Scotland: The Story of a Nation

The Macbeth episode in Tales of a Grandfather has always puzzled me because Scott simply regurgitated the plot of Shakespeare’s play. His account gives the impression of Macbeth the usurper, Macbeth the barbarian king, Macbeth the tyrant who would massacre his own subjects, and so on; yet Scott knew that this was far from the historical truth – if there is such a thing as historical truth!

Scott was perhaps trying to set up a contrast between the disappearing old Celtic world and the wonderful new world of the Normans as portrayed in Ivanhoe and other novels; he was personifying the dissolution of Celtic Scotland in the figure of Macbeth. That may be all right in literary or artistic terms, but it is certainly not legitimate in strictly historical terms.

So Tales of a Grandfather presents the demise of Macbeth as a happy prelude to the normanisation and ultimate anglicisation of Scotland to come. For pro-Unionist historians like Scott, the denigration of Macbeth reflected a profound distaste for the ancient role of Celtic culture in the Lowland Scotland of his day; for Scott, any relevance it might have had was overshadowed by the emerging Norman (i.e. civilising) influence which was to begin in the reign of Malcolm Canmore. Not that Scott himself would have admitted to any such notion; in his History of Scotland he showed clearly that he was aware of the historical inaccuracies of Shakespeare’s plot:

All these things are now known: but the mind retains pertinaciously the impression made by the impositions of genius. While the works of Shakespeare are read, and the English language subsists, History may say what she will, but the general reader will only recollect Macbeth as a sacrilegious usurper, and Richard [III] as a deformed murtherer.

It is only in much more recent times that Macbeth has been rehabilitated as the champion of the Men of Moray and the last truly Celtic king of Scotland.

But there was another player in the Macbeth drama whom Shakespeare did not mention at all – Thorfinn the Mighty, Earl of Orkney. The sources about Thorfinn’s life (both Icelandic and Scottish) are tantalisingly elusive about his real impact on Scottish affairs – so elusive, indeed, that the eminent Scottish historical novelist Dorothy Dunnett was able to create a brilliantly plausible scenario from them in her novel King Hereafter (1982). Her thesis was that Macbeth and Thorfinn were in reality the same person, known as Thorfinn in Orkney and Macbeth in Scotland. It may sound outrageously unlikely, but …

Orkneyinga Saga relates that on the Feast of the Assumption (10 August) in 1040 – the very day on which Macbeth defeated Duncan near the village of Pitgaveny in Aberdeenshire – Thorfinn defeated a King of Scots called ‘Karl Hundason’ in battle at a fortified site the saga called Torfnes, somewhere on the northern coast of Scotland. It is impossible to identify the site with any certainty, but circumstantial evidence suggests that ‘Torfnes’ may well have been a name for the large and important fortification at modern Burghead, on the north Moray coast, near Elgin. Meanwhile John of Fordun’s early version of the Scotichronicon relates an old Scottish tradition that after Duncan’s death at Pitgaveny in 1040, his body was taken to Elgin; it was this tradition which, two centuries later, in 1235, inspired King Alexander II to found a chapel in the cathedral church in Elgin where masses were sung for Duncan’s soul.

In the year 1050, when Macbeth went on his pilgrimage to Rome, Orkneyinga Saga tells us that Thorfinn the Mighty went to Rome as well. Was it pure coincidence that these two rulers should choose the same year in which to absent themselves from their respective warring domains for such a long time? Thereafter, according to the saga, Thorfinn maintained good relations with the Scottish court.

There are just as many inconsistencies as coincidences between the stories of Thorfinn and Macbeth, of course. According to Orkneyinga Saga, for instance, Thorfinn died peacefully in Orkney and was buried in his beloved minster of Christchurch on the Brough of Birsay; whereas Macbeth, as we have heard, was buried on Iona. But both the saga and the Scottish sources agree that Thorfinn was married to Ingibjörg, the daughter of Earl Finn Arnason of Norway, and that after Thorfinn’s death she married Malcolm III – Macbeth’s conqueror and successor as King of Scots. Intriguing, isn’t it?

1 (#ulink_0abd771a-bb52-5752-9dc9-4e186b0ac349) Local tradition in Inverness insists that the murdered King Duncan was buried in Culcabock, a village to the east of the town (now a suburb of it). In front of a petrol station on the Old Perth Road, at the junction with Culcabock Avenue, is a stone marked with a plaque which reads: ‘Behind is the supposed burial place of King Duncan 1040’ – that is to say, underneath the present petrol station. On the opposite side of the road is a ‘Duncan’s Well’ (Fuaran Dhonnachaidh). According to this tradition, the king’s body was later removed and buried in the royal cemetery on the Holy Island of Iona. In fact, Duncan was killed in battle in Aberdeenshire (see here (#ulink_8743a2dc-253c-5e6e-a08f-c0a8d35fa59f)).

1 (#ulink_b3dd1247-a03c-534c-a974-2e429bb4fbff) Just for the record (literally), the ‘Birnam Oak’ stands next to the largest sycamore tree in Britain; it has a height of thirty metres and a girth of eight metres.

1 (#ulink_3cd088ae-20a7-5a72-9633-8b4abdd34e92) The Culdees (Cele dei, ‘Friends of God’) formed early monastic communities which attached themselves to hereditary secular priests.

1 (#ulink_394aa510-9dc6-5f93-91ec-61bd1f098eb1) ‘Motte-and-bailey’ is the term used for an early Anglo-Norman fortification consisting of a timber tower raised on an artificial mound. The word ‘motte’ comes from Old French, meaning mound, and the ‘bailey’ was the fortified courtyard within the surrounding ditch, or moat. In English, ‘motte’ came to mean the moat rather than the mound.

1 (#ulink_eccd41b9-efb6-59d6-86d1-e08bfc39dd94) John of Fordun (c.1320–84) has often been called ‘the Father of Scottish History’. Not a great deal is known about him; he is believed to have been a chantry priest at Aberdeen Cathedral, and may have come from Fordoun in the Mearns. His history was a compilation of (now lost) earlier historical writings on Scotland and took the story down to 1383. His work formed the basis of the Scotichronicon of Walter Bower, which was written in the 1440s.

Chapter 5 MALCOLM CANMORE AND ST MARGARET (#ulink_f6fa130f-97fb-536f-bd1b-04b7e4123b4d)

Malcolm III, called Canmore (or Great Head) … was a brave and wise prince, though without education. He often made war upon King William the Conqueror of England, and upon his son and successor William, who, from his complexion, was called William Rufus, that is, Red William.

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER IV

The accession of Malcolm Canmore in 1058 marked the end of what Michael Lynch has called ‘the crisis of the mac Alpin succession’ (Scotland: A New History). It also marked the start of a highly formative period in the development of ‘Scotland’ as a modern state; in particular, Scotland’s boundaries along the lines we recognise today began to take shape now (apart from the later inclusion of the Northern Isles). For the next 230 years, until the death of Alexander III in 1286 (see Chapter 8 (#u3d7726d3-875c-5c4d-a283-35e4f2d6e6eb)), the throne of Scotland was occupied by a powerful royal dynasty which is called variously the ‘Canmore Dynasty’ or the ‘House of Dunkeld’. In comparison with preceding centuries, and with what was to come during the ‘Wars of Independence’, this was to be a period of considerable prosperity and relative peace.

Malcolm III, who reigned for thirty-five years (1058–93), has come down in history with a mixed reputation. Commentators have made much mock of his Gaelic nickname: ‘Canmore’ is from the Gaelic ceann mòr, meaning ‘Great Chief’, but it is frequently translated as ‘Big-head’. Nigel Tranter, in The Story of Scotland, called him ‘something of a boor, bloodthirsty and without statesmanlike qualities. His one delight was in raiding, pillage, slaughter.’ The historical records, however, are too scanty to justify such a sweeping judgement.

Malcolm’s chief preoccupation throughout his reign was the consolidation and extension of his kingdom of ‘Scotia’, or ‘Alba’. Thorfinn the Mighty, Earl of Orkney, died some time between 1057 and 1065 (it is, alas, impossible to be sure of the precise date), and with his death his widespread empire in the north, which was said in Orkneyinga Saga to have included nine earldoms on the mainland of Scotland, began to disintegrate. Malcolm helped the process by marrying Thorfinn’s widow, Ingibjörg; some sources say that Ingibjörg was Thorfinn’s daughter, not his widow, but no matter. Before her death, some time before 1069, Ingibjörg bore Malcolm two sons: Duncan (the future King Duncan II) and Donald (d.1085); more importantly, however, the marriage helped to neutralise or at least diminish the insistent pressure on Scotland from the north.

Malcolm’s main objective was to seize the perennially debatable lands of Northumbria and Cumbria. At this time there was no recognised border between the kingdoms of ‘Scotland’ and ‘England’; and once again the events in England were to provide an opportunity for an ambitious and energetic King of Scots. After the death in 1055 of Earl Siward of Northumbria, who had helped Malcolm gain a foothold in Scotland in 1054, the new earl was a Wessex warlord named Tostig (the half-brother of the future King Harold Godwinsson who would die at Hastings). During Tostig’s absence abroad in 1061, Malcolm launched a major raid into Northumbria. It was the first of no fewer than five incursions into the north of England which he was to make during his reign – none with lasting success, and the last, in 1093, at the cost of his life.

But Malcolm Canmore will always be overshadowed, in Scottish eyes at least, by the woman who became his second queen sometime between 1069 and 1071: Margaret, a princess of the old Saxon royal house, who would become Scotland’s only royal saint.

Queen Margaret, the Saint

At the summit of the citadel of Edinburgh Castle stands a tiny, simple building which is the oldest surviving structure in the castle: St Margaret’s Chapel. It was built in the 1130s or 1140s by Margaret’s youngest son, King David I (see Chapter 6 (#u77c5f51e-7815-507d-a47e-01439b5070f5)), and dedicated to his mother, who had died in the castle in 1093. It began as a private oratory for the royal family; in the sixteenth century it passed out of use as a chapel and was converted into a gunpowder magazine. Its original purpose was rediscovered in 1845 and it was restored to its present condition. It is now a very popular venue for weddings and christenings: castle guides tell visitors, tongue in cheek, that it is the ideal place for a Scottish wedding, for it only holds twenty people and the bride’s father can have the reception in the telephone box on the way down!

The interior is as charming as the exterior is austere. The semi-circular chancel at the east end which housed the altar now has stained-glass windows depicting St Andrew and St Ninian. St Columba is represented, too, as is William Wallace in full battle array. But pride of place goes to St Margaret herself, flaxen-haired and beautiful, flanked by handmaidens at their sewing and holding an open book on her lap.

Margaret arrived in Scotland as a direct result of the Norman Conquest of 1066. She was of the English royal family which was swept aside by William of Normandy. Born in Hungary about the year 1047, she was a granddaughter of Edmund Ironside (half-brother of Edward the Confessor, r.1042–66), who had been killed resisting the conquest of England in 1016 by the Danish king Knút (Canute); she was the daughter of Edmund’s son Edward, who had married a Hungarian princess during his long exile in Hungary but died soon after the family’s return to England in 1057; and she was the sister of Prince Edgar (‘Edgar the Atheling’), whose claims to the throne at the death of the childless Edward the Confessor early in 1066 were passed over in favour of the warrior Harold Godwinsson.

After the Conquest, William the Conqueror treated Edgar and his family well, despite the fact that Edgar had been, rather optimistically, declared king-elect after Harold’s death at Hastings. But this cosy state of affairs did not last long, and in 1068, after an abortive rebellion in the north of England which he supported, Edgar tried to escape back to the greater safety of Hungary with his mother and two sisters, Margaret and Christina. Their ship, bound for the Continent, was driven off course by gales to Scotland and made land in Fife in a small bay now called St Margaret’s Hope (Inlet).

The story goes that Malcolm Canmore, now a forty-year-old widower, rode from his residence at Dunfermline to welcome the royal refugees to Scotland; he fell instantly in love with the young Princess Margaret, who was then in her early twenties, and within a few months he married her in Dunfermline.

Be that as it may, it was clearly a good political marriage. From Edgar’s point of view, it meant becoming brother-in-law to a formidable warrior King of Scots who could provide him with powerful support against the Norman ‘usurpers’ in England. For Malcolm, Margaret brought not just an alliance with the old royal house of England, but also a significant dowry in the form of the rich treasures which King Stephen of Hungary had given to her mother.

She was an excellent woman, and of such a gentle, amiable disposition, that she often prevailed upon her husband, who was a fierce, passionate man, to lay aside his resentment, and forgive those who had offended him.

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER IV

Sir Walter Scott’s picture of Queen Margaret as a Saxon diamond among Celtic dross is the conventional image of her which has come down in history. Margaret’s confessor in Scotland was a chaplain named Turgot (subsequently the first Roman, as opposed to Celtic, Bishop of St Andrews), who wrote a vivid biography of her soon after her death. In Turgot’s account she emerges as a determined and saintly woman who dominated her brash but doting husband who was so besotted with her that, although illiterate himself, he would kiss her devotional books and have them bound with gold and jewels.

As is to be expected in a biography which was also a hagiography, Turgot placed huge emphasis on the saintly queen’s piety. She enjoyed the rich trappings of royalty, but she also spent many hours in prayer, and fed the poor regularly and washed their feet. Soon after her marriage she attended to the building of a small Romanesque church at Dunfermline, and three Benedictine monks were sent at her request from Canterbury to form the nucleus of a Benedictine priory there. She restored the church on Iona and was a benefactress of St Andrews, where she revived the cult of St Andrew and encouraged pilgrims to go there by giving them free passage across the Forth – the names of South and North Queensferry, on either side of the estuary of the Forth, still carry the memory of this initiative. Her devotion to the Roman Church which had embraced her during her childhood in Hungary was undoubtedly significant in the struggle between the doctrines and formulas of the Celtic Church of Scotland, founded by St Columba, and the established practice of the Universal Catholic Church in which she had been reared.

Apart from the influence she may have had on spiritual matters in Scotland, Margaret has also been credited with, or blamed for, the anglicisation of the court and culture of southern Scotland:

a very great number of the Saxons who fled from the cruelty of William the Conqueror, retired into Scotland, and this had a considerable effect in civilizing the southern parts of that country; for if the Saxons were inferior to the Normans in arts and in learning, they were, on the other hand, much superior to the Scots, who were a rude and very ignorant people … No doubt, the number of the Saxons thus introduced into Scotland, tended much to improve and civilize the manners of the people …

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER IV

Walter Scott never missed a chance to rub in his view that the Scots of medieval times were a decidedly backward people compared with their southern neighbours. But certainly at this time, in the latter half of the eleventh century, Scotland can be seen to be moving from a Gaelic-speaking realm of semi-autonomous princedoms to a much more centralised monarchy on the English and Continental model. If Macbeth was the last truly Celtic King of Scots, as some claim, it is because during Malcolm’s reign there was a greater intermingling of the Celtic and Anglo-Norman cultures and mores.

It was perhaps on the future of Scotland and Anglo – Scottish relations, rather than on their present, that Queen Margaret had most effect – through the children she had by Malcolm. She gave birth to six pious sons, three of whom would reign successively as Kings of Scots: Edgar (r.1097–1107), Alexander I (r.1107–24) and David I (r.1124–53). She also had two daughters, both of whom married into the English royal house: Edith, the elder, married William the Conqueror’s son, Henry I of England (r.1100–35), and became known in England as the Empress Matilda (see below); and Mary, the younger, married Eustace, Count of Boulogne, and their daughter (also named Matilda, or Maud) married Stephen of Blois, who was King of England from 1135 to 1164.

The border issue

Malcolm’s marriage connection with a claimant to the English throne may well have added fuel to his ambitions to extend his own kingdom by attacking Northumbria, allegedly on Edgar the Atheling’s behalf. His first opportunity came in 1070. Northumbria had fiercely resisted the Norman conquest of southern England, and had been savagely punished by King William. Malcolm launched his own invasion, ostensibly to help the English rebels, but it did little more than add to the cruel devastation of Yorkshire.

King William recognised the danger to the security of England posed by Malcolm’s aggression. In 1072 he invaded Scotland with a large, well-organised army, supported by a fleet; it was the first full-scale invasion of Scotland since Roman times. William marched through Lothian and across the River Forth at Stirling, and went on to the River Tay. Malcolm realised that his own forces were no match for the powerful host of Norman knights and men-at-arms, and refused to give battle. Frustrated by Malcolm’s delaying tactics, William offered to talk terms at Abernethy on the Tay. The treaty which resulted is known in English sources as the ‘Abernethy Submission’: Malcolm apparently submitted to William – ‘he gave hostages and was his man’. He agreed not to harbour the English king’s enemies (for instance, Edgar the Atheling), and surrendered his eldest son, Duncan (by Ingibjörg of Orkney), as a hostage. But was it a formal act of homage by a King of Scots as a vassal of England – or was Malcolm only recognising English suzerainty of the disputed lands of Cumbria and Northumbria? Ted Cowan believes that the idea of the King of Scots accepting the overlordship or ‘feudal superiority’ of the English king was a later fabrication by English chroniclers, designed to reinforce English claims to be rulers of Scotland; certainly, the ‘Abernethy Submission’ would remain a bone of contention between English and Scots constitutional lawyers for centuries to come.

Malcolm did not consider himself bound by it in any way. In 1079, when Norman control of the north of England was precarious once more, Malcolm invaded again – but again with no other result than a retaliatory invasion from England, led this time by William’s son, Robert Curthose. Malcolm, again, refused battle, and at Falkirk the terms of the Abernethy Treaty (such as they were) were renewed. It also seems that a border was agreed, stretching between the Solway and the Tyne. Certainly, it was immediately after the Falkirk meeting that Robert Curthose commissioned the building of a ‘New Castle’ on the Tyne. It was a motte-and-bailey, and was the foundation of modern Newcastle. The border was reinforced in 1091, after yet another indecisive incursion against Durham and a counter-incursion into Lothian, this time led by William’s successor on the throne of England, his son William Rufus (William II). William II took Carlisle and temporarily robbed the Scots of that part of ancient Cumbria which lay south of the Solway; he consolidated the western end of the ‘border’ by ordering the building of the first castle at Carlisle.

The death of Malcolm

There was to be one more Scottish invasion of Northumbria. In November 1093 Malcolm Canmore, stung (it is said) by some calculated insult from William II, or irritated by the building of Carlisle Castle, gathered another army and marched south on a last furious raid, accompanied by his eldest son by Margaret, Edward. It was a grievous miscalculation. Near the castle of Alnwick he was ambushed by the Norman Earl of Northumbria, Robert de Mowbray, and was killed, along with his son Edward – by treachery, it was subsequently claimed.

Malcolm had left Queen Margaret on her sickbed in Edinburgh Castle when he set off on his last expedition to Northumbria. According to her biographer, Turgot, she had foreseen that it would have disastrous consequences. For consolation she sent for the ‘Black Rood’ – a fragment of the True Cross encased in a cross of gold, with an ivory image of Christ upon it, the most precious of the treasures she had brought from Hungary.

The news of her husband’s and son’s deaths was too much for her, and three days later, on 16 November 1093, she died. Malcolm’s death prompted fears of a palace coup. Margaret’s body was taken from Edinburgh Castle in great secrecy, through the west postern gate, and ferried across the Forth to Dunfermline, where she was buried in the little church she had founded there.

Standing in the soaring sonorities of Dunfermline Abbey today, it is difficult to visualise the small church where Margaret was first laid to rest. On the floor of the nave are some brass strips which mark the outlines of parts of an early church whose foundations were uncovered during excavations in 1916, and grilles in the floor allow glimpses of the stonework. It was Margaret’s youngest son, King David I (r.1124–53), who rebuilt the first church as a major abbey, the most splendid ecclesiastical building of its time in Scotland; it was consecrated in 1150.

Margaret’s manifest piety throughout her life soon made Dunfermline a place of pilgrimage after her death. It was clearly of great advantage to the ruling Canmore dynasty to have a saint on its books, and her canonisation was vigorously promoted. It eventually came about in 1250, in time to add lustre to the inauguration of Alexander III the previous year (see Chapter 8 (#u3d7726d3-875c-5c4d-a283-35e4f2d6e6eb)), and her body was moved to a new shrine in a chapel specially built to receive it near the High Altar.

Aftermath

After the death of Malcolm Canmore, the Scottish crown was occupied successively by three princes of little power or talent, who seized on the supreme authority because the children of the deceased sovereign were under age.