way
issued the swarms that settled in Iceland, and afterwards gave us a
code of law, our system of trial by jury, much of our legal procedure,
and, when crossed with Gaelic blood, produced the glorious literature
of the Sagas. But in their exodus, whencesoever they started, what
all alike sought was liberty; which, for them, meant the right to do
exactly as they pleased to others, and freedom from paying "scat" or
dues to a superior lord.

When the Vikings came, they came as worshippers of Thor and Odin and
the old Teutonic gods. To them the Christianity of the Pict was "a
weak effeminate creed." They, therefore, slew its followers, plundered
its shrines, and drove its clergy south from Orkney, from north-east
Caithness and the coasts of Sutherland, and from the seaboard of Ross
and Moray, and for a century and a half Christianity was uprooted
and almost wholly expelled. No jarl before Sigurd Hlodverson was a
Christian, and he was baptized by force, and died fighting for Odin
at Clontarf. With all "the fury of an expiring faith, its last lambent
flickering flame, against a creed that seemed to contradict every
article of the old belief,"[2] wherever they came, they destroyed the
cult and culture of Columba, which it had taken several centuries to
establish in the north and west of Alban.

When the conquerors settled in the land, they enslaved such of its
inhabitants as remained among them for a time, and gave to the best
coastal lands and lower valley farms the Norse names which they still
bear, but they left the heads of the river valleys and the hills
mainly to the Moddan family and their Pictish followers and clansmen,
who held them tenaciously and extended their holdings, as the Norse
became less hostile through inter-marriage, or less strong. Once
settled, the Norse exerted such steady pressure on their southern
Pictish neighbours in Ross and Moray, and kept them so fully occupied
in war or by the constant menace of it from the north, that successive
Scottish kings were in their turn left comparatively free, on their
own northern frontier, from Pictish attacks, and were therefore
enabled to consolidate their own kingdom in the south of Scotland and
to beat the English back to the line of the Tweed. Afterwards they
were able to turn their attention to the consolidation of the mainland
north of the Grampians,[3] by first overcoming the Picts in Moray,
and then the Norse in Cat, and establishing the feudal system an