In 2008, archaeologists revealed their finds from work at a Pictish monastery at Portmahomack on the Tarbat Peninsula in Easter Ross, which dated back to the sixth century. The monastery was made up of an enclosure centred on a church that is thought to have housed about 150 monks and workers, and was similar to St Columba’s monastery at Iona, with evidence that the Pictish monks would have made gospel books similar to the Book of Kells, and religious artefacts such as chalices.
Archaeologists found more than 200 fragments of Pictish stone sculptures, including the Calf Stone, which shows a bull and cow licking their calf. The real surprise, however, was the sophistication of the building, with architectural techniques that had been thought too sophisticated for the Picts. A fragment of a sculpture with a Latin inscription was also found; unfortunately the rest has not been unearthed.
Martin Carver, Professor of Archaeology at York University, said this of the Picts:
They were the most extraordinary artists. They could draw a wolf, a salmon, an eagle on a piece of stone with a single line and produce a beautiful naturalistic drawing. Nothing as good as this is found between Portmahomack and Rome. Even the Anglo-Saxons didn’t do stone-carving as well as the Picts did. Not until the post-Renaissance were people able to get across the character of animals just like that.8
The Pictish monastery was burnt down, probably by Norse raiders, around 820. The complex was in use from the ninth to the eleventh centuries, possibly under the control of the Pictish Mormaers of Moray, including Macbeth.
Besides the Portmahomack artefacts, we know little about the everyday life of the ordinary people. They lived in small farming communities, breeding cattle, sheep and pigs, plus rearing small and stocky horses, which are shown on sculpted stones drawing carts and carrying members of the elite on hunting expeditions. Barley, wheat, oats and rye were grown, providing a plain diet. Fish, seals and shellfish would have been an important source of protein, as meat would have rarely been on the plates, except at festival times.
The myth might be that the land was owned by a clan, but it was administered by a chief, and long before the arrival of classical feudalism he demanded rent in the form of a share of the produce or livestock, or unpaid labour on his lands and military service. Little was to change for ordinary people for centuries, all the way to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Lowlands, and the early nineteenth in the Highlands.
The Kingdom of the Scots Emerges
It was the Celtic Church, from its base in Iona, that had brought Christianity to Northumbria and northern England. However, it was weakened by the spread of the Roman Church, which appealed to kings and nobles with its celebration of monarchy and aristocracy. The Roman Church finally won out in 664 when a synod, a meeting of bishops and senior church figures, was convened at Whitby in North Yorkshire by King Oswiu of Northumbria, who appointed himself the final judge on the issues at stake. Oswiu was hardly neutral. His son, Alchfrith, had expelled monks of the Celtic Church from the monastery of Ripon and handed it over to Wilfrid, a Northumbrian churchman recently returned from Rome.
The main issue was the practice of the Christian church in Britain and whether it should be controlled by the Pope in Rome. The Celtic Church of the late St Columba, based in Iona, had developed in isolation from Rome and was less centralised than the Catholic Church. The synod established the date for Easter and other matters in accordance with Rome, which led to the withdrawal of Celtic Church opponents from Northumbria to Iona and thence to Ireland.9
The Roman Church, having established itself in Northumbria, then moved to win over the Pictish and Scottish kings. The hierarchy of the Catholic Church was loyal to Rome, but generally it allied with the local royal power, and drew its senior churchmen and women from ruling circles. It provided administrators for the Crown in return for land and other rewards.
For many later opponents of the Catholic Church in Scotland, the Synod of Whitby represented a historic defeat for the Celtic Church, which had been indigenous to Scotland. It later re-emerged, however, in Presbyterian opposition to bishops and patronage of the Church by the Crown and the nobility.
The Celtic Church would be injured beyond recovery by Norse raiders and, after the union of the Pictish and Scottish realms in 844, the first king of what would be termed Scotland, Kenneth MacAlpin, began a policy of thorough-going reform, relying mainly upon Anglian and Scottish clergy who had conformed to the ways of Rome. An important step in this direction was taken in 849 with the removal of St Columba’s relics, and the relocation of the headquarters of the Romanised Celtic Church from Iona to Dunkeld, which succeeded Iona as the major centre for the church in Alba.10
Despite the decline of the Celtic Church, the Pict kings were still in the ascendant. Southern Pictland was under attack from Northumbrian Angles who had conquered the Lothians from the British tribes and were pushing north. One king, Bridei, managed to unite the various kingdoms and tribes, and eventually in 685 the Picts achieved a victory over the Northumbrians as great as any in the history of what was now becoming Scotland. At a place called Dunnichen (also known as Dun Nechtain and Nectansmere) near Aviemore, mass ranks of Pictish spearmen drove the Northumbrians downhill and into a loch where they were butchered.11
Bridei established one united Pictish kingdom, but all its inhabitants now faced an even more ferocious adversary: the Vikings. In 839 the Vikings defeated a Pictish army, killing their king and many of the chiefs. That power vacuum was filled by a Gaelic warlord. Kenneth MacAlpin (Cináed mac Ailpín) who by 840 became king of Pictland and the Scottish lands. This was not the result of conquest: his grandmother was a Pictish royal, so he possibly inherited the throne, and the Norse threat probably necessitated the need for a strong military ruler.
Yet by 847 the Norwegians controlled the coast of Dál Riata, the Hebrides, Wester Ross, Sutherland, Caithness, and the Orkneys and Shetlands. In the Orkneys and Shetlands the new arrivals seem to have physically removed the Pictish inhabitants, and Norse became the language of the islands. Elsewhere they ruled over the native people, and in the case of the Scots began to adopt the Gaelic culture and language.
Around 840 McAlpin established his court in Perthshire. The language of the court was Irish (Gaelic), and this became the language of the people of the new kingdom, probably helped by the spread of the Gaelic/Irish Church. The new kingdom was strong enough to restrict the Norse to their lands in the north and west.
The death of McAlpin was followed by civil war, quite possibly because of the Pictish nobility’s resentment of the new Gaelic order. It was only in 906 that King Constantine was crowned at Scone, which would become the traditional coronation site.
To the south a new threat was emerging. By 927 a united Anglo-Saxon or English kingdom had been established under King Æthelstan or Athelstan (c.893/895–939). Æthelstan established control over rival Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and Danish settlers. He had the ambition to be ‘King of all Britain’, and in 934 he marched north as far as Dunnottar, near Stonehaven, forcing homage from King Constantine.
Constantine, however, played for time, making a treaty with the Norse and with the British kingdom of Strathclyde. Æthelstan met with Constantine and his allies in 937 at a place called Brunnanburh, near modern-day Liverpool. It was a bloody slaughter of a battle, but Æthelstan’s army controlled the field at the close of the day. In truth the losses were so great no one could claim victory, and Æthelstan was forced to cede any claims over Alba.12
By 1018, Malcolm II defeated the Northumbrians at Carham-on-Tweed and annexed the Lothians. His grandson Duncan had become king of Strathclyde at about the same time, and when he succeeded Malcolm II, the kingdom of Scotland’s boundaries were essentially those of today. The creation of the new kingdom was largely the achievement of three kings, Constantine II (900–943), Kenneth II (971–995) and Malcolm II (1005–1034), whose relatively long reigns provided some stability. Nevertheless, the tribal lands remained contested.
The Norweg
ians’ control of the territory on the mainland came to an end by the close of the eleventh century. Their final attempt to control England was defeated in 1066 by the Anglo-Saxons at Stamford Bridge. Nevertheless, the Hebrides joined the kingdom of Scotland only in 1266, and Orkney and Shetland remained under Norwegian control until the fifteenth century.
Feudalism Takes Control
The Norman conquest of England in 1066 may have seemed remote to the Scottish ruling class, but it heralded momentous changes that shaped Scotland as it essentially existed until 1746. But the new kingdom was not yet an effective state. Aside from those areas under Norse control (the Orkneys and Shetlands under direct Norwegian rule and the Norse-Gaelic kingdom of the Western Isles), the northern third, Moray, remained semi-independent under its own ‘mormaers’ (sometimes called kings). How Pictish they were we do not know, but in 1040 one Mac Bethad (Macbeth) killed King Duncan at Pitgaveny (Bothnagowan) near Elgin, and ruled as king for the next seventeen years. Duncan’s son Malcolm Canmore (Bighead) fled to safety at the Saxon court of Edward the Confessor. In 1057, Malcolm, with Saxon aid, defeated and killed Macbeth and was crowned king of Scotland as Malcolm III.
Malcolm Canmore would go down in history as a ‘good king’, in large part because his wife, Margaret, an Anglo-Saxon princess, was made a saint by the Catholic Church for promoting its still loose hold over religious affairs. A comprehensive system of bishops and parishes was introduced. She also encouraged Malcolm to initiate new abbeys and monasteries, and to bestow them with lands and riches. These would become one of the mainstays of feudal rule because they had both a religious and an economic function. They were often more innovative than the nobility in exploiting the land, and the peasantry, amassing great wealth.
Malcolm’s ambition was to obtain Northumbria for the Scottish Crown and he seized every opportunity, throwing Scotland into a series of unsuccessful wars and instigating English retribution. In response the new Norman kingdom of England began exerting its might north of the Solway–Tweed border. In 1072, William the Conqueror advanced as far as the Tay. The Scots were unable to resist the heavily armoured horsemen and disciplined infantry, and Malcolm Canmore met William at Abernethy to swear vassalage. The Norman kings to the south were content to allow the Canmore dynasty to reign, using military pressure to keep them in line. They in turn saw that the feudal state to the south gave their English counterparts greater power and wealth and began to invite Norman nobles to take over estates in Scotland, transplanting the Norman feudal system into what was still, in Scotland, a clan-based society.
It was under the Canmores that a form of English gradually became the main language of the Lowlands, encouraged by the court, the Church and the new nobility. Malcolm IV (1153–65) and William the Lion (1165–1214) were David I’s grandsons and their mother was a Norman. They continued David’s policy of encouraging Norman nobles to settle in Scotland. The most powerful Norman dynasty was the Comyns (Cummings), who by the mid-thirteenth century held lands in Galloway, the Borders and Moray.
The influx of Normans (many were actually Flemings) reached its peak under David I, who ruled 1124–53. He gave land in return for knight service, especially in the troublesome south-west. Robert de Brus (the Bruce) was given Annandale, Liddesdale went to Ranulf de Sules, David’s constable, Hugh de Morville acquired Cunningham and Lauderdale, and Robert Avenel got Eskdale. David’s steward Walter had come from Shropshire and was given the lordship of Renfrew and North Kyle. He brought his own followers who in turn were given land in return for their service. Walter and his family took over the castle at Renfrew and built another at Dundonald as well as bestowing an abbey at Paisley.13 New settlements were created and named after their lord – Duddingston, now in Edinburgh, after Dodin, Houston, now in Renfrew, after Hugh.14
Initially feudalism was restricted to the royal heartlands of Lothian, but David I’s successors extended these grants to Strathclyde, Angus, Perth and eventually Aberdeen and Moray at the expense of the older, Celtic nobility. Even so, by 1286 five earldoms were in the hands of newcomers but eight were in native hands, their lands now operated on the basis of a feudal relationship.
Some of these barons were appointed royal sheriffs, administering the king’s law, collecting rents and maintaining order and the defence of the realm. The new royal army prevented the Norse-Celtic chief Somerled from taking control in 1164. It conquered Caithness from the Norse and defeated a Norwegian invasion at Largs in 1263. By the close of that century the kingdom of Scotland more or less corresponded to the country we know today, except for Orkney and Shetland, which remained under Norse control.
Galloway, Buchan and other areas had been brought under nominal royal control, and the new nobles such as the Bruces in Galloway, quickly asserted a degree of independence. In the north-west and the islands, royal control was weak and a Gaelic culture tied to Ireland held sway.
The new burghs were small in size. Edinburgh in the late fourteenth century had just 400 homes, and as late as 1550, Stirling had a population of only 405 adult males. These were described by one chronicler around 1200 as ‘English’, meaning this was the language spoken there.15 David I had also created a royal mint and began producing silver pennies around 1140.
One key reason for inviting Norman and Flemish knights to Scotland was to give the Scots kings heavy cavalry. The Canmore dynasty had been raiding and plundering the south, taking slaves and hostages, with their lightly armed forces that could move quickly. But by the late eleventh century the English kings began fortifying the border, building castles at Durham (1072), Newcastle (1080), Carlisle (1092) and, at the beginning of the next century, Norham on the Tweed.
In 1138, King David invaded England and reached Northallerton in Yorkshire, where an English army was waiting. The ‘Scottish’ army was at odds; David’s Norman and English advisers wanted to put the heavy cavalry and archers in the front line, facing like with like. The Galloway contingent, which lacked armour and carried merely spears and cowhide shields, protested, reportedly telling the king: ‘Why, O king, are you afraid and why do you fear those iron coats you see afar … we have conquered mail-clad men.’
A Scottish earl then piped up, stating: ‘O king, why do you agree to the wishes of foreigners when not one of them, with their armour, will be before me in battle today, although I am without armour.’
David finally agreed to put the Galwegians in the front line. They attacked the English force but were cut down by heavily armoured knights and archers. David’s army then began to disintegrate.
Thirty-seven years later, David’s grandson William the Lion invaded Northumberland again, hoping to annexe it with an army of knights and Flemish mercenaries, but was defeated and captured at Alnwick. When the news reached Galloway the population rose up and destroyed the castles that had been built to guard them, killing as many incomers as they could.
But what did such wars mean for the ordinary people? The vast majority were subsistence farmers, living on the verge of starvation and frequently plagued by famine and disease. Tiny numbers lived in the royal burghs, market centres established by the Crown, where the writ of the nobility did not run and serfdom did not exist, but which were controlled by an elite of wealthy merchants, the burgesses or burghers, who were answerable to the king.
The Church was free to impose all sorts of irritating taxes for the upkeep of church buildings, for the cost of ceremonies and for simply saying mass on a Sunday. From the very start kings and nobles would vie to secure bishoprics and other lucrative positions for their sons, legitimate or not, because the Church was by now one of the biggest landlords and was no better than the nobility. Within the Church were those who opposed the lay power of the Pope, a king in central Italy in his own right, and the wealth and avarice of the Church, but it wasn’t until the fourteenth century that the Church experienced a full-scale rebellion, with the Lollards in England, for instance.
The nobles maintained the myth of common kinship between themselves
and their tenants because it strengthened feudal ties and also helped undercut any possible acts of revolt. One result of this was that formal, written tenantships were rare, with both sides relying on verbal agreements. Formal feudalisation was something that had to be introduced over time, because of opposition from a section of the old Scottish-Pictish nobility, as well as those in the Church who disliked Margaret’s reforms, and ordinary people who clung to the remnants of the old clan system.
Though the period from Malcolm Canmore’s accession to the death of Alexander III and the subsequent occupation by Edward I of England is often portrayed as some sort of golden age in Scottish history, it’s worth spelling out the reality of feudal Scotland. The socialist historian Thomas Johnston wrote:
Famines and starvation ensued; none but the serfs would cultivate the land, and they only with whip over their heads … the process of slow robbery went on steadily and effectively. The barons were given full powers of jurisdiction over their domains … In their courts they tried every sort of case … They had the rights of Fossa and Furca, i.e. pit and gallows. By the latter they could gibbet any vassal: by the former they could immure in pit or dungeon, or, as they usually did with women, drown. Torture they specialised in.16
TWO
The Wars of Independence
On a stormy night on 18 March 1286, King Alexander III fell off a cliff near Kinghorn in Fife and broke his neck. Earlier that evening he had left Edinburgh Castle, where he had been wining and dining with his cronies, to spend the night with his new wife across the Firth of Forth in Fife. The next day was her birthday. All three of his children by his first marriage had died, leaving no direct heir, and Alexander was keen to rectify that and had re-married. His courtiers and the ferryman who took him across the Forth advised him not to travel, but he ignored them. En route along the coastal path he lost his guides. The next morning he was found on the seashore. One of the earliest recorded Scottish poems, collected by Andrew of Wyntoun over a century later, described the event thus:
A People's History of Scotland Page 2