This attempt, which ended so fatally for the Gael of Moray, was followed a few years after by one of the strangest incidents which occur in the history of Scotland at that period. It is obviously alluded to by Ailred in his eulogium upon King David, when, on telling us that ‘God gave David the affection of a son amid scourgings, that he should not murmur or backslide, but should give thanks amid “scourgings,”’ he adds, ‘These were his words, when God sent as a foe against him a certain spurious bishop, who lied and said he was the earl of Moray’s son;’ and again, ‘that the Lord had scourged with the lies of a certain monk that invincible king who had subdued unto himself so many barbarous nations, and had, without great trouble triumphed over the men of Moray and the islands.’[[681]]
William of Newburgh, however, who had personally known the impostor, if impostor he was, and had conversed with him, gives us a fuller account of this strange transaction. He first appears as a monk of the Cistercian monastery of Furness, which had been founded in the year 1124, as Brother Wymundus. According to William of Newburgh, ‘he possessed an ardent temper, a retentive memory, and competent eloquence, and advanced so rapidly that the highest expectations were formed of him.’ In 1134, Olave, the Norwegian king of Man, granted lands in that island to Yvo, abbot of Furness, to found an affiliated monastery at Russin, and Brother Wymund was sent with some monks to fill it; and here we are told ‘he so pleased the barbarous natives with the sweetness of his address and openness of his countenance, being also of a tall and athletic make, that they requested him to become their bishop and obtained their desire.’ Olave accordingly applied to Thurstan, archbishop of York, to consecrate him their bishop, and Wymund appears to have been consecrated by him.[[682]] He had no sooner obtained this position than he announced himself to be the son of the earl of Moray, who had been slain in 1130, and ‘that he was deprived of the inheritance of his father by the king of Scotland.’ Having collected a band of followers, who took an oath to him, he dropped his monastic name of Wymund for his Celtic appellation of Malcolm mac Eth, and began his career throughout the adjacent islands. His claim appears to have been recognised as genuine by the Norwegian king of the Isles, and by Somerled, the Celtic regulus of Argyll, whose sister he married. ‘Every day,’ says William of Newburgh, ‘he was joined by troops of adherents, among whom he was conspicuous above all by the head and shoulders: and, like some mighty commander, he inflamed their desires. He then made a descent on the provinces of Scotland, wasting all before him with rapine and slaughter; but whenever the royal army was despatched against him, he eluded the whole warlike preparation, either by retreating to distant forests, or taking to the sea; and when the troops had retired, he again issued from his hiding-places to ravage the provinces.’ In this career he met one check; for, invading the province of Galloway and demanding tribute from the bishop, he was encountered by him at the head of his people when attempting to ford the river Cree; and the bishop ‘having met him as he was furiously advancing and himself striking the first blow in the battle, by way of animating his party, he threw a small hatchet, and, by God’s assistance, he felled his enemy to the earth as he was marching in the van. Gladdened at this event, the people rushed desperately against the marauders, and killing vast numbers of them compelled their ferocious leader shamefully to fly,’ ‘Wymund,’ adds William, ‘himself used afterwards with much pleasantry and boastingly to relate among his friends that God alone was able to vanquish him by the faith of a simple bishop. This circumstance I learnt from a person who had been one of his soldiers, and had fled with those who had made their escape. Recovering his forces, however, he ravaged the islands and provinces of Scotland as he had done before;’[before;’][[683]] till at length the king, with the assistance of a Norman army, succeeded in taking him prisoner, and confined him in the castle of Marchmont or Roxburgh.[[684]] This took place, as we shall see, in the year 1137.[[685]]
A.D. 1138.
David invades England; position of Norman barons.
In the following year, when King David invaded England at the head of as large a force as he could bring together from the entire country under his dominion, for the purpose of supporting the cause of his niece Matilda, the daughter of King Henry the First, and empress of Germany, he placed those Norman barons who belonged to the party of Stephen of Blois, and held possessions under King David as well as in England, in a position of great difficulty. Their feudal holdings in Scotland gave David a right as their overlord to their military service, while their policy in England was to support Stephen in his opposition to the claim of his niece Matilda to the English throne. One of the principal of these Norman barons, Robertus de Brus, who had great possessions in Yorkshire, but had adhered to King David from his youth, and held under him the extensive district of Annandale, repaired to the Scottish camp when David had advanced as far as the Tees, to remonstrate with him, and when he did not succeed, renounced his fealty to him. It is well worth quoting that part of his speech, as reported by Ailred, which details the part the Norman barons had taken in the Scottish events detailed in this chapter. ‘Against whom,’ he says to the king, ‘dost thou this day take up arms and lead this countless host? Is it not against the English and Normans? O king, are they not those from whom thou hast always obtained profitable counsel and prompt assistance? When, I ask thee, hast thou ever found such fidelity in the Scots that thou canst so confidently dispense with the advice of the English and the assistance of the Normans, as if Scots sufficed thee even against Scots? This confidence in the Galwegians is somewhat new to thee who this day turnest thine arms against those through whom thou now rulest,—beloved by Scots and feared by Galwegians. Thinkest thou, O king, that the majesty of heaven will behold thee, with unmoved eyes, do thy best to ruin those by whom the throne was gotten and secured to thee and thine? With what forces and by what aid did thy brother Duncan overthrow the army of Donald and recover the kingdom which the tyrant had usurped? Who restored Eadgar thy brother, nay more than brother, to the kingdom? was it not our army? Thou too, O king, when thou didst demand that part of the kingdom which that same brother bequeathed to thee at his death from thy brother Alexander, was it not from dread of us that thou receivedst it without bloodshed? Recollect last year when thou didst entreat the aid of the English in opposing Malcolm, the heir of a father’s hate and persecution, how keenly,—how promptly,—with what alacrity, Walter Espec and many other English nobles met thee at Carlisle; how many ships they prepared,—the armaments they equipped them with,—the youths they manned them with; how they struck terror into thy foes till at length they took the traitor Malcolm himself prisoner, and delivered him bound to thee. Thus the fear of us did not only bind his limbs but still more daunted the spirit of the Scots, and suppressed their tendency to revolt by depriving it of all hope of success. Whatever hatred, therefore,—whatever enmity the Scots have towards us, is because of thee and thine, for whom we have so often fought against them, deprived them of all hope in rebelling, and altogether subdued them to thee and to thy will.’
Composition of king David’s army.
Ailred tells us that King David’s army was composed not only of those who were subject to his dominion, but that he had been joined by many of the people of the Western Isles and the Orkneys still under Norwegian rule;[[686]] and the account which he gives of the different bodies of men which now formed his troops gives us a good idea of the heterogeneous elements of which the population of Scotland was at this time composed.
The first body of his army was composed of the ‘Galwenses’ or people of Galloway, who still bore the name of Picts, and who claimed to lead the van as their right. The second body was led by Henry, King David’s son, with soldiers and archers, to whom were joined the ‘Cumbrenses’ and ‘Tevidalenses,’ or the Welsh population of Strathclyde and Teviotdale. The third body consisted of the ‘Laodonenses’ or Anglic inhabitants of Lothian, with the ‘Insulani’ and ‘Lavernani’ or Islesmen and people of the Lennox; and the last body or rearguard was led by the king in person, and consisted of the ‘Scoti’ and ‘Muravenses,’ or the Scots of the kingdom proper extending from the Forth to the Spey, and the recently subdued people of Moray. Along with the king were many of the Norman and English knights who still adhered to him.[[687]]
During the remaining year of David’s reign he appears to have maintained his authority with a firm hand and unimpaired over these various races. We read of no further insurrections on their part against him, and all attempts to resist the encroachment of the Norman barons, with their feudal followers, on their territories seem to have been given up, though probably no great advance was made in the process of amalgamating these different nationalities into one people. In the last year of his reign, his only son, Prince Henry, died, leaving three sons, the eldest of whom, Malcolm, was only eleven years of age. The succession of a grandson to his grandfather was still a novelty to the Celtic population of the kingdom, and a greater infringement upon the law of tanistic succession than had yet been made, while the obstacle to his succession would be still greater if his grandfather’s death opened the throne to him while yet a minor. The aged monarch foresaw that after his death a conflict would once more take place between the laws and customs of the Teutonic and Celtic races, and lead to a renewed collision between them; and in order to avert this, he prevailed upon the earl of Fife, who was the acknowledged head of the constitutional body of the seven earls of Scotland, to make a progress with the youthful Malcolm through the kingdom, and obtain his recognition as heir to the throne.
David died in the following year, and, as might have been expected, the succession of Malcolm was viewed with dislike by the entire Gaelic population of the country, as well as by those districts more immediately under the power or influence of the Norwegians, and he had ere long to contend against the open revolt of the great Gaelic districts which surrounded the kingdom of Scotland proper. These were, on the north, ‘Moravia’ or Moray; on the west, ‘Arregaithel’ or Argyll; and on the south-west corner, separated from Scotland by the Cumbrian population, was the wild region of Galloway. It is remarkable that, while the race of native rulers of the first had come to an end in the preceding reign, we find the two latter suddenly starting into life under the rule of two native princes—Somerled, ‘regulus’ of Arregaithel, and Fergus, prince of Galloway, while no hint is given of the parentage of either. The Norwegians appear to have retained a hold over both districts till the beginning of the twelfth century, and it is probable that the native population had now succeeded in expelling them from their coasts, and that owing to the long possession of the country by the Norwegians, all trace of the parentage of the native leaders under whom they had risen had disappeared from the annals of the country, and they were viewed as the founders of a new race of native lords.[[688]]
A.D. 1153-1165.
Malcolm, grandson of David, reigns 12 years.