Aed/Heth/Beth/Head, possibly also known as "AEthelred", alias Hugh

Sharon, I think you've misunderstood some piece of this. I have not yet seen doubt in the academic community. Before the grant was published, yes. Then after it was published from one source that seemed not to be aware of it.

Hmm - okay. I haven't seen the academic community responses to the existence of two documents. I was wondering why not though - did you find them?

No one reacted. The discussion just changed -- a clear sign that the existence of the grant wasn't even questioned once it was revealed.

Okay then I'm happy to acknowledge that you and Maven moved this discussion from talking initially about the doubt we found in the academic community about his status as Earl of Fife, to the finding and analysis of a second document, which showed that doubt to be far less plausible.

If the academic community went through the same process without documenting it on the net, that just means that you guys are damn impressive amateurs to have got there on your own :-)

If we'd really been impressive amateurs we'd have been looking at sources like DNB long before anyone got to the stage of opening an entire thread about whether the charter is real or fake.

My rather strong suspicion (but of course no way of proving it) is that the lordship of Fife devolved on (or was seized by) the Crown circa the 1070s-1080s, perhaps because whoever was mormaer died leaving very minor children, and Malcolm III used the opportunity to change it to an Earldom and bestow it as a royal fief on his third(?) son Ethelred. (We don't know what he bestowed upon Edmund, since no grants that he made have survived - but whatever it was, apparently it wasn't enough for him.)

It's certainly not at the same level, but something like that happened with the fief of Stanton in England. The holder (jure uxoris) died leaving a minor son and daughter, and Henry II grabbed the fief and gave it to one of his henchmen. The son, once he'd grown up, got it back from Richard I, but it was probably a quid pro quo obliging him to follow Richard on crusade - and he did not return. (The daughter, Isabel de Camville, passed the fief on to her husband, Robert d'Harcourt, and his descendants, since which time it has been known as Stanton Harcourt.)

My rather strong suspicion (but of course no way of proving it) is that Ethelred was married to the heiress, or was guardian (custos) for a step-son ;)

What's this hangup on *marriage*, or do you just keep bringing it up to annoy because you know it teases? :-P

It's very hard to get at the facts now, partly because your precious Sir Ian Moncrieffe muddied up the water so thoroughly with his cockamamie theory that Ethelred mac Malcolm of Dunkeld and Aed mac meic Ruairidh of Moray were the same person. When experts go off the beam, they do far more damage than speculating amateurs - and IMHO he fell off that one with a resounding splat.

Apparently he had NO more grounds for his theory than a casual resemblance of names and a gut feeling that "it *must* be so".

It might be worthwhile chasing down this tome: Taylor, S., and Markus, G. (2012) The Place-Names of Fife. Vol. 5, Discussions, Glossaries and Edited Texts. Shaun Tyas: Donington, UK. ISBN 9781907730085. Per reports from Wikipedia, they call into question the "seven Pictish sub-kingdoms" idea, point out that "the Kingdom of Fife" was never so called prior to 1678, date the rise of Fife's importance specifically from the reign of Malcolm III, and pin much of the misunderstanding on Andrew of Wyntoun.

Per a detailed description here: http://onomastics.co.uk/the-place-names-of-fife/ Chapters 3 and 4 should prove particularly enlightening.

And here I was thinking you keep bringing up the idea that there is something odd about Ethelred's tenure just to annoy me ;)

A dispassionate assessment has to be that Ethelred held the earldom maybe from his father, or from his brother, or from his uncle, maybe by grant, maybe by marriage, maybe in his own right, maybe as custos, and maybe he held it outright, or maybe as an unperfected claim, or maybe just as recipient of the revenues.

There is very little basis here for forming an attachment to any particular theory, which means that any opinion tells us more about someone's own prejudices than about history.

My impression is that you very much to drive a stake through the heart of any idea that Ethelred left descendants, so you're going to extremes to get rid of any ambiguity about his status as a layman, the possibility of him being married, the authenticity of the charters that name him as earl, the dating of the charters, and the creation of the earldom.

You're so attached to this theory of yours that you try to obscure the problem, as for example when you posted the confirmation without also posting the grant from the same source, then built an entire argument around the idea the confirmation must have been forged. Or here, where you leave out Learney and try to spin the whole problem as just a theory by Moncrieffe.

So whenever you post your theory, I feel almost duty-bound to post something in response just to keep a sense of balance.

I've said there's very little basis for forming an attachment to one theory. I'm partial to the marriage theory because it was the opinion of Learney who (before Moncrieffe) thought Earl Constantine must have succeeded a cousin or niece who was married to Ethelred. It can't be proved, but it's simple, is consistent with the surviving info, makes contextual sense in the politics of the time, and it comes from a man who was immersed in this information and arguably had a better feel for it than any of us amateurs.

Shew - so if we could get all this balancing cutting-edgedness over to the last discussion precipice still left open on this line: http://www.geni.com/discussions/151557?msg=1060521 imagine what we could achieve with it?

(Yes, I recently saw Star Wars :-))

I'm pausing a bit before responding about the Kingdom of Fife. One of the difficulties here is that your message implies this is new information to you, but for me it's just part of an old, familiar and sprawling, brawling argument. We'll get off-topic very fast if we spend much time on it.

The argument here is a bit disingenuous and might be confusing. The idea that there was a "Kingdom of Fife" is a medieval invention the same way Macbeth is a medieval invention. The fact that the earliest mention of a "kingdom" of Fife is 1678 obscures that point that the histories of all these (supposed) kingdoms is very erratic and depends on the importance of the kingdoms to chroniclers recording battles.

At the risk of over-simplification, and going just from memory, the basic idea is this:

From legal codes, old histories, old genealogies, and later traditions it seems that there was a very ancient division of the Picts into seven "kingdoms". That division might have been more notional than real. If this is true, there might have been more or fewer at any particular time but the strength of tradition (arguably) kept the "official" number at seven. (Today, we would probably prefer the word "polities" to "kingdoms".)

At the same time, we also have evidence that there were two main Pictish kingdoms, Alba and Fortriu. It's difficult to reconcile the two schemes exactly. The problem is harder because the actual location of Fortriu has been debated. The problem has been recently solved by placing Fortriu in the north and equating it with Moray, but past arguments have included the idea that it was Fife..

According to a tradition dating perhaps to about 800, Kenneth mac Alpin succeeded to the main Pictish kingdom (Alba) in right of his mother. He himself was a Gael not a Pict. So, he is said to have united the Picts and the invading Gaels (called Scots). He is credited with changing the matrilinear Pictish succession to a patrilinear Gaelic succession. He and his successors down to Donald II were called Kings of the Picts. We call them Kings of Scots, but even as late as Malcolm III the Scots were still occasionally being called the Picts.

I know you know all this background about Picts and Scots, but it's worth recapping here because it becomes part of the argument about the kingdom of Fife. There are surviving genealogies (or king lists) for the rulers of three of the seven kingdoms (if Fortriu was Moray). So, if there were seven kingdoms (according to this old tradition) what happened to the rulers of the other four? And was Fife really one of them, since the first mention is so late? But if Fife wasn't one of them, what was really the seventh, and which of the others included Fife?

You can see how the arguments get very complicated.

There is an old theory, not supported by any sources I know, that the invading Gaels married the Pictish heiresses of these seven kingdoms, or some of them, in the same way Kenneth mac Alpin married the heiress of the central kingdom, Alba. But the surviving genealogies don't tell us what happened. We just have three royal families of Gaels ruling in three sub-kingdoms that are supposed to have been three of the seven old Pictish sub-kingdoms.

Then, as we've said before on this thread, some experts think the descendants of Kenneth mac Alpin ruled some of these kingdoms as part of a division of the royal patrimony. For example, many people think the descendants of King Dubh ruled in Fife, and that might be why there is no separate king list for Fife.

My point here isn't to argue one side or the other, it's that this is old familiar territory with arguments on all sides going back to Skene and beyond. The idea that there was no kingdom of Fife isn't new or daring. It's just one side of an old debate.

> so if we could get all this balancing cutting-edgedness over to the last discussion precipice still left open on this line

We'll get there, Sharon, I'm sure of it. But you can't push the river ;)

You can't have it both ways, Justin. Either Ethelred left *no* descendants and the MacDuffs picked up/regained the territory, or he *did* leave descendants and the whole MacDuff thing is a later crock.

Considering that Constantine *may* have been styling himself "macDuff", and Gille Micheil certainly was so styling himself, that's a pretty strong argument against any descendants from Ethelred.

I have also concluded that the whole topic of early-medieval charters is a minefield. Particularly in Scotland, very very very few authentic original charters have survived (I read somewhere, can't remember where, that there are *no* extant originals prior to David I - which may or may not be true).

And every time something gets copied, a chance of error creeps in. (That's assuming an honest attempt to transcribe an original accurately - which certainly *wasn't* always the case in England....)

I also wonder why, if the "original" Ethelred grant was so important, Lawrie consigned it to his notes and didn't cite it upfront. Did he not trust it because it was a transcription in Sibbald's collection? (He seems to have had a fairly high index of suspicion, higher than several other prominent experts of his time.)

I wonder if we'll ever know who "Maddock, comes" was supposed to be, or what he was "comes" of. He probably wouldn't have been Madach of Atholl, who belongs to a later generation. He would also not have been the possibly-fictional "Mutatan or Muddan" who was allegedly appointed to take Thorfinn's Caithness away from him - that's too early.

"I have also concluded that the whole topic of early-medieval charters is a minefield. Particularly in Scotland, very very very few authentic original charters have survived "" - FYI

The Models of Authority project encompasses a period remarkable for the emergence of an extraordinary level of diversity in the appearance of the handwriting of charters issued both north and south of the Scottish border. The earliest surviving Scottish charters, which date from the early twelfth century, reflect the long-established Anglo-Saxon tradition of writing such documents in a script no different from that used for formal handwriting in books. Over the course of the twelfth century, however, two very different kinds of stimuli prompted scribes to introduce a number of modifications to their handwriting when they wrote documents. These modifications came to be combined in various different ways, resulting in the diversity that characterises the handwriting of English and Scottish charters by the first half of the thirteenth century.

The great majority of charters, however, survive in cartularies. When the project was first conceived it was assumed that a fine-grained analysis of scribal approaches to charters would of necessity be confined to originals. This is no longer the case. Joanna Tucker has developed a new approach to studying the earliest Scottish cartularies which has the potential to open the door to fresh perspectives on documentary culture in this period.

All of this is focused on Scotland. Taking the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as a whole, about 5,000 Scottish charters as such survive (including brieves), of which over a fifth are extant as contemporary single sheets.

The kingdom itself was thought of as a realm comprising a number of ‘countries’, as it were, with (in some cases) a clear sense of their own laws and customs. Some of these ‘countries’ had their own kings in the early twelfth century, while others had been regularly under the control of kings of Scots for at least a couple of generations. The history of this period is not simply about territorial expansion, however. The radical change of the kingdom from a realm of many countries to a single country and people highlights the growing significance of royal government as a focus of identity.[2]

The first traces of this new identity can be picked up in charters where property is said to be held or given as freely as any other similar property is held or given in the kingdom of Scotland or the kingdom of the Scots (in regno Scotie or in regno Scottorum). This implies an assumption that property-rights were the same across the kingdom, and were enjoyed on the same terms. The earliest example of the kingdom as a point of reference like this in a charter dates from the 1150s. It only ceased to be a rarity, however, from the 1180s at the earliest.[3]At this stage charters had only recently become a regular part of property transactions at the apex of society: Matthew Hammond has recently argued compellingly that royal gifts of land to lay people were routinely recorded in a charter from the mid-1160s.[4]

* * *

Charters themselves were a relatively recent phenomenon in Scotland. The very earliest examples date from the 1090s, and are restricted to royal charters. All these were produced by Durham Cathedral Priory. The earliest extant original charter written in Scotland is a brieve of Alexander I.[5] Although we must always be alert to the problem that many more charters have been lost than survive, there is nothing about the prose, form or appearance of the earliest examples that cannot comfortably be explained as the result of recent introduction from England.[6] This is not to say that there were no property records of any kind in Scotland before the 1090s. A crucial distinction, however, can be made between the project’s charters and the material written into originally blank spaces in a pocket gospel book at Deer in the North-East.[7]

The protective force of a property-record in the Book of Deer (Cambridge University Library MS Ii.6.32) would have been enhanced by being written into the gospel book, either as a copy or as fresh prose. As far as charters are concerned, however, their full force was as a single sheet with the donor’s seal. They must have originated as such, even if most survive only as copies. The Deer records, by contrast, need not have existed as single sheets at all.[9]

The earliest generations of Scottish charters were based on English models, and exhibit similar prose and modified bookhand. On our current understanding, it would appear that this close association with England continued throughout our period. This means that any development has to be considered within a British context. It is likely, for example, that many, if not all the features that Tessa Webber has identified in her study of English charters during the course of the twelfth century will also be found in the project’s corpus.[9] Some charters also began to exhibit a few features derived ultimately from papal documents. If these were copied directly from bulls dispatched to Scotland—and this is by no means necessary—then the models might have been those which, like charters, were concerned with safeguarding possessions and privileges. Bulls like these began to be sought and received from the 1140s.[10]

Dauvit Broun, ‘The adoption of brieves in Scotland’, in Marie-Therese Flanagan and Judith A. Green (eds), Charters and Charter Scholarship in Britain and Ireland (London 2005), 164–83.

[7] Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh, ‘The property records: diplomatic edition including accents’, and Katherine Forsyth, Dauvit Broun and Thomas Clancy, ‘The property records: text and translation’, in Katherine Forsyth (ed.), Studies in the Book of Deer (Dublin 2008), 119–130, 131–44.

[8] This is a better way of encapsulating the distinction between charters and property records than in Dauvit Broun, The Charters of Gaelic Scotland and Ireland in the Early and Central Middle Ages. Quiggin Pamphlet no.2. Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, University of Cambridge (Cambridge 1995), and Dauvit Broun, ‘The writing of charters in Scotland and Ireland in the twelfth century’, in Karl Heidecker (ed.), Charters and the Use of the Written Word in Medieval Society, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy no. 5 (Turnhout 2000), 113–32. It arises from Joanna Tucker’s work on cartularies, building on the relationship between originals and cartularies discussed in Laurent Morelle, ‘Histoire et archives vers l’an mil: une nouvelle “mutation”?’, Histoire et Archives, 3 (January–June 1998), 119–41, and Laurent Morelle, ‘De l’original á la copie. Remarques sur l’évaluation des transcriptions dans les cartulaires médiévaux’, in Olivier Guyotjeannin, Laurent Morelle and Michel Parisse (eds), Les cartularies. Actes de la table ronde organise par l’École nationale des chartes et le G.D.R 121 du C.N.R.S (Paris, 5–7 décembre 1991) (Paris 1993), 91–102. For an example of a record written directly into a gospel book, see English Historical Documents, vol. i, ed. Dorothy Whitelock (London 1955), 602, discussed in Elaine Treharne, ‘Textual communities (vernacular)’, in Julia Crick and Elisabeth van Houts (eds), A Social History of England, 900–1200 (Cambridge 2011), 341–51, at 347–8.

[9] Teresa Webber, ‘L’écriture des documents en Angleterre au XIIe siècle’, Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes, 165 (2007) [published 2008], 139–65

[10] Robert Somerville, Scotia Pontificia. Papal Letters to Scotland before the Pontificate of Innocent III (Oxford 1988), nos. 23, 25–28.

Just an FYI - I should be able to post on a discussion without the backlash, implied insults, and belittling of the past by another user. Thank you in advance.

> You can't have it both ways, Justin.

Always with you it's these strident certainties.

I'm not trying to have it both ways, or any way at all. That's a point you miss and keep missing. I'm keeping open all reasonable possibilities while having a favorite among them.

I'm partial to the idea Ethelred was earl by marriage. I feel comfortable with that because it was Learney's opinion and it fits the available information. I'm not advocating the idea he had children, but I'm also not going to exclude it just because it doesn't fit my ideas. There are any number of scenarios that could work. As I've said before, Maddock might have been Ethelred's guardian ("tutor"). Constantine might have been Ethelred's step-son. On and on.

But I think you are dead-wrong when you say Ethelred cannot have been the male-line ancestor of the later earls. I don't think it's the likeliest scenario but I don't think it can be excluded as a logical possibility.

You are thinking of Macduff as a surname instead of allowing for Celtic-style kinship systems where it might have been something closer to what we would call a title -- "captain of the kindred descended from Duff".

Ethelred's descendants could, in theory, have taken the name Macduff without being patrilineal Macduffs. "Incoming husbands" taking the designation of an heiress wife were a common feature of Scottish society. I don't know of another example this early, but it's treated as so normal in later times that it must be much earlier than the earliest documented examples.

Along the same lines, this problem of husbands taking their names from heiress wives is also one of the biggest headaches with traditional clan genealogies. Often there is a genealogy that seems to show an unbroken male of chiefs but contemporary evidence shows (or pedigree variations suggest) that one of them married an heiress so the man shown as his father is really her father. This would be worth a separate thread.

"Yes, the Earliest Scottish Charters" A. A. M. Duncan
The Scottish Historical Review, Vol. 78, No. 205, Part 1 (Apr., 1999), pp. 1-38 Published by: Edinburgh University Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25530864 Page Count: 38

> I have also concluded that the whole topic of early-medieval charters is a minefield.

It's certainly a minefield. I don't disagree with you there. That's why Scottish historians don't rely on charters to the same extent English historians do for the same period.

In Scotland something can be accepted as true (or probable) even if there is no evidence in the charters. And, it's not just that we suddenly have charters where we didn't before, it's that political structure was changing radically as the tribal Scots were becoming feudalized following English patterns.

That's one reason, for example, why it's so tricky to say there is no documentary evidence of the kingdom of Fife until 1678. The odds would be against that kind of evidence existing in the first place. The kingdom was over and done with, already an earldom, by the time of the earliest charters.

Good stuff, Jacqueli. This sounds vaguely familiar. I must have read it at some point, or something like it. When I think about the evolution of charters, my mind immediately rushes to some of the glittery details, like when Scottish kings began using the royal We, or when they began to copy certain features of English charters.

Back in college I had a professor whose passion was King John's administrative reforms. He was always going off on long digressions about features of charters, types of charters, who witnessed charters and what that tells us, the shift in the chancery, administrative streamlining, on and on. That was 40 years ago but I've been left in permanent shell-shock, wondering if this is going to be on the final exam :)

Thanks for the reminder. I meant to send Douglas an email. I want to keep in touch with him. He'll be a valuable resource, as well as just a congenial chum to have.