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The first delusion
to be encountered in surveying the early history of Scotland, is that
Scotland, in its modern sense, can be traced back to Kenneth, or even to
a date several centuries later. The name of the Celtic Highlanders or
Irish-Scots has been the cause of great bewilderment, because that
people have been confounded with the country to which they gave their
name; just as the Angles were privileged to bestow theirs upon Angleland
or England. Speaking of the historians, Burton says: "At one time
they find the territory of some Saxon king, stretching to the Tay; at
another the King of Scots reigns to the Humber or farther. It would have
saved them a world of trouble and anxiety to come at once to the
conclusion that Scotland was nowhere - that the separate kingdom marked
off against England by a distinct boundary on the physical globe, as
well as by a moral boundary of undying hatred - did not exist."* It
is the persistence of the name of Scot from Fergus in 404, or Kenneth in
838, to Mary Queen of Scots, and her son the first James of England, and
on to the Union in the reign of Anne, the last Stuart, that has been the
cause of all the trouble and confusion. Gibbon calls it "national
pride," but it appears rather to have sprung from antiquarian
prejudice or stupidity. There is an obscure period lasting several
centuries, upon which a veil of thick darkness hangs, and concerning it
the chronicler or historian has been able to work his sweet will - an
advantage England, after Egbert, cannot boast. George Buchanan has made
Fergus II. the fortieth King of Scotland, and discovered a Scots' king
of the same name on the throne anterior to 300 B.C., somewhere about the
time that Alexander the Great was engaged in taking Babylon. During
Columba's time there was a King Aidan who was anointed by the saint of
Iona, and he is said to have emancipated his country from Irish
supremacy, fought the Picts, the Britons of Strathclyde, and even the
Saxons. He was defeated by Ethelfried near Carlisle. Donald Brae (A. D.
637), tried to conquer Ireland with a vast army made of Picts, Scots,
Strathc1yde Britons and Saxons, but was signally defeated after fighting
a seven days' battle, already mentioned, at what is now Moira, in the
County Down. This obstinate conflict, says Burton (History, i.
328) was "the Marathon of all Ireland as it at last became as it
grew in fame and importance," and the memory of it became more
significant, "when, after the lapse of centuries, the Saxons
returned to enslave the Celt." Usually the Picts went with the
Saxons, whether from a feeling of kinship or near neighbourhood does not
appear. They combined under Egbert and fought against the Scots and took
what is now Dumbarton in 756. On the other hand the Scots had as their
allies, their brother Celts of Strathclyde in 1018, at the battle of
Car, near Wark, in Northumberland.
Kenneth, reported to be
the grandson of a semi-mythical Achaius, "the ally of Charlemagne
and patron of letters," is, in 843, found ruling over both Picts
and Scots and the former soon disappear out of history, although we hear
of the Picts of Galloway, probably Strathclyde Welsh afterwards, but
there were so-called Picts at the battle of the Standard, in the English
Stephen's reign (A. D. 1138). In centre Scotland, Kenneth reigned
supreme, either by conquest, by marriage or inheritance, and the last
two sources of power in those days were often the fruit of the first. He
did not reign over Scotland in any intelligible sense, yet he became, in
a wider sense than hitherto, King of the Scots by absorption, or by
whatever name the coup d'etat of those days may be properly
designated. He was still, however, only King of the Scots, including
what was left, by Norse and Teuton, of the Pictish dominions.
The subject of the
heathen religion prevalent in Scotland before the introduction of
Christianity can hardly be touched here, and, sooth to say, it is not a
profitable theme. It was probably some form of nature-worship, and that
is about all that can be safely asserted. The so-called Druidical
remains are attributed to that mysterious hierarchy which probably had
no existence in fact, and may safely be left enshrined, where most
moderns are acquainted with it, in Bellini's opera of Norma, or the
scattered references to it in poetical literature.
Towards the end of the
fourth century we come upon the famous name of St. Ninian, the apostle
of Southern Scotland. "From his White House on the sea," says
Prof. Veitch, "the teacher of Pict and Scot had apparently, about
the beginning of the fifth century, partially reached the Pagan Cymri of
Tweeddale."** Butler says that St. Ninian or St. Ringan was born in
Cornwall; he certainly was of Cymric origin, and his influence, however
great for the time, was swept away before St. Columba and St. Kentigern
appeared in the sixth century. It is unnecessary to refer speciaIly to
the renowned St. Patrick further than to write that he was indubitably a
native of the same Strathclyde - the former Roman Province between the
walls called Valentia. He has been claimed by Ireland and even Brittany;
but there is no doubt he belonged to Kil Patrick, a district at the west
end of the wall, and even his original name of Succat, or Succoth, is
still borne by an estate in that district. Neither he nor any other
single man produced the wonderful transformation of the Green Isle
attributed to him. The shoal of able and learned missionaries who, in
the next century, carried the Gospel, under St. Columba, St. Gall and a
host of others, to Scotland, to Germany and other parts of the
continent, owed their Christianity to something more than the isolated
work of the patron saint, energetic and zealous though he unquestionably
was.
The illustrious name of
St. Columba and the school of Iona, that gradually spread the faith of
the Gospel over the west and across by Northumbria to Lindisfarne, or
Holy Island, in spite of legends, shed a glorious light in a period of
the thickest darkness. To Ireland that light is due; and
characteristically enough the Iona church was the result of a sanguinary
feud between the so-called Kings of Ireland, which drove Columba forth
an exile. He was born about 520, in Donegal, and to St. Adamnan, his
biographer, the sixth abbot of Iona, we owe the story of his eventful
life. St. Kentigern or St. Mungo, the patron saint of Glasgow, was the
apostle of Strathclyde. In the arms of the city are perpetuated - by the
bird, the tree or branch, and the fish with a ring in its mouth - three
of his miracles. He is mythically said to have been the grandson of Loth,
King of the Lothians; but, whatever his origin, he was at least known to
St. Columba, though perhaps not his disciple. Besides these there were
St. Palladius, rather a hazy figure, from Rome according to the story,
who founded a church at Fordun, Kincardineshire; and of the Irish
school, St. Ternan, whose name is still preserved in Banchory Ternan;
St. Serf, with his monastery in Kinross, on an island in Mary Stuart's
Lochleven, where Wyntoun wrote his chronicle; St. Donnan, St. Ronan, and
a host of others to be found in the hagiologies.*** St. Finnian built
the church on Lindisfarne; but before him, also of the Irish school, was
the redoubtable St. Aidan, the apostle of Northumbria, and, like Columba,
a soldier as well as a priest. St. Cuthbert, although intimately
connected with the Irish school of Iona appears first in story as
"a shepherd boy on the braes of the Leader," then in the
kingdom of Northumbria, that bordered on Strathclyde and touched it at
Galashiels. He was miraculously converted by an angelic vision, it is
said, in 657, in which he saw St. Aidan's soul borne upward from Holy
Isle to Heaven. The story of his miracles and the removal of his body
must be familiar to all readers of Marmion. The account of the
saint, as it is given, in the second canto, tells –
"How, when the rude
Dane burned their pile,
The monks fled forth from Holy Isle
O'er northern mountain, marsh and moor,
From sea to sea, from shore to shore,
Seven years St. Cuthbert's corpse they bore,
They rested them in fair Melrose," &c.,
and finally buried it in
the eastern extremity of the choir of Durham Cathedral,
"where," says Prof. Veitch, it "was disinterred in 1827,
1139 years after his death." With him we may leave behind us the
primitive Christianity of North Britain.
The human material in
those early centuries was crude, and the manifestations of its rough
energy coarse and often brutal; but, in their primitive migrations and
the effects of them, lay already potentially the future glory of that
world-girding chain of peoples which is beginning to work its perfect
work. Upon Scotland, it was natural that the shock should fall with
exceptional severity from all quarters. Ireland was to the north-west,
the Scandinavian peninsula and Denmark not far away; and the Orkney and
Shetland Isles stretched off to the latter like a tentacle extended
in an attitude of invitation. Between them and the Celts of Argyle and
the Western Isles there was constant warfare, and, in some of the
blank intervals, filled up from fancy by the chroniclers, it
appears probable that the early Scoto-Irish civilization was under an
all but irrecoverable eclipse. On the east coast, the
invasions took another form in earlier times; there, though raiding
might be profitable, it must soon have appeared that it could not
continue to be so, and the strangers gradually disappeared. Long prior
to the arrival of the Saxons in England, droves of them had settled in
all parts of northern and eastern Scotland, the rougher class in the
north-west, the more civilized in the counties bordered by the German
Ocean. The former doubtless came from the fjords of Norway and from
Jutland or the Elbe; the latter from the Baltic shores, and at
that time, the people of Schleswig or Holstein were scarcely
distinguishable in language or appearance from the Frisian or
Pomeranian, or the former from their Danish fellows of the North. So it
came to pass in the North of Scotland that there were jarls or
maormors - earls as we call them - of Ross, Caithness and Orkney,
and, with the Celts on the one hand, and the Saxons, so soon as they
came in contact with them, they waged perpetual warfare. The battle of
Nechtansmere took place in 685, near Dunnichen, and there Egfried, the
Saxon of Northumbria, fell fighting with the Picts; later the
Northumbrians were contending, in alliance with the Picts, against the
Cymric Strathclyde, and in 756 the Britons submitted; in the west the
Scots of the Dalriada fought with the Norse jarls of the extreme north;
and in 793 the Danes and Norwegians descended on the Bernician coast at
Lindisfarne and ravaged the country far over the border by the valleys
of Tweed, Ettrick and Yarrow. Thus within, all was division; from
without, constant invasion.
Saxon rule took definite
form in 547, when Ida founded Bernicia, and Ella established Deira to
the south - both afterwards united as Northumbria which extended from
the Forth to the Humber and occasionally further to the southward and
northward. Between these Saxons and the Cymric Celts of Strathclyde
there was constant war until Cumbria - an elastic name, became Saxon
also, and the entire Lowlands between the entrances of the Forth and
Clyde were thoroughly Saxonized, with a strong admixture of the Norse.
It was not until about the middle of the tenth century that the Scots'
kings obtained Dunedin or Edinburgh, and altogether too late to change
either the blood or language of the people in Scotland, east and south.
In the north, they never possessed more than a fictitious sovereignty.
On all sides then, there appears the evidence of a nation in the making,
and it is perhaps the more instructive as a study, because the birth
throes lasted so far down in the history, as compared with England which
ended its race troubles early, and with poor Erin where they are, as Mr.
Froude remarks, not yet brought to a peaceful solution. The outlook was
not over-promising under Malcolm Canmore, with whom, according to Tytler,
Scottish history proper commences. There was a people not homogeneous,
as was once supposed, but composite. It was certainly not Celtic, nor
yet unmixed with Saxon; yet evidently there was a hardy, determined and
vigorous community in the process of formation. If you ask why the Scot
in British North America has approved himself the frugal, pushing,
keen-witted and sternly straightforward man he appears in the main, the
answer is because of those barren hills with heather-clad slopes and the
wildness of nature around him - its grandeur and its penuriousness
together – that he has been made at once thrifty and imaginative - a
ploughman, a shepherd, a weaver, and yet a poet or a philosopher. And if
to the influences of nature we add the fiery discipline of unceasing
conflict within, and from without, what wonder if the Scot, who is the
inheritor of the stout virtues bequeathed him by his fathers, should be
one of the first in the peaceful crusade of British civilization all the
world over?
Malcolm Canmore's reign,
as already remarked, is usually taken to be the opening of a new era in
Scotland; but neither nature nor man effects anything by abrupt leaps.
The King of Scots was merely the ultimate link in a chain which had been
drawing the Celtic dynasty to its Saxon subjects for many a long year.
The monarch whom he dethroned had, perhaps, as good a title to the
throne as he, and the mention of his name to most readers will excite a
deeper feeling of interest than that of the husband of St. Margaret.
Macbeth, or Macbeda, as Mr. Burton prefers to call him, was no mean man,
apart from that lurid and sinister glow which the transcendent genius of
Shakspeare has thrown about him. It is not certain that he was not a
usurper to be sure; but it would be exceedingly difficult to prove that
he was one. Mr. Burton shrewdly hints that the Norman chroniclers,
monkish or otherwise, not finding a proper genealogy for Macbeth, as
king in hereditary succession on Norman principles, boldly made him out
"a fraud," when, for all that appears, he was the rightful
heir, if not in himself, in right of his wife Gruach, whom we all know
now as the Lady Macbeth of Shakspeare. Indeed, it is not very hard to
demonstrate that "the gracious Duncan," instead of being one
who
"Hath borne his
faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office that his virtues
Will plead like angels trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking off " - (Act I , sc. 7),
as Macbeth is made to
declare, would seem to have been all aggressive and troublesome ruler
and a usurper to boot, according to the notions of succession prevalent
in those days. From the time of Kenneth Macalpine, who conquered the
Picts, the Scots were incessantly at war with the Danes, and no less
that eight Scottish kings altogether are said to have fallen in fighting
with them. Malcolm I., to whom, in 945, Edmund had made over Cumbria,
was one of these. Kenneth III., however, defeated the Danes signally at
the great battle of Luncarty (970); but was killed at the castle of
Fettercairns, in a row with the Earls or Maormors of Angus and Mearns.
Constantine was killed by a rival, Kenneth IV. (the Grim), who was in
turn slain in fight by Malcolm II. He reigned twenty years, dying in
1033, and was a warlike king, consolidating and even enlarging his
territory. In the year 1018 he invaded Northumbria, and, at Carham on
the Tweed, gained a victory which made the Tweed henceforth the boundary
of the Scottish kingdom. Malcolm, therefore, was the first monarch
entitled to be called King of Scotia, and, with him, the male line of
Kenneth Macalpine became extinct. Duncan, his grandson by the maternal
side succeeded. At the time of Duncan's death, he was not the guest of
Macbeda or Macbeth, Maormor of Ross and Moray, but an invader of his
territory. The Lady Macbeth was Gruach, granddaughter of Kenneth IV; and
if, as is alleged, Malcolm had put a grandson of Kenneth's to death,
Gruach was his sister, who thus had an "inheritance of revenge;
" but, apart from that, "she was, according to the Scots'
authorities, the representative of the Kenneth, whom Duncan's
grandfather had deprived of his throne and his life" (Burton: History,
i., 369-71). Macbeth was the rightful ruler of all the country from
Moray Firth and Loch Ness north; and his wife was heiress of Scotland.
The latter, after Duncan's death, was ruled evidently in right of the
wife, because, in grants, the royal title ran, "The King and Queen
of Scots." How Duncan met his death is a matter of uncertainty. He
appears to have been slain near Elgin, and he was northward with hostile
intent where he had no business to be. Mr. Burton alludes to a rumour
that Shakspeare had once visited Scotland, and had derived his views of
the wretched state of the country in the eleventh century from the utter
despair which settled upon it after Flodden. The whole of Macduff's
description, in his colloquy with Malcolm (Act. iv., sc. 3),
sets forth vividly the desperate plight of that sore-bested land, As in
most other cases, where Shakspeare's knowledge or experience surprises
one, it is better perhaps to leave the mystery unexplained and be
content to call it the fruit of transcendent genius.
Duncan perished in 1039,
having reigned five or six years; Macbeth was slain in battle in 1057;
so that his tenure of royalty was much longer than readers of the
tragedy would suppose. He was the first Scottish monarch who appears as
a benefactor of the Church, and he proved, so far as appears, an
enlightened ruler. With him "the mixed or alternative royal
succession" terminated, and the strictly hereditary system was
established. After Macbeth's death, Lulach, as Gruach the Queen's son by
a first marriage, claimed the throne. It was in 1054 that Siward, Danish
Earl of Northumbria, whose sister Duncan had married, conquered Cumbria
and the Lothians, and gave them to Malcolm, his nephew and Duncan's son.
In 1057 the war was carried further; there was a battle at Dunsinnane,
as the dramatist tells us; but it was not decisive. The allies crossed
the Dee and defeated and slew Macbeth at Lumphanan, in Aberdeenshire.
Lulach was afterwards overcome and perished at Strathbogie. With Malcolm
III., surnamed Canmore or Big Head, the veil which almost impenetrably
shrouds Scottish history for four centuries is uplifted, and events are
seen in clearer outline. He was a natural son, according to Wyntoun, his
mother being a miller's daughter. His coronation, like that of all the
old kings, took place at Scone, in 1057, nine years before the Battle of
Senlac or Hastings. Edmund Ironsides had left two children, Edgar
Aetheling and Margaret, and in 1068 these last survivors of the Saxon
line took refuge in Scotland, and were hospitably received by Malcolm;
Margaret took something more - a husband to wit, and became Malcolm's
second wife. The Conquest in England was the signal for an extensive
Saxon migration northwards; the exiles "found in Scotland people of
their own race, and made a marked addition to the predominance of the
Saxon or Teutonic element." Malcolm became the champion of the
Saxon royal house and William's enemy. The Norman conquest
unquestionably effected much in Scotland, but rather by subtle working
than the forcible upsetting of established institutions. Yet the strong
hand of feudalism was laid upon these, before the reign of William; the
nobles grew more powerful, the Crown more arbitrary and exacting, whilst
the people sank from villeinage into serfdom. The stubborn resistance of
small landed proprietors who disdained "the sheep's skin
title" to their estates, prevented the permanent establishment of
the feudal system in Scotland; but it immensely increased the power of
the great nobles, and paved the way for those disastrous conflicts which
proved so vexatious, and often fatal, to the Jameses. Malcolm's wife,
St. Margaret, was an earnest devotee, and so naturally favoured the
Roman system rather than the practice of the Columbite Church or of the
Culdees. Still it was the twelfth century before Rome imposed its
hierarchical system on Scotland, to be overthrown by a national uprising
in the sixteenth. The Culdees - a word, according to the philologist,
equivalent to Cultores Dei, worshippers of God - deserve more
attention than is compatible with the present purpose. They were
certainly Catholics, though not of the Roman type, and much ingenious
sophism has been expended upon them. They appear to have preserved
something of the early simplicity of the primitive Celtic Church, but,
having passed through a barbarous time and gathered, as Christianity
elsewhere did, of the foulness which reeked in that channel through
which it passed down the stream of time. Into the Culdee controversy it
would be absurd to enter. At the time of the Reformation, the very name
was a tower of strength to the evangelical party; but it is not well to
claim too much for men who simply adhered to the ritual and form of
Church government which had come down to them through oral tradition,
for the most part, of a non-episcopal Christian Church. At the beginning
the Culdees, so far as may be gleaned, were stricter in form and more
democratic in spirit than the school of Iona, which was itself episcopal,
or non-episcopal, as suited the times. A bishop in those days was not of
much account either in the Irish or Scottish Dalriada, and St. Patrick
would have thought himself degraded by the crozier which modern Irish
Catholics regard as inseparable from his dignity. Moreover, great as
even St. Patrick was, it speaks volumes for the Celtic race - for the
pure love and reverence for womanhood, especially when sanctified by a
living faith - that St. Bridget stands high above all the saints, even
the redoubtable St. Patrick himself. Whatever the Culdees may have been
- and it seems almost ludicrous to search for a pure Christianity in a
cult handed down under such conditions - it may be taken for granted
that they were early Protestants in the sense that they resisted Rome.
In Scotland, the feudal fashion, for such it was, had drawn more closely
together the baron and the ecclesiastic. There was no longer room
for the Culdees, nor, indeed, for the old-fashioned school of
Iona. The Saxon influence and the Norman pressure acting on a new and
unstable regime, quenched opposition to the supremacy of the
Papal See, and made the Church of Scotland a branch of the great Roman
Catholic communion. It was only natural that modern Protestants should
revert to the Culdees with an affectionate reverence which, on the
whole, seems entirely misplaced. "That the Culdees were bad
Papists, may be clear enough; but it must not be held to follow that, on
that account, they were good Protestant Evangelicals." (Burton: History,
Vol. ii., p. 26.) Whatever the doctrine or practice of the Culdees
may have been, they had certainly degenerated so far from any reasonable
theology or ordinary modus vivendi with the world around, that
the introduction of the Roman or Papal system was, on the whole, a
blessing. Whether Churches be prelatical or non-prelatical, they run
through the human cycle with unerring regularity, and the Culdees, of
whom little is known till they were in a state of decadence, fell out of
the great preparatory scene in the historic drama ere long to be enacted
with terrible effect in Scotland.
To return to secular
affairs. Malcolm, although he had a pious wife, who, for aught we know,
may have taught him his letters, was plagued with the same weird
beckoning which in drama, though not in history, lured Macbeth to his
doom. Having received the Saxon royal family and espoused the sister of
the heir to England's throne, what was then left him but to make war
upon England? Under William, however, he was saved the trouble, for the
descendant of Rollo was quite as eager for the fray; in fact, the one
was all impetuosity, the other, facing a disagreeable duty imposed on
him by kinship, was not whole-hearted in the matter. He however, invaded
Northumbria, south of the Tweed, much as the Russians occupied Roumania
as a point d'appui. William invaded by sea and land, and did an
immense amount of damage, devastating the country between the Humber and
Tees, in the old Deira, and applying the scourge principally on English
soil. War raged fiercely after William's fatal rage had wrought its own
retribution, and his horse had plunged upon the hot embers of Nantes as
he rode down the steep street vowing vengeance on Philip of France.+ In
the Church he deposed the Saxon Stigand and enthroned Lanfranc the
Norman, who speedily made the see of York subordinate to his own.
William had shown his power in Northumbria, but he hardly touched
Scotland. Under Rufus, Malcolm made war and made peace; marched over the
northern English counties and, at last, met Rufus at Gloucester for
conference; when returning, he and his son and heir were slain by the
Northumbrian Earls. Then followed, in short order, Donald Bane and
Malcolm's natural son Duncan; Edgar fought his way to the throne, in
turn, and unconsciously made the Kingdom of Scotland what it is by
ceding the country from the Lammermoor Hills west through that portion
of the country between the Solway and Clyde to his younger brother
David. In 1124 David became King and held the Scottish kingdom almost
intact. Cumberland still remained a part of Scotland unti11153, when
William the Lion relinquished it to Henry II, after he was beaten at
Alnwick. In 1237, the boundaries of the kingdoms were for the first time
definitively settled.
Edgar's reign of eight or
nine years was chiefly remarkable for the first matrimonial union of
England and Scotland in regnant families. In 1100 his sister Matilda
married Henry I. and thus the heirs of the Saxon and Norman line were
doubly united, and the bond was further cemented when Alexander I.
married Sibylla, the daughter of Henry. David I. was, above all things,
a Churchman, and he was also an hereditary enemy of the Norman line - a
legacy of ill to him in the usurpation of Stephen, when Matilda, the
daughter of the first Henry was set aside, there was an illegitimate
uncle named Robert, Earl of Gloucester, who fled to Scotland and was
received by David. The end of that enterprise was the contest at
Northallerton, known as the Battle of the Standard from the vehicle with
crucifix and adornments which formed the rallying point of the English
host. At this battle the Scots and the malcontents from the south were
terribly defeated in the year 1138. Of David's army it is somewhat
difficult to form a conception, and almost beyond the art of the
literary scene-painter to describe. "A wild, diversified horde such
as we may suppose to have been commanded by Attila or Genseric,"
not only of Scots or wild Picts, but strange men from Orkney over which
David had no pretence of authority. It is not a matter for surprise that
this motley host, although they piled charge upon charge, were defeated;
yet, as the Scottish historian observes, David "acted more like a
baffled than a beaten general, and collecting such of his forces as
remained, laid siege to Wark Castle. Stephen had enough work on his
hands elsewhere; he therefore made peace with David in 1139 at Durham.
St. David, for he has been canonized, was what is called "a pious
prince," that is, he endowed the Church liberally - rather too
liberally in the opinion of James I. (of Scotland), for he used an
expression at David's sepulchre at Dunfermline - "as he wald mene
that that king left the Kirk ower riche, and the crown ower puir."
He endowed or adjusted nine bishoprics and a number of religious houses,
known in after song and story, among them Holyrood, Melrose, Jedburg,
Kelso, Dryburg, Newbattle and Kinloss (in Moray).
Malcolm IV. lived on
amicable terms with Henry II. of England; but his brother, William the
Lion, took part with Henry's undutiful sons and having fallen into that
king's hands at Alnwick (1174), was taken prisoner to Northampton and
then to Normandy, where at Falaise, he made a treaty acknowledging
"a complete feudal superiority of the King of England over
Scotland" - a concession which proved of some moment in years to
come." Whatever its value, as extorted from a prisoner, apart from
other considerations, it is certain that Richard I. in 1189, in the
strongest language absolved the Scottish king from the agreements which
his "good father Henry had, through his capture, been able to wrest
from William (per captionem suam extorsit). For that act of
justice the impulsive Coeur de Lion received the sum of ten thousand
pounds and flung it away, with chivalrous recklessness, in the abyss of
the Crusades. There was now a lull in the affairs of Scotland, although
much of note was going on in Europe - the cause, doubtless, of
tranquillity in North Britain. From the accession of William to the
death of his Successor Alexander II., eighty-four years elapsed - a
period pregnant with momentous issues to Europe and the world. Becket
had been murdered at Canterbury, Ireland conquered, Jerusalem taken by
Saladin, and re-taken by Richard after the battle of Ascalon; Pope
Innocent III. sat on the throne, the Albigenses were slaughtered by
Simon de Montford, and the Inquisition was set on foot; John had signed
the Magna Charta, and behaved generally, like the crafty poltroon that
he was; and St. Louis, the tender, ascetic, yet almost pitiful
impersonation of medieval piety, had just embarked upon his Crusade,
when Alexander III. mounted the Scottish throne in 1249.
In accordance with the
treaty of Newcastle made with Henry III., King Alexander II. was married
to the Princess Margaret of England at York. He did homage for
territories south of the Border; but when the wily Henry proposed to the
boy - for such he was - that he should also perform the same feudal
obligation for the kingdom of Scotland, the answer was, that that was
too important a matter for a festive occasion, and must be deferred. It
was deferred accordingly until the next reign, when the great Edward
accomplished the work of conquest, and, in the end, got nought but worry
and anxiety for his victories and temporary success. In 1262, Haco or
Hakon, king of Norway; made his way, on the usual track, round the
northwest coast of Scotland by the Hebrides, Outer and Inner, and so
south, until be rounded Cantire and by Bute and Arran reached the
pleasant coast of Ayrshire, where he landed a force. Mr. Carlyle says
that he had been engaged during this cruise in "adjusting and
rectifying among his Hebrides as he went along, and landing withal on
the Scotch coast to plunder and punish as he thought fit."++ At
Largs, now a town - or rather south of it - there are still
"stone-cairns and monumental heaps" "mutely testifying to
a battle there, altogether clearly to this battle of King Hakon; who, by
the Norse records, too, was in these neighbourhoods about that same
date, and evidently in an aggressive, high kind of humour"+++
Whether Haco's failures were due chiefly to the winds or to the
superior prowess of the Scots, Norman invasion henceforward
ceases to be a factor in Scottish history. Magnus IV. of Norway
ceded all the Western Isles, and the only Norse possessions
thereafter were Orkney and Shetland; yet the Norse element
remained in North-western Scotland and the Isles, and
impregnated strongly the Celtic region in the South-west which had been
the original realm of the Scots. This district, says Burton, along with
a large strip on the east coast of Ireland, having Dublin as its
capital, and the Isle of Man, constituted a Sort of naval empire of the
Northmen. *+
In 1281, Eric of Norway
married Margaret of Scotland, and with their daughter, "the Maid of
Norway," who died at Orkney on her way to take possession of the
Crown, the direct line failed, and then new and terrible woes to that
sorely harassed country began. **+ Alexander III, fell over the crags at
Kinghorn, and the condition of Scotland, from the death of "The
Maid," in 1286, until the battle of Bannockburn (1314), was
deplorable in the extreme. An old verse, chiefly interesting for its
age, and as expressing the despair which soon settled on the people, may
be inserted here; -
" When Alysandyr our
Kynge was dede,
That Scotland led in luve and le,
Away was sons of ale and brede,
Of wyne and wax, of gamyn and gle,
Our gold was changyd into lede,
Cryst born into virgynyte,
Succour Scotland and remede,
That stad is in perplexyte."
"This," says
Prof. Murray, "which is probably the earliest extant specimen of
Scottish verse, is of peculiar interest, as revealing the bitterness
with which the people remembered the good old times of plenty preceding
the War of Independence, and enabling us to understand the intensity of
national feeling which called the war forth, and which found utterance
in the popular songs of the period."***+ The "perplexyte,"
of which the unknown rhymer tells must have been appalling, because
apparently without hope. The kingdom, although marked out by natural
boundaries, was far from homogeneous. There were lords and lairds, petty
monarchs, earls and potentates of all sorts, from the Norse ruler in
Caithness to the robber-kings of Liddesdale, and the other valleys of
the Border-Tushielaw, Mangertoun, and the like. To the south, were the
English Border earls, and behind them that dreaded Norman tyranny of
which Scotland had already experienced her share. Everything seemed
hopeless; within were poverty and despair, no middle class, a few
miserable towns, wretched agriculture, and security for person or
property nowhere. The reivers of the Highlands were on one side, and the
free-booters of the Border on the other, and between them, as in a
press, poor Scotland was squeezed until all the healthy vitality was
well-nigh crushed out of her. There was no central focus of power,
whatever the kings may have claimed, during this early period; and when
the royal line became extinct all hope of nationality, of prosperity and
peace, must have vanished. This was the primary school of discipline,
hard, stern and rugged, through which the Scottish nation was compelled
to pass, and its effects are to be seen in the vigorous efforts which
followed under Wallace and Bruce. In addition to former troubles, the
Norman Conquest and its influence, indirect rather than otherwise, but
none the less real and galling, had, in the Lowlands, introduced
feudality with its burdens and oppressions. In the next chapter will
appear how far resistance to the Norman system lay at the bottom of the
great national struggle.
Meanwhile it is well to
recall the facts regarding race already insisted upon. One race which
figures in ancient story vanished early from history and was known no
more. What the Picts were it is impossible to tell; perhaps they were
Cymri, like the Ancient Britons of the south, acted upon by Gothic
influences of some sort, Scandinavian or Teutonic. At any rate they were
not Scoti or Gaels, and to us the survival of the name in "the
Picts of Galloway" seems to indicate a Cymric basis. "It has
been usually supposed," says Mr. Burton, "that the reign of
Malcolm and Margaret was the turning-point, at which the court, which
had been Celtic, became a Saxon court, with a dash of Norman to adorn
it; but of this we cannot be sure. One thing is certain, that a Teutonic
population existed far beyond their jurisdiction. Long after Norman
feudality had stamped its impress on southern Scotland, it was unknown
north of the Tay, where the Saxon institutions of that age survived in
all their purity. That crowds of Saxons fled from oppression in England
is true; but that immigration was too limited to account for the settled
nature of the Saxon population all over the east and north, with
institutions, language, and manners complete; and if the facts seem to
warrant such a theory, all that need be said is, so much the worse for
the facts - or rather for those who undertake to interpret them. Leaving
the Picts out of the question, there were four distinct peoples at least
in Scotland at an early period, the Gaelic or Irish Celts, the Cymric or
British Celts, as in Strathclyde, the Norsemen, and the Saxons,
including under this name all the Teutonic tribes of the Southern Baltic
and German Ocean. In what condition the conglomerate nation - if such a
name may be applied to a mass of autonomous tribes, septs, and lordships
- found itself at or near the end of the thirteenth century has been
imperfectly shown. It is now our task to mount to a higher level,
breathe a purer and more bracing air in the noble struggle which the
Norman kings forced upon Scotland, and out of which she emerged, if not
happy and secure, at all events, victorious and free.
* The Scot Abroad, Vol. i, p. 4.
** Veitch; Border History and Poetry, p
122. See also Burton's History, vol. ii, chap, vii. The historian
examines the peculiar Christianity of this time, and the more permanent
work of Columba, Kentigern and Cuthbert, contrasting it with the fully
developed Catholisim subsequently introduced from Rome.
*** In Kempion a
weird legendary ballad, St. Mungo is celebrated as a deliverer:
" None shall take
pity her upon,
In Wormeswood, aye, shall she be won;
And relieved shall she never be,
Till St. Mungo comes over the sea."
And Bishop Forbes quotes
as the battle-prayer of the Scottish borderers: - "Godde arid St
Mungo, Saint Ronayn and Saint Andrew, schield us this day fro' Goddes
grace, and the foul death that Englishmen dien on."
+Green's History. Vol. i.,
Book ii., chap. i., p.133.
++ Carlyle: Early
Kings of Norway.-Chap. xv.
+++ By the hand of the
veteran master are also written these remarks, which would seem to point
to the conclusion that Alexander III. had not much more to do with
Haco's discomfiture than Elizabeth with the fate of the Armada:--"
Of Largs, there is no mention whatever in Norse books. But beyond any
doubt, such is the other evidence, Hakon did land there; land and fight,
not conquering rather than beaten; and very certainly retiring to his
ships, as in either case he behooved to do! It is further certain that
he was dreadfully maltreated by the weather on those wild coasts; and
altogether credible, as the Scotch records bear, that he was so at Largs
very specially. The Norse records or Sagas say merely that he lost many
of his ships by the tempests, and many of his men by land-fighting in
various parts, - tacitly including Largs no doubt, which was the last of
these misfortunes to him. ‘In the battle here he lost 15,000 men,' say
the Scots, 'we 5,000!' Divide these numbers by ten, and the excellently
brief and lucid summary by Buchanan may be taken as the approximately
true and exact. Date of the battle is A. D. 1263." Ibid.
*+ Hist. ii. 100.
**+ The convoy which
attended Eric’s bride to Norway met with a dire mishap coming home,
which is celebrated in the ballad of "Sir Patrick Spens."
Before reaching the catastrophe, which is properly reserved for the
last, there is a quaint description of the treatment the guests
received, when "they hadna been there a week." This is what
the "lords of Norway" said to Spens and his comrades; -
" Ye Scottishmen
spend a’ our king's goud,
And a’ our queenis fee."
"Ye lie, ye lie, ye liars loud!
Fu' loud I hear ye lie;
"For I hae brought as
much white monie,
As gave (sufficed) my men and me,
And I hae brought a half-fou of gude red goud,
Out o'er the sea wi’ me."
The result is an
immediate order to embark issued by Sir Patrick in anger. They are
caught in a storm and the result is pathetically told in the last five
stanzas. This is the concluding one: -
"Half owre, half owre,
to Aberdour,
Tis fifty fathoms deep,
And there lies gude Sir Patrick Spens
Wi' the Scots lords at his feet."
This ballad was long
thought to have been the oldest specimen of its kind; but it would
appear that both it and "Hardyknute," which relates to the
battle of Largs, were written by Elizabeth Halkett, Lady Wardlaw.
***+The Ballads and
Songs of Scotland, in view of their influence on the character of
the people. By J. Clark Murray, LL.D., McGill College, Montreal. |
