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Secondly, we have the family of Moddan, Celtic earls or maormors, with extensive territories held under the kings of Alban and Scotland for many centuries before this time, but dispossessed in part by the Norse.
The men of Moray, however, and their Pictish Maormors remained ungrateful, and irreconcilably opposed to Scottish rule; and Moray, then stretching across almost from ocean to ocean, barred the way of the Scots to the north. What he could not achieve by arms, Malcolm, both before and after his accession, decided to secure by a series of matrimonial alliances.
Attention will have to be paid to the Pictish family of Moldan of Duncansby, of Moddan, created Earl of Caithness by his uncle Duncan I, and of Moddan "in Dale," each of whom in turn succeeded to much of the estates of the ancient Maormors of Duncansby, but whose people had been driven back from most of the best low-lying lands into the upper valleys and the hills by the foreign invaders of Cat.
To this tide the Pictish and Columban Churches, and the Province of Moray and its Maormors had formed the main barriers and obstacles; and the Saxon nobility, introduced by the elder sons of Malcolm Canmore's second queen, St. Margaret, had proved quite unable to break them down.
Long thwarted in their policy by Moray and its Pictish maormors, who claimed even the throne itself, these two kings pushed their authority, by organisation and conquest, more and more towards the north. Alexander I founded the Bishoprics of St. Andrew's, Dunkeld, and Moray in 1107, and the Monastery of Scone, afterwards intimately connected with Kildonan in Sutherland, in 1113 or 1114.
This strife was provoked by Hakon, and apparently lasted for many years, Erlend supporting his own sons, and driving Hakon abroad to Norway about the year 1090. Neither Paul nor Erlend seems to have been much in Sutherland or Caithness, in which the representatives of the Gaelic Maormors or Chiefs probably regained power, especially the family of Moddan, and extended their territories.
On Thorfinn's death, however, the rest of his territories, nine Scottish earldoms, it is said, "fell away, and went under those men who were territorially born to rule over them;" that is to say, they reverted to Scottish Maormors; but Orkney and Shetland remained wholly Norse, and under Norse rule.
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