Читать книгу Scotland: The Story of a Nation - Magnus Magnusson - Страница 39

After the death of Malcolm Canmore, the Scottish crown was occupied successively by three princes of little power or talent, who seized on the supreme authority because the children of the deceased sovereign were under age.

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER IV

Malcolm Canmore’s death threw Scotland into a virtual civil war. From his refuge in the Western Isles, where he had been living since Macbeth had killed his father Duncan I, came Malcolm’s younger brother Donald bàn (Shakespeare’s ‘Donalbain’), who now, at the age of sixty, claimed the vacant throne and was crowned as Donald III. It was the Celtic backlash against the anglicisation of the court: his accession seems to have been backed by the native aristocracy, who had come to resent the foreign influences associated with Queen Margaret. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for the year 1093, ‘the Scots drove out all the English who had been with King Malcolm’. Certainly, the surviving children of Malcolm Canmore and St Margaret fled to the English court for safety, led by the eldest son Edgar and including the youngest, the ten-year-old David – the future King David I.

There was another claimant to the throne of Scotland – the royal prince who had been surrendered as a hostage by his father to William the Conqueror at Abernethy twenty years earlier: Duncan, Malcolm Canmore’s son by Ingibjörg of Orkney. He had been brought up at the English court, and had been formally released, and knighted, on William the Conqueror’s death in 1087. Here was an obvious opportunity for King William II of England to make his presence felt in Scotland again. Duncan was now a fully ‘normanised’ Celt, a protégé who had sworn fealty to the English king. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1093, ‘Duncan came to the king, and gave such pledges as the king demanded of him and, with his consent, went to Scotland.’ With the help of an English and French army he ousted Donald III and was accepted as King of Scots as Duncan II – but only on condition that he dismissed his alien supporters. It was a fatal promise: before the year was out he had been murdered (November 1094), and Donald III resumed his interrupted reign.

William Rufus was not to be balked, however. He had another claimant to the Scottish throne up his sleeve: Malcolm Canmore’s fourth son by Margaret, Edgar, who had fled to his court in 1093. In 1097 William sent Edgar to Scotland as his vassal at the head of another army. This time there was to be no slip-up. Donald III was soundly defeated, hunted down and captured, then blinded and thrown into a dungeon. When he died, he was the last King of Scots to be buried on Iona.

The accession of King Edgar in 1097 heralded a remarkable span of rule by three men of the same generation, the three youngest sons of Malcolm Canmore and Queen Margaret, who gave Scotland’s relationship with England a new stability: Edgar, Alexander I and David I.

Edgar was known as ‘the Peaceable’. He made no resistance when Magnús Barelegs (berfœttr), king of Norway, made a violent onslaught on the Western Isles and confirmed Norwegian sovereignty there, leaving the sacred island of Iona in ruins again. There were no rebellions or uprisings against Edgar’s rule. He never married, and had no children; when he died in 1107 he bequeathed his kingdom to his younger brothers Alexander (as monarch) and David (as ruler of southern Lothian and Strathclyde).

In contrast to his ‘peaceable’ elder brother, Alexander I was known as ‘the Fierce’, perhaps because of the severity of his suppression of a rebellion in Moray and the Mearns. Apart from that he was a devout man who showed all the signs of his strictly pious upbringing by his mother, Queen Margaret. Like his brother Edgar he was a vassal of the English king, Henry I (r.1100–35); Henry was the youngest (and only English-born) son of William the Conqueror, and the husband of Alexander’s sister Edith (Matilda). Alexander I now married his brother-in-law’s illegitimate daughter Sibyl, and his vassalage to England seemed to be confirmed in 1114 when he participated in an English campaign in Wales. His reign is particularly remembered, however, for his encouragement of monastic orders. He brought Augustinian canons from England to found priories at Scone and at Inchcolm in the Firth of Forth, and made plans for Augustinian foundations at the ancient Celtic royal centres of Dunkeld and St Andrews. He died at Stirling in April 1124 without legitimate issue, and was buried with his parents in the church at Dunfermline which his mother had founded.

To what extent was Scotland being ‘normanised’, as England had been? Some commentators have seen the accession of Edgar in 1097 as Scotland’s equivalent of England’s Norman Conquest. Dauvit Brown disagrees:

There was no Norman Conquest of Scotland, as such. In England, simply and spectacularly, the Normans conquered the kingdom; the native aristocracy were largely dispossessed, or at least fell down a few rungs in the social ladder. In the case of Scotland, however, the Normans came by invitation: the Scottish kings themselves invited the Norman knights into their kingdom, and not necessarily from England – for instance, there were Norman knights fighting in Macbeth’s defeated army at the Battle of Dunsinane in 1054. They were given, as grants from the king, positions of authority in some regions or in the court; these Norman knights represented the latest in military technology, and they were an important element in the attempt to consolidate and extend control of the kingdom.

The kings who succeeded Macbeth were trying to do something really new: they were aligning themselves with the major social and cultural forces in western Europe, especially the reform of the Church which was being promoted by the papacy from the middle of the eleventh century. They promoted this in their own kingdom by establishing monasteries staffed by monks and nuns of the brand-new religious orders which were part of the mood of the day.

The other major force in western Europe was the French knightly culture which came to Scotland with the Norman knights. The Scottish kings were themselves part of this culture; they, too, were knights, and in due course the major members of the Gaelic aristocracy, first in the east and later in the west, also became fully-fledged knights.

What was happening in Scotland was not a simple clash between the old, kin-based values of Gaeldom and the new-fangled feudal ideas of the Normans; rather, it was a gradual melding of the old and the new.

The death of Alexander I left the way open for his brother David to ascend the throne at the age of about forty: David I (r.1124–53), the man who could never have expected to become King of Scots.