Scotland: The Story of a Nation

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER IV

Malcolm Canmore’s death threw Scotland into a virtual civil war. From his refuge in the Western Isles, where he had been living since Macbeth had killed his father Duncan I, came Malcolm’s younger brother Donald bàn (Shakespeare’s ‘Donalbain’), who now, at the age of sixty, claimed the vacant throne and was crowned as Donald III. It was the Celtic backlash against the anglicisation of the court: his accession seems to have been backed by the native aristocracy, who had come to resent the foreign influences associated with Queen Margaret. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for the year 1093, ‘the Scots drove out all the English who had been with King Malcolm’. Certainly, the surviving children of Malcolm Canmore and St Margaret fled to the English court for safety, led by the eldest son Edgar and including the youngest, the ten-year-old David – the future King David I.

There was another claimant to the throne of Scotland – the royal prince who had been surrendered as a hostage by his father to William the Conqueror at Abernethy twenty years earlier: Duncan, Malcolm Canmore’s son by Ingibjörg of Orkney. He had been brought up at the English court, and had been formally released, and knighted, on William the Conqueror’s death in 1087. Here was an obvious opportunity for King William II of England to make his presence felt in Scotland again. Duncan was now a fully ‘normanised’ Celt, a protégé who had sworn fealty to the English king. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1093, ‘Duncan came to the king, and gave such pledges as the king demanded of him and, with his consent, went to Scotland.’ With the help of an English and French army he ousted Donald III and was accepted as King of Scots as Duncan II – but only on condition that he dismissed his alien supporters. It was a fatal promise: before the year was out he had been murdered (November 1094), and Donald III resumed his interrupted reign.

William Rufus was not to be balked, however. He had another claimant to the Scottish throne up his sleeve: Malcolm Canmore’s fourth son by Margaret, Edgar, who had fled to his court in 1093. In 1097 William sent Edgar to Scotland as his vassal at the head of another army. This time there was to be no slip-up. Donald III was soundly defeated, hunted down and captured, then blinded and thrown into a dungeon. When he died, he was the last King of Scots to be buried on Iona.

The accession of King Edgar in 1097 heralded a remarkable span of rule by three men of the same generation, the three youngest sons of Malcolm Canmore and Queen Margaret, who gave Scotland’s relationship with England a new stability: Edgar, Alexander I and David I.

Edgar was known as ‘the Peaceable’. He made no resistance when Magnús Barelegs (berfœttr), king of Norway, made a violent onslaught on the Western Isles and confirmed Norwegian sovereignty there, leaving the sacred island of Iona in ruins again. There were no rebellions or uprisings against Edgar’s rule. He never married, and had no children; when he died in 1107 he bequeathed his kingdom to his younger brothers Alexander (as monarch) and David (as ruler of southern Lothian and Strathclyde).

In contrast to his ‘peaceable’ elder brother, Alexander I was known as ‘the Fierce’, perhaps because of the severity of his suppression of a rebellion in Moray and the Mearns. Apart from that he was a devout man who showed all the signs of his strictly pious upbringing by his mother, Queen Margaret. Like his brother Edgar he was a vassal of the English king, Henry I (r.1100–35); Henry was the youngest (and only English-born) son of William the Conqueror, and the husband of Alexander’s sister Edith (Matilda). Alexander I now married his brother-in-law’s illegitimate daughter Sibyl, and his vassalage to England seemed to be confirmed in 1114 when he participated in an English campaign in Wales. His reign is particularly remembered, however, for his encouragement of monastic orders. He brought Augustinian canons from England to found priories at Scone and at Inchcolm in the Firth of Forth, and made plans for Augustinian foundations at the ancient Celtic royal centres of Dunkeld and St Andrews. He died at Stirling in April 1124 without legitimate issue, and was buried with his parents in the church at Dunfermline which his mother had founded.

To what extent was Scotland being ‘normanised’, as England had been? Some commentators have seen the accession of Edgar in 1097 as Scotland’s equivalent of England’s Norman Conquest. Dauvit Brown disagrees:

There was no Norman Conquest of Scotland, as such. In England, simply and spectacularly, the Normans conquered the kingdom; the native aristocracy were largely dispossessed, or at least fell down a few rungs in the social ladder. In the case of Scotland, however, the Normans came by invitation: the Scottish kings themselves invited the Norman knights into their kingdom, and not necessarily from England – for instance, there were Norman knights fighting in Macbeth’s defeated army at the Battle of Dunsinane in 1054. They were given, as grants from the king, positions of authority in some regions or in the court; these Norman knights represented the latest in military technology, and they were an important element in the attempt to consolidate and extend control of the kingdom.

The kings who succeeded Macbeth were trying to do something really new: they were aligning themselves with the major social and cultural forces in western Europe, especially the reform of the Church which was being promoted by the papacy from the middle of the eleventh century. They promoted this in their own kingdom by establishing monasteries staffed by monks and nuns of the brand-new religious orders which were part of the mood of the day.

The other major force in western Europe was the French knightly culture which came to Scotland with the Norman knights. The Scottish kings were themselves part of this culture; they, too, were knights, and in due course the major members of the Gaelic aristocracy, first in the east and later in the west, also became fully-fledged knights.

What was happening in Scotland was not a simple clash between the old, kin-based values of Gaeldom and the new-fangled feudal ideas of the Normans; rather, it was a gradual melding of the old and the new.

The death of Alexander I left the way open for his brother David to ascend the throne at the age of about forty: David I (r.1124–53), the man who could never have expected to become King of Scots.

Chapter 6 DAVID I (r.1124–53) (#ulink_49311213-7550-524b-ba75-5fded159c90c)

David was a most excellent sovereign … He founded bishoprics, and built and endowed many monasteries, which he vested with large grants of lands out of the patrimony of the kings … He had many furious wars with England, and made dreadful incursions into the neighbouring provinces, which were the more easy that the country of England was then disunited by civil war.

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER IV

The noble remains of four magnificent abbeys punctuate the landscape of the Borders: four great monastic foundations which survive today only as monastic monuments, piercing reminders of the transience of greatness and power. They were all founded by one King of Scots – King David I – and all brought to ruin by the punitive onslaught on the Borders, known as the ‘Rough Wooing’, ordered by King Henry VIII of England in the 1540s (see Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)).

Kelso Abbey is now just a stump – but what an elegant stump it is. Only the west end of the abbey church survives, with its Galilee porch islanded by traffic in the middle of the town. It was founded by King David in 1128 for the Tironensian order of monks (reformed Benedictines) from Tiron, near Chartres, who had originally been settled in Selkirk but who wanted to be closer to the formidable royal castle of Roxburgh on the other side of the Tweed. Kelso became one of the country’s wealthiest religious houses, as well as being one of the most spectacular achievements of Romanesque architecture in Scotland. It was where the young King James III was crowned King of Scots in 1460, following the untimely death of his father, James II, at the siege of Roxburgh when a cannon burst during a ceremonial firing (see Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)).

Melrose Abbey, the largest and, some would say, the finest of the four, was founded under the patronage of King David by Cistercian monks from Yorkshire in 1136. Even in ruin it is strikingly handsome, and it is still of great importance to the local economy of Melrose – it is one of the most popular visitor attractions in Scotland.

Jedburgh was founded as a priory under the patronage of King David in 1138 and raised to the status of abbey in 1154. It is a graceful and almost entire ruin of an Augustinian abbey, sitting high and proud on a ridge above its associated monastic and domestic buildings. In the course of its history it suffered the usual ransackings due to its strategic position at one of the main gateways to Scotland. It was rebuilt on several occasions, but finally succumbed to the English hammer during the ‘Rough Wooing’ and was later suppressed by the Scottish Reformers in 1559. It is now served by a splendid new Visitor Centre which explains and illuminates its story with exemplary clarity.

Finally there is Dryburgh Abbey, perhaps the most hauntingly exquisite of the four. It stands in a beautiful sylvan setting on a horseshoe bend of the River Tweed, with fine parklands sweeping down to the river. It was established in 1150, towards the end of King David’s reign. Because of its nearness to the border it, too, was severely damaged on several occasions, and never recovered from the final indignities of the ‘Rough Wooing’. It was in one of the chapels of the ruined north transept that Sir Walter Scott was buried in September 1832 (see Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)).

With these four great foundations, and many others besides, so resonant with the echoes of the nation’s history, King David I created the fabric of the great period of medieval civilisation which Scotland was to enjoy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

David the king

David was the most ‘English’ of the three Canmore brother kings, and perhaps the luckiest. He was an attractive person in every sense, well-favoured physically and good-natured; he had spent much of his youth in England, where he was groomed as a Norman knight and ‘polished from his boyhood by his intercourse and friendship with us’, as an English chronicler put it. His sister’s marriage to Henry I of England in 1100 added to his social standing as a prince who, from 1107, was viceroy of the southern half of Scotland. In 1114 he married a wealthy forty-year-old widow, Maud de Senlis, Countess of Northampton and a ward of the king; she was also the daughter and heiress of Waltheof, the Earl of Huntingdon. This brought David the earldom of Northampton and the earldom (‘Honour’) of Huntingdon, with manors in eleven counties across the Midlands of England, making him one of the greatest barons in the country. Such was the premier nobleman of Norman England who turned into one of the greatest kings of medieval Scotland.

When David succeeded his brother on the throne in 1124 he brought with him to Scotland many of his friends from England who were to help him reshape the organisation and administration of Scotland, both civil and ecclesiastical, and become its new feudal aristocracy. We now meet for the first time the families who were to mould Scotland’s future, powerful names like the Bruces, the Balliols and the Stewarts (David’s first ‘Steward’ in Scotland was Walter Fitzalan, originally from Brittany, whose father had acquired lands in Norfolk and Shropshire). To these families David gave huge grants of land to establish their authority: to the Bruces he gave the vast lands of Annandale around the river Annan, which runs from the southern uplands to the Solway Firth; the hereditary ‘Stewards’ were given land which corresponds to modern Renfrewshire.

David’s ecclesiastical foundations were the most spectacular of his reforms. In addition to the four great Border abbeys, he converted the wooden church of Drumselch Forest outside Edinburgh into the Abbey of Holyrood; he promoted the Benedictine priory of Dunfermline to the rank of an abbey, in honour of his mother Queen Margaret; he founded Newbattle on the Esk and St Mary of Cambuskenneth on the Forth. To all the churches and monasteries he founded he gave extensive estates and extravagant benefactions. So generous was he with the royal lands and revenues that he was later to be called ‘a sair sanct [sore saint] for the crown’ – that is to say, his pious activities cost the crown dear.

But there was prudence as well as religious devotion involved. Abbeys were good for the national economy. The Cistercians were the international wool merchants of their time, for instance; and David’s monks engaged in all kinds of business enterprises, in farming, fishing, forestry, coal-working and salt-mining. The fledgling village of Kelso consisted almost entirely of people employed by the monks.

On top of this, David was assiduous in promoting commerce through the granting of royal charters to burghs from which he could collect regular revenues, and many of the towns and cities in today’s Scotland date their origin or their first charters to David’s reign. The first royal burghs, at Berwick-upon-Tweed and Roxburgh, were fortified with castles: Berwick Castle, standing high above the left bank of the Tweed, was to play a critically important role in Scottish history for centuries; Roxburgh Castle, sited between the Tweed and the Teviot, was to become the strongest bastion anywhere in the border lands. These developments may be seen as the beginning of a fortified ‘border’.

All these important innovations were designed to give cohesion and stability to the realm, held together by a feudal system looser than its English model. Norman castles provided royal and baronial authority and security for the king’s officers and tax-gatherers. His personal chaplains – well-educated priests all – formed the basis of an administrative bureaucracy, headed by a chancellor (for legal advice) and a chamberlain (for financial control). King David brought Scotland, as a kingdom, into the medieval European mainstream.

Steve Boardman, lecturer in Scottish History at Edinburgh University, says:

David is regarded as a pivotal figure in the development of Scotland and the Scottish kingship, because it was during his reign that so many novel and important features begin to develop and all the attributes of a medieval kingdom appear in Scotland. He was a very international figure in terms of Scottish kingship, part of the great cosmopolitan world which embraced Norman Europe. He had first-hand experience of Norman military techniques and tactics. He was part of the fashionable scene in terms of wider developments in Europe. Through David the Scottish kingdom began to develop along the same path as other European kingdoms, along similar lines to the accepted norms in France and England; so, in that sense, his kingship was crucial and has to be seen as extremely important.

Ted Cowan urges caution in an uncritical use of the term ‘feudalism’ as it applies to David’s Scotland:

I think David masterminded, quite brilliantly, a combination of what he wanted from the Norman world and what he perceived as being desirable in the old Celtic world.

But this question of feudalism’ is a highly problematical area. Many historians are no longer sure that there was any such thing as feudalism. If it is to he understood at all, it is best thought of simply as a system of landholding, whereby all land is held of the king; the king is the absolute proprietor of all land in the country. This is interesting, because in Celtic law all land was held communally by the clan. There were no absolute proprietors in the Celtic world. So there was a potential conflict there, but it is largely in the way in which landholding is described: the two systems could be accommodated quite well. And David was intelligent enough, and opportunistic enough, to achieve it.

It all suggests a sunshine reign of success and untroubled prosperity. There were rebellions in the Celtic north-east in 1130 and again in 1134, but with southern help David was able to suppress them both and put his own men in place there. At home (which by now, for a King of Scots, meant Edinburgh) David’s wife Maud (who died in 1130) provided him with three children. The only one to reach adulthood, however, was Henry (c.1114–52), the heir apparent, who became Earl of Northumberland and Northampton. He was a dashing young man of whom David was manifestly very proud. But not everything was to go David’s way.

The Battle of the Standard (Northallerton, 1138)

At the side of the A167 between Northallerton and Darlington, in North Yorkshire, stands a plain stone obelisk, its plinth marked with the simple legend: ‘Battle of the Standard: AD 1138’. It also bears a metal shield with a stylised picture of a four-wheeled cart with a ship’s mast festooned with banners. The monument marks the site of the most spectacular military event in David’s long reign – the crushing defeat of a marauding Scottish army on a stretch of rolling moorland some three miles north of Northallerton on 22 August 1138.

The moorland has long been cultivated for agriculture, but the battle-site is easy to make out. Behind and in line with the monument is a rise in the ground on which sit the buildings of a farm called Standard Hill Farm; this was where the English army took up position around the curious ‘standard’ which gave the battle its popular name. To the left (i.e. the north) the ground dips and rises again towards another farm (also called Standard Hill Farm), which was where the Scottish force was deployed.

What was the battle about? England at that time was in the grip of a civil war following the death of Henry I in 1135. Henry’s daughter Matilda, who was David I’s niece, had the most obvious claim to the vacant throne and had been nominated by the late king as his heir. But another claimant stepped in – the king’s nephew, Stephen of Blois, a grandson of William the Conqueror and husband of another of David I’s nieces. Stephen had sworn fealty to Matilda (as had David I as a baron in England), but no sooner was Henry I dead than Stephen seized the throne for himself. It was to lead to nineteen years of bitter conflict within England; but its chief significance for Scotland was that it gave David I an opportunity to try to push Scotland’s boundaries southwards. Claiming that he was supporting Matilda, he moved south in force and seized the English fortresses of Newcastle and Carlisle.

This was his great chance, it seemed, to recover the ‘lost provinces’. From all corners of his kingdom he mustered a huge army (twenty-five thousand strong, according to English chroniclers, but this is now considered a substantial over-estimate) and set off in July 1138 towards York, harrying and pillaging on the way. Stephen had his hands full with a baronial uprising near Bristol, and the defence of the north fell to Thurstan, the ageing but militant Archbishop of York. Thurstan called for a ‘holy crusade’ to repel the Scottish invaders; from every pulpit in the county the call went out for able-bodied volunteers.

The English army – much smaller than the Scottish force – mustered at York and marched north to Thirsk; on Sunday, 21 August King David crossed the River Tees from Durham into Yorkshire. The English army thereupon marched north to stop his advance, and drew up in battle order early next morning just north of Northallerton. They were a motley collection of knights, peasants and priests, led by prelates; and because the resistance was Church-inspired, the English monastic chroniclers of the time took particular interest in what happened. Prior Richard of Hexham, writing in 1154, mirrored the propaganda war which preceded the encounter:

The king [David] then passing by Durham … and according to his usual practice, caused the towns and churches which had previously escaped uninjured to be dismantled, plundered and burnt. Crossing the Tees, he commenced a similar career of violence. But God’s mercy, being moved by the tears of innumerable widows, orphans, and victims, no longer permitted such wickedness to remain unchastised.

The rallying-point of the English army was a cart on which had been erected a ship’s mast topped by a cross. From the pole hung a silver pyx containing the consecrated host, with the sacred banners of St Peter of York, St Cuthbert of Durham, St John of Beverley and St Wilfred of Ripon.

The Scots army presented a formidable array. In the centre were the lightly-armoured Pictish Galwegians from Galloway (known as Gallgaels), spoiling for a fight; on the left flank David’s eldest son Henry led a force of mounted knights and well-equipped men-at-arms from the Borders and Cumbria; the Highland brigades were on the right flank, and King David himself commanded a reserve comprising the men of Moray and the eastern shires in the rear.

The battle was fought with tremendous heroism, and at terrible cost. The Gallgaels, dashing forward in a furious charge with their war-cry of ‘Albanaich!’, fell in droves under a storm of English arrows, but charged again and again at the English van. As the impetus of the reckless Gallgael attack faltered, Prince Henry charged the English centre with his mounted knights, but found himself isolated and extricated himself only with great difficulty. The Scottish attack stalled, and King David was pragmatic enough to realise that there could be no victory that day. Covered by the mounted reserve, the Scottish troops withdrew from the field. An old tree-lined lane just to the south of the English position, known as ‘Scotpit Lane’ (now disused and barred), is named after the burial pits into which some of the Scottish dead were thrown.

Surprisingly, after such a defeat in the field, David was able to salvage a great deal from this reverse. Neither Stephen nor the Empress Matilda was in any position to follow up the English victory. By the Treaty of Durham, which was signed in 1139, Stephen granted Northumberland to David’s son, Earl Henry of Huntingdon, and to David I he granted Cumberland (with Carlisle) as far as the Ribble. It opened up the possibility, at least, that the Scottish frontier would run on the line of the Tees rather than the Tweed – which was precisely what David had hoped to achieve. Ten years later, in 1149, Matilda’s son Henry of Anjou (subsequently Henry II of England) swore that should he become king, he would give David all the land between the Tweed and the Tees, and Cumberland on the west. But by the time Henry of Anjou became Henry II in 1154 he had little compunction about ignoring this promise to make the northern counties of England a part of Scotland for ever.

The Battle of the Standard left another and more enduring legacy. The invasion brought out all the deep-rooted English prejudices against the Picts and the Scots as murderous barbarians, which Walter Scott reflected so faithfully in his Tales of a Grandfather. An English chronicler, Henry of Huntingdon, wrote of David’s troops:

They cleft open pregnant women, and took out the unborn babe; they tossed children upon the spear-points, and beheaded priests upon the altars … There was the screaming of women, the wailing of old men; groans of the dying, despair of the living.

HISTORIA ANGLORUM

What seems to have shocked the English was the fact that one of ‘their own’, a flower of Norman chivalry like David, should have unleashed such a savage horde to ravage a civilised kingdom. According to the English version, one of David’s own Norman-English knights, Robert de Brus (the ancestor of the future King Robert Bruce), whom he had made Lord of Annandale, was so appalled by the Scots’ brutality that he went over to the English camp; another of his new Norman friends, Bernard de Bailleul (the ancestor of the future King John Balliol), also deserted him.