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lose it again. Eventually the Gaels gained the upper hand and in 843 the Gaelic king Kenneth
MacAlpin was crowned the first king of Alba, a unified country covering both the land of the Picts
and Dalriada. Kenneth MacAlpin’s claim to the throne was a combination of the Gaelic patrilineal
succession of Dalriada and the matrilineal inheritance system of the Picts. These rules did not mean
that women became rulers themselves, but that a man would be able to claim the throne through his
mother’s genealogy rather than his father’s. The land came to be called Scotland because Scotti
was the label the Romans gave to all Irish immigrants into Britannia. As we have already seen, that
name has its own, deeper origins in the mythology of Scota, wife of Mil.
The unification of Scotland under a single king came shortly after the Vikings began their
attacks on the coast and is widely seen as a response to this external threat, when unity against a
common enemy was more prudent than being weakened by continued feuding, a solution that eluded
the Irish. Kenneth MacAlpin moved his centre of operations from Dalriada to the Pictish capital
near Perth on the eastern side of Scotland. To emphasize that he was there to stay, he brought the
ancient ‘Stone of Destiny’ from the west and installed it at Scone, near Perth, for his coronation.
These decisions, no doubt diplomatically and politically sound at the time, did mean that the centre
of power shifted away from the Gaelic west. In later centuries Argyll and the Hebrides consistently
refused to be governed by the kings of Scotland, and even now still see themselves as different.
Kenneth was the first of a dynasty of Scottish kings that ruled in patrilineal succession until
1286. Towards the end, Robert the Bruce emerged victorious from a confusion of claimants. His
grandson Robert II, the son of Walter, the High Steward of Scotland, and Bruce’s daughter, began
the Stuart dynasty, which ruled in Scotland until 1603. This was when James VI, on the death of the
childless Elizabeth I, also became King of England, and, though it is often forgotten, King of
Ireland as well.
The Stuarts were not Scottish in origin at all, but Anglo-Normans. Just as territorial ambition
had spurred Richard de Clare, Earl of Pembroke, to invade Ireland in 1166, so other Anglo-
Norman lords had their eyes on Scotland. However, unlike Ireland, where the chaos of rival kings
made it easy for de Clare to divide and conquer, the relative stability of the unified Scottish royal
house required more subtle tactics. Anglo-Norman barons sided with the Scottish kings against the
unruly Gaels of the west and it was the contingent of armoured Norman knights on horseback that
defeated the Celtic chieftain Somerled’s attempted invasion of Scotland at the battle of Renfrew in
1164. Walter the Steward, whose son was to become, as Robert II, the first of the Stuart dynasty,
was himself a member of the Norman Dapifer family from near Oswestry in Shropshire, where they
had been granted land by Henry I. This is relev-ant in the genetic context because, although there
was no invasion as there had been in Ireland, the Anglo-Norman presence in Scotland was very
influential. It may have affected the nature of the Y-chromosome pattern that we find in much the
same way that Gaelic and Anglo-Norman Y-chromosomes are distinctly different in Ireland.
So far, we have four possible influences on the genetic structure of the people of Scotland:
firstly the Picts; then the Gaels of Ireland, synonymous with the Celts; the Vikings; and, in the south
of Scotland particularly, the Anglo-Normans. As we shall see later, the south of Scotland was
originally the British Celtic kingdom of Strathclyde. It is known that from the fifth century AD
onwards this came under pressure from Anglo-Saxons, but we will leave that to a later chapter.
With the Picts, Celts, Vikings and Anglo-Normans to sort out, there is already more than enough to
keep us occupied.