attacked the country from the ninth to the eighteenth century, and
profoundly modified the racial character of the population on the south
and west coasts, in the islands, and along the east coast as far south
as the Moray Firth.

Such, then, was the racial distribution of Scotland. Picts, Goidelic
Celts, Brythonic Celts, Scots, and Anglo-Saxons were in possession of
the country. In the year 844, Kenneth MacAlpine, King of the Scots of
Dalriada, united under his rule the ancient kingdoms of the Picts and
Scots, including the whole of Scotland from the Pentland Firth to the
Forth. In 908, a brother of the King of Scots became King of the Britons
of Strathclyde, while Lothian, with the rest of Northumbria, passed
under the overlordship of the House of Wessex. We have now arrived at
the commencement of the long dispute about the "overlordship". We shall
attempt to state the main outlines as clearly as possible.

The foundation of the whole controversy lies in a statement, "in the
honest English of the Winchester Chronicle", that, in 924, "was Eadward
king chosen to father and to lord of the Scots king and of the Scots,
and of Regnold king, and of all the Northumbrians", and also of the
Strathclyde, Brythons or Welsh. Mr. E.W. Robertson has argued that no
real weight can be given to this statement, for (1) "Regnold king" had
died in 921; (2) in 924, Edward the Elder was striving to suppress the
Danes south of the Humber, and had no claims to overlordship of any kind
over the Northumbrian Danes and English; and (3) the place assigned,
Bakewell, in Derbyshire, is improbable, and the recorded building of a
fort there is irrelevant. The reassertion of this homage, under
Aethelstan, in 926, which occurs in one MS. of the Chronicle, is open to
the objection that it describes the King of Scots as giving up idolatry,
more than three hundred and fifty years after the conversion of the