How 'Scotland's first king' unified a country during troubling times

The trouble with Scotland’s ancient history is that there isn’t any. Well not much of it, in the sense of a written contemporary record of the foundation of the country that we now call Scotland, and there is certainly no Scottish record of any kind dating from the court of the early kings in the ninth century.

For instance, if we ask the question who was the first king of Scotland, the answer is usually Kenneth MacAlpin, and in the oft-reproduced regnal list of Scottish kings he is named as Kenneth I. Except that his name was not Kenneth but Cinaed mac Ailpin – we will call him Kenneth to avoid confusion – and there is no contemporary Scottish written account of his kingship.

That may be due to several reasons, for example written records were not kept because of the oral history tradition of the peoples who occupied what is now Scotland in the eighth, ninth and 10th centuries. Various predators such as the Vikings and the English invaders of later times – notably Edward I, as we know Longshanks ordered the destruction of Scottish records – plus the loss of church documents over the centuries and especially at the Reformation mean that we have precious few writings about the facts of the foundation of the Kingdom of Scotland, and most of those are by English or Irish chroniclers or Scots writing unreliably some centuries after the events of ‘facts’ which in many cases are just legends.

Wikipedia boldly asserts that Kenneth “was a king of the Picts who, according to national myth, was the first king of Scots.” Once again Wikipedia is unreliable, because it mentions a “national myth” when we do know that there was almost certainly a king later identified as Kenneth and that he apparently did unite the kingdoms of Dalriada and Fortriu into a kingdom.

This verse, taken from Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland by the 15th-century author Andrew of Wyntoun, is one of the earliest accounts of Kenneth:

Quhen Alpyne this kyng was dede,
He left a sowne wes cal’d Kyned,
Dowchty man he wes and stout,
All the Peychtis he put out.
Gret bataylis than dyd he, To pwt in freedom his cuntre!

The kingdom of Dalriada was based in Argyll and was the province of the Gaels, originally from Ireland and known for centuries by their Latin name Scoti. Fortriu was the kingdom of the Picts, the “lost” people of Scotland whose standing stones in the north-east of the country are the best evidence of their existence and sophistication as a people.

We are getting ever closer to understanding them, and my bet is that Gordon Noble and his Aberdeen University team in the Northern Picts Project will eventually solve the problem of understanding these fascinating people and their culture.

At the end of the eighth century, Scotland was divided into three distinct areas ruled by kings – the aforesaid Fortriu and Dalriada, and the Brythonic Kingdom of Strathclyde. The south-east and what is now the Border country were under the control of the Northumbrians descended from the invaders of England known as Angles.

There is little doubt that Kenneth I was a Scot from Dalriada. His very Gaelic name Cináed mac Ailpin betrays his origins, and as the son of Alpin, a leader of Dalriada who is reported to have been killed fighting either for or against the Picts – oral tradition can be confusing – so he would be at the very least of royal blood, though not a king in his own right.

The chronological lists of kings published centuries later are divided on Kenneth’s ancestry but all agree he was of the house of Alpin who in turn descended from the macFergus line of kings of Dalriada whose progenitor, according to the chroniclers was Fergus mac Erc, the prince who invaded the west coast of Scotland from Ireland around the year 500.

That Fergus paved the way for a rather more peaceful but even more important invasion – that of St Columba and his followers who travelled to Iona around 563 and then moved on to convert the Picts so thoroughly that by the year 800, both Dalriada and Fortriu were Christian and followed the Columban Celtic rites.

There were battles between the Scots and the Picts, the latter having won the Battle of Dun Nechtain or Nechtansmere on May 20, 685, to limit the advance of the Northumbrians who were content afterwards to stay south of the Forth. Mostly, however, the Scots and Picts co-existed peacefully, probably due to the Columban Christianity that united them.

Most historians now accept that the process of integration of the two peoples proceeded though treaty and intermarriage, rather than conquest, and certainly there was a very good reason for them to join together – the invasion of the Vikings.

The wild raiders from the north had attacked churches and settlements in Scotland from the start of the seventh century, but they also settled on the coasts of Northern Scotland as well as Orkney, Shetland and the Hebrides. The three Celtic kingdoms were all suffering and there is evidence that they joined together in a mutual self-defence pact to see off Viking raids.

By the year 800, it is likely that the incursions of the Vikings had forced many Scots to settle east in Fortriu which had Forteviot as its capital.

THOUGH we do not know exactly what happened, at least two men emerged to claim the joint kingship of Picts and Scots, namely Constantine and Oengus and they succeeded in doing so, though again we must emphasis that the history of the early part of the ninth century is vague to say the least.

We do know Constantine really existed because there is a record of him – the magnificent ninth century Dupplin Cross in the Church of St Serf in Dunning is effectively a contemporary stone monument to him and mentions him as ‘Custantin Filis Fircus’, Latin for Constantine son of Fergus.

It is one of the few Crosses found in the Pictish areas and therefore suggests he was indeed a dual king of Dalriada and Fortriu, and the important element is that he was of the Pictish royal line suggesting that the Picts had the upper hand by the late eighth and early ninth centuries.

If we go by the Irish and English chronicles, we do know that a huge disaster in 839 turned the whole relationship on its head and paved the way for Kenneth’s reign. The Picts were under the kingship of Eoganan (Ewan) from around 836 and by 839 he had control of a joint army of Picts and Scots.

Unfortunately for Eoganan, the Vikings were invading en masse and he led his army to meet them at a location that is still unknown. Most probably somewhere in Perthshire, the Vikings routed the native armies, with Eoganan and his brother Bran among the many slain. So, too, was Aed, the main chief of the Scots under Eoganan. Numerous other chiefs and sub-chiefs also died, and the Vikings went on the rampage against leaderless peoples.

Into this power vacuum stepped Kenneth. He was most probably a military leader of the Scots who assumed the kingship of that people probably only days after the disastrous battle. He then either claimed or was given the kingship of the Picts, possibly because he was the son of a Pictish mother and they believed in matrilinear succession.

Interestingly, there had been no previous Coinnich (Gaelic for Kenneth) in the list of kings of Scots, but there had been a Cináed among the Pictish kings – or did this shadowy figure just adopt a name for strategic dynasty reasons?

Whatever his name, Kenneth saw off challenges to his joint throne. The chronicles speak of at least three, and he beat them all. But did he do so at a “black dinner”? For one of the most intriguing accounts of Kenneth’s actions, contained in the Irish “Prophecy of Berchan” and the “Teaching of Princes” by Gerald of Wales – the latter dating from 1214 – state that Kenneth invited the leaders of the Picts to a feast and after they had been wined and dined, Kenneth’s men slaughtered them all.

There is no evidence whatsoever of such an event dating from the time of Kenneth, but it would make sense of how he came to consolidate his kingship so quickly. For by 843, Kenneth had imposed his will on the two kingdoms and united them into one – the one that was later known as Alba, though that term was not used in the time of Kenneth.

He also managed to pacify Strathclyde – though he did not bring it into his little empire – by the simple tactic of marrying his daughter to a prince of the Britons called Rhun, later the king of Strathclyde. According to the later chronicles, he sent two other daughters to Ireland, one to marry the high king and the other to marry the Norse king of Dublin, Olaf the White.

The chronicles of later years say that Kenneth went south several times into the Northumbrian kingdom with an army that raided far and wide. Dunbar and Melrose were sacked by him, and certainly no Northumbrian invasion of Kenneth’s lands took place during his reign.

Indeed one chronicle says he ruled “as far as the Tweed” which later kings would see as the border with England. In short, by 854 he ruled most of what we now call Scotland, so calling him the first king of Scots is no outlandish claim.

Kenneth also made Dunkeld the new Christian centre of Scotland and transferred the sacred relics of St Columba to a church he had built there. The relics had been moved into hiding when the Vikings sacked Iona, and no doubt their restoration to a place of honour would have been a hugely popular move.

The Vikings continued to raid into Kenneth’s joint kingdom – the Danes got as far as Dunkeld – but he appears to have agreed terms with them so that they were allowed to settle on the northern islands, the north coast and the Hebrides. The Viking influence on those coastal areas can be seen in the Norse-based names of places today – Kirkwall (Kirkjuvagr), Wick (vik), Jura (djur-ey) and many others.

For a king about whom so much is unknown, it seems curious that we can state with some certainty where, when and how he died. The Pictish Chronicle of the following century is maddeningly sparse on detail about the kings it records, but it does say that Kenneth died at his home in Forteviot on February 13, 858, of a tumour of the rectum.

That he was considered a fine king is evidenced by a verse in his honour in the Fragmentary Annals of Ireland written in the early 11th century:

Because Cináed with many troops lives no longer
there is weeping in every house;
there is no king of his worth under heaven
as far as the borders of Rome

In his lifetime, Kenneth MacAlpin was never acclaimed as king of Scotland because no such country existed at that time.

Next week we will examine his legacy through his son Constantine and show how Scotland as we know it owes much to these two kings.