Such, then, was the racial distribution of Scotland.  Picts, Goidelic Celts, Brythonic Celts, Scots, and Anglo-Saxons were in possession of the country.  In the year 844, Kenneth MacAlpine, King of the Scots of Dalriada, united under his rule the ancient kingdoms of the Picts and Scots, including the whole of Scotland from the Pentland Firth to the Forth.  In 908, a brother of the King of Scots became King of the Britons of Strathclyde, while Lothian, with the rest of Northumbria, passed under the overlordship of the House of Wessex.  We have now arrived at the commencement of the long dispute about the “overlordship”.  We shall attempt to state the main outlines as clearly as possible.

The foundation of the whole controversy lies in a statement, “in the honest English of the Winchester Chronicle”, that, in 924, “was Eadward king chosen to father and to lord of the Scots king and of the Scots, and of Regnold king, and of all the Northumbrians”, and also of the Strathclyde, Brythons or Welsh.  Mr. E.W.  Robertson has argued that no real weight can be given to this statement, for (1) “Regnold king” had died in 921; (2) in 924, Edward the Elder was striving to suppress the Danes south of the Humber, and had no claims to overlordship of any kind over the Northumbrian Danes and English; and (3) the place assigned, Bakewell, in Derbyshire, is improbable, and the recorded building of a fort there is irrelevant.  The reassertion of this homage, under Aethelstan, in 926, which occurs in one MS. of the Chronicle, is open to the objection that it describes the King of Scots as giving up idolatry, more than three hundred and fifty years after the conversion of the country; but as the entry under the year 924 is probably in a contemporary hand, considerable weight must be attached to the double statement.  In the reign of Edmund the Magnificent, an event occurred which has given fresh occasion for dispute.  A famous passage in the “Chronicle” (945 A.D.) tells how Edmund and Malcolm I of Scotland conquered Cumbria, which the English king gave to Malcolm on condition that Malcolm should be his “midwyrtha” or fellow-worker by sea and land.  Mr. Freeman interpreted this as a feudal grant, reading the sense of “fealty” into “midwyrtha”, and regarded the district described as “Cumbria” as including the whole of Strathclyde.  It is somewhat difficult to justify this position, especially as we have no reason for supposing that Edmund did invade Strathclyde, and since, in point of fact, Strathclyde remained hostile to the kingdom of Scotland long after this date.  In 946 the statement of the Chronicle is reasserted in connection with the accession of Eadred, and in somewhat stronger words:—­“the Scots gave him oaths, that they would all that he would”.  Such are the main facts relating to the first two divisions of the threefold claim to overlordship, and their value will probably continue to be estimated in accordance with the personal feelings of the reader.  It