Rise of the Kingdom of Alba

The myth of MacAlpin's Treason tells how Alba was born when the Dalriadan Kenneth mac Alpin conquered the Picts. Modern studies are less sure of Kenneth's Dalriadan roots and consider Kenneth and his successors to be Pictish Kings. Kenneth's son Constantine had the Series Longoir written to show his family's claim to the throne of a united Pictland. The triumph of Gaelic over Pictish and the change from Pictland to Alba is placed in the half-century reign of Constantine mac Aeda. Why and how this happened is unknown.

At first this new kingdom corresponded to Scotland north of the Rivers Forth and Clyde. Southwest Scotland remained under the control of the Strathclyde Britons. Southeast Scotland was under the control from around 638 of the proto-English kingdom of Bernicia, then of the Kingdom of Northumbria. This portion of Scotland was contested from the time of Constantine II and finally fell into Scottish hands in 1018, when Malcolm II pushed the border as far south as the River Tweed. This remains the south-eastern border to this day (except around Berwick-upon-Tweed).

Scotland, in the geographical sense it has retained for nearly a millennium, completed its expansion by the gradual incorporation of the Britons' kingdom of Strathclyde into Alba. In 1034, Duncan I, descended from Irish Ui Neill monastery protectors and appointed to the crown of Strathclyde some years earlier, inherited Alba from his maternal grandfather, Malcolm II. With the exception of Orkney, the Western Isles, Caithness and Sutherland, which had come under the sway of the Norse, Scotland stood unified.

Macbeth, the "Cenél Loairn" candidate for the throne whose family had been suppressed by Malcolm II, defeated Duncan in battle in 1040. Macbeth then ruled for seventeen years before Duncan's son Malcolm III, more commonly known as Malcolm Canmore (Scottish Gaelic: Ceann mòr meaning "Big Head"), overthrew him. (William Shakespeare, in his play Macbeth, later immortalised these events, in a heavily fictionalised way based on inaccurate contemporary history that flattered the antecedents of James VI of Scotland/I of England at Macbeth's expense. For a more accurate fictional account, it is better to read Dorothy Dunnett's novel, King Hereafter.)