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Descendants of Crinan

Generation No. 3

3. MALCOLM³ CANMORE , KING MALCOLM III (THE FIRST KING OF SCOTS² DUNCAN, CRINAN¹) was born Abt. 1031, and died 1093. He married SAINT MARGARET OF SCOTLAND 1070 in Scottland, daughter of EDWARD ATHELING and AGATHA.

Notes for MALCOLM CANMORE , KING MALCOLM III:
Malcolm III, King of Scotland (Malcolm Canmore)
The earliest known individual ancestor of the Weems Family was one Malcolm Canmore whose name was saved from oblivion by records which were found by an inquisitive antiquarian in the little Church of the Markish in the Scottish Lowlands across the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh in Fifeshire. Records from the church show that Malcom was a communicant and that he had a son named Ethelred or Aethelred. Other information indicates that Malcolm, born c. 1031 rose from the position of petty king of the Picts or Celtic chief to the dignity of Malcolm III, King of Scotland, founding the house of Canmore, which ruled Scotland for more than 200 years.
The reign of Malcom Ceanmor was remarkable for a variety of circumstances, which tended towards the drifting of the monarch from his Gaelic to his Lowland subjects, but which contributed indirectly to the development of the Highland clan system.
Malcolm contributed to the organisation and development of Scotland as a united and organised kingdom, and, moreover, to the high degree of tribal development in Scotland, which we recognise in the clan system. About 1066 Malcolm selected for his settled capital, Dunfermlme, the picturesque little city in the old Pictish province of Fife, and so much did the Royal house become attached to the cathedral city founded there in this reign that Dunfermlme Abbey became the place of sepulture of many Scottish monarchs in place of Scone, which, however, with its historic moot hill, still remained the official centre and constitutional seat of the Scottish sovereigns and the spot where their coronations took place. About the very time at which Malcolm settled at Dunfermlme occurred the Norman Conquest of England, as a result of which a number of noble Saxon families fled to Scotland, where they were well received by the king, who assigned them grants of land. What actually happened was, as Professor Rait explains, in The Making of Scotland p.27, that the kings"did not interfere with the ownership of land as it existed before these grants; the result of his intervention was ultimately to confirm it. What the king gave his friends consisted rather of rights over land than of land itself." The dominium utile, as it is called, remained with the Celtic chieftains and their dependents, and by the new tenure they got a legal security for ownership; new lords only got their castle, the demesne, and right of a following, whilst they also got the domirnum diredum, namely, presiding in the new Baron Court as a local Parliament. Among the refugees were Edgar the Atheling, the rightful heir to the English Saxon throne, who was accompanied by his mother and his sister Margaret, of the English royal house of Wessex. While later the Norman barons merely consolidated existing Celtic land usages, Margaret, on the other hand, made social innovations. She became Malcolm’s second wife, and was later canonized as Margaret Of Scotland. The Princess Margaret was espoused by King Malcolm in 1070, and as she obtained a great influence over her husband, the queen was instrumental in introducing many Saxon innovations at the Scottish Court. Among these was the supersession of Gaelic as the court language by Saxon. Queen Margaret used all her influence to replace the rites of the Celtic Church by those of Rome. She had frequent discussions on the subject with the Scottish clergy whose language was Gaelic. On those occasions, we are told, King Malcolm, who spoke both the Gaelic and Saxon languages, acted as interpreter.
These events led to the introduction into Scotland of many new names. Indeed, the introduction of surnames into Scotland is attributed to this reign. The Chronicles of Scottland relate that "He (Malcolm) was a religious and valiant king; he rewarded his nobles with great lands and offices, and commanded that the lands and offices should be called after their names. It is not to be supposed that he did this specifically, but he did bring about a state of progress wherein the chiefs of tribes came to be named from, or gave names to, their duthus, and began to use such names.
Malcolm invaded England many times after 1068 supporting the claim of his brother-in-law Edgar Atheling to the English throne. In 1072 he was forced to pay homage to William I and in 1091, to William II. Finally, Malcolm Canmor, after a prosperous reign, was defeated and killed by Norman forces at the siege of Alnwick, in Northumberland, in 1093. The king's family were then all under age, and his brother Donald (known as "Donald Dane") succeeded to the Scottish throne as Donald III. During the short reign of this sovereign he acquired a considerable measure of popularity among his Gaelic subjects by the expulsion from Scotland of many of the Saxon immigrants, who had been settled in the kingdom by his brother and predecessor. Malcolm fathered four sons, Aethelred, or Aedh in the Gaelic, was the oldest and became Abbot of Dunkeld and later Earl of Fife. Upon Malcolm's death Aedh was barred from the throne either because he was an Abbot or too old. At any rate his younger brothers ascended to the throne. Aedh became the First Earl of Fife probably as a result of his marriage to the sister of Maelsnechtan, the King of Moray, which included the Kingdom of Fife. The King of Moray was also the Chief of the Clan Duff as grandson of Queen Gruoch, herself the heiress of the line of King Duff (killed in 967) which was appanaged in the “kingdom of Fife.”
Aethelred was the father of several sons also, the oldest of which predeceased Aedh and was known merely as Duff. Not much is known of Duff except that he was named after his mother's clan, had sons and died before his father.
Upon the death of Aethelred, around 1128, several attempts were made by the Moray kinsmen of his surviving sons to put them on the throne as they were the sons of King Malcolm's eldest son who was barred from the throne upon Malcolm's death. This was in keeping with the old laws of the Gaels. The son of the deceased Duff, however, who was a nephew of the contenders, sided with the line of his great uncles rather than his father's younger brothers, who were known as the MacAedh brothers.
Donald Bane thus reigned along with Eadmund, eldest-surviving son of Malcolm and Margaret. This is usually represented as a usurpation, or assertion by Donald of a supposed earlier system of collateral succession, It is overlooked that under one of the old Scoto-Celtic laws which long survived, and to which attention is drawn by Skene and Fordun, if the heir, either male or female, was under fourteen, the nearest agnate (heir-male), became chief or king for life, but when the heir attained majority he also reigned jointly with his-if we may so describe it-" trustee for life," and a situation arose in which there was a "joint reign." In primitive days it was no doubt difficult for the heir, on coming of age, completely to dispossess a man who had during the minority taken all the eflective threads of power into his own hands, and a joint reign was perhaps in those days the expedient least likely to lead to civil war or domestic tragedy. However, in 1097, this joint form of monarchy was brought to an end through intervention of Edgar Atheling (brother-in-law of Malcolm Ceanmor), who succeeded in dethroning both Donald Bane and Eadmund and placed Eadgar, next brother of Eadmund, on the throne. His reign was an unfortunate one, for during it the Norwegian king, Magnus, surnamed Barefoot, succeeded in obtaining possession of the Western Isles and Kintyre.

More About SAINT MARGARET OF SCOTLAND:
Fact 1: grand-daughter of English King Edmond 'Ironside' who died 1016.

Children of MALCOLM CANMORE and SAINT SCOTLAND are:

KING⁴ EDGAR.

More About KING EDGAR:
Fact 1: Reigned from 1097-1107

ii.

KING ALEXANDER I.

More About KING ALEXANDER I:
Fact 1: Reigned from 1107-1124

iii.

KING DAVID I.

More About KING DAVID I:
Fact 1: Reigned from 1124-1153

iv.

FIRST EARL OF FIFE ATHELRED, d. 1128.

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