King Alexander’s fatal fall from his horse brought to a head not only questions about the principles of succession in the Scottish kingship, but also the much more fundamental problem of Anglo-Scottish relations which had existed since Malcolm III’s submission to William the Conqueror in 1072. The issue had at least three major strands. One was whether the king of Scots held his kingdom of the king of England. The second was the claim of the king of Scots to sovereignty of Northumbria and Cumbria, and the third was the relevance to the first of the lands in England which the king of Scots did undoubtedly hold of the king of England, above all the honour and earldom of Huntingdon. On all points there was ebb and flow throughout the twelfth century, and on each side of the argument cases would be pressed most strongly at times when the other party was, for one reason or another, politically weak. Under the Alexanders greater stability prevailed, perhaps helped by the interests of the many magnates who held land in both kingdoms and for whom open conflict between them would be potentially disastrous. The Scottish claim to the northern counties was given up in the Treaty of York in 1237, and it was made clear, at least on the Scottish side, that homage was given to the English king only for the lands that the king of Scots held in England. Although it was accepted that the lands held in England by Scots (including the king) were subject to English law and jurisdiction, attempts to deal in England with disputes arising in Scotland (for example, over the earldom of Menteith in the 1260s) were successfully resisted. The Laws of the Marches, a customary regime applying to cross-border disputes, were recorded in writing for the first time in 1249, another aspect of the sharpening recognition on each side of the border that to allow the king’s subjects to be treated under the law of another kingdom prejudiced royal authority and national identity.
Following the death of his son in 1284, Alexander III had obtained from a colloquium recognition that the heir presumptive was his infant grandchild Margaret, daughter of the king of Norway. This acknowledgement of female inheritance was a first for the Scottish kingship and was upheld after Alexander’s death, despite the existence within Scotland of alternative claims, notably from Robert Bruce, lord of Annandale, and John Balliol, lord of Galloway, both descendants in the female line of Earl David of Huntingdon, youngest brother of Malcolm IV and William I. Six guardians were appointed to govern the kingdom for the absentee child and entered into negotiations with Edward I for the marriage of Margaret with his eldest son. These discussions, which clearly had the potential to bring the two kingdoms into a much closer relationship, bore fruit in the Treaty of Birgham in 1290. The treaty contained no assertions of English feudal superiority and recognized that the kingdoms would remain separate and sovereign jurisdictions. The carefully crafted arrangements were, however, blown apart by the death of Margaret on her way to Scotland in September 1290, throwing open the question of who should be king and holding out the prospect of civil war between the claimants, particularly Bruce and Balliol. It was in these circumstances that King Edward either was invited by the Scottish political community to be, or made himself available as, an adjudicator of the competing claims; and he took the opportunity to reassert feudal superiority over the kingdom of the Scots, a superiority that was accepted, reluctantly or otherwise, by all the competitors for the Scottish throne.
Edward’s judgement was in favour of Balliol and the principle of seniority of line (i. e., as descendant of the oldest of Earl David’s daughters) over that of nearness by degree maintained by Bruce (i. e., as a grandson rather than a great-grandson of Earl David). Scotland was held to be a kingdom and therefore, unlike ordinary fiefs in both Scots and English law, not apt to be divided even amongst claimants whose title depended on descent in the female line. Yet virtually from the moment that John was inaugurated as king of Scots at Scone, his and the kingdom’s status were undermined by the assertion of Edward’s feudal superiority. The English king renounced the Treaty of Birgham. Appeals from Scottish judgements, including those of King John himself, were accepted in the English king’s court: that is to say, contrary to the treaty and previous custom and practice, cases arising in Scotland were disposed of in England. Although in these judgements Scots laws and customs were recognized and applied, by 1305 Edward was clearly ready to contemplate and implement change to these laws and customs where appropriate. When in 1295 a Scottish council took control of government from King John and entered a treaty of mutual assistance with the king of France, against whom Edward was
Waging war, the English king saw it as an act of treason that justified his humiliating removal of John from the kingship and the imposition of direct rule from Westminster (albeit through appointed agents in Scotland), the transportation south of the insignia of Scottish royalty such as the Stone of Destiny, and the execution as traitors of Scots like William Wallace, captured in acts of aggression against the English crown.
When Robert Bruce, descendant of one of the earliest Anglo-Norman settlers in Scotland and grandson not only of the competitor for the throne in 1290 but also of Neil, earl of Gaelic Carrick, killed his rival John Comyn and seized such power as pertained to the king of Scots in 1306, his principal thought was no doubt to maintain and make good the long-standing Bruce claim to the kingship. But there was also a strong sense of the independence and distinctive mixture of traditions of the kingdom he sought to make his own. Everything about Robert’s kingship, from its commencement in a necessarily truncated inauguration ceremony at Scone to his ultimate retirement in the still essentially Gaelic province of Lennox and his interment in the royal burial grounds at Dunfermline, points up conservative attachment to the customs and ways of government that had prevailed before 1286, encompassing, like his own descent, both its Gaelic and Anglo-Norman strands. The earldoms survived as territorial units, largely in the hands of the families who had held them in 1286, the main exceptions being Buchan, which had belonged to the Comyns, and Angus. An earldom of Moray, based on the ancient province, was created for the king’s nephew and chief lieutenant, Thomas Randolph. Robert also restored the Alexandrian system of sheriffdoms and justiciarships, which would continue in operation until the end of the fifteenth century, as well as founding a sheriffdom of Argyll. He convened parliaments in which the kingly power to make and change the laws was strongly asserted, while the fundamentally important common law principle in favour of security of tenure and inheritance, that no man would be put out of his heritage save by the king’s brieve, was restated in statute in 1318. His own grants of land made frequent use of the concepts of military tenure, including not only knight service but also service with the king’s galleys. He sought, and had he lived would probably have achieved, the return to Scotland of the Stone of Destiny. He revived the Scottish claim to the northern counties of England, and pursued relationships with Ireland in which the common origins and heritage of the Irish and the Scots were strongly emphasized. In all probability it was under his authority that work began on the first systematic account of the laws and customs of Scotland, the text known from its opening words as Regiam Majestatem and based, significantly, upon the twelfth-century English treatise known as Glanvill. Finally, it is surely indicative that the king named the son and heir born in 1324 David, recalling the founder of the kingdom over which Robert had come to reign.
Yet the king could not simply seek restoration of a ‘golden age’ that had prevailed up to 1286. His victory at Bannockburn was not the end of the Wars of Independence. His claims were still not accepted in England; nor by the pope, who saw Bruce as an excommunicate guilty of the slaying of John Comyn in a church; nor by those who maintained the illegitimacy of the title under which Robert reigned. Even within the ranks of those apparently loyal to the king, treachery could lurk; and the terrible punishments visited upon some of those involved in the Soules conspiracy against him in 1320 may show just how fragile Robert felt his position to be. The conspiracy was most probably in support of the continuing Balliol claim to the kingship, although Soules himself was an heir of one of the 1290 competitors for the throne, while Sir David Brechin, who was executed for breaking his obligation to protect his lord by failing to reveal in advance what he knew of the conspiracy, was descended from an illegitimate son of Earl David of Huntingdon and so may have been in the eyes of at least some Gaelic traditionalists a potential claimant to the throne. Although the Bruce claim to the kingship through inheritance was strongly asserted by his supporters, additional elements were brought in to bolster his right, notably in the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320. This was addressed to the pope in an effort to obtain his recognition of the king, and spoke of the people’s rights to rid themselves of a king who subjected them to English rule (i. e., Balliol) and to make another to defend their liberties (i. e., Bruce). Robert, said the declaration, had become king by ‘divine providence, the right of succession by the laws and customs of the kingdom (which we will defend till death) and the due and lawful consent and assent of all the people’. The doubts over his title as well as his lack of a legitimate son until 1324 probably encouraged the king to pursue a statutory settlement of the succession in 1315 and again in 1318, the latter being in favour of the king’s grandson, young Robert Stewart. Although the birth of David Bruce made these arrangements unnecessary at the king’s death in 1329, they were to mean that, when David himself died childless in 1371, Robert Stewart at last ascended the throne, after a wait of over fifty years.
Robert I had also to consider what to do about those owners of land in Scotland who would not accept his kingship. Following Bannockburn, a parliament declared that all who would not come into the king’s peace would be forfeited. Thus those who held lands in both Scotland and England had to choose to which crown they would in future give their allegiance; those who chose to be subject to the English king would lose their lands in Scotland. This had two major implications for the future: it created a group of the ‘disinherited’ in England, centred round the Balliol claim to the kingship, and it provided Robert I with massive amounts of land for redistribution amongst his supporters, perhaps above all the extensive northern holdings of the Comyns and the Galloway lands of the Balliols. The principal beneficiaries were families such as the Stewarts, who added to their already considerable territories, and the Douglases, who were raised far above the position they had enjoyed in 1286. In the Isles Robert I set in train the processes which would make the MacDonalds, descendants of the twelfth-century figure of Somerled, lords of the Isles, while also raising the Campbells to prominence in Argyll. It was the beginning of a substantial transformation of the personnel in the upper reaches of the Scottish landowning classes, albeit still within the territorial structures prevailing before 1286, and the end of the Anglo-Scottish nobility whose role had been so significant hitherto.
The conflict with England dragged on throughout King Robert’s reign. In 1326 a further treaty of alliance with France was sealed at Corbeil, providing again for mutual assistance against the common enemy, England; this was to be the basis of the ‘auld alliance’ for the rest of the medieval period, and was to play a particularly vital role in enabling the Scots to exploit the opportunities provided by the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. The pressures which Robert himself continued to exert upon the English led to the conclusion of a treaty in 1328, in which the English king (Edward III) renounced his claim to overlordship of Scotland, and there was provision for perpetual peace between the two kingdoms and the marriage of David Bruce with Edward’s sister. The treaty triggered the lifting of Robert’s excommunication and paved the way for the anointing of future kings of Scots at their coronations; but the intractable problem of the ‘disinherited’ was left for another day.
That problem flared up once more after the death of King Robert in 1329, leading to a resumption of Anglo-Scottish hostilities that would endure until 1500 and beyond. The 1330s and 1340s saw the renewal of the Balliol claim in the person of King John’s son Edward, English repudiation of the treaty of 1328, disastrous Scottish defeats at Dupplin (1332) and Halidon Hill (1333), substantial and sustained English occupation of Scotland south of Forth, and, for the young David II, first exile in France from 1334 to 1341, and then captivity in England from 1346 to 1357 following another Scottish defeat at Neville’s Cross near Durham. Ironically, it was this last event which finally undermined the Balliol claim to the Scottish kingdom; the king of England could do more to bend Scotland to his will with a captive king than with another who commanded relatively little support amongst the Scots themselves.
Once again, the uncertainty of the succession, this time to the childless David, was a key weapon. Through the 1350s Edward III showed himself willing to return David to Scotland provided an English succession to the throne was guaranteed if the king had no heir of his body; but this was unacceptable to the Scots, whose main leader was now Robert Stewart, heir presumptive under the provisions of 1318. Eventually David was released in 1357 for a large ransom payable over ten years and guaranteed by noble hostages. In 1363, however, Edward III reopened the succession issue with a proposal to forgo the ransom, release the hostages and return the still-occupied territories of southern Scotland if David were to be succeeded by either the English king or one of his younger sons. The proposal also showed respect for the identity of the kingdom, echoing the provisions of the Treaty of Birgham in 1290: the king to be would ‘maintain the laws, statutes and customs of the kingdom of Scotland as established under the good kings of Scotland of the past’, while ‘in no way’ would he ‘summon or constrain the people of Scotland to compear in England or elsewhere outwith where they ought’. It is unclear whether the scheme enjoyed the support of King David, who had just married for the second time and was not yet forty years old; but the English approach was ringingly rebuffed by the Scottish parliament in 1364. In 1371 David died suddenly, without issue, and the Stewart dynasty which would hold the kingship for the next 300 years was inaugurated at Scone in the person of Robert II.
Anglo-Scottish relations would continue to be tense and involve fluctuating military fortunes between 1370 and 1500. The words of contemporary literature and legislation make clear the power of national feeling and anti-English sentiment that prevailed throughout this period. The English attempted no full-scale invasion or indeed much incursion far beyond the Tweed-Teviot line; the experience of the early fourteenth century had shown that the resources for a permanently successful campaign of deeper subjugation simply did not exist. Thus, while Roxburgh and Berwick, first taken in the 1330s, did not return to Scottish control until 1460 and 1461 respectively, when England was weakened by the Wars of the Roses, there was never any real English threat to the integrity of the realm (although Berwick was lost again, permanently, in 1482, triggering a major crisis in the troubled reign of James III). The eighteen-year captivity of James I from 1406 was probably the most effective manifestation of English hostility in the fifteenth century. After his return to Scotland in 1424, the French alliance was twice renewed but was not deployed again in the military contexts in which it had flourished for the previous hundred years.
World History
