Scotland under her early kings, Volume 1 (of 2)

by Eben William Robertson

CHAPTER VIII.

David the First  1124–1153.

The death of Alexander, without heirs, reunited to the Scottish kingdom the appanage of Cumbria, which had been so unwisely severed from it by Edgar; and the last surviving son of Malcolm and Margaret, the rightful heir by ancient Gaelic custom as well as by feudal law, ascended the throne without dispute. An intimate connection with the Court of England for upwards of a quarter of a century, had effectually “rubbed off the Scottish rust” from David,—to use the words of the contemporary Malmesbury,—converting him into a feudal baron; and many years before he was called upon to fill the throne, he had gathered around him in his Cumbrian principality a body of knights and barons, from whom sprung the older Norman chivalry of Scotland. During his residence in the south he married Matilda, the widow of Simon de St. Liz and heiress of Earl Waltheof of Northumberland, a portion of whose vast estates had been conferred upon each of her husbands in succession—St. Liz having been created Earl of Northampton, whilst the Honour of Huntingdon was granted to the Scottish prince; but the great earldom of Northumberland was retained in the Crown, for after the forfeiture of Robert de Mowbray, the English kings were jealous of intrusting that important province out of their own hands.[231] The sole offspring of the second marriage of Matilda was an only son, to whom his parents gave the name of Henry, born about ten years before the accession of his father to the throne of Scotland.

David was the first of his family who united the character of an English baron to that of a Scottish king; and in the former capacity he was soon called upon to exercise the political sagacity through which he had reaped the reward of the appanage of Cumbria, which he held during the lifetime of his brother Alexander. Upon the death of Henry the Fifth of Germany, the English king, despairing of any male heir from his second marriage, determined upon adopting as his successor his daughter Alicia, who fifteen years before had been betrothed, whilst a mere child, to the deceased Emperor. The princess, it is said, was reluctant to leave a country in which she had resided since her infancy, and where she still enjoyed vast possessions with the title of Empress; but she had become a necessary instrument for furthering the views of her father, and he turned a deaf ear to the entreaties of the princes of Lombardy and Lorraine, whose desire to retain their Empress interfered with the tenor of his policy. The assistance of the Scottish king was early sought to join in securing the succession to his sister’s child, and he passed a whole year in England in concerting measures for this purpose. In the great council of London, to which every baron of note was summoned, David was the first to swear fealty to his niece,—who now, like her mother, had assumed the popular name of Matilda—as heiress of the kingdom in which he held the Honour of Huntingdon; and it was by his advice that the unfortunate Robert Curtois was removed from the custody of the bishop of Salisbury, and placed in Bristol Castle under the safer charge of the Earl of Gloucester: A. D. 1226. for the fears of Henry were at this time directed against Robert and his son William, nor did he harbour any suspicion of his frank and jovial nephew, Stephen of Boulogne, upon whom he had heaped honours and dignities in return for his gallant services in war.[232]

The feudal obligations of his English fief, and his anxiety to promote the interests of the future queen, led to the frequent and prolonged absence of David from his own kingdom at this period of his reign, offering many favourable opportunities for the inveterate enemies of his family to enter once more upon a struggle for the superiority. Heth the contemporary, and possibly the opponent of Alexander, was no longer living, but his hereditary animosity survived in his sons Angus and Malcolm, who availed themselves of one occasion when David was detained in England, A. D. 1130. about six years after his accession, to rise in arms and assert those claims upon the crown of Scotland which they inherited through their mother, the daughter of Lulach.[233] In the absence of the king, the leader of the royal forces was the Constable, and the safety of the kingdom now depended upon Edward, the first historical personage upon whom the dignity is known to have been conferred, and the son of that Siward Beorn who accompanied the Atheling into Scotland. Edward in this crisis proved himself to be worthy of the trust, and meeting the Moraymen at the entrance of one of the passes into the Lowlands of Forfarshire, overthrew them with a loss of four thousand men at Stickathrow, not far from the northern Esk—Angus the Earl, or as the Irish annalists call him, the king of Moray, being left amongst the dead, though Malcolm the other brother, escaping from the field, prolonged the struggle amidst the recesses of the remoter Highlands, and the contest was not brought to a conclusion until four years later.[234] A. D. 1134. The prestige of the Moray Mormaors was still very great throughout the northern and north-western Highlands, and as many of the national party, even though partisans of the reigning family, viewed with jealousy the increasing influence of “foreigners,” and the introduction of laws and customs against which they entertained a rooted antipathy, as long as a descendant of Kenneth Mac Duff remained at large, claiming to be the representative of one of their ancient line of kings, his standard became a dangerous rallying point both for open enemies and disaffected friends. David, seriously alarmed, besought the assistance of the barons of Yorkshire and Northumberland, who answering to his call with alacrity, the flower of the northern counties speedily assembled at Carlisle under the banner of Walter Espec. The numbers and equipment of these Anglo-Norman auxiliaries, with the rumour of a vast fleet with which the Scottish king intended to prosecute the war to extremity amongst the island fastnesses of the western chieftains, filled the supporters of Malcolm with such dismay, that, in the hope of atoning for their disaffection towards the king by treachery to his unfortunate rival, Mac Heth was surprised by a body of his own partisans, and delivered into the hands of David. He was at once dispatched as a prisoner to the castle of Roxburgh, and David, in the full determination of eradicating every trace of his enemies from the district in which they had so long ruled supreme, declared the whole earldom of Moray forfeited to the Crown, regranting great portions of it to knights of foreign extraction, or to native Scots upon whose fidelity he could depend. The confiscation of their hereditary patrimony struck a death blow at the power of the great Moray family, and more than one Scottish name of note dates its first rise from the ruin of the senior branch of that ancient and far descended race.[235]

Four more years had barely passed away before David was destined to meet, in hostile array, the very men upon whose assistance he had relied against his formidable adversary Malcolm Mac Heth. Upon the 1st of December 1135, died Henry the First of England, A. D. 1135. bequeathing with his latest breath the whole of his dominions to his daughter the Empress Queen. His spirit had hardly passed away before Stephen, arriving suddenly in England, gained over to his cause Roger, Bishop of Salisbury, the most favoured and confidential friend of Henry, and William du Pont de l’Arche, who was joint keeper, with the Bishop, of the immense wealth accumulated in the coffers of the late king; and as the possession of the royal treasure in those days was the surest means of opening a path to the throne, before the year was ended Stephen was crowned king of England without opposition. The Earl of Gloucester, whose unsuccessful contest for precedency with the new king, when they both swore fealty to Matilda, had strengthened his devotion to the cause of the latter, was still in Normandy with his sister; but of all the other barons and prelates who pledged their faith to support the Empress Queen in her claim upon her father’s throne, none proved mindful of his oath save her uncle the king of Scotland.

No sooner had intelligence of the death of Henry reached Scotland, than aware of the necessity for promptitude, David led an army across the frontier, and at the very moment of Stephen’s coronation in London, the Scottish king was receiving the allegiance of the northern barons in behalf of his royal niece. Carlisle and Norham, Werk, Alnwick, and Newcastle, in short all the border fortresses beyond the Tyne, with the exception of Bamborough, opened their gates at his appearance, and he had advanced far into the territory of St. Cuthbert, upon his route to Durham, when he was anticipated by the approach of a numerous army under Stephen. A.D. 1136. No time could have been lost by that prince in collecting his forces, as upon the 5th of February, little more than six weeks after his coronation, he marched into Durham. David retired upon Newcastle, and the two kings remained in a hostile attitude for another fortnight before a conference was arranged, at which conditions of peace were finally agreed upon. The Scottish king, still true to his oath, refused to hold any fiefs of Stephen; but Carlisle and Doncaster were conferred upon his son Henry, in addition to the Honour of Huntingdon, with a promise that the claims of the prince upon Northumberland, in right of his maternal ancestry, should be taken into consideration if the English king ever regranted that earldom. Peace was concluded upon these terms; all the castles surrendered to David were restored with the exception of Carlisle; and Henry, after performing homage at York for his English fiefs, accompanied Stephen upon his return to the south.[236]

Advancing years, and a disposition naturally pliant and easy, are the reasons assigned by a contemporary historian for the acquiescence of David in the usurpation of Stephen; but however willing he might have been to support the cause of his niece Matilda, he must naturally have shrunk from sustaining the whole weight of a contest, in which he alone was in arms in her behalf. Nor must it be forgotten, that the wife of Stephen was equally a daughter of one of David’s sisters; and however the approach of age may have increased his aversion to war, it had hardly yet diminished his characteristic sagacity, as he was undoubtedly a gainer by the conditions of the peace.[237]

The event, as it proved, frustrated the intentions of both parties. Stephen, when he held his court in London at Easter, assigned the place of honour, upon his right hand, to his guest the Scottish prince; an arrangement which so excited the jealousy of some of the English barons, more especially of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and of Ranulf Earl of Chester—the latter of whom had claims upon Carlisle and Cumberland—that, after openly expressing their discontent in the presence of Henry, they left the court in a body. Incensed at this unprovoked insult to his son, David recalled him from England; and though Henry was repeatedly summoned by Stephen to perform his feudal obligations, he was not permitted by his father to return to the south.[238]

A. D. 1137.

The absence of Stephen in Normandy, in the following year, afforded David a favourable opportunity of avenging the indignity offered to his son, and of forwarding, at the same time, the interests of his niece Matilda. Already an army was collected to cross the Borders, and the barons of the north of England were assembled at Newcastle to repel the invasion, when Thorstein, the aged archbishop of York, by his intercession with both parties, obtained a promise from the Scottish king to abstain from hostilities until Advent, by which time it was expected that Stephen would have returned from the Continent. Shortly before Christmas, therefore, a Scottish embassy arrived at the English court, charged to declare the truce at an end unless Prince Henry was placed in immediate possession of Northumberland; and as this abrupt demand for the earldom was all but tantamount to a declaration of war, Stephen, who had just concluded a peace for two years with Geoffrey of Anjou, and was consequently in a position to concentrate all his energies upon establishing his power at home, at once declined to listen to the proposal; and his refusal to comply with the conditions of David led to an immediate rupture with Scotland.[239]

A. D. 1138.

Upon the 10th of January 1138 the advance guard of the Scottish army, under the command of William Fitz-Duncan the king’s nephew, crossed the Borders, and attempted to surprise Werk Castle before daylight; but, failing in their object, they wasted the surrounding country until the arrival of the main body under David and his son Henry, when a regular siege was commenced with all the engineering appliances of the age. The castle was the property of Walter Espec, and so gallantly was it defended by his nephew, Jordan de Bussy, that, before long, the king, converting the siege into a blockade, marched with the remainder of his army to effect a junction with William Fitz-Duncan, whom he had already dispatched to lay waste the remainder of Northumberland; and once more the northern counties endured a repetition of the scenes of horror enacted, nearly seventy years before, in the early days of the Conqueror. David, who had been long preparing for war, had gathered his army from every quarter of his dominions; and around the royal standard, the ancient Dragon of Wessex, might be seen the representatives of nearly every race contributing to form the varied ancestry of the modern Scottish people. The Norman knight and the Low Country “Reiter,” the sturdy Angle and the fiery Scot, marched side by side with the men of Northumberland and Cumberland, of Lothian and of Teviotdale; whilst the mixed population of the distant islands, Norwegians from the Orkneys, and the wild Picts of Galloway, flocked in crowds to the banner of their king, to revel in the plunder of the south.[240] The Galwegians, an unruly host of tributary allies rather than of subjects, claimed to march in the van, and a piteous account of their ravages, and enormities, has been left on record by the contemporary chroniclers of Hexham. It was only by a great exertion of authority, that William Fitz-Duncan was enabled to save that priory from the destruction with which it was menaced by a body of exasperated clansmen, whose chieftain had fallen in an affray with some retainers of the monastery; and to prevent the possibility of such a sacrilege, David quartered a body of Scots within its walls, whilst he granted to the community his own share of the plunder, in reparation for the injuries they had sustained from his undisciplined and semi-barbarous followers.

The approach of Stephen’s army, early in February, warned the Scottish leaders that it was time to collect their scattered forces either for battle or retreat; but David, who was in secret correspondence with many of Stephen’s barons, entertained the hope of finishing the war by a stratagem, without the hazard of a contest. All of the wretched country-people who had escaped the slaughter—and they were principally women—were either bartered for cattle on the spot, or driven northward with the prospect of a hopeless captivity; whilst the main body of the Scottish army withdrew to a small morass in the neighbourhood of Roxburgh, inaccessible except to the few who possessed an intimate knowledge of the locality. The burghers of the town were instructed to throw open their gates, and admit the English army without resistance; as it was David’s intention to enter with his followers in the dead of night, and surprise Stephen in his fancied security, calculating, that by the capture of the English king and his principal adherents, the war would be brought to a successful conclusion; the accession of the empress secured; and his own claims upon Northumberland readily acknowledged by his grateful niece.

But though in the multitude of counsellors there may be wisdom, in the multitude of confidants there is little chance of secrecy; and through some unknown channel Stephen became aware of his enemy’s intentions. Avoiding Roxburgh, he retaliated upon other Scottish districts the injuries which had been inflicted on the north of England; but as he began to entertain suspicions of the fidelity of certain barons, and his army was weakened, as well by the want of provisions as by the religious scruples—either real or pretended—of several of his followers who objected to bearing arms in Lent, he soon retraced his steps towards the south, first possessing himself of Bamborough on his passage through Northumberland, and placing in it a garrison on which he could depend. The castle belonged to Eustace Fitz-John, a powerful baron, of whose fidelity the king was so mistrustful, that, contrary to all feudal precedent, he caused his person to be seized whilst in actual attendance at court upon a summons of military service; and Eustace was not restored to liberty until he yielded up to Stephen the key-stone of his power in the north, long famous as the ancient residence of the royal race of Ida, and the strongest fortress in Northumberland.[241]

The conclusion of the Easter festival set at liberty the scrupulous chivalry of the age, to enter with renewed zest upon the pursuits of war; and David was fast approaching Durham, when a mutiny amongst the unruly Galwegians threatened both the life of the king, and the safety of his army. A report, judiciously fabricated for the occasion, that the enemy was approaching, restored order for the moment; the mutineers flew to arms to repel the foe, and David at once leading them to Norham, employed them, with the rest of his army, in besieging the castle. The garrison surrendered after a short resistance, and it affords a curious instance of the impregnability of the fortresses of that age against the limited means of offence available to besieging armies, that it was accounted a disgraceful occurrence when nine men-at-arms, all of whom were inexperienced, and the majority suffering from wounds, hopeless of relief from their lord the Bishop of Durham, yielded a well victualled castle to the whole force of Scotland! An offer was made to restore Norham to the bishop, if he would consent to hold it as a fief from the Scottish king; but as the proposed terms were declined, it was immediately reduced to ashes.

The success at Norham was counterbalanced by a sally from Werk, in which the indefatigable castellan of that fortress overthrew a body of knights and men-at-arms, capturing several of the party, whom he put to ransom, and carrying off a convoy of provisions intended for the army of the Scots, which by this daring feat he once more drew around his walls. Again the siege of Werk was converted into a blockade when David marched to join the force, collected by the exasperated Eustace Fitz-John, in an attempt to recover Bamborough; but though the burghers of that place were driven, with considerable loss, from an outwork in front of the castle, no permanent impression was made upon the fortress itself, and it was useless to attempt a blockade without the assistance, and co-operation, of a fleet.

Whilst the king was engaged before the castles of Norham and Werk, the intractable division under William Fitz-Duncan, of little use in a regular siege, had been dispatched to the more congenial occupation of harrying Craven, and the adjoining districts of the shires of York and Lancaster. The inhabitants assembled to resist the invaders, and upon the 10th of June took post in four divisions at Clitheroe on the Ribble; but their courage failing at the sight of the enemy, they broke and fled at the first onset. As this was the first occasion upon which the hostile parties had met in arms in the open field, the result increased the audacity of the victors, who, spreading over the face of the country, plundered and wasted it on every side, surpassing if possible their former excesses; but laying the foundation of future retribution in the very extent to which they carried their ravages.

Hitherto the barons of Yorkshire had looked upon the distant warfare with lukewarm indifference, each mistrusting his neighbour, and hardly knowing whether to oppose the Scots, as became the trusty partizans of King Stephen, or to support them as loyal subjects of the Empress Queen, whose standard was already raised by Robert of Gloucester, and her other friends, in the south and west. But when the war was now fast approaching their own neighbourhood, when their own lands were about to be plundered and their own vassals to be put to the sword, it was time to shake off their apathy, and out of the very excesses of the foe arose their strongest bond of union. Archbishop Thorstein preached a holy war; and through every parish, priests bore the relics of the saints, with all the imposing paraphernalia of the Roman Catholic religion, proclaiming it to be the duty of every Christian man to rise in defence of the church against barbarians, hateful alike to God and man. Ilbert de Lacy and Robert de Bruce, the youthful William Albemarle and the aged Walter de Ghent, summoned their followers to meet at Thirsk; and even Robert de Mowbray, then a mere child, appeared in armour at the head of his vassals to animate the courage of the numerous retainers of his house. To the same place of meeting hurried William Percy and William Fossard, Richard de Courcy and Robert d’ Estoteville; the knights of Nottinghamshire under William Peveril, and the chivalry of Derbyshire under Robert Ferrers: whilst Stephen, too much occupied to leave the south of England, dispatched a chosen body of knights, under Bernard de Balliol, to join the flower of the midland and northern chivalry in repelling the inroads of the Scottish foe. Walter Espec, a baron of vast possessions, whose age and experience, united to a gigantic stature and a ready eloquence, marked him out as a leader fit to inspire confidence and exact obedience, reminded the confederate nobles of the glories of their ancestry, and pointed out to their retainers that the enemy was little better than an unarmed mob.[242] Ralph, the titular bishop of the Orkneys, was commissioned, in the place of the aged and infirm Thorstein, to grant a general absolution to the army, which, strengthened by the consolations of the ministers of religion, and encouraged by the exhortations of military experience, viewed the impending contest in the light of a holy war, and prepared with alacrity for battle.

After waiting in the neighbourhood of Bamborough until the arrival of some expected reinforcements from Carlisle, Cumberland, and Galloway, David moved southward to effect a junction with William Fitz-Duncan. Their forces, when united, amounted to twenty-six thousand men, and as most of the historians of the period represent this army as “innumerable,” it affords some clue for estimating what was in those days looked upon as a countless host. David was well aware of the character of the army against which he was advancing, and with the concurrence of his most experienced officers, he determined upon opposing his own knights and men-at-arms to the mailed chivalry of England; rightly calculating, that, if he once broke through the rival phalanx, his light armed irregulars, of little real use in the first onset, would easily complete the victory. But the native warriors of Alban, elated with the victory at Clitheroe, and vainly imagining that the flower of England’s knights and men-at-arms would fly before their impetuous charge, like the undisciplined peasantry and townsmen of the district, loudly exclaimed against such tactics. “Of what use were their breastplates and their helmets at Clitheroe?” exclaimed the Scots. “Why trust you to these Normans?” added Malise Earl of Strathearn, when David still remained unmoved; “unprotected as I am, none shall be more forward in the fight.” “A great boast,” retorted Alan Percy, “which for your life you cannot make good.” Alarmed at the probable consequences of dissension at such a moment, David reluctantly yielded the point in dispute, and the post of honour in the approaching conflict was assigned to the men of Galloway.

One course yet held out a fair hope of success—a surprise—and David determined to make the attempt.[243] He ranged his army in four divisions, the Galwegians marching in the van, with all who claimed to share with them the honour of the first attack. The contingent from Cumberland and Teviotdale composed the second division, with the knights, archers, and men-at-arms under Prince Henry and Eustace Fitz-John, by whom the battle ought to have been commenced. Then followed the men of the Lothians, Lennox[244] and the Isles; whilst the king in person brought up the rear with the Scots and Moraymen, and his own body-guard of English and Norman knights.

The morning of Monday the 22d of August favoured the design of the Scots. A dense fog hung over the country, and under cover of the mist the Scottish host rapidly advanced in unwonted order; for the commands of David were rigorous in prohibiting his men from firing the villages along their route, according to their usual practice. They had reached the Tees, and were already crossing, when they were accidentally discovered by an esquire, who galloped back to Thirsk, to warn the confederate barons of the rapid approach of the hostile army.[245] In the hope of yet averting the contest, perhaps also to gain time, Robert de Bruce and Bernard de Balliol,—names singularly associated as the emissaries of an English army to a Scottish king,—rode forward to hazard a last appeal, pledging themselves, in the joint name of the confederates, to obtain for Prince Henry the grant of Northumberland. Bruce, in particular, warned the king of the danger he was about to incur, in entering into a contest with the very men upon whose aid he most relied, for curbing the refractory Galwegians, or for repressing his own disaffected subjects; whilst, with tears in his eyes, he besought him to be mindful of his ancient friendship, and by accepting the conditions of peace, to put a stop to the frightful enormities of his followers. The easy and kindly nature of David was fast yielding to the entreaties of Bruce, who had been his friend from childhood, when William Fitz-Duncan, a man of high spirit and the chief promoter of the war, angrily interposed, and reproaching the latter with a breach of fealty to his lord, prevailed upon his uncle to break off the conference; on which the two barons, formally renouncing their allegiance to the Scottish king, turned their horses heads and rode back to share the fortunes of the confederate army.

The delay was fatal to the attempted surprise; for it gave time to the army of the barons to clear the town of Northallerton, and to take up a favourable position, two miles further to the northward, upon Cutton Moor. A ship’s mast, bearing upon its summit the consecrated host, and surrounded by the banners of St. Peter of York, St. John of Beverley, and St. Wilfred of Ripon, was elevated upon a waggon, and marked the centre of the army, around which were grouped dismounted knights and men-at-arms; whilst from the immediate neighbourhood of the sacred standard, Bishop Ralph and his priests dispensed blessings, and absolution, throughout the host. The front of the position was covered by a line of archers, with a body of men-at-arms in support; all the horses were then removed to the rear under the charge of a mounted guard; and the remainder of the English forces—townsmen, apparently, and the array of the county—were ranged around the real strength of the army in the centre.[246]

Levelling their spears, long the national weapon of the Scottish infantry, and with wild cries of Albanach! Albanach! the ancient slogan of the warriors of the north, the first division of the assailants rushed to the charge; and such was the impetuosity of their onset, that the front ranks of the English reeled beneath the shock, and were borne back in confusion upon the dismounted knights around the standard. But then came to pass all that David had anticipated, and the unprotected lines of Scottish spearmen recoiled, and were dashed back like breakers from off a reef, before the steady discipline of that animated wall of iron. Broken, but not discouraged, they cast aside their fractured and useless lances, and, with drawn swords, once more flung themselves, with reckless valour, upon the foe: but the front ranks of the English had now rallied, and, from behind their dismounted comrades, the archers poured in a storm of arrows, those fatal Norman weapons which won so many a field for England in the days of old. Unsheltered from the shower of missiles by any defensive armour, rank after rank of the assailants went down before the English bowmen, the best and bravest of their leaders falling in fruitless efforts to penetrate the fatal line; and already the attack was slackening, when Prince Henry brought his mounted division into the battle, and the Norman chivalry of Scotland, with the disciplined retainers of Eustace Fitz-John, bore down with levelled lances to the charge. His success was complete. That part of the English army which sustained the shock, was ridden down and swept from the field; and the prince, elated with his easy triumph, and imagining that the whole Scottish army was pressing on in support, wheeled round in the rear of the English position to complete a victory not yet achieved, and charging the mounted guard left to protect the horses, broke and pursued them for many miles. His error was fatal; for the critical moment of the day had arrived, and the English were rapidly giving way, none holding their ground except the veteran phalanx in the centre, when suddenly a gory head was raised aloft, and the voice of one who was never subsequently recognized, loudly proclaimed that the king of Scotland was slain. More than once has such a cry turned the fortune of the day against a brave, but undisciplined, army. Upon the field of Assingdon it won the realm of England for Canute; at Hastings it all but wrested the same prize from the Norman William, though he led the flower of Europe to the field; and it decided the day upon Cutton Moor in favour of the confederate army. No longer pressed by the division of Prince Henry, the English rallied at the cry; and the Galwegians, who for two hours had prolonged their attack with desperate and unflinching courage, until the last of their chieftains fell beneath an English arrow, panic stricken at their loss, turned and fled the field; whilst the confederates, promptly taking advantage of the confusion, advanced at once to the charge. The Saxons of the Lothians broke at the first onset; and though David, leaping from his horse, and placing himself at the head of the reserve, bravely endeavoured to stem the advance of the enemy, the Scots wavered and were carried away in the rout; whilst the king, maddened at the thought of defeat, refused to fly until he was forced off the field by his own body-guard. High above his head still fluttered the ancient Dragon of Wessex, contradicting the report of his death, and numbers who had been swept away in the first confusion of the flight, disengaging themselves from the crowd of fugitives, and rallying around the banner of their king, presented a formidable front to the advancing foe. The foremost of the pursuers were either cut down or captured, and the rest soon gave up following the Scottish army, which, without further molestation, retreated in perfect order to Carlisle.[247]

The losses of the Scots upon this memorable occasion were estimated at ten thousand men, a number probably exaggerated, together with all the plunder they had accumulated, the place where it was captured being long remembered as Baggage Moor. More perished in the flight than in the battle—and such was generally the case—for not only were the fugitives massacred by the exasperated peasantry, but whenever they came into contact with each other, Angles, Scots, and Picts of Galloway fought with all the animosity of mutual hatred. The victors, deprived of their horses by Prince Henry’s charge, could make no attempt at following up their success: so, separating with mutual congratulations, they dispatched intelligence of their victory to Stephen, who, in acknowledgment of their important services, raised two of their number to the dignity of earls; Robert Ferrers obtaining the Earldom of Derbyshire, whilst that of Yorkshire was conferred upon William Albemarle.

The battle of Northallerton, long famous under the name of the battle of the Standard, adds but another to the many bitter proofs, that an army without discipline is simply a disorderly mob. The discordant elements of the Scottish nation were naturally averse to coalesce; whilst the custom of “Scottish service,” which bound every man to attend “the hosting across the frontier,”[248] swelled the ranks of the army with a body of men, fierce and warlike indeed, and endued with that self-willed and reckless courage which has on more than one occasion been their bane, but often indifferently armed, and as undisciplined as they were unruly. David, brought up amongst the Norman chivalry of the court of England, was well aware of the military character both of his own followers and of his opponents, and framed his plan of attack accordingly, the result of Prince Henry’s charge fully justifying his original decision; and when the fear of a mutiny at a most critical moment forced him to yield his better judgment, he rightly determined upon the sole course left open—a surprise. But in allowing Bruce and Balliol to gain time by parlying, thus confirming the character ascribed to him by Malmesbury, he committed a serious and fatal error, sacrificing every advantage he had already obtained, and enabling the confederates to clear the town of Northallerton, and receive the shock of his disorderly host in a favourable and well-chosen position, that ensured victory to the defending army.

Upon the third day after the arrival of the Scottish army at Carlisle, the anxiety of the king about his son was set at rest by the safe arrival of the prince. Henry, upon his return from his second charge, instead of meeting, as he had expected, with a victorious army, beheld the royal standard slowly retiring in the distance, and at once comprehending the catastrophe, arranged with his companions to mingle with the pursuers and endeavour if possible to rejoin the king. In order to prevent recognition, they agreed to disperse in different directions, first divesting themselves of everything that could betray their real character; so that out of two hundred knights originally in attendance upon the prince, only nineteen entered Carlisle in armour. Other fugitives reached the same place by degrees, and the king busied himself in restoring discipline, and in punishing with severity all whom he deemed guilty of misconduct or defection. Heavy fines were levied upon the delinquents, who were also bound by oaths and hostages never again to desert the royal person in battle, and when order was in some measure restored, David once more led his army to the investment of Werk.[249]

He was still prosecuting the siege when he was informed of the approach of the Papal legate Alberic Bishop of Ostia, and hastened to meet him at Carlisle, with the clergy and nobility of his dominions. A. D. 1130. Eight years previously, upon the death of Honorius the Second, sixteen cardinals had declared for Innocent the Second, whilst the majority elected Peter of Leon under the name of Anacletus, who through the wealth of his father, a converted Jew, was enabled successfully to establish himself in Rome. Two princes alone adhered to the antipope, his own brother-in-law Roger Count of Sicily, who by this course converted his coronet into a crown, and David of Scotland, the reasons for whose conduct are not so easily apparent. Upon the death of Anacletus, which occurred in the beginning of this year, an attempt to continue the schism by electing another rival to Innocent, who took the name of Victor the Fourth, was rendered abortive by the speedy resignation of the ephemeral pope; Innocent returned without opposition to Rome, and it was principally to notify the extinction of the schism, that Alberic was dispatched as legate to the kings of England and Scotland.

A. D. 1138.

He arrived at Carlisle four days before Michaelmas, bringing with him the Scottish chancellor William Comyn, whom he had ransomed from his captors at Northallerton, and everything was satisfactorily arranged during the three following days. Eardulf was admitted to the see of Carlisle, and John was recalled to Glasgow from the monastery of Tiron, in which that determined absentee had taken refuge from the troublesome duties of his diocese;[250] whilst reparation was made by David, even before it was demanded, for the injuries sustained by the Priory of Hexham from an unauthorised foray of a party of the Scottish army,[251] and the wildest tribes promised to set their captives at liberty, and to abstain henceforth from indiscriminate slaughter. Still the benevolent Alberic was oppressed with anxiety, for during his progress through the north he had been an eyewitness of the frightful consequences of the ravages of the hostile armies. All Northumberland was a desert, no attempt was made at cultivation, nor was an inhabitant to be met with along the route which he had traversed. The barons with their retainers were shut up in their castles, the peasantry and their families crowded the monasteries, or lurked in the wildest and most inaccessible retreats. The good bishop, dreading a recurrence of such horrors, and feeling that his sacred office imposed more than the mere formal duties of his legateship, besought the king to accept of his mediation with Stephen, and thus to put an end to the miseries of the war. Long was David inexorable, until the representative of the haughtiest prelate of Christendom, kneeling before the king of Scotland as a humble suppliant for “peace upon earth,” prevailed so far that a truce was arranged to last until St. Martin’s day, from the benefit of which the garrison of Werk was alone to be excepted; and Alberic, departing from Carlisle upon Michaelmas day, retraced his steps towards the court of Stephen, in the true character of a Christian bishop, as the bearer of a message of peace.[252]

The castle of Werk still held out, though David, having ascertained that its defenders were short of provisions, continued to press the siege with unabated rigour. But Jordan de Bussy was indomitable. The horses of the garrison yet survived, and he was determined that they should be sacrificed one by one to enable their masters to continue their stubborn resistance, proposing, when this last resource failed, to make a desperate sally in the all but hopeless attempt to cut his way through the besieging army. From this last alternative he was saved, for when his stock of provisions was reduced to two horses, one alive and the other in salt, the abbot of Rievaulx arrived, with the commands of Walter Espec to surrender the castle; and David, in a spirit of knightly courtesy that does him credit, provided this gallant little garrison, twenty-four in number, with fresh horses, and permitted them to depart with their arms, and all the honours of war.[253]

Much about the same time arrangements were concluded for the settlement of a firm and lasting peace between the two kings. Alberic had not been unmindful of his mission of peace, and, after the conclusion of the council of London, he pressed upon Stephen the necessity of putting a stop to the horrors of the northern war. At first the English king showed as decided an aversion to conclude a peace as his antagonist, and his exasperation was encouraged by a numerous party amongst his barons, who burned to avenge themselves for their losses. But Alberic soon found that he possessed an ally whose influence more than counterbalanced that of the war party, in Matilda the queen of Stephen, who was warmly attached to her uncle and cousin, and most anxious to promote a friendly feeling between her Scottish kinsmen and her husband. She joined her entreaties to those of the legate, who, rightly appreciating the value of such support, hesitated not to return to Rome long before the truce expired, in the full conviction that his benevolent object was attained.[254] A. D. 1139. Nor were his anticipations destined to be falsified, and as Stephen left the whole conduct of the negotiation in the hands of his queen, in the following April she repaired to Durham for the purpose of meeting her cousin Henry. Neither of the kings were present upon this occasion,—indeed they never appear to have met,—but the conditions of the peace had been already settled, and it had been decided that Henry was to receive investiture of Northumberland in addition to his other fiefs, the barons of the shire holding of the Scottish prince, saving their fidelity to Stephen. The English king, however, continued to retain Newcastle and Bamborough in his own possession, for which an equivalent was to be provided in the south of England—Henry on his side guaranteeing to preserve unaltered throughout his new fiefs, “the laws and customs” of the late king Henry, and to respect the rights of the Archbishop of York and of the Bishop of Durham. The barons of Northumberland then swore fealty to their new Earl, who, delivering up the sons of five of the principal nobles of Scotland as hostages for the due performance of his part of the agreement, accompanied the queen upon her return to the south, when the treaty was confirmed by Stephen at Nottingham.[255]

During the whole of the following summer Henry remained in England, sedulously courting popularity by his lavish munificence and gallant bearing—qualities so acceptable to the Norman chivalry of the age. He accompanied Stephen to the siege of Ludlow Castle, narrowly escaping capture on this occasion; for, on approaching too closely to the walls, he was unhorsed by a hook suddenly launched from the battlements, owing his rescue solely to the prompt and daring gallantry of the king. In the course of the same year he was united to Ada de Warenne, the youngest daughter of the great earl of that name; and as the bride’s family were staunch adherents of the cause of Stephen, and the Scottish prince, bound by no ties to the empress, was probably far more attached to the amiable character of Queen Matilda—whose influence seems traceable in the marriage—than to her haughty and imperious cousin, the arrival of the latter in England with the Earl of Gloucester, appears to have produced no interruption of cordiality between Henry and the English king. He was again present with his countess at the English court in the following year, A. D. 1140. in spite of the civil war then raging, barely escaping, on his return to Scotland, the machinations of his ancient enemy the Earl of Chester, the grant of Carlisle being once more the cause of their quarrel. Ranulph, tempted by the prevailing anarchy, had planned the seizure of Henry and the Countess Ada, counting probably upon extorting, as their ransom, a surrender of the coveted fief; but the queen, anticipating his design, warned Stephen of the danger, who, in accordance with her suggestions, escorted his guests in person to the north, thus frustrating the intentions of Ranulph, but, by so doing, drawing upon himself the hatred of that fickle and revengeful baron.[256]

A. D. 1141.

After the defeat and capture of Stephen at Lincoln, David, who had hitherto refrained from espousing the cause of either candidate for the throne of England, hastened to join the empress, leaving his chancellor, William Comyn, at Durham, with instructions to hold that important bishopric in her name. He arrived in time to accompany his niece upon her entry into London, his presence confirming the fidelity of many of the leading barons, but failing to inspire Matilda with any portion of his own sagacity, and her arrogant and imperious behaviour soon alienated the affections of her new subjects. Driven out of London by the hostility of the citizens, her personal antipathy to the imprisoned king next caused a rupture with his brother, the influential Bishop of Winchester, who turned a willing ear to the entreaties of Stephen’s queen, now as eager in urging war in behalf of her captive husband, as in advocating peace, a few years previously, with her Scottish relatives. Participating in the ill success which he could not avert, David was present at the rout of Winchester, only escaping capture through the attachment and devotion of a youthful godson, David Olifard, then serving in the hostile army, who, concealing him from all pursuit, enabled him to return in safety to Scotland. The grateful king was not unmindful of his friendly benefactor; and it was probably in requital for his services upon this occasion that Olifard obtained a grant of lands in Scotland, becoming the founder of a numerous family, whose name is still well known in the country of his adoption.[257]

It has been already mentioned that in passing through Durham on his way to the south, David left his chancellor, William Comyn, in that city, in the hope that he might be elected to the vacant see, and hold the bishopric in the interest of the empress queen. Nothing will convey a clearer idea of the anarchy of the period, and of the extraordinary measures that were occasionally resorted to by the gravest characters, than a narrative of the proceedings of William Comyn. He had passed his early years in the household of the late bishop Geoffrey, and, upon the death of the latter, his relatives, wishing to favour the views of Comyn, kept the catastrophe a profound secret, the body of the dead bishop being submitted to an elaborate course of preparation, including a process of salting, in order that it might be preserved above ground until the arrival of the Scottish chancellor! One important point remained to be gained—the consent of the chapter—and this was resolutely refused. Escaping from Durham, they chose William Dean of York to be their bishop; but their troubles were only commencing, for they had to deal with a most determined character in the chancellor. In vain the Pope deprived him of the Archdeaconry of Worcester which he had hitherto enjoyed, and launched an anathema at his head; in vain the newly-chosen bishop endeavoured to enter his Episcopal city by force of arms. Comyn set at nought the anger of the distant pope, and drove out the monks who attempted to give secret admittance to his rival. Filling their monastery with his own men-at-arms, he converted it into a regular fortress—a not unusual course of proceeding in that turbulent era—and, secretly supported by Prince Henry and the Earl of Richmond, for three years he kept the bishop at bay, until the sudden death of a favourite nephew induced him to make overtures for an arrangement, A. D. 1144. and the bishop was at length permitted to enjoy undisputed possession of his dignity. A grant of the honour of Allerton was conferred upon another of the chancellor’s nephews, Richard Comyn, the founder of that name in Scotland, whose union with Hextilda, the heiress of Bethoc, sole daughter of Donald Bane, may have contributed to the greatness of the family; and, by this arrangement, a scandal by no means of uncommon occurrence amongst the churchmen of that age, was at length compromised, and brought to a satisfactory conclusion.[258]

Many years elapsed before the Scottish king was again induced to enter upon the scene of English politics—internal rather than external policy appearing to have occupied his attention during this period of his reign, and many of the alterations he had previously set on foot were now probably completed and confirmed. He had not lost sight, however, of the interests of the empress and her son; and in his anxiety to further the designs of the latter, A. D. 1149. about eight years after the siege of Winchester, upon the crown of England, he was again brought to the verge of a rupture with Stephen. The youthful Henry Fitz Empress suddenly arrived at Carlisle to receive the honour of knighthood from the hands of his venerable kinsman, Ranulph of Chester, who had purposely repaired to the same city, with Henry of Scotland, assisting in the solemnities of the occasion. Ceremonial and festivity, however, only served to cover the real object of the meeting, and arrangements were set on foot, at the same time, for cementing an alliance which was to place young Henry upon the English throne. The Earl of Chester, consenting to waive all claims upon Carlisle, performed homage to David on receiving in exchange the fief of Lancaster, with a promise that a daughter of Prince Henry should be given in marriage to his son. Henry Fitz Empress bound himself, if ever he regained his grandfather’s throne, to confirm, without let or hindrance, to David and his heirs, Newcastle and Northumberland, from Tyne to Tweed, with all the other English fiefs that belonged to the heir of the Scottish crown, in right of his descent from Earl Waltheof; and, these preliminaries being adjusted, it was agreed that the earl was to concentrate his followers upon Lancaster; and that the Scottish army, strengthened by his retainers and by the barons of the western counties who adhered to Henry, should at once advance against Stephen, who, suspecting the proceedings at Carlisle, had already reached York on his march towards the north. In accordance with this arrangement, David and his young relative lost no time in reaching Lancaster; but Randolph, fickle and treacherous as usual, was as faithless to his new allies as he had been ever false to Stephen. He failed in his appointment at Lancaster, Henry recrossed the sea to Normandy, and the two kings, mutually averse to the hazard of an open rupture, led back their armies without a contest.[259]

Towards the close of David’s reign the peace of Scotland was disturbed for a considerable time by the pretensions of a most extraordinary imposter, who, by a singular chance, has been confounded by the historians of the last five hundred years with the very person whose son, or nephew, he seems to have attempted to personate. In the course of 1134, the same year in which Malcolm MacHeth was committed to Roxburgh castle, Olave Godredson, king of Man, granted certain lands to Ivo, abbot of Furness, for the erection of a priory at Rushen; and amongst the brotherhood who, either at that time or subsequently, were sent into the Isle of Man, was a monk of the name of Wimund, a man of obscure birth but of considerable talents, and still greater and most unscrupulous ambition. His jovial countenance and ready eloquence, his stalwart frame and commanding stature—for he towered a head and shoulders above the height of ordinary men—marked him out as a fit leader for an ignorant and excitable multitude, though scarcely in the capacity of a bishop. Yet the Manxmen thought otherwise, and, in process of time, Wimund was advanced to the see of the Isles; though such peaceful dignity suiting ill with his restless disposition, he only regarded his appointment as a stepping stone to further advancement, soon giving himself out as a son of the Earl of Moray, and inviting the boldest and most reckless of his wild flock to assist in avenging the injuries, and recovering the possessions, of his supposed father, promising unlimited plunder to all who followed him to Scotland. The descendants of the old sea-rovers flocked eagerly to the call of their singular pastor, whose influence over them was unbounded, and the warlike bishop lost no time in leading his followers to the pillage of the western coasts. His proceedings, ere long, proved him to be no mean proficient in the tactics of partizan warfare. The approach of a hostile force was the signal for immediate departure, Wimund and his followers dispersed amongst the islands, and upon the arrival of the royal army the sole tidings of the enemy were the reports of his excesses in another direction. No sooner had his pursuers retraced their steps, than the bishop and his satellites were again on the alert, carrying fire and sword throughout the district just evacuated; and so often and so successfully were these tactics repeated, that David is said to have experienced more trouble and anxiety on account of this turbulent monk, than through any other enemy during the whole course of his reign. Once, only, he sustained a check, which he received from an appropriate quarter—another bishop, who refusing to submit to his demand for tribute on the singular, but strictly ecclesiastical, grounds that “one bishop should not pay tribute to another,” summoned his own flock to resist the unorthodox intrusion, and launched a light battle-axe at the head of Wimund with an aim so accurate that the burly monk reeled beneath the blow, and his followers fled from the field.

At length, in despair of succeeding by force, the king adopted an opposite policy, and bought off the hostility of Wimund by a grant of Furness in Westmoreland, where, for a short time, the bishop played the tyrant with impunity, particularly directing his virulence against the monastery in which he had passed his early days. At length the people of the neighbourhood, whose patience was worn out by his exactions, watching their opportunity, seized upon him at an unguarded moment, and the luckless Wimund, to whom no mercy was shown, was deprived of his see, and passed the remainder of his life, sightless and cruelly maimed, in the monastery of Biland. No sufferings, however, could subdue the reckless spirit of the man, who was wont to boast, with a laugh, that “even Providence could only conquer him by the faith of a foolish bishop;” adding, that if his enemies had only left him as much sight as a “sparrow’s eye,” he would have soon shown them how little cause they had for triumph.[260]

The whole of the north of England beyond the Tees had now for several years been under the influence, if not under the direct authority, of the Scottish king, and the comparative prosperity of this part of the kingdom, contrasting strongly with the anarchy prevailing in every other quarter, naturally inclined the population of the northern counties to look with favour upon a continuance of the Scottish connection. All southward of the Tyne, indeed, was held probably in the name of the Empress Queen, but the influence of David extended far beyond the Tees, and when a claim was raised upon the Honour of Skipton in Craven, it was the Scottish, and not the English king who decided upon its validity. William Fitz Duncan was the claimant, the heir of Duncan the Second and the victor at Clitheroe, whose fiery courage broke off the conference before the battle upon Cutton Moor, and whose prominent position upon this and other occasions during the war, seems to mark him as the Gaelic Toshach. Like his father, however, he was more of a feudal than a Gaelic noble, and several years before this date he married, during the lifetime of Archbishop Thorstein, Alice de Rumeli, the heiress of her Norman name; three daughters and one son, whose fame yet lingers in local tradition as William of Egremont, being the issue of their union. It was in right of his wife that William raised his claim; A. D. 1151. and as it must have suited well with the policy of David to increase the feudal ties incidentally securing the fidelity of his nephew, he lost no time in installing him in the Honour, willingly providing him with the means of enforcing his rights (as some opposition appears to have been meditated), and atoning for the depredations of the more unruly portion of the army by the gift of a silver chalice wherever the property of the church was shown to have suffered from their licence.[261]

One of the most important objects of David’s policy at length appeared to be satisfactorily attained, and the great northern fiefs of his wife’s father added securely to the Scottish crown. They were at present held by his son, and in some sort as a guarantee of neutrality towards Stephen, which, though slight was so far effectual that it restrained David from ill-advised hostilities; whilst the feeble hold of Stephen upon the fiefs in question must have rendered him unwilling, as long as a nominal peace was preserved, to risk the chances of an ineffectual forfeiture which he could have scarcely hoped to carry out. In the event of the Duke of Normandy’s accession, there was the solemn contract ratified at Carlisle, which was to confirm the Scottish princes in the hereditary possession of these fiefs, in which it might well be hoped that a kindred people in language, origin, and laws, would amalgamate in course of time, under the fostering rule of the representatives of the sainted Edward, with the Anglian inhabitants of the Lothians. Even the population of that great Episcopal Palatinate, where the bishop ruled with regal power and privileges over a district scarcely yet included in Norman England at the time of the Domesday survey, was in sympathy and in race far more akin to the Angles of Bernicia than to the descendants of the Scandinavian conquerors of the Danelage; and the tendency of the men of Durham to turn their regards towards the North, was sedulously encouraged ever since the days of Margaret. It was her husband, the Scottish Malcolm, who laid the first stone of the new church in the Episcopal city; her sons and their leading nobles who enriched with their donations her favourite monastery; and now the last and greatest of her immediate family sheltered the sacred territory of St. Cuthbert from the miseries of southern England, and secured for it the advantages of peace. The grant of the English fief of Furness to Wimund, by which a troublesome enemy was converted into a questionable feudatory, and the confirmation of Skipton, also a dependency of the English crown, to William Fitz Duncan, were carried out by the Scottish king without the slightest reference to the prerogatives of the English sovereign; and owing to the distracted state of England during the reign of Stephen, never was Scotland at any period of her history more powerful relatively to her southern neighbour, than during the last ten years of David’s reign.

A. D. 1152. 12th June.

Bright as were the hopes of the aged king, when he established his nephew in the inheritance of the de Rumelis, in the following summer they were doomed to disappointment, when a sudden gloom was cast over Scotland by the untimely death of Prince Henry. Nor was the sorrow thus felt confined to his native land alone, for his loss was regretted throughout the neighbouring kingdom. His death was indeed a calamity for Scotland, for all the virtues of his family are said to have centred in his character; and handsome in person, and gallant in bearing, he possessed in addition those popular qualities which, had he lived, would have endeared him to his people; though the elaborate praises dictated by the attachment of his early friend, the abbot of Rievaulx, are perhaps less emphatic than the brief description of St. Bernard, “a brave and able soldier, he walked like his father in the paths of justice and of truth.”[262] By his marriage with Ada de Warenne, who survived him, Henry left six children, three sons and three daughters. Of the former, Malcolm and William lived to ascend the throne of Scotland, and David, the youngest, long enjoyed the Honour and title of Huntingdon. Ada, the eldest daughter, became the wife of Florence Count of Holland, carrying with her as a dowry the northern earldom of Ross. Margaret, the second, was twice married; first to Conan Duke of Bretagne, by whom she left an only daughter, Constance, who became the wife of Geoffrey and the mother of Arthur, son and grandson of Henry the Second; and after the death of Conan, to Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford. Matilda, the youngest sister, died unmarried in the same year as her brother Malcolm.[263]

Amidst the deep affliction which he must have felt at the loss of his only son, nothing was left undone by David that could ensure the peaceful succession of his grandchildren. A crisis was even then impending, for six months before the death of the prince of Scotland Henry Fitz Empress had already landed in England, and Stephen, whose good and gentle queen was no longer alive, seizing upon the opportunity of Prince Henry’s death to strengthen his cause by a fresh alliance, had at once made over Huntingdon to the Earl of Northampton. Accordingly, under the charge of Duncan Earl of Fife, upon whom the privileges of his earldom appear to have conferred this office, Malcolm was dispatched throughout the Scottish provinces to be acknowledged in every quarter of the realm as the heir and successor of his grandfather, whilst the king, hurrying in person to Newcastle, assembled the barons of Northumberland and took oaths and hostages for their obedience to William, whom he presented to them as their future feudal lord; and during the few short months he survived his son, he busied himself in completing his arrangements for the regulation of the kingdom in the event of his own decease.[264]

The close of his career, indeed, was not far distant, for though his intellect was still clear and vigorous, his bodily health was failing fast, and though his friends would assure him that he had yet many years to live, he felt in his own mind a presentiment that his end was at hand. It was on a Wednesday towards the close of May that the venerable monarch perceived the approach of death. Calmly reviewing his last instructions, he suggested a few additions, and having concluded his earthly affairs, dedicated his remaining hours to religion. Even at such a moment his kindly nature beamed forth, and when almost speechless he beckoned to his almoner, who, bending over the couch of his dying master, heard him whisper his latest instructions for the distribution of his daily alms. A. D. 1153. Thus he lingered over the remainder of the week, and as the sun rose upon the morning of the 24th, the spirit of the aged king returned to his Maker.[265]

David was a good man as well as an able king. His faith was of the age, but his religion was from the heart, and there are few who will not respect the feeling that prompted his dying wish to be carried to pray before the Black Rood of his mother. The times in which he lived, and the peculiar tone of his mother’s mind, which is easily traceable in all her children, may naturally have influenced the character of his religion, but the formal and saintly colours in which he is occasionally depicted, represent the actual living man about as much, probably, as a mediæval portrait in stained glass resembles the real features of the original. Strict in the conception of his own religious duties, he was exact in requiring from the ecclesiastical body a decorous abstinence from all internal broils and dissensions, in return for the immunities and external peace he was zealous in insuring them, enforcing obedience if necessary; though, it is said, that on one occasion he was obliged to kneel to an obdurate churchman before he could shame him into propriety. A kindly and warm-hearted disposition is traceable in many of his acts, and is especially displayed in his consideration and thoughtfulness for his poorer subjects. In accordance with a regulation often found in other codes, and which was, probably, a well-known and general maxim of law, no one was allowed to bring a lesser cause into the royal court of justice, except as an appeal from a lower court: yet, in spite of this enactment, which he seems to have been the first to introduce into Scotland, he appointed certain days on which, like an eastern king of old, he “sat in the gate” to give audience to the poor and the aged; and he would turn without a murmur from a hunting party to examine the appeal of a suppliant; if his decision was contrary to the expectations of his humble petitioners, kindly endeavouring to convince them of its justice—in too many instances a thankless and hopeless undertaking. The poor and the defenceless, indeed, were the especial objects of his protection, and he passed a law that whenever anything belonging to them was stolen, if only one man of good repute was ready to testify to the thief by an oath sworn on the altar before proper witnesses, “according to Scottish usage,” the stolen property was to be restored, “on the footing of the king,” and an additional fine of “eight cows,” the usual mulct for serious offences, levied on the offender—a privilege of great moment to the unprotected and oppressed in an age when, in ordinary cases, the oaths of six, twelve, or even more men, were necessary to establish an accusation of theft.[266]

Conciliation may be described as the leading principle of David’s policy. Called in the prime of life to reign over a people differing in race, in habits, and in language, and agreeing only in the perpetuation of hereditary feuds, he determined upon introducing, amongst his own subjects, the more orderly and settled system of government with which he and his brother Alexander were familiar during their lengthened residence at the Anglo-Norman court; and so ably were his measures conceived, and so judicious was his admixture of conciliation and authority in carrying out this project,—which seems to have been entertained by both brothers,—that he is said to have succeeded in establishing a more durable state of concord amongst the heterogeneous population of his kingdom, than existed at that period amongst people enjoying far higher advantages. Perhaps the true secret of his popularity lay in the admirable tact with which he seems to have entered warmly into the subject that lay nearest to the hearts of all his people—their own affairs. David had nothing to conceal except his councils, and the royal chamber was accessible at all times; every one in turn was favoured with an audience; the great and the lowly; the churchman and the soldier the burgher and the peasant, each departing with the assurance that his own interests were a matter of attention and care to a watchful and paternal ruler.

Pursuing the policy inaugurated by his mother, Queen Margaret, he encouraged the resort of foreign merchants to the ports of Scotland, insuring to native traders the same advantages which they had enjoyed during the reign of his father; whilst he familiarized his Gaelic nobles, in their attendance upon the royal court, with habits of luxury and magnificence, remitting three years’ rent and tribute—according to the account of his contemporary Malmesbury—to all his people who were willing to improve their dwellings, to dress with greater elegance, and to adopt increased refinement in their general manner of living. Even in the occupations of his leisure moments he seems to have wished to exercise a softening influence over his countrymen, for, like many men of his character, he was fond of gardening, and he delighted in indoctrinating his people in the peaceful arts of horticulture, and in the mysteries of planting and of grafting. For similar reasons he sedulously promoted the improvement of agriculture, or rather, perhaps, directed increased attention to it; for the Scots of that period were still a pastoral, and, in some respects, a migratory people, their magnates not residing, like the great feudal nobles, in their own castles, and in the centre of their own “demesnes,” but moving about from place to place—not always upon their own property—and quartering themselves upon the dependant population. By enforcing tillage and agricultural labour, and by directing laws against the indolent listlessness of a pastoral life—for it was an age when, from the reaction which might be expected after a period of “irregulated” independence, even the common occurrences of every day life were often made the subject of legal statutes—David hoped to convert the lower orders into a more settled and industrious population; whilst he enjoined the higher classes to “live like noblemen” upon their own estates, and not to waste the property of their neighbours, and spare their own, under pretence of continual journeys. In consequence of these measures feudal castles began, ere long, to replace the earlier buildings of wood and wattles rudely fortified by earthworks; and towns rapidly grew up around the royal castles and about the principal localities of commerce. The monasteries of Kelso, Jedburgh, Melrose, and Holyrood, with many another stately pile, also owed their first foundation to the fostering care of David; for, independently of his religious zeal, he appreciated the encouragement afforded by such establishments to the pacific arts it was his aim to introduce amongst his subjects. The prosperity of the country during the last fifteen years of his reign contrasted strongly with the miseries of England under the disastrous rule of Stephen; Scotland became the granary from which her neighbour’s wants were supplied; and to the court of Scotland’s king resorted the knights and nobles of foreign origin, whom the commotions of the Continent had hitherto driven to take refuge in England.[267]

David, for his own purposes, encouraged this immigration by every means in his power; for many of the events of his reign disclose the dilemma in which he was occasionally placed between his nobility of native birth, and the Anglo-Norman feudatories whose allegiance was also due to the English crown. On the former he could count with safety in any of his inroads upon the south, and to the latter he could look for assistance against the rebellions of the north and west; but there were circumstances in which he could place entire dependance upon neither party. If he threw himself into the arms of the native Scots he must have resigned all hope of social improvement; but if he alienated their affections and relied exclusively upon the Anglo-Normans, he must have made up his mind to reconquer northern Scotland by force of arms, or to resign it to some successful competitor. He gave, therefore, a ready welcome to all who arrived unfettered by any tie to the English king, depending on the knights for the creation of a baronage strongly attached to his own interests, and equally to be relied upon against Englishman and native Scot; whilst to the lower orders, whom he settled in the towns, he looked for the promotion of commerce and the formation of a burgherhood, devoted to the king from whom their privileges and immunities were derived.

In furtherance of his contemplated innovations, and not a little also of the views which he never ceased to entertain of still farther aggrandizing his kingdom on her southern frontier, David may be said to have laid the foundation of a radical change in the relative importance of the two great divisions of feudal Scotland. Hitherto, though the royal authority extended practically as far as the Spey, and the king of Scots was obeyed nominally throughout the whole extent of the mainland, the country between the Forth, the Tay, and the central ridge of the Grampian range, was the real heart and centre of Alban. Here were the royal capitals of Scone and Forteviot; here the bishoprics of St. Andrews and Dunkeld, and Abernethy once also a capital and bishopric, still an abbacy, and apparently the seat of the learning of the age.[268] Here also were the religious foundations of David’s parents, and of his brother Alexander; and here the late king was wont to hold his court at his favourite residence of Invergowrie. Southward of the Forth stretched Lothian and the ancient principality of Strath Clyde, provinces still dependant on the kingdom beyond the Scots-water, and never yet regarded as the seat of the central authority. Northern Scotland may be compared to Wessex, the hereditary province of the royal race and the centre of the English government; the southern district between the Forth, the Solway, and the Tweed, resembling the Danelage, secure in its own laws and customs, but secondary in other respects to the remaining portion of the kingdom. Southern Scotland was the creation of David. He embellished it with the monasteries of his religious foundations; he strengthened it with the castles of his feudal baronage; and here he established the nucleus of feudal Scotland, and the foundation of that importance which eventually transferred the preponderance in the kingdom to the south. Strath Clyde and the Lothians were admirably adapted to his purpose, for all the land appears to have been in direct dependance on the crown; he could stud it at will with his favourite Anglo-Norman chivalry, and there are no traces in either quarter of the powerful magnates who were in a position, beyond the Scots-water, to oppose the policy of their king.

But it is not to be imagined that in any portion of the kingdom, except in forfeited districts, David enacted the part of a conqueror, driving out the earlier population and replacing the native proprietary by a baronage of foreign origin. He was beloved by the Scots, and terrible only to the men of Galloway, says his friend and biographer Ailred; and it is impossible that he could have retained the affections of his own people had he carried out a policy so hostile to their very existence. He seems to have confirmed rather than destroyed proprietary right, and though he introduced novel tenures into Scotland, the Thanes holding, according to ancient custom, by Scottish service will be found, long after his reign, side by side with the knights and barons holding by the feudal tenure of military service. But this and other changes which he accomplished, and the general policy he pursued in church and state, will form the subject of the two succeeding chapters.[269]

CHAPTER IX.
The State.

Scotland in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries still retained many of the features of a confederated rather than of a consolidated kingdom, acknowledging indeed, even in the earlier portion of that period, the rule of one reigning family, but scarcely recognising the authority of the same laws and customs, or bound together by the ties of kindred, origin, and language. Between Forth and Tweed lay Lothian, bordering towards the western frontiers upon the Cumbrian principality and Galloway; both the former provinces having been annexed to the Scottish crown by a course of successful aggression, if not by actual conquest, though Galloway was still rather a tributary dependency than an integral portion of the kingdom. Lothian, apparently, preserved the same laws that were in force throughout Saxon Northumbria before the reign of Canute; whilst two centuries of the dominion of a Scottish line of princes over Cumbria must have introduced a Scottish proprietary very generally throughout the province, without effecting any material alteration in laws and customs, which, based upon the Celtic principle of government, differed probably little, if at all, from the code then and long afterwards retained in Galloway.

Northward of the Scots-water two great divisions were recognised, Scotia, or Scotland proper, and Moravia. The former embraced the whole of the Lowland districts from the Spey to the Forth, extending to the summit of the Mounth or Grampian range; thus including the earldoms of Mar, Buchan, and Angus, Fife, Atholl, Strathearn, and Menteith, with Gowrie and Stormont, the Merns and other districts retained more directly in the king’s hands; together with the whole of “Scottish Argyle,” which, before the creation of the shire and bishopric, was connected with Atholl and the Abbacy of Glendochart; whilst Cantyre and Cowal depended upon the earldom of Menteith. Moravia was made up of the earldoms of Moray, forfeited in the earlier portion of David’s reign; Caithness, which still included Sutherland, then extending as far as Dingwall; and Ross, a sort of debatable land between the Gall-Gael, Oirir-Gael, and ancient Mormaors of Moray: with “Northern Argyle,” or that portion of the territories of the Oirir-Gael which reached, at this period, from the northern boundaries of the modern county to the frontiers of the Gall-Gael in Sutherland.[270] Feudal tenure, in the later Anglo-Norman acceptation of the word, was unknown throughout these provinces at the accession of Alexander the First; though the earlier system of government, once existing amongst a number of independent tribes and confederacies, had long given place to the royal authority wherever the rights of the crown—as was certainly the case in Scotia—were thoroughly established. But though the principle of the system was changed, the features remained very much the same; and a nobility, owing their original appointment or confirmation to the crown, exercising as deputies the privileges of the sovereign, and retaining as their prerogative a portion of the dues they exacted in his name, stood in the place of the elective or hereditary magistrates of tribes and confederacies. The Thane, or Tighern, and the official known as the Deempster, represented the Cean-cinneth, or rather perhaps the Toshach, and the Brehon—the chief, or captain, and the judge of the clan; the earl or Mormaor the provincial judge answered to the chosen leader and judge of the confederacy; the kindred of these officials, and the Og-tiernach, or “lesser lords,” formed the Duchasach and Duine-uasal, the gentry or freeholders of the district; whilst none who could not claim to be enrolled amongst one of these kindreds were entitled to the privileges of free or gentle birth.

The only tenure known at this period was the Gavel[271] one of the earliest forms of the original allotment, which was enjoyed in common by all within the limit of the immediate kindred—or, in Teutonic phrase, all embraced in the Mæg-borh—a permanent property in such a holding only being acquired by uninterrupted possession for the usual period of “three generations.” No fixed or individual property, in the modern sense of the word, was conveyed by such a tenure in any certain spot of land as long as divisible and inheritable property consisted of money, arms, and ornaments, and the stock and produce of the land; but rather a right of joint-occupancy in the family district or holding, shared by all who could claim a certain degree of kindred with the Senior of the race. The Senior was elective, every member of the kindred who had a right of joint-occupancy also having an equal claim to choose the head of his family; though under ordinary circumstances the precedency seems to have been generally conceded to the actual representative of the original “eldest born.” Seniority conferred privileges, but it also entailed obligations. To every kindred occupant of a lesser holding was assigned a portion of land, the Senior having the preference in the choice of allotments, with a joint right to feed his live stock on the common pasture, and a similar share in the house, barns, and stabling; the possession of the hearth in the “capital messuage” generally being included amongst the prerogatives of seniority. All that was not partitioned out in this manner fell to the share of the Senior, who in return for his privileges was responsible for the whole of his kindred. He was their plegius or security, and their spokesman on all occasions,—or, in the language of the Anglo-Saxon laws, their Borh and Fore-Speca. He asserted their joint rights, he avenged their joint wrongs, and he was answerable in their joint names for the receipts or payments invariably following injuries whether inflicted or received—for community in good or evil was the very soul of the system of kindred—as well as for the due exercise of hospitality whenever the “overlord,” to use the feudal phrase, was entitled, on his Cuairt or Visitation, to demand the “refection,” which was known amongst the Anglo-Saxons as “a night’s feorm.” It may be safely assumed that similar features were exhibited on a greater scale in the thanage, and in the holding belonging to the district judge; the obligation of “refection” in the case of the thane being confined to receiving the king, an earl, or an abbot or bishop, according as he held office under a lay or ecclesiastical superior. To judge from the parallel case of the Welsh nobleman, this was generally on the occasion of the great winter circuit, when the Scottish kings and magnates were accustomed to pass their Christmas amongst their thanes, much as the kings and Jarls of Scandinavia were wont, according to the old Icelandic chronicler, to move about during the winter months amongst their baronage, or Hersirs, who held their lands in a similar manner by the tenure of Veitslo, or provisioning the king. The same rule may be supposed to have been applicable to the earldom; whilst the principle of community of right in the kindred unquestionably extended to ecclesiastical dignitaries amongst the Gael, Tanist and Adbhar abbots—or the successor actually chosen, and all capable of being nominated to the abbacy—being continually met with in the Irish annals.[272] It may be gathered from the ancient Scottish laws that the limit of the immediate kindred extended to the third generation, all who were fourth in descent from a Senior passing from amongst the joint-proprietary, and receiving, apparently, a final allotment; which seems to have been separated permanently from the remainder of the joint-property by certain ceremonies usual on such occasions. On the death of a Senior, a redistribution of the land and offices belonging to the family invariably took place; and it was at this period, probably, that all who were beyond the limit of the immediate kindred received their final allotment. The fourth in descent from a thane, no longer entitled to his share amongst the joint-proprietary, or Tigherns, became an Og-tiern, he and his descendants holding henceforth of the representative of the Senior, by the same tenure as the thane held of the king; the lapse of the necessary period in both cases rendering them irremovable from their respective districts. The Tanist, or next in succession—for the “law of Tanistry” is only another phrase for the law of succession—was appointed at the same time as the Senior, receiving an allotment in proportion to the dignity of his office, and, at this period, generally holding the Toshachdorach, or captaincy of the family,—which, in later days, as the law of succession gradually altered, and the office of Tanist sunk into disuse, seems to have become the especial prerogative of the next in succession; and when the earldom, lordship, or thanage passed out of the original family by female heiresses, was generally confirmed by charter on the heir male, to be held hereditarily under the head of the house. Nor was the Toshach a character confined to the Celtic people alone; for the Mayor of the palace under the early Merovingian sovereigns, who was usually elected at the same time as the king, and was perhaps a member of the same royal race, was known as the Dux Francorum; very much resembling the Gaelic Toshach, and the dignitary whose title appears upon the early British coins under the Latinized form of Tascio.[273]

Many of the features, indeed, displayed in the Celtic Gavel were not in any way peculiar to the Celtic people, but will be found to have very generally existed in every part of western and northern Europe, wherever a portion of the population continued to hold their land by the older system, which was stigmatized as Roturier after the feudal theory of “knight-service” was recognised as the only principle of “gentle tenure.” In the intermediate period, when the earlier system still held its ground side by side with the principles of Roman law, and the shifting allotment to which every member of the Folk or Leod was entitled by “the right of blood” was passing gradually into a fixed and permanent inheritance, length of possession, variously reckoned in different early laws, alone conferred pure allodial property in land amongst the German people—for the chartered grant from the king was thoroughly Roman—whilst throughout the North, long uninfluenced by contact with Imperial Rome, the original principle of descent, which was still traceable in the Germanic nobility of this period, and in the “inborn” right acquired by the lower orders, was in full force; the Bonder growing into the Odal-Bonder, and if his blood was strictly pure, into the Holder, solely after the lapse of the necessary number of descents. Long after the conquest of the ancestral dukedom of the English kings by Philip Augustus of France, the main features of the law of Tanistry, which seemed so strange to the Anglo-Irish lawyers of the seventeenth century, were still familiar to the Normans of the continental duchy. All the family up to the sixth degree were joint proprietors with the Senior of the race in the Tenure-par-Parage, holding by fealty alone, the seventh in descent passing from amongst the privileged kindred and holding by homage, thus becoming “the man” of the head of the family, just as the fourth in descent by Scottish custom became an Og-tiern under the Thane. The difference in the number of descents was simply the result of the introduction of a noble class above the free, and in either case, all who passed beyond the limits of the kindred evidently had an “inborn” right to a fixed and final provision.[274] A similar principle seems to have regulated the holding amongst the continental Angles, which never passed to an heiress until the kindred could furnish no male heir within the necessary limit, extending in this case to the fifth degree. The share-house of the Kentish Gavel (the Bold-getal perhaps of Alfred’s laws), with the hearth reserved, as among the Welsh, for the youngest heir; the allotment of which the name of shifting betokens the original character; and the freedom of the heirs from the consequences of the father’s felony, alluded to in the old Kentish rhymes, “the father to the bough, the son to the plough,”—a freedom which was confirmed, rather than introduced, in Scotland by the laws of William,[275]—closely resemble the characteristics of the Celtic holding: though the preference of the youngest heir in the Welsh and Kentish Gavel, and in the tenure known as Borough-English, discloses the pre-existence of a state of society unknown, apparently, amongst the Gael; whilst the allodial character of the Kentish Gavel seems to have been almost peculiar to that county.

Both the principle of joint proprietary right, and the elective character of the Senior, were thoroughly recognised in the Imperial Benefice, at least as late as the eleventh century. The kindred, ending at the seventh in descent, and never acquiring hereditary right before the lapse of three generations, chose and presented their Senior to their lord, their representative fulfilling all the obligations of the benefice, which, being held by military service, differed in certain particulars from the older Gavel.[276] Stated military service was required for a stated portion of land, a well-armed soldier attending his lord from every benefice, which was always originally of a certain stated size, the holder of many being answerable for an equivalent number of men-at-arms, whilst the responsibility in half a benefice was shared between the Seniors of two such holdings. As the military feud required the service of a man-at-arms, it followed that the lord was entitled to provide a substitute whenever such service could not be rendered through the minority or sex of the heirs; and out of this right arose the claim of the lord of a military fief to control the marriage of the heiress, and to act as guardian of the minor, rights which, in the case of the Gavel, belonged to the kindred. The earlier system was ruled by a different principle of military service: the greater the numbers of the family or tribe, the more prominent their position in battle, the wider the district allotted to them in the annual distribution of the land; and hence it was the pride of the German pagi, in the days of Tacitus, to contribute a far greater number of warriors than their necessary quota of “a hundred.” The earlier principle was still in full force amongst the Celts, every freeman continuing to carry arms, and to be liable at the call of the king to attend the yearly assembly of the Sluagh or Leuchte—the Welsh Lluyd, the German Leudes—if required for a “hosting across the border;” a custom which was retained side by side with the military service of the feudal system, under the name of “Scottish service,” rendering an army thus levied, and armed only with weapons of offence, more numerous indeed, but far less effective, than the well-equipped body of mail-clad men-at-arms, who were bound by the tenure of “knight-service” to follow their lord to the field.

Wherever the adoption of the benefice had introduced the principle of stated military service, the representatives of the earlier freemen had invariably sunk into a class of agricultural peasantry, free, but occupying an intermediate station between the noble and the læt or serf. The soldier, for instance, amongst the Anglo-Saxons in the seventh century was exclusively represented by the Thane, whilst the member of the folk or people was only required to attend the army in the capacity of a camp follower, unarmed and without either the duties or responsibilities of a fighting man.[277] No such intermediate class is traceable amongst the Celts of this period, who had not yet, apparently, entered upon that stage of society in which the noble rose out from amongst the ranks of the free, as a member of a distinct and separate caste. The equivalent of the Anglo-Saxon Ceorl—the Boneddig or Bonnacht—continued to rank amongst the lesser Duine-Uasal who lived by the sword, and whilst the title of Churl has passed into an opprobrious epithet in the English language, the candidate for a Welsh county still esteems it an act of courtesy to address his constituency as Boneddigion or “gentlemen.” A wide, and in most cases apparently an all but impassable barrier, separated the Duine-Uasal from the agricultural population connected with the land, a class which may be said, in a general way, to have comprised all who were not connected by blood with the Duchasach of the district, answering to the Attach Tuatha or Daer-Clans amongst the Irish, and the Alltudion and earlier Lætic population—the Wealh—amongst the Welsh and Germans. Captives and criminals formed the absolutely servile class, for, to judge from the Welsh laws, the alien enjoyed a certain degree of freedom, being at liberty to change his residence as long as it was equally in the power of his lord to remove him from his land; though after a lapse of three generations in one locality, the fourth in descent acquired a permanent right to remain in the ancestral dwelling, with a claim to subsistence in that district from which he was now irremovable. No fixity of tenure was acquired by such a claim, which was simply a right to receive every year from the maor or steward of the Tighern a shifting allotment, representing literally the yearly assignment of land alluded to in the descriptions of Cæsar and Tacitus; and at the opening of the fourteenth century the agricultural population throughout Scotland, as a class, still held their farms by a yearly tenancy-at-will.[278] By that time, however, the shifting character of the allotment had probably undergone a certain qualification, for the earliest law laid down in the first year of the reign of Alexander the Second seems to have been directed against the unsettled condition of these Attach Tuatha, and their predilection for the listless indolence of a pastoral life. Every “Bondman” was ordered to plough and sow the land in the same locality, or Vill, he had occupied in the preceding year; all who had held no land but were in the possession of five cows or upwards—in other words, of more than a pound—were bidden to take land from their lord and raise a corn crop for his benefit; whilst the proprietor of less than that amount of cattle was to sell his oxen, if he had any, to those who could use them in tillage, and work as a labourer in digging and sowing, equally for the benefit of his lord.[279] The dependance of the Duine-Uasal for their support upon the population thus attached to the soil, ensured to the latter a certain amount of consideration; for it was on his “native-men” that the Tighern quartered his kinsmen and retainers, and from the same agricultural class he levied his rents. The necessity of a class of this description in such an age was its safeguard, up to a certain point, from extortion and oppression; they were protected like a sheep for its fleece, as long as their Tighern was in a condition to defend them, the want of fixed and settled rights being invariably most felt when society is in a state of transition.

Such then were the two great classes into which the whole population of Scotland was at this time divided. Earls, Thanes, Judges, and Ogtierns, with their respective kindred, composed the Duchasach or Duine-Uasal, the free proprietary of the kingdom, together with the lesser Duine-Uasal who dedicated their swords to the service of their Senior, answering to the Welsh Boneddigion. Amongst the numerous burdens which pressed so heavily upon the Irish peasantry in the Anglo-Irish period, was the payment of a certain sum under the name of Bonnacht, to relieve them from the necessity of supporting their lord’s retainers; the existence of this custom amongst the Irish Gael pointing to the manner in which, in a similar state of society, the lesser Duine-Uasal, or Bonnacht, amongst the Scottish Gael were quartered upon the native-men of their respective districts. Nor must the abbot and his kindred, with Duine-Uasal connected with the ab-thanage, be omitted from amongst the Duchasach; whilst as there were “inborn” clergy, who at a later date were numbered amongst the Nativi, and the son of a chaplain by the laws of William lost his free-right upon the death of his father, the law of descent which was in force amongst the laity was evidently in operation amongst the clergy also.[280] No especial privileges of rank belonged to the ecclesiastical order in early times amongst the people of Germanic origin; they were assessed according to their actual birth, and it was an innovation upon ancient custom amongst the Anglo-Saxons when the priest, “on account of his seven orders,” was reckoned worthy of Thane-right or nobility. The earlier custom was still in force apparently amongst the Celts; and as none beyond a certain limit of the “Founder’s kin” were privileged to succeed to the abbacy, so the descendants of the married clergy, beyond a similar limit, would appear to have become attached as dependants to the abbey lands; forming, probably, those bands of monastic warriors whose occasional conflicts, recorded in the Irish Annals, seem to have rivalled in ferocity the tumults of the eastern monks. The kindred of the sovereign enjoyed the rank and appanages of earls, the line of Atholl unquestionably, and perhaps that of Fife, branching off permanently in this manner from the royal stock—just as the ealdormen of Saxon Mercia towards the close of the tenth century traced their origin to Ælfhere the kinsman of Edgar. The remaining earls represented, either the “inborn” descendants of Mormaors appointed at an earlier period over conquered districts; or the inheritors of a province from an independent ancestry, who, acknowledging the superiority of the king of Scots, continued to hold their territories by hereditary right, resembling the ealdormen of Saxon Northumbria. Of the earls of Scotia, the majority probably answered to the former description, though the ancient earls of Strathern may have represented, either an offshoot from an earlier royal race, or the descendants of a line of independent princes; whilst amongst the latter class may be reckoned the forfeited earls of Moray, the earls of Caithness, and perhaps of Ross, with the lords of Galloway and of the Oirir-Gael.

The only recognised bond of union was the immemorial tie of kindred, none being entitled to the privileges of gentle birth who could not claim a certain degree of relationship to a Tighern or Og-tiern; none being entitled to a right of subsistence whose kindred had not dwelt for three generations in the district. Charters were unknown; a shake of the hand before a witness settled a common bargain—the thirstier southerns concluded such compacts with a drink—whilst the delivery of a stick, a straw, or a clod of earth, in the presence of a greater number of witnesses, apparently conveyed a more permanent grant of land, though length of occupancy alone conferred hereditary right. On important occasions a greater degree of ceremony was observed, one of the latest displays of this description occurring in the reign of Alexander the First, when the king restored to the Priory of St. Andrews the tract of country known as the Cursus Apri, or “the Boar’s Raik.” The king, in the presence of a vast concourse of people, led up to the high altar his Arab charger, equipped with housings of great value, and with a silver lance and shield; the royal saddle and shield, with a complete suit of Turkish armour, being preserved in the church of St. Andrews in testimony of the munificent donation. Notices of such grants after the middle of the eleventh century were occasionally preserved in writing, as memoranda, however, and not as title-deeds; and instances of such memoranda are to be found amongst the Irish and Welsh, as well as amongst the Scots, in the transitional period preceding the introduction of the regular charter.[281]

The inevitable tendency of such a state of society was to call into existence a class of lesser Duine-Uasal, clinging to the privileges of gentle birth, and naturally averse to sink to the level of the agricultural peasantry. The distant kinsman, removed beyond the limit of the privileged branches of the family, was ever ready to dedicate his sword to the service of the Senior of his race, and was quartered upon the peasantry of the district as an Amas or Bonnach, a member of the Arimannia or Hird; for he was always certain of a welcome in an age in which the numbers of such a following, useless except for purposes of aggression, were the source and evidence of a chieftain’s power. Expansion thus became a vital necessity, the very numbers of a kindred, which entailed the obligation, generally ensuring success in their encroachments on a weaker neighbour; and the same causes that impelled one German tribe upon another, or precipitated them in one mighty wave upon the Roman frontier, ensured a normal state of warfare amongst the Celts. Scotland was, however, in a far less disorganized condition than Ireland at this period; and though the royal authority was comparatively of little use in repressing internal warfare amongst the mountains of Moravia and Argyle, it was of greater power in the more open districts of Scotland proper, and the south, where the magnates no longer mustered their followers for “a hosting beyond the frontier” except at the sovereign’s command. Oppression and encroachment had taken the place of open warfare, and they were content to quarter their followers upon a weaker neighbour, and to relieve the native-men of their own district by moving about from place to place under pretence of travelling, or of attending upon the royal court, with a retinue numerous enough to support their own dignity, and ensure for themselves and followers the necessary hospitality known as “herbary.” It was to protect themselves against the abuses of such a system, which was long in full force amidst the mountains of the north and west, that the lesser barons at a later period entered into bonds of Manred—or of allegiance in return for protection—with the greater magnates, whose power and dignity were thus enhanced; such engagements being only the chartered form of the same tie that united, in an earlier period, the Gallic and Germanic clientes to the greater confederacies upon whom they were dependant: for wherever the circumstances of the age called it forth, the principle of clientage was sure to be developed.[282]

Few material changes had been introduced beyond the Scots water, in either church or state, when the youngest and greatest of Malcolm Ceanmore’s sons succeeded his brother upon the throne. Malcolm was a Gaelic king to the last, and the reforming energy of Margaret was directed to the court and clergy; she scarcely aimed at effecting any radical change in the principles of government. During the reigns of Duncan and of Donald, Scotland must, if anything, have retrograded rather than advanced, remaining stationary apparently whilst Edgar was king—to judge from the little that is known of that period—the disorganized condition of the see of St. Andrews, which was vacant during the whole of these three reigns, typifying probably the general state of the kingdom at large. Sufficient occupation was afforded Alexander by his contest with the church, which was scarcely brought to a close with his life, and by his northern wars; and though, from the presence of some of the great feudal officers of the crown, and of Vicecomites, on certain state occasions during his reign, it may be gathered that his policy was identical with that of his successor, David may be safely regarded as the first king who practically introduced into Scotland the novel system of government in church and state, which was hardly thoroughly established before the opening of the thirteenth century. Many of the institutions and principles which had grown into use, more or less, upon the Continent through the gradual substitution of Roman law for the earlier Teutonic custom, and which had been adopted by successive sovereigns of Alfred’s race in the reconstruction of the Anglo-Saxon monarchy, were now substituted in a similar manner for the earlier laws and customs of Scotland; some of these changes being carried out at once, whilst in other cases a considerable time elapsed, after the first introduction of the principle, before it was thoroughly in operation throughout the country.

There was a period in early Frankish history, when the Comes or Graphio was a royal deputy, answerable for the due collection of the royal revenue, and exercising over the population, dependant on the Crown, as fiscal-judge, a jurisdiction which did not extend over the allodial proprietary. None of these attributes belonged to the Count of a later era, who, no longer either a fiscal-judge or a collector of the royal revenue, was simply a greater baron, enjoying only the title and dignity of his former office. A similar change was in progress amongst the Anglo-Saxons, for in the reign of Ini, the king’s ealdorman was the leading judge of the shire, forfeiting his district for compounding a felony; and in Alfred’s days, no man of a certain class could pass from one shire to another without permission from the king’s ealdorman, who was still connected with the shire as the leading personage in the Gemote, and appealed to, on certain occasions, as an official. In Edward’s laws, however, and in the laws of subsequent kings, the sovereign addresses his Gerefas alone, without any allusion to the jurisdiction of the ealdorman; and though the presence of the bishop and the ealdorman at the Shire-Gemote was required by Edgar’s law, confirmed by Canute, the Norman Conquest seems to have found the sheriff, a royal official, and not the Earl—who was a Duke rather than a Count at this period—the presiding officer in the county court.[283] It appears to have been one of the leading features of the policy introduced by Alexander and David, to carry out an alteration of this character in Scotland, where the Earl and the Thane—the Mormaor and the Maor—like the Jarl and the Lenderman and Stallr amongst the Northmen, were still invested with the full authority of royal officials. In the Welsh Commot, which was supposed to be divided by law, or custom, into twelve maenols, only one of these divisions was the actual property of the Maer, who exercised a joint authority with the Cynghellwr over the whole district, one-third of the Commot being composed of Taog-trefs, occupied by royal villeins, in other words, being royal demesne; and from the division of the crown lands in Scotland at a later period into Thanages and Demesne, it may be gathered that the thanage was by this time restricted to the actual property of the thane, who, no longer exercising authority over the demesne as a royal official, was simply a hereditary tenant by rent, holding by Scottish service instead of by knight service. In the same manner, the authority of the Earl or Mormaor—a character unknown in the principality of Wales, but who was simply a high steward or Maer on a greater scale,—appears to have been limited to his actual earldom, the functions which he had hitherto discharged as a royal deputy devolving on the Vicecomes, an official newly introduced, and directly dependant on the sovereign; in certain cases standing in the same relation to the royal thanes and the tenantry on demesne lands, as the baron by military service did to the knights and tenantry of his barony. Thus, for instance, the great sheriffdom of Perth was made up, probably, of all the thanages and demesne lands withdrawn from the superintendence of the various earls, of whose ancient Mormaordoms the greater portion is now included in the modern county. In Gowrie there was an earldom and a regality, both remaining under the jurisdiction of the sheriff of Scone, as long as they were both retained in the king’s hands; though, had the earldom been granted away, the authority of the Vicecomes would have been limited to the regality. In Fife alone the Earl continued in the thirteenth century to exercise the prerogatives of a royal Maor; and when Alexander the Second, in accordance with the original gift of David, issued his writs for assigning one-eighth of the profits and fines of Fife and Fortrev to Dunfermlyn, one writ was directed to the sheriff of Fife, the other to Earl Malcolm and his bailies, directing him to make over to the abbey “the eighth, which ye levied with us in the county.”[284]

The sheriffdom, however, was introduced by degrees; and in Scottish Argyle, and in Cantyre and Cowal, the duties which devolved in Moravia on the Vicecomes of Inverness were still performed by the Earls of Atholl and Menteith, or the Abbot of Glendochart. David still addressed his mandate in behalf of the abbey of Dunfermlyn to “the earl and proprietary of Caithness and the Orkneys;” and when, in the subsequent reign, Malcolm issued a mandate of the same description to the Earl of Ross, it was similarly addressed to “Earl Malcolm and his thanes.” Four centuries elapsed before there was more than one sheriffdom in ancient Moravia—a sure sign of the weakness of the royal authority in early times in the distant north, when the earl, if so inclined, was probably a more efficient delegate to carry out the king’s decrees than the royal Vicecomes of Inverness. Even in Fife the Sheriff is not traceable before the days of William, David always addressing, “the bishop, earl, and proprietary of Fife,” and directing “my judge of that province” to assist at the court of the Abbot of Dunfermlyn; in the same manner as it was incumbent on the sheriff, or his substitute, to be present at a later period on similar occasions.[285] Gradually, however, in all the settled portions of Scotland, the Vicecomes assumed the prerogative of the royal Maor; amongst other duties, settling the rents of the demesne lands, much as his type, the English Sheriff, assessed the ferms levied upon the royal Hundreds or Wapentakes included in his shire. In both countries the sheriffdom occasionally became hereditary, until a statute of Edward the Third fixed a year as the limit of the English Sheriff’s tenure of office. Permanency, and a certain degree of greater dignity, seem still to have attached to the Vicecomes in Scotland, where the equivalent of the lord-lieutenant of an English county is known at the present day as “lieutenant and sheriff of the shire,” the acting official being the sheriff-depute, the tenure of whose office is equally permanent.[286]

As it was the policy of the race of Alfred to knit together the whole of Southern England and the Danelage in the bonds of Commendation, or hlaford-socn, so amongst the first principles of the system of government introduced by David, it was strictly enacted, that, within a fortnight after the proclamation of the king’s writ in the royal Moot, every man “should find him a lord,” or forfeit the usual mulct of eight cows to the king, and remain at the royal mercy until he had duly commended himself to some responsible person. So necessary was this enactment considered for insuring the internal peace of the kingdom, and the practical dependance of its unruly population upon the sovereign, that it was a royal axiom in the reign of David’s grandson, William, that any man accused of theft, who could not “find a lord” to be his surety, was to be at once treated as a convicted felon; though such must have been the difficulty of enforcing it in the remoter districts, that four centuries after the first introduction of the principle, enactments were still occasionally levelled against “the broken clans” of the Highlands and Borders.[287] Violence and robbery, the usual crimes of a lawless age, were severely dealt with, and the sanctity of the Gryth strictly enforced, its “infraction”—in other words a breach of the peace—being heavily fined, according to the rank and dignity of the personage whose gryth or peace was broken. All the district up to a certain limit around the kings court and person, and all the public highways, were “in pace regis,” or under the immediate protection of the king; whilst the earldom, the barony, and the thanage were under the similar protection of the proprietors, whether lay or clerical, who were entitled to the privileges of a court. For threatening to strike within the limits of the royal gryth, four cows were paid to the king, one to the party threatened; the oaths of two “liel men” being required in proof of the charge. For an actual blow the fine was raised, increasing in proportion, if blood followed; a drawn dagger was struck through the hand; and if the weapon were used, and with effect, the guilty hand was forfeited—a stern enactment, enforced five centuries later by the Star-Chamber;—whilst if death followed the blow, the full fine of one hundred and eighty cows was paid to the king, the kindred receiving that “satisfaction according to the law of Scotland”—the cro or wergild—from which the victim could no longer hope to profit.[288] Petty thefts were summarily dealt with; the man detected backberand—with a calf, a sheep, or anything he could carry on his back—was mulcted of a cow or a sheep by the lord of the property, was well scourged, and lost an ear, the presence of two “liel men” being required to carry out the punishment. None were to be hanged for less than the value of two sheep, each reckoned at sixteen pence, or an ore.[289] The usual form of robbery, however, was “cattle-lifting,” or the Creagh, a relic of that lawless state of society in which the property of all who were not connected by the ties of blood, or of intimate alliance, was looked upon as the lawful spoil of the strongest. The Creagh was on land what the Sumorlida was by sea; lawful warfare when carried on under the royal authority, but robbery and piracy if wanting the sanction of the sovereign power; which, as “the confederacy” was gradually bound in the firmer bonds of “the kingdom,” was invariably directed against the Cateran and the Viking, the last relics of that barbarous independence which claimed the right of private warfare. The rules laid down in the early Frank and Anglo-Saxon laws for tracing the perpetrators of a robbery, leave little room for doubt that, with the Frank and the Saxon, as with the Gael, there was a time when “lost property” was but another word for stolen cattle. It was to check the increase of “cattle-lifting,” against which the ordinary night watches—the stretward or road-guard of the Conqueror’s laws—were thoroughly inefficient, that the early Frank kings instituted the Canton, or Hundred, laying the responsibility of the theft upon the district in which it occurred: and as such robberies were generally carried out at night, the watch-dog was considered by David an animal of sufficient importance to justify the enactment of a special law, and whoever killed him was bound to watch his master’s house for a year and a day, being answerable during that period for any losses that might be incurred. It was probably to check this tendency to night robbery that a law, very much resembling the Norman regulation of the Couvre-feu—which may have been introduced for a similar reason—was either passed, or confirmed, in the reign of William, forbidding all but men in authority, or responsible persons, from leaving their homes after nightfall, except to fetch a priest to a sick man, to go to the mill, or to do the bidding of their lord; he who was abroad after dark on an errand of this description being bound to declare openly the reason of his absence from home. But the measures of David were not confined to the protection of the watch-dog, and he laid down rules for the course to be pursued in cases of robbery, assimilating his regulations to the usages elsewhere in force.[290]

By Anglo-Saxon law, all property above a certain value was to be bought in open market, and in the presence of Witnesses, who were always men of property and good repute—the Reeve, the Landlord, the Priest, or other “unlying men” of similar station, who were chosen for this and other purposes in every Burh and Hundred. No sale was legal without a Warranter, who guaranteed that the property offered for sale was honestly acquired; and if it was subsequently claimed within a certain period as stolen goods, the purchaser was bound to produce his witnesses and the warranter, the responsibility from that time resting upon the latter. If he failed to appear the purchase was void, though the oaths of the witnesses cleared the purchaser from the legal consequences of theft; but if neither witnesses nor warranter came forward in his behalf, he was at once condemned as a thief. The name of the warranter was Getyma, whilst the legal process, which was always numbered amongst the privileges of the Baron’s Court at this period, was known as Team, and was a part of that system which aimed at supplanting the rude personal independence which answered every accusation by an appeal to the sword.[291] The equivalent of the Getyma amongst the Welsh was known as the Mach, and he seems to be traceable in the Salic law under the name of Hamallus, the prototype apparently of the Norman Heimil-borch, or Hemold-borh—perhaps even of the Anglo-Saxon Getyma—the similarity of the title by which the warranter was known beyond the Tweed, or rather perhaps beyond the Forth, Hamehald, pointing to the quarter from which the regulations of the Team would appear to have been introduced, at any rate beyond the “Scots-water.”[292] In pursuance of this system, of which the germs are earliest found in force amongst the Franks, David appointed certain places in every Scottish sheriffdom to which all property “challenged for theft” was to be brought, and all the warranters in such cases were to be summoned. Scone, Cluny, Logierait and Dalginch were the places named for Gowrie, Stormont, Atholl, and Fife; Kintulloch for Strathearn; Forfar and Dunottar for Angus and the Mearns; and Aberdeen for Mar and Buchan. Inverness was named for Ross and Moray, whilst Stirling was the place appointed for transactions in which “the men beyond the Forth” were implicated; for though in modern times this description would apply to the northern Scots, when Scone was the capital and Gowrie the heart of the kingdom, “all beyond the Scots-water” meant the inhabitants of the Lothians, Cumbria, and Galloway. Just as amongst the Franks forty days were allowed the accused to collect his evidence within Ardennes and the Loire, eighty if the parties required dwelt beyond these limits;—the time varying amongst the Anglo-Saxons from one week to four, according to the distance of the shire from which the evidence was summoned, six weeks and a day being allowed for all “beyond sea,”—so if the warranter was within the limits of Scotia the challenged party was bound to produce him in a fortnight, an additional month being allowed if he dwelt beyond the borders: and as it is obvious that there must occasionally have been considerable difficulty in procuring the attendance of a reluctant Hamehald, his lord was bound to enforce his attendance under penalty of forfeiting one hundred cows, the recusant himself being mulcted in three times the value of the challenged property, whilst he who failed his warranter was proclaimed an outlaw. Every assistance in the search was to be given by the Vicecomes and his officers—the Sheriff of Inverness being answerable for the whole of Moravia, whilst the Earl of Atholl, or the Abbot of Glendochart, were responsible for Scottish Argyle, and the Earl of Menteith for Cantyre and Cowal, the sheriffdom being as yet unknown throughout the territories of the Oirir-Gael.[293] Considerable light is thrown by these regulations upon the comparative dependance of different parts of Scotland upon the crown during the reign of David; and as they are not extended to the Lothians, which remained under the jurisdiction of the Northumbrian ealdormen for nearly a century after similar rules appear in the Anglo-Saxon codes, it may be inferred from this silence, not that the law was not enforced throughout southern Scotland, but that the Team was a familiar process to the population between Forth and Tweed, at the time when David first extended its provisions over the rest of his kingdom.

Very stringent rules were either enforced, or confirmed, in a subsequent reign for all cases in which a priest was called as warranter. The necessity of open dealing in all transactions connected with property was enforced upon the clergy by rendering it unlawful for a priest to receive gift or tithe except in the presence of “good and true men”—the Witnesses probably of a bargain between laymen—and he could not be summoned as a warranter without the testimony of “three leal men,” evidently the witnesses in question. If he named the donor, when the gift was challenged, and produced his three witnesses, the responsibility was shifted upon the person named, who, in addition to any other penalties, was bound to make good the value of the gift to the priest; and if the latter stated that the claimed property was his own, or, if cattle, reared by himself, his assertion was to be corroborated by the oaths of “three leal men;” and to guard against all undue influence, their credibility was to be vouched for by the lord of the Vill. It was not from any suspicion of the ecclesiastical body that the law required their evidence to be thus corroborated on such occasions, but rather from a perfect appreciation of the practice, not confined to cattle-lifters, of compounding for a course of evil doing by dedicating a portion of ill-gotten gains to the church. Hence the necessity of the lord of the Vill vouching for the credibility of the witnesses, thus becoming responsible for the penalties of their perjury; for the priest who was capable of receiving stolen goods would have scarcely hesitated at exercising the influence of his sacred character amongst ignorant, or unscrupulous, parishioners in order to clear himself from the consequences of his offence.[294]

The strictest regulations, however, would have been of little avail without securing the co-operation of the magnates of the land, whose right to hold a court with the privileges of “pit and gallows,” which in this reign carried with it jurisdiction in cases of theft and homicide, must have rendered such co-operation absolutely essential. Undue leniency towards offending relatives or dependants, and occasionally connivance in a Creagh for a share of the spoil—for a gift might purchase immunity from the overlord as well as absolution from the priest—must have been of only too frequent occurrence in an age in which escape from the gallows was so likely an event, evidently through a fellow feeling with the criminal, that the very first law in the collection ascribed to David, whilst ensuring the actual offender against a second hanging for the same offence, visited the consequences of his escape upon the officiating party as a crime of more than ordinary magnitude. Hence, as it was incumbent upon every freeman to seek the protection of a lord, it was equally necessary that such protection should be restrained within just and proper limits; and for “selling a thief” for money, friendship, or any other consideration whatever, a mulct of a hundred cows was levied upon an earl, or upon any magnate enjoying the rights and privileges of an earl—a description probably embracing the greater barons, the officers of state, the higher clergy, and subsequently the lords of Galloway, Argyle, and the Isles. The fine was reduced to thirty-four cows in the case of personages of lesser dignity; whilst if a thief escaped from prison, the lord of the prison was bound to clear himself from all complicity by the oaths of three Thanes and twenty-seven “good men and true;” the triple oath, in other words, of three Thanedoms or Baronies. The complicity of “the Baronage” in offences of this description was, but too often, a fruitful source of disorder; and in the subsequent reigns, the practice of taking money for “remission of judgment” was punished by withdrawing from “the lord,” found guilty of such an abuse, all further right of “holding a court:” and if, in return for a gift or rent of any description, he granted his protection to a man accused of crime, who was proved by the verdict of “the good men of the country” to be neither liegeman nor native-man of his protector, he was condemned for so doing to be “at the king’s mercy.”[295] Laws and enactments, however, are of little avail unless the lawmaker has the power of enforcing them, and long after the rule of the House of Atholl had passed away, the Scottish magnates, though capable of exercising their “rights of regality” in a very summary manner, were only too apt to overlook, if not to connive at, the excesses of an useful follower; though a true idea of the state of Scotland under the later successors of David would scarcely be gathered from confounding it with the state of the same country in the fourteenth, perhaps even in the following century; during which period the kingdom, at any rate in its more settled and civilized quarters, had decidedly retrograded rather than advanced from its condition in the thirteenth century.

Amongst the regulations either introduced, or confirmed, by David, at any rate beyond the Scots-water, the system of the Voisinage, or Visnet, holds a prominent place; through which the older forms of trial were gradually supplanted by the verdict of “the good men and true” of the neighbourhood. Two principles seem to have lain at the root of the whole system of justice—compurgation, and the ordeal. As individuality was unrecognized, or helpless, the testimony of a single witness was, except under certain circumstances, inadmissible; though the oath of a man of rank, or of a churchman, after the church had acquired worldly station, outweighed the oath of an inferior, and seems often to have been reckoned according to the proportion of their wergilds. Thus, amongst the Anglo-Saxons, two thanes appear to have answered to twelve compurgators of lesser note; five thanes to the triple oath of thirty in Wessex, though the number of the triple oath varied in Wessex, Mercia, and the Danelage; and a similar principle is traceable in the laws of the kindred Old Saxons of the Continent.[296] Compurgation was originally the duty of the kin, and the nearest relatives who received, or paid, the wergild were bound to come forward to take oath in behalf of any member of the brotherhood, every accusation being thus supported or repelled. The number of compurgators varied according to the importance of the case, judgment going against the party whose kin declined to come forward, or who failed in obtaining the required number. The accusation frequently had to be repelled by a number of compurgators doubling the amount of those who supported the charge; and on some occasions, to judge from the custom of the Imperial Benefice, each party went on increasing in number until the greater tourbe, the most numerous body of compurgators, carried the day; or else a final appeal seems to have been made to the ordeal.[297] Witnesses, in the modern sense of the word, are seldom or never alluded to; had they been examined, and borne testimony against a man, as at present, they would have legally had to “bear the feud” of his kindred—a danger actually provided against by one of William’s laws. In an age in which the duty of revenge was amongst the paramount obligations of the family tie, the kindred, in such a case, were only too ready to wreak their vengeance on all through whom their kinsman suffered; an offence which was visited with the highest fine for a breach of “the kings peace,” except the victim’s kindred had consented to the deed—had, in other words, declined “to bear the feud.” The extent to which the blood-feud was acknowledged, at this period, may be gathered from a proviso in the same law, that even if the king had “granted grace” to the offending parties, his pardon was of no avail unless it had been issued with the full knowledge of the kindred of the slaughtered man, who otherwise retained their legal right of vengeance on the homicide.[298] The liability of the kindred, however, must have enabled the jurisprudence of the age, in ordinary cases, to dispense with witnesses. The responsibility of the theft, or homicide, was thrown upon the district; and if the responsible parties failed to shift it elsewhere, the law visited them with the penalty. Publicity was the test of innocence, secresy of guilty intent. In the olden time, all who crossed the mark openly were welcomed as guests, safe and secure in the protection of the whole people, amongst whom they were sacred characters; but he who failed to give due notice of his approach, was slain at once as a foe or a thief; and in later days, the magnate travelling through the royal forest might always strike a deer or two if he first sounded his horn, to give due notice to the forester of his intention. He who slew his foe in open strife, proclaimed the deed, and told where the body lay—sometimes even if he left his weapon sticking in the wound—was never reckoned as a murderer, simply bearing the feud with his kindred, or paying the wergild; whilst by Old Saxon law, a murderer was fined nine times the ordinary mulct, his kinsmen only paying one-third of the usual wergild as their share of the fine, and being released from all consequences of the feud; evidently on the principle of their ignorance of the secret intentions of the murderer.[299] So, at a later date, it was the duty of the man who claimed his own cattle, or “impounded” that of another for debt, to proclaim it openly in the neighbourhood; when his neighbour, thus made aware of his intentions, might stop him if in the wrong, and assist or clear him on oath if right. Thus, publicity was necessary in all the transactions of social life; and as its neglect was assumed to imply a guilty purpose, and the kin, or the neighbourhood, was the joint security for all its members, it would naturally become a legal axiom of the age, that the kinsmen, or neighbours, were responsible that such publicity had been complied with, and liable to pay the penalty of any neglect.

For all who doubted their ability to muster the requisite number of compurgators—but too often, it is to be feared, for the friendless—the ordeal was the last resource; either water, cold or boiling; hot iron; or the wager of battle.[300] In primitive societies the sword has ever been the freeman’s last appeal—still remaining so where they congregate in numbers sufficient to constitute a separate state—and the early Germans looked upon every other mode of settling a disputed question as a novel and unheard of method of proceeding.[301] Many of the rights which have long been made over to the state were in early times supposed to be vested in every full-born member of the community, continuing until a comparatively recent period, to be more or less enjoyed by the great and privileged; and it must have been the aim of the early lawgiver to control and regulate rights which he could not supersede; just as in Scotland the royal official directed the judgment of the Barons’ Court long before he superseded its jurisdiction. As long as the constituted authorities were too weak, or too feebly supported, to retain the sword of justice in their own hands, it is evident that it remained in the power of every free kindred to execute the vengeance which the laws allowed; and when the suit had not been compounded, or the feud appeased, the criminal, instead of being “left for execution,” was simply handed over to the legal vengeance of his enemies; just as amongst the Israelites of old it was not from the official, but from the avenger of kindred blood, that the unintentional homicide fled to the city of refuge. Men, under certain circumstances, were allowed “to take the law into their own hands;” the thief caught by the “sequela clamoris viciniæ”—the hue and cry of the neighbourhood—with the stolen cattle in his possession, was hung without ceremony; and in their rules for tracing stolen cattle, the men of London-burh were bidden to be foremost, not in delivering the thief to justice, but in taking prompt and summary vengeance on him. The regulations in the Anglo-Saxon laws for clearing the man slain for a thief, show that the well-known proverb about “Jeddart justice,” has been scarcely exaggerated—“Hang first and try afterwards.”[302] The wager of battle naturally arose out of such a state of society, when the “ultima ratio regum,” with other royal prerogatives, was regarded as the right of every full-born freeman; and the same arguments, which are now used to palliate warfare between states, might then have been urged in favour of the freeman’s last appeal. Disseisin, when the freeman was dispossessed of his property, was simply invasion on a lesser scale; and as long as the central authority was inefficient to rectify the wrong, and reinstate the rightful owner, all that it could promise was “non-intervention,”—open lists for the combat, and death to all who interfered; whilst in doubtful charges affecting a man’s life, it was quite in accordance with the rude justice of the age, that, as a last resource, the accused might defend his head with his hand. The challenger faced the west, the challenged party the east, and he who was defeated lost all “right” for ever; though, if he “craved” his life, he might live as a “recreant,” a craven who “recanted” the perjury he had sworn to; so that most brave men must have fought to the death. Compurgation, which passed into the English law as “the wager of law,” and was not quite forgotten in the Perthshire highlands in the early part of the seventeenth century, was probably one of the first compromises of the ancient “wager of battle”—perhaps suggested by the softening influence of Christianity[303]—the same number of the kindred who formed the Wer-borh, or cleared their kinsman on oath, having, perhaps, in early times, like the second in a duel of the seventeenth century, stood beside him occasionally in the actual combat, or kept the ground during its progress—one of the latest instances in Scotland of such a combat on a great scale being, perhaps, the well-known contest on the North Inch of Perth.[304]

Compurgation and ordeal seem to have been as familiar to the Celts as to the Teutons, until by degrees the system known of old in English law as the “Jugement del Pais,” superseded all the earlier methods of trial. Amongst the early Germans, a leading magnate, or prince, was chosen in the yearly meeting to judge the people, making the tour of the whole confederacy, with a hundred comites to assist and support him in his decisions; the Vergobreith amongst the Gauls being a very similar character, though, from the peculiar separative principle of Gallic policy, the Druids supplied the place of the Comites, the exposition of the law being one of the prerogatives of the sacred caste. Every freeman, therefore, was tried in the open Mall, or court, of his own district by a judge, in whose appointment he was supposed to have a voice; and in the presence of his equals, or of the class to which all legal and religious obligations were deputed. For his family, his Hird or followers, his Lœts and serfs—for all who were in his mund or under his protection—he was himself the judge; and as the class of Comites increased in numbers, a greater body of freemen was transferred, so to say, from the jurisdiction of the public to that of the private judge, thus exhibiting the spectacle of a free population living, in a certain sense, according to different laws. This is nowhere better exemplified than in the case of Sweden in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when the whole of the Bonders, or allodial proprietary, were under the jurisdiction of their chosen Lagaman, none of “the king’s men” having a right to enter the Bonders’ Court without their permission, where, when the king was present, the Lagaman sat on a raised seat opposite the royal throne, on the footing of all but equality.[305] A similar spectacle may have been exhibited, in a certain stage of society, wherever a kingdom arose out of a number of small allodial communities; but after the various members of the Frank confederacy were united in one kingdom, under the race of Merovic, the different laws acknowledged in the historical period were, not allodial and royal, but Salic and Roman—a distinction generally observable wherever a people of Teutonic race settled as conquerors in the Roman provinces. Amongst the Burgundians, indeed, where the Roman and his conqueror were on a footing of comparative equality, two royal officials administered justice in the same court, each people being judged by a Count of their own race, and according to the laws of Gundobald, or the code of Rome; but with the Franks, amongst whom the Roman was an inferior, there was but one official, the Graphio, or Judex Fiscalis, whose authority extended, though in a different degree, over both races. The Roman was judged solely by the royal official, who was bidden when in doubt “to read the Roman law;”[306] but in all cases in which the Frank was tried by the old Salic law, the official, whether Missus or Fiscal judge, simply pronounced the sentence, the real judges of the cause being the Scabini. Originally seven in number, latterly twelve, the Scabini were always chosen by the Graphio, or the Missus, from amongst the “Meliores Pagenses,” or leading proprietary of the district in which the cause was tried; and in cases of doubt reference was made, not to a written code, but to “nostrum placitum generale,” representing the whole community in general Mall or meeting; just as the Scabini represented the “proportio visnetæ,” or the chosen portion of proprietors acting in the name of the whole neighbourhood. The same principle was extended to every lesser court, whether public or private; three Sagibarones pronounced judgment in the court of the Canton; and when Sigwald the priest, and Dodilo the noble—representing respectively the ecclesiastical and lay element, as in the association of the Bishop with the Ealdorman in the old Anglo-Saxon Shire-gemote—sat as Missi, or deputies, of Hincmar in the archi-episcopal court of Rheims, the judgment was pronounced by eight Scabini chosen from amongst the leading Frank-tenantry of the archbishop.[307] This difference between the Roman and the Teutonic systems is even yet recognisable in English law—all questions falling within the province of the great official, who derives his origin from the institutions of Rome, the Chancellor, being settled by the fiat of the royal official alone; but whenever the freeman is put on his trial for life or liberty, his fate is still decided by “the Jugement del Pais,” the verdict of his own Visnet or neighbourhood—unless for some sufficient reason the venue is changed to another Visnet or neighbourhood—the presiding judge simply passing sentence according to the verdict thus given; though in modern times the jury, and not the judge, leave the court. Every Germanic people seems to have clung with tenacity to this principle, and after the law of the Benefice, mostly founded on the Roman Code, had replaced allodialism in Eastern Germany, it is still recognizable in the stipulation that no man should be deprived of his Benefice—for the jus Beneficiale had now replaced allodial right—except “by the judgment of his peers”—the identical principle maintained by the Anglo-Norman barons against the encroachments, not of the Norman William, but of the Angevin Henry and his sons.[308]

There is not a trace of any similar institution amongst the earlier Anglo-Saxons, as far as it is possible to judge from the collection of laws in force in Wessex and Saxon Mercia during the reign of Alfred. The king’s Ealdorman or his junior—the Vicarius, not the Vicecomes—presided in the ancient Folk-mote, which was held in every shire or district under an Ealdorman; and as every freeholder was bound to be present at a meeting of this description, justice appears to have been administered according to the ancient custom, in the presence of the whole free population; though not by a Lagaman chosen by the people, but by an official appointed by the crown. A solitary passage in the laws of Athelstan seems to point to the exercise of judicial functions by the “Meliores Pagenses” in the reign of Alfred’s grandson; for in cases of manslaughter and fire-raising, if the accused was found guilty, it was “to stand within the doom of the Senior men of the Burgh whether he should have his life or not.” The principle was in full force, during the reign of Ethelred, amongst the Anglo-Danes of the Mercian confederacy, twelve of the Senior Thanes binding themselves to administer true justice with the Reeve in the Gemote; unanimity in their verdict being aimed at by fining the dissentient minority, when two-thirds of their number had agreed, the whole amount of the sum which each had deposited as a wed—the decision of the majority carrying the verdict, continuing to be a feature distinguishing the Scottish from the English jury at the present day.[309] No innovation appears to have been introduced amongst the Gaelic people upon the older custom of assembling the whole free population of the district, confederacy, or kingdom, in annual or occasional meetings, which in the settled parts of the country were by this time probably represented by the assemblages of the thanedom, the earldom, and the great meeting in which the sovereign presided in person; for it is still possible to trace the existence of district, provincial, and royal judges, who must have had a part assigned to them in each separate assemblage of this description. Four “Courts” are alluded to in the Welsh laws, but the free proprietary had probably little to do with the courts of the Breyr and of the Tawg-tref—the Baron’s and the Villein Court—their attendance being only required at the courts of the Cymmud and of the king—for the earldom was unknown in Wales—where, in the absence of the sovereign, the Effeiriad, the Distyn and the Brawddwr-Llys presided; or the royal chaplain (the equivalent perhaps of the Scandinavian Hird-Bishop), the high-steward as president of all the Maers, and the court judge as senior of all the Cynghellwrs.[310] It was in a great assembly of the whole free population of the united people that “the laws of Aodh the Fair,” involving, probably, the right of his descendants to the throne, were recognised in the reign of the first Donald; a similar assemblage under Constantine the Second, on the Moot Hill of Scone, appears to have ratified, or assented to, the ecclesiastical constitution of the Scottish church of that period; and it was in great meetings of a similar description, and at the same place, that it was “the custom of the Scots” to choose their kings, or rather perhaps to confirm the selection of their Seniors.[311] The affairs of a province, or Mormaordom, appear to have been regulated in a similar assemblage on a smaller scale; and a description of such a meeting in the olden time will be found in the Registry of the Priory of St. Andrews, part of the property of the priory having been held by a verdict given in a general assembly of the province. When Sir Robert Burgoin encroached upon the lands of Kirkinnis an appeal was at once made to king David, who despatched his messengers throughout the united district of Fife and Fotheriff to convene the people of the province. The place of meeting is not mentioned; but thither came Earl Constantine of Fife, “a discreet and eloquent man,” at this time Justiciary of Scotland, with “the Satraps, Satellites, and Hosting” of the county; or the free proprietary who held under the Mormaor, with their kinsmen, and the followers who would have been known amongst the Northmen as Thingmen. The presence of the Bishop is not alluded to, but thither came his Hosting, or all the Frank-tenantry of the broad lands restored by Alexander to the church, under the captaincy of Budadh and Slogodadh—Toshachs or leaders apparently of the military contingent due from the church-lands in the province—and under the presidency of Macbeth, Thane of Falkland, probably the Maor, Baillie, or Vidame of the bishop. When the whole community of the province was assembled, three arbiters were chosen to try the case,—Earl Constantine as justiciary; Maldonaeth Mac Machedach, “a good and discreet judge,” the Brehon probably of the province; and Dugal Mac Moccha, on account of his venerable age,—the number of the arbiters exactly coinciding with the number of judges in a Welsh court. The cause was conducted on the principle of compurgation—in earlier times it would have been decided by battle—the abbot in legal phrase “swearing se sexta manu;” or, in other words, Abbot Dubtach and five of his clergy testified, by an oath sworn on the altar, to the boundaries in dispute. As no notice is taken of the defence, it is impossible to say whether Sir Robert failed in producing his twelve compurgators—for he would have been bound to “lay twelve hands” on the altar—or whether the oaths of his “jury” were disbelieved; the arbiters, deferring to Dugal from his experience and “knowledge of law,” pronounced in favour of the Culdees; and a notice of the transaction, entered in the Registry of the Priory of St. Andrews, attested the right of that foundation to the property in question, as heirs of the Culdees of Kirkinnis.[312]

Such was the legal process, during the earlier portion of David’s reign, for settling the numerous cases of disputed boundaries, which, by the same king’s subsequent regulations, were decided by the “perambulation” of the “good men and true” of the neighbourhood, and in the presence of the royal Missi, or other notabilities, appointed as “unlying witnesses” of the proceeding. There is no trace at this period of the Vicecomes in Fifeshire, though he existed in other quarters beyond the Forth; nor of the “Jugement del Pais,” by which the arbiters chosen in public Moot were replaced by the good men and true of the country, appointed by the royal official. As the division of power, so remarkable amongst the Gauls in the days of Cæsar, was still traceable in the delegation of authority to two officials, so the restriction of all judicial functions to the Druids would almost appear to have survived, in a certain sense, in the limitation of similar functions to their representatives, the Cynghellwrs, Brehons, or Deempsters. Thus the Hereban levied during the reign of the second Alexander upon all who failed to attend the Hosting against Donald Mac Niel, was settled at Perth, on the second Thursday in Lent, “by all the Judges of Scotia;” condemnation was pronounced against Gillescop Mahohegan on “the Tuesday before St. Denis” at Edinburgh, “by all the united Judges of Galloway and Scotland;” the “Judges of Galloway” assessed the fine for a breach of the king’s peace; and when the king crossed the borders of a province in his great circuit, all the Judges of the district were still bound, in the reign of William, to be in attendance upon the royal court until it reached the frontiers of another province. Pure blood and property qualified the Teuton to be chosen as a Scabinus, but the Celtic Judge seems to have been selected from a family of Brehons.[313]

It was probably, then, upon a system acknowledging the usual Ordeals of water and iron, the Wager of battle, and Compurgation “by oath sworn on the altar, according to the custom of Scotland,” and in which justice was generally administered by the district, provincial, or royal judge, whether inheriting his office, nominated by the crown, or chosen as arbiter in the public Moot, that David introduced the “Jugement del Pais” or Visnet; which must have, ere long, replaced the judgment of the earlier Brehon, or Deempster, by the verdict of “the good men of the country,” or the leading proprietary of the neighbourhood. Henceforth judgment was to be given by “the free-tenants, suitors of the Court,” sentence only being pronounced according to their verdict by the Judge, Sheriff, Alderman, or Bailiff, who was bound to leave the Court during their deliberation; and in process of time, the representative of the ancient president of the Gaelic Court of justice sunk so low, that the holder of the office of Deempster, which had long been shifted upon the lowest official of the law, no longer appeared at all in Court, except to pronounce that sentence of death which he himself was bound to execute—he was the Hangman. Every man, whether Earl, Baron, Vavassor, or Burgess, was entitled to be tried by his Peers, though one of lesser standing might be judged by the verdict of his superiors. Damages, or the amount of injuries sustained, were to be assessed by men of credit—fide-digni, the “unlying witnesses” of Athelstan’s Laws; and in challenge of battle, the sum deposited was to be estimated, not according to the claim of the challenger, but by “the assize of the good country,” the “body of the defender” being reckoned as one-third of the amount; whilst if a man accused of theft could prove, to the satisfaction of a similar jury, that the complainant had never possessed as much property as he charged the accused with stealing, the latter was to be at once acquitted by their verdict. Jurisdiction in the four greater causes known as “the Crown-pleas”—murder, rape, robbery, and fire-raising—was removed from the lesser Courts, no Alderman or Baron’s Bailiff being permitted to try such cases unless by special mandate of the Justiciary or “his attorney;” and it was ordered, that in every county a royal Moot was to be held “within forty days,” or six week’s after the issue of the king’s writ, which was to be attended by the Bishop, the Earl, the Vicecomes, and by every free proprietor who was “Lord of a Vill.” All direct appeals to the king were prohibited, except in cases connected with the Crown-pleas, or where the officials in a lesser Court had failed to do their duty; and if the last law, ascribed to David, is not misplaced, all questions connected with property and inheritance were to be referred to the decision of “the assize of the good country.” The heir, no longer chosen according to the Law of Tanistry, by the kindred, was to be declared successor by the voice of “the good men of the neighbourhood;” whilst the claimant of property held by another—he who urged that he had been unjustly disseised—was not to support his claim by an appeal to the sword, but to submit it to the verdict of a similar jury.[314] The older system, however, appears to have been reluctantly abandoned, or at any rate to have died out very gradually; and in Galloway, which, after its closer union with the rest of Scotland, retained its peculiar code until the days of the first Edward and Robert Bruce, the was the exception and not the rule, none being judged according to its provisions except they refused the older law, and claimed Visnet. The Ordeal, the Wager of battle, and the Wager of Law, long held their ground side by side with the Verdict of the “good men and true,” for most of the ordinary trials of “Common Pleas;” and it seems doubtful even if in other quarters besides Galloway it were not open to the contending parties, at a much later period, to choose between the “Jugement del Pais,” and the misnamed “Judgment of God.”[315]

Another of the innovations upon “ancient custom,” traceable apparently to the reigns of Alexander and David, though more particularly to the reign of the latter king, was the introduction of the written charter as the necessary evidence of the right to freehold property. It was long before any of the northern nations attached importance to the written documents, which were at the basis of the whole system of free rights, or property, held by Roman law. He who was freed “by tablet” ranked merely as a Roman citizen, reckoned at half the value of the man freed in open Court “by casting the denarius;” and when the horn of the Graphio summoned the Voisinage around the body of the murdered man, or when the suspended shield of the Centenarius marked the spot where the Mall was to be held, the parchment writ would have been unheeded by the Frank living by Salic Law, or despised as an unmeaning formula of the Roman. Liability was transferred, or responsibility was shifted, by casting a small stick into the lap, or by throwing a handful of earth, in open Mall, or before witnesses; and allodial right was alone acquired by undisputed possession for a term of years, or by descent. The earliest application of the Roman principle appears in the royal grant equivalent to the Franc-Alleu-noble—the permanent alienation of a certain portion of the Fiscal or Folk-land, in which, by ancient custom, the king, or the community, held a life interest alone: a similar process, some centuries later, converting the Benefice into the hereditary Feud, held by written charter. The royal grant of Bocland had long been familiar to the Anglo-Saxons as the sole known form of permanent property; but the Benefice, rather than the chartered Feud, was its equivalent amongst the Normans in the earlier part of the eleventh century; and when they adopted the Charter after the Conquest, it was always in the old Anglo-Saxon form, which can scarcely be supposed to have been brought from the Continental Duchy; and it was accordingly in this form that it penetrated subsequently into Scotland.[316]

It is only from indirect evidence that it can be gathered that the Charter became necessary, to prove the existence of freehold right, from the time of David. The charters ascribed to Duncan II., and Edgar, were connected with the Saxon Church of Durham. They were attested, apparently, by witnesses of Saxon, or Danish, descent, connected probably with the diocese—Ligulf of Bamborough, for example—and drawn up by Saxon monks after the manner of their own country; so that they afford no proof whatever of the existence, or the necessity, of public, much less of private, documents of this description beyond the Forth at the opening of the twelfth century; and when Alexander restored to the Church the lands which had lapsed to the kings of Scotland, as hereditary abbots of St. Andrews, the re-grant was completed with all the studied ceremonial and display of “ancient custom.”[317] A different course, indeed, was adopted at Scone; when, for the first time, perhaps, was displayed the unwonted spectacle of six Gaelic Mormaors affixing crosses to the signatures, which some clerkly scribe had attached to a written document, confirming a munificent donation of lands and privileges to the royal foundation: but no private charters can be traced to an earlier date than the reign of David, who appears to have first introduced them into his principality of Scottish Cumbria. No law or enactment of any description has been left on the subject; but a statute of William, by which all who were found guilty of forging a royal charter were to be placed “at the king’s mercy”—the forgery of a similar grant from a subject being also punishable, but as a minor offence—affords the surest evidence of the necessity of a charter, at that period, in proof of freehold rights.[318] The habit of forging such evidence must have arisen out of the necessity of a written title-deed, a similar necessity accounting for the multiplicity of such forgeries in southern Britain; where a legend was occasionally framed for a similar purpose, or a saint appeared in a vision to afford miraculous, but suspicious, testimony about the extent and privileges of his ancient patrimony. Henceforth the Charter marked the Freeholder, or the member of the Community of the Realm; and whilst in southern Britain knight-service was the test of gentle birth, the holder by free socage, and the Kentish Gaveller, being only classed amongst the yeomanry, in Scotland a similar test was afforded by the Charter; and in the reign of Alexander II., all who were knights, sons of knights, or holders of any portion of a knight’s fee, and all who held their lands by free service, or by “fie-de-hauberc,” hereditarily and by charter, ranked, with their sons, as men of free and gentle birth, who could appear in the lists by their champion; the churl-born tenant of land, the man of ignoble birth, and all who had neither free tenement, nor free parentage, being bound to appear in person. It was from the former class that the “good men and true” were chosen to perform the duties of the Voisinage, and before the middle of the thirteenth century none could be sworn to hold inquest touching “the life or limbs of a land or grass holding man,” except, “good men and true, freeholders by charter.”[319]

It can scarcely, then, be doubted that David was the originator of that important change by which a fixed title to land was acquired, produceable when necessary in proof of ownership—a change which, in connection with the formal perambulation of boundaries, in the presence of “the good men and true,” must have done much to put a stop to those constant disputes about proprietorship, which had hitherto been settled by the sword. David is often represented, in modern times, as the exterminator of his fellow-countrymen, granting their lands to foreigners, and driving out the native Scottish race, or enslaving them beneath the yoke of alien masters—a course that could have hardly earned the character ascribed to him by his friend and biographer Ailred, “he was beloved by his own people the Scots, and feared by the men of Galloway.” It would be nearer the truth, perhaps, to describe him as the great confirmer of proprietary right throughout the settled portion of his kingdom; and it still seems possible to point out the method which was adopted to carry out his purpose. By a law of a much later period it was decided that the freeholder was not bound to produce his charter to his overlord more than once, after which it was to be returned to him immediately. It may be gathered, from this regulation, that there were occasions on which the land-holder might be required to prove his title to ownership; and the kings of Scotland, at a later period, are sometimes found amongst the Western Highlands demanding charters, and confiscating the property, or rather the freehold rights, of all who could not produce the necessary title-deed. Thus, at the opening of the fourteenth century, every Vicecomes was commanded to attend “our council,” with the other magnates of the realm, and to warn his bailies, amongst other duties, “to summon all who have, without license, entered upon lands alienated after the death of our predecessor Alexander, to show their right to do so”—a right which could only be proved by a written document. How such a title was originally acquired may be gathered from the example of Eogan, Thane of Rothenec, who appeared at Inverness on the Monday before St. Andrew’s Day, in the year 1262, and in the presence of the Bishop of Ross, the Justiciary of Scotland, and the Sheriff of Elgin, proved to the satisfaction of the good men and true of the neighbourhood, that the lands of Mefth, with a house in Elgin Castle, which had been given by William to Yothre Mac Gillies, had been held uninterruptedly by Eogan and Angus, son and grandson of the first recipient of the grant; passing from the last-named Angus to his son Eogan, the actual Thane of Rothenec, who was thus the fourth in descent from the original holder. The written and attested verdict of the good men and true, formed, from this time forward, the chartered title-deed of the lands of Mefth; and it may be conjectured that, at the first introduction of the Charter, all who claimed the right of freehold proprietorship were bound to attend the royal Moot, and prove to the satisfaction of the good men and true, the necessary qualification of three descents of ownership. He who was thus qualified could claim a charter as his title from the king, earl, thane, or ecclesiastical superior, of whom he held his lands; whilst in the case of all who failed in proving the necessary qualification, it would remain in the power of their overlord, either to confirm their proprietorship by the wished-for title, or to enter upon the land as lapsed “demesne.”[320]

From this period two classes of Freeholders, besides the Earls and greater Barons, may be traced in Scotland, who may be compared to the Vavassors or Mesné tenants of the corresponding era in Southern Britain; the holders by knight-service, who grew into the Lairds, or lesser Barons, of a later age; and the holders by Scottish service, who were, with few exceptions, confined to the northward of the Forth.[321] The latter were the Thanes, who, on the occasion of the festivities at York in 1251, when Paris notices the presence of more than sixty Scottish knights, were also in attendance upon their youthful sovereign, at least in equal numbers.[322] The lowest amongst the Freeholders appears to have been the proprietor of half a plough-land—the eighth part of a Davoch or of a Fief de Hauberk—containing fifty-two Scottish acres; the holder of that amount of land, by free service, and by charter, answering to the proprietor of the Half-holding, wherever the Imperial Law of the Benefice was acknowledged, who, though widely changed in character, is still known in the United Kingdom as “the forty shilling freeholder.” The Quarter-holding of two ox-gangs, or twenty-six Scottish acres, answering to the Anglo-Saxon Virgate or quarter-hyde, and known in many parts of Scotland as the Husband-land, gave no pretensions originally to freehold rights.[323] Scottish service was probably most popular in early times with the native Scots, for it accorded best with their custom of planting the junior branches of the family upon the land, liable to rent, as well as to general military service—a system which may have also had its attractions in the eyes of the greater Barons, who held their own lands by knight-service of the Crown—but it died out gradually in the more settled portions of the kingdom; and, in the case of certain well-known families, the charters can still be produced by which the ancestral Thanedom was converted into a Barony. The earlier system was traceable in the Highlands as late as the opening of the seventeenth century, when the proprietors were divided into Lords, Lairds—greater and lesser Barons—and royal Bailies of lands, the latter holding in fee-farm, and answering to the Thanes of an earlier period.[324] The patronymic, as distinguished from the surname, still lingered in the same quarter, where the Tighern was known for his descent, rather than from his property, though the custom was even then fast giving way; and at the present time, in no part of the United Kingdom is the territorial appellation so generally used as in the Scottish Highlands, where “the Laird” is often better known by the name of his property than by his own surname. A similar change had been in progress in ancient Scotia long before it penetrated to the wilds of Moravia and Argyle; and after the introduction of the charter, when the privileges of free and gentle birth, hitherto attached to a certain degree of relationship to a thane, were transferred to the chartered freehold, the freeholder, whether of native or foreign origin, gradually became known from his barony or freehold; and as none but the greater Norman barons were distinguished, as at present, by a separate surname, the property itself supplied a designation for its owner. Thus by degrees the whole of the freehold proprietary, without distinction of race, relinquishing the shifting patronymic which had hitherto belonged as much to the Saxon and the Northman as to the Gael, adopted surnames from those chartered properties, which ensured to them the privileges of free and gentle birth, which had formerly attached to descent.[325]

If David may be looked upon as the regulator of the “Two Estates,”—the Clergy, and the Baronage and Freeholders connected with the land,—he may be regarded as the founder of the “Third Estate” in Scotland, the actual creator of the free population connected with the towns. An intramural population was an anomaly amongst the people of the North, and in their older codes no provision was made for a free proprietary dwelling in towns, land, and land only, being connected with freedom and hereditary right. It is only in the old Burgundian code that the craftsman connected with the city is mentioned, and he was placed by the regulations of Gundobald upon a servile footing. It scarcely admits of a doubt, indeed, that a civic population, for which no provision was made in any Germanic code, must have lived, whether free or servile, by Roman law, retaining probably their original institutions, after they survived the first fury of the storm, without much interference from their conquerors; nor would the privileges subsequently belonging to free towns have been of much moment, had there not been a time when all such communities were neither free nor privileged. Britain, however, was peculiarly situated, no Roman population remaining to preserve the civilized institutions of imperial despotism, side by side with the rude, but free, traditions of their Anglo-Saxon conquerors—most fortunately for the liberties of England—and as no regulations for a free civic proprietary are traceable in the earlier Anglo-Saxon laws, it may be doubted whether any such proprietary existed. The shattered remnants of the old Roman cities of the island became the property of the owners of the district in which they were situated—petty kings and Ealdormen originally, like Hrofa and Cissa, who gave their names to Hrofa’s ceaster and Cissa’s ceaster, Rochester and Chichester; and latterly the sovereign of one of the greater states, or the nobleman to whom he entrusted the district—the population remaining probably on a Lœtic or dependant footing, the Teutonic element entering very little into its composition in early times. The British town, according to Cæsar, was a portion of the forest separated from the rest by a bank and ditch, the Briton in time of danger securing his cattle and family within the precincts of this “circumvallation;” and as amongst several of the Germanic tribes the same word Wic meant a grove, a temple, and a town, it may be surmised that the original Wick was a portion of the forest similarly encircled with a bank and ditch, and used as a temple for the gods, and a place of security in times of danger, instead of the caves which, in the days of Tacitus, appear to have been used, for places of concealment rather than for defence. London-wic and other British towns may have occasionally supplied the place of such earlier and ruder “places of strength,” the resident population remaining on a dependant footing, and the freeholders of the vicinity not habitually dwelling within the walls, but sheltering themselves behind them in times of danger; for the Tun of the Gesithcundman was scarcely capable of defence, and the Ceorl’s Hedge was only calculated to keep out cattle. Such seems to have been the case at the time of the Danish wars, when the walls were seldom of a more formidable construction than a strong wooden palisade, and were easily broken through at the great battle of York. As soon as he had saved the monarchy, Alfred directed his attention, as much to remedying this defect, as to reviving letters amongst his subjects, or building ships to protect the coast, constantly impressing the necessity of building Burhs upon his Reeves and Ealdormen, and providing skilled artificers—a sure test of the ignorance of such arts amongst his own people—to carry out his projects. London-wic, plundered and ruined by the Danes, arose from its ashes as London-burh, and was made over—geset or let—by Alfred to his daughter’s husband, the Mercian Ealdorman. The history of the next reign, after Edward was once securely seated on his throne, is one continual record of the progress of Burh-building and Hlaford-socn—or Commendation—the Burh-bote, a permanent obligation attached to all property held of the crown, whether church-land or thegn-land, binding the churchman or thegn to keep in repair the Burh with which his land was connected, such associations being entered into for defence, not for trade; and it would be a grave error to mistake the Anglo-Danish confederacy of “the Five Burghs,” or the men of London-Burgh in the days of Athelstane—the Burh-Thegns as they are often called—whose Bishops and Reeves were bound to keep the peace, as ordered by the king and his Witan, for mercantile or trading communities. The rules laid down by the London Reeves and Bishops at this period will be found to relate to tracing stolen cattle, and keeping their “Hirdmen” in order; but it is vain to look for the regulations about trades and craftsmen, which will be found invariably in later Burghal laws.[326]

Amongst the innovations introduced by the Normans, it may be read in the Saxon Chronicle how “they wrought castles throughout the land,” novelties to the people of the country, who seem to have retained much of that old Germanic aversion to castles which is traceable in the Frison law against building stone walls above a certain height; and accordingly from this time the Scots no longer swept the country in their invasions to the gates of Durham, but were stopped at Werk, Norham, and other feudal strongholds which they were obliged to invest, or if they advanced further into the country, to blockade. The royal castle was now attached to the royal burgh, and its garrison provided by the knights who held their lands by the tenure of castle-guard; the neighbouring gentry probably, differing little from the thegns who in earlier times had been bound to keep the burgh in repair. The name of Burgher henceforth undoubtedly belonged only to the actual possessors of property within the walls, the bulk of whom had probably from the earliest period of their location within burgh formed the commercial part—the Twyhyndmen, as the Upland thegns were the Twelfhyndmen—of the community. It was the Anglo-Norman Burgh, with its feudal castle, and its civic population distinct and separate from the garrison, which was the model of the burghs established, or confirmed, by David beyond the Tweed. It may be doubted whether any free communities engaged in commerce, and occupying walled towns, were in existence much before this reign even in the Lothians, though the germs of such societies may have existed at Scone, Edinburgh, Stirling, and other places, which were of a certain importance at that early period. Had there been burghs or walled towns in any part of Saxon Northumbria before the close of the eleventh century, the invading Scots would have surely been checked before they reached the gates of Durham; the unopposed incursion of the Second Constantine as far as the Tees marking apparently the non-existence, in that quarter, of any walled town in the middle of the tenth century, capable of arresting the progress of a hostile force. As the sees of Glasgow and St. Andrews may be regarded as the models left by David for the regulation of the other Scottish bishoprics, so the Hanse or community of the Four Burghs of Roxburgh, Berwick, Edinburgh, and Stirling, was the leading commercial association of the same reign, all other burghs as they grew into existence conforming to its rules and ordinances; and as the Hanse was composed of four burghs, so each Burgh seems to have been originally divided into four Wards—in strict accordance with the theory which divided in a similar way the great rural association of the shire into four quarters. Over every Ward was placed a Bailie, a type of the rural “Mair of the Quarter,” and sometimes known, like the President of the Frison Quarter, as the Ferthyngman; the leading personage being the Burgh-Reeve, or Provost, annually chosen, with the Bailies and Bedells, by the community of the Burghers in the first Burgh-Moot held after Michaelmas.[327] Complete self-government, indeed, was conferred, from the outset, upon the Scottish Burghers by a sovereign who was desirous of attracting such a class to his kingdom; and the enlightened policy of David, together with the state of peace and prosperity which he secured for the whole of the North of England, as well as for the settled portion of his own kingdom, soon filled the walled towns, which rapidly sprung up on every side, with a crowd of willing settlers from Southern Britain and Flanders, who were guaranteed the enjoyment of even more than the usual freedom and privileges under the royal protection. They were to be judged by their own chosen magistrates, by “the verdict of their peers”—a privilege shared, indeed, with every Scottish freeholder—and according to the laws and assize of the Burgh, sanctioned by the community, and regulated by the Provost and twelve leading men. As in the case of the Baron’s Court, the crown pleas were withdrawn from the jurisdiction of the Provost and Bailies, but the royal justiciary, or his deputy, sat in the Burgh-Court; the verdict was given by the “good men and true” of the community; and no summons made by a royal serjeant was valid, unless he was accompanied by the Town Bedell. Every burgher was bound to possess at least one rood of land in the burgh, for which he paid five pence yearly to the king; and to swear fealty to the sovereign, the magistrates, and the community of the burgh—for the tie which bound the burgher was the old fealty of the Leud, not the homage of the Antrustion with its attendant obligations; he plighted his troth with his hand upon the Sacred Volume, not placed between the hands of his overlord “after the Frank custom.” In this, and in other points, burgage-tenure much resembled the tenures of socage, and of gavelkind, which approached the earlier allodial custom, looked upon in later times as Roturier; but from Merchet, Heriot, and other exactions which had passed, with the principles of service and dependance, into many of the tenures of the age, the Scottish Burgher was exempt; as well as from the wardship which was attached to knight-service. The heir, if a minor, remained with his “chattels” in the custody of his mother’s relatives, the father’s kindred taking the charge of the “heritage;” this heritage being strictly entailed upon the heir, who could stop those deathbed transfers of property which were occasionally suggested by designing personages, whether lay or clerical. Under certain circumstances, such as the fear of starvation, even the Allod might be parted with; and similarly the “Capital Messuage” might be sold, or the property alienated, if the heir was either unwilling, or unable, to relieve his father’s necessities, or to pay his father’s debts; the Burghal Code justifying this exception from the ordinary rule by the admission that “nede has na law.” Twelve witnesses were required for the purchase of a burgage tenement, the twelve next door neighbours apparently, who stood in the place of the kindred of earlier times—the occupants of the four houses on either side and of the four immediately opposite; and if the tenement was held without dispute for a year and a day—the period which also seems, from time immemorial, to have conferred the right of participating in the privileges of “the neighbourhood” in the rural districts—it became the absolute property of the purchaser, unless the former owner could show that he was a minor, or beyond sea, at the time of the purchase. The perfect freedom of burgage tenure was ensured by the provision that “If any man’s thryll, baron’s or knight’s, comes to the burgh and buys a burgage, and dwells in his burgage a twelvemonth and a day, without challenge of his lord or his baillie, he shall be ever more free as a burgess within that king’s burgh, and enjoy the freedom of that burgh;” an enactment, not so much aimed at encouraging fugitive native-men from the rural districts to settle in the towns, as against a previous state of society which still exists in Russia—or existed lately—in which the bondman might rise to wealth and station as a citizen, without shaking off the thraldom which bound him to his original proprietor. As, after the enfranchisement of towns, the undisputed possession of a burgage tenement for a year and a day conferred the proprietorship of a freehold, it necessarily carried with it, like the gift of arms at an earlier period, the indisputable rights of a freeholder.[328]

Every fortnight a Moot was held within the burgh, at which every burgher within the walls was bound to be present—in winter, before Undern, or nine o’clock in the morning; and at Midmorn during the summer—a greater Burgh-moot being assembled at Michaelmas, Christmas, and Easter, at which the presence of every upland burgher was also required, their absence being punished by the highest fine levied—the full forfeiture—as the burgher who dwelt without the walls was excused attendance upon the lesser moots. The general Burgh-moot was evidently a relic of the time before the separation of the Castle from the Burgh, when the upland thegns were bound, under heavy penalty, to meet three times a-year to fulfil the duties of their tenure; the lesser moots, and the general regulations of the burgh having been probably left very much to the Twyhyndmen who dwelt within the walls. A watch was established for the security of the town; and at the stroke of a staff upon the door, an inmate was bound to come forth from every burgher’s house, and, armed with two weapons, to join in keeping watch and ward over the sleeping burgh from couvre-feu to cockcrow, the houses of widows alone being exempted from this duty. The trades were under the general superintendence of the Probi homines, or leading men of the burgh, and some of their regulations are remarkable. The baker whose bread was not made and placed openly, in the window, for sale, was fined “full forfeiture,” and his bread confiscated for the use of the poor—a somewhat questionable method of disposing of it, if the law was to punish its adulteration. The provision dealer was obliged to sell all that was in his house beyond the value of fourpence, if required, on the plea that it was public property—an enactment levelled, probably, against hoarding provisions in a time of scarcity for private use, or for profit; for when famines were of frequent occurrence, the dealer in the necessaries of life might be tempted to speculate in his neighbours need. The dignity of the magistracy was kept up by prohibiting any Provost, Bailie, or Bedell, from making bread, or brewing ale, for sale; and of the burgherhood, by excluding from its privileges every dyer, butcher, or tanner, who worked at his calling with his own hands. If he aspired to become a member of the guild, the business was to be deputed to other hands, whom he was only to superintend as “a master.” Cloth appears to have been the staple product of the time, and wool was as jealously guarded as in England, none but a burgher being allowed to buy it, for the purposes of dying, or cloth-making. An occasional difficulty with “the hands,” as at present, appears to have arisen, though from different causes; but the age was less scrupulous, and the Kemester, or wool-comber, who tried to escape to the Upland, might at once be committed to the town-jail, on the plea that there was work to be done. The runaway was not invariably a fugitive from the rural districts. It was a hard age for the dependant classes wherever they were; and the “bondman in-burgh” may at times have cast many a wistful glance towards the blue hills in the distance. Monopoly and exclusive dealing were only in accordance with the spirit and policy of the age; and must inevitably have arisen in every quarter, when it was enacted that every sale and purchase should be made “in port,” and in the presence of witnesses chosen “in burgh;” which must, of course, have concentrated all the traffic of the district connected with the burgh in the hands of the resident population. The subdivision of the Hundred was unknown in Scotland, and accordingly such privileges occasionally extended over the whole County or Sheriffdom; as in Edinburgh, and as in the case of Perth; where, perhaps in consequence of this wide monopoly, the unprivileged trader from other quarters was allowed to retail cloth during the summer, from Ascension Day to the 1st of August; though ordinarily the privileges of the burgh were only suspended during Fair-time. The Fair was in some respects a sort of regulated Saturnalia; none but the outlaw, the traitor, and the malefactor whose crime was of too deep a dye to admit of sanctuary, could be taken during its continuance; all else, whether debtors, runaways, or minor offenders of any description, being free from arrest, except they broke “the peace of the Fair,” when they were tried and punished, not by the ordinary magistrates of the burgh, but in a temporary Court, known universally as the Court of Pies-poudrees, or Dusty-feet. The Dustyfoot was the travelling pedlar, or merchant as he was called in Scotland, the original of the modern Haberdasher—or “man with a Havresac;” and as, in Fair-time, the Stallenger, or trader who sold from a temporary stall, or booth, could claim “lot and cavyl”—share and share—with the more dignified Burgher, with whom for the time he was upon an equality, it would have been contrary to the true northern principle of justice if he had been liable to be tried and punished in a strange Court, and by any other verdict than that of “his Peers,” the Community, for the time being, of the Fair. The Dustyfoot probably came by land, and only entered the burgh for traffic during Fair-time; but the sea, or the river, bore the vessel of the foreign trader to the burgh at all times, though, except when it was otherwise provided, as at Perth during summer time, the burghers alone could dispose of the traders’ wares, only salt or herrings being sold on board ship. All disputes between a foreign trader and a burgher were to be settled before the third flood of the tide.[329]

No Burgh was complete without a Hospital—no royal Burgh without a Castle. Leprosy was the disease of the age—a never-ceasing plague, entailed by unwholesome food, a want of vegetables, and the salted meat and fish, which formed invariably the winter diet, not a little aided by uncleanliness. Every one struck with leprosy within the walls was to be removed at once to the Spittal; and if he had nothing of his own, a collection of twenty shillings—a considerable sum for the time—was to be raised for his support. If the pauper was not cured by the time the money was spent, he was probably dismissed as incurable, and classed amongst the confirmed lepers, who were forbidden to enter any town, but were allowed to sit at the gate and beg. By the Law of Scotland it was allowable to give “Herbary” to a stranger for one night without question, but if he stayed beyond that period the host was answerable for the guest, and bound to produce him before the proper officer. Even this relic of the unstinted hospitality of early times was dispensed with in the case of this dreaded disease; and he who sheltered a leper within the walls was liable to the heaviest fine inflicted, “the full forfeiture.” Similar arrangements were once in force in every burgh; as in London, for instance, where the Spittal Fields were the open meadows around the Hospital for Lepers, who were allowed to ask for alms at the Cripples Gate, a spot which the charitable may have sought out, but which a larger class must, most assuredly, have shunned.[330]

The royal burgh was under the rule of its chosen magistrates, but the royal castle was under the charge of the Constable appointed by the king, this office often becoming hereditary in the family on which it was originally conferred. Forty days were fixed as the period of service on castle-guard, which, like everything else towards the decline of the Feudal system, was gradually compounded for by a money payment to the Constable; who, in other words, performed the service with his own retainers, and exacted the usual fine, or its equivalent, for the non-attendance of the party bound by the tenure of his land to undertake such service. This custom, however, had scarcely grown into general use in the reign of David, for it was one of the provisions of Magna Charta that no Constable should summon a knight to perform castle-guard whilst he was serving in the king’s army, nor exact the fine for non-attendance when he was ready to perform the service in person, or by proper substitute. Freedom from arrest was one of the privileges attached to castle-guard, as well as to service in the king’s “host,” lasting, like the similar privilege of Parliament, which still exists, for the whole period of service; the same exemption being extended to all who were in attendance on their duties in the county, or who were sent to the burgh to buy provisions for their lord. The Bailie of the castle was empowered to borrow of a burgher goods to the amount of forty pence, and for a period not exceeding forty days; but it was at the option of the lender to increase the amount of the loan beyond that sum, or to defer the time of payment beyond the forty days. At Easter, Whitsuntide, and Christmas, a “castellan” was entitled to demand from a burgher pigs, geese, or chickens, “for the king’s need;” but if the burgher could close his door no entry might be forced—his house was his castle, according to the well-known English saying—but the castellan might catch and kill any of the burgher’s stock that he found beyond bounds, paying the price at which the neighbourhood assessed the articles. The probable object of both these regulations was to ensure the garrison a fair supply of necessaries without entailing too heavy a burden upon the townsmen. In all disputes, if a castellan complained of wrong, he was to claim his right in the Court of the Burgh; and if the burgher considered himself aggrieved he was to carry his plaint to the Castle gate. On these occasions there appears to have been a mixed jury, as in the trial of an alien at the present day, “the peers” of each party furnishing a portion; such at least seems to have been the case in the following trial in the castle of Dumfries for the homicide of a burgher, the party charged with the offence being an Upland-man, probably on castle-guard, as he was tried in the place appointed for appeals against a castellan. Adam, the miller of Dumfries, meeting Richard, son of Robert Elias’s son, in the churchyard of St. Fabian and St. Sebastian in the castle, abused him as a thief, “because he was a Galloway man”—a species of reasoning still sometimes current in cases of unpopular nationality. On the following Thursday, when Adam was standing in the doorway of a house, a woman called out to him that Richard was coming up the street, warning him to be on his guard. “My knife is as sharp as his,” replied the miller; attacking Richard at once, who drew his sword and struck Adam with the flat side of the weapon. The miller closed his arm upon the sword, and in disengaging it sharply, Richard inflicted a mortal wound upon his assailant, exclaiming, on seeing the catastrophe, “you caused your own death.” All the Burghers testified on oath that Richard was a man of good repute, but that Adam was a rogue; and the “Barons” concurring, an unanimous verdict of acquittal was pronounced. Barons and Burghers both seem to have been concerned in this trial, which affords a very fair specimen of the lawless manners of the age, and of the advantages of the “jugement del pais” over the earlier system expressed in the legal axiom “buy the spear or bear it”—pay the were or stand the feud.[331]

Such were the leading regulations of David’s community of Burghs. They correspond closely with the ancient customs of Newcastle, to which indeed allusion is made in the Burghal Code, the English community having been consulted apparently upon the law of inheritance;[332] and there can be little doubt that the Anglo-Norman Burgh, itself in most respects a confirmation of the Anglo-Saxon, except where the custom of Borough-English existed, was the model for the burghs introduced by David throughout the land. In imitation of their sovereign, the greater magnates, lay and ecclesiastical, occasionally enfranchised their towns, or founded burghs, filling them with a class of freemen on a footing with the royal burghers, though the latter were reckoned higher in the social scale, and were privileged to decline the challenge of a member of a lesser burgh; just as the Scepenbar man, who could count his “four ancestors and his hant-gemahl,” was entitled to refuse the challenge of his equal in position who was not his equal in blood.[333] The royal burghs generally retained their ascendancy, though not invariably; for in spite of the jealous rivalry of Dunbarton and Rutherglen, upon the margin of her own fair river, the great episcopal city of Glasgow has long been acknowledged the undisputed mistress of the western waters. The original burghers, as a class, were, with few exceptions, of foreign origin, emigrants from southern Britain, and not unfrequently Flemings; as in Berwick, where the Flemings long dwelt apart as a separate guild.[334] It was long before the native element entered largely amongst the privileged civic population, clinging to Scottish customs and to the rural districts, especially in the distant North, where the towns must have long stood out like commercial garrisons in a disaffected, and not unfrequently a hostile, country. Not the least amongst the many changes introduced by the burgher class beyond the Forth was the diffusion of the language hitherto only spoken to the southward of that river, a Teutonic dialect spreading over the country, as in Ireland, with the gradual preponderance of the intramural population, a similar result being traceable in France, though under exactly opposite circumstances; for the language spoken in towns, where men congregate together in large numbers, will always prevail over the dialects of a rural and scattered population. It would be difficult to overestimate the utility of the burgher class to the Scotland of that period, or its influence in promoting the amelioration and prosperity of the country. The increase it brought to the revenue, though perhaps one of its greatest advantages in the opinion of the age, was comparatively of secondary importance. The invariable tendency of such a class has always been to favour peace, order, and civilization, as long as it has occupied its natural position; for it is only when a burgherhood has become over-powerful that it has afforded as frequent examples as a nobility, or an autocracy, of the inability of human nature in any condition to withstand the evil influences of unlimited power. Such was not the case in Britain, where the burgherhood has never occupied the same position as the great communities of Flanders, of Germany, or of Northern Italy. It would be of little use to speculate upon what might have happened had England remained under the rule of a feeble, or an “unkindly” king—of Edgar Atheling or Harold—with her great provincial Jarls, like the Dukes of Franee, distracting the country with their contentions for power. Great burgher communities might have arisen, especially in the Danelage, where the Socmen, representatives of the Land-agende men, or Odal-Bonders, of an earlier period, were exactly the class to form a martial burgherhood; but such a future was not to be. In neither England nor Scotland has the civic class ever been the sole depositary of the ancient northern principles of self-government, as on the Continent; where the Echevin, the representative of the ancient Scepenbar Freeholder, who could alone pass judgment upon his equal, has for centuries been confined to the towns. It may be read in the Capitularies of the Carlovingian era, how it was offered to the ancestry of the French nobility to declare the law they would live by, and their choice was destined to be unfortunate; for wherever the hand of Imperial Rome is traceable, it has sown the seeds of future despotism. In every part of Britain, however, there was but one law for Baron and for Burgher, framed upon the principles of the free north; and much as we may be indebted to the civic portion of our “Third Estate,” the institutions of which we are so justly proud, were not preserved by their intervention. It is well that in the days of old there were other parties engaged in the struggle; for where is the example that history can furnish of a contest for liberty successfully carried out by an unassisted Burgherhood?[335]

The Court was not forgotten in the reforming zeal of David, and following up the innovations, which seem to have been first introduced by Alexander, he assimilated the Scottish Court to the Anglo-Norman model, with which both brothers must have been familiar. It must not be supposed, however, that before this period a Court was unknown in Scotland; but it was probably of a primitive character, even after the innovations of Queen Margaret. Howel Dha is supposed to have laid down certain regulations, about the middle of the tenth century, for his Court in Wales; and without putting faith in the apocryphal ordinances ascribed to Malcolm the Second, it may be safely assumed that Scotland, in the eleventh century, was at least as far advanced in this respect as Wales in the tenth. Fordun, who gives to Crinan the title of Abthane of Dull and Seneschal of the Isles, describes the Abthane as the Head of all the royal Thanes; and though the title is evidently an error, the office may have been a reality, for it would have been simply identical with that of the Welsh Distyn, the Lord High Steward or Seneschal. In every Scottish Earldom the Seneschal was next in authority to the Earl—his Deputy or Maor, who appeared in his place at the greater Shire Moots appointed by William; and Crinan may have filled such an office under the king. The feature most worthy of remark, however, in the constitution of the Welsh Court, was the rank and position of the royal attendants, the highest alone—the Distyn—being on a footing with the Chief, and the royal officials of the Commot; while only the leading Court officials were on a level with the Breyr, or noble proprietor; and the other members of the household ranked only just above the Boneddig, or Lesser Freeman. Dignity of the highest description, therefore, was not attached at this period to service about the royal person; and the classes from which the Welsh king chose his courtiers and attendants were the lesser freemen, and the dependants known as Mab aillts, rather than the noble class which furnished the Maors and Cynghellwrs.[336]

It must not be imagined that this was a Welsh or a Celtic peculiarity, for there was a time when the Hird, or Court, of the Frank kings was of a yet more primitive description, the attendants in the Hird being all on a servile footing, known as Scalcs, and chosen most probably from the subordinate race. The Household appears to have been under the superintendence of the Sene-scalc—perhaps the Senior Slave—the Stable under the March-scalc, officials who seem to be traceable amongst the Anglo-Saxons in the Wealh-gerefa and the royal Horswealh, the latter raised by his office to the footing of a Ceorl.[337] Totally unconnected with the servile classes, and in the absence of the sovereign exercising royal authority over the whole kingdom, as well as over the Household, was the Deputy, the “Dux et Major Domus regni Francorum,” more familiarly known as the Maire du Palais, whose original Teutonic title was probably the Stallr. The office was originally elective, the Franks choosing the Deputy as well as the actual sovereign; and it must in some respects have resembled that of the Celtic Tascio. It latterly became hereditary, as is well known, in the family of Pepin and Charles Martel, who monopolized the office in Austrasia and Neustrasia, until they exchanged the title of Maire du Palais for that of king. No other great official besides the Stallr is traceable in the Norwegian Court, for which, at the opening of the eleventh century, Olive the Saint framed regulations, which must have been adopted for the usages of other Courts of the same period; though the use of the word Hus-Carles, both there and in England, may point to the gradual replacement of the scalc by the freeman about the royal person. The progress of Roman innovation soon necessitated the presence of officials whom the simpler institutions of the north ignored; and to receive the offerings of the fiscal tenantry, made in lieu of the feorm, veitzslo or actual support afforded to the sovereign and his retinue, a Camera, or treasure-chamber, was required; the leading Camerarius, or Chamberlain, the Lord High Treasurer of the age, becoming, as purse-bearer, a most important member of the Court. The charter next became a necessary document to attest the possession of proprietary right; and accordingly, in the early part of the ninth century, it was ordered in the Frank Capitularies, “that there should be chosen everywhere good and true Chancellors, to write public charters before the Comes, Scabini, and Vicarii.”[338] Much more, then, was it necessary that a similar official should be in attendance at the fountain-head of all chartered grants, and consequently the royal Cancellarius became another most important attendant upon the royal person, the clerkly attributes required for the Chancellorship naturally placing it in the hands of the clergy. Most of these changes were probably introduced amongst the Franks after their king had been converted into the Kaiser of the West; and as the old Allodial Stallr disappeared with the institutions of which he was a part, the office, which raised a subject to such a dangerous proximity to the throne, seems to have been divided between his subordinates. His leadership in war fell to the share of the Constable, the commander of the royal armies, in the absence of the king, whose name is derived from the same title of Stallr, held by a Comes, or Graphio, instead of by the Heretoga of the whole kingdom. The Mareschal had not yet arrived at the leadership of the army; his duties were still connected with the horse, but they had increased in dignity with the growing importance of the Chevalerie; for though not the head of the army, the representative of the royal farrier had become the captain and leader of the Chivalry of the age. The judicial functions of the Stallr were performed by the Grand Justiciary, the President of the royal Courts of Law; whilst the Seneschal, who, though he retained his servile name, had, like the Mareschal, long discarded his servile origin, rose to the office of “Maire du Palais;” and in France he was also supreme over all the justiciaries. In Germany the Stallr was unknown, the Dukes of the Alamanni, Bavarians, and Saxons, having themselves been originally, in some sort, the Stallrs or Deputies of the king of the Franks; and by the time that the Empire passed to the eastward of the Rhine, the Court had become thoroughly Romanized, the Allodial Stallr never forming any part of it. His functions were accordingly divided between his two leading subordinates, the Seneschal and the Mareschal, the former being the Pfaltz Graf, or Count Palatine, and representing the Maire du Palais; whilst the Mareschal was the Heretoga, and leader of the host. Together with the three Chancellors and the Chamberlain, they were the first to give their votes at the election of a Kaiser, whom they were bound to accompany to Rome; and, in later times, with the subsequent addition of the Grand Butler, they were known as the seven Electors, monopolizing amongst themselves the sole choice of the Emperor.

Little can be said of the composition of the Anglo-Saxon Court after the establishment of the sole monarchy by the race of Alfred, though it was scarcely framed at first upon the Roman model, resembling rather that of Wales or Norway, or the Teutonic Hird, after the freeman rather than the noble had replaced the scalc. A nearer advance towards the usages of the Feudal era is disclosed in a charter of the Confessor’s reign, attested apparently by the royal court, the great Jarls or Dukes being the leading witnesses amongst the laity; and next to them in importance the Stallr, known under his Latin title of “Regiæ procurator Aulæ,” probably the Constable. The Aulicus seems to be the next official—he may have been the Chamberlain—and the Palatinus, perhaps the Pfaltz Graf, or Seneschal of the Household; followed by the Chancellor, whose office was deemed at this time of scarcely sufficient importance to be held by one of the higher clergy. The Butlers of the king and queen, with three Stewards, close the list; two of the latter being attached to the king, whilst the other was in attendance upon the queen.[339] The Justiciary and the great Feudal functionary, whose name is still identified with military command, are missed from the Court of the Confessor; the Anglo-Saxons were not a race of horsemen—chivalry and the Mareschal came in with the Normans.

Some of these officials may have been introduced into the Scottish Court by Margaret, but with the exception of the Constable, the Justiciary, and the Chancellor, who appear in the time of Alexander, none of the great Feudal dignitaries who were in constant attendance upon the royal court in the middle ages are to be met with in the few existing charters which date before the reign of David. The earliest Constable on record was Edward, son of Siward, who fully justified the confidence of Alexander and David on the field of Stickathrow, the office—of which the jurisdiction, like that of the ancient Stallr, extended over all the country within a certain distance of the royal person—after the death of Edward, becoming hereditary in the great Norman family of De Moreville. Alan, son of Flahald, was another noble of the same race, who, like most of the actual followers of the Conqueror, crossed the Channel before the general use of surnames had arisen amongst the Normans, and upon his son, Walter, David conferred the hereditary Seneschalship of the realm; his descendants, it need hardly be added, deriving their name of Stewart from the dignity thus acquired by their ancestor. Neither the Chamberlain nor the Mareschal held their offices by a similar hereditary tenure; the former in the capacity of royal treasurer, exercising supreme sway over the Third Estate, who paid the largest ordinary contributions into the treasury; holding his “Courts of Eyre” or circuits, and presiding in the great assembly of the burghs; whilst the Mareschal was the supreme judge and referee in Courts of Honour and of Chivalry. The Justiciary and the Chancellor completed the six greater dignitaries of the Scottish Feudal Court, Constantine, Earl of Fife, being Justiciary at the opening of David’s reign, the only Gaelic Earl who appears at that time amongst the leading courtiers holding office. Service about the royal person was scarcely yet regarded as befitting the great Gaelic Mormaors, and as the Court henceforth was in reality the Supreme Council of the kingdom, the preponderance of the Feudal element in the direction of affairs was quickly developed.

Such were the leading features of David’s civil policy; the state of the Scottish Church, and the changes introduced during the course of this reign, will be the subject of the ensuing chapter. The influence of David upon his native country has been compared to that of Alfred upon England, and of Charlemagne upon a wider sphere, but in some respects it was of a different character. Alfred was the saviour of the Anglo-Saxon race from complete subjection to the Danes, and though he can scarcely be called a king of England, he was the real founder of the monarchy. Within the limits of his ancestral dominions, and of the rescued principality of English Mercia, he was the reviver of letters; the creator of a navy; the reformer of the army, upon which he expended a third of his revenue; and, as the builder of walled towns, he may in a certain sense be regarded as the originator of a burgherhood; but, like Charlemagne, he was a collector and not a maker of laws, the constitutional institutions which have been attributed to him belonging, unquestionably, to other periods. His was a policy of defence not of aggrandisement—not even of amalgamation beyond the limits of the Anglo-Saxon race—of defence by sea and on land; of renovation rather than of innovation, for it was not an era for the development of great constitutional changes. But David was a mighty innovator, scarcely reviving anything except bishoprics; and even in his ecclesiastical policy, in all other respects, he was equally an innovator. He instituted a feudal court, a feudal nobility, and feudal tenures, governing the country upon feudal principles; for the great dignitaries of the court, in his time, were not merely the holders of honorary offices, but the actual ministers of the crown. He introduced the charter into general use, confirming proprietary right throughout the kingdom, the earls and freeholders by ancient Scottish tenure, henceforth standing, side by side, with the new noblesse and their vavassors, until all difference insensibly disappeared. He created a burgherhood, and laid down a novel Code of Law, by which the earlier system was gradually superseded by the principle still acknowledged—“the verdict of the neighbourhood.” Augustus found Rome brick and left her marble; but David found Scotland built of wattles and left her framed in granite, castles and monasteries studding the land in every direction. He found her a pastoral country, and before the close of his reign she is described as the granary of her neighbours; and though the expressions of Ailred are probably exaggerated, as an exporting country she must have made considerable progress in agriculture. England may trace the germs of her monarchy to Alfred, and of the union of her people under one sovereign, though it was certainly not consummated in Alfred’s time. First amongst the Cæsars of the Western Empire stands Charlemagne, scarcely, however, the originator of the mighty results of that revival which still continue to influence the continent of Europe. But of feudal and historical Scotland; of the Scotland which counts Edinburgh amongst her fairest cities, and Glasgow, as well as Perth and Aberdeen; of the familiar Scotland of Bruce and of the Stewarts, David was unquestionably the creator. With the close of the eleventh century ancient Gaelic Alban gradually fades into the background, and before the middle of the twelfth, modern Scotland has already risen into existence.

CHAPTER X.
THE CHURCH.

At some remote and long-forgotten period, Christianity was first preached amongst the Provincials of Britain; and it became the established religion of the Romanized portion of the island after the great revolution effected by Constantine. Three British bishops accordingly sat at the Council of Arles, as representatives of the three Imperial provinces; and the presence of a similar deputation from the island is occasionally noticed in the accounts of other important councils. After the Faith had reached Britain from the neighbouring coasts of Gaul, it appears to have passed across the western Channel into Ireland—for there were believers in that country at the beginning of the fifth century;[340] although, from the success attending the labours of St. Patrick amongst the leading clans of the north and west, the conversion of the whole island has been generally attributed to the preaching of that celebrated missionary. From the date usually ascribed to the arrival of Patrick in Ireland, it is not improbable that his mission to that country was connected with one of the visits of Germanus and his companions to the neighbouring island of Britain.[341] The progress of the Pelagian heresy in the country of which its originator was a native, had excited the alarm of the orthodox Britons, who craved the assistance of their brethren in Gaul to aid them in eradicating the evil, and at a council which was held by the heads of the Gallican Church, Germanus and Lupus, the bishops of Auxerre and Troyes, were commissioned to cross the Channel, and refute the doctrines of the arch-heretic Pelagius; whilst about the same time, the notice of Celestine, Bishop of Rome, being attracted towards the state of the West, he dispatched Palladius, the Deacon, to exercise episcopal functions amongst the Irish believers in the name of Christ.[342] The actions of Palladius have long been consigned to oblivion, but the name of Patrick is still venerated as the great Apostle of the Truth to Ireland.[343]

Born of parents of senatorial rank in one of the British provinces, at the age of sixteen Patrick was carried off by a party of marauders, and sold as a slave amongst the northern Irish.[344] Six years he passed in captivity before he was enabled to effect his escape; and upwards of twenty more elapsed, the greater part of which he probably spent amongst the monasteries of Gaul, before he returned to settle in the land of his birth, where his kindred earnestly entreated him to remain. But he had long felt an ardent desire to effect the conversion of the heathen Irish, and listening at length to the promptings of his fervent zeal, he revisited the scene of his early captivity, and undertook the holy task in which he was destined to be blessed with such complete success. His lengthened residence in Gaul must have familiarised him with the system so prevalent in that quarter; and the manner in which Patrick appears to have planted his religious communities throughout the provinces of Ireland, evinces the extent to which he had been affected by the monastic spirit of the age.

Eusebius, Bishop of Vercelli, about the middle of the fourth century, was the first to introduce into Western Europe the custom of the bishop and his clergy residing together according to monastic rule, and to familiarize the inhabitants of cities with the presence of ascetics, hitherto confined to the desert and the wilderness. His example was followed by Augustine of Hippo, and Martin of Tours; and through the latter, the founder of monachism in the Gallic provinces, the system appears to have penetrated into the British Isles. Beda has left upon record a description of the Church of Lindisfarne, founded by Aidan in the best days of the Gaelic Church, which identifies the customs of that bishopric, still remaining in force at the time of the Norman Conquest, with the practice of Eusebius and Augustine.[345] Nor is it necessary to adduce the traditionary relationship between St. Martin and the Apostle of Ireland, as a proof how largely the Churches, which preceded the mission of Austin to the Anglo-Saxons, must have been indebted for their characteristic features to the celebrated Bishop of Tours.[346]

Many of the Gaelic monasteries were founded in remote and inaccessible situations; but the most important appear to have been placed, in exact imitation of the Abbey of Tours, at a short distance from the capital, or chief fortress, of the neighbourhood. Such was the case at Armagh, Lindisfarne, and St. Martins near Canterbury—that ancient British church which is said to have retained the early privilege of maintaining a bishop within its walls down to the time of the Norman Conquest.[347] Here the bishop dwelt with his clergy, and the rest of the brethren, of whom the great majority were laymen. All were bound to the observance of the same Rule; and all, as monks, were under the superintendence of the abbot of the community. In one point, however, a wide difference was observable between the constitution of the Gaelic Church, and the ecclesiastical system elsewhere prevailing; and this peculiar variation from the general rule may, in a great degree, be attributed to the circumstances under which monachism was originally introduced amongst the Gaelic people.

After Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire, the ecclesiastical system was naturally much influenced by the political institutions of a highly civilized and artificial state of society. The bishop and the city were inseparably connected; the diocese was not unfrequently bounded by the city walls; and when a large country district was included within the limits of the episcopal jurisdiction, the Diocesan was assisted by one or more Chorepiscopi, or Country Bishops, whose duties were strictly confined to that part of the diocese from which their name was originally derived. Nothing, indeed, more convincingly demonstrates how completely the Christianity of early times must have been confined to the cities of the Empire, than the epithet of Pagans, or “Country people,” which was used to distinguish those who persisted in adhering to the antiquated superstitions of their heathen forefathers. To the two great Christian divisions of clergy and laity, a third was added, when the increasing multitudes of ascetics and anchorites were collected by various pious men, and established in communities as cænobites; and when the ordination of certain members of the fraternity—which in early times was exclusively composed of laymen—and the introduction of the system into cities, brought these societies within the jurisdiction of the bishop, the authority of the Secular Head of the diocese clashed with that of the Regular Superior of the monastery, and frequently became a matter of dispute. Accordingly, the submission of the monks to the Diocesan, in ecclesiastical matters, was strictly enforced, by the rule laid down in various councils of the fifth and sixth centuries, “that no monastery should be erected without the consent of the bishop of the diocese.” In societies already existing, the limits of episcopal and abbatial jurisdiction were carefully defined, whilst a few monasteries preserved the privilege of retaining within their walls a bishop expressly for their own community, as was the case in the abbeys of St. Denis, and of St. Martin at Tours.

Such was the manner in which the abbot eventually assumed a subordinate position beneath the recognized Head of the clerical order, wherever the monastery was introduced upon a state of society, amongst which a settled ecclesiastical system had long prevailed. But neither regular dioceses, nor secular clergy, existed in Ireland at the time when Patrick disseminated throughout that country the rule, and the discipline, with which he had become familiarized in Gaul. Monachism may be said to have brought in Christianity; and the Faith was ingrafted on the Rule, rather than the Rule on the Faith. The monastery was all in all, and the whole scheme of Church government was based upon a monastic foundation. Instead of dioceses under the jurisdiction of metropolitan and suffragan bishops, wide districts were under the sway of different monasteries, the greater number dependant upon some leading community, like that of Armagh, or Iona. It is not to be supposed, however, that there were no bishops.[348] Every monastic establishment of any pretension possessed one bishop, sometimes several, within the walls; but as the prelate was without a diocese, he was in an anomalous, and in some measure in a subordinate situation. It was amongst the privileges of the monastery of Bobbio, founded in Italy by the Irish Columbanus, that the bishop of the diocese was never allowed to enter the precincts of the abbey except for clerical purposes alone; and the position in which the Italian prelate must have been placed, during the brief period for which he remained amongst the brotherhood of Bobbio, was the normal condition of a bishop in the Gaelic and British Churches. As a priest, he was the ecclesiastical Head of the whole community, upon whom he alone could confer orders; whilst as a monk he observed the same rule as the rest of the brethren, asserting no authority in this respect over the abbot, who, as the Regular Superior of the Fraternity, became in reality the leading churchman of the district.

Tithes and parishes were unknown, and the income of the community was originally derived exclusively from dues and altar offerings; though, by degrees, lands were conferred upon monasteries, fines were levied upon offenders against certain laws, and the greater abbots asserted their right to a cuairt or visitation, similar to that enjoyed by the secular princes of the age.[349] The promulgation of the different laws, of which the infringement was punishable by fine, and the progresses of the great Abbots of Armagh upon their Visitations, with the tribute levied upon such occasions, are frequently to be met with in the Irish annalists after the commencement of the eighth century,[350] and as all fines, tributes, and other temporal advantages, fell to the share of the Regular Superior of the monastery, it is easy to conceive how the abbacy, rather than the bishopric, grew to be the object of an Irish or Scottish churchman’s ambition.[351] About the same time occurs the first mention of a personage, second only in importance to the abbot—the Herenach, or lay tenant of the lands of the monastery, answering in many respects to the Advocatus Ecclesiæ upon the Continent. According to the invariable custom of the Gaelic system of tenure, the possessions of the community, or Termon lands, were made over to a tenant, generally some powerful chieftain of the neighbourhood, in whose family the office remained as an inalienable duchas, and who acted as the abbot’s deputy, or maor, retaining the invariable third as his prerogative.[352]

A hundred years passed away after the mission of St. Patrick before a diversity of Rules crept into the Gaelic church, and a different mode of celebrating the service was introduced, amongst some of the Irish monasteries, from Britain.[353] In another century arose the question about Easter and the Tonsure, causing a temporary breach between the churches of the South of Ireland—which conformed to the practice of the Western Church towards the middle of the seventh century—and the churches of the North which, together with those of the Picts and Scots, and their Anglo-Saxon followers, clung to their ancient usage till the close of the same century, or the beginning of the next, when the Britons alone remained consistent in their attachment to the Eastern tonsure, and to the erroneous cycle.[354] Long before the death of Beda flagrant abuses had crept into the English Church, and the venerable historian laments the condition into which most of the monasteries had fallen throughout the dominions of Northumbria.[355] Very similar causes to those which brought about such results in England, were rife both in Ireland and in Scotland; and the Gaelic Church had varied widely from its original form and spirit, when it presented to the astonished eyes of the dignified prelates of the Roman Church in the twelfth century a picture, in which the abuses of encroachment and neglect had left but the shadow of a long forgotten system of church government. The greater abbacies had become the hereditary appanages of powerful families, where they were not still the objects of bloody contention; and the leading members of the septs, who filled the office of abbot, had sometimes ceased even to be in holy orders.[356] The Termon lands were leased out as the hereditary property of Herenachs, members generally of the same families that possessed the abbacies; whilst the vast communities of monks, that Eastern peculiarity which formed so prominent a feature of the Gaelic Church in her best days, had dwindled into small bodies of Culdees, the representatives of the clerical portion of the brotherhood—the twelve companions so invariably attending the abbots of the early period—who were frequently as remarkable for the amount of their private wealth, as their predecessors, in the times of Columba and Aidan, had been renowned for their disinterested reluctance to acquire property of any description.[357]

The Scottish Church, at the commencement of the twelfth century, must have presented many similar features to those which met the eyes of the English prelates in Ireland, towards the close of the same period. The whole of ancient Alban had once been subject to the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Abbots of Iona, until the dispute between the members of that community and the Pictish king Nechtan appears to have resulted in transferring the supremacy to the Superior of Abernethy; who, in turn, yielded the predominance to the abbot or bishop of Dunkeld, after the establishment of that monastery by Constantine Mac Fergus. The primacy was eventually transferred during the reign of Cyric, from the foundation of Constantine to the establishment endowed by his brother Angus; and, from that period, the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of St. Andrews extended in exact proportion with the temporal authority of the kings of Scotland.[358] Each of the provinces that were originally independent must, at one time, have possessed its own monastery and bishop; but as the district kings sunk under the dominion of the supreme sovereign, the bishops either disappeared altogether, or became subordinate to, and dependant on, the Bishop of St. Andrews; so that only three or, at most, four sees existed in Scotland when David ascended the throne.[359] One of these must have been the bishopric of Glasgow, created, or revived, by the king during the lifetime of his predecessor Alexander; whilst the three remaining sees were St. Andrews, Dunkeld, and Moray.[360] In two of the latter the old abbacies had become hereditary appanages of the reigning family, and the jurisdiction of the sees of St. Andrews and Dunkeld embraced the whole of Scotland immediately dependant upon the royal authority; whilst the North remained under the superiority of the monastery, whichever that may have been, in which the earlier Bishops of Moray were accustomed to fix their residence; thus demonstrating how completely the two great provinces of Scotia and Moravia must at one period have been divided between the rival families of Atholl and Moray.

The first step towards remodelling the Scottish Church was Alexander’s re-grant of the ancient donation of the Pictish Angus to the monastery of St. Andrews; but many years elapsed before David was enabled to complete the measures which his brother had only commenced. Five other bishoprics were added to the four already existing, and the sees of Dunblane, Brechin, Aberdeen, Ross, and Caithness, were created, or revived, in districts where hitherto the abbacy, rather than the bishopric, had been predominant; but it was long before all the Scottish dioceses attained the footing of regularly established bishoprics, like those of Glasgow and St. Andrews. In Dunkeld, the peculiar district of the royal family, all difficulties were originally overcome, by electing the last abbot of the Culdee monastery to be the first bishop of the remodelled see; but very little provision was made for the Canons before the episcopate of Geoffrey, towards the middle of the following century. In Aberdeen, the power of appointing Canons, and constituting a Chapter in his Cathedral, was conferred by Papal Bull upon Bishop Edward; but the first record of a constitution dates from the episcopate of Peter Ramsay, about 1259; whilst in Moray, the Chapter was first created by Bishop Bryce Douglas about the year 1220. In Caithness, the establishment dates from about 1245, the service before that time having been performed by a single priest, owing to the impoverishment, through war, of a see which appears to have owed little or nothing, in the way of endowment, to the Norwegian Magnates of the Orkneys. Dunblane was in a very similar condition about the same period; for although endowed by Gilbert of Strathearn with one-third of his earldom (if Fordun is to be credited) fifteen years after the death of this munificent patron the see had been ten years vacant through poverty—a single chaplain, as in Caithness, celebrating divine service in a church without a roof—a state of affairs which was remedied by Bishop Clement in 1238.[361] With the revival of these sees by David, the rule of discipline sanctioned by the Roman Church was introduced into the Scottish monasteries; and wherever the authority of the Crown was paramount, the numerous Culdee societies, which were scattered in every direction over the face of the country at the beginning of the twelfth century, were either suppressed altogether, or deprived of their most important privileges. The state of the Scottish Church at this period, and the nature of the changes brought about by David, may be best appreciated from a sketch of the royal proceedings in the diocese of St. Andrews, the principal bishopric of the kingdom.

A Prior and twelve Culdees constituted the College of Kilrimont, better known under the subsequent name of St. Andrews. The possessions, which they held in common, were small and poor; their private property, which was inherited or acquired by the gifts of friends and penitents, was large and valuable, reverting, upon the death of the possessors, to their wives, children, or relatives. Upon seven of the community devolved the duty of ministration at the altar; but the service was never performed before the high altar of St. Andrews except upon state occasions, in the presence of the king or the bishop; and at other times the Culdees celebrated their office, after their own peculiar manner, in a remote corner of the church. From the frequent allusion to Seven Churches amongst the early religious societies in Ireland and Scotland, it is probable that in ancient times each priest officiated in a separate chapel, set apart for his own particular ministration.[362] The altar-offerings were divided into seven portions; one for the bishop, another for the hospital—that invariable appendage of a Culdee monastery, which alone survived the changes introduced by David; whilst the remaining five became the property of the five Culdees, who never officiated at the altar, on the condition of entertaining all pilgrims and strangers when the hospital (which contained six) was full; and upon such occasions the host was decided upon by lot. The origin of this custom may, probably, be traced to the practice amongst the early Religious, of giving up the greater part of the altar-offerings to a common fund, to be administered by the members of the community who did not officiate at the altar, in relieving the poor, and in exercising the duties of hospitality to pilgrims and strangers. No Culdee, after his election, continued to dwell in the same house with his wife and family.[363]

The privilege of electing the abbot, the bishop, and every member of the community, was vested in the Culdees, who exercised, within the walls of their monastery, the same rights that belonged in secular affairs to the district and provincial chieftains. The right of blood was as predominant amongst the ecclesiastics as it was all prevalent amongst the laity of the Gaelic people; and as the abbot represented the original Founder of the monastery, and came in time to be chosen from the leading family of the district, so the Culdees appear to have been selected from amongst the members of the same race who could claim the privilege of Founder’s kin. Latterly, the abbots of the greater monasteries in Scotland became altogether lay functionaries, proprietors of the abbey lands, out of which the remainder of the community were supported.[364] They seem to have resembled the Herenach rather than the abbot of the Irish Gael; whilst those ecclesiastical duties and prerogatives, which were very generally exercised by the Irish abbots until the arrival of the English prelates in that country, appear to have been divided in Scotland between the bishop and the prior.[365]

After the establishment and endowment of the Regular Priory of St. Andrews by David in 1144, nearly all the privileges originally belonging to the Culdees of Kilrimont were transferred to the Canons Regular. The Culdees themselves were permitted to retain their possessions for their own lives, or to embrace the Regular life and become Canons of the newly-founded Priory;[366] but the members of smaller Culdee establishments, like that of St. Servans on Loch Leven, were treated with far less ceremony; and when their possessions were disposed of in other quarters, they were peremptorily ordered to conform to the Regular discipline, on pain of summary ejectment from their monastery.[367] Whilst the lesser religious houses were thus converted into small dependant priories, filled with Regular monks, the more important communities seem frequently to have retained one part of their ancient establishment, and to have become “Hospitallers;” so much so, that in the succeeding century, the name of “Kildey” is used as an equivalent for a Hospital.[368]

The condition of the Culdees, after the reign of David, varied according to the circumstances of the dioceses in which they were placed. None can be traced to the south of the Forth, where they appear never to have existed; nor within the limits of the see of Moray, in which they must undoubtedly have been suppressed, upon the forfeiture of the ancient earls of the province. In Aberdeen, only those establishments seem to have been retained which were dependant on the bishop of St. Andrews; whilst little or nothing is known of the existence of Culdees in Ross and Caithness, though they probably lingered for some time amidst the mountains of those remote districts. In the bishoprics of St. Andrews and Dunkeld they remained in the character of Hospitallers, retaining the tithes of certain parishes, with the privilege of electing the prior and other members of their fraternity, subject to the approval of the bishop. But the case was widely different in the dioceses of Brechin and Dunblane, where the Culdees long shared in the privileges of the Chapter—a compromise that must be attributed to the peculiar circumstance of those bishoprics, in which the church-lands were held by powerful feudatories, whom it would have been dangerous and impolitic to offend.[369]

But even in those dioceses in which the church lands had reverted to the crown, either through hereditary succession, or from the forfeiture of their earlier possessors, the Culdees, chosen from amongst the leading provincial families, were far too powerful a body to submit without a struggle to the loss of their former privileges.[370] It appears to have been their object to establish themselves as Regular Canons, independent of the authority of the bishop; and they were occasionally assisted in their endeavours to promote their aim by the earl of the province, with whom they were frequently connected by the ties of relationship. At the opening of the thirteenth century, the Bishop of St. Andrews was obliged to obtain a Papal Bull to prevent the refractory brethren of Monymusk from exchanging the character of Hospitallers for that of Regular Canons; though the Culdees, who seem to have enlisted in their behalf the Earl of Mar and the Bishop of Aberdeen, eventually obtained their object, and before the middle of the same century, they were addressed by the pope as Regular Augustine Canons.[371]

Frequent contests between the Culdees of Kilrimont and the Prior and Canons of St. Andrews can be traced in the Register of that Priory. The Culdees seem to have been connected with the Comyns and their adherents, and to have profited by the preponderance of the national party during the stormy minority of Alexander the Third; for not only was a Papal Bull issued in favour of the married clergy of Scotland, representing that they were unjustly debarred from their rights,[372] but the Prior and Culdees were about this time converted, by the authority of a similar document, into the Provost and Chapter of St. Mary’s; though a proviso was introduced into the latter Bull to secure the privileges of the Canons of St. Andrews.[373] For a short time the Provost and Chapter of St. Mary’s appear to have been placed on a similar footing with the Culdee Chapters of Brechin and Dunblane, and to have re-established a claim to share in the election of the Bishop of St. Andrews; but they were once more reduced to their former subordination after the state of Scotland became more settled, and when the national party came to terms with the opposite faction, to which the Canons of St. Andrews appear to have adhered.[374]

At the close of the century the Culdees again make their appearance, when they elected their provost, William Comyn, to the bishopric of St. Andrews, and as they still followed the fortunes of the party which now supported Balliol, their appeal to Rome, in support of this election, was backed by the whole interest of Edward of England.[375] The pope, however, decided against the Culdees, and as they were now connected with the losing side, they shared in the downfall of the Balliols, and were finally subjected to the jurisdiction of the bishop of St. Andrews.[376] From this time nothing more is heard of the Culdees, though their monastery still existed in dependance on their former rivals; and as in the sister island the Reformation found a prior and twelve Culdees amongst the recognized clergy at Armagh, so at the same era in Scotland, a prior and twelve prebendaries still remained in the little monastery of Kirkheugh, humble representatives of the once powerful and high-born Culdees of Kilrimont.

CHAPTER XI.
MALCOLM THE FOURTH—A.D. 1153–1165.

A. D. 1153.

Six months had barely elapsed since the death of David before the evil consequences of a minority became apparent, and the peace of Scotland was again disturbed by the attempts of the Moray family upon the Crown. Malcolm Mac Heth, the head of the race, had married a sister of Somerled Mac Gillebride, the ancestor of the Lords of Argyle, an energetic and ambitious chieftain, who raised the power of the Oirir-Gael to a height hitherto unexampled, and who now sought still further to increase that power by establishing one of his sister’s children upon the throne. 1st Nov. Upon the very day on which the King of England and the Duke of Normandy solemnly pledged their mutual faith to the ratification of a lasting peace, the storm burst over the south-western coasts of Scotland, and a desultory war seems to have lingered throughout the ensuing winter, amidst the mountains of the west, until an offer of the kingdom of the Isles, in the following year, called away the most formidable supporter of the rebellion.[377]

A. D. 1103.

When the death of the Norwegian Magnus relieved the Islands from the dominion of his son Sigurd, Man again reverted to its former ruler Lagman Godfreyson, though the remainder of his reign was disturbed by the unceasing attempts of his brother Harald to obtain a share in the government. Harald, at length falling into his brother’s hands, was punished by the loss of his eyes; A. D. 1108. and soon afterwards, Lagman, filled with remorse at his own cruelty, undertook an expiatory pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which he never lived to accomplish. At the date of his death, his youngest brother, Olave, was residing at the English Court; but the nobility of the Islands, passing him over, apparently on account of his extreme youth, solicited the appointment of a regent, or guardian to the youthful heir, from the Irish king Murketagh O’Brien; who, gladly acceding to their request, dispatched his brother’s son, Donald Mac Teige, to fill that office during the minority of Olave. Donald had already given considerable trouble in his own country, and a desire to get rid of an impracticable kinsman may have had its weight in the selection of Murketagh; but three years of mis-government exhausted the patience of the Manxmen, the regent was expelled in a general rising, and a successor was this time sought for, in the opposite direction, from Norway. A. D. 1111. The change was hardly for the better, for Ingemund, the next governor, impatient at the idea of filling a subordinate situation, on his arrival at the Lewis, summoned the chieftains of the Northern Isles to meet upon a stated day, and choose him for their king. He and his Norwegians, however, conducted themselves in the meantime with such unrestrained licentiousness, that the Islesmen, carefully guarding the outlets, set fire to the residence of their king-elect, who perished with all his followers in vain attempts to escape from the flames.[378]

A. D. 1112

Four years had elapsed since the death of Lagman, when Olave, who was now probably of age, assumed the government of his father’s kingdom. He is described as a peaceful prince, voluptuous and devout—a combination of opposite features in the same character, by no means confined to that age—and his residence at the Court of Henry the First appears to have assimilated his character in some respects to that of the Scottish David, with whom he is also said to have cultivated a close alliance. He instituted, or remodelled, the bishopric of the Isles, establishing a priory at Rushen, which he filled with a body of monks from Furness Abbey, conferring upon the latter monastery the privilege of electing the bishop of the Isles. Their first choice was unfortunate, and Olave became the patron of that singular bishop, Wimund, whose vagaries, towards the close of David’s reign, have been already noticed in a preceding chapter.[379]

A. D. 1152.

Towards the close of a long and peaceful reign, Olave dispatched his son Godfrey to Norway, to obtain from Inge, who then ruled over that kingdom, a confirmation of his claim upon the throne of the Isles. Hardly had Godfrey left his home, when the three sons of the blind Harald, landing upon the coast of Man, asserted their claim to a share in the kingdom, as the lawful inheritance of their father. Olave agreed to submit the question to the general assembly of the Manxmen, and, on the 29th of June, both parties met at Ramsay, when Ronald Haraldson, rising under pretence of opening the conference, struck the unsuspecting Olave to the ground with his battle-axe, and proclaimed himself and his brothers kings of the Isles. A. D. 1153. Their usurpation, however, was of short duration, for upon the return of Godfrey Olaveson from Norway, the whole of the island chieftains at once declared in favour of Olave’s heir; and the sons of Harald, who were made over to their kinsman, suffered the usual punishment of a cruel age for their treacherous outrage upon his father.[380]

Shortly after his return to Man, overtures were made to Godfrey to cross over to Dublin and place himself at the head of the Northmen of Fingal, or Dublin Ostmen as they now began to be called. He willingly responded to the invitation, but by adopting this course, and by some of his subsequent proceedings, he appears to have provoked the serious enmity of one of the leading magnates of the Isles. After the conquest of Man by Godfrey Crovan, the original clans, whose connection with the Northmen of Dublin and the Isles has been already noticed, were confined to the north of the island; whilst the south, partitioned out amongst the Islesmen who had contributed to the success of Godfrey, remained in the possession of their descendants, and became the seat of the government, the locality of the episcopal see, and the favoured portion of the island. The names of the leaders in the sanguinary battle of Sandwirth, Ottir and Mac Maras, point to the different descent of their followers; and it appears to have been the policy of Godfrey Crovan and his descendants to preserve the distinction between North and South, and to maintain their own ascendancy by holding the balance between the two races.[381]

A. D. 1142.

About ten years before Godfrey became connected with the Dublin Ostmen, Reginald Mac Torquil, a grandson of Jarl Ottir who fell at Sandwirth—and, perhaps, also a member of the old Hy Ivar race, which probably still lingered in the north of Man—had either been chosen, or deputed, to assume the government of the Dublin Norsemen, this leadership remaining in the possession of his descendants until the capture of Dublin by the English.[382] The arrival of the king of Man must have interfered with the authority of Reginald, and, upon his return home, Godfrey appears to have directed his enmity still further against the family of Reginald by depriving Thorfin Ottirson of his possessions in the island. A. D. 1156 Thirsting for vengeance Thorfin sought out Somarled, who had married the sister of Godfrey Olaveson, undertaking to place one of the great chief’s sons upon the throne of the Isles in right of his maternal ancestry. Most readily was the offer accepted, and Thorfin, accompanied by Somarled’s eldest son Dugal, sailed amongst the northern islands, exacting the submission of their chieftains to the joint heir of the Isles and the Oirir-Gael, whilst Somarled, on his part, prepared to support his son’s claim with a powerful fleet of eighty vessels. 6th Jan. A. D. 1157. The proceedings of Thorfin could scarcely escape the notice of Godfrey, and he was fully prepared to meet the confederates when they appeared off the coasts of Man, where a desperate and bloody battle, lasting through a whole winter’s night, and terminating in favour of Somarled, led to the partition of the islands; the permanent cession of all the Sudreys, or Southern Hebrides, striking a fatal blow at the ancient ascendancy of the Gall-Gael. Not content, however, with his partial success, the lord of the Oirir-Gael aimed at the possession of the remainder, A. D. 1158. and in the following year, landing in Man, he completed his conquest by the reduction of that island, Godfrey flying before his sister’s husband, and passing the next seven years in exile at the court of Norway.[383]

The defection of Thorfin from Godfrey Olaveson was, probably, as fatal in its consequences to the sons of Mac Heth as it was advantageous to their powerful kinsman; for in the very year in which Somarled, relinquishing his attacks upon Scotland, turned all his energies towards acquiring the kingdom of the Isles, Donald Mac Malcolm was captured in Galloway, A. D. 1156. and sent to share his father’s imprisonment in Roxburgh Castle.[384] Three and twenty years of hopeless captivity must have bowed the spirit of the forlorn prisoner, and despairing of success when his son became the partner of his dungeon, Malcolm Mac Heth came to terms with his enemies. A. D. 1157. No account remains of the nature of the transaction by which he at length repurchased his liberty; of the claims which he relinquished, or of the concessions extorted by his opponents. Once only his name occurs in the chartularies of the period, when it appears amongst the signatures of the leading nobles who were in attendance at the court of their youthful sovereign at Dunfermlyn; and then, with one solitary and insignificant exception, the name of the once mighty leaders of the ancient race of Moray disappears for ever from the page of history.[385]

Three years had elapsed since the death of Stephen, and a very different monarch now filled the throne of England. A true descendant of the Norman conqueror, Henry Fitz Empress seems to have reunited, in his own character, the different qualities bequeathed by his mighty ancestor between his younger sons, and, together with the politic sagacity of his maternal grandfather, the young king displayed all the fiery passions of Rufus. Astute, ambitious, and little scrupulous about the means by which his ends were attained, his first aim was to re-establish the royal authority upon the destruction of the all but independent power achieved by many of the greater nobles. William Peveril, Hugo Mortimer, and the great Earl of Yorkshire—the same William Albemarle who won his earldom upon Cutton Moor—were either reduced to submission, or driven from the realm; and the once all-powerful Bishop of Winchester deemed it prudent to consult his safety in flight, seeking a surer refuge with his treasure in the monastery of Clugny. In pursuance of a similar line of policy, after the death of the Earl of Northampton, upon whom Stephen had conferred the Honor of Huntingdon, had again placed that fief at the disposal of the English king, Henry caused it to be notified to the young king of Scotland, that he expected the restoration of all the fiefs in the North of England which had been held by David in the name of the Empress Queen. Such was the light in which Henry now chose to regard the feudal dependance of the northern counties upon the king of Scots; for of all the contracting parties who joined in the treaty of Carlisle, eight years before, he alone survived, and, secure in the possession of the throne of England, he little regarded the word he had plighted in his days of exile and adversity to the firmest friend of his early youth.[386] Compliance was the only course left open to Malcolm, A. D. 1157. and meeting Henry at Chester, he made a formal resignation of the three northern counties, with the castles of Carlisle, Bamborough, and Newcastle on Tyne, putting forward his claims upon Huntingdon on the same occasion, and receiving immediate investment of the Honor, upon the same terms of homage as it had been held by David in the days of the first Henry.[387] A. D. 1158. In the following year the two kings again met at Carlisle, but the honour of knighthood which he appears to have expected was not conferred upon Malcolm, as a coolness had arisen about some long-forgotten point connected, probably, with the performance of feudal service for the fief of Huntingdon; for, in the ensuing year, after Malcolm had accompanied the English king in the expedition against Toulouse, A. D. 1159. which was rendered abortive through the royal scruples about attacking a town which contained the person of his own feudal superior the king of France, the coveted ceremony was performed at Tours, and the young king returned immediately to Scotland.[388]

The departure of their king to render feudal service as an English baron, was viewed with general disapproval by the Scots, to whom this phase of the English connection appears to have been always distasteful. For nearly twenty years David and his grandson had enjoyed in succession the advantages of their English fiefs, without the burden of their feudal obligations; as during the lifetime of Stephen, and for the first three years of his successor’s reign, no king of Scotland had ever met an English sovereign except at the head of a hostile army. Under these circumstances, the cession of all the advantages which had been acquired by David, the revival of a closer feudal connection with England, above all, the departure of the king for France, in direct opposition to the wishes of the great body of his native followers, aroused a spirit of disaffection; a formidable conspiracy appears to have been set on foot during his absence in France, and in his anxiety to win his spurs in the service of Henry, Malcolm risked the loss of his crown.

A veil of deep mystery enshrouds the proceedings of the conspirators. Foremost amongst their number was Ferquhard, Earl of Strathearn, whose father, Malise, had been the spokesman of the discontented Scots at the battle of the Standard; together with a certain Gilleanrias Ergemauche, and five other magnates, or “Mayster men,” as Wynton calls them, including perhaps the Earl of Ross and the Lord of Galloway, or his sons. A. D. 1160. Malcolm was holding his court at Perth, soon after his return from France, when the confederates suddenly surrounded the city, intending, either to secure the person of the king and dictate their own terms, or, as one historian affirms, to place his brother William on the throne. None of the race of Malcolm Ceanmore ever failed in the hour of danger, and the young king displayed, in this crisis, all the hereditary courage of his ancestry. Promptly assuming the offensive, he at once attacked the conspirators, drove them from the field, and following up his first success, led an army into Galloway, in the determination of crushing the insurrection at its source.[389]

The history of Galloway is a blank from the time when the father of Kenneth the First was slain upon the borders of Kyle, until the age in which the mutinous spirit of its unruly contingent to David’s army more than counterbalanced the utmost efforts of their reckless valour. Three centuries of antagonism appear to have engendered a feeling of bitter hostility between the Galwegians and their neighbours of Scottish Cumbria and the Lothians; whilst their continual encroachments upon the ancient kingdom of Strath Clyde must, from a very early period, have tended to throw the people of that province upon the protection of the Scottish kings, and materially to advance the policy which eventually placed a branch of the Mac Alpin family upon the Scoto-Cumbrian throne. At some remote era the Lord of Galloway became dependant upon the king of Scotland, and Fergus, the first known prince of the province, was an attendant on certain state occasions at the royal court, whilst he acknowledged the superiority of his contemporary David by the payment of a certain tribute in time of peace, and by a contingent of turbulent soldiery in war; resembling, in other respects, an ally rather than a vassal, and enjoying a considerable degree of independence within his hereditary dominions. He married Elizabeth, a natural daughter of Henry the First, and Afreca, his daughter by this union, became the wife of Olave and the mother of Godfrey, kings of Man and the Isles; the latter connection, apparently, involving him in the attempts of Somerled, Mac Heth, and others, who opposed the reigning family, either in the hope of advancing their own rival claims, or through a repugnance to the introduction of a novel system. It was in Galloway that Donald Mac Heth sought his last retreat, and amidst the mountains and moors of the same locality the discomfited conspirators seem to have hoped, after their defeat at Perth, to elude the pursuit of Malcolm. Twice was the king baffled in his attempts to penetrate the province; as much, probably, from the natural difficulties of the country, as from the magnitude of the opposition he encountered; but on the third occasion he was successful. Fergus, reduced at length to liege submission, retired, either of his own accord or from compulsion, into the monastery of Holyrood, where he died in the course of the following year; the whole of Galloway, thoroughly subdued, was brought into direct feudal subjection to the Scottish crown; and a conspiracy, which at one time threatened to entail the loss of a crown, through the energy and abilities of the youthful sovereign, or of his advisers, terminated in the acquisition of a principality.[390]

But Malcolm was never destined to fulfil the high promise of his youthful career, the delicacy of constitution, bequeathed by Queen Margaret to so many of her descendants, early developing itself in her grandson’s eldest child. A. D. 1163. Three years after the conquest of Galloway, during his progress towards the south, he was overtaken by a dangerous illness at Doncaster; though his days were not yet numbered, and he recovered sufficiently to carry out the original purpose of his visit to England, concluding an alliance with Henry that promised to ensure a firm and lasting peace.[391] He is also stated to have been present shortly afterwards at Woodstock, to tender his homage to the younger Henry, as his grandfather had done to the empress-queen, with the usual reservation of fealty to the elder king.[392]

A. D. 1164.

One more triumph was in store to grace the closing years of his career. Within a year or two of the liberation of Malcolm Mac Heth from Roxburgh Castle, the lord of the Oirir-Gael appears to have made his peace with the king of Scotland; though for some unknown cause, in the year 1164, he again broke out into open rebellion, landing suddenly on the coast of Renfrew with the whole force of Argyle and the Isles, strengthened by a body of auxiliaries from Ireland. Hardly had he set foot on shore before he fell, with his son Gillecolum—tradition says by treachery—and his followers dispersing, as usual, upon the death of their leader, returned at once to their island homes. Thus perished, in an obscure skirmish, the mightiest and most formidable of Malcolm’s enemies; the chieftain who raised the power of the Lords of Argyle upon the ruins of the ancient kingdom of the Gall-Gael.[393]

The defeat of Somerled was the final event in Malcolm’s reign, for the hand of death was already upon him, and, on the 9th of December 1165, A. D. 1165. he sunk into the grave, at the early age of twenty-four. His premature decease lent an interest to his memory, and may, in a great measure, have led the historians of the succeeding generation to invest the character of the king with the qualities which were supposed, in those days, to constitute the attributes of a saint upon earth. A certain effeminacy of appearance, resulting from his constitutional delicacy, may have originated the epithet of “the Maiden,” by which he was so often known; and though the same cause may have undoubtedly affected the tone of his mind, so far from having been an ascetic recluse, as he is frequently represented—more fit to wear the cowl than to wield the sword—whenever Malcolm appears in history, he stands forward as a prince of exceeding promise and spirit. His reign was principally taken up in quelling the disaffection of different powerful magnates, above all, of Somerled, whose hostility only ceased with his life; and the character of the young king may be best estimated by the successful result of those measures, through which he secured the direct feudal submission of the principality of Galloway, and the total cessation of all internal revolt during the early years of his successor.[394]

A singular policy—recalling to mind the compulsatory migrations of conquered races in the remote era of the early eastern empires—has been attributed by Fordun to this king; who is supposed, by that historian, to have transplanted the original inhabitants of Moray from their ancient province, repeopling the district with settlers from other parts of his dominions.[395] If such a proceeding was ever carried out, it may have originated in the arrangement with Malcolm MacHeth; but though it is impossible to pronounce with absolute certainty upon the accuracy of Fordun’s statement, it is very difficult to imagine that such a measure could have extended throughout the Highland portion of the district subsequently erected into an earldom for Randolph. The race, the language, and many of the customs of the mountaineers, remained unchanged at a comparatively recent period; and whilst the lowlands and the coast of Moray, which had already been partitioned out amongst the followers of David, would have presented comparatively few obstacles to such a project, it is hardly possible to conceive how it could ever have been successfully put into execution amidst the wild and inaccessible mountains of the interior. It appears, therefore, most reasonable to conclude, that Malcolm only carried out the policy pursued by his grandfather ever since the first forfeiture of the earldom; and that any changes that may have been brought about in the population of this part of Scotland—and which scarcely extended below the class of lesser Duchasach, or small proprietors—are not to be attributed to one sweeping and compulsatory measure, but to the grants of David and his successors; which must have had the effect of either reducing the earlier proprietary to a dependant position, or of driving into the remoter Highlands all who were inclined to contest the authority of the sovereign, or to dispute the validity of the royal ordinances, which reduced them to the condition of subordinates.

CHAPTER XII.
WILLIAM THE LION—1165–1214.

Amongst the earliest acts of William after his accession was the performance of feudal service for the fief of Huntingdon, accompanying Henry for this purpose upon one of his numerous expeditions into the French territories. A. D. 1166. By his ready acquiescence on a point about which his brother had at first demurred, he may have hoped to influence the English king in favour of his claim upon the northern counties; but if he entertained such expectations he was doomed to disappointment, as Henry limited his grant to the Honor of Huntingdon.[396]

William, however, was not of a disposition to submit with patience to the denial of his rights—for thus would he have characterised his claims; and he was ready to enter warmly into any confederacy promising to extort from the fears of Henry the cession of the coveted fiefs. Two campaigns against the Welsh, conducted with more than equivocal success; the continued hostility of Louis of France; and a doubtful contest with the newly made Archbishop of Canterbury, whose former reputation as a man-at-arms was destined to be eclipsed by his subsequent renown as a martyr,[397] heightened the difficulties of Henry’s situation: and his exasperation was increased against the king of Scotland, whose envoys at the French court, uniting with the representatives of the Welsh princes, were eager to enter into a league with the enemies of the English king.[398] A. D. 1168. But the hostility of William was not yet to be openly displayed, for a peace was concluded between the French and English kings, and the opportunity of attacking the latter at a disadvantage passed away. A. D. 1170. It was with an appearance, therefore, of renewed cordiality, that William and his brother David appeared at the court of Henry, to assist at the coronation of his eldest son at Westminster; when both the Scottish princes, taking the oaths of fealty and allegiance to the younger Henry, swore upon the sacred relics to be true to the heir of England, saving, as usual, their fidelity to his father.[399] But in spite of these professions of mutual friendship, the alliance in reality was hollow and insincere, the refusal of the northern counties still rankled in the breast of William, and an opportunity for enforcing his claim was not long wanting.

A. D. 1173.

Never did the fortunes of the second Henry appear more prosperous than at the very moment when the flight of his eldest son to the court of France, suddenly revealed the extent of the intrigues which were based upon the disaffection of his own children. Whilst the elder king was occupied in strengthening his defences upon the frontiers of France and in securing the important services of twenty thousand Reiters of Brabant, the younger Henry was busily corrupting the unfaithful adherents of his father, and lavishing grants upon the allies whose assistance he wished to purchase. The promise of Northumberland to William, and the offer of the fief of Cambridge to his brother, the Earl of Huntingdon, secured the active co-operation of both the Scottish princes;[400] and towards the close of summer, whilst the attention of the elder Henry was fully occupied in Normandy, the frontiers of England were suddenly invaded from the north.

Siege was laid to Werk and Carlisle, whilst the main body of irregulars, according to the usual tactics of Scottish armies, was dispatched to lay waste the surrounding country. The Bishop of Durham appears to have secretly favoured the confederates, and the Scots were allowed a free passage through the lands of his diocese;[401] but their further progress was checked, before long, by tidings of the approach of a powerful force under the orders of Richard de Lucy, and Humphrey de Bohun, the Justiciary and Constable of England. Raising the siege of Carlisle, William retired across the borders, closely followed by de Lucy and de Bohun, who were beginning to retaliate upon the Lothians the ravages of the Scottish army in England, when the arrival of messengers from the south, brought the unwelcome intelligence of the landing of the Earl of Leicester on Michaelmas Day. Negotiations were hastily opened with the Scottish king, and so well did the English commanders succeed in concealing the real state of affairs, that they obtained a truce until the following January, and were thus enabled to lead back their army to oppose the Earl of Leicester, and to bend all their energies towards confronting the novel danger.[402]

During the whole of the ensuing winter the war was carried on in England without intermission, whilst, with the singular policy of the age, a truce existed in all other quarters; thus enabling the partizans of Henry, in his own kingdom, to unite their forces for the purpose of crushing the Earl of Leicester.[403] A. D. 1174. At the expiration of the truce in January, the payment of 300 marks, offered by the barons of Northumberland through the medium of the bishop of Durham, purchased from William a further cessation of hostilities until Easter; and when the term of this second truce had also expired, the armies of the allies[404] at length appeared in the field. Whilst Louis prosecuted the war in Normandy, and the Count of Flanders, with the younger Henry, meditated a descent upon England, William again crossed the Borders with an army, strengthened by a body of mercenaries from the Low Countries;[405] his brother David proceeding at once to the south, as the earl had been chosen to command the English confederates, now left without a head through the capture of the Earl of Leicester.[406]

Leaving a division of his army to blockade Carlisle, William led the main body into Northumberland. Brough and Appleby were captured without resistance, and the castles of Liddel, Warkworth, and Harbottle, fell, in succession, into the hands of the Scots, who then retraced their steps to Carlisle. A close blockade extorted a promise of surrender from the castellan, Robert de Vaux, if no relief arrived before Michaelmas; for his provisions were beginning to fail, and he suspected the townsmen—attached, probably, to the memory of David, who had often made Carlisle his residence—of a favourable inclination towards the Scots. William then marched to invest Prudhoe Castle, upon the southern bank of the Tyne, where he was joined by Robert de Mowbray, the youngest of the victors of Northallerton, who, sorely pressed by the warlike bishop of Lincoln, eagerly advocated the advance of the Scots into Yorkshire, before the fall of his last castle of Thirsk, placing his eldest son in the hands of William as a hostage for the sincerity of his request. William promised to march to his assistance, but, warned of the approach of the Yorkshire barons, he relinquished his intention of relieving Thirsk, and, raising the siege of Prudhoe Castle, commenced his retreat towards the north.[407]

As he approached his own frontiers, the king dispatched the greater part of his army, under the command of Duncan, Earl of Fife, with instructions to disperse his forces over the face of the country, and carry out the usual tactics of Scottish warfare. In order to extend the circuit of his operations, Earl Duncan subdivided the forces committed to his charge, entrusting two separate divisions to Richard de Moreville and the Earl of Angus; whilst with the main body under his immediate command he entered Warkworth upon the morning of Saturday, the 13th of July; and the inhabitants of that place, no longer protected by the garrison of the castle, fell an easy prey to his followers. The town was burnt to the ground, and more than a hundred miserable beings, who, in the vain hope of safety, had fled to the Church of St. Lawrence, were torn from its sacred precincts and massacred with remorseless cruelty. Little did Earl Duncan imagine, as he contemplated the ruins of the burning church, that within a few short miles the fate of Scotland was trembling in the balance.[408]

Upon reaching Newcastle, late on the evening of the 12th of July, the Yorkshire Barons, so often destined to render good service to England, found that the Scottish army had retreated; when a difference of opinion arose as to the expediency of a further pursuit. Several of their number urged that they had already done enough in frustrating the intentions of the enemy against their own neighbourhood, and that it would be merely courting unnecessary danger to pursue eight thousand armed men with only four hundred horsemen. But there were others amongst their ranks who argued that much might be done by a compact and well-equipped body of knights, whilst the Scottish army was dispersed over the country, and whilst William was still in ignorance of their approach; and by the arguments and the authority of those who were in favour of an advance, the hesitation of the dissentients was at length overcome, and the bolder counsels prevailed.[409]

At earliest dawn upon the 13th, the Barons set out from Newcastle. A dense fog overhung the country, appearing to increase as they advanced northwards; and it was still early, though they had ridden fast and far, when several of the party began to suggest the expediency of a return, urging, that in their utter ignorance of their own locality, as well as of the position of the enemy, they might be blindly rushing upon unknown perils.[410] But Balliol, with a resolute determination that has often extricated brave men out of difficulties, refused to listen to such suggestions, avowing his own intention of proceeding at all risks, and the waverers were ashamed to turn back. Onwards they pressed, whilst close upon their right lay Warkworth, swarming with the Scottish foe; but enshrouded in the obscurity of the friendly mist they passed the river Coquet in safety, and continued their adventurous progress. The fog rolled away as the morning advanced, displaying to the delighted eyes of the little band the friendly walls of Alnwick, and they were hastening with alacrity towards its welcome shelter, when they perceived a small body of about sixty knights, who were engaged in tilting in a neighbouring meadow. The tilting party was composed of William and his attendant suite, who paid little or no attention to the approach of a band of horsemen, mistaking them for a party of Earl Duncan’s mounted force returning to the Scottish camp, until a nearer view of the advancing barons revealed the English cognizances. One moment of reflection would have warned the king not to imperil the whole fortune of the war upon such an unequal contest; but no such thoughts crossed the mind of William, and, with the hasty exclamation, “Now will it be seen who is a true knight,” he dashed at once against the enemy with all the reckless gallantry of a knight-errant. The result can be easily imagined. His horse was immediately slain—for this was no tilting match, and his opponents aimed at securing their prize—and before he could disengage himself from the dying charger, William was a helpless captive. His nobles determined to share his fate; many of his suite, who had not been present at the catastrophe, riding in and surrendering to the English barons to avoid the imputation of deserting their sovereign; and, before the close of the same fatal Saturday, the Barons of Yorkshire again entered Newcastle with their illustrious captive in their charge.[411]

On the following morning the royal prisoner was removed, for greater security, to Richmond castle; and the important intelligence of his capture was forwarded in haste to London, where Henry had by this time arrived. Alarmed at the assemblage of the hostile fleet, and anxious to be upon the spot to oppose the threatened invasion, he had crossed from Barfleur in a gale of wind, undeterred by the elements which held his enemies wind-bound at Gravelines, reaching Southampton in safety on the evening of the 8th of July. All that night, and the following day, he is said to have hurried on, without rest or refreshment beyond bread and water, to the tomb of the murdered Becket, at whose shrine either policy, or repentance, dictated the performance of a penance, that, to the ideas of the present age, appears degrading. After he reached London, fatigue and excitement threw him into a fever, from which he was only partially recovered, when the messenger of Ranulph de Glanville, standing by the side of his bed on the morning of Thursday the 18th, aroused him from sleep, before daylight, with the welcome intelligence of William’s capture. All remembrance of his illness vanishing at the joyful tidings, before the close of the same day Henry departed for the north; and ere a fortnight had elapsed from the date of his misfortune, the royal captive was removed from Richmond castle, his legs were fettered under the body of a horse, and in this degrading position he was presented to Henry at Northampton.[412]

The effects of the calamity which had befallen the king of Scotland were at once instantaneous and decisive. His own army, stunned for the moment, only recovered to break out, as usual, into mutual dissension and strife. Gilbert and Uchtred, the lords of Galloway, hurrying homewards, destroyed the castles which had been built in their province to secure the authority of the king, drove out the royal officers, and then dispatched gifts and envoys to the English king with the offer of their fealty and submission. The Scots availed themselves of the anarchy of the moment to vent their long suppressed animosity against the townsmen and burghers, mostly of English origin, with whom David and his successors had filled the royal burghs and cities of their kingdom. The Earl of Huntingdon, relinquishing his high command, returned in haste to Scotland. Ferrers and De Mowbray threw themselves on Henry’s mercy; Gloucester and De Clare, the waverers of the western counties, met him with assurances of their fidelity; Hugh Bigot dismissed his Flemish auxiliaries; and the Bishop of Durham surrendered his castles, protesting that the presence of his nephew, the Count de Bar, was merely for his own protection: whilst the formidable fleet, which had threatened the invasion of the English coasts, melted away at the news of the disaster; and the Count of Flanders, with the younger Henry, drew off their forces from Gravelines to join Louis of France at the siege of Rouen. Within three weeks from the date of the catastrophe the power of Henry was re-established throughout England; and, as he had nothing more to fear in his own kingdom, he prepared to face his opponents in France, 8th Aug. and sailed with his Scottish prisoners for Normandy. Such were the first consequences of William’s fatal error, in mistaking the rash folly of “a true knight” for the gallant bearing of a king.[413]

In another month the war was brought to a triumphant conclusion by the elder Henry, who, at the personal request of Louis of France, set all his prisoners at liberty, with the exception of the king of Scotland, detaining William in fetters at Falaise until the month of December, before the terms of his release were finally arranged.[414] They may be briefly described as follows:—

William was to become the liegeman of his lord, the King Henry, for Scotland, Galloway, and all his other lands, and to perform fealty to his liege lord in the same way as other vassals. His brother, his barons, his clergy, and all his other vassals, were to become the liegemen of the English crown, acknowledging that they held their lands of the English king, and swearing to support him, their liege lord, against the king of Scotland, if the latter ever failed in his fidelity.

The Scottish Church was to acknowledge the subjection due to the English Church; and the English Church was to possess all those rights over the Scottish Church to which the former was justly entitled.

For the strict observance of this convention, the castles of Berwick, Roxburgh, Jedburgh, Edinburgh, and Stirling, were to be made over to Henry, and to receive English garrisons, all expenses being defrayed by the Scottish king; David, and twenty-one of the earls and barons of Scotland, were to remain as hostages until the delivery of the castles; while each of these noblemen was further required to give up his son, or his next heir, as a pledge for the due performance of his part of the treaty after his own release. Three days after the conclusion of the convention of Falaise, William was allowed to leave his Norman prison, and proceed, in the first instance, to England; where he was to remain, in a state of comparative freedom, until the castles already mentioned were delivered over to the officers of the English king.[415]

The conduct of Henry upon this occasion has been characterised by his advocates as generous and lenient; whilst it has been stigmatised by his opponents as harsh and illiberal. Neither view appears to be correct. When William, conceiving himself to have been aggrieved, united in a confederacy which, if successful, would have probably confined Henry within the walls of a monastery for the remainder of his life, the Scottish king was fully prepared to profit to the utmost at the expense of his enemy’s weakness; and Henry did no more with the captive of Falaise than William would have done had their positions been reversed. But to maintain, as it has been sometimes asserted, that he might have put his prisoner to death, is to argue with a total disregard of the principles and sentiments of an age in which the death of an independent prince, like William, would have been even more revolting to the feelings of his contemporaries, than the public scourging of Henry in Canterbury Cathedral would be unsuitable to the ideas of the present time. In depriving his captive of his English fiefs, which were justly forfeited, and in extorting liege homage for Scotland, Henry displayed neither mercy nor leniency, simply availing himself, to the utmost, of an opportunity for advancing his own interests at the expense of his unfortunate rival; and his conduct was that of an able and unsparing politician, exacting his own terms from a fallen foe. As such, it must be judged; and, as such, it is far less open to censure, than his repudiation in prosperity of the promises which he made in his adversity to his earliest and most faithful ally.

A. D. 1175.

In the course of the summer after the release of William, both the English kings, who now affected the closest intimacy and regard, repaired in company to York: and here, upon the 10th of August, they were met by the king of Scotland, bringing with him Earl David, no longer lord of Huntingdon, with the bishops, abbots, earls, barons, knights, and other freeholders of Scotland, who united with their king in swearing fealty to the two Henries, and in ratifying the convention of Falaise. All became the liegemen of the English kings in the Cathedral church of St. Peter—a fabric of an earlier date than the present noble minster—and yet further to secure the exact fulfilment of the treaty, the clergy swore to lay their native land under an interdict, and the laity pledged themselves to hold, as true men, to their English suzerains, if ever William of Scotland proved unfaithful to his oath.[416]

For fifteen years the convention of Falaise remained in full force, and every action of Henry, down to the day of his death, exhibits the tenacity with which he clung to its scrupulous fulfilment. Not a papal legate was allowed to enter Scotland who had not first sworn to do nothing detrimental to the interests of the English king, with an additional promise to return through England—a proviso that precluded the possibility of evasion—whilst a similar pledge was exacted from all the Scottish clergy who attended the eleventh Council at the Lateran. William was continually summoned to attend, as a vassal, at the Court of his English lord; and he brought his earls and barons, when required, to assist at the councils of their common superior. He crossed the sea to Normandy, at the command of Henry, to submit to that king’s decision in his dispute about the bishopric of St. Andrews; license was granted for his expeditions into Galloway; and he conducted the lords of that province to perform fealty to Henry, or to promise to abide by the decrees of the English court. In short, a comparison between the usual state of Scotland, and her condition during these fifteen years of real feudal subjection, affords one of the clearest and most convincing proofs of her entire freedom from all dependance upon her southern neighbour, at every other period of her history, before the reign of the first Edward.

The oaths of fealty and allegiance tendered in the church of St. Peter riveted upon Scotland the yoke of feudal dependance; but her Church was destined to vindicate with success her ecclesiastical liberties, and to evade the claims of the English metropolitans, which a special clause in the convention of Falaise had, to all appearance, triumphantly established. The contest which embittered the whole of the reign of Alexander, seems to have slumbered in the days of David, to break out afresh in the time of his eldest grandson, Malcolm, when the papal chair was occupied by Nicolas Breakespear, under the title of Adrian IV., the only Englishman who ever rose to be the head of the Church of Rome.[417] His partiality to the land of his nativity was frequently manifested, and availing himself of the papal claim to dominion over all the islands, founded upon the imaginary Donation of Constantine, he willingly lent himself to the ambitious policy of Henry, authorising that king to conquer, and exact obedience from, the people of Ireland for the advancement of the interests of the Roman Church.[418] It is also probable that Adrian was inclined to favour the pretensions of the English metropolitans to the obedience of the Scottish bishops; for, immediately upon his death, a mission was dispatched to the next pope, A. D. 1159. and the successive appointments of the bishops of Moray and St. Andrews to the office of papal legate for Scotland guaranteed, for the time, the independence of the Scottish Church.[419]

Upon the death of the bishop of St. Andrews, Roger, archbishop of York—the same prelate who was the rival and opponent of Becket—obtained the office of legate for England, A. D. 1163.and repaired to Norham towards the close of Malcolm’s reign, to summon the Scottish bishops to submit to his pretensions. Ingelram the archdeacon, and Solomon the dean of Glasgow, with Walter, prior of Kelso, were deputed to maintain the liberties of their Church; both parties appealed to Rome, and the Scots achieved a notable triumph when Ingelram was consecrated to the bishopric of Glasgow in spite of the opposition of the archbishop.[420]

The dispute again languished until the concessions recently extorted from William appeared to deal a death-blow to all the liberties of Scotland. A. D. 1176. A great council was held at Northampton in the January after the meeting at York, at which, in obedience to a summons from his suzerain, William was in attendance with the bishops, abbots, and other ecclesiastical dignitaries of his kingdom, as liege subjects of the English king; and at the conclusion of the council the Scottish clergy were commanded, upon their allegiance, and in virtue of the oath which they had already sworn, to acknowledge their dependance upon the English Church. They denied that any such submission was due; and in reply to the assertion of the archbishop of York that the bishops of Glasgow and Galloway were rightfully his suffragans, Jocelyn of Glasgow, the spokesman of the Scottish party, affirmed that his see was “the daughter of Rome,” and consequently independent of all other authority.[421]

But the cause of the Scottish bishops was best served by the disputes of the English metropolitans, as the archbishop of Canterbury opposed the pretensions of his own see to the rival claims of York; and Henry, foreseeing that he would be called upon to decide between the archbishops, and dreading the very idea of another collision with a churchman, hastily dismissed the Scottish clergy without exacting from them any admission of canonical dependance upon either see.[422] Upon their return to Scotland a deputation immediately set out for Rome,[423] and in the course of the same year an injunction was obtained from the pope forbidding the archbishop of York to press his claims except before the Roman Court:[424] and twelve years later the dispute was finally set at rest by the declaration of Pope Clement III., that the Church of Scotland was in immediate dependance upon the see of Rome.[425]

But the difficulties of William were not confined to ecclesiastical disputes, for the confusion amongst the Scottish army, after his capture at Alnwick, was only precursory of the anarchy, and disorganization, prevailing in the remoter provinces of his dominions for several years afterwards. Conspicuous amongst the disturbed districts was Galloway, for the alliance between the brothers, who were lords of the province, lasted only as long as it was their mutual interest to unite for the overthrow of the Scottish supremacy. The king’s officers, or Maors, A. D. 1174. who appear to have been paralyzed at the suddenness of the attack, were either massacred or driven out of the country almost without resistance; and fourteen years after the conquest of the principality, the royal authority was eradicated from Galloway, in fewer weeks than it had taken years to establish.

It then occurred to the elder brother Gilbert that his father had suffered no rival to share his dominions; and, after ascertaining the sentiments of his immediate adherents, he determined upon entrusting a body of men to his son, Malcolm, with instructions to remove all impediments from his path to undivided power. The son was worthy of the father, and surprising the unsuspecting Uchtred in his island home, he tore out his eyes and tongue, and then, with still more atrocious barbarity, left him in this state to perish slowly and in agony. So speedily had this tragedy been enacted, that when Henry dispatched his chaplain, Roger Hoveden, from Normandy, with directions to put himself in communication with Robert de Vaux at Carlisle, and to negotiate with the lords of Galloway about the transfer of their allegiance to the English crown, the envoys, upon their arrival in Galloway, found Gilbert sole ruler of the province. He entered with eagerness upon the subject of their mission, guaranteeing a yearly tribute of two thousand marks of silver, and a thousand head of cattle and hogs, if Henry would release him from his dependance upon the king of Scotland; but as the envoys possessed no power to conclude an arrangement without submitting the terms to Henry, they could only promise to lay the proposal before their king, and, with this reply, they took their leave. 23d Nov. As it was late in November before they reached Galloway, by the time they returned to Normandy the convention of Falaise must have been decided upon, if it had not been already completed; and as the clause accepting the homage of William for Galloway precluded Henry from entering into a separate agreement with Gilbert, he availed himself of the crime of the latter as an excuse for breaking off the negotiations, and for refusing to treat upon any terms with the murderer of “his cousin Uchtred.”[426]

A. D. 1175.

Immediately after the conclusion of the ceremony at York, Henry granted license to William to march an army into Galloway, empowering him to seek out and seize the murderer, and bring him before the court of his liege lord for punishment.[427] Gilbert submitted without resistance; and, in the autumn of the following year, William again presented himself at the court of Henry, A. D. 1176. with the lord of Galloway in his suite; but a fine seems to have been considered as a sufficient atonement for fratricide, and, upon the 9th of October, Gilbert swore fealty to the English king, giving up his eldest son Duncan as a hostage for his allegiance, and purchasing the royal favour at the price of a thousand marks of silver. No sooner had he returned to his principality than, driving out of the province all who were not of native origin, he denounced the penalty of death against every true-born Galwegian who dared to acknowledge that he held his lands of the king of Scots. His hatred against William was intense, and as no fear ever seems to have crossed his mind that he might forfeit the newly acquired favour of Henry by hostilities against his subject and ally, until the day of his death the Galwegian prince never omitted an opportunity of harassing and plundering the neighbouring provinces of Scotland; nor did his estimate of Henry’s character prove to be incorrect.[428]

Few kings who lived in that age were fortunate enough to escape a collision with the Church of Rome, nor was William destined to be amongst the number. His quarrel with Pope Alexander III. arose out of a dispute connected with the bishopric of St. Andrews. Upon the death of Bishop Richard in 1178 the chapter elected John Scot to the vacant see; but the king, who had destined the bishopric for his own confessor Hugh, and was not accustomed to be dictated to in matters of church patronage, ordered his nominee to be installed and consecrated by the Scottish bishops, A. D. 1180. whilst the pope, espousing the opposite side, commissioned his legate, the sub-deacon Alexis, to consecrate John. Yielding to the advice of his clergy, William offered no opposition to this proceeding, but he swore by the arm of St. James—his favourite oath—that the same kingdom should not hold himself and John Scot, and after the conclusion of the ceremony he effectually frustrated the intentions of the pope by banishing John, with his uncle Matthew, bishop of Aberdeen, and all his relations, from the country. Alexander, highly exasperated, retaliated by threatening to extinguish the liberties of the Scottish Church which he had hitherto protected, and he engaged the king of England to interfere in his behalf, conferring the office of legate for Scotland upon the archbishop of York, and authorizing that prelate to excommunicate William, and to lay his dominions under an interdict if he still persisted in his determination. A. D. 1181. It was in vain that Henry summoned William to Normandy, where the banished prelates had taken refuge, and endeavoured to effect an arrangement. The king steadily refused to permit John Scot to enjoy the bishopric of St. Andrews, offering to appoint him to the chancellorship, with a promise of the first see that fell vacant in his dominions; and as the pope determined with equal firmness that none but John Scot should preside over the contested diocese, refusing to listen to any sort of compromise, every one who acknowledged Hugh was excommunicated by the papal legate, whilst all who denied his claim were banished by the king.

Such was the state of Scotland towards the close of the year 1181, when, to the unfeigned delight of William, he was unexpectedly released from his difficulties by the deaths of the aged pope and of Roger, archbishop of York, the inveterate opponent of the liberties of the Scottish Church. The bishop of Glasgow and the abbot of Melrose were commissioned to set out immediately for Rome, for the purpose of negotiating an arrangement with the new pope; and Lucius III., A. D. 1182. reversing the policy of his predecessor, absolved William from the excommunication, released his kingdom from the interdict, and forwarded to him the Golden Rose in token of amity.[429] It was subsequently agreed that both bishops, resigning their sees, should be reinstated by the pope, Hugh retaining the bishopric of St. Andrews, and John Scot receiving Dunkeld; and though six years elapsed before the dispute was brought to a final close, after the death of Alexander no serious misunderstanding arose between the king of Scotland and the papal see.[430]

A. D. 1181.

During the absence of William in Normandy, whilst he was in attendance at the court of Henry upon the subject of his dispute with the papal see, some of the leading nobility of Scotland—probably of Moravia—taking advantage of the distracted state of the kingdom, made overtures to Donald Bane, a son of William Fitz Duncan, inviting him to assert his claim upon the throne of Scotland. This Donald, better known as Mac William, had already put forward his pretensions to the Scottish crown, but his attempts had been hitherto limited to predatory incursions, nor had he ever yet obtained a permanent footing in the country; but the old spirit of disaffection still lingered in the north and west, where the enemies of the king flocked to the standard of his hostile kinsman as readily as they had once gathered around the banner of the heir of Moray, and the insurrection soon rose to a formidable head.[431] Upon his return to England towards the close of July, William received intelligence of the invasion of Donald Bane, but it was not until the middle of September that he obtained the permission of Henry to absent himself with his attendant barons from the English court, and to take measures for the defence of his kingdom. He at once hurried with his brother David toward the provinces in possession of the enemy, but Mac William appears to have avoided an encounter, and the king was obliged to remain satisfied with strengthening his hold upon the marches and lowlands of Ross-shire, and confining his enemy to the remoter Highland districts, by the erection of the two castles of Eddirton and Dunscath.[432]

Although he was now released from the interdict, William found too much occupation, in attending to the internal dissensions of his own kingdom, to attempt any interference in the quarrels between Henry and his sons. Mac William in the north was still unsubdued, whilst Gilbert of Galloway openly invaded the Lothians, plundering the country, massacring the inhabitants, and refusing to listen to any terms of accommodation. A. D. 1184. Such was the state of disorder created by the Galwegians, that in the year 1184 William had assembled an army to repress the outrages of Gilbert, when the return of Henry from Normandy induced him to alter his intentions, and, dismissing his followers, he hastened southwards to meet the English king. Mingled motives may have dictated this change of purpose, though, as a vassal of the English crown, he was not strictly justified in avenging himself upon another vassal without the license of his superior; but at this time particularly, he was anxious to avoid every cause of quarrel with Henry, for the Duchess of Saxony had arrived in the train of her father from Normandy, and William was a suitor for the hand of her daughter Matilda. Simon de St. Liz also, upon whom the Honor of Huntingdon had been conferred, had lately died without an heir, and the Scottish king was equally on his guard lest any misunderstanding should interfere with his claims upon his former fief.[433]

Henry readily promised his consent to the proposed union if a papal dispensation could be obtained, but though the relationship was somewhat distant—for Matilda was eight degrees removed from William according to the old computation of the civil law, though only four by the later canonical method of reckoning—the pope refused compliance, and from subsequent occurrences it is not improbable that Henry was secretly opposed to the marriage. As a set off to the failure of his suit with Matilda, the forfeiture of Huntingdon was reversed, and though several of the English barons put forward pretensions to the fief, A. D. 1185. offering large sums of money for its possession, it was restored by Henry to the Scottish king, who immediately sub-infeoffed it to his brother David.[434]

The renewal of the grant of Huntingdon was decided upon at a council held at London in the middle of Lent 1185, at which the king of Scotland and his nobility were in attendance, to consult upon a letter which had been received from Pope Lucius respecting the relief of Jerusalem.[435] William had been recently released from one of his bitterest and most implacable foes, for Gilbert of Galloway had died in the preceding January. Duncan, the heir of the deceased lord, was still residing at the court of England in his original capacity of a hostage; but a competitor for the principality had already arisen in Roland, the eldest son of the murdered Uchtred, who had now passed ten years in exile at the Scottish court, where he had married Helena, the daughter and heiress of the Constable—the same Richard de Moreville who had been included in the excommunication of William for his staunch adherence to the cause of his royal master. Roland, therefore, was attached to the connection with Scotland both by interest and inclination; he was a Scot rather than a Galwegian, and in his attempt to recover the inheritance of his father he was assisted by a numerous band of auxiliaries from the kingdom in which he had so long resided.[436]

4th July.

The summer found him in Galloway, entering upon a course of brilliant and unchequered success. Gillepatrick, Henry Kennedy, and Samuel, the partners of the late lord in his hostilities against Scotland, and the leaders of the faction now in arms to secure the succession of his son, were one after the other defeated and slain: a similar fate was in store for Gillecolum, who appears to have held the lands of Gilbert against either claimant, but of whom little else is known except his incessant ravages of the Lothians; and further resistance was soon crushed out by the vigorous measures of Roland, who inflicted summary vengeance on all who refused to acknowledge his authority. His residence in Scotland had converted him into a feudal baron, and he lost no time in securing the submission of the province by rebuilding, and garrisoning, the royal castles which had been destroyed by the sons of Fergus, on their return after the catastrophe at Alnwick.[437]

Intelligence of Roland’s proceedings must have reached Henry in the course of the same year, but he passed them over without notice until his return from Normandy, A. D. 1186. when, shortly after Christmas, William and his barons were again in attendance at the court of England. They were treated by Henry with the most marked and studied courtesy, for it was his object to prepare them for the marriage which he had projected between Ermengarde de Bellomont and William; and the anxiety of Henry to conclude a union which would confer no increase of political importance upon his royal vassal, strengthens the supposition that he had looked unfavourably upon the alliance with Matilda of Saxony. Such thoughts may have passed through the mind of William, for he delayed his final consent to Henry’s proposal until after a lengthened conference with his barons, who were possibly influenced in favour of the projected marriage by the prospect of regaining, as the dowry of their future queen, the important castle of Edinburgh.[438]

As the grand object of Henry was now attained, he was at liberty to turn his attention to the affairs of Galloway; and accordingly he directed William, on his return to Scotland, to summon the new lord of the province to repair to the English court, for the purpose of rendering an account of his conduct in entering upon the lands of Duncan, and other barons of Galloway, seizing upon their castles, and disposing of their possessions without any reference to his suzerain. Roland took no further notice of the summons than to strengthen the natural defences of the country by felling trees in the passes, and by endeavouring, in various other ways, to render the approaches to the province impassable for an invading force. But Henry was in earnest, and he concentrated the whole military force of England on Carlisle, where he was met by the Scottish contingent under William and his brother David, whom he deputed to bring Roland to his presence. They returned at first without success, for the lord of Galloway appears to have been reluctant to entrust himself within the power of Henry without some pledge for his safety; but after a second mission, in which the bishop of Durham and Ranulph de Glanville were associated with the former envoys, and empowered to give hostages for his security and safe conduct, Roland placed himself in the hands of the Scottish princes, and was presented by William to the English king. It was not the object of the latter to proceed to extremities, for as long as the lord of Galloway admitted his dependance upon the English crown, it was immaterial to Henry by whom the fief was held; and he was satisfied with accepting the allegiance which Roland tendered for his father’s lands, with his promise to abide by the decision of the English court respecting the claims of his cousin Duncan. The three sons of the Galwegian chieftain were then delivered over as hostages for the fidelity of their father; William, his brother, and his barons bound themselves on oath to enforce the adherence of Roland, if necessary, to his English allegiance; and as a further security against a breach of faith, the bishop of Glasgow promised, upon the relics of the saints, to fulminate against the prince, if he proved a traitor, all the pains and penalties incurred by a disobedient son of the Church.[439]

Such was the conclusion of the disturbances of Galloway, and from the date of this arrangement Roland remained in undisputed possession of the whole principality. It is impossible to say whether Duncan ever prosecuted his claim upon his paternal inheritance; but, immediately upon the death of Henry, William, who had all along been favourable to Roland, conferred the district of Carrick as an earldom upon Duncan, on condition that the new earl should resign all claims upon the lordship of his cousin.[440] In this arrangement Duncan willingly acquiesced, thus becoming the first possessor of the Earldom of Carrick, a fief which was destined once more to revert to the crown, when the illustrious great-grandson of the first earl ascended the throne of Scotland as Robert the First. Ere long William reaped the full benefit of having secured a firm and devoted adherent in Roland of Galloway.

Sept.

Upon his return from this expedition, Henry celebrated the marriage of William and Ermengarde with much pomp and ceremony, placing the palace of Woodstock at the disposal of the royal pair. After four days spent in feasting and revelry, the young queen departed for her husband’s kingdom, the earl of Huntingdon escorting her, with the rest of the Scottish nobility who had been present at the celebration of the marriage; whilst William, instead of attending upon his bride in her progress to the north, accompanied the English king to Marlborough.[441]

A. D. 1187.

Six years had now elapsed since the establishment of Mac William in the country, where his influence and power had increased to a formidable extent, and the affairs of the north began to assume an alarming aspect. The majority of the barons and thanes of Ross, and other portions of Moravia, had by this time ranged themselves beneath his banner;[442] whilst the connection of the lords of Argyle, and the Isles, with the family of Malcolm Mac Heth, must have disposed the leading nobles of the Western Highlands to display a very lukewarm adherence to the royal cause. With the greater part of the north and west either openly, or secretly, in his favour, Mac William could also calculate upon the support of many other leading men, who had been parties to his first establishment in the country; and the king perceived that a crisis had at length arrived, in which he must either immediately crush his competitor, or risk the loss of half his kingdom.[443]

Accordingly, in the summer of 1187, all the military force of Scotland which had not openly declared for Mac William, was ordered to concentrate upon Inverness; and William contemplated placing himself at the head of his army, following his rival into the remoter Highlands, and forcing him to a decisive contest, about the result of which he entertained little doubt. Many of his barons, however, who were alive to the dangers of the impending campaign in a wild and mountainous region, vehemently opposed the royal project, dreading the repetition of some disastrous accident from the fiery and impetuous courage of the king. They were uneasy, also, about the fidelity of a certain portion of the royal army, who were quite as well inclined to favour Mac William as to support the cause of the king; and, acquiescing at length in the prudence of their advice, William consented to remain at Inverness, and to entrust the immediate conduct of the war to leaders upon whose ability and fidelity he could depend.

A fresh difficulty arose, after the king’s decision, from the positive refusal of some of his principal nobles to march without the king against Mac William. At a moment of such vital importance to the royal cause, when the exertions of the well-affected were paralysed by this unexpected sedition, the eyes of all the army were turned upon the Lord of Galloway; and it was well for William that, in this crisis, he could count upon the fidelity of that powerful baron.[444] No hesitation marked the conduct of Roland, who at once threw the whole weight of his influence and authority upon the side of his royal master; and when, in consequence of the dispute, it was arranged that the main body of the army should remain with William at Inverness, placing himself at the head of three thousand of his own followers, upon whose fidelity he could depend, he set out in search of Mac William, in the determination of carrying out in person the original intentions of the king.

The fate of Scotland was decided by an accident; and it has twice been the destiny of Inverness to witness, in its vicinity, the termination of a contest for a crown. Upon the moor of Mamgarvy, some long forgotten spot in that neighbourhood, the party of Roland unexpectedly fell in with a body of the enemy, whose numbers were about equal to their own. Neither party shunned the contest, but the royalists gained the day, and amongst the slain was discovered the lifeless body of Mac William. His death terminated the war, and the victor returned in triumph to Inverness, to earn the grant of the broad lands of Galloway with the head of his royal master’s most formidable and inveterate opponent.[445]

The death of Donald Bane at once restored peace throughout the north of Scotland. The strength of his cause had lain, not so much in the devotion of his adherents to his own person, as in their disaffection towards the reigning sovereign; and the same feelings which had induced many of the Scottish nobles to look with indifference upon the increase of Donald’s power, rendered them equally careless about its extinction. No enthusiastic clansmen burned to avenge the slaughter of their chief; for no hereditary attachment united his followers to Mac William, like the feelings which once bound the men of Moray to the descendants of their early kings and mormaors.[446] The cause of Mac Heth was identified with the claims of the ancient line of Kenneth Mac Duff; but the powerful chieftains of the North and West, who adhered to that family from hereditary associations, must have followed the banner of Mac William from enmity to the reigning family, or from dislike to their feudal innovations, rather than from any clannish feeling of attachment to the heir of Malcolm Ceanmore’s eldest son, who claimed to be the rightful representative of the rival line of Atholl.

A. D. 1188.

Scotland had at this period almost regained the position in which she stood before the fatal capture of her king. Galloway was at length pacified, the north and west were no longer in open rebellion, and Scottish men-at-arms once more garrisoned the castle of Edinburgh; but Henry still retained Roxburgh and Berwick, the keys of the southern frontier, and for the cession of these important fortresses William offered to pay 4000 marks of silver. Henry signified his readiness to restore the castles if William, in return, would agree to grant him the tenths of the kingdom of Scotland for the projected crusade, an arrangement to which the latter promised to consent, if he could prevail upon his people to give their sanction to the terms; but when the bishop of Durham, who was deputed by his king to collect the promised aid, arrived for this purpose upon the frontiers of Scotland, he was met between Werk and Brigham by the Scottish king, who unexpectedly prohibited his further advance. William renewed his original offer for the castles, explaining to the bishop, that, personally, he was still ready to adhere to his compact with Henry; but that upon assembling his barons and clergy in council, they had unanimously refused to listen to the arrangement, asserting that they would refuse to grant away the tenths of Scotland, though both kings had sworn to levy them in person. In vain the English envoy attempted to turn the Scots from their purpose; threats and persuasion were equally unavailing, for the determination of the latter was inflexible; and as the bishop was not empowered to take into consideration the propositions of the Scottish king, he was obliged to return empty handed to the south, and convey to his master in Normandy the impotent result of his mission.[447]

A. D. 1189.

In the following year the ingratitude of his favourite son John, for whose sake he had provoked the hostility of Richard, by evading the acknowledgment of the latter as his rightful successor, completed the ruin that fatigue and chagrin had commenced, and, early in July, Henry of England died of a broken heart at Chinon. Earl David appears to have been implicated in the rebellion of Richard, for Huntingdon was amongst the fiefs granted by the latter at Tours, upon the day after the army of the confederates was enabled, through the continued drought, to enter that town by fording the shallow Loire.[448] The death of Henry was fraught with most important consequences for Scotland, for Richard, with all the enthusiasm of his impetuous nature, was burning to lead the chivalry of Europe to the re-conquest of the Holy Sepulchre, and as money was most essential for carrying out the crusade, in every imaginable method he sought to procure it. The great offices of the crown were put up for sale; the favour of the king was purchased by his illegitimate brother Geoffry; and the earldom of Northumberland was bought by the bishop of Durham.[449] Ten thousand marks of silver were paid by William as the price of the independence of his kingdom and of the restoration of the castles of Roxburgh and Berwick; and in the following November, about six weeks after the coronation of Richard, at which the earl of Huntingdon had assisted, bearing one of the swords of state, the archbishop of York, with the sheriff and barons of the shire, met William at the Tweed, and in obedience to the commands of their sovereign, escorted him with every mark of honour to Canterbury. Here upon the 5th of December, after duly performing “such homage for his English dignities as his ancestors were wont to render to the predecessors of the English king,” he received from the hands of Richard a charter annulling all the concessions extorted by Henry at the time of his capture; and after fifteen years of feudal subjection, the consequences of the disastrous accident at Alnwick were at length repaired, and the independence of Scotland re-established.[450]

CHAPTER XIII.
WILLIAM THE LION—1165–1214.

Peace reigned throughout the northern borders of England during the absence of her king in the Holy Land; and when Richard languished in the dungeons of the emperor, William contributed two thousand marks towards his ransom. A. D. 1193. No countenance was afforded by the Scottish sovereign to the intrigues of Philip and John; but upon the release of the royal captive, Earl David of Huntingdon was the first to declare in his favour, and uniting with the Earl of Chester, A. D. 1194. whose sister he had married, he joined in besieging the strong castle of Nottingham on behalf of the liberated king.[451]

Early in April, and shortly after the Council of Nottingham, William met the king of England at Clipston, passing the remainder of the month in his company. He soon found an opportunity for urging a restoration of the dignities and honors which had belonged, as he maintained, to his predecessors, putting forward a formal claim upon the earldom of Northumberland, and the Honor of Lancaster, together with the counties of Cumberland and Westmoreland—the whole territory, in short, which had once been held by his father, Earl Henry. Richard returned an evasive answer, alleging that he must consult his barons: and after the council held at Northampton, in Easter week, he replied that, in his present circumstances, it was impossible to listen to William’s demands; as concession on his part would be attributed to his fear of the French war, rather than to his affection for the Scottish king. As a set off to a reply which was tantamount to a refusal, he conferred upon William a charter of privileges, specifying that whenever the king of Scotland attended the English court, the whole of his expenses should be defrayed out of the English exchequer; and providing that he should be escorted, both in arriving and on his return, by the bishops and sheriffs of the different dioceses and counties, through which it was necessary for him to pass in the course of his progress. William was obliged to be satisfied with this concession; and he assisted, in token of amity, at the second coronation of Richard, bearing, upon this occasion, the principal sword of state.[452]

Another opportunity soon occurred for again advancing his claims. After the conclusion of the coronation, the bishop of Durham resigned his earldom of Northumberland into the hands of Richard, and the king was on the point of transferring it to Hugo Bardolf, when William hastened to offer 15,000 marks for the fief. The magnitude of the sum tempted Richard, who was seldom proof against an offer of this description, and, after a short deliberation, he consented to grant the earldom without the castles—or, in other words, the pecuniary, but not the political, advantages of the fief—a compromise which did not accord with the views of William. He made a final effort to obtain his object a few days before the departure of Richard for Normandy, but equally without success, for the latter would only hold out the hope that he might take the matter into consideration on his return from his expedition into France; and the Scottish king, towards the close of the month, retraced his steps towards the north in bitter chagrin at his failure.[453]

A. D. 1195.

In the course of the following year, William was seized with an alarming illness at Clackmannan, and, in the momentary expectation of death, assembling his leading nobles, he made known his intention of declaring as his successor Otho of Saxony, a son of Henry the Lion, and subsequently emperor of Germany, on the stipulation that the prince should marry his eldest daughter Margaret. The proposal was but coldly received by many of his nobility; Earl Patrick of Dunbar, as the spokesman of the dissentient party, maintaining that it was contrary to the custom of Scotland for the crown to descend in the female line, as long as there was a brother, or nephew, in the succession.[454] The question was terminated for the time by the recovery of the king; but he did not relinquish his purpose, and, at Christmas, he gave an audience at York to the archbishop of Canterbury, who was empowered by Richard to conduct the negotiations connected with the marriage in question. Lothian was to be the dowry of the Scottish princess, and the castles of that province were to be made over to the keeping of the English king; whilst Richard engaged to bestow the earldoms of Carlisle and Northumberland upon his nephew the Saxon prince, and to place all the castles of those fiefs in the hands of William.[455] But this convention was never destined to be carried out; the return of health, and the hopes of an heir, induced William to procrastinate; and the reasons which influenced him in entering upon the negotiation were finally removed, three years afterwards, when his queen presented him with a son.

It was in the year following this abortive negotiation about the marriage of his eldest daughter with the Prince of Saxony, that the attention of the king was directed to renewed commotions in the north; but, to explain the origin of these disturbances, it will be necessary to revert once more to the history of the Orkneys.

Paul and Erlend, the joint earls, who were deposed and sent prisoners to Norway by Magnus Barefoot, never revisited their native land. They died in exile; A. D. 1199. and about two years after Magnus lost his life in Ireland, Hacon, the son of Paul, who had rendered good service in the Irish expedition, A. D. 1105. obtained from the sons of the deceased king a grant of the earldom of the Orkneys. The sons of Erlend had been also carried off by the Norwegian king; but Magnus Erlendson, taking advantage of a moment, when he was unobserved, to plunge into the sea, swam to the neighbouring shore of Scotland, and thus escaped; whilst his brother Erlend, who remained on board, lost his life subsequently in battle.[456]

Magnus Erlendson remained quietly at the Court of Scotland until the departure of Sigurd Magnusson for Norway, when he sailed for the Orkneys to claim his share in the earldom. Hacon viewed his arrival with displeasure, but as the feeling of the islanders was in favour of his cousin, he consented to abide by the decision of the Norwegian Court, and Magnus was shortly afterwards confirmed in the possession of his father’s portion of the earldom. Little cordiality existed between the earls, and they were at length upon the brink of an open rupture, when it was agreed that they should meet upon the small islet of Egillsey for the arrangement of their mutual differences. To this spot, accordingly, Magnus repaired upon the appointed day, and, faithful to the conditions of the meeting, he brought with him only a few unarmed friends. Hacon arrived soon afterwards with a squadron of eight ships, filled with the rovers of the sea; and as the armed crews stepped upon the shore, the son of Erlend foresaw his doom. He met it with fortitude and resignation; his head was severed from his body; and the islanders, horror stricken at the perfidious murder, long venerated their favourite earl as a martyr and a saint.[457]

Success affording leisure for repentance, Hacon sought to expiate his crime by a pilgrimage to Jerusalem; and upon his death, some years afterwards, the earldom was divided between his two sons by different marriages, who were known respectively as Paul the Silent, and Harald the Eloquent. The latter, who was the younger, appears in some of the Scottish charters as earl of Caithness, a province which then, and long afterwards, seems to have extended as far as Dingwall.[458] The usual jealousy existed between the brothers, ceasing only with the life of Harald, who is said to have met his death in a mysterious and unaccountable manner, and, as was generally supposed, through wearing, by mistake, a poisoned garment intended for his half-brother Paul, who was an object of hatred and aversion to Helga and her sister Frakarka, the mother and aunt of Harald. The opportunity was not lost upon the surviving earl, who, very easily convinced of the guilt of Helga, banished her immediately from the islands. Her brother Ottir was lord of Thurso, and her sister also held large possessions on the mainland. To them accordingly she repaired, with her grandson Erlend Haroldson and her daughter Margaret, who was soon afterwards married to Madach, Earl of Atholl, one of the greatest nobles of the day, and a first cousin of David, who, at this period, occupied the throne of Scotland.[459]

Earl Paul was not destined to hold for any length of time undisputed possession of the whole earldom, for a competitor arose in the person of a descendant, and heir to the claims, of Erlend Thorfinson. In one of his numerous conflicts in the western seas, Magnus Barefoot lost an attached and faithful follower of the name of Kali, upon whose son he conferred large possessions in the Orkneys and elsewhere, with the hand of Gunhilda, the daughter of the elder Erlend. Gunhilda, after the death of her brothers, became the heiress of her father’s rights; and it was her son who now demanded his share of the earldom from the surviving son of Hacon. His real name was Kol, the same as that of his father, but he assumed the name of Rognwald, which was popular amongst the Orkneymen, from his supposed resemblance to Rognwald Brusison, who is said to have still lingered in the recollection of an aged Norwegian queen as the handsomest man of her time.[460]

Paul refused to listen to the claims of Rognwald, though they were supported by the authority of the Court of Norway; but Frakarka and her sister Helga willingly agreed to further his cause, promising to attack the earl from the mainland, whilst Rognwald assailed him from the sea. But Paul was on the alert, holding his ground successfully against both attacks; nor was it until some years later that Rognwald, to whom the Shetlanders steadily adhered, A. D. 1135. was enabled to extend his authority over the whole of the Orkneys, through the surprise and capture of Paul by the contrivance of the Earl of Atholl.[461]

The first step taken by the new earl was to identify his cause with the memory of his murdered uncle, whose aid had been invoked in support of the second and successful expedition. Policy as well as gratitude suggested that the fortunate result should be attributed to the intervention of the popular martyr, and Rognwald vowed that a lasting monument should hand down the remembrance of his murdered kinsman, and commemorate, at the same time, the manner in which the saint had interfered in his own behalf. In accordance with his vow a stately cathedral church arose at Kirkwall, which was dedicated in honour of St. Magnus; but it was a work far beyond the means of the earl, and to further its completion, he was obliged to restore their rights to the Odallers, who were permitted to regain their ancient privileges on payment of a large contribution in aid of the building.[462]

In the meantime the luckless Paul was conducted to the residence of the Earl of Atholl by his captor Sweyne Asleifason, a powerful nobleman of Caithness at feud with the earl on account of his banishment from the Orkneys. Here he was treated with the most ceremonious courtesy. The chair of state was resigned to him by Madach; the beautiful Margaret, surrounded by her ladies, received him with the cordial welcome of a sister; mummers and jesters relieved the monotony of the hour; and in the true spirit of northern hospitality the evening was devoted to drinking. Thus passed the leisure time of a Scottish nobleman in the twelfth century, when he was not engaged in the more stirring pursuits of war, or of the chase. One thing alone reminded the deposed earl of the real position in which he stood—the doors were invariably locked.[463]

Paul long maintained his reputation for taciturnity, but at length he appears to have spoken, and to the purpose; A. D. 1137. for two years after the accession of Rognwald, whilst that earl was celebrating with his friends some festive occasion in the month of July, their attention was attracted by the arrival of a vessel from the south with a venerable personage on board, whose purple cloak and quaintly trimmed beard aroused the curiosity of the Orkneymen, until the earl’s chaplain pronounced the mysterious stranger to be a Scottish bishop.[464] He was received with every mark of respect, and subsequently escorted to Egillsey, the residence of William, Bishop of the Orkneys; and the result of a conference between Rognwald and the two prelates was the admission of the claim of Harald Mac Madach to his uncle’s share in the earldom, in virtue of the resignation of Paul. The rights of Harald, then a child between four and five years of age, were confirmed at an amicable meeting, held in Caithness, by the leading chieftains of Atholl and the Orkneys, representing “the communities” of the respective earldoms;[465] A. D. 1138. and, in the following spring, he was consigned to the charge of Earl Rognwald, though his real supporters appear to have been Sweyne Asleifason and Thorbiorn, a grandson of Frakarka, married to the sister of Sweyne, and guardian to the youthful earl.[466]

A. D. 1153.

Fifteen years elapsed without any diminution in the friendship of Rognwald for his youthful colleague; Madach and his royal cousin sunk into the grave; and the elder earl departed for the Holy Land, leaving Harald in charge of the earldom.[467] The same year witnessed the last expedition, in which a Norwegian king enacted the part of a pirate in the western seas; Eystein, in a time of profound peace, inflicting upon the unoffending inhabitants of the English and Scottish coasts a repetition of the ravages of his heathen predecessors. Amongst the sufferers was Harald, who was surprised and captured off Thurso, but he regained his liberty at the price of several marks “in gold,” and an acknowledgment of his dependance upon Norway;[468] though he was less fortunate some years later, when his cousin Erlend Haraldson arrived to claim his share in the earldom. Erlend, who appears to have succeeded to the authority of his uncle, Ottir of Thurso, had taken advantage of the absence of Rognwald to obtain from the youthful king of Scotland, Malcolm the Fourth, a confirmation of his right to the half of Caithness, and he now demanded a similar division of the islands. Harald demurred to his claims unless they were confirmed by the Court of Norway, nor would he consent to acknowledge Erlend as his colleague, even after his rights were recognized by the Norwegian kings, till the defection of Sweyne Asleifason forced from him a reluctant acquiescence in this arrangement. Not content with depriving Harald of half the earldom, Erlend carried off the Earl’s mother, the still beautiful Margaret, bearing her to that singular fort of Mousa, in the Shetland Isles, of which the remains still exist to excite the curiosity of modern times; where he defended his prize with such tenacity, that he forced Harald to consent to their marriage, and this singular union of a nephew with his aunt is related in the Saga without a comment![469]

After a lengthened absence in the Holy Land, Rognwald returned from Palestine to find Erlend established in his place. In this dilemma the Bonders were assembled, whose unanimous verdict pronounced Rognwald to be the lawful representative of one line of their rulers; and as it then remained for them to determine which of the other earls was entitled to the remaining share in the islands, their decision was given in favour of Erlend. Their award was probably just, but Harald could hardly be expected to acquiesce in it. Retiring to the mainland he sought the assistance of his kinsmen, and when he reappeared in the Orkneys in the following spring, Rognwald immediately declared in favour of his early friend. But the redoubtable Sweyne Asleifason, who espoused the side of Erlend, long upheld the cause of the latter earl, by his courage and counsels, until the confederates, watching their opportunity, surprised and slew their rival whilst he was stupified by the effects of his potations.[470] Rognwald did not long survive their victory, falling a victim to the revenge of Thorbiorn, the former guardian of Harald, A. D. 1158. who waylaid and assassinated the earl whilst hunting in the dales of Caithness. His surviving colleague conveyed the body to Thurso, from whence, after a lapse of thirty years, A. D. 1188. it was removed to the cathedral church of Kirkwall, when the name of the murdered Rognwald was enrolled in the Calendar of the Saints.[471]

In this manner Harald found himself, at the age of five and twenty, in undisputed possession of the earldoms of Caithness and the Orkneys. In appearance, as well as in character, he must have resembled his maternal ancestor Thorfin; for, like that earl, he is described as “tall, strong, and hard-featured,”[472] and he raised his power, by his talents and military prowess, to a height unprecedented since the days of his formidable predecessor. To Sweyne Asleifason, his early friend and subsequent opponent, he appears to have been thoroughly reconciled. Sweyne was a genuine type of the chieftain of that era, a veritable representative of that numerous class which viewed, with such suspicious jealousy, the curtailment of their lawless liberty by the introduction of a novel system of government. The spring and autumn he dedicated to agriculture; a scanty crop was rudely sown and as rudely gathered in: the summer was devoted to a course of piracy; and the winter was spent in revelry. Such were still the habits of life amongst the chieftains of the north and west of Scotland; and in earlier times, as in Scandinavia and Northern Germany, the practice had been similar throughout the whole country, with the sole difference, that the dwellers upon the coasts were rovers by sea, and the inhabitants of the interior were plunderers by land.[473]

For nearly forty years Harald remained in the contented enjoyment of his two earldoms, acknowledging a nominal dependence upon the crowns of Scotland and Norway, but in all other respects as untrammelled as the most independent of his maternal ancestors. He was married to a sister of Duncan, Earl of Fife, and this connection with one of the firmest partizans of the reigning family may have kept him steady in his allegiance. At length, at the mature age of sixty and upwards, he transferred his affections to a daughter of Mac Heth, and he married the object of his elderly love after divorcing his former wife by one of those summary processes which lingered latest, with other barbarisms, in the extreme north. The union was inauspicious, as might have been expected; a daughter of Mac Heth could not fail to remind her husband of her hereditary claims upon Moray, and, yielding too readily to the suggestions of ambition, ere long Harald seized upon the province.[474]

A. D. 1196

It was the intelligence of these proceedings on the part of the earl that now brought William in haste from the south; for he had already suffered too much from such a cause to think lightly of a rebellion in the northern Highlands. Meeting Harald’s son, Thorfin, in the neighbourhood of Inverness, he defeated him with ease, killing Roderic, a partizan, apparently, of the family of Mac Heth;[475] whilst Harald retreated as the king advanced, until at length, despairing of success, he fled to his ships in the hope of escaping to the Orkneys. But the earl was doomed to misfortune; an adverse gale detained him in port, and he was compelled to become a reluctant eyewitness of the destruction of his castle at Thurso, and of the unwonted spectacle of a royal army ravaging the extremity of Caithness. Submission was now the only course left open, and he was fain to purchase the withdrawal of the hostile army by promising to surrender the enemies of the king, to place his son Thorfin as a hostage in the hands of William for his own fidelity, and to resign half the earldom of Caithness to Harald Ericson.[476]

Satisfied with the earl’s concessions, the king withdrew from his territories; again proceeding northwards as far as Nairn in the course of the same autumn, to await the fulfilment of the treaty. On his return from hunting late one evening, he found Earl Harald in attendance with two children, his nephews, whom he offered in the place of his own son as hostages for his fidelity and allegiance. Surprised at this evasion of their agreement, the king demanded the reason of it, remarking upon the absence of Thorfin, whom Harald had promised as a hostage. The earl’s reply was remarkable, though it could scarcely be considered satisfactory. Thorfin, he said, was his only son, and he was reluctant to part with the sole heir of his earldom; and as for the enemies of the king whom he had promised to deliver into his hands, they had actually accompanied him as far as the port of Lochloy, within a few miles of Nairn, when he had suffered them to escape, reflecting that their doom was certain if once surrendered to the king.[477] As it is impossible that the earl could have imagined for one moment that William would permit so palpable an evasion of their treaty, it can only be supposed that, repenting of his promise as he approached Nairn, he preferred braving the royal anger by conniving at the escape of his prisoners, to surrendering friends, and probably connections, of his own, or of his wife, to the certain doom of death; or the even worse alternative of perpetual imprisonment, with probable mutilation or loss of sight. William and his barons in council—the peers of the earl, before whom he was immediately arraigned—at once pronounced him guilty of a breach of fealty, declaring that he had thereby forfeited his liberty; and he was carried in the train of William to the south, and retained in custody until, upon the arrival of his son Thorfin, he was released from captivity, and permitted to return to the Orkneys.[478]

A. D. 1197.

But the earl had not yet reached the conclusion of his troubles; for Harald Ericson, after receiving a grant of half the earldom of Caithness from the king of Scotland, sailed to Norway, and obtained a recognition of his right, from King Suerer, to a similar partition of the Orkneys. This Harald, generally known as the younger earl, was a son of Ingigerda, the only child of Rognwald; but the elder Harald, unmindful of his early friend, seems to have ignored the claims of his heir to a partition of the earldom. A band of followers, however, was easily collected in Norway, and so little was the elder earl prepared for an attack, that, upon the arrival of his competitor in the Orkneys, he fled precipitately to Man. He was shortly followed by Harald Ericson; but again eluding pursuit, he returned suddenly to the Orkneys, visiting with summary vengeance all who had declared for the younger Harald. He had lost no time in the interval in gathering his own partizans, and, upon the return of his opponent from the Western Isles, he no longer shrunk from a contest for which he was now fully prepared.

The rival earls met near Wick, in Caithness; victory declared for the elder Harald, and the last descendant of Erlend Thorfinson perished upon the field of his defeat. Availing himself of the protection of the bishops of Ross and of St. Andrews, the conqueror sought the Scottish Court, and hastened to offer a large sum for the restitution of that portion of Caithness which had been conferred upon his deceased competitor. The king promised his consent if the earl would comply with his conditions, and agree to take back his former wife, and surrender Bonaver, the son of Ingemund, together with his chaplain, Lawrence, as additional hostages for his allegiance. Which of these conditions was distasteful to the earl the chronicler has failed to specify; but, in the opinion of Harald, half the earldom of Caithness would have been too dearly purchased at such a price; and upon the refusal of the proposed terms, William, without further parley, sold the fief to Ronald, king of Man.[479]

According to the usual custom of the age, Ronald placed his Maors, or deputies, over his newly acquired earldom, whilst Harald, retreating to the Orkneys, busied himself in preparations for the forcible recovery of his possessions; and suddenly reappearing in Caithness with an overpowering force, he drove out all who opposed him, treating the bishop of the diocese with savage cruelty for a supposed predilection to the cause of his rival.[480] Although Christmas was approaching, William lost no time in hastening to the scene of action, first retaliating the barbarities of the earl upon his unfortunate hostage Thorfin; but by the time the king reached Caithness, Harald had escaped to the Orkneys, returning immediately upon the departure of the royal army. William again marched to the north in the following spring, and again the earl sought refuge amongst his islands; but as such a fruitless contest was harassing to both parties, without being beneficial to either, it was at length terminated by Harald, who, A. D. 1202. placing himself under the safe conduct of the Bishop of St. Andrews, tendered his submission to the king at Perth, and was permitted, for a sum of 2000 pounds of silver, to enjoy his earldom in peace during the brief remainder of his life.[481]

A. D. 1198.

The six years over which these disturbances in the extreme north of Scotland extended had not been destitute of other events of importance, for, on the 24th of August 1198, the question of the succession to the Scottish throne had been finally set at rest by the birth of a prince, to whom the name of Alexander was given. A. D. 1201 Three years afterwards, according to the usual custom of the age, William summoned the barons of his realm to swear fealty to his infant heir at Musselburgh; the Earl of Huntingdon imitating the example of the Scottish nobles, and performing homage to his youthful nephew about four years later.[482] A. D. 1205 By the death of Richard, in the year following the birth of Alexander, A. D. 1199 the relations between the English and Scottish kings had once more become unsettled. Doubt and mistrust overshadowed England, bishops and barons strengthening their castles, and preparing for the contest anticipated between the uncle and his nephew; whilst numbers of the continental vassals of the English crown openly declared for Arthur. Following the course invariably adopted upon such occasions by all aspirants to the crown, John possessed himself of the late king’s treasures at Chinon, and this important point secured, he dispatched the Archbishop of Canterbury across the Channel, with William the Mareschal, and Geoffry Fitz Peter, the Justiciary of England, empowering them to pledge his royal word to all whose allegiance appeared doubtful, that full justice should be rendered on the arrival of the king to every faithful adherent of his cause. William, as might have been expected, had seized upon the opportunity afforded by John’s uncertain position to revive his claims upon the northern counties; but the royal deputies, after the council held at Northampton, forbade the Scottish envoys, who had arrived there, to cross to Normandy, prevailing upon the Earl of Huntingdon, one of the principal of the dubious adherents who had been gained over at the recent meeting, to notify to his royal brother that he should await the arrival of the king. A similar request was conveyed directly from John by Eustace de Vesci, who bore a promise to his wife’s father—for Eustace had married Margaret, one of William’s natural daughters—that complete satisfaction should be afforded him in all that he sought, if he would only refrain from immediate hostilities.[483]

Soon after his coronation upon Ascension day, John gave audience to William de Hay, and the priors of May and Inchcolm, who, in the name of the Scottish king, demanded a full restitution of his “patrimony”—the northern counties; promising liege and faithful service if he gained his suit, but threatening, in case of refusal, to win his rights by the sword. The reply of John was characteristically evasive;—“If your king, my very dear cousin, will come in person, I will do him right in this and in all that he demands.” The bishop of St. Andrews, with Hugo Malebise, were made the bearers of this message to William, whilst, that no point of courtesy or ceremonial might be omitted, the bishop of Durham was directed to proceed at once to the frontiers and escort the Scottish king to the place of meeting.

John reached the appointed rendezvous at Nottingham upon Whitsunday, but the king of Scotland declined to come, only sending word by Malebise and the bishop that, if his demands were not immediately granted, he would resent the refusal by a declaration of war. John stipulated for a further truce of forty days, promising a final answer at the end of that time; but after collecting a powerful army, and placing the counties in question under the charge of William d’Estoteville, he hastened to embark for Normandy within a fortnight, leaving the Scottish envoys, who had hurried after him to the coast, to convey what answer they pleased to their king.[484]

At length perceiving that the promises of John had been merely subterfuges for gaining time, William prepared to put his threats into execution; but the proper season for action had already passed away, and the English barons, not yet disgusted by the falsehood and tyranny of John, had for the present declared in his favour. A natural feeling of anxiety oppressed the mind of William as he recalled the events of his early manhood, and remembered the consequences of his former war with England. His kingdom was still unsettled, his health was beginning to fail, whilst his heir was still a mere child, and Scotland had hardly yet recovered from the disastrous state of anarchy into which she had been plunged by the capture of her king at Alnwick. Impressed with gloomy forebodings, the king determined upon passing the night by the shrine of his sainted ancestress at Dunfermline; where his reluctance to engage in hostilities assuming the form of a warning dream, he dismissed his army on the following morning, assuring them that he had been forbidden by a heavenly vision to attempt the invasion of England.[485]

A. D. 1200.

William had given up all present thoughts of open war, but he refused to listen to any overtures from John, declining to meet the English king at York in the following Lent, whilst he cultivated an alliance with Philip of France, and a marriage was negotiated between the young prince of Scotland and an infant French princess, the daughter of Agnes de Meranie.[486] The rumour of this alliance seriously alarmed John, and after the second of his numerous coronations, he dispatched a distinguished embassy with letters of safe conduct to the borders, to propose an interview with the king of Scotland, and to escort him for this purpose to Lincoln. With the Bishop of Durham and the Sheriff of Northumberland were associated the Earl of Hereford and the Lords de Vesci and de Ros, the nephew and sons-in-law of William, who, with the Earls of Huntingdon and Norfolk, and a brilliant retinue of other barons, awaited the arrival of the Scottish king on the frontiers, and conducted him, with every mark of respect, to the place of meeting. Here, upon a neighbouring hill, which was at that time without the city of Lincoln, William performed homage to John “for his right saving his own right;” 22d Nov. swearing fealty upon the cross of the Archbishop of Canterbury—a breach of the usual custom, explained by one of the chroniclers as arising “because there was no sacred book at hand.” The question about the northern counties was again brought forward for discussion, but with no satisfactory result, although a final decision was again promised at the end of another six months; and the king of Scotland, who had in reality gained nothing beyond his ordinary feudal advantages by his journey, was obliged to rest contented with the empty honour of returning to his own kingdom under the same distinguished escort that had accompanied him to Lincoln.[487]

The interview between the kings had not been of a nature to promote any real feeling of cordiality; for William had again proved from experience that the promises of John were merely empty words, whilst he had permitted his crafty rival to discover how little real importance he need attach to the threats of a Scottish war. No more dangerous knowledge could have been acquired by a prince of such a character as John, who, in his subsequent transactions with the Scottish king, turned this backwardness to his own account, evidently presuming upon the reluctance of William to venture upon the chances of a war.

A rupture, however, had almost occurred through the contemplated erection of a castle at the mouth of the Tweed, for the purpose of commanding the Scottish burgh of Berwick, with its important fortress; thus endangering the prosperity of the foremost commercial town in Scotland, and neutralizing the cession of one of the keys of the Lothians, restored by the charter of Cœur de Lion. It was impossible for William to overlook so dangerous an encroachment, and whenever the English attempted to begin the building, the Scots drove them away by force, levelling their work with the ground; proceedings which were more than once repeated, until, upon his return from the disastrous campaign of 1203, John hastened to the north of England, A. D. 1204. where he was met upon the frontiers at Norham by William, who was hardly recovered from one of those dangerous attacks of illness to which his advancing years appear to have rendered him liable. The conference was stormy, and the kings parted in anger; but John was either too much occupied with the French war to add another to the list of his open enemies, or he treated the whole affair with his usual fickle levity, and in spite of the hostile character of their interview, their kingdoms remained in a state of nominal peace.[488]

However averse he might have been to risk the chances of hostilities, William was evidently a very cool friend to England during the next five years, eagerly testifying his devotion to the papal see when the interdict was levelled against John, and receiving in return from Pope Innocent a bull, or rescript, fully confirming every liberty and immunity that had at any time been conferred upon the king, church, or kingdom of Scotland, by the head of the Roman Church.[489] He appears, also, to have set on foot a negotiation for procuring a foreign alliance for one of his children;[490] A. D. 1209. but the fears of John were by this time aroused, and he marched with an immense army to the north, in the determination of calling William to account for destroying his castle at Tweedmouth, for aiming at an alliance with his open enemies, and for negotiating the intended marriage without consulting the suzerain of whom he held his English fiefs. To guard against the chances of invasion, William occupied a strong position in the neighbourhood of Roxburgh, where he gave audience to the envoys of John, who, upon reaching Norham, dispatched a safe conduct to the Scottish king, with a requisition to meet him at Newcastle; but three days after his arrival at the place of meeting, and before their conference had resulted in any satisfactory conclusion, it was unexpectedly interrupted by the sudden illness of the Scottish king, and all further proceedings were broken off after a temporary truce had been arranged.[491]

The return of health revived the reluctance of William to yield to the demands of John, and, after ascertaining the sentiments of his baronage and clergy in a council held at Stirling, he dispatched the bishops of St. Andrews and Glasgow, with William Comyn and Philip de Valoniis, the Justiciary and Chamberlain of Scotland, charged with so decided an answer to the English king, that John’s fury was aroused to the utmost pitch, and he issued immediate orders for the assemblage of his army, and the reconstruction of the castle at Tweedmouth. William, upon learning the result of his embassy, hurried from Forfar towards the Lothians, deputing the bishop of St. Andrews to convey a qualified refusal to the incensed John. Arrived at Edinburgh, the king was met by Sayer de Quinci, Earl of Winchester, and Robert de Ros, who had already reached the future Scottish capital, and dwelt upon the wrath of their royal master, and the magnitude of the army with which he was hurrying, by forced marches, to the north.[492]

Without awaiting the return of the bishop of St. Andrews, William dispatched a third embassy to avert, if possible, the impending war; and when the bishop reached his royal master at Traquair with intelligence that the English army was fast approaching the borders, the reverend envoy was commissioned, for the third time, to return in the utmost haste to John, and to use every effort to delay his advance until the Scottish army could be concentrated upon the frontiers.[493]

By the time John reached Bamborough, towards the close of July, his formidable preparations for hostilities had fully attained the end upon which he had probably calculated, by working upon the fears of his opponent. A brave and warlike army was ranged along either frontier, prompt and ready for a contest, but advancing years and increasing infirmities had bowed the once fierce and haughty spirit of the Scottish king, who was now as averse to risk the chances of war as, in early manhood, he had been eager in courting its dangers. Under such circumstances the result could not long remain in doubt, and William, yielding his consent to the conditions imposed by John, covenanted to pay 15,000 marks for his “good will” (in other words for peace, and for the confirmation of his fiefs and privileges, which appear to have been in danger of forfeiture), and for the performance of certain conditions specified in their mutual charters. Hostages were to be given by the Scottish king for the payment of the stated sum within two years.[494] Two of his daughters, Margaret and Isabella—the third was probably under age—were to be delivered into the charge of John, and to be suitably married according to the tenure of their secret arrangement; whilst, in return, one of the articles of the treaty provided against the erection of a castle at Tweedmouth at any future period. The final settlement of the treaty took place at Northampton, and, within ten days from its completion, the Scottish princesses were placed in the hands of the English Justiciary at Carlisle.[495]

From the date of this arrangement a close alliance existed between the kings, and still further to cement their union, A. D. 1210. the prince of Scotland proceeded in the following year as far as Alnwick, where, upon the 10th of May, he performed homage to John as liegeman for all the fiefs held by his father of the English crown; and it was probably upon this occasion that the English king, after receiving the half of the sum of 15,000 marks, in token of amity remitted the payment of the remainder.[496]

William, however, in his anxiety to avoid an encounter with John, appears to have deeply offended many of his own powerful subjects, to several of whom the English connection had all along been distasteful. All the advantages of the English fiefs belonged solely to the royal family; and as it was of little or no importance to many of the Scots that the brother of their king should enjoy the earldom of Huntingdon, or that their sovereign should be received with certain ceremonies whenever he absented himself from his own dominions to attend the English Court, they looked with jealousy and discontent at the concessions extorted from William, through his double anxiety to prevent hostilities, and to avoid the forfeiture of his English fiefs and privileges. The treaty concluded at Northampton had been in direct contradiction to the wishes of the nation, and ere long William discovered that, in his solicitude to avert the evils of a foreign war, he had re-kindled the embers of civil discord at home.

The discontent must have been widely disseminated which first threatened to explode in the south. Thomas de Colvill, a powerful baron in constant attendance at the court of Scotland, was accused of conspiring against his liege lord, and detained in Edinburgh Castle until he was permitted to redeem his treason by the payment of a fine, and was subsequently dispatched, in a species of honourable captivity, as a hostage to the king of England.[497] The storm which had thus threatened the southern, or feudalized, division of the kingdom was shortly destined to burst in all its fury upon the distant north and west, where a Mac William still existed in the person of Godfrey, one of the sons of Donald Bane. Ireland, as usual, had been his home when he was not amongst the western isles of Scotland, where he had never ceased to assert the claims of his family; and either Godfrey, or some of his partizans, had probably been amongst those “enemies of the king” whom the Earl of Caithness had suffered to escape at Lochloy. No time could have been more favourable for the revival of his pretensions than a period of general discontent, and his partizans in Ross, with all the disaffected clans of the neighbouring provinces, invited him to cross from Ireland, with promises of their warmest support.[498]

But in the course of the same autumn, and before the arrival of Godfrey, the lives of William and his family were threatened by an unexpected danger from a totally different quarter. The king, with his brother and the prince of Scotland, was staying with the court at Perth, when a sudden inundation, occasioned by a spring tide meeting the swollen waters of the Tay, menaced the town and its inhabitants with destruction. The old hill-fort at the junction of the Almond with the Tay was swept away in the deluge, carrying along with it many houses, and destroying the bridge and an old chapel, whilst the royal party were at one time in imminent danger, escaping with difficulty the fury of the flood.[499]

A. D. 1211

It was winter when Mac William arrived in Ross, and six months elapsed before an army could be dispatched to operate with effect against him, the king following by easy marches, as well as his debilitated condition would allow. Each party pursuing their usual tactics, the campaign was opened on the royal side by the construction of two forts, or rather, perhaps, by the repair of the buildings, which had been raised in the previous war to command the most important points in the district;[500] whilst Godfrey, carefully avoiding a battle, endeavoured to harass the royal army by continued surprises and night attacks. Steadily pursuing the course which he had proposed to follow in his campaign against Donald Bane, the king placed 4000 men under the command of the Earls of Atholl and Buchan, with Malcolm of Mar and Thomas the Durward, ordering them to penetrate the recesses of the mountains in every direction, and force Mac William to an encounter. Godfrey’s place of strength was upon an island, where he had collected his treasure and supplies; and here he was at length discovered and brought to bay by the royal leaders. The struggle was most obstinate, for the rebels were animated by despair; victory, however, declared for the royal arms, Godfrey with a few of his companions escaping, though with difficulty, amongst the clefts and thickets of the neighbouring mountains.[501]

Satisfied with his success, William returned with the main body of his army to the south, leaving Earl Malcolm of Fife in charge of Moray. His departure was the signal for the reappearance of Godfrey, who suddenly presented himself in force before one of the royal castles, and commenced preparations for a siege. Alarmed at the prospect of an attack, and the probable consequences of its success, the garrison offered to capitulate on condition that their lives were spared; and as Godfrey willingly agreed to their terms, they were permitted to depart in safety, and the fort was burnt to the ground.[502]

A. D. 1212.

The tidings of Godfrey’s proceedings reached William in the winter, when any hope of taking the field amongst the northern mountains with the least probability of success was frustrated by the unusual severity of the season; and as he had calculated upon his forts securing the advantages gained in the preceding campaign, he was incensed and embarrassed at this unexpected loss. A renewal of such a doubtful contest as the struggle in which he had been engaged with his cousin, the elder Mac William, was an anxious prospect at his time of life, and he naturally felt inclined to draw yet closer the ties connecting him with his English ally.[503] Ere the winter passed away the two kings met once more, and for the last time, at Durham; their conference was adjourned from that place to Norham, where the queen of Scotland is said to have exerted her influence with both parties to obtain the treaty of mutual alliance, which was concluded upon this occasion. 7th Feb. Both kings are said to have agreed, that, in case of the death of either, the survivor should be bound to protect and support the youthful heir in securing the rights of his crown; William conceding to John the privilege of marrying his son Alexander, now in his fourteenth year, according to his own pleasure during the next six years, so that the alliance was suitable to the dignity of the Scottish crown; at the same time confirming his own, and his son’s, liege homage to the English prince Henry, saving their fealty to John. The Scottish prince then accompanied the king of England, upon his return, to the south, and received the honor of knighthood at St. Brides in Clerkenwell, where John held high festival in Mid-Lent.[504]

4th Mar.

With his mind set at rest upon the subject of the English alliance, William prepared to bend all his remaining energies to the suppression of the dangerous rebellion in the north. About the middle of June a considerable force was dispatched to the scene of action, the prince of Scotland accompanying the army to prove himself worthy of his golden spurs; and the reserve was to have followed by easy marches, under the immediate orders of the king, when its departure was arrested by the welcome intelligence of the capture of the head of the rebellion. The Earl of Fife, during a temporary absence from his command, left the province under the charge of the Justiciary, William Comyn, Earl of Buchan, into whose hands the adherents of Mac William, terror-stricken apparently at the magnitude of the royal preparations, had just surrendered their leader. The earl had already reached Kincardine with his prisoner, whom he was in haste to present to William before death robbed him of his prize—for Godfrey had resolutely refused all nourishment since his capture—when he was met by a significant message from the king, that he had no desire to see his enemy; and the unfortunate Mac William was at once beheaded, and hung up by the feet, lest starvation should anticipate his doom.[505]

A. D. 1213

The ensuing winter once more found John upon the Scottish frontier. Whilst on the march in the preceding summer to repress the revolt of Llewellyn, he had received letters from William, as well as from his own natural daughter Joanna, the wife of the Welsh prince, warning him against the intentions of his own barons, if he involved himself in the intricacies of a mountain warfare in Wales.[506] The coincidence of the arrival of similar warnings from quarters so far apart, aroused his fears lest the intelligence should be true; and returning in haste to London, he sent to his principal barons, demanding hostages for their allegiance and good faith. All obeyed the royal command except Eustace de Vesci and Robert Fitz Walter; the former, too deeply implicated apparently to entrust himself within the power of John, at once seeking refuge with his father-in-law in Scotland. The flight of De Vesci was amongst the causes which brought John to the north, for it appears that he had already written to William to claim the fugitive as a traitor. Norham, as usual, was the place chosen for the conference; but William, who had been for some time detained at Newbattle by another severe attack of illness, was unable to proceed farther than Haddington; and John, who had every reason for desiring, at this period of his reign, to draw still closer the bonds of union between himself and his fellow king, earnestly adjured him to depute the young Prince Alexander in his place, holding out magnificent promises to induce compliance. The aged king was inclined to send his son, some of his advisers agreeing with him; but the majority of his council strongly opposed the project, objecting to entrust the heir of Scotland within the power of John, of whose intentions they were, not unnaturally, suspicious. They were fearful, also, lest the English king should detain Alexander as a hostage for the delivery of De Vesci, and as William eventually deferred to their opinion, John was obliged to relinquish all hope of a conference, and return disappointed to the south.[507]

During William’s contest with Earl Harald, Olave, the earl’s brother-in-law, and John Halkelson, sailed from the Orkneys to assist the son of the Norwegian Regent Erling in placing Sigurd Magnusson upon his father’s throne. Their fate was most unfortunate; the flower of the Orkneys assembled around the banner of Olave perishing, with both their leaders, in the disastrous battle of Floravagr; and their ill-omened expedition entailing the wrath of the conqueror upon Harald, who only made his peace with the indignant Sverer by yielding up to Norway the whole of the Shetland Isles. It was a diminished and impaired dominion, therefore, which Harald, upon his death in 1206, left as an inheritance between his three sons; A. D. 1206. Heinrek succeeding to his claims upon Ross, whilst David and John divided his possessions in Caithness and the Orkneys, the latter, upon the death of David, becoming the sole possessor of both his father’s earldoms.[508] To ensure the submission of Earl John to his authority, William, during the summer of 1214, proceeded as far as Moray, A. D. 1214. when the earl, unwilling to provoke the hostility of his sovereign, yielded at once to his terms, giving up his daughter and heiress as a hostage for his fidelity and allegiance. The king then returned by easy journeys towards the south, but he had far over-taxed his feeble strength, having risen from a bed of sickness to ensure the tranquil succession of his son. As he approached the Forth he expressed a wish to be carried to Stirling, a place for which he appears to have felt an especial fondness; and here he lingered over the autumn within the walls of that royal castle, from whence his failing sight could gaze upon one of the fairest prospects of his native land. He was never destined to see another year, and on Thursday, the 4th of December, he breathed his last, expiring in the seventy-third year of his age, and within five days of entering upon the fiftieth of a chequered and eventful reign.[509]

Few materials remain for estimating the personal character of William beyond the actions ascribed to him in the chronicles of the period. Newbridge, perhaps a prejudiced authority, contrasts him unfavourably with his brother Malcolm, regarding many of his misfortunes in the early part of his career as punishments for his addiction to worldly pleasures, and attributing the comparative peace and prosperity of his later years—meaning the period of Richard’s reign—to the beneficial effects of his marriage with Ermengarde de Bellomont.[510] He was a great man, however, in the opinion of the archdeacon of Brecknock, Giraldus Cambrensis, and worthy of praise in many things, one blot only resting upon his glory—throughout the whole length and breadth of Scotland his will alone decided the disposal of church patronage, expressly imitating, in this respect, the policy of the English kings, stigmatized by the archdeacon as “the enormous abuses of the Norman tyranny in England.”[511] Giraldus wrote in the spirit of a churchman of the twelfth century; but it must at least be admitted that it tells not a little for the energy of William’s character, that in his contest with the Church of Rome, in the very zenith of her power, he was successful; neither legate nor pope bending him from his purpose, though they launched anathemas at his head, and were supported by Henry, at that time feudal overlord of Scotland. But though high-spirited and impetuous, even to rashness, in his youth and manhood, William appears to have been broken down by repeated attacks of illness as he advanced in life; and the reckless knight-errant, who rushed upon seven times his numbers at Alnwick, grew into an over-cautious sovereign, who aroused the discontent of his subjects, and risked the newly recovered independence of his kingdom, by his inordinate dread of the consequences of a rupture with England. Some allowance may be made for his anxiety to carry out the policy of his grandfather, and re-annex to the Scottish crown the appanage of his early years, which his brother had resigned at Chester; but from the comparative ease with which his successor crushed every rebellion within a few years of his accession, firmly established the royal authority over the whole mainland of Scotland, and vindicated on every occasion the liberties of his crown and kingdom, it is very evident that William carried his caution too far; and though circumstances may have been more favourable to his son, the temporizing policy of William towards the close of his life must have increased, rather than diminished, the difficulties of his situation. From the use of the lion rampant upon his seal, a device which has since become the well-known cognizance of Scotland, he was very frequently known as “William the Lion;” and the names of Rufus and Garw—or the Rough—have also been applied to him, indicating, apparently, some distinguishing feature in his character, or personal appearance.[512] By his marriage with Ermengarde de Bellomont, he left four children; an only son, Alexander, who succeeded to the throne, and three daughters, Margaret, Isabella, and Marjory. Margaret, the eldest, was married to Hubert de Burgh, and left an only daughter, Magota, who died apparently at an early age. Isabella became the wife of Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk; and Marjory, who appears to have been celebrated for her beauty, which made a deep impression upon the susceptible heart of Henry the Third, was subsequently united to Gilbert the Mareschal, Earl of Pembroke, both the younger princesses dying without issue.

The lengthened reign of William was the era of the more complete development of David’s changes in church and state; and Scotland, at the opening of the thirteenth century, was fast progressing towards the condition of a thoroughly feudalized kingdom in her more settled portions. Traces of her earlier institutions, however, were still abundant; the more lenient custom, for instance, of the allodial system, by which the property of the felon was not confiscated but descended at once to the heir, was confirmed as the general law of Scotland, the strict feudal theory being, in other words, relaxed in favour of “ancient custom;” though where the homicide, or cattle-lifter, escaped the penalty of the crime by flight, his property reverted to the lord, the heir only succeeding on the death of the forfeited proprietor. Even sedition against the king did not disinherit the heir, if the property was not held directly of the crown; but for treason against the royal person both life and lands were irretrievably forfeited. Another concession in favour of “ancient custom,” perhaps, is traceable in the permission granted to the kindred of a murdered man to take full legal vengeance on the homicide, even when under the protection of “the king’s peace,” if they could prove that their consent had not been obtained to compromise the feud; though, from the wording of the law in question, this relaxation of the royal power of pardoning the highest offences, may have been confined to the case of a murdered witness. In most other respects the usual feudal customs were generally established; the charter was required as a necessary document for every freeholder—a stringent enactment being levelled against all who were convicted of forging such evidence of rights to which they were not entitled; and the Visnet was fast becoming the recognised law of the land. Galloway alone formed an exception, in this point, to the rest of Scotland, retaining her ancient code; no Galwegian being judged by “the verdict of the neighbourhood,” except at his especial demand; but very strict rules were laid down for its substitute, “the wager of battle,”—a fine of ten cows being enacted for speaking during the progress of a judicial combat; he who raised his hand, or made a sign, being “at the king’s mercy.” The fines assessed at Dumfries by “the Judges of Galloway,” appear, indeed, to have been heavier than in Scotland proper; and the regulations about collecting the king’s Can in this turbulent province, are marked with a degree of severity which seems to point to a state of society in which the royal imposts were still regarded as unwelcome novelties, all recusants being mulcted in a hundred cows, and bound to pay one-third more than the original demand. Agriculture was still a subject of legislation, and the regulations of David, which discouraged pasturage, were repeated; the barons and greater clergy being exhorted “to live like lords and masters upon their own domains, not like husbandmen and shepherds, wasting their lands and the country with multitudes of sheep and cattle, thereby troubling God’s people with scarcity, poverty, and utter hership.” Constant travelling with a retinue unnecessarily large, was also a social feature which it was still necessary to discountenance; as well as sorning, or living at free quarters; and unnecessary exaction of herbary, or food and lodging for the night; the repetition of David’s laws on all these points displaying the tenacity with which the native baronage clung to the habits of an earlier age, the sole difference noticeable in the later enactments of William pointing to one of those changes from a simpler state of society, which the progress of civilization is sure to introduce upon “the good old times”—the herbary which, in the time of David, was to be given “for the sake of charity,” in the reign of his grandson was to be duly recompensed—with pence.[513]

But though the regulations of David still continued to be the groundwork of the Scottish constitution, certain modifications were introduced by William which tended still further to increase the power of the crown. In the fifteenth year of his reign, “on the Monday before the festival of St. Margaret” in 1180, in one of these great assemblies of the whole Frank-tenantry of the kingdom, lay and ecclesiastical, in which the germs of future parliaments are traceable, and which, on this occasion, was held at Stirling, it was agreed that, for the future, none were to hold ordinary courts of justice, or a court of ordeal, whether “of battle, iron, or water,” except in the presence of the sheriff, or of one of his serjeants; though, if the official, after due summons, failed to attend, the court might be held in his absence. At the same time, the four great pleas, which had been removed from the jurisdiction of burgh provosts and baron baillies in the reign of David, were reserved absolutely for the crown.[514] Seventeen years later, in 1197, perhaps in consequence of abuses in the exercise of authority, these minor courts were further regulated by an ordinance passed in a similar “Parliament” held at Perth, and attended by “the Bishops, Abbots, Earls, Barons, Thanes, and Community of the Realm;” in which the great barons were pledged to give no support to law-breakers, whether their own followers or others, and to take no money for remission of judgment after sentence had been duly passed; all failing in their duty, in either of these points, being condemned to forfeit for ever their right to hold a court.[515] The regulations of David about the great royal moots, and about the sheriffs’ courts, were also modified at some period of William’s reign; and it was ordered that two great assemblies were to be held yearly at Edinburgh and Peebles, at which every freeholder was bound to attend, unless prevented by sickness, or other sufficient cause. In every province the sheriff was to hold a court every forty days—in this particular following the Norman, or Frank, rather than the Saxon custom; but bishops, abbots, earls, and probably the greater barons who enjoyed “the rights and custom of an earl,” were now excused from personal attendance, appearing by their Seneschals or Stewards, and only being bound to attend in person upon the court of the royal justiciary, or of his deputy.[516] Henceforth the privilege of a “Regality” was confined to the greater barons or clergy, upon whom it was conferred by royal favour; a sure sign of the progress of order, and of the royal authority. It may be remarked that a Regality in the feudal period was generally on some frontier; or was a district made over to some powerful noble to control, as he best might, by the strong hand; and in England, the sole provinces of this description were the Palatinates of Chester and Durham, the former on the Welsh frontier, the latter upon the borders of that turbulent Northumbrian province which, at one period, could be scarcely reckoned as an integral, or settled, portion of either England or Scotland. David probably interfered but little with the privileges of the ancient earls within their immediate possessions, limiting his innovations upon their earlier duties and prerogatives to the introduction of the royal Vicecomes: but William was enabled to advance a step further; the royal authority was becoming firmer, and was now made paramount throughout the settled portion of Scotland, except where the greater barons or higher clergy were specially privileged; though the right to execute within the precincts of his own barony the homicide taken “red-hand,” or the robber captured with the stolen cattle, still remained the privilege of every baron who claimed the jurisdiction of “pit and gallows.”

In pursuance of his usual line of policy, William also carried out the ecclesiastical and commercial measures of his predecessors, ordering the general payment of tithes and dues throughout the kingdom, defining the means by which his edicts were to be put in force, and assimilating the dioceses of Aberdeen and Moray to the model bishoprics of Glasgow and St. Andrews.[517] More than this he appears to have been unable to effect, for the church lands in the sees of Brechin and Dunblane were still in the possession of great lay feudatories, disinclined as yet to restore the property to the bishops, and too powerful to be rendered discontented by any overprompt measures of alienation. Even in Dunkeld the chapter was not as yet provided for; Ross was in a chronic state of rebellion during the greater part of this reign; and Caithness was at this time hardly more than a nominal province of Scotland. Only one religious foundation is ascribed to William, the monastery of Arbroath, which he dedicated to the memory of Thomas à Becket, with whom he is sometimes said to have been on terms of familiar intimacy at the English court in his earlier years; and from the date of this tribute to the memory of the martyred archbishop, which was completed and endowed within a very few years after the king’s return from captivity, it would certainly appear as if William had been very much impressed at the time by the peculiar circumstances of his capture.[518]

Though David may be regarded unquestionably as the founder of the Scottish burghs, many were indebted to William for the earliest charters confirmatory of their original privileges. Monopoly was, as usual, ensured to the privileged class within the walls, no one being allowed to sell the produce of his lands or flocks except to burgesses;[519] commerce, thus forbidden to the nobility, was confined to the burgher class; and the result was the same all over Europe. There is not a trace amongst the Teutonic people, in early times, of that broad line of distinction which grew up in a later age between the soldier and the merchant, the man of arms and the man of commerce—though the few actual trades, or rather handicrafts, of the period, were probably confined to the unfree. “Biorn the merchant” was the son of a king, and the spirit of commerce was strongly developed amongst the early Northmen. But the burghers claimed it as their exclusive privilege, and their monopolies were fostered and encouraged, stringent laws prohibiting the upland nobility from entering into competition with the freemen within the walls; and accordingly they soon grew to despise pursuits in which they were thus precluded from engaging. No such restrictions existed in Italy, and her merchants were amongst the noblest in the land. Elsewhere the exclusive monopolies of a Roturier class very much contributed to stamp commerce, in the Middle Ages, as a pursuit generally confined to the low-born. David’s commercial, like his religious, foundations were principally to the southward of the Forth—his views were directed towards Northumberland—and though many of his burghs were planted to the northward of that river, and particularly in the forfeited province of Moray, it is from the confirmatory charters of William that their existence is first discovered. Not a few additions were also made by William to the number of Scottish burghs—foremost in importance to future ages the bishop’s burgh of Glasgow—and Galloway, Scottish Cumbria, and the northern and eastern coasts of Scotland proper, were studded with commercial garrisons. Berwick still appears to have monopolized the foreign trade, and its importance may be best appreciated by the clause inserted in one of the treaties between John and William, engaging the English king to stop the further progress of the castle at Tweedmouth, which had evidently been intended to aim a fatal blow at the most flourishing emporium of Scottish commerce.[520] But it was upon the northern and eastern coasts of Scotia proper, and upon that portion of the northern coast which had been reclaimed from Moravia by the establishment of Inverness, that the progress and advancement of the kingdom were most marked in William’s reign. David’s favourite residences appear to have been generally in the south and centre of his kingdom, but William was often in the north, and many of his charters are dated from Forfar and Aberdeen, and from the Moray burghs of Nairn, Forres, Elgin, and Inverness. The latter burgh was a thorough garrison, and in return for certain privileges which its inhabitants enjoyed over other burgesses, they were bound to keep in good repair the ditch and rampart, which the king had thrown up around the town. Most of the great families which are still to be found in this quarter—Chisholms, Roses, Bissetts now represented by the Frasers, and others—are of Scoto-Norman origin, descendants of the auxiliaries planted in, by the Scottish kings, “in the times of eld,” to defend the lands they had won from the supporters of Mac Heth, or Mac William; their names, though they have long been enrolled most worthily in the ranks of “Scottish Highlanders,” yet recalling the time in which the ancient house of Moray was finally crushed by the power of the rival house of Atholl; and when the hereditary earldom of Macbeth was the real march of royal Scotland towards the north, held by the disciplined valour of the Normans. Inverness was the key of the lowlands of Moray, and in many respects an outpost of civilization, from which, in the next reign, the royal power extended still further over the north and west. The views of David were turned southwards, and he never ceased to hope that the ancient territories of the Northumbrian Ealdormen might yet be numbered amongst the appanages of the Scottish crown. But William, in his later years, if the Scottish version of his secret treaty with John is correct, was ready to waive his claims upon Northumberland; and as the unsubstantial vision of the fair English earldom faded from his sight, he may have directed his attention more exclusively to his own kingdom, and have inaugurated that wiser line of policy which, in the course of his son’s reign, united the whole of the Scottish mainland in loyal obedience to the king.

END OF VOL. I.

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