Somerled(c. 1113–1164)

Somerled (Somhairle in Gaelic, Sumarliði in Old Norse) was born around 1113 into the mixed Norse and Gaelic aristocracy of the western seaboard, most probably on Morvern or the Sound of Mull. His father Gillebride was a dispossessed Gaelic lord whose family had been driven out of Argyll by the Norse expansion of the late eleventh century; his mother is recorded only as a Hebridean noblewoman. The world he was born into had been Norse for two centuries. The Western Isles, the Isle of Man, Caithness and Sutherland all paid tribute to the kings of Norway through the Kingdom of Mann, ruled by the descendants of Godred Crovan. The Gaels of the western mainland were on the wrong side of that tide.

Family tradition, recorded centuries later in the Book of Clanranald, places Somerled as a young man living in a cave on Morvern with his father in reduced circumstances when a Norse raiding party came ashore. Somerled rallied a band of his father's surviving kinsmen and drove the raiders back to their ships. Whatever the truth of the cave, by the late 1130s he had become the unrivalled war-leader of the Argyll Gaels, retaking lands his family had lost and styling himself Rí Innse Gall, King of the Hebrides. In 1140 he married Ragnhild, daughter of Olaf the Red, King of Mann. The marriage tied the rising Gaelic power to the declining Norse royal house and produced the sons through whom his line continued.

His defining act came in 1156. Olaf had been murdered in 1153; his son Godred the Black succeeded to Mann and quickly alienated the Hebridean chiefs by the harshness of his rule. On the night of the Epiphany, 5 to 6 January 1156, Somerled met Godred's fleet in the Sound of Islay in what the Manx Chronicle calls a sea battle of 'great slaughter on both sides'. The fight lasted through the dark and into the dawn. By morning Godred had been forced to a partition: Somerled took the southern Hebrides from Ardnamurchan down (Mull, Islay, Jura, Coll, Tiree) and Godred kept Man and the northern isles. Two years later Somerled returned with a larger fleet, drove Godred out of Mann altogether, and ruled the whole Norse-Gaelic west from the Mull of Kintyre to the Butt of Lewis. The Lordship of the Isles, the great sea-kingdom that would dominate the western seaboard for the next three centuries, dates from this moment.

What broke him was ambition on the mainland. Malcolm IV of Scotland had been pursuing a long policy of replacing the autonomous western chiefs with Norman-Scottish vassals on the Stewart and de Brus model. In 1164 Somerled gathered a fleet of, by some sources, one hundred and sixty galleys and landed at Renfrew on the Clyde, intending to settle accounts with the Stewart of Scotland on his own ground. The campaign collapsed almost at once. Somerled was killed on the field at Renfrew, either by a stray arrow or by treachery; the sources disagree. He was buried at Saddell Abbey on the Kintyre coast, the foundation he had patronised in his last years. He was about fifty.

The line he founded did not break. His son Reginald inherited the southern islands; Reginald's son Donald gave the family the name Clan Donald carries to this day. By the fourteenth century Somerled's descendants ruled an autonomous Gaelic state from Finlaggan on Islay, with their own parliament, their own coinage, their own marine and their own diplomatic relations with the kings of England as separate sovereigns from the kings of Scotland. The Lordship was forfeit to the crown in 1493, but the MacDonalds remained the largest of the Highland clans, fought alongside Bruce at Bannockburn, raised the Jacobite standard in 1715 and 1745, and carry his surname into every continent of the diaspora today. The Macdonald name in its many spellings, MacDonell, McDonnell, Donald, descends from Somerled, and the Lord of the Isles title remains a formal title of the Prince of Wales as heir to the Scottish crown to which the Lordship was finally surrendered.