familiarity with us, had rubbed off all the rust of Scottish barbarism. Finally, when he obtained the kingdom, he released from the payment of taxes, for three years, all such of his countrymen as would pay more attention to their dwellings, dress more elegantly, and feed more nicely. No history has ever recorded three kings, and at the same time brothers, who were of equal sanctity, or savoured so much of their mother's piety; for independently of their abstemiousness, their extensive charity, and their frequency in prayer, they so completely subdued the domestic vice of kings, that no report, even, prevailed, that any entered their bed except their legitimate wives, or that either of them had ever been guilty of any unlawful intercourse. Edmund was the only degenerate son of Margaret, who, partaking in his uncle Donald's crime, and bargaining for half his kingdom, had been accessary to his brother's death. But being taken, and doomed to perpetual imprisonment, he sincerely repented; and, on his near approach to death, ordered himself to be buried in his chains: confessing that he suffered deservedly for the crime of fratricide.
The Welsh, perpetually rebelling, were subjugated by the king in repeated expeditions, who, relying on a prudent expedient to quell their tumults, transported thither all the Flemings then resident in England. For that country contained such numbers of these people, who, in the time of his father, had come over from national relationship to his mother, that, from their numbers, they appeared burdensome to the kingdom. In consequence he settled them, with all their property and connexions, at Ross, a Welsh province, as in a common receptacle, both for the purpose of cleansing the kingdom, and repressing the brutal temerity of the enemy. Still, however, he did not neglect leading his expeditions thither, as circumstances required: in one of which, being privily aimed at with an arrow from a distance, though by whose audacity is unknown, he opportunely and fortunately escaped, by the interposition of his firmly mailed hauberk, and the counsel of God at the same time frustrating this treachery. But neither was the director of the arrow discovered at that time, nor could he ever after be detected, although the king immediately declared, that it was not let fly by a Welshman, but by a subject; swearing to it, by the
