Alan MacQuarrie - Medieval Scotland: The Forging of a Nation

For John and Andrew
and in memory of Hazel

KINGSHIP
AND NATION

ALAN MACQUARRIE

First published in 2004 by Sutton Publishing

The History Press
The Mill, Brimscombe Port
Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG
www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

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Alan Macquarrie, 2004, 2013

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Contents

Preface

This work presents an overview of Scottish medieval history from the Roman invasion to the death of James II in a way that attempts to be accessible and non-controversial, while hoping to stimulate the curious to explore the subject more deeply. I hope that this book will help many people to understand Scotland better through a better understanding of our past.

My thanks are due to many colleagues and friends for their help and support while this work has been in progress. I owe a debt to the Department of Adult and Continuing Education at Glasgow University, and to my students there for their many helpful and astute comments. I must thank my son Andrew Macquarrie, whose computer skills have made this task infinitely easier and faster. My colleague Anne Clackson has read the entire manuscript and made many helpful corrections. My wife Hazel read and commented on the first third of the manuscript, and helped to make comprehensible to the general reader many concepts which were difficult enough for a specialist. Sadly, she became seriously ill while this work was in progress, and did not live to see its completion. Her courage in the face of illness has been an inspiration to me.

I alone am responsible for faults and errors which remain despite their best efforts. This book is dedicated with pride to my sons John and Andrew, who helped me through difficult times, and to Hazels memory.

ALAN MACQUARRIE
University of Strathclyde, Glasgow

Introduction

Medieval Scotland: Kingship and Nation

The Celtic peoples were once dominant across the whole of Europe north of the Alps. By the central Middle Ages, the Scots were the only Celtic people who had established a lasting unified kingdom. Wales and Brittany, subject to the same sort of pressure from a powerful neighbour, retained linguistic distinctness but lost political nationhood; Ireland became a patchwork of petty kingdoms. So why is Scotlands medieval history so different from theirs?

Themes

There are a number of contributory factors to Scottish distinctness which this book will explore. One of these is kingship. In most Celtic nations, very strikingly in Ireland, kingship tends to become fragmented and debased. Heads of quite small clans and kin-groups were entitled to be called r , king. This does not happen in Scotland, where from an early time kingship represented power and prestige. We will seek to explore the origins and development of Scottish kingship, and to explain how the fact of being a self-consciously unified kingdom contributed to Scotlands struggle for freedom in the Middle Ages.

Another factor is national identity. The Scots were a not so much a pure Celtic race as an admixture of Celtic peoples Gael, Picts and Britons with strong non-Celtic elements blending in, notably Norse and English. There was perhaps no more hybrid nation in the north-west of Europe. Did this identity, transcending ethnic and linguistic divisions, give Scotland some kind of mongrel robustness?

Another consideration, perhaps a contrast to these, is the fact of regional and local identities and social cohesion. Scots today have a strong sense of attachment to their locality as well as to their nation, and this may always have been the case. Sometimes these local attachments have transcended hierarchical ones, and there is evidence that medieval Scotland was a more open society, with better opportunities for social mobility, than some others. It would be an exaggeration to say that medieval Scotland was egalitarian or democratic; but the striking success of presbyterianism in Scotland has to be explained somehow. Regional and local loyalties may also help to explain how the struggle for identity continued even at times when monarchy and central government were weak.

Like all its medieval neighbours, Scotland was a Christian society. Although English, Gaelic and British elements all went together to make up Scottish Christianity, the resulting Church was a coherent and homogeneous blend. Until the very end of the medieval period, Scotland did not have its own archbishop; but it had a self-consciously national Church, an Ecclesia Scoticana , which powerfully preached the virtues of national defence, freedom and patriotism in times of crisis. The Scottish Church has always been notably loyal to Scotland.

Periods

The history of medieval Scotland can be conveniently divided into three periods:

1. Between the end of Roman Britain and the coming of the Vikings, there was a long period of equilibrium between the different races occupying Scotland Picts, Gael, Britons and Angles. This period saw the conversion of Scotland to Christianity. The shock of the Viking onslaught shattered this balance, and prepared the way for the unification of these disparate peoples, plus the Norse, into a single kingdom under a new and successful dynasty. By the middle of the eleventh century Scotland had recognisably taken on the geographical and ethnic form that it has today.

2. The High Middle Ages was a period of creativity and relative prosperity for Scotland. The descendants of Queen Margaret transformed their Celtic kingdom into a cosmopolitan feudal state within the unity of Western Christendom. Relations with Scotlands most powerful neighbour, England, were for the most part harmonious through the recognition of distinctness and independence, to the advantage of both kingdoms.

3. After 1286, Scotlands history becomes the story of a struggle against successive attempts at conquest and incorporation. The story is one of spectacular triumphs and dismal failures on both sides. The monarchy was at times strong, at other times weak; but always the struggle for national identity was unremitting. There were modest successes as well. Scotland developed distinctiveness in education, architecture and literature, and at the end of the period enjoyed a remarkable cultural renaissance.

Geography

Much early and later history is determined by geographical factors. These determine the nature of an economy and the pattern of trade and settlement. Important factors include the relationship of land and water masses, altitude and climate.

The most obvious point about the area which we now call Scotland is that it occupies the northern third of an island, some 550 miles long and varying in breadth between 300 miles and 50 miles. There is no natural boundary between Scotland and England, but the narrowest point or waist of Britain is formed by the great sea inlets of the Firths of Forth and Clyde, and this isthmus has at times formed an important boundary between political divisions in Britain. It was here that the Roman emperor Antoninus chose to mark the northern frontier of the Roman empire by a solid wall guarded by a network of roads and forts. But the other, more substantial, Roman wall built by Hadrian shows that the line of the Tyne and Solway could also be regarded as a defensible frontier. The present Anglo-Scottish border, having hardly changed since the twelfth century, represents something of a compromise between the two Roman attempts to find a frontier for the island of Britain.