[142] _Wynton_, bk. 6, c. 16, 18. Much needless confusion is thrown over the period of Macbeth by raising unnecessary questions about his birth and his rights to the crown. All the best authorities--his contemporaries Tighernach and Marianus, and the Registry of the Priory of St. Andrews, which records his gift to the Culdees of Lochleven--unite in calling him the son of Finlay, the Register describing his wife as the daughter of Boedhe, whose claims she inherited. Another difficulty is raised because Macbeth appears as the immediate successor of Malcolm the Second in _Sim. Dun. de Gestis_, 1034, contrary to every other authority. That this is an error, of some transcriber apparently, is very evident, for the same Simeon, in his History of Durham, l. 3, c. 9, calls Duncan the king of Scots, adding that he was defeated before Durham in the fifth year of Harald’s reign, _i.e._, 1040, and soon afterwards slain by his own subjects. The supposed relationship between Macbeth and Duncan may have been grounded upon the real connection between the king and Thorfin, with whom the Moray Mormaor seems to have been confounded in more ways than one. [143] _Reg. Prior. St. And._, p. 114. [144] _Mar. Scot._ 1050. [145] _Tigh. An. Ult._ 1045. The flight of Duncan’s children--mere infants--one to _Cumbria_, the other to _the Isles_, is a fiction founded on the ideas of the time when it first appears, three or four centuries later. They probably remained amongst their hereditary partizans in Atholl and the southern provinces, occupying the same position which their cousin Lulach had done during the reign of their father--the position of the Head of the Hy Nial, when Brian Boru achieved the sovereignty of Ireland; or of a Duke of Bavaria or Austria, in the olden time, when another magnate had been elected to the empire. [146] _Flor. Wig._ 1052.