"In the mid twelfth century, the Isles were partitioned between two rival power blocks. One faction, controlling Mann and the northern Hebrides, was led by the representative of the Crovan dynasty, Gofraid mac Amlaíb, Godred's grandson; the other faction,controlling the southern Hebrides, was ruled by Somairle mac Gilla Brigte, Lord of Argyll, husband of Ragnailt ingen Amlaíb, Godred's granddaughter. Somairle eventually forced his brother-in-law from power, and ruled the entire kingdom for almost a decade before the Crovan dynasty regained control of their permanently partitioned domain.[273][note 23] Although the dynasty expired in the mid thirteenth century, Somairle's descendants—Clann Somairle—held power in the Hebrides for centuries to come.[274] Infact, the later mediaeval Clann Somairle Lordship of the Isles, which survived into the late fifteenth century, was a direct successor of Godred's maritime imperium.[275]
orms of Gofraid mac Fergusa's name as they appear on folios 13r (image a) and 320v (image b) of the seventeenth-century Dublin Royal Irish Academy C iii 3 (the Annals of the Four Masters).
The Chronicle of Mann, Orkneyinga saga,[276] and later tradition preserved in the eighteenth-century Book of Clanranald, reveal that it was through Ragnailt's descent that Clann Somairle, and Somairle himself, claimed kingship in the Isles.[277] Godred's place at the royal apex of the two dynasties who contested the kingship of the Isles in the twelfth- and thirteenth centuries suggests that he is identical to the like-named man proclaimed as an eminent ancestral figure in two thirteenth-century poems concerning Clann Somairle dynasts.[278] The professed descendants of this Gofraid were poetically conceptualised as Síol nGofraidh ("the seed of Gofraid"), a Gaelic term that, conceivably, originally applied to both the Crovan dynasty and Clann Somairle.[276] Later unease with a matrilineal descendent from Godred may have led to the invention of a patrilineal descent of Clann Somairle from a like-named man with enviable, albeit concocted, Scottish connections. Godred, therefore, may be identical to the anachronistic Gofraid mac Fergusa,[276] an alleged ninth-century figure dubiously noted in the Annals of the Four Masters,[279] and otherwise only specifically attested in later genealogical accounts concerning Clann Somairle.[276][note 24]" |
King SOMERLED MacGillebride of the Northern Isles, Thayne of Argyll DR01