Sir John Skene, however, attaches the third privilege to the Croce of the Clan Macduff which divides Stratherne from Fife, as a privilege and liberty of girth in such sort that when any manslayer, being within the ninth degree of kin and blood to Macduff, sometime earl of Fife, came to that cross and gave nine cows and a colpindach, or year-old cow, he was free of the slaughter committed by him, and quotes a charter by David the Second to William Ramsay of the earldom of Fife, with the law called Clan Macduff.[428] The existence of this privilege is so far confirmed that in a Parliament of King Robert the Second, held in 1384, in which certain laws were enacted regarding _Katheranes_, the earl of Fife agreed that as ‘principal of law of Clan Macduff’ (_capitalis legis de Clen m’Duffe_), he would cause them to be observed within his bounds;[429] and in the fragmentary code of laws it is enacted that the _duellum_, or wager of battle, may be remitted in three instances, the second being ‘by the law of the Clan Macduff for the slaughter of one of the kin, if the kin of the other party can come in the place of combat when the appealer is proven, and his lance.’[430] We thus see that when the line of the Celtic Earls of Fife, the hereditary _Toshachs_ of the tribe, failed, they were replaced by the _Capitalis legis_, ‘Capytale of lawch,’ or _Toshachdor_, the principal being the alien Earl, to whom Wyntoun joins the priest of Wedale, a parsonage belonging to St. Andrews, and the Lord of Abernethy, the descendant of the old abbots of the monastery of that name. Hector Boece pushes the origin of the clan as far back as the reign of Kenneth MacAlpin, the founder of the Scottish dynasty, who, according to that veracious chronicler, appointed governors of the different provinces, that of Fife being a certain Fifus Duffus. There were of course no thanes of Fife at any time. The first appearance of the name on record is in the reign of David the First, when Gillemichel Macduff witnesses an early charter of that monarch to the monks of Dunfermline, along with five earls, one of whom is Constantine, earl of Fife, and he certainly is the same person who witnesses the foundation charter of Holyrood shortly after as ‘Gillemichel Comes,’ and had thus become earl of Fife.