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.