When Earl David, as Prince of Cumbria, proposed to restore the ancient church of Glasgow, and asked the elders and wise men of Cumbria to inquire into the ancient possessions of that church, they told him that after Kentigern, the founder of the church, and several of his successors, had passed to God, ‘various seditions and insurrections rising all around not only destroyed the church and its possessions, but, laying waste the whole country, delivered its inhabitants into exile. Thus, also, all good being exterminated, after a considerable interval of time different tribes of different nationalities pouring in from different parts inhabited this deserted country, but being of separate race, speaking a dissimilar language, and living after different fashion, not easily agreeing among themselves, they maintained paganism rather than the cultivation of the faith. The Lord, however, who wills that none should perish, was pleased to visit, in his clemency, these unhappy inhabitants of a condemned habitation, irrationally dwelling after the manner of beasts. In the days of Henry, king of England, Alexander reigning as king in Scotia, God sent them David, brother-german of the foresaid king, as prince and leader, who corrected their obscene and wicked contagion, and bridled their contumelious contumacy with nobleness of soul and inflexible severity.’[14] This picture, coloured no doubt to deepen the shade of the past, and to brighten the prospects of the country under David’s rule, still sufficiently indicates the belief that the British inhabitants had to a great extent deserted the country, and that it had been repeatedly laid waste by foreign nations, who had eventually settled in the country. The allusion to the paganism of some refers probably to the Norwegians and Danes, the former of whom in 870 besieged their capital Alclyde, now Dumbarton, and destroyed it after a few months’ siege, and carried a great host of prisoners with them to Ireland into captivity, and five years afterwards the Britons of Strathclyde and Picts of Galloway were ravaged by the Danes of Northumberland. A Welsh chronicle, attributed to Caradoc of Llancarvan, tells us that in ‘891 the men of Strathclyde, who would not unite with the Saxons, were obliged to leave their country, and go to Gwynedd or North Wales.’[15] In 945 it was ravaged by Edmund, king of Wessex, and ceded to the Scots. In 1000, Ethelred, king of Wessex, entered Cumbria, ravaged it nearly all, and it was again laid waste; and in 1070, Gospatric, Earl of Northumbria, having collected a considerable force, made a furious incursion into the Cumbrian kingdom, then under the dominion of the Scottish king Malcolm, spreading slaughter and conflagration on all sides. These notices sufficiently bear out that feature in the dark picture of the past history of the British kingdom, and we may well believe that under these repeated devastations, and