ving a usurper--as he understood it--and he ruled in
the name of his stepson, Lulach. The power of Duncan had been weakened
by repeated defeats at the hands of the Northmen under Thorfinn. In 1057
Macbeth was slain in battle at Lumphanan, in Aberdeenshire, and Malcolm
Canmore, son of Duncan, after returning from England, whither he had fled
from Macbeth, succeeded to the throne. But he and his descendants for
long were opposed by the House of Murray, descendants of Lulach, who
himself had died in 1058.

The world will always believe Shakespeare's version of these events, and
suppose the gracious Duncan to have been a venerable old man, and Macbeth
an ambitious Thane, with a bloodthirsty wife, he himself being urged on
by the predictions of witches. He was, in fact, Mormaor of Murray, and
upheld the claims of his stepson Lulach, who was son of a daughter of the
wrongfully extruded House of Aodh.

Malcolm Canmore, Duncan's grandson, on the other hand, represented the
European custom of direct lineal succession against the ancient Scots'
mode.

CHAPTER IV. MALCOLM CANMORE--NORMAN CONQUEST.

The reign of Malcolm Canmore (1057-1093) brought Scotland into closer
connection with western Europe and western Christianity. The Norman
Conquest (1066) increased the tendency of the English-speaking people of
Lothian to acquiesce in the rule of a Celtic king, rather than in that of
the adventurers who followed William of Normandy. Norman operations did
not at first reach Cumberland, which Malcolm held; and, on the death of
his Norse wife, the widow of Duncan's foe, Thorfinn (she left a son,
Duncan), Malcolm allied himself with the English Royal House by marrying
Margaret, sister of Eadgar AEtheling, then engaged in the hopeless effort
to rescue northern England from the Normans. The dates are confused:
Malcolm may have won the beautiful sister of Edgar, rightful king of
England, in 1068, or at the time (1070) of his raid, said to have been of
savage ferocity, into Northumberland, and his yet more cruel reprisals
for Gospatric's harrying of Cumberland. In either case, St Margaret's
biographer, who had lived at her Court, whether or not he was her
Confessor, Turgot, represents the Saint as subduing the savagery of
Malcolm, who passed wakeful nights in weeping for his sins. A lover of
books, which Malcolm could not read, an expert in "the delicate, and
gracious, and bright works of women," Margaret brought her own ge