wealthy," and "his son Ottar was jarl in Thurso." Frakark, a daughter
of Moddan in Dale, was the wife of Liot Nidingr, or the Dastard, a
Sudrland chief, and during the half century after Thorfinn's death
Moddan's family seems to have owned much of Caithness and Sutherland,
where the Norse steadily lost their hold. We may be sure also that the
Celt always kept his land, if he could, or, if he lost it, regained it
as soon as he could. Amongst its members this family probably held all
the hills and upper parts of the valleys of Strathnavern, Sutherland
and Ness at this time, and, from a centre on the low-lying land at
the head waters of the Naver, Helmsdale and Thurso rivers, kept on
pressing their more Norse neighbours steadily outwards and eastwards.

Shortly after Hakon's death in 1123, King Alexander I and his brother,
David I, began to organise the Catholic Church in Scotland, and also
to introduce feudalism. Even in the north of Scotland, between the
years 1107 and 1153 they founded monasteries and bishoprics, and
introduced Norman knights and barons holding land by feudal service
from the Crown. Long thwarted in their policy by Moray and its Pictish
maormors, who claimed even the throne itself, these two kings pushed
their authority, by organisation and conquest, more and more towards
the north. Alexander I founded the Bishoprics of St. Andrew's,
Dunkeld, and Moray in 1107, and the Monastery of Scone, afterwards
intimately connected with Kildonan in Sutherland, in 1113 or 1114.
David I, that "sair sanct to the croun," who succeeded in 1124,
founded the Bishoprics of Ross and of Caithness in 1128 or 1130, and
of Aberdeen in 1137, and endowed them with lands. The same king[20]
between 1140 and 1145 issued a mandate "to Reinwald Earl of Orkney and
to the Earl and all the men of substance of Caithness and Orkney to
love and maintain free from injury the monks of Durnach and their men
and property," and also in some year between 1145 and 1153, he granted
Hoctor Common[21] near Durnach, to Andrew, Bishop of Caithness, whose
see was then well established there, and he spent the summer of 1150,
while he was superintending the building of the Cistercian abbey
of Kinloss, in the neighbouring Castle of Duffus, whose ruins still
stand, with Freskyn de Moravia, the first known ancestor of the Earls
of Sutherland.[22]

Freskyn, probably about 1130[23] or earlier, had built this castle on
the northern estate, comprising the pari