The story goes that Malcolm Canmore, now a forty-year-old widower, rode from his residence at Dunfermline to welcome the royal refugees to Scotland; he fell instantly in love with the young Princess Margaret, who was then in her early twenties, and within a few months he married her in Dunfermline.
Be that as it may, it was clearly a good political marriage. From Edgar’s point of view, it meant becoming brother-in-law to a formidable warrior King of Scots who could provide him with powerful support against the Norman ‘usurpers’ in England. For Malcolm, Margaret brought not just an alliance with the old royal house of England, but also a significant dowry in the form of the rich treasures which King Stephen of Hungary had given to her mother.
She was an excellent woman, and of such a gentle, amiable disposition, that she often prevailed upon her husband, who was a fierce, passionate man, to lay aside his resentment, and forgive those who had offended him.
TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER IV
Sir Walter Scott’s picture of Queen Margaret as a Saxon diamond among Celtic dross is the conventional image of her which has come down in history. Margaret’s confessor in Scotland was a chaplain named Turgot (subsequently the first Roman, as opposed to Celtic, Bishop of St Andrews), who wrote a vivid biography of her soon after her death. In Turgot’s account she emerges as a determined and saintly woman who dominated her brash but doting husband who was so besotted with her that, although illiterate himself, he would kiss her devotional books and have them bound with gold and jewels.
As is to be expected in a biography which was also a hagiography, Turgot placed huge emphasis on the saintly queen’s piety. She enjoyed the rich trappings of royalty, but she also spent many hours in prayer, and fed the poor regularly and washed their feet. Soon after her marriage she attended to the building of a small Romanesque church at Dunfermline, and three Benedictine monks were sent at her request from Canterbury to form the nucleus of a Benedictine priory there. She restored the church on Iona and was a benefactress of St Andrews, where she revived the cult of St Andrew and encouraged pilgrims to go there by giving them free passage across the Forth – the names of South and North Queensferry, on either side of the estuary of the Forth, still carry the memory of this initiative. Her devotion to the Roman Church which had embraced her during her childhood in Hungary was undoubtedly significant in the struggle between the doctrines and formulas of the Celtic Church of Scotland, founded by St Columba, and the established practice of the Universal Catholic Church in which she had been reared.
Apart from the influence she may have had on spiritual matters in Scotland, Margaret has also been credited with, or blamed for, the anglicisation of the court and culture of southern Scotland:
a very great number of the Saxons who fled from the cruelty of William the Conqueror, retired into Scotland, and this had a considerable effect in civilizing the southern parts of that country; for if the Saxons were inferior to the Normans in arts and in learning, they were, on the other hand, much superior to the Scots, who were a rude and very ignorant people … No doubt, the number of the Saxons thus introduced into Scotland, tended much to improve and civilize the manners of the people …
TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER IV
Walter Scott never missed a chance to rub in his view that the Scots of medieval times were a decidedly backward people compared with their southern neighbours. But certainly at this time, in the latter half of the eleventh century, Scotland can be seen to be moving from a Gaelic-speaking realm of semi-autonomous princedoms to a much more centralised monarchy on the English and Continental model. If Macbeth was the last truly Celtic King of Scots, as some claim, it is because during Malcolm’s reign there was a greater intermingling of the Celtic and Anglo-Norman cultures and mores.
It was perhaps on the future of Scotland and Anglo – Scottish relations, rather than on their present, that Queen Margaret had most effect – through the children she had by Malcolm. She gave birth to six pious sons, three of whom would reign successively as Kings of Scots: Edgar (r.1097–1107), Alexander I (r.1107–24) and David I (r.1124–53). She also had two daughters, both of whom married into the English royal house: Edith, the elder, married William the Conqueror’s son, Henry I of England (r.1100–35), and became known in England as the Empress Matilda (see below); and Mary, the younger, married Eustace, Count of Boulogne, and their daughter (also named Matilda, or Maud) married Stephen of Blois, who was King of England from 1135 to 1164.
The border issue
Malcolm’s marriage connection with a claimant to the English throne may well have added fuel to his ambitions to extend his own kingdom by attacking Northumbria, allegedly on Edgar the Atheling’s behalf. His first opportunity came in 1070. Northumbria had fiercely resisted the Norman conquest of southern England, and had been savagely punished by King William. Malcolm launched his own invasion, ostensibly to help the English rebels, but it did little more than add to the cruel devastation of Yorkshire.
King William recognised the danger to the security of England posed by Malcolm’s aggression. In 1072 he invaded Scotland with a large, well-organised army, supported by a fleet; it was the first full-scale invasion of Scotland since Roman times. William marched through Lothian and across the River Forth at Stirling, and went on to the River Tay. Malcolm realised that his own forces were no match for the powerful host of Norman knights and men-at-arms, and refused to give battle. Frustrated by Malcolm’s delaying tactics, William offered to talk terms at Abernethy on the Tay. The treaty which resulted is known in English sources as the ‘Abernethy Submission’: Malcolm apparently submitted to William – ‘he gave hostages and was his man’. He agreed not to harbour the English king’s enemies (for instance, Edgar the Atheling), and surrendered his eldest son, Duncan (by Ingibjörg of Orkney), as a hostage. But was it a formal act of homage by a King of Scots as a vassal of England – or was Malcolm only recognising English suzerainty of the disputed lands of Cumbria and Northumbria? Ted Cowan believes that the idea of the King of Scots accepting the overlordship or ‘feudal superiority’ of the English king was a later fabrication by English chroniclers, designed to reinforce English claims to be rulers of Scotland; certainly, the ‘Abernethy Submission’ would remain a bone of contention between English and Scots constitutional lawyers for centuries to come.
Malcolm did not consider himself bound by it in any way. In 1079, when Norman control of the north of England was precarious once more, Malcolm invaded again – but again with no other result than a retaliatory invasion from England, led this time by William’s son, Robert Curthose. Malcolm, again, refused battle, and at Falkirk the terms of the Abernethy Treaty (such as they were) were renewed. It also seems that a border was agreed, stretching between the Solway and the Tyne. Certainly, it was immediately after the Falkirk meeting that Robert Curthose commissioned the building of a ‘New Castle’ on the Tyne. It was a motte-and-bailey, and was the foundation of modern Newcastle. The border was reinforced in 1091, after yet another indecisive incursion against Durham and a counter-incursion into Lothian, this time led by William’s successor on the throne of England, his son William Rufus (William II). William II took Carlisle and temporarily robbed the Scots of that part of ancient Cumbria which lay south of the Solway; he consolidated the western end of the ‘border’ by ordering the building of the first castle at Carlisle.
The death of Malcolm
There was to be one more Scottish invasion of Northumbria. In November 1093 Malcolm Canmore, stung (it is said) by some calculated insult from William II, or irritated by the building of Carlisle Castle, gathered another army and marched south on a last furious raid, accompanied by his eldest son by Margaret, Edward. It was a grievous miscalculation. Near the castle of Alnwick he was ambushed by the Norman Earl of Northumbria, Robert de Mowbray, and was killed, along with his son Edward – by treachery, it was subsequently claimed.
Malcolm had left Queen Margaret on her sickbed in Edinburgh Castle when he set off on his last expedition to Northumbria. According