The confused fighting on the Ayrshire shore on 2 October 1263, when Haakon IV of Norway’s men came ashore to salvage ships driven aground by a gale and were engaged by a Scottish force. Militarily it settled nothing; the weather, and Haakon’s death in Orkney ten weeks later, did.
On 2 October 1263 Norwegian crews trying to recover storm-driven ships on the beach at Largs were attacked by a Scottish force that had come down to the shore. The fighting lasted part of a day, moved up and down the rising ground behind the beach, and ended with the Norwegians getting back to their boats. Both sides afterwards said they had won.
It is the best-known battle in the history of Norwegian Scotland and one of the least decisive. The Norwegian account, written within two years by a man with access to the men who were there, describes a rearguard action fought by a landing party; the Scottish chronicles closest to the event are brief. The picture of a great Scottish victory that destroyed a Viking invasion is a later construction, and the article does not repeat it.
What ended Norwegian power in the Hebrides was not the afternoon at Largs but the sequence around it: a campaign that had run into October without forcing a settlement, a fleet damaged by autumn gales, and the death of the sixty-year-old king who was the whole enterprise’s reason for existing. Three years later his son sold the Isles for cash.
The Hebrides and the Isle of Man had been held of the Norwegian crown since Magnus Barefoot’s expedition of 1098, an arrangement that worked because Norway was far away and the island lords were effectively independent. As the Scottish kingdom consolidated in the thirteenth century that became less tolerable to Scotland and no more defensible for Norway.
Alexander II had tried to buy the Isles and, when Haakon refused, had sailed west to take them; he died of a fever at Kerrera off Oban in 1249 with the expedition under way. His son Alexander III renewed the offer on coming of age, was refused again, and applied pressure instead: the Earl of Ross raided Skye, and Scottish agents worked on the island chiefs.
Haakon IV was the king who had closed the Norwegian civil wars, taken the submission of Iceland in 1262 and built the strongest monarchy Norway had yet had. Letting a dependency be taken by degrees was not an option he could accept, and in the summer of 1263 he answered with force.
Haakon sailed from Bergen in early July with a leidang fleet that Hákonar saga puts at more than a hundred and twenty ships, the largest Norwegian force sent to sea within memory, and his own vessel was said to be built of oak throughout. He went by Shetland and Orkney, down the Minch and through the Isles, collecting the island lords as he came, and anchored in the Firth of Clyde by late September.
Detachments went up Loch Long, were dragged across the isthmus at Arrochar into Loch Lomond, and raided the Lennox. Meanwhile envoys went back and forth with the Scots over the disputed islands, and Alexander III let them go back and forth.
That was the Scottish strategy and it was a good one. Every week of talk brought the season on, and a fleet of open ships lying in an exposed firth in late September was running a risk the Scots did not have to run. Alexander avoided a general battle, kept the negotiations alive, and waited.
The gale came on the night of 30 September and through 1 October. Several Norwegian vessels dragged their anchors and were driven ashore near Largs, among them a large transport, and their crews had to be got off and the ships and cargo salvaged from a beach on the Scottish mainland.
On 2 October a Scottish force came down to the shore while the salvage was going on. The Norwegian party was divided between the beach and a mound above it; the saga describes the men on the higher ground withdrawing towards the shore, some confusion as those below thought they were being abandoned, and a stand at the water’s edge that held long enough for the boats to take them off. There was archery, some cavalry on the Scottish side, and no formed battle of the kind either kingdom could have fought had both intended one.
Casualties on the Norwegian side were real but modest by the saga’s own account, which names the men of rank who fell. Scottish figures from the later chronicles run into the thousands and are not credible: an engagement fought by part of a landing party over the course of one afternoon cannot produce them. The next day the Norwegians came back, burned the stranded ships they could not float, and rejoined the fleet.
Haakon did not treat Largs as a defeat and did not go home beaten. He took the fleet north, intending to winter in Orkney and resume the campaign in the spring, which is not the behaviour of a man who thinks the war is lost. He reached Kirkwall, took up residence in the Bishop’s Palace, fell ill in the autumn and died in the early hours of 16 December 1263, having had the sagas of his predecessors read to him as he weakened. He was buried in St Magnus Cathedral for the winter and taken home to Bergen in the spring.
His son Magnus VI inherited a position that could not be held without another expedition and chose not to mount one. By the Treaty of Perth on 2 July 1266, Norway ceded the Hebrides and the Isle of Man to Scotland for 4,000 marks down and 100 marks a year in perpetuity — the payment the Scots called the annual of Norway and stopped making soon enough.
Orkney and Shetland stayed Norwegian for two more centuries. They passed to Scotland in 1468 and 1469, pledged by Christian I against the unpaid dowry of his daughter Margaret, and were annexed in 1472 when the pledge was not redeemed.
The Norwegian source is Hákonar saga Hákonarsonar, written in 1264 and 1265 by the Icelander Sturla Þórðarson at the commission of Magnus VI, from the testimony of men who had sailed on the expedition. It is partisan towards Haakon and it is close to the event, and it presents Largs as a hard scrap over stranded ships in which the Norwegians got off the beach in good order.
The Scottish record nearest the event is thin. The Chronicle of Melrose notices the campaign briefly; the fuller and more triumphant accounts come from John of Fordun in the later fourteenth century and from Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon in the fifteenth, a century and more afterwards, by which time the outcome of the whole war was known and could be read back into the day.
The victory, in other words, was awarded in retrospect, and the monument follows the story rather than the evidence: the tower on the shore at Largs known as the Pencil was raised in 1912. Modern historians treat the engagement as indecisive and attribute the collapse of Norwegian lordship in the Isles to the campaign’s failure to force a decision, the weather, and the death of the king.