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Updated: May 22, 2025
This Hugo thus seems to have been uncle of, and not identical with Hugo de Moravia, grantee of Sutherland, known as Hugo Freskyn.
But this half of Caithness would be conferred on Harald Ungi subject to the prior grant of Sudrland to Hugo Freskyn. For Harold Maddadson must, in the opinion of so eminent an authority as Lord Hailes, have been forfeited in 1196, if not earlier, for both he and his son Thorfinn were then in open rebellion against the Scottish Crown.
The same king between 1140 and 1145 issued a mandate "to Reinwald Earl of Orkney and to the Earl and all the men of substance of Caithness and Orkney to love and maintain free from injury the monks of Durnach and their men and property," and also in some year between 1145 and 1153, he granted Hoctor Common near Durnach, to Andrew, Bishop of Caithness, whose see was then well established there, and he spent the summer of 1150, while he was superintending the building of the Cistercian abbey of Kinloss, in the neighbouring Castle of Duffus, whose ruins still stand, with Freskyn de Moravia, the first known ancestor of the Earls of Sutherland.
It was at this time, too, that the Innes family, afterwards so well known in Caithness and Sutherland, were, in the person of Berowald the Fleming, given their lands in Moray, William MacFrisgyn, Freskyn's eldest son, and father of Hugo Freskyn of Sutherland, witnessing the charter, a neighbourly turn which has ever since caused some to believe wrongly that the Freskyns were Flemings.
"Alane Southerland, Thane of Southerland," Walter "first Earle," Robert, second earl, who is alleged to have founded "Dounrobin Castell" were purely fictitious persons. "Hugh Southerland, Earle of Southerland nicknamed Freskin" existed, but never was an earl, as Sir Robert well knew, because he quotes charters right up to his death, in which he was styled simply Hugo Freskyn.
David died without issue in 1214 probably soon after Hugo Freskyn, and David was succeeded by his brother John in the jarldom of Orkney and in the reduced earldom of Caithness as sole jarl and earl.
William of Petty, to whom and whose descendants we now bid adieu, was probably sheriff of Invernarrin or Invernairn in 1204, and uncle of another William who became first earl of Sutherland. In Hugo, the elder son of William son of Freskyn, we are deeply interested.
The first event in the brilliant reign of this boy king was the invasion and plundering of Aberdeen by Eystein king of Norway about 1153, in repelling which the feudal Barons of Moray and Angus, including the first Freskyn of Duffus and his son William MacFrisgyn, must have been of service.
The second branch was that of the younger Freskin de Moravia, great-great-grandson of the original Freskyn, and ancestor of the Lords of Duffus, who obtained lands, which were mainly in modern Caithness, and also in the upper portion of the valley of the Naver and the valley of Coire-na-fearn in Strathnavern, by marriage with the Lady Johanna of Strathnaver about 1250.
But of this Hugo's existence we have no definite record, and of him we know nothing more than that he witnessed the document above referred to, and one other about 1195, namely, a Charter of Strathyla, in which the words occur "Willelmo filio Freskyn, Hugone filio Freskyn" quoted by Shaw, page 406, App. No. xxvii, in the edition of 1775.
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