doption of English along
the seaboard, and in the towns, while Gaelic still remained the
language of the countryman. There is no evidence of any English
immigration of sufficient proportions to overwhelm the Gaelic
population. Like the victory of the conquered English over the
conquering Normans, which was even then making fast progress in England,
it is a triumph of a kind that subsequent events have revealed as
characteristically Anglo-Saxon, and it called into force the powers of
adaptation and of colonization which have brought into being so great an
English-speaking world.

Malcolm's reign ended in defeat and failure; his wife died of grief, and
the opportunity presented itself of a Celtic reaction against the
Anglicization of the reign of Malcolm III. The throne was seized by
Malcolm's brother, Donald Bane. Malcolm's eldest son, Duncan, whose
mother, Ingibjorg, had been a Dane, received assistance from Rufus, and
drove Donald Bane, after a reign of six months, into the distant North.
But after about six months he himself was slain in a small fight with
the Mormaer or Earl of the Mearns, and Donald Bane continued to reign
for about three years, in conjunction with Edmund, a son of Malcolm and
Margaret. But in 1097, Edgar, a younger brother of Edmund, again
obtained the help of Rufus and secured the throne. The reign of Edgar is
important in two respects. It put an end to the Celtic revival, and
reproduced the conditions of the time of Malcolm and Margaret.
Henceforward Celtic efforts were impossible except in the Highlands, and
the Celts of the Lowlands resigned themselves to the process of
Anglicization imposed upon them alike by ecclesiastical, political, and
commercial circumstances. It saw also the beginning of an influence
which was to prove scarcely less fruitful in results than the
Anglo-Saxon triumph of which we have spoken. In November, 1100, Edgar's
sister, Matilda, was married to the Norman King of England, Henry I, and
two years later, another sister, Mary, was married to Eustace, Count of
Boulogne, the son of the future King Stephen. These unions, with a son
and a grandson respectively of William the Conqueror, prepared the way
for the Norman Conquest of Scotland. Edgar died in January, 1106-7, and
his brother and successor, Alexander I, espoused an Anglo-Norman,
Sybilla, who is generally supposed to have been a natural daughter of
Henry I. On the death of Alexander, in 1124, these Norman influences
a