[229] _Lib. de Scone_, No. 1. Six earls attest the charter; Heth (written through a clerical error _Beth_) of Moray, Madach of Atholl, Malise of Strathearn, Dufagan of Fife, and Gartnach and Rory, who may be assigned to Angus, Mar, or Buchan. Heth appears to have married the sister of Malsnechtan (for his successor, Angus, is described as the son of Lulach’s daughter, _An. Ult._ 1130), and thus to have inherited and transmitted the claims of the line of Kenneth MacDuff. He must have been an inveterate opponent of the reigning family, as his son Malcolm is described by Ailred as “the inheritor of his father’s hatred.” The real descent of the Stewarts was well known as late as the fourteenth century, when Richard Fitz-Alan, Earl of Arundel in 1336, sold the Stewardship of Scotland to Edward III., a transaction which was confirmed by Edward Balliol (_Tiernay’s Hist. of Arundel_, vol. i., pp. 193, 299, _notes_). The sale was of course a political fiction, founded on the assumed forfeiture of the Scottish branch of the earl’s family, through which their hereditary office was supposed to have reverted to their English connections. The real king and the pseudo-king united in the joint exercise of an act of shadowy sovereignty--a joint protest of their claims as vassal king and overlord of Scotland--the sole substantial gain, the purchase-money, falling to the earl; though, had the Plantagenets succeeded in conquering Scotland, the transaction would have become a reality, and the ancestry of the hereditary Earls Marshal of the present day would have lost their claim to supplant the ancestry of the reigning sovereign. The father of _Alan_ was Flahald or _Fleald_, a name which reappears under the familiar form of “_Fleance_, son of Banquo, Thane of Lochaber.” [230] The reign of Edgar has been occasionally regarded as the era of a thorough _Saxonizing_ of all Scotland, except the Highlands; but with respect to this opinion I can only use the words which Father Innes applies to the laws of Aodh Fin--“De hisce...... _altissimum apud scriptores nostros silentium_.” If _Thane_ and _Thanage_ are supposed to be, not Saxon _names_ applied to Scottish institutions, but actual Saxon institutions introduced beyond the Forth, it should be explained why the Saxon Thane was as totally different a character from the Scottish Thane as _Thane-land_ was from a Thanage. The Saxon held by military service--_cnicht_-service, an expression scarcely traceable to Normandy; the Scot by _Scottish_ service and rent--in _fee-farm_. Why also is only one Thane traceable in the Lothians, if all the Thanes came from the Saxons? Compare _Appendices N and R_. [231] _Chron. Sax._ 1124, calls David Earl of Northamptonshire. If this authority is correct, he must have held that earldom as guardian of the younger St. Liz, who was Earl of Northampton at the date of his death in 1153.