Roderic was now far away on his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and the
vengeance might never be fulfilled. If war should come, and Kenric
himself be slain, then Roderic was the next heir to the lordship of
Bute, and whether King Alexander or King Hakon became the overlord and
monarch, it mattered little, for Roderic would still make claim to his
father's dominions.

Earl Hamish of Bute had but a few days before his tragic death been into
Scotland to render account to Alexander the Third concerning his mission
to the King of Norway. That mission had failed in its object. The
letters of Henry of England and His Majesty of Scots had not succeeded
in persuading the Norse monarch to resign his claims to the dominion of
the Western Isles. King Hakon claimed that those lands, from the Lewis
in the north even to the Isle of Man in the south, were his by right of
both conquest and possession, and that each and all of the island kings,
or jarls, were bound in fealty and vassalage to Norway. On the other
hand, King Alexander claimed that he held yet stronger rights of
sovereignty, and that the islands were even by nature intended to be
part of Scotland.

The Western Isles, and more especially that group lying south of the
holy island of Iona, were at this time in a most prosperous condition.
Together with a large tract of country on the northeast of Ireland, they
formed a sort of naval empire, with the open sea as its centre. They
were densely populated. The useful arts were carried to a degree of
perfection unsurpassed in other European countries. The learned Irish
clergy had established their well-built monasteries over all the islands
even before the arrival of the Norse colonists, and great numbers of
Britons, flying hither as an asylum when their own country was ravaged
by the Saxons, had carried with them the remains of science,