Knowledge of the state of Alba in 1100 is crucial for an understanding of the transformation in what has been termed ‘the Davidian revolution’.1 We must be careful not to claim too much for that revolution, for it is evident that the world in existence before the accession of David I was far from swept away in consequence, and that trends which became very strong after 1124 had begun some time before. Nor should it be assumed that the revolution, if such it was, was in any way complete when David died in 1153, for it was really under his twelfth-century successors that new patterns and forms of royal government took definitive hold and the kingship of the Scots began to look increasingly similar to that of other western European kings, and less and less like that of the kings and princes of the other parts of Celtic Britain, Ireland and Wales.
David’s upbringing probably made him francophone and accustomed to, indeed very much in tune with, the Anglo-Norman world of the English court. He was knighted by Henry I and in 1113 received through marriage the prestigious earldom and honour of Huntingdon in the English midlands. The circle of Anglo-Norman friends and knights drawn into David’s patronage, such as the Avenels, Bruces, Morvilles and Soules, was to be of crucial importance for developments in Scotland even before he became king of Scots. King Edgar had bequeathed to him lordship of Cumbria and Lothian; support for David from his Norman knights appears to have been instrumental in compelling a reluctant Alexander I to cede control of the southern part of his kingdom. David had certainly begun to found monasteries and burghs in Lothian before 1124, and probably his initial infeftments of knights from his English honour and elsewhere occurred in this period as well. The first of which we actually know, the grant of Annandale to Robert Bruce, probably for the service of ten knights, was made at Scone in 1124, and therefore seems likely to have been performed at or just after the king’s inauguration. The main settlement of Anglo-Frenchmen and Flemings in lands held for knight service under David I was, however, mainly in Lothian and Fife and also reached Moray after the king subdued the province in 1130. This was followed under David’s grandsons, Malcolm IV (1153-65) and William I (1165-1214), by an intensification of existing settlement and ‘a steady feudalisation’2 in the provinces without mormaers, Gowrie and Mearns, as well as in Angus (the native lords of which appear to have been very much subject to royal power) and Clydesdale, in the old kingdom of Strathclyde.
The intensely pious King David was repelled by some of the more pagan aspects of the royal inauguration ceremony which he had to undergo (having been persuaded by the bishops present) at Scone in 1124: possibly the rituals physically symbolizing the marriage of the king and his people, if Irish parallels may be drawn upon here. If such grosser elements were part of the inauguration in 1124, they had been removed by 1249 when the young Alexander III was set upon the Stone of Destiny by the earl of Fife, supported by the earl of Strathearn, and the royal poet recited the king’s genealogy in Gaelic. Still missing, however, despite the consecration of the king by the bishop of St Andrews, was an ecclesiastical coronation and anointing; these were sought from the pope by successive kings of Scots, but, thanks to English opposition, not until 1331 with David II (1329-71) were they finally added to the inauguration ceremonies at Scone, the papal favour having been granted along with recognition of Robert I’s kingship in 1329. The Christian element of kingship was emphasized in royal charters from their earliest use, however, through the adoption of a style hinting at the desired anointing, ‘by God’s grace king of Scots’; while until late in the thirteenth century the king’s great seal bore on its circumference that he was ‘under God’s ruling king of Scots’, adopting thereafter the charter formula of ‘God’s grace’. So then, and in the later medieval centuries, the king was presented as essentially the Christian ruler of a people rather than a territory. It is significant, however, that by the mid-thirteenth century all the territory over which he ruled was known as Scotia or Scotland, and not just the original core of Alba.
Practice in the succession to the kingship also pointed away from the past struggles of rival contenders towards an orderly dynastic succession founded on the principle of male primogeniture, although not without ambiguities which may well have been deliberate. In King David’s lifetime his only son, Earl Henry, appears as ‘king-designate’. It has been suggested, on the one hand, that this was a form of the Gaelic custom of tanistry in operation, identifying the king’s successor in advance of his death; or, on the other, that it was conscious imitation of the practice of the Capetian dynasty in France, perhaps extending so far as anointing and crowning the king’s heir in the king’s lifetime. Whatever the origin of the idea, clearly the aim was to avoid succession disputes on King David’s death. But Earl Henry predeceased his father, causing a crisis met by charging the earl of Fife with the display of Henry’s first-born son Malcolm, still only a child, throughout the kingdom as the future king (the key role of the earl in the royal inauguration being probably of significance here). Malcolm succeeded safely in 1153, aged just twelve; dying childless in 1165, he was followed by his brother William. Neither of the latter’s direct descendants, Alexander II (1214-49) and Alexander III, were yet adults when they became king, the former despite the fact that his uncle, Earl David of Huntingdon, was still living.
It thus seems clear that a succession custom of male primogeniture, regardless of the age of the claimant, became firmly entrenched in the Scottish royal house, perhaps strengthened by the fact that alternative claims, forcefully asserted in the traditional manner by other segments of the royal dynasties throughout the twelfth and on into the thirteenth centuries, were equally forcibly overcome. Most troublesome to the successors of King David were the Mac Williams, a kindred based in Moray and descended from William, a grandson of Malcolm III by his eldest son and successor Duncan II. Its claims to the Scottish kingship were only brought to an end in 1230 when the brains of the last of ‘the race of Mac William’, a baby girl, were dashed out on the market cross at Forfar, apparently by royal command. Moray, whose rulers had had claims upon the kingship of Alba, and, further to the north, Ross, were the sources of other challenges to the kings of Scots in the twelfth century. The last native ruler of Moray, a descendant of Macbeth’s stepson King Lulach, was killed in battle against the king’s forces in 1130, and Flemish settlement, feudalization and royal burghs followed in the region. Some further drastic assertion of royal control may be cloaked in a cryptic entry in the Holyrood chronicle for 1163, saying that Malcolm IV ‘removed’ (transtulit) the men of Moray.
A clear concern of David I and his successors throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, exemplified by these developments in Moray, was the removal of alternative sources of authority within the other territories to which they laid claim. Kingship in the outer or peripheral zones of the north and west was no longer to be merely a form of overkingship, exacting merely nominal or occasional allegiance from essentially autonomous local rulers or sub-kings. When King Malcolm granted the earldom of Ross to Malcolm Mac Heth, he may have expected recognition from the leading kindred in the area. But following Mac Heth’s death in 1168, the earldom seems to have returned to royal possession and nothing more is heard of it until its grant c. 1215 to the shadowy figure of Farquhar Mactaggart as a reward for his role in putting down a Mac Heth rebellion. If Ross was not yet subdued, it had been brought within the sway of the Scottish king.
Galloway was encircled in King David’s time by major Anglo-Norman lordships in Annandale (Bruce), Eskdale (Avenel) and Liddesdale (de Soules) to the east, and Strathgryfe and Kyle (the Stewarts, named from the office of steward which they had in the king’s household) and Cunningham (de Morville) to the north. Then, after a rebellion led by Fergus, king of Galloway, had been crushed in 1160, feudalization of Galloway itself began, to some extent with the cooperation of Fergus’s successors. After another Galwegian rising had finally been put down in 1185, the intermarriage of members of the native ruling house with Anglo-Norman heiresses brought about increasing integration of Galloway within the kingdom, although local feeling, strong enough in 1234 for there to be a further revolt, was also exploited by Edward I towards his own imperial ends in the 1290s.
The lordships in Strathgryfe, Cunningham and Kyle faced west as well as south, challenging the native kingship or lordship of Argyll; risings in 1154 and 1164 under the leadership of Somerled of Argyll were also put down, although his extensive territories in Argyll and the Isles passed into the lordship of his descendants rather than the king of Scots. Given the continuing Scandinavian control of the western seaboard, the grip of the Scottish kings on the area continued to be at best tenuous, despite efforts which continued into the middle of the thirteenth century. Only in 1266, after the Treaty of Perth with Norway, did Argyll and the Isles come clearly under Scottish sovereignty; and even then the local lordship of the descendants of Somerled - the Macdougalls, the Macruaries and the Macdonalds - continued to exert considerable autonomy and power. Earlier, at the end of the twelfth century, Scandinavian power in Caithness was brought to an end and the originally Flemish family of Moray was granted lordship in the area shortly after 1200. This became the new earldom of Sutherland in the 1230s; but the northern isles of Orkney and Shetland would remain under Scandinavian dominion until 1469.
‘[T]he more recent kings of Scots profess themselves to be rather Frenchmen, both in race and in manners, language and culture; and after reducing the Scots to utter servitude, they admit only Frenchmen to their friendship and service’, wrote
Map 15.1 Scotland: earldoms and ‘provincial lordships’, 1124 to 1286. Based upon a map prepared by K. Stringer for P. G. B. McNeill and H. L. MacQueen, eds, Atlas of Scottish History to 1707 (Edinburgh, 1996; revised rpt. 2000).
An English chronicler in the 1220s. The narrative above might well support an impression of a feudalizing kingship opposing, and opposed by, the native society of Scotland in the twelfth century. The image can easily be reinforced by other stories: for example, of Ferteth, earl of Strathearn, and five other earls besieging Malcolm IV in Perth in 1160, angry because he had served the English king in a siege at Toulouse the previous year and had there been belted knight by him. Nevertheless, this picture of violent clashes between a radically innovative kingship and a conservative traditional society must be balanced against other aspects of the twelfth-century scene. Although the addresses of some twelfth-century royal charters could distinguish between the king’s French, English and Scots subjects (and sometimes also his Welsh and Galwegian ones), the simple form of ‘all the good men of his whole land’ was usual long before 1200. The dominance of French language and culture faded in the course of the thirteenth century, to be replaced increasingly by Scots as Gaelic too gradually retreated to the north and west. The ancient provinces between Forth and Moray continued to exist in largely unchallenged autonomy, albeit now as earldoms, and remained very substantially in the hands of native families. When they did pass into the possession of those of Anglo-French descent, as for example with the increasingly influential Comyns in Buchan c.1212 and Menteith from the 1230s, it was generally as a result of intermarriage with the female heiresses of the native earls (albeit that this involved recognition of hitherto unknown customs allowing inheritance through the female line). Native lords themselves took Anglo-French heiresses as wives and so acquired stakes in the new order of things. Thus when Lachlann, lord of Galloway 1185-1200, who preferred to be known by the romantic French name of Roland, married Elena de Morville, heiress of the great fief of Lauderdale, he acquired not only the Morville lands but also the office of constable. While the earldoms retained much of the character of provincial governorships under the king, it was possible for them to come to be held tenurially, as in Fife from 1136, and for the earls themselves to grant land to be held of them for service by Anglo-French settlers and others.
Nevertheless, the traditional customs, structures and institutions of native society continued to exist and, indeed, to flourish. Thus the provincial britheamhan were absorbed within the emerging court structures of sheriff and justiciar (see ‘The growth and regularization of royal justice and common law’ below). Again, while the earldom of Fife passed down through the generations in accordance with the feudal rules of primogeniture, the headship of the kindred of Fife, the Clan Duff (later Macduff) may not necessarily have rested with whoever was earl but have gone instead to the most appropriate male representative of the kin; this became particularly important when the earl was a minor, and so unable to deal with the kindred’s affairs. Likewise when Neil, earl of Carrick, died in 1256 leaving only a minor daughter, his nephew assumed the headship of the kindred, carrying responsibilities for both leadership in war and protection against injustice and wrongdoing by others, while the earldom title and lands went to the girl and, after her marriage c.1270, to Robert Bruce younger of Annandale, descendant of one of the earliest of King David’s Anglo-Norman settlers. In both cases, the arrangements struck represented a compromise between the new and the old, and as such seem to have had royal support or, at any rate, tolerance.
The expanding use of writing to express the king’s will and record his acts meant that government could extend far beyond the king’s presence and interpersonal relationships, to achieve at least a degree of bureaucratic regularity and definition in the interaction of king and people. The royal household which was the hub of the king’s government developed very much along the lines that King David would have experienced in his youth in England, with officers such as the chancellor, the chamberlain, the constable and the steward whose occupants were principally from the incoming social groups and whose titles and functions were exactly those of their English counterparts. It never took on the elaborate structures and record-keeping of English royal government, however, while offices such as the carver of the king’s food, his poet and his physician often remained in the hands of Gaelic families. By the mid-thirteenth century, and surely long before, the king’s officers from both his household and the localities had to account for their activities in the royal exchequer; but even this vital task did not involve the creation of a permanent institution, simply the annual appointment of auditors whose work was supported by the household clerks.
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