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Fordun has the character of a man of judgment and research, and any statement or opinion delivered by him would be entitled to respect. Of Bower not so much can be said. He largely interpolated the work of his master, and sometimes with the absurdest fictions. Among his interpolations, and forming, it is important to observe, no part of the original text, is a passage translated as follows.
Fordun, who wrote two centuries later, ascribes to David's successor, Malcolm IV, an invasion of Moray, and says that the king scattered the inhabitants throughout the rest of Scotland, and replaced them by "his own peaceful people". There is no further evidence in support of this statement, and almost the whole of Malcolm's short reign was occupied with the settlement of Galloway.
The new king, Malcolm IV, the grandson of David, easily subdued this rising, and it is in connection with its suppression that Fordun makes the statement, quoted in the Introduction, about the displacement of the population of Moray.
He writes of the Highlanders with some ill-will, describing them as a "savage and untamed people, rude and independent, given to rapine, ... hostile to the English language and people, and, owing to diversity of speech, even to their own nation ." But it is his custom to write thus of the opponents of the Anglo-Norman civil and ecclesiastical institutions, and he brings all Scotland under the same condemnation when he tells us how David "did his utmost to draw on that rough and boorish people towards quiet and chastened manners". The reference to "their own nation" shows, too, that Fordun did not understand that the Highlanders were a different people; and when he called them hostile to the English, he was evidently unaware that their custom was "out of hatred to the Saxons nearest them" to league with the English.
But Fordun says the murder was perpetrated near Elgin; and others say at Cawdor Castle.
Neither in Barbour's Bruce nor in Blind Harry's Wallace is there any such consciousness of difference, although Barbour lived in Aberdeen in the days before Harlaw. John of Fordun, a fellow-townsman and a contemporary of Barbour, was an ardent admirer of St. Margaret and of David I, and of the Anglo-Norman institutions they introduced, while he possessed an invincible objection to the kilt.
Fordun, the earliest of his countrymen from whom we have any account of him, is his junior by nearly a century. Wyntoun, the next authority, is still half a century later.
Fordun, who wrote in the reign of Robert Bruce, Bowyer, and Langtoft, all Scotch historians, say that it was he who betrayed Wallace, and their account is confirmed by contemporary English writings.
Fordun, the chronicler of Scotland, came upon the same rock, and was driven by consequence into wild declarations about the work of Palladius in North Britain. Fordun, however, had the disadvantage of not being infallible. Prosper of Aquitaine is not a person to be implicitly followed, when the subject is the claims and the great deeds of bishops of Rome.
The subjugation of Moray is said to have been carried out with the greatest severity. According to Fordun the king "removed the rebel nation of Moray men and scattered them throughout the other districts of Scotland, both beyond the hills and this side thereof," though Robertson in his Early Kings expresses the opinion that this clearance took place in the reign of David his predecessor.
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