Kenneth MacAlpin
Kenneth MacAlpin was the king of the Gaelic Scots of Dal Riata who became king of the Picts about 843, and the tradition that he united the two peoples into one kingdom of Alba, and the later story that he did it by inviting the Pictish nobles to a feast at Scone and dropping them through the benches into a pit, made him the founder of Scotland, from whom every later king of Scots counted his number. What the sources allow is less. The Pictish king-lists put him at the head of a line that reigned from Forteviot and Scone, the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba gives him sixteen years, and the Irish annals, which call him king of the Picts when he died, record no conquest. The kingdom of the Picts had been broken by the Vikings, who killed its king and most of its nobility in a battle in 839, and Kenneth, whose own kingdom on the west coast was being squeezed by the same Norse, was one of several men who tried for the vacant throne in the years after. By 843 or 848 he had it. He moved the relics of Saint Columba from Iona, which the Vikings had sacked three times, to a new church at Dunkeld in the middle of his kingdom, which is the act most of the later histories remember. He invaded Northumbria six times, the Chronicle says, burned Dunbar and took Melrose, while the Britons of Strathclyde burned Dunblane and the Danes wasted Pictland to Clunie and Dunkeld. He married a daughter to the king of Strathclyde and another to an Irish high king. He died of a tumour at Forteviot in February 858 and was buried on Iona, and his brother and then his two sons followed him as kings of the Picts, the name Alba appearing for the kingdom only in his grandsons' time. That the Pictish language and the Pictish name disappeared within a century of him is the fact the legend grew to explain.
- Lived: 810 CE – 858 CE
- Nationality: Scottish
- Roles: king, monarch, founder
