Having arrived, under the guidance of the Orkneyinga, at the closing years of the 12th century, so far as the affairs of Orkney and Shetland and Sutherland and Caithness are concerned, it remains for us to turn and observe the tide of civilisation and order which under our Scottish kings was now setting strongly northwards and ever further north in each successive reign, the Catholic Church and the feudal baron being the chosen instruments of national organisation and discipline, and the charter being the method of establishing them in the land.

To this tide the Pictish and Columban Churches, and the Province of Moray and its Maormors had formed the main barriers and obstacles; and the Saxon nobility, introduced by the elder sons of Malcolm Canmore’s second queen, St. Margaret, had proved quite unable to break them down.  The Pict of Moray was obstinately hostile to the Scots, and his leaders and rulers aspired to, and claimed the crown of Scotland itself.  Rebellion after rebellion took place, and it was not until King David I had introduced the feudal baron with his mail-clad tenants, and settled them on the land by charter, that any success in establishing peace and civil order was achieved in the vast Pictish province of Ross and Moray, which stretched across Scotland from the North Sea to the Minch, and whose people resisted to the utmost.

It is not part of our purpose to treat generally of the feudal and largely Norman families, which gradually asserted their power over the Picts in the north, and were accepted as Chiefs, such as were the Umphraville Earls of Angus, the Roses of Kilravock, the Chisholms of Strath Farrer, the Bissets and Fresels or Frasers of Beauly, the Grants of Moray and Inverness, and the Comyns of Badenoch; for none of these held land north of the Oykel.  But later on in the thirteenth century we shall have more particularly to note the Chens or Cheynes in Caithness, and the Scottish or Pictish family of Freskyn of Strabrock and Moray, in its two branches, that of Hugo of Sutherland and that of his grandson Freskin the younger in Sutherland and Caithness.

Of Freskyn or Fretheskin I, the founder of the line, we have no mention in any charter direct to him,[7] either of his Linlithgowshire lands at Strabrock, or of his estate near Spynie in Moray with its Castle at Duffus.

To us he is as Melchizedek; for neither his father nor his mother is known.  We believe him to have been born before 1100, and so to have been a contemporary of Frakark, Thorbiorn Klerk, and Olvir Rosta, of Jarl Ragnvald, of Margret of Athole, Erlend Haraldson and Sweyn, and also of Harold Maddadson; and to have won his Duffus estate, as an addition to his lands at Strabrock, about 1120 or at latest 1130, before or after the crushing defeat, at Stracathro, of the Picts of Angus and Moray; and between these dates to have built the Castle of Duffus on the bank of Loch Spynie, in order to check Norse raids on the Moray coast while