Unwilling to accept this omen, they demanded that the witch should give them yet another sign. She thereupon informed the Earl of Caithness that whichever side lost the first man in the fight would lose the day. Soon afterwards a boy was met herding cattle, and by order of the earl he was slain. Only after the deed was done did they discover that the boy was not an Orcadian but a native of Caithness. Already prepared for defeat by these bad omens, the invaders came upon the Orcadian force at Summerdale. The Orcadians assailed them with showers of stones, and the Caithness force was quickly destroyed. Only one Orcadian is said to have fallen. He, having dressed himself in the clothes of one of the fallen enemy, was slain in the dusk of the evening as he returned home. His mother mistook him for one of the invading force, and felled him by a blow with a stone in the foot of a stocking. Such are some of the tales tradition has woven round this fight. It was the last stand of the udallers, and the last pitched battle fought on Orcadian soil, if we except the siege of Kirkwall Castle during the rebellion of the Stewarts. After the battle of Summerdale the islands still remained in a very unsettled condition, until in 1540 James the Fifth thought his presence necessary to restore tranquillity. The king stayed with the bishop in Kirkwall, though not in the ancient Bishop’s Palace, which had witnessed the death of King Hakon. The visit of the king led to the removal of many abuses. But his death in 1542, and the long minority of his daughter, Mary Queen of Scots, brought back the former evils in an aggravated form. For twenty years the records of the islands are records of murder, violence, and oppression. The udallers were now a comparatively feeble folk, but their worst period of oppression was still to come. THE STEWART EARLS. In 1565 began the most cruel oppression which the islands suffered under Scottish rule. Lord Robert Stewart, a son of James the Fifth and half-brother of the Earl of Moray, obtained a feu charter of Orkney and Shetland. This grant was illegal in every way. It was not sanctioned by Parliament, and it disposed not only of the actual property which the crown of Scotland had acquired in the islands, but of the lands and services of the udallers or free landowners, which had never belonged to Norway or Denmark, and could not therefore have been acquired by Scotland. In exchange for the revenues of the Abbey of Holyrood, the new earl also obtained possession of the lands and revenues of the Bishopric of Orkney.