as the great mountains and broad straths over which Constantin reigned in the north, had resumed its fascination over the king’s mind, and blinded him to the essential injustice and great risks of his crooked policy. This time the omens were favourable. The Scoto-Danish army was reinforced by the Welsh, the Danes of Dublin, and the Britons of Strathclyde. Each nationality had its own particular cause of quarrel with Athelstan, and if only this vast confederacy can be brought into the field and kept together till they have struck a blow at the power of the English king, there can be little doubt of the issue. The Scots this time will carry back not the doleful news of the crushing defeat, but the welcome tidings of a glorious victory.

A great tempest was rolling up on all sides against Athelstan, who meanwhile was making vigorous preparations to meet it, and direct its destructive fury past himself and his subjects. The Scottish army was transported by sea, and landed at the mouth of the Humber. They marched into the interior of the country to meet their allies, and deliver their meditated blow with united and decisive force. They sighted the encampments of their confederates, as the believed, but no friendly shout welcomed their coming. The Scots halted, for the ominous silence told them that it was the camp of Athelstan to which they were drawing nigh. The Welsh and other confederates had not yet arrived. The promptitude of Athelstan had anticipated the junction of the allies. He struck at once, and with vigour.

A gleam of romance heralded the dark tragedy that followed. So says the legend. Along with the Scots came Anlaf, a son of Godfrey, king of the Danes of Dublin, and a relative of King Constantin. Anlaf knew, like most of his countrymen, how to handle the harp. The thought struck him that his gift of music might be turned to account in the cause of his royal relative. He had read of an adventure not unlike what he was now meditating, successfully carried out by the great Alfred. Disguising himself as a minstrel, he appeared at the gates of the English Camp, and was instantly admitted. Anlaf touched his harp, and to the music of its strings added the yet sweeter music of his voice. Even in monarch’s hall the well-played strains would have brought praise to their author, but heard on the battlefield, where they naturally suggested with the force of contrast the rougher sounds by which they were so soon to be succeeded and drowned, they entranced the English soldiers. The musician was left to range at will through the camp. He was brought before the English king, that he might display in the royal presence the marvellous melody of his harp when touched by the skilful hand of its owner. Athelstan was delighted with his music, and dismissed him with a reward. The musician was not so carried away by the triumph of his art as to forget his object in coming hither. He carefully noted the disposition of the English army, and in particular the position of the royal tent, so as to be able to lead in a nocturnal assault upon it.

It so happened, however, that a soldier who had formerly served in the Irish army, and was now with the English, recognised Anlaf under his disguise, and communicated to the king his suspicions that the minstrel, whose performance had so delighted the army, was a spy. The king, profiting by the hint, made a priest occupy his tent for the night, himself sleeping in the priest’s bed. The night assault came off, Anlaf leading in it. The priest was slain, and the king lived to lead the battle of the morning.

That morrow brought with it emphatic intimation to the Scottish king that his dream of conquering a kingdom in England was not to be realised. Still the omens continued to be favourable. The dawn witnessed the arrival on the field of action of the looked for Danish reinforcements. To these were added some Cumbrian Britons, making the Scottish army superior in respect of numbers to the English host. Athelstan, knowing that delay would only lessen the hopes of victory by increasing the number of his enemies, immediately joined battle. The action was fought near the Humber, at a place which Fordum calls Brounyngfeld, most probably the modern Brumby (A.D. 937). Athelstan, at the head of his troops, rushed sword in hand into the midst of the Scottish entrenchments. Both sides fought with desperation. Locked in deadly grapple with each other they contended on ground which was every moment becoming more slippery with the blood, and more cumbered with the bodies of the fallen. The Londoners and Mercians, the flower of the English army, threw themselves upon the Scots. The latter, for some time, bravely sustained their onset, but at last they were compelled to give way. With them went the fortunes of the day; for though the slaughter was prolonged, it was not for victory but for vengeance. It was with difficulty that the Scottish king made his escape alive from the field, but it must have sadly embittered the pleasure arising from his own safety to reflect that he had left behind him the bulk of the Scottish army, including the flower of his nobility, to be buried by the English, or devoured by the birds of prey which in those days gathered in flocks to feast at such banquets as that which was now spread for them on the banks of the Humber.⁶

On both sides the loss was great. Speaking of the Scots army, Fordun says that "the slain were innumerable." He specifies, moreover, three princes and nine generals as having fallen. The English chroniclers magnify still more the carnage, and call the battle of Brunanburgh the bloodiest ever fought in Britain. Of course they could compare it only with battles which had happened before their day, and which had been stricken on a very limited territory. The "Britain" of their day, we need not remind our readers, did not mean the far spreading empire which the name calls up to our minds; it did not even include the northern hills, and the southern plains which the "four seas" of our insular home enclose; the "Britain" of the English chroniclers of that time lay within the two walls of Hadrian and Severus. It had Anglo-land on the south, and Alban, now beginning to be called Scotia, on the north, and was restricted to the strip of territory lying between the Tyne, or at the utmost the Humber, and the Forth. Still in judging the rank assigned to this battle by the English historians, we must bear in mind that the district where it was fought was conspicuously a region of battles. Such had been its history from the days of the Romans downwards, and its evil destiny still cling to it; and of all the bloody conflicts waged upon it, the last we are told was the bloodiest.

The humiliation which had befallen the Scottish monarch, and the reverse which had been sustained by the Scottish arms, had in it a great lesson to the nation, though we greatly doubt if that lesson was understood at the time or seriously laid to heart. It emphatically taught the Scots that their allotted portion of earth was the mountains of the north. It taught them that where shone the lamp of Iona there were their tents to be spread, and it effectually rebuked that ambition which impelled them to seek an enlarged territorial domain at the sacrifice of interests of infinitely higher importance than a great Scottish Kingdom. It would have been a great misfortune to the world, and to the Scots themselves not less, if they had conquered England and placed Constantin on the throne of both countries. If they had come to mingle with the Saxon race their peculiar fervour and fire would have been extinguished. Their energies would have been relaxed and their strength abated if, instead of being concentrated in their own little country, against the narrow boundary of which we so often find them chafing, they had been permitted to overflow into the wider spaces of Great Britain. In a word, they would have been lost as the Scottish nation to Christendom, and the Scotic elements so intense and so vitalising might have disappeared from the forces of the world. The Scots were a reserve force for the ages to come. How much their national individuality would have been missed at certain great epochs of the future, the record of the long past can alone enable us to judge. The Scots were taught by these disasters to eschew the path of foreign war, and seek conquests on other fields and with other weapons than those with which they had contended so fatally for themselves on the field of Brunanburg.

After this terrible battle the Scottish king made haste to go back to his own country, but Athelstan, like an avenging Nemesis, trode close behind him. The darkness as of a thunder cloud fell upon the land as he pursued his way northward, and the allies, discomfited and dispirited, were fain to propitiate the conqueror by yielding a ready submission to whatever chastisement he chose to mete out to them. Athelstan tightened his yoke on those ceaseless plotters, the Northumbrian Danes. He stript Constantin of the provinces of Cumberland and Westmoreland, which, when attached to the Scottish crown, were commonly governed by a prince of the blood, the heir presumptive, like our Prince of Wales at the present day. Crossing the Tweed, Athelstan traversed the Merse, broke into the Lothians, marking his steps through the terrified country with devastation, and finally rolled back the Scottish frontier once more to the banks of the Forth. Such ending had this expedition which had begun amid so many auguries of success, was supported by the arms of a multitude of confederates, and which had promised a rich spoil to all concerned in it, and to Constantin a new kingdom stretching southward to the meadows of the Humber, if not to the richer banks of the Thames.

By this time the chair of Columba had ceased to be restricted to the island in which it was originally set up. It had become a moveable seat. The kings of Scotland had already transported it from Iona to Dunkeld, from Dunkeld to Abernethy, from Abernethy to St. Andrews, where it now stood. With every removal of the Scottish capital came another transportation of that chair. It gave sanction to the Scottish power; it was the prop of the throne, and therefore never far from the seat of royalty. If Constantin had succeeded in extending his kingdom so as to include the great capitals of York and London, the chair of Columba, following the established custom of the Scottish kings, would have been set up first at York and finally at London. But how long would the lamp of Iona have burned at either place. That lamp had not now the vigour it its early days: it had waxed dim. Moreover, the air of England had become mephitic and murky by reason of the fast gathering shades of Romanism in the southern kingdom. The light of the Scottish lamp would have gone out in the unfriendly air, and the extinction of the Scottish Christianity would have been speedily followed by the death of the Scottish genius.

Constantin’s first care after his arrival in his own country was to convoke his nobles and take counsel with them on the position of affairs. He assembled them at the old Pictish capital of Abernethy. Many words were not needed to depict the deplorable conditions into which his ill-fated expedition had brought the kingdom. It was not one but a multitude of calamities that were weighing upon it. The King indeed had returned safe, but with him had not returned that numerous and high-spirited army he had led into England. It strength and valour lay rotting on the gory field of Brunanburg. The many vacant places in the circle around the King gave mournful proof that of the nobles who had accompanied him to the war a few only now lived. Scotland was not nearly so large as it had been a few short months before. Its boundaries had suddenly shrunk to the shores of Fife, and the sway of Athelstan had reached at a bound the banks of the Forth. The reign of Constantin had now been prolonged for thirty-five inglorious years. The task of governing was becoming too heavy for him, and he was anxious to lay down the sceptre. His subjects, we may well believe, were not unwilling that the burden should be transferred to a stronger shoulders, and an other chance given the little, valorous, but of late ill-governed country of gathering up its energies, and of vindicating for itself its rightful position and influence among the nations of Europe.

The conference at Abernethy ended in the abdication of Constantin. When he laid down the crown and assumed the "cowl,"—using the phrase in a loose sense, for monkery, in the modern meaning of the word, had not yet been introduced into Scotland,—the monarch selected as his retreat the Monastery of Kilrimont (St. Andrews), where he might pass the evening of his life in the society of the Culdees, "retiring," says Buchanan, "as to a safe haven, and passed the remaining five years of his life in their society."⁸ He died in the fortieth year from his accession to the throne, and in A.D. 943. We take leave of Constantin at the gate of his monastery. As he passes from our view we may be permitted to drop an expression of sympathy with him amid the many misfortunes which have bowed him down. Subject to illusions, mistaking the path of ambition for the path of honour, in a word, a weak rather than a flagitious ruler, we see him not ungracefully closing a reign, clouded with many calamities, by acknowledging, if he could not repair, the errors into which he had fallen. St. Berchan touchingly describes his latter end: "Afterwards God did call him to the monastery on the brink of the waves. In the house of the Apostle he came to death: undefiled was the pilgrim." He came not into the sepulchres of his fathers! The same spot which had given Constantin a shelter for his age, gave him a grave for his ashes.

Endnotes

1. "In pace diem clausit extremam," says John Major of Gregory, "et in insula Iona sepultus." –Hist. Britain., Lib. iii. cap. 2, p. 91.

2. Buchanan, Hist., Lib. vi. c. 14.

3. "Oppidum Fother occisum est a gentibus."—Chronicon Pictorum. Pinkerton’s Enquiry, vol. i. p. 495. By the "Fother" here Chalmers (Caledonia, i. 384) believes Forteviot to be meant, and that the words intimate its destruction by the Danes. But "occisum" is not the word usually employed to denote the destruction of a town, but the slaughter of a man. Innes, Pinkerton, and others agree in thinking that Forres is here meant, and that Donald was there slain. Skene says Dunotter.

4. Historia Britannioe, Lib. iii. c. 2, p. 91.

5. "Such is the account given by Dr. Skene in his Celtic Scotland (i. 340 et seq.), mainly on the authority of Andrew, Bishop of Caithness, a Scotsman by birth, and a Monk of Dunfermline. He is mentioned as Bishop in 1150, and died in 1184.

6. It is impossible to arrive at certainty regarding the events which happened under Constantin of Scotland and Athelstan of England. And in particular it is impossible to say what exactly were the causes which gave rise to the war that ended in this great battle. According to some it was the desire of Constantin to aggrandise his kingdom; according to others, it grew out of the ambition of Athelstan to extend his territory to the Forth. We may perhaps be permitted to divide the blame between the two. All the chroniclers, Scotch, English, and Irish have written of the battle of Brunanburgh, but their narratives are a tangled web. Dr. W. F. Skene has brought vast Celtic scholarship and laborious research to the elucidation of this, as well as of many other points in Scottish history. See Celtic Scotland, i. 351-359. He says, "Aldborough unites almost all the conditions required for the battle of Brunanburgh.

. . .About a quarter of a mile to the west of Boroughbridge are three large monoliths, varying from eighteen to twenty-three feet high. They are now called the Devil’s Arrows; and east of Aldborough, at a place called Dunsforth, was a tumulus called the Devil’s Cross. It was broken into many years ago for road materials, and in it were found human remains. The Devil’s Cross and the Devil’s Arrows may be memorials of the battle." Vol. i. 359.

7. "Unde iste Constantinus grandi cum exercitu Angliam ingreditur, et in praelio victus Coimbriae terras quas a diebus Gregorii 54 annis Scoti Tenuerant, Turpiter amissit."—Historia, Johannis Major, Lib. iii. cap. ii. p. 92.

8. Buchan, Hist., Lib. vi. c. 17. "Et in senectute descripitus baculum cepit et Domino servivit."—Chronicon Pictorum. "Hic dimisso regno sponte, Deo in habitu religionis abbas factus Kelederum S. Andreae 5 ann. Servivit et ibi

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