Domhnall? (mac meic Dubh) MacAlpin - Line back to Giric

Okay. I wouldn't call that a persistent tradition but it's something better -- a modern theory that can stand on its own terms.

We already know the theory mac Duib evolved to MacDuff isn't original to Bannerman. The idea the the MacDuffs took their name from King Dubh goes back at least to the late 1800s, if not further.

And, it's certainly true that many Scottish clans were "founded by" a grandson (or great grandson) of their eponym. That is a point I made earlier about the problem with Ethelred being the name father of the later MacDuffs. Maven, I think you noticed it as well when you pointed out that Duff mac Eth has to be a fictitious person constructed to give the later MacDuffs a new eponym.

My response to Bannerman on this point would be that we don't actually know who the first MacDuff was, so guessing that the name father was grandson Giric then arguing that Giric was the founder is a circular argument.

The ancestor could have been any of King Dubh's grandsons or great grandsons. And, following the pattern of other clans, If Giric was the eponymous ancestor, it is likely his collateral kin also descended from Dubh were included in the label MacDuff.

In other words, Bannerman's argument is sound but it only goes so far. Giric is a candidate, but not the only candidate.

I'm doing two things here:

First, I'm leaving Giric open as possibility.

Second, I'm looking for older traditions. I remember seeing Grimus / Gryme given definitively somewhere as the MacDuff ancestor. The value of that statement depends on when and where the statement was made. If it was a Victorian genealogy, then it is just an example of someone before Bannerman to speculate Grimus for the same reasons Bannerman speculated Giric. If it was an older source, I might give it more authority.

My argument against Giric is that he is too closely related to Gruoch for her to have been the heiress. But my arguments against Grimus would be (a) that John of Fordun has apparently confused him with Giric, (b) some 19th century scholars thought Grimus might be the same person as Kenneth III, and (c) I want more information documenting his existence.

I also read in one of the penny history books I picked up in Scotland ( by David Ross), that Kenneth is supposedly nicknamed Grimus - but it gave no sources, and I've read it nowhere else (including in Alex Woolf's much acclaimed 2007 book about this era), so I'm assuming it's derivative - and likely from the same Victorian source you've indicated, Justin.

On Giric's vs Gruoch's son's claim to the throne - your point is crucial, and I hadn't thought of it. If primogeniture was the rule, any male heir of his would have taken precedence over Lulach.
Fichtenau's 1990 book 'Living in the Tenth Century' goes into some detail about the expectations that a king would be visible on the battlefield, and the compromise that older kings made in acknowledging their sons as co-kings, without abdicating, because they were young enough to be seen leading on the battlefield. Kenneth III Mac Duibh, king of Scots may have acknowledged his son Giric II mac Cináeda, King of Scots as co-king in this way, before they were both killed at the Battle of Monzievaird in 1005 (Roughly the year that Macbeth was born!) In explanation of the query that hangs over Giric’s existence because his supposed reign coincides with his father’s.
That doesn’t mean, though, that Giric – or his murdered brother, GilleCoemgain, couldn’t have had daughters from whom the MacDuff’s descend.

Boite’s son or grandson is killed as a rival, but Boite’s daughter in Moray - married to a man who has an equal claim to the throne as Duncan does (grandson through a daughter) - might have had a better chance of challenging from Moray without being killed.
(Aside – It’s quite possible that Shakespeare is referencing Boite’s grand/son’s death as the Macduff Household killings in the play).

I'll copy out the three book references tomorrow when I'm actually awake enough to find them :-)

A further aside as I shuffle off to bed before my slippers turn to glass -
Once I'd read a reference to Bethoc or Gruoch as 'the heiress of Scone" I started looking at the Scots king lists with a query about whether the Pictish matriliny traditions might still be operating in the successions that move from house to house in ways that appear oddly alternate.
Could the anthropologically vouched for notion of the mother's brother explain the Scots kings succession? Could the king's daughters be the missing element linking the two houses in the succession confrontations?

I think we need to deal with two different inheritance paradigms here.

Primogeniture was introduced by St. Margaret and the English. It was one aspect of her campaign to bring the light of Anglo-Saxon civilization to the barbarians in Scotland. Her church reforms were another aspect of the same guiding principle.

The idea that St. Margaret's children were following the new primogeniture rules is the foundation for asserting that we know their relative ages, that Edmund must have been the oldest after Edward, and that Ethelred must have died before 1098. Without primogeniture, all that falls apart.

They had to do some fancy footwork when politics made primogeniture inconvenient. First, they had to argue that Malcolm III's oldest son Duncan was really illegitimate, so he shouldn't count. (Under the old Celtic rules Duncan would have been eligible even if he was illegitimate.) Then they had to ignore Edmund's seniority in order to justify bringing an English army into Scotland under the leadership of Edmund's younger brother Edgar. Finally, they had to argue it was okay to pass over Edmund for the throne because he had collaborated with the Scots.

So. Primogeniture, but only when it was convenient. But there are still people who will argue that Ethelred must have been dead because they never would have passed over him like they did Edmund.

Instead of primogeniture the Scots used the Celtic derbhfine system.

The derbhfine was a kinship group of people descended from the same great grandfather.

To be eligible to inherit the kingship a man had to be in the derbhfine of the last king or one of his predecessors.

Lulach is often used as an example. As a great grandson of Kenneth III he was the last generation of his line to have a chance at the throne.

It doesn't matter for Lulach that his step-father Macbeth was king, but it might have mattered that his mother Gruoch was queen, if Macbeth claimed in her right (which we don't know).

Because Lulach got to be king, even just briefly, his own descendants down to his great grandchildren were eligible for the throne.

It's not as complicated as it sounds. You just look at your parents, grandparents, and great grandparents. If one of them was the king, you had a chance at the throne.

This was the system used for all hereditary offices -- kings, mormaers, chiefs, lay abbots -- everything.

>Primogeniture was introduced by St. Margaret and the English

Not entirely. It was the name of the game Malcolm II was playing with his grandsons - the oldest (Duncan) was supposed to inherit whether he could live up to it or not (he couldn't).

It has been said, but not confirmed, that Malcolm's father, Kenneth II, wanted to restrict the succession to just his own branch of the family, and that that's what got him assassinated.

The idea kept sneaking in, but it took English swords in quantity to get Scots to accept it (reluctantly).

In practice, a king normally designated his heir ("tanist") during his life, although after his death the leading men of the derbhfine confirmed the appointment. Theoretically, at least.

Legalists like Learney have argued that the election was conducted with the five leading men of the derbhfine as electors. Notionally, these would have been the senior heads of households. The theory is enshrined in later law where it takes five branches to make a clan or sept. Others have argued that this was the idealized system but probably broke down in practice.

One of the main concerns was that the new king be someone mature, with experience, and still in the prime of life so he could lead in battle. So, the system effectively gave preference to the old king's brothers over his sons, and if the brothers were too old then preference to the older sons. That's probably why the Scots preferred Malcolm III's son Duncan over the children of St. Margaret.

This system also tended to create alternating lines of kings. If two brothers had both been king, and both were dead with mature sons then two sets of cousins would contend for the throne. And after them, their children.

> It was the name of the game Malcolm II was playing with his grandsons

That's not primogeniture as the English knew it. That's good, old-fashioned derbhfine politics.

Rather more like it than the Scots were used to, though - and Malcolm played much rougher than they were used to, too.

I"m not dogmatic about the boundaries. I assume there will be a certain amount of cultural influence across any border. However, I'm not sure Malcolm II was influenced by abstract legal theories as much as just personal self-interest. He wanted his line to "win". He was -- I think -- helped by the increasing centralization of the kingdom and the inherent instability of the tribal sub-kingdoms. In other words, he could hope to win in a way that would not have been possible for his predecessors.

> heiress of Scone

An interesting sidelight here. Scone was the ceremonial capital but the old political center was 7 miles away, at Abernethy. And, curiously, the Abernethy family claims to be descended from the Earls of Fife. Their ancestor Orm de Abernethy is supposedly a grandson of Gillemichael.

Discussion concluded/ paused in Dec 2015 with no Sources to support the existence of a 'Domhnall? (mac meic Dubh) MacAlpin' as the connection between the already postulated placeholder: "Macduff" and Dubh mac Máel Coluim, King of Scots
I am therefore removing the profile, pending further sources.

The MacDuff clan will have to be content with an ancestral line back to a MacDuff composite profile until we can find a better documented candidate to complete their connection back to Duff, the clan's ancestor.

It appears to me to be highly unlikely that a son of Giric would not have been documented as challenging for the throne if he'd lived long enough to procreate.

There's also the possibility that the line actually traces back to Gille Coemgáin mac Cináeda, who certainly lived long enough to have (at least) one son (who had a daughter who married a kinglet of West Leinster in Ireland, and she and her husband and her husband's dog were all massacred in 1035, presumably by a rival claimant - see Annals of Ulster for 1035).

OTOH if whatever was left of the Gille Coemgain family bugged out to Ireland, did any of them (e.g. a grandson) ever come back?

Looks like Mr Cawley misread an entry in the Annals of the Four Masters, which calls into question his death date for Gille Coemgain. It actually reads:

> M998.14

> Dunghal, son of Cinaedh, was slain by Gillacaeimhghin, son of Cinaedh.

In plain words, Gille C did the killing, he wasn't the guy who was killed.

The Four Masters (and for that matter the Irish annals in general) have an annoying tendency not to tell when they are reporting events from overseas (eg Scotland) - but both "Gille Coemgain" and "Cinaed" occurred more often in Scotland than in Ireland (the latter is believed to be Pictish in origin).

This leaves open the question of whether Gille C was killed after 998 but before 1005, or if he took his family and bugged out to Ireland in search of greater safety (which, alas, his granddaughter did *not* find!).