Michael Brown - The Black Douglases: War and Lordship in Late Medieval Scotland, 1300-1455

Also by Michael Brown:
James I

This eBook was published in Great Britain in 2021 by John Donald, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

Birlinn Ltd

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First published in Great Britain in 1998 by John Donald

Copyright Michael Brown, 1998

eBook ISBN 978 1 78885 436 8

The right of Michael Brown to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patent Act 1988

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

As befits a study of a family, like the Douglases, with international ambitions and connections, this book, first conceived in Wales, has been written and researched in Scotland, England, France and Ireland. In the course of these travels I have had the pleasure of meeting and working with numerous colleagues who have given me enormous help and encouragement for which I am grateful. In particular, I would like to thank the Institute of Scottish Historical Studies at the University of Strathclyde and Professor Tom Devine for awarding me the research fellowship which allowed me to initiate and do much of the groundwork for this project. I am also grateful to the University of Aberdeen for giving me a second research fellowship, during which I was able to devote the time necessary to complete the writing of The Black Douglases. I would like to thank University College Dublin for funding my research in France.

I also owe many personal debts of gratitude. Dr Sandy Grant of the University of Lancaster kindly made available to me his collection of the acts of the fourth earl of Douglas and has been generous with his insights into the Douglas family and his own work on late medieval Scotland. Dr Steve Boardman of the University of Edinburgh has also been free with his own research on fourteenth-century Scotland and has been prepared to listen to my own ramblings. The Tuckwells have once more proved a pleasure to work with, enthusiastic with the project and patient with its recalcitrant author. I owe a special debt to Dr Norman Macdougall of the University of St Andrews. His careful reading of, and comments on, the text were above and beyond the call of duty and his support and encouragement of my research have been a major factor in the completion of this book.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank my family and especially my uncles and aunts, Eric and Evelyn Ireland and Bob and Ella Tollervey, for their hospitality to their itinerant nephew during research trips to Edinburgh in the course of writing this book. Finally, my wife, Margaret, has been a constant source of support and encouragement in the writing of this book, even if I suspect her interest in the complexities of Scottish political society may have remained strictly limited. For this I forgive her; for the rest I am deeply grateful.

The photographs in the plate section, of Chteau Gaillard and of Loches, are my own. The artefacts found at Threave are reproduced by permission of the Public Record Office, London. All the remaining photographs are reproduced with the permission of Historic Scotland.

Hermitage Castle

Tantallon Castle

Melrose Abbey

Lincluden Priory

The Seal of William, first earl of Douglas (d. 1384)

The Seal of Archibald the Grim, third earl of Douglas (d. 1400)

Threave Castle

The seal matrix of Margaret Stewart, duchess of Touraine (d. c. 1450)

Artefacts found at Threave

Bothwell Castle

The tomb of Archibald, fifth earl of Douglas (d. 1439)

Chteau-Gaillard

Loches. The donjon

The tomb of James, seventh earl of Douglas (d. 1443)

The Douglas arms from the tomb of James, seventh earl of Douglas

The Black Douglases were amongst the most powerful and certainly the most notorious of the great aristocratic families of late medieval Scotland. Their name and reputation creates an image of warfare on the borders with England, of the defence of king and kingdom by the Good Sir James Douglas, the first of the family to achieve widespread fame, and his heirs. The family was also associated with darker deeds. The great castles built or held by Douglas lords, Tantallon, Threave, Bothwell, the Hermitage and others, were seen to symbolise the power and arrogance of these great magnates within Scotland. This power rested on the rule, or misrule, of the family over its tenants and neighbours, a dominance maintained by fear and force and only ended by a bloody conflict with their own lord, the king of Scots. The climax of this conflict, the stabbing of the Douglas earl by King James II himself, was a fitting culmination to a history punctuated by similar acts of violence by lords of the Douglas name. This two-sided reputation, as patriotic heroes and as overmighty subjects defying their king, was born, not simply from the actions of Douglas lords, but from the changing perceptions and preoccupations of Scottish historians from the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries. Whatever their view, though, these writers all regarded the rise and fall of the Douglas dynasty as central to the development of Scotland in the later middle ages. This importance is not just because the relationships of such great lords with the local communities they ran, and with the crown which, in theory, ran them, has consistently been identified as the dominant theme of all European political societies in the later middle ages. It is also because the history of the Douglases as great magnates is bound up with the emergence of Scotland as an independent European kingdom in the later middle ages. For a nation lacking such status in the modern world, the place of great nobles in the independent kingdom, as defenders of its liberties and existence or as a check on the development of the Scottish state, assumes a special importance. As patriots or robber barons no magnates have greater significance for the history of Scotland than the Douglas earls.