We must beware of thinking that all the land in an earldom such as Cat was the absolute property of the chief, as in the nineteenth century, or the latter half of it, was practically true in the modern county of Sutherland. The fact was very much otherwise. The Maormor and afterwards the earl doubtless had demesne lands, but he was in early times, _ex officio_, mainly a superior and receiver of dues for his king;[15] and this possibly shows why very early Scottish earldoms, as for instance that of Sutherland, in the absence of male heirs, often descended to females, unless the grant or custom excluded them. It was quite different with later feudal baronies or tenancies, where military service, which only males could render, was due, and which with rare exceptions it was, after about 1130, the policy of the Scottish kings to create; and in the case of baronies or lordships the land itself was often described and given to the grantee and his heirs by metes and bounds, in return for specified military service, and his heirs male were exhausted before any female could inherit. In Ness and in the rest of Cat there were many Norse and native holders of land within the earldom, and much tribal ownership. Duncan of Duncansby or Dungall of Dungallsby, as he is variously called, allowed part at least of his dominions to pass by marriage to the Norse jarls; but both Moddan and Earl Ottar, whose heir was Earl Erlend Haraldson, who left no heir, owned land extensively in Ness and elsewhere, while Moddan "in Dale" had daughters also owning land, one of whom, Frakark, widow of Liot Nidingr, had many homesteads in upper Kildonan in Sudrland and elsewhere, and possibly it is her sister Helga's name that lingers in a place-name lower down that strath near Helmsdale, at Helgarie. What is worthy of notice is that it is clear from the place-names that after the Norse conquest the Norse held and named most of the lower or seaward parts of the valleys and nearly all the coast lands of Cat and Ross as far south as the Beauly Firth, and the Picts occupied and were never dispossessed of the upper parts of the valleys or the hills all through the Norse occupation. In other words, as conquerors coming from the sea, the Norsemen seized and held the better Pictish lands near the coast, which had been cultivated for centuries, and on which crops would ripen with regularity and certainty year after year. But as time went on the Pictish Maormor pressed the Norse Jarl more and more outwards and eastwards in Cat. We must also remember the enormous power of the Scottish Crown through its right of granting wardships, especially in the case of a female heir. Under such grants the grantee, usually some very powerful noble, took over during minority the title of his ward and all his revenues absolutely, in return for a payment, correspondingly large, to the Crown. If the ward was a female, the grantee disposed of her hand in marriage as well.