not readily have left
smooth water. It was Viking not Celtic blood that drove them to the
open sea. It was Viking skill that built the ships, managed them in
storms through Viking discipline, navigated them across the ocean, and
gave us the naval and commercial supremacy which founded and preserves
our empire overseas.

They came to us not only from Norway direct, westwards across the sea.
They came to us also from Normandy northwards through England. The
first swarms of Norsemen had brought with them rapine and disorder.
Later on the Norman came to the north to curb such evils, and to
organise, administer, and rule the land. The Normans succeeded in
this as signally as the Saxon barons, introduced under Saint Margaret,
Malcolm Canmore's Saxon queen, had failed. David I was by education a
Norman knight. At heart he was an ecclesiastic. As Scotland's king,
he was, in theory, owner of Scotland's soil from the Tweed to the
Pentland Firth, and he disposed of it to his feudal barons, mainly
Norman, and to religious foundations on Norman lines, as the Norman
kings of England had done there before him, in order to organise and
consolidate his kingdom; and his successors did the same.

Thus, as Professor Hume Brown puts it--[22]

"Directly and indirectly the Norman conquest influenced Scotland only
less profoundly than England itself. In the case of Scotland it was
less immediate and obtrusive, but in its totality it is a fact of the
first importance in the national history."

It affected Scotland in the latter part of the times which we have
considered right up to John o' Groats. Moray was divided among
Normans and "trustworthy natives," and the scattering of its Pictish
population gave the Mackays to Sutherland, and, largely blended with
the Norse, they still occupy the greater part of it. The Freskyns, as
"trustworthy natives," were introduced into Sutherland, after many
a fight for it, by charter doubtless in Norman form; and Normans won
Caithness in the persons of the earlier Cheynes and Oliphants and St.
Clairs, who, by inter-marriage with the descendants in the female
line of a branch of the Freskyns, possessed themselves not only of the
lands of the family of Moddan but of most of the mainland territories
of the Erlend line, through Johanna of Strathnaver's daughters and
great-grand-daughters.

At a time and in an age when liberty meant licence, the order which
the Norman introduced into the north made more truly