Swan the Viking Ruthven2

1582, he was abducted by Gowrie and imprisoned in his House of Ruthven until, the next morning, he signed a document proclaiming himself to be quite free and that Lennox was to he banished from Scotland. Gowrie led a new government which gave the Presbyterians ruling powers, all the while keeping James their captive. Lennox, who had moved back to France, died in 1583. Then in June that year the young King escaped from his imprisonment. Cowrie was charged with treason and had his head cut off. Battle of Largs 1263. Kintyre and the Western Isles had been acknowledged as the property of the Norwegian crown in a treaty between Edgar, King of Scots and Magnus Barefoot, King of Norway, in 1098. By the mid-12th century the Norwegians appeared uninterested in their Scottish lands, and by 1156 Somerled, descended from Dalriada royalty, had become their lands' "sub-kin" and son-in-law of Olaf, King of Man. In 1263, Alexander III made an offer to Haakon IV to buy Kintyre and the Isles back. Haakon rejected his offer and instead, hearing of Scots attacks on Skye, set sail with a fleet to do battle with Alexander. Sailing via the Hebrides to collect additional men and ships, the fleet eventually numbered some two hundred ships. Ewan MacDougall was now on the Isles. Trying to remain neutral, he refused to join Haakon but surrendered the islands to him. With his men hungry to pillage, Haakon sent part of the fleet to Bute and Loch Lomond, which was reached by dragging fifty galleys across the land at Tarbet. The main fleet was sailed past Alexander's position at Ayr and anchored of Largs. On the 30 September a gale struck the area, wrecking and sinking the galleys. A sea battle began which lasted for four confused days. When the gale subsided on the 5 October Haakon withdrew and headed for the Isles. Ewan had, by this time. decided which horse to back, and attacked the remaining Norse fleet. Haakon died in Orkney at the year's end. In 1266 the Treaty of Perth returned the Isles and Kintyre to Scotland. Magnus Barefoot claims the Western Isles 1098. Magnus Barefoot (or Barelegs) came to the throne of Norway in 1093. Like his countrymen he enjoyed the conquest of other countries. In 1098 he drew up the first formal treaty with a Scots king, Edgar, confirming in writing that all the Western Isles and the peninsula of Kintyre belonged to Norway. On a journey, which had included plundering the Hebrides yet again, before taking over the Isle of Man as a base for his invasion of Wales, Magnus landed in Ireland in 1103, from where he made an unscheduled journey to Valhalla. The treaty between Scotland and Norway survived until 1266.
Orkney and Shetland Acquired by Scotland 1468. For six centuries the Orkney and Shetland Islands remained under Norwegian sovereignty, geographically central in a sea-faring Scandinavian civilisation which readied across the Atlantic. The earldom of the islands was of great Norwegian importance. In the fifteenth century however. Norway had fallen under the control of Denmark, and the Danes held little interest in their acquisitions to the west. Christian I was King of Denmark and Norway and in 1468 his daughter Margaret married Scotland's James III. Her dowry was set at sixty thousand florins of the Rhine. Christian pledged his lands and rights in Orkney for the first fifty thousand florins due, and was to pay the remaining ten thousand in coins. He could only spare two thousand, and so pledged the Shetlands to cover the remaining unpaid eight thousand in 1469. The paperwork has never been completed for these transactions and so the lands pledged have not been formally transferred. In 1667 this was questioned, with the conclusion that Scandinavia still had the right of redemption. Under Norse law, the man who worked a piece of land was the owner of that piece of land, but the new Scottish masters soon reduced the islanders' lives to misery using fraud and violence to strip them of their rights and develop a regime of extortion and slave labour.