created Earl, probably of Ross,[24] after another civil war in Somarled’s own country had called Somarled back to the Isles; and the young king Malcolm joined Henry II of England in his wars in France.  During King Malcolm’s absence abroad Fereteth, Earl of Stratherne, and five other earls, of whom Harold Maddadson was probably one, rebelled in 1160; and, on failing in an attempt to kidnap the young king, who had returned to quell the disturbance, the six earls were reconciled to him; and in the same year he subdued another rising in Galloway, and yet another in Moray.  The subjugation of Moray is said to have been carried out with the greatest severity.  According to Fordun[25] the king “removed the rebel nation of Moray men and scattered them throughout the other districts of Scotland, both beyond the hills and this side thereof,” though Robertson in his Early Kings expresses the opinion that this clearance took place in the reign of David his predecessor.[26] He is probably right, but whenever it took place, it doubtless gave Sutherland the first of its Mackays, originally MacHeths, who were at first refugees from Moray, and ultimately in the thirteenth century are found settled in Durness in the north-western parts of the modern county of Sutherland.  It was at this time, too, that the Innes family, afterwards so well known in Caithness and Sutherland, were, in the person of Berowald the Fleming, given their lands in Moray,[27] William MacFrisgyn, Freskyn’s eldest son, and father of Hugo Freskyn of Sutherland, witnessing the charter, a neighbourly turn which has ever since caused some to believe wrongly that the Freskyns were Flemings.

Malcolm next defeated another rising by Somarled, who was killed in 1164, by treachery or surprise, in a skirmish at Renfrew,[28] and was not Somarled the freeman, who is said in the Orkneyinga Saga to have been slain by Sweyn in the Isles, in his pursuit and defeat of Gilli Odran in the Myrkfjord about seven years earlier.[29]

Then King Malcolm, after a short but brilliant reign, died in his 24th year.  He was succeeded by his brother William the Lion, who was forthwith crowned at Scone on Christmas Eve 1165 in his twenty-second year.

We may now try to state how things stood in the north at the date of his accession.  Soon after this time his grandfather’s friend, the first Freskyn, died between 1166 and 1171, and was succeeded by his son William MacFrisgyn, whose son Hugo would then be quite young.  Harold Maddadson had in 1165 been for twenty-six years Earl of Caithness, and Jarl of Orkney and Shetland for nineteen years jointly with Ragnvald, and for seven years sole jarl of those islands.[30] He had probably put away his first wife Afreka of Fife about 1165, but he afterwards lived with Gormflaith, the daughter of Malcolm MacHeth from a date which cannot be fixed with certainty.  Led by her, it is said, Harold was openly hostile to the Scottish king, of whom, however, he held the earldom of Caithness, which at that time included not only the parishes of Creich, Dornoch, Rogart, Kilmalie or Golspie, Clyne, Loth, and most of Kildonan and of Lairg, then called by the Norse Sudrland, but also the districts of Strathnavern, Eddrachilles, and Durness (where Mackay refugees had not yet permanently settled) as well as Ness, which is now known as the County of Caithness.