chapter 2 Lordship, Loyalty and the Earldom of Orkney
In August 1379, King Hákon vi of Norway and sixteen knights and armigers of Norway’s council of the Realm assembled in Marstrand, on the eastern coast of present-day Sweden, in anticipation of a host of prelates and noblemen ar- riving from the kingdom of Scotland. Their aim was to bear witness to the res- toration of a frontier institution, the earldom of Orkney, and the confirmation of its illustrious recipient, Henry i Sinclair. While Henry i had no doubt been in contact with the Norwegian king and his officials on prior occasions, he was still very much a newcomer to the political scene in the realm of Norway, and retained honours that marked him as a Scottish nobleman. His roots lay in Lothian, in Lowland Scotland, and he arrived in Marstrand under the presti- gious designation of lord of Roslin. Accompanying him was an entourage of Scottish knights and esquires, most of whom had probably never before set foot on Scandinavian soil. Despite the seemingly ‘foreign’ nature of the arriv- ing party, its leader, Henry I Sinclair, was introduced into the top rung of the political hierarchy of the Norwegian realm. By a kiss of the hand and mouth, Henry i pledged his fealty to the Norwegian crown and was therewith made earl of Orkney.1 In older scholarship, Norway’s loss of authority in Orkney in the fifteenth century is said to reflect the gradual de-nationalization of governance in the isles. According to Munch, this was a top-down process that began with the ascendency of Scottish lines of earls, trickling through the ranks as earls del- egated land and authority in local arenas to their kinsman, friends and associ- ates from the Scottish mainland.2 The earldom’s ‘Scottification’, it is said, began in earnest with failure of the ‘Norse’ line of earls with the death of Earl John i in 1231, and the succession of the Scottish-based Angus line with the succes- sion of Earl Magnus ii several years later.3 The house of Angus held Orkney
1 dn 2, no. 459. 2 Munch 1858, 465; idem 1863, 102. Munch argues that process did not begin until the four- teenth century, for the population of the isles before that time was ‘thoroughly Norwegian’ (igjennem norsk) (idem 1858, 465). Cf. Brøgger 1929, 166–97; Holmsen 1939, 368. 3 Crawford 2013, 278–82. Earl John has been portrayed as the last of the Norse earls in older research. Joseph Anderson, for example, says that ‘the ancient line of the Norse Earls, that had ruled the Orkneys since 872 – a period of 350 years – became extinct, and the earldom passed into the possession of the house of Angus’ (Joseph Anderson, introduction to The Orkneyinga Saga, Edinburgh 1873, xlvi). Earl John’s death, which Anderson called a ‘tragic
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and ill-omened event’ (ibid., xlv), has also been portrayed – intentionally or otherwise – as the start of a downturn in the history of the isles. Thomson, for instance, notes that ‘it is dif- ficult to avoid the conclusion that, with the accession of the Angus earls, the great days of medieval Orkney had come to an end’ (Thomson 2008, 136). In truth, there had already been significant acculturation with neighbouring Scottish communities. This is evident in the an- cestry of Earl Harald Maddadson, who was the son of a Gaelic mormaer of Atholl (Crawford 2013, 177–78). Although the new line appears to have fostered a Norse naming tradition – invoking the power of ancestry with the name Magnus – Crawford emphasizes that the An- gus earls ‘would have been thoroughly assimilated into mainstream Scottish nobility’ and that the Scottish crown looked upon the dynastic shift as a means of strengthening its control on the earls’ Scottish patrimony, Caithness, and further influence frontier affairs (ibid., 279). 4 Munch 1863, 102. 5 Ibid. Still an orthodoxy in Orkney historiography, Alexander Fenton noted that in ‘the first period [of “scotticisation”], starting before the fifteenth century, the lords and earls, the civil servants, the ministers of the church (often the younger sons of landed gentry), and others involved in the administration arrived’ (Alexander Fenton, The Northern Isles: Orkney and Shetland, East Linton 1997, 7). 6 Odal (óðal) or allodial inheritance gave agnates privileged inheritance and redemption rights to patrimonial land. See Knut Robberstad, Magnús Már Lárusson and Gerhard Hafström, “Odelsrett”, Kulturhistorisk leksikon for nordisk middelalder fra vikingetid til reformationstid,