Aed/Heth/Beth/Head, possibly also known as "AEthelred", alias Hugh

Ewww Maven, it's Friday afternoon sundowners time in South Africa and you hit us with this :-) I promise to get all my Macbeth stuff out this weekend and comment tomorrow :-)

Things come up when they come up. :-(

The Fife succession is not 100% clear, but it doesn't look like this guy is in it. That was more-or-less reserved for the descendants of King Dub (Dubh, Duffus), a cadet branch of the (former) Scottish royal family who became known as the Clan Macduff.

During Aed/Heth/Beth's time, the mormaership of Fife was held by Causantin mac meic Dubh (Constantine descendant of Duffus), fl. 1095-1128. His successor as of c. 1130, Gille Mícheil, may have been Causantín's younger brother, and had been styling himself "MacDuib" since c. 1126.

My 28th great grandfather

Maven, a quick search suggests to me that this discussion http://www.geni.com/discussions/111856?msg=809510 point may be the crux;
=So, The Book of McKee has Lulach's daughter marrying Malcolm Canmore's son - Ethelred, Lay Abott of Dunkeld - & tells us the Scots called him Aed (said 'Eth')

& the Book of MacKay has Lulach's daughter marrying Ruardri's descendent - Aed, Mormaer of Moray.=

Primary documentation from this period is unfortunately very sketchy, and we can't be sure 1) who was Earl of Angus from c. 1050-c. 1150; 2) whether Lulach's wife was actually a daughter of an Earl of Angus fl. c. 1050, and what her name was; 3) what his daughter's name was; 4) who her husband was, and what his name was.

I always trust primary or near-contemporary secondary documentation more than later accounts, when I can get it.

More later....

Yes I agree. You go girl :-)
I think the lack of mention of kinship of the signatory to David is one possible clue. The relationship between Moray and the crown another.

My guess is that this is ultimately going to be unprovable, and we may have to put the two possible stories side by side and decide which fits the couple of facts we have better, or whether we cut the line altogether.. Easier said than done because there is a lot of contemporary user investment in the Macbeth clan link.

Moray appears to have been the last holdout of the anti-Dunkeld faction, headed first by Lulach's son Mael Snechtai (defeated and dethroned 1085 - whether Malcolm III had him killed or clapped into a monastery seems to be open to debate) and later by Mael Snechtai's nephew (sister's son) Oengus (Angus).

Oengus/Angus seems to have made an attempt to regain the throne in 1130; it was a disaster, Oengus was killed, and the title to Moray went into the hands of the Scottish Crown.

What King David I did with the title is not known for certain - he put his nephew William fitz Duncan in charge of the reconquered territory, but whether he also styled him Mormaer is unknown.

The next known ruler of Moray was Thomas Randolph, created Earl in 1312 by Robert the Bruce.

Interesting compilation. It doesn't quite help to sort out the tangle we're currently dealing with, but does indicate how it got so tangled (claimants and counter-claimants, most of them fratricidally inclined).

Right now we're trying to sort out this Aed/Heth/Beth guy. I don't think he's a mac meic Findleich, but we're not sure where he *does* come from.

The one thing that is certain is that he is *not* the same person as Ethelred of Dunkeld, younger son of Malcolm III Canmore by his second wife Saint Margaret.

If he's a son of Malcolm at all - which is highly doubtful - he would have to be a "wild oat" from Malcolm's youth, before he had married even Ingibjorg, let alone Margaret.

One reason for believing that Macbeth had no sons has always been that he named his stepson Lulach as his successor. On the other hand, Lulach was the only adult male in his family at the time, and had his own claim to the crown. Macbeth, having claimed the crown by the law of tanistry, was morally bound to follow it himself.

I also hope that no one revives the Dorothy Dunnett silliness of assuming that Thorfinn = Macbeth and Ingibjorg = Gruoch. That was a grotesque abuse of Occam's Razor, and falls apart when closely examined.

Not that Thorfinn the Black didn't take an interest in Scottish affairs - he did, since he was Earl of Caithness as well as Jarl of Orkney, *and* a grandson of Malcolm II through a daughter possibly named Olith. But he chose and changed sides as best suited his own interests.

We've got four or five Aed/Heth/Beths, and I made a new profile for Ethelred mac Malcolm: Ethelred, Lay Abbot of Dunkeld

Ethelred seems to have had a genuine vocation, as he seldom poked his nose out of the cloister. "Royal Dunfermline" http://www.royaldunfermline.com/Resources/ROYALTYB.pdf cites him as the son who brought his mother Saint Margaret's body back to Dunfermline for royal burial (Malcolm III having decided that from his time on this, and not the Isle of Iona, would be where Scottish royals were interred). It also states that Ethelred died and was interred there himself circa 1098.

Since Aed/Heth/Beth was active *after* c. 1100, that is yet another indication that he and Ethelred can't be the same person.

The name "Ethelred" came into Scotland with Margaret of Wessex - she was the daughter of Edward the Exile and the sister of Edgar AEtheling, and her great-grandfather was AEthelred "Unraedig" (which should be translated as "Ill-Advised" rather than "Unready" - he made a lot of very foolish mistakes through bad advice, or possibly not listening to anyone else's advice).

She also named her two youngest sons David and Alexander, neither of which had seen much use in Scotland - or western Europe for that matter - before then. But she had been born and raised in Hungary, and her mother was certainly of Slavic high nobility and possibly a (the youngest?) daughter of Yaroslav the Wise of Kiev (he had at least four daughters, but we have names and husbands for only three of them).

Ethelred of Dunkeld left no offspring (that we know of), so he gets left out of a lot of genealogies.

Doubt that Aed/Heth/Beth is the same person as Alexander I, considering that they are both cited on the same charter in 1114/15. "Alexander…rex Scottorum filius regis Malcolmi et regine Margerete et…Sibilla regina Scottorum filia Henrici regis Anglie" reformed Scone Abbey by charter dated to [1114/15], witnessed by "Alexander nepos regis Alexandri, >>>Beth comes<<<, Gospatricius Dolfini, Mallus comes, Madach comes, Rothri comes, Gartnach comes, Dufagan comes, Willelmus frater regine, Edwardus constabularius, Gospatricius filius Walthef, Ufieth Alfricus pincerna"[377]. http://poms.cch.kcl.ac.uk/db/record/factoid/7988/

The PoMS database identifies "Beth" as "Bethoc" [sic!], earl of ?. This is a ridiculously unlikely translation, as Bethoc was a *woman's* name. Sloppy/bad handwriting could scramble "Aedh" into "Beth" or "Heth" quite easily,

I think somebody made some very bad assumptions - people will do that when they don't have enough information.

Ethelred mac Malcolm was 1) *never* Earl of Fife and 2) *not* of the mic meic Dubh.

The holder of the title Earl of Fife c. 1090s-c. 1130 was Constantine aka Causantin mac meic Duib, a fifth or sixth generation descendant of King Dubh. The "Clan Macduff" (which was still in its incipient stages) had become a cadet branch of the *former* Scottish royal house (the house of Alpin) as of the date that Malcolm II butchered Kenneth III on the field of battle (March 25, 1005, at Monzievaird in Perthshire).

Kenneth III, not so incidentally, was the grandfather of Queen Gruoch....

Constantine's father or grandfather will have been the "Macduff" who features in That Scottish Play by W. Shakespeare. This figure will have been the son of Giric, son of Cináed mac Duib, king of Alba (997-1005), but his own personal name is lost to history.

(Obviously, "Macduff" did not lose all his family to treacherous murder - that was a later slander cooked up by the house of Dunkeld.)

Is anyone getting the impression that Malcolm II was a worse monster than WS depicted Macbeth as? :-)

Not gonna disagree, diehard Ricardian that I am. :-) "History is written by the winners" (usually).

Macbeth seems to have been a king whose luck turned fickle on him, rather than one whose luck was mostly bad (Harold Godwinson, Richard III).

Old Malcolm was definitely a nasty piece of work. He went out of his way to eliminate all possible rival claimants to the throne, only for it to bite him in the ass when he had no surviving sons and only three(?) daughters.

I'm tagging Justin Durand into this discussion, since he is responsible for one of the (bad) locked profiles.

Wow. You gals have been busy. Well done!
I'll have to read the messages properly after I've had my coffee, but it is very likely there is more than one man amongst these profiles, so don't have Justin remove his mastering too quickly.
Sometimes profiles are mastered not to protect their own info, but to protect the info of a similarly named profile.

I don't think that's the case here. The name "Ethelred" was *not* known or used in Scotland until Queen Margaret introduced it for one of her younger sons. Nor did it catch on.

There were a plethora of Aedhs, variously spelled, and a few Heths, but only one of them seems to have gotten tabbed with the alias of "Beth".

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Mormaer Beth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormaer_Beth
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mormaer Beth is a name of a Mormaer mentioned in an unreliable charter granted to Scone Priory, later Scone Abbey, by king Alexander I of Scotland.

The charter (Lawrie XXXVI) says, merely, Beth comes (i.e. Mormaer Beth). This could be a mistake for Heth, a form often used for the Gaelic name Áed, or perhaps MacBethad, or even a real name as Beth, meaning life. Alternatively, the name may have been made up by either the scribe or his overseer. The only reason for associating Beth with Fife is that he appears first in the witness list, an honour often but certainly not always given to the Mormaers of Fife amongst the other Scottish Mormaers.

It is more probable that Beth this is the same person as Áed, either Mormaer of Moray or Mormaer of Ross, attested in two early charters of David I. Áed disappears from the record ca. 1130. His identification as the ancestor of the MacHeths is uncertain.

Conflation with Ethelred of Scotland is spurious, and based on the unlikely idea that Ethelred ever was Mormaer of Fife.

Bibliography[edit]
Bannerman, John, "MacDuff of Fife," in A. Grant & K.Stringer (eds.) Medieval Scotland: Crown, Lordship and Community, Essays Presented to G.W.S. Barrow, (Edinburgh, 1993), pp. 20–38
Lawrie, Sir Archibald C., Early Scottish Charters Prior to A.D. 1153, (Glasgow, 1905), no. XXXVI, pp. 28–31, pp. 283–84
Duncan, A.A.M., The Kingship of the Scots 842–1292: Succession and Independence. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2002. ISBN 0-7486-1626-8
McDonald, R. Andrew, Outlaws of Medieval Scotland: Challenges to the Canmore Kings, 1058–1266. Tuckwell Press, East Linton, 2003. ISBN 1-86232-236-8
Oram, Richard, David I: The King Who Made Scotland. Tempus, Stroud, 2004. ISBN 0-7524-2825-X

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethelred_of_Scotland

[Ethelred] is often thought to have held the office Mormaer of Fife, but this is almost certainly a mistake. The source is ultimately Gaelic notitia of a grant to the Céli Dé monks of Loch Leven, later translated into Latin and incorporated in the Register of the Priory of St Andrews, where the grant is headed:

Edelradus vir venerandae memoriae filius Malcolmi Regis Scotiae, Abbas de Dunkeldense et insuper Comes de Fyf.[1]
Translated, this is "Edelradus man of venerable memory, son of King Máel Coluim of Scotland, Abbot of Dunkeld and also Mormaer of Fife". However, the same notitia record a number of witnesses, among whom are the brothers of Ethelred, David and Alexander; after the last two comes >>>Constantinus Comes de Fyf, i.e. Causantín, the actual Mormaer of Fife<<<. The contradiction has been explained by Bannerman. He argues that the translator had been thrown off by the use of a singular Gaelic verb for a joint grant (i.e. where the verb had two subjects), common in Gaelic charters. As a result, the translator omitted the mormaer, Causantín. At any rate, it is clear that Ethelred was never a mormaer of Fife, since Causantín is attested in other sources.

Bannerman, John, "MacDuff of Fife," in A. Grant & K.Stringer (eds.) Medieval Scotland: Crown, Lordship and Community, Essays Presented to G.W.S. Barrow, (Edinburgh, 1993), pp. 20–38

While Medlands is normally very useful, the author occasionally tends to wrong-headedly cite a charter too literally, and/or to leave out information that he doesn't think is important (but which is actually essential to understanding the situation).

The "Ethelred charter" appears to be one of those cases.