Ethelred, Abbot of Dunkeld - Birthdate

Considering that the marriage date for Malcolm and Margaret is usually given as c. 1070, I'd say add five years to that estimate (c. 1073-1074 or thereabouts).

Yes I agree.

The more I look at that charter, the more I think Ethelred took his religion very, very seriously. None of his relatives go on quite like *that* - they tend to be much more matter-of-fact and sometimes perfunctory. And here's Ethelred nattering about making his donation "with all reverence and honor" and "with great(er) affection and love" and sounding more like one of the known churchmen from whom we have preserved letters than a secular prince. IMHO if he hadn't taken Holy Orders (yet), it wasn't because he didn't want to.

Renee, check your history. Malcolm and Margaret did not even meet, as far as we know for certain, until the year 1068, when she and her family landed in his kingdom as refugees. If she was born c. 1045, she would have already been 23 at that time.

And if you move her birth date more than a year or two later, you have to throw out the idea that Malcolm was fishing for a marriage contract with her in 1059 (something I don't find terribly believable anyway).

Since there is no source for his birth year shouldnt it be locked as blank?

No, it can be guesstimated to within a very few years (not before 1072 nor, probably, after 1075) A "Between" range is the most you need to do to it.

Good idea to lock them though, Ethelred, Lay Abbot of Dunkeld
The after birthdate is based on his mother's age;
The death date on the range in which scholars currently estimate it.

Actually I based *my* guesstimate on the estimated/known(?) birthdates of Margaret's younger children. IMHO Ethelred was either her third or fourth child, with the probabilities favoring third - after Edgar the naming pattern changes drastically.

It's possible, of course, that Ethelred caught his death of cold on the schlep from Edinburgh to Dunfermline with his mother's body....

Even today it's a lot longer than it looks on a map, as you either have to cross the Firth of Forth by boat or go far out of your way west and then east again by road. What it was like in an 11th century winter...brrrr!

:-) We need to take into account her earliest possible childbearing age, and the outlying possibility that Justin is correct and he's the oldest child.

Lawrie's Early Scottish Charters gives some notes about a notitia we've been discussing on a different thread. Extracting just some of the relevant pieces, he says:

This notitia is in the Registr. Prior. St. And., fol. 5ib ; Bannatyne
Club edition, p. 115 ; Reeves' Culdees, p. 127.

It speaks of Ethelred as "vir venerandae memoriae," whence it
may be concluded that he was dead before the notice was written.
Robertson (Early Kings, I., p. 151) says that Ethelred survived his
parents only a very short time.

The grant was given at Abernethy, and confirmed by David and
Alexander, two of Ethelred's brothers, in presence of the Earl of Fife,
and of several priests of Abernethy....

Ethelred was the third son of King Malcolm III. and Queen
Margaret. He cannot have been older than fifteen or sixteen in
1093 when his father and mother died.

In his youth he received Admore from his parents, possibly as
part of the Earldom of Fife. It seems to me probable that he
became a monk, and that he remained in the retirement of the Abbey of Dunkeld during the stormy years when his uncle Donald was
king.

I do not agree with Skene and other writers who assume that
Ethelred was a ' lay ' abbot.

That opinion is founded partly on the fact that Ethelred was an
earl, and partly on the fact that a former abbot of Dunkeld, Crinan
(Ethelred's great-grandfather), was married, and fought and fell in
battle, but these circumstances are not incompatible with holy orders
in those early days.

Wyntoun, prior of St. Serf's, makes no mention of Ethelred in
his Chronicle. Fordun said (5. 24): "De Ethelred nihil certum
scriptis invenio ubi sit mortuus vel sepultus : praeter ut quidam
asserunt in antiqua ecclesia S. Andreae de Kilrimont humatus
requiescit." [Nothing is certain is known about Ethelred died or was buried.] ...

Insuper Comes de Fyf. "Insuper" may be a mistake for a word
meaning "formerly." G. E. C. suggests that Ethelred was Earl of
Forthrif, and Constantine Earl of Fife. It was an early tradition that
Macduff was Thane of Fife in the reign of Macbeth, and that in the
time of King Malcolm he became Earl. Mr. Skene thinks Macduff
is 'fictitious,' the creation of Fordun, and Robertson (Early Kings,
I., p. 124): "Fife was 'in the Crown' in the days of Malcolm Can-
more, who granted the Earldom to his son Ethelred. The Macduff, Earl of Fife, of the fabulists a being unknown to Wynton must be
put down as a myth." These eminent writers are mistaken. Macduff
may be a myth, but he is certainly not the creation of Fordun.
Wyntoun, who calls him Thane of Fife, gives a long account of him
which agrees with Fordun....

In Ethelred's time the monastery [Abernethy] had not yet been secularized ; less
than a century afterwards part of the endowments had passed into the
lands of Laurence, the son of Orm, who in one charter is called the
abbot. In 1272 Abernethy was made a priory canons regular
from Inchaffray displacing the Culdees.

p. ii. Constantinus, Comes de Fife, was probably the son, or
grandson, of Macduff of Fife, who lived in the reigns of Duncan I.,
Macbeth, and Malcolm III.

Constantine Macdufe is one of the witnesses to the doubtful charter
by Edgar to Durham (No. XV., ante, p. 12).

Constantine Comes is a witness (circa A.D. 1 128) to the great charter
by David I. to Dunfermline Abbey (No. LXXiv., ante, p. 61), with
Gillemichel Mac duf, whom I take to be his son and successor in the
Earldom.

Here he is described as " vir discretissimus," and in the record of
the suit between the brethren of St. Serf and Sir Robert Burgonensis
(circa A.D. 1128, No. LXXX., ante, p. 66) he was one of the judges ; he
was styled " magnus judex in Scotia" and " vir discretus et facundus."
He appeared at the trial "cum satrapy s et satellitibus ex exercitu de
Fyf." He is mentioned in Charter xciv., ante, p. 76, as having with-
held by force the shire of Kirkcaldy from the Abbey of Dunfermline.

https://archive.org/stream/earlyscottishcha00lawruoft#page/242/mode...

I can see the dilemma. Ethelred the Abbot of Dunkeld was born o/a 1076.

He was the 3rd oldest of the later of his siblings, was a clunic reformer, and was a cluny.

It is difficult for me to start spinning my wheels on this abbot. I am sorry, but I have to go on with my quest.

Good luck!

Ken

> outlying possibility that Justin is correct and he's the oldest child.

I don't think the body of tradition there needs him to be the oldest child. It would be enough that he was passed over for the crown. So, he could be positioned any order where a supposedly younger brother succeeded and he did not.

For the idea that he was ancestor of the later MacDuffs the more important question is the date of his death, whether he was old enough to be married with children, and whether he lived long enough for there to be a question of him succeeding to the throne.

In terms of birth age - I'm explaining why the year I'm designating as >after is earlier than Maven (& I agree) is most likely.

With a name like "Ethelred", his *ONLY* possible mother is Margaret of Wessex (great-granddaughter of AEthelred "Unraedig" (and no, her brother was *not* also called "unraedig", nor was he "alias Cerdic of Wessex").

Margaret *was not* married to Malcolm before 1068, perhaps not before 1070. Ethelred was *probably* not their first child.

Do the math.

Malcolm had two children with his first wife.

Susan - at least two, possibly three, and they all had good Scots names. None of this foreign Saxon stuff.

There is some question as to just exactly who *she* was - Norse sources (Orkneyinga Saga etc) claim she was Ingibjorg, widow of Jarl Thorfinn of Orkney, which gets into difficult questions of chronology. Some scholars prefer to think she was a daughter by the same name (although naming children after their parents was *not* something the Norse usually did). And some say the Norse were making stuff up (which of course is always possible - they did a certain amount of that, just like everyone else).

Malcolm's sons by his first wife were Duncan (gained the Scottish throne temporarily as Duncan II - long and complicated story), Donald (noted principally for getting himself killed and for leaving at least one son who also came to a sticky end), and possibly Malcolm (whose legitimacy is open to some question).

Thanks. I am beginning to wonder if legitimacy is open to some question in a lot of these ancient genealogies! And as you say, the Norse are not the only ones making things up!

As our ancestors are said to have journeyed with Margaret back from Hungary, we are investigating if they went into exile with the King originally, (as is claimed by the Drummond family) and returned with him and Margaret. Confirming this would require obtaining records from the court in Hungary from that period....
Instead the legend is that Leving was a Hungarian noble who accompanied Margaret, but stayed...and later research says no, he was Saxon or no, a Scot living in Hungary with them the whole time.
After a certain amount of time has passed, it gets a bit foggy. And perhaps that is also why we are so enamored of the research.
Then how much did you read about who Margaret really was? Very entertaining....

Not so much Margaret, since she's pretty well documented and accounted for (at least once her family got back to England). The BIG question is, who were her mother's parents?

We know her mother was named "Agatha", which is a Greek name that was popular in Eastern Europe from Byzantium to Novgorod and west to Buda-Pest. But that isn't a lot of help, and the various accounts contradict each other and contain confusing and sometimes impossible details. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agatha,_wife_of_Edward_the_Exile

I tend to favor the idea that Agatha was the mysterious fourth daughter of Yaroslav the Wise - we *know* he had at least four, because four are shown in a fresco in Saint Sophia's Cathedral, Kiev. We also know the names of three of them and who they married:
* Anastasia, married to Andrew, refugee claimant to the throne of Hungary (who later became Andrew I)
* Anne, probably the youngest, sent off with great care to Paris to become the second wife of Henri I Capet (he was the only one actually a ruler at marriage)
* Elisaveta (alias Ellisif), married to the ambitious warlord Harald Sigurdsson (later known as Harald Hardraada, King of Norway)

With that kind of distribution, it seems reasonable that Yaroslav would take a chance with his fourth daughter on yet another ambitious refugee with a royal claim.

Other candidates have included Stephen I (St. Stephen) of Hungary, or one of the half-brothers of Emperor Henry III, or Tsar Gavril Radomir of Bulgaria, or Mieszko II Lambert of Poland, all of whom have the problem that there is *absolutely no* evidence for any extraneous daughters (and in St. Stephen's case considerable doubt that *any* of his children survived him).