and death, and Jarl Sigurd’s body was laid in howe on Oykel’s Bank at Sigurthar-haugr, or Sigurds-haugr, the Siwards-hoch of early charters now on modern maps corruptly written Sidera or Cyderhall, near Dornoch, which, when translated, is Sigurd’s Howe.[9] “Thenceforward,” as Professor Hume Brown tells us, “the mainland was never secure from the attacks of successive jarls, who for long periods held firm possession of what is now Caithness and Sutherland.  As things now went, this was in truth in the interest of the kings of Scots themselves.  To the north of the Grampians they exercised little or no authority; and the people of that district were as often their enemies as their friends.  Through the action of the Orkney jarls, therefore, the Scottish kings were at comparative liberty to extend their territory towards the south; and the day came when they found themselves able to crush every hostile element even in the north.[10]

It is this process of consolidation in the north which it is proposed to describe so far as Sutherland and Caithness are concerned, using both Norse and Scottish records, and piecing them together as best we can, and, be it confessed, in many cases filling up great gaps by necessary guess-work when records fail.

In the reign of the great king Constantine III, between the years 900 and 942, the Danes again gave trouble.  In 903 the Irish Danes ravaged Alban,[11] as Scotland north of the Forth was then called, for a whole year; in 918 Constantine and his ally, Eldred of Lothian, were defeated by another expedition of these invaders; and in 934 Athelstan and his Saxons burst into Strathclyde and Forfar, the heart of Constantine’s kingdom, and the Saxon fleet was sent up even to the shores of Caithness, as a naval demonstration intended to brave the Norse, who had joined Constantine, on their own element.  Lastly, in 937 Athelstan and Constantine met at Brunanburg, probably Birrenswark near Ecclefechan, and Constantine and his Norse allies were completely defeated.[12]

Meantime, since 875, a succession of jarls had endeavoured to hold, for the kings of Norway, Orkney and Shetland, as well as Cat, which then included Ness, Strathnavern, and Sudrland.[13] The history of these early jarls is not told in detail in any surviving contemporary record, for the Sagas of the jarls as individuals have perished; but there is a brief account of them in the beginning of the Orkneyinga Saga, another in chapters 99 and 100 of the St. Olaf’s Saga, and a fuller one in chapters 179 to 187 of the Saga of Olaf Tryggvi’s Son, contained in the Flatey Book.[14] From these the following story may be gathered.