The Highlanders of Scotland - Clan Strachan Society

CHAP. VI] O F S C O T L A N D 279
land, and Maolsnectan Maclulaigh, king of Moray, by Malcolm
Kenmore in the year 1085, the line of the ancient Maormors
seems to have become extinct, and from that period the conse-
quence of that powerful tribe began to decline. After the death
of Maolsnectan, the first person whom we find in possession of
this district is Angus, who in the Ulster Annals, is styled earl of
Moray and son of Lulach's daughter ; Lulach was the father of
Maolsnechtan, and Angus was thus the son of his sister.
Although these annals do not mention who this Angus was,
\et we are enabled, bv the assistance of the invaluable MS. so
often quoted, to discover that he was the head of an ancient branch
of the same famil)-, for when Wimund, the English monk, who
claimed the earldom of Moray in the reign of David II., asserted
that he was the son of this Angus, he assumed in consequence
the name of Malcolm Macbeth. As his supposed father's name
was Angus, it is plain that the name Macbeth which he assumed,
was Angus's famiK' name, particularly as Wimund's son,
Kenneth, also called himself Kenneth Macbeth. Among the
Comites, however, who witness charters in the first j^ears of
David the First's reign appears frequently Head, Hed, and Ed,
with the word " Comes " after it, and he appears along with the
earls of almost all the other earldoms, so that he could scarcely
have been earl of any other district than Moray. His date is
circa 1125, Angus is killed in 11 30, and if we add the fact of
Angus's family name being Macbeth, there can be little doubt that
Head was his father, and the husband of Lulach's daughter, and
that from him his descendants took the name of Macbeth. At
this period, feudal succession, by which alone Head could have
derived any right from his wife, was altogether unknown in
Scotland, and as he was the first of the Maormors of Moray who
exchanged that name for the Saxon title of earl, it follows of
necessity that his right to the position of Maormor- must have
been derived through the Highland law of succession ; we should
therefore expect to find this earl the head of some family closely
connected with the former earls, to whom the earldom could
have come by the operation of a strictly male succession.
It so happens, however, that the grandson of Gillichattan, the
founder of the clan Chattan, by far the most important of those
clans, whose descent from the ancient Maormors of Moray is