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Scotland - The Rise of Scotland
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 and 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 only fell into Scottish hands in 1018, when Malcolm II attacked the English and pushed the border as far south as the River Tweed. This remains the south-eastern border to this day (except round Berwick upon Tweed).
Scotland, in the geographical sense it has retained for nearly a millennium, completed its expansion by the gradual subsumation 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 Pictish 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, overthrew him.
(William Shakespeare, in his play Macbeth, later immortalized these events, in a heavily fictionalized way based on inaccurate contemporary history that flattered the antecedents of James VI of Scotland/I of England. For a more accurate fictional account, it is better to read Nigel Tranter's novel, Macbeth the King.)
Article is provided courtesy of Wikipedia.org and distributed under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License.
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