Richard of Hexham described David’s ‘wicked army’ as being ‘composed of Normans, Germans, English, of Northumbrians and Cumbrians, of men of Teviotdale and Lothian, of Picts (who are commonly called Galwegians) and of Scots’. For Ted Cowan, this list of participants from Scotland tells us a lot about David’s kingship:
Whether that list is strictly accurate or not, it was a code for saying ‘David controlled the whole of his kingdom’. He was the ruler – the first person who ruled all of Scotland; and all its representatives showed up to fight for him against the English in 1138. That is a remarkable testimony to the ability, and probably the ingenuity, of this man.
David escaped from the potential disaster of the Battle of the Standard with his territorial ambitions unscathed, even enhanced. But what sort of ‘Scotland’ did he create? To what extent could Scotland be called ‘a nation’, in the modern sense, in King David’s reign? Steve Boardman says:
‘Nation’ is not the right word to use when we look back on the medieval kingdom. Scotland in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was a collection of regional lordships, presided over by a man who called himself King of Scots. David issued charters during his reign to his subjects – Scots, French, English – reflecting the different racial, ethnic and linguistic groups which made up the kingdom. The idea of nationhood would have been alien to people in twelfth-century Scotland, because they still belonged to different lordships, they still belonged to different ethnic and linguistic groups. What held Scotland, and indeed all medieval kingdoms, together was allegiance to the king and submission to the king’s laws, the king’s political authority; so to be a ‘Scot’ would not have meant what we mean by it today; it would have meant being someone who acknowledged the authority of the King of Scots – and that is not the same thing as identifying yourself ethnically and linguistically as part of a bigger group who are called Scots.
Later Scottish sources were fulsome in praise of David. John of Fordun wrote of him in the Chronica Gentis Scotorum in floridly metaphorical terms:
He enriched the parts of his kingdom with foreign merchandise, and to the wealth of his own land added the riches and luxuries of foreign nations, changing its coarse stuffs for precious vestments, and covering its ancient nakedness with purple and fine linen.
King David I reigned for twenty-nine years. He was nearly seventy years old, but had lost none of his vigour, when he died – significantly, in ‘his’ Carlisle Castle – in May 1153. His only son, Henry, Earl of Huntingdon, had died the previous year, leaving three sons and three daughters from his marriage to Ada, the Anglo-Norman daughter of the Norman Earl of Warenne. These three granddaughters of David I were to play an important role in the dynastic crisis which followed the death of Alexander III in 1286 (see Chapter 9).
In the last year of his life, after his son Henry’s death, David designated the eldest of his grandsons, Malcolm, as his successor. In 1153, at the age of twelve, Malcolm was inaugurated on the Stone of Scone as Malcolm IV (r.1153–65). He never married, and was known as Malcolm ‘the Maiden’. Sure enough, as David had feared, having a minor on the throne triggered unrest, and there were uprisings against Malcolm in the ‘unreconstructed’ Celtic west and north. In 1157 Malcolm was summoned to meet the new King of Engand, Henry II, at Chester. Henry forswore the undertaking he had given David in 1149 about Scotland’s future frontier; by the Treaty of Chester the young King of Scots gave up Carlisle, together with the rest of Cumberland, Westmorland and Northumberland. He was compensated, however, with the gift of the earldom of Huntingdon. This made him a vassal of the King of England, for that possession at least. Henry II was not slow to press home his advantage; in 1158 he took Malcolm to France as his liegeman to campaign under his standard.
Malcolm was a frail, intensely pious young man who never enjoyed good health. Nonetheless, he showed unfailing courage and determination in dealing with the various uprisings and rebellions which broke out during his reign. He died at Jedburgh in December 1165 at the age of twenty-four, and was succeeded by his twenty-two-year-old brother William, a much more aggressive character: William I (r.1165–1214), later to be known as William ‘the Lion’.
Chapter 7 WILLIAM THE LION (r.1165–1214)
William King of Scotland, having chosen for his armorial bearing a Red Lion, rampant … he acquired the name of William the Lion … William, though a brave man, and though he had a lion for his emblem, was unfortunate in war.
TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER IV
The majestic ruins of Arbroath Abbey, on the Angus coast about thirty kilometres east of Dundee, retain memories of many significant events in the story of Scotland’s nationhood struggle: it was here that the Declaration of Arbroath was prepared and signed in 1320 (see Chapter 11), and it was on the foundations of the High Altar that the Stone of Destiny was laid in 1950 after it had been spirited away from Westminster Abbey by four young Scottish Nationalists (see here).
On the turf a few metres in front of the High Altar, sheltered now only by the gaunt remains of the east gable wall, an incised slab of red sandstone commemorates the burial, somewhere in that area, of the royal founder of the abbey in 1178: King William I, ‘the Lion’.
William the Lion is one of the least known and most disregarded of Scotland’s kings. Despite the fact that his was the longest reign by a medieval Scottish monarch (forty-nine years, from 1165 to 1214), he is strangely unknown to the general public compared with his grandfather David I or his successors (his son Alexander II and grandson Alexander III). Indeed, some historians have been scornfully dismissive of him:
Of this king little can be told that is creditable to himself, of advantage to Scotland or, indeed, of interest to the reader. He reigned for almost half a century but achieved practically nothing.
P. AND F.S. FRY, THE HISTORY OF SCOTLAND (1980)
But was William really as toothless a lion as that? Geoffrey Barrow, Professor Emeritus at Edinburgh University and an eminent scholar of late medieval Scotland, has stressed that William successfully extended royal authority over the remoter Celtic and Scandinavian areas of the kingdom (the far north and west), and greatly improved the feudal administration of Scotland. His major failure, however – a failure which cost Scotland very dear – was his attempt to recover, as his personal fiefdom, the northern provinces of England: David I had assigned to William’s father, Prince Henry, the earldom of Northumberland, but William’s predecessor on the throne, his elder brother Malcolm IV, had surrendered it to the King of England.
And therein lies the paradox at the heart of William’s reign. Totally committed as he was to consolidating Scotland’s independence, he was nonetheless forced to pledge the nation’s vassalage to England as a result of his disastrous obsession with the lost province of Northumbria.
Yet when he ascended the throne in 1165 at the age of twenty-two, William must have looked every inch the part of a native Scottish king. He was red-haired and powerfully built, a man of lusty energies and appetites (he fathered six illegitimate children before his marriage in 1186 at the age of forty-three), a reckless young knight who lacked both the political guile of his grandfather David I and the artistic sensibilities of his brother Malcolm IV, a blustering, headstrong fellow, the sort of captain of men who could today win a rugby international at Murrayfield single-handed and just as easily throw away the Calcutta Cup at Twickenham.
The most useful way of assessing his long reign is to divide it into four distinct periods.
The first nine years, from 1165 to 1174, was a time when the new king enjoyed comparative peace. But he quickly signalled his obsession with the earldom of Northumberland by badgering Henry II of England about it at every