All Hail Macbeth, Thain of Cromarty? — Good king, bad king: the making of an historical myth

Liz Broumley

Victoria Hall, Cromarty

Of Macbeth, did one of the weird sisters actually say “Lo, yondyr the thayne of Crwmbarthy”? Was this a king under whose reign “the land did prosper mightily”? Macbeth was king of Alba, one of the areas we now call Scotland, from 1040 to 1057. He took power towards the end of a turbulent time as Scots, Gaels, Norse, Picts and Anglo-Saxons fought for power across northern Britain. The scant contemporary record suggest he was a skilful king with enough control of his realm to become the first ever King of Scotland to make a pilgrimage to Rome. When he was beaten in battle, there was enough respect from his enemies for him to be buried with honour in Iona. So why is Shakespeare’s depiction of him so bleak? What had happened to the story of Macbeth between his death and his reincarnation in the Scottish play? This talk will look at the emergence of Scottish narratives about Macbeth and the reasons that might lie behind the creation of a myth that in Macbeth “Something wicked this way comes.” As for Macbeth being Thain of Cromarty, well I will present the evidence but you, the jury, must decide!

Liz Broumley trained in the social sciences, working in industry and academia before being seduced by computing, which led to a major career shift into AI and computer science. She spent the rest of her career in research and tutoring, finally running a small research unit on e-learning within UHI, cleverly combining her background skills with her love of the Scottish mountains. Liz plans to be one of the oldest women ever to complete the Munros. When not huffing and puffing her way up hillsides, she can be heard tormenting a perfectly innocent fiddle or engrossed in the plays of a glover’s son from Stratford; that is when commitment to Cromarty Courthouse Museum allows.

Cromarty History Society now meets on the third Tuesday of each month, September‐April and occasionally during the summer