ately after David's death, King William the Lion, who had, in
1211, suppressed a rebellion in Moray of the Thanes of Ross under
Guthred son of Donald Ban MacWilliam whom a few years later he
captured and beheaded,[3] came to Moray again; and, about the 1st
of August 1214, King William demanded, and received[4] Earl John's
daughter, whose name is not known, as a hostage for her father's
loyalty, and a guarantee of the peace then made, under which John was
probably recognised as earl and as entitled to his reduced territory.
His daughter may, at this time, have been her father's sole heiress,
although she did not remain so, because we find that he had a son who
lived till 1226, called Harald. Meantime Bishop Adam, after the death
in 1213 of Bishop John, his half-blinded and mutilated predecessor,
succeeded to the Episcopal See of Caithness,[5] and seems to have
reversed Bishop John's policy of leniency to his flock by exacting
from them heavier and heavier tithes, as years went by.

In 1217, King Hakon's rival, Jarl Skuli, thought Earl John so
promising a traitor as to send him letters forged with the Norse
king's seal.[6] In 1218 John was present at Bergen to witness the
ordeal successfully undergone by King Hakon's mother in order to prove
that king, then a boy, to be her son by the late King Hakon Sverri's
son, and so rightly entitled to the Norwegian crown.[7]

After Earl John's return from Norway, the bishop's exactions of tithes
of butter reached such a pitch that the Caithness folk met near his
house at Halkirk, and demanded that the earl should protect them
against the bishop's rapacity, and, either at the earl's suggestion
or without any opposition on his part, they attacked the bishop in his
house, which was close to _Breithivellir_ (now Brawl) Castle,
where John lived. The Saga gives the following description of this
affair:--[8]

"They then held a Thing on the fell above the homestead where the earl
was. Rafn the Lawman was then with the bishop, and prayed the bishop
to spare the men; also he said he was afraid how things might go. Then
a message was sent to Earl John with a prayer that he would reconcile
the bishop and the freemen; but the earl would come never near the
spot. Then the freemen ran down from the fell and fared hotly and
eagerly. And when Rafn the Lawman saw that, he bade the bishop devise
some plan to save himself. He and the bishop were drinking in a loft,
and when the freemen came to the l