Eben William Robertson

“ Thus died Malcolm Ceanmore in the six-and-thirtieth year of a long and prosperous reign. An able king, and a bold and fearless warrior, the traits that have been preserved of his private character evince the kindliness of disposition, and the frank generosity, which not unfrequently adorn so gracefully the character of a brave man. Though as ignorant of letters as most of his contemporaries, he loved to choose the books which were the favourite study of his queen, and to cause them to be emblazoned with gold and jewels as a testimony of his affection and esteem ”

“ By the time John reached Bamborough, towards the close of July, his formidable preparations for hostilities had fully attained the end upon which he had probably calculated, by working upon the fears of his opponent. A brave and warlike army was ranged along either frontier, prompt and ready for a contest, but advancing years and increasing infirmities had bowed the once fierce and haughty spirit of the Scottish king, who was now as averse to risk the chances of war as, in early manhood, he had been eager in courting its dangers. ”

“ But the native warriors of Alban, elated with the victory at Clitheroe, and vainly imagining that the flower of England’s knights and men-at-arms would fly before their impetuous charge, like the undisciplined peasantry and townsmen of the district, loudly exclaimed against such tactics. “Of what use were their breastplates and their helmets at Clitheroe?” exclaimed the Scots. “Why trust you to these Normans?” added Malise Earl of Strathearn, when David still remained unmoved; “unprotected as I am, none shall be more forward in the fight.” ”

“ Three years after the death of Reginald, the fiery Dane is resuscitated from his grave, and placed, by the fiat of the English chroniclers, side by side with Constantine and the Prince of Strath Clyde, brought, together with the whole free population of Cumbria, Scotland, and Danish Northumbria, from the borders of the Forth, the Clyde, and the Humber, to the distant Peak of Derbyshire, to tender homage to the Saxon Edward at Bakewell! Yet their submission, and even the unwonted journey so far from their respective frontiers, fail to avert their sorrowful fate ”

“ But though high-spirited and impetuous, even to rashness, in his youth and manhood, William appears to have been broken down by repeated attacks of illness as he advanced in life; and the reckless knight-errant, who rushed upon seven times his numbers at Alnwick, grew into an over-cautious sovereign, who aroused the discontent of his subjects, and risked the newly recovered independence of his kingdom, by his inordinate dread of the consequences of a rupture with England. ”

“ If he threw himself into the arms of the native Scots he must have resigned all hope of social improvement; but if he alienated their affections and relied exclusively upon the Anglo-Normans, he must have made up his mind to reconquer northern Scotland by force of arms, or to resign it to some successful competitor. He gave, therefore, a ready welcome to all who arrived unfettered by any tie to the English king, depending on the knights for the creation of a baronage strongly attached to his own interests, and equally to be relied upon against Englishman and native Scot ”

“ Never were the qualities more needed which earned for the first Kenneth the title of “the Hardy,” than during the sixteen years of his turbulent reign; for his kingdom was exposed to hostilities on every side. The Britons of Strath Clyde burnt Dunblane; the Danes carried their ravages to Dunkeld in Atholl, and to Cluny in Stormont, and if Ragnar Lodbroc is not the mere creation of some northern scald, it was probably under the leadership of that renowned sea-king that they destroyed the monastery of the Pictish Constantine. ”

“ This Donald, better known as Mac William, had already put forward his pretensions to the Scottish crown, but his attempts had been hitherto limited to predatory incursions, nor had he ever yet obtained a permanent footing in the country; but the old spirit of disaffection still lingered in the north and west, where the enemies of the king flocked to the standard of his hostile kinsman as readily as they had once gathered around the banner of the heir of Moray, and the insurrection soon rose to a formidable head. ”

“ The departure of their king to render feudal service as an English baron, was viewed with general disapproval by the Scots, to whom this phase of the English connection appears to have been always distasteful. For nearly twenty years David and his grandson had enjoyed in succession the advantages of their English fiefs, without the burden of their feudal obligations; as during the lifetime of Stephen, and for the first three years of his successor’s reign, no king of Scotland had ever met an English sovereign except at the head of a hostile army. ”

“ William marched to the north with a formidable array of mounted chivalry, supported by a numerous fleet, in the full determination of exacting vengeance, both for the open hostility of the Scottish king, and for the support invariably afforded in the same quarter to his disaffected subjects beyond the Humber. If he had expected to find any of the insurgents in Scotland, he was doomed, on this occasion, to disappointment, as they had undoubtedly escaped elsewhere on the first rumours of the magnitude of the expedition. ”

“ In imitation apparently of the example of his father, Malcolm signalized his accession by one of those inroads upon Northumbria which point significantly to the gradual extension of the Scottish kingdom on her southern frontier. Borne down by the weight of years, Ealdorman Waltheof, shutting himself up within the walls of Bamborough, placidly let the storm sweep by; but his son Uchtred, who had married the daughter of the bishop, was neither of an age nor of a temperament to look quietly on while the broad lands he had received in dowry with his bride were wasted by the northern invaders. ”

“ The conclusion of the Easter festival set at liberty the scrupulous chivalry of the age, to enter with renewed zest upon the pursuits of war; and David was fast approaching Durham, when a mutiny amongst the unruly Galwegians threatened both the life of the king, and the safety of his army. A report, judiciously fabricated for the occasion, that the enemy was approaching, restored order for the moment; the mutineers flew to arms to repel the foe, and David at once leading them to Norham, employed them, with the rest of his army, in besieging the castle. ”

“ The death of Henry was fraught with most important consequences for Scotland, for Richard, with all the enthusiasm of his impetuous nature, was burning to lead the chivalry of Europe to the re-conquest of the Holy Sepulchre, and as money was most essential for carrying out the crusade, in every imaginable method he sought to procure it. The great offices of the crown were put up for sale; the favour of the king was purchased by his illegitimate brother Geoffry; and the earldom of Northumberland was bought by the bishop of Durham. ”

“ During another visit to the English court at Lincoln, a crafty suggestion of the Scottish king about the difficulty and trouble of defending Lothian, is rewarded by the gift of the province as a feudal fief, to be held by various acts of homage, amongst others on condition of carrying the crown on all state occasions, whilst manors are provided to cover the expenses of the royal vassal on his progresses towards the southern court! It is curious to remark the tone of increasing feudalism pervading the fabrications of each succeeding century. ”

“ The invariable tendency of such a class has always been to favour peace, order, and civilization, as long as it has occupied its natural position; for it is only when a burgherhood has become over-powerful that it has afforded as frequent examples as a nobility, or an autocracy, of the inability of human nature in any condition to withstand the evil influences of unlimited power. Such was not the case in Britain, where the burgherhood has never occupied the same position as the great communities of Flanders, of Germany, or of Northern Italy. ”

“ Amidst the deep affliction which he must have felt at the loss of his only son, nothing was left undone by David that could ensure the peaceful succession of his grandchildren. A crisis was even then impending, for six months before the death of the prince of Scotland Henry Fitz Empress had already landed in England, and Stephen, whose good and gentle queen was no longer alive, seizing upon the opportunity of Prince Henry’s death to strengthen his cause by a fresh alliance, had at once made over Huntingdon to the Earl of Northampton. ”

“ Men possessed property in land long before it was secured by written documents, and many a burgh had been in the enjoyment of rights and privileges by unwritten law long before it was thought necessary to obtain the sanction of a feudal charter, which must no more be regarded as necessarily creating a new burgh, than as necessarily introducing a foreign settler into Scotland, and eradicating a native proprietor. ”

“ Every cause for hostility between the English and Scottish kings was removed for a time by the relinquishment of Edgar’s claims upon the English crown, and Malcolm was at liberty to turn his attention to internal policy, and to establish his authority, and secure it more firmly, over the northern provinces of his dominions. The deaths of Macbeth, and of his successor Lulach, had crushed without extinguishing the hopes of the rival family ”

“ Even the population of that great Episcopal Palatinate, where the bishop ruled with regal power and privileges over a district scarcely yet included in Norman England at the time of the Domesday survey, was in sympathy and in race far more akin to the Angles of Bernicia than to the descendants of the Scandinavian conquerors of the Danelage; and the tendency of the men of Durham to turn their regards towards the North, was sedulously encouraged ever since the days of Margaret. It was her husband, the Scottish Malcolm, who laid the first stone of the new church in the Episcopal city ”

“ There is not a trace of any similar institution amongst the earlier Anglo-Saxons, as far as it is possible to judge from the collection of laws in force in Wessex and Saxon Mercia during the reign of Alfred. The king’s Ealdorman or his junior—the Vicarius, not the Vicecomes—presided in the ancient Folk-mote, which was held in every shire or district under an Ealdorman; and as every freeholder was bound to be present at a meeting of this description, justice appears to have been administered according to the ancient custom, in the presence of the whole free population ”

“ The dismemberment of his kingdom by the separation of Scottish Cumbria must have materially diminished his power; and had not Alexander died without an heir, the impolitic bequest of Edgar might have been fraught with most disastrous consequences to Scotland. The principality of David must inevitably, in course of time, have become dependant upon one of the greater kingdoms by which it was surrounded; it could only have existed by skilfully promoting disunion between its more powerful neighbours ”

“ Six months had barely elapsed since the death of David before the evil consequences of a minority became apparent, and the peace of Scotland was again disturbed by the attempts of the Moray family upon the Crown. Malcolm Mac Heth, the head of the race, had married a sister of Somerled Mac Gillebride, the ancestor of the Lords of Argyle, an energetic and ambitious chieftain, who raised the power of the Oirir-Gael to a height hitherto unexampled, and who now sought still further to increase that power by establishing one of his sister’s children upon the throne. ”

“ The influence of David upon his native country has been compared to that of Alfred upon England, and of Charlemagne upon a wider sphere, but in some respects it was of a different character. Alfred was the saviour of the Anglo-Saxon race from complete subjection to the Danes, and though he can scarcely be called a king of England, he was the real founder of the monarchy. Within the limits of his ancestral dominions, and of the rescued principality of English Mercia, he was the reviver of letters; the creator of a navy ”

“ Gilbert and Uchtred, the lords of Galloway, hurrying homewards, destroyed the castles which had been built in their province to secure the authority of the king, drove out the royal officers, and then dispatched gifts and envoys to the English king with the offer of their fealty and submission. The Scots availed themselves of the anarchy of the moment to vent their long suppressed animosity against the townsmen and burghers, mostly of English origin, with whom David and his successors had filled the royal burghs and cities of their kingdom. ”

“ Waste is the term ominously affixed in Domesday to all the possessions of Edwin, Morkar, and the northern prelates, as well as to the lands of Waltheof and Cospatric, of Siward Beorn, and Merlesweyne; and a province, once flourishing and prosperous, became the haunt of beasts of prey, wild cattle, and outlaws. To add still more to the wretchedness of the period, a partial dearth, which had arisen from the ravages of William, was increased by the events of the two succeeding years, until it became a famine of the most intense description. Many sold themselves to slavery to escape starvation ”

“ Then is exhibited the singular anomaly of an obedient and obsequious vassal appropriating without ceremony the territories of his sovereign lord, until the climax is attained in the reign of the Confessor; and at a time when the over-powerful subjects of that prince seem to have been fast verging towards independence, freely and willingly does the Scottish king tender that allegiance for his entire kingdom which the iron-willed successors of the feeble Edward in vain attempted to extort. ”

“ A natural feeling of anxiety oppressed the mind of William as he recalled the events of his early manhood, and remembered the consequences of his former war with England. His kingdom was still unsettled, his health was beginning to fail, whilst his heir was still a mere child, and Scotland had hardly yet recovered from the disastrous state of anarchy into which she had been plunged by the capture of her king at Alnwick. ”

“ Fife appears to have been the latest earldom held by the old Scottish tenure, and its earls, like the earls of Atholl—a branch of the reigning family—never appear in the ranks of the king’s enemies. Indeed they may be looked upon in early times as premier Earls of Scotland, with certain privileges attaching to their dignity, to account for which the legend of Macduff was probably framed ”

“ Soon after Malcolm had thus established his grandson in the northern extremity of his kingdom, an opportunity again occurred for extending his dominions on the Northumbrian frontier, which ever since the days of Indulf had been the object of the aggressions of the Scottish kings. The sceptre of a great nation was fast escaping from the feeble grasp of Ethelred, and Uchtred, the opponent of Malcolm’s earlier years, after twice submitting to the Danish invaders, had been put to death with the connivance of Canute from mingled motives of policy and revenge. ”

“ During thirty days and nights, a comet, a baleful and ill-omened prodigy in the eyes of the Northumbrians of the eleventh century, blazed forth, a presage of impending woe; and when the men of St. Cuthbert’s joined their countrymen at Carham, on the [96] banks of the Tweed, it was only to participate in the disasters of a defeat, and to perish in multitudes in a disorderly flight. The aged bishop sunk under the shock, dying within a few days of the battle, and such was the confusion throughout the diocese of St. Cuthbert’s that for three years no successor was elected. ”

“ Upon the very day on which the King of England and the Duke of Normandy solemnly pledged their mutual faith to the ratification of a lasting peace, the storm burst over the south-western coasts of Scotland, and a desultory war seems to have lingered throughout the ensuing winter, amidst the mountains of the west, until an offer of the kingdom of the Isles, in the following year, called away the most formidable supporter of the rebellion. ”