Thus, as Professor Hume Brown puts it--[22]
"Directly and indirectly the Norman conquest influenced Scotland only
less profoundly than England itself. In the case of Scotland it was
less immediate and obtrusive, but in its totality it is a fact of the
first importance in the national history."
It affected Scotland in the latter part of the times which we have
considered right up to John o' Groats. Moray was divided among
Normans and "trustworthy natives," and the scattering of its Pictish
population gave the Mackays to Sutherland, and, largely blended with
the Norse, they still occupy the greater part of it. The Freskyns, as
"trustworthy natives," were introduced into Sutherland, after many
a fight for it, by charter doubtless in Norman form; and Normans won
Caithness in the persons of the earlier Cheynes and Oliphants and St.
Clairs, who, by inter-marriage with the descendants in the female
line of a branch of the Freskyns, possessed themselves not only of the
lands of the family of Moddan but of most of the mainland territories
of the Erlend line, through Johanna of Strathnaver's daughters and
great-grand-daughters.
At a time and in an age when liberty meant licence, the order which
the Norman introduced into the north made more truly for real liberty
and the supremacy of law, than the individual independence which
the Norseman had left his native land to preserve; and though both
feudalism and the blind obedience to authority then enjoined by the
Catholic Church are no longer approved or required, and have long
been rightly discarded, yet they served their purpose in their day,
by evolving from the wild blend of Gaels and Norsemen, which held the
land, a civilised people free from many of the worse, and endowed with
many of the better qualities of either race.
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