Fordun, who concludes his Chronicle immediately before the first appearance of a Highland clan beyond the Highland Line, gives the following description of the inhabitants of the Highlands:—‘The Highlanders and people of the Islands are,’ he says, ‘a savage and untamed nation, rude and independent, given to rapine, ease-loving, of a docile and warm disposition, comely in person but unsightly in dress, hostile to the Anglic people and language, and, owing to diversity of speech, even to their own nation, and exceedingly cruel. They are, however, faithful and obedient to their king and country, and easily made to submit to law, if properly governed.’[433] This is a picture drawn by one who had no friendly feeling towards them, but the good qualities with which he credits them, of being of a docile and warm disposition, and faithful and obedient to their king and country, read as strangely to us when their subsequent history is taken into account, as Fordun’s opinion that the dress is unsightly hardly corresponds with modern taste. At the time he wrote, however, he was warranted in what he said, for from the time when Alexander the Second finally suppressed the rebellion of the people of Moray, and conquered Argyll in the early part of his reign, to his own day, they had not broken out beyond their mountain barrier, and these early rebellions arose from their adherence to a family which they believed had a rightful claim to the throne, just as those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the result of their attachment to the cause of the Stewarts. [Sidenote: Raid into Angus in 1391.]