man 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 the Norse held Turfness or Burghead; and we
know that he entertained King David I there during the whole summer of
1150, while that king was superintending the building of the Abbey of
Kinloss. From notices in a charter of King William the Lion granting
and confirming to Freskyn's son, William, his father's lands of
Strabrock in West Lothian and of Duffus, Roseisle, Inchkeile, Macher
and Kintrai,[8] forming almost the whole parish of Spynie, we believe
him to have been dead by 1166, or, at the latest, 1171, the year of
Sweyn Asleifarson's death, and we know that he held all these lands
from David I, with probably many more in Moray. Contrary to the
general impression, it seems probable that Freskyn had not one son,
but two sons, William above mentioned and also Hugo, who witnessed a
charter, not necessarily spurious, granting Lohworuora, now Borthwick,
Church to Herbert, bishop of Glasgow, about 1150. But of this Hugo