Scotland in the High Middle Ages: Encyclopedia II - Scotland in the High Middle Ages - Kingdom of Alba or Scotia

Scotland in the High Middle Ages - Kingdom of Alba or Scotia

Scotland in the High Middle Ages - Gaelic kings: Domnall II to Alexander I

King Domnall II was the first man to have been called rí Alban (i.e. King of Alba), when he died at Dunnotar in 900.^[15] This meant king of Britain or Scotland. All his predecessors bore the style of either King of the Picts or King of Fortriu. Such an apparent innovation in the Gaelic chronicles is occasionally taken to spell the birth of Scotland, but there is nothing special about his reign that might confirm this. Domnall had the nickname dásachtach. This simply meant a madman, or in early Irish law, a man not in control of his functions and hence without legal culpability.^[16] In fact, the long reign (900-942/3) of Domnall's successor Causantín is more often regarded as the key to formation of the High Medieval Kingdom of Alba.^[17] Despite some setbacks, it was during this half-century reign that the Scots saw off any danger that the Vikings would expand their territory beyond the Western and Northern Isles, and the Caithness area.

The period between the accession of Máel Coluim I and Máel Coluim II was marked by good relations with the Wessex rulers of England, intense internal dynastic disunity and, despite this, relatively successful expansionary policies. In 945, king Máel Coluim I received Strathclyde as part of a deal with King Edmund of England, an event offset somewhat by Máel Coluim's loss of control in Moray.^[18] Sometime in the reign of king Idulb (954-62), the Scots captured the fortress called oppidum Eden, i.e. almost certainly Edinburgh.^[19] Scottish control of Lothian was strengthened with Máel Coluim II's victory over the Northumbrians and the Battle of Carham (1018). The Scots had probably had some authority in Strathclyde since the later part of the ninth century, but the kingdom kept its own rulers, and it is not clear that the Scots were always strong enough to enforce their authority.^[20].

The reign of King Donnchad I from 1034 was marred by failed military adventures, and he was defeated and killed by the Mormaer of Moray, Mac Bethad mac Findláich, who became king in 1040.^[21] Mac Bethad ruled for seventeen years, so peacefully that he was able to leave to go on pilgrimage to Rome. However, he was overthrown by Máel Coluim, a descendant of Donnchad who eighteen months later defeated Mac Bethad's successor Lulach to become king Máel Coluim III. In subsequent medieval propaganda Donnchad's reign was portrayed positively, while Mac Bethad was villanised. William Shakespeare followed this distorted history in describing both men in his play Macbeth.

It was Máel Coluim III and not his father Donnchad, who did more to create the successful dynasty which ruled Scotland for the following two centuries. Part of the success was the huge number of children he had, perhaps as many as a dozen, through marriage to the Norse noblewoman Ingebjørg Finnsdottir, and afterwards to the Anglo-Hungarian princess Margaret. However, despite having a royal Anglo-Saxon wife, Máel Coluim spent much of his reign conducting slave raids against the English, adding to the woes of that people in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest of England and the Harrying of the North. Marianus Scotus tells us that "the Gaels and French devastated the English; and [the English] were dispersed and died of hunger; and were compelled to eat human flesh".^[22]

Máel Coluim's raids and attempts to forge claims for his successors to the English kingship prompted interference by the Norman rulers of England in the Scottish kingdom. He had married the sister of the native English claimant to the English throne, Edgar Ætheling, and had given most of his children by this marriage Anglo-Saxon royal names. In 1080, King William the Conqueror sent his son on an invasion of Scotland, and Máel Coluim submitted to the authority of the king, giving his oldest son Donnchad as a hostage. King Máel Coluim himself died in one of the raids, in 1093.

Máel Coluim's natural successor was Domnall Bán, as Máel Coluim's sons were young and Domnall was Máel Coluim's brother. However, the Norman state to the south sent Máel Coluim's son Donnchad to take the kingship. In the ensuing conflict, Donnchad gained the throne, but according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle his English and French followers were massacred,^[23], and Donnchad II himself was killed later in the same year (1094) by Domnall's ally Máel Petair of Mearns. However, in 1097, the Norman King of the English sent another of Máel Coluim's sons, Edgar, to take the kingship. The ensuing death of Domnall Bán secured the kingship for Edgar, and there followed a period of relative peace. The reigns of both Edgar and his successor Alexander are obscure in comparison with their successors. The former's most notable act was to send a camel (or perhaps an elephant) to his fellow Gael Muirchertach Ua Briain, High King of Ireland.^[24] When Edgar died, Alexander took the kingship, while his youngest brother David became Prince of "Cumbria" and ruler of Lothian.

Scotland in the High Middle Ages - Scoto-Norman kings: David I to Alexander III

The period between the accession of David I and the death of Alexander III was marked by dependency upon and relatively good relations with, the Kings of the English. As long as one remembers the continuities, the period can also be regarded as one of great historical transformation, part of a more general phenomenon which has been called the "Europeanisation of Europe".^[25] As a related matter, the period witnessed the successful imposition of royal authority across most of the modern country. After David I, and especially in the reign of William I, Scotland's King's became ambivalent about the culture of most of their subjects. As Walter of Coventry tells us that "The modern kings of Scotland count themselves as Frenchmen, in race, manners, language and culture; they keep only Frenchmen in their household and following, and have reduced the Scots [=Gaels] to utter servitude."^[26]

The ambivalence of the kings was matched to a certain extent by the Scots themselves. In the aftermath of William's was capture at Alnwick in 1174, the Scots turned on the small number of English-speakers and French-speakers among them. William of Newburgh related that the Scots first attacked the Scoto-English in their own army, and Newburgh reported a repetition of these events in Scotland itself.^[27] Walter Bower, writing a few centuries later albeit, wrote about the same events, and confirms that "there took place a most wretched and widespread persecution of the English both in Scotland and Galloway".^[28]

Opposition to the Scottish kings in this period was indeed hard. The first instance is perhaps the revolt of Óengus, the Mormaer of Moray. Other important resistors to the expansionary Scottish kings were Somairle mac Gillai Brigte, Fergus of Galloway, Gilla Brigte of Galloway and Harald Maddadson, along with two kin-groups known today as the MacHeths and the MacWilliams.^[29] The latter claimed descent from king Donnchad II, through his son William fitz Duncan. The MacWilliams appear to have rebelled for no less a reason than the Scottish throne itself. The threat was so grave that, after the defeat of the MacWilliams in 1230, the Scottish crown ordered the public execution of the infant girl who happened to be the last of the MacWilliam line. This was how the Lanercost Chronicle related the fate of this last MacWilliam:

"the same Mac-William's daughter, who had not long left her mother's womb, innocent as she was, was put to death, in the burgh of Forfar, in view of the market place, after a proclamation by the public crier. Her head was struck against the column of the market cross, and her brains dashed out" ^[30]

Many of these resistors collaborated, and drew support not just in the peripheral Gaelic regions of Galloway, Moray, Ross and Argyll, but also from eastern "Scotland-proper", and elsewhere in the Gaelic world. However, by the end of the twelfth century, the Scottish kings had acquired the authority and ability to draw in native Gaelic lords outside their previous zone of control in order to do their work, the most famous examples being Lochlann of Galloway and Ferchar mac in tSagairt. Cumulatively, by the reign of Alexander III, the Scots were in a strong position to annex the remainder of the western seaboard, which they did in 1265, with the Treaty of Perth. The conquest of the west, the creation of the Mormaerdom of Carrick in 1186 and the absorption of the Lordship of Galloway after the Galwegian revolt of 1135 meant that the number and proportion of Gaelic speakers under the rule of the Scottish king actually increased, and perhaps even doubled, in the so-called Norman period. It was the Gaels and Gaelicised warriors of the new west, and the power they offered, that enabled King Robert I (himself a Gaelicised Scoto-Norman of Carrick) to emerge victorious during the Wars of Independence, which followed soon after the death of Alexander III.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Kingdom of Alba or Scotia", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki