Caithness earldom lands, which _The Flatey Book_ and _Torfaeus_ state that Jarl Ragnvald had held, does not appear to have been granted to David, or to any successor to the Caithness earldom of his line, or to any other person at this time. Indeed, the line of Paul were the last persons to whom such a grant would be made. It was, therefore, to a very much reduced territory and earldom that David succeeded in 1206, as Earl of Caithness. We hear almost nothing of him, save that for the latter part of the eight years of his rule,[1] more or less inefficient probably through ill health, he shared the earldom and what had been left to him of its lands with his younger brother John. David died without issue in 1214[2] probably soon after Hugo Freskyn, and David was succeeded by his brother John in the jarldom of Orkney and in the reduced earldom of Caithness as sole jarl and earl. Immediately after David's death, King William the Lion, who had, in 1211, suppressed a rebellion in Moray of the Thanes of Ross under Guthred son of Donald Ban MacWilliam whom a few years later he captured and beheaded,[3] came to Moray again; and, about the 1st of August 1214, King William demanded, and received[4] Earl John's daughter, whose name is not known, as a hostage for her father's loyalty, and a guarantee of the peace then made, under which John was probably recognised as earl and as entitled to his reduced territory. His daughter may, at this time, have been her father's sole heiress, although she did not remain so, because we find that he had a son who lived till 1226, called Harald. Meantime Bishop Adam, after the death in 1213 of Bishop John, his half-blinded and mutilated predecessor, succeeded to the Episcopal See of Caithness,[5] and seems to have reversed Bishop John's policy of leniency to his flock by exacting from them heavier and heavier tithes, as years went by. In 1217, King Hakon's rival, Jarl Skuli, thought Earl John so promising a traitor as to send him letters forged with the Norse king's seal.[6] In 1218 John was present at Bergen to witness the ordeal successfully undergone by King Hakon's mother in order to prove that king, then a boy, to be her son by the late King Hakon Sverri's son, and so rightly entitled to the Norwegian crown.[7] After Earl John's return from Norway, the bishop's exactions of tithes of butter reached such a pitch that the Caithness folk met near his house at Halkirk, and demanded that the earl should protect them against the bishop's rapacity, and, either at the earl's suggestion or without any opposition on his part, they attacked the bishop in his house, which was close to _Breithivellir_ (now Brawl) Castle, where John lived. The Saga gives the following description of this affair:--[8]