Читать книгу Scotland: The Story of a Nation - Magnus Magnusson - Страница 41

David was the most ‘English’ of the three Canmore brother kings, and perhaps the luckiest. He was an attractive person in every sense, well-favoured physically and good-natured; he had spent much of his youth in England, where he was groomed as a Norman knight and ‘polished from his boyhood by his intercourse and friendship with us’, as an English chronicler put it. His sister’s marriage to Henry I of England in 1100 added to his social standing as a prince who, from 1107, was viceroy of the southern half of Scotland. In 1114 he married a wealthy forty-year-old widow, Maud de Senlis, Countess of Northampton and a ward of the king; she was also the daughter and heiress of Waltheof, the Earl of Huntingdon. This brought David the earldom of Northampton and the earldom (‘Honour’) of Huntingdon, with manors in eleven counties across the Midlands of England, making him one of the greatest barons in the country. Such was the premier nobleman of Norman England who turned into one of the greatest kings of medieval Scotland.

When David succeeded his brother on the throne in 1124 he brought with him to Scotland many of his friends from England who were to help him reshape the organisation and administration of Scotland, both civil and ecclesiastical, and become its new feudal aristocracy. We now meet for the first time the families who were to mould Scotland’s future, powerful names like the Bruces, the Balliols and the Stewarts (David’s first ‘Steward’ in Scotland was Walter Fitzalan, originally from Brittany, whose father had acquired lands in Norfolk and Shropshire). To these families David gave huge grants of land to establish their authority: to the Bruces he gave the vast lands of Annandale around the river Annan, which runs from the southern uplands to the Solway Firth; the hereditary ‘Stewards’ were given land which corresponds to modern Renfrewshire.

David’s ecclesiastical foundations were the most spectacular of his reforms. In addition to the four great Border abbeys, he converted the wooden church of Drumselch Forest outside Edinburgh into the Abbey of Holyrood; he promoted the Benedictine priory of Dunfermline to the rank of an abbey, in honour of his mother Queen Margaret; he founded Newbattle on the Esk and St Mary of Cambuskenneth on the Forth. To all the churches and monasteries he founded he gave extensive estates and extravagant benefactions. So generous was he with the royal lands and revenues that he was later to be called ‘a sair sanct [sore saint] for the crown’ – that is to say, his pious activities cost the crown dear.

But there was prudence as well as religious devotion involved. Abbeys were good for the national economy. The Cistercians were the international wool merchants of their time, for instance; and David’s monks engaged in all kinds of business enterprises, in farming, fishing, forestry, coal-working and salt-mining. The fledgling village of Kelso consisted almost entirely of people employed by the monks.

On top of this, David was assiduous in promoting commerce through the granting of royal charters to burghs from which he could collect regular revenues, and many of the towns and cities in today’s Scotland date their origin or their first charters to David’s reign. The first royal burghs, at Berwick-upon-Tweed and Roxburgh, were fortified with castles: Berwick Castle, standing high above the left bank of the Tweed, was to play a critically important role in Scottish history for centuries; Roxburgh Castle, sited between the Tweed and the Teviot, was to become the strongest bastion anywhere in the border lands. These developments may be seen as the beginning of a fortified ‘border’.

All these important innovations were designed to give cohesion and stability to the realm, held together by a feudal system looser than its English model. Norman castles provided royal and baronial authority and security for the king’s officers and tax-gatherers. His personal chaplains – well-educated priests all – formed the basis of an administrative bureaucracy, headed by a chancellor (for legal advice) and a chamberlain (for financial control). King David brought Scotland, as a kingdom, into the medieval European mainstream.

Steve Boardman, lecturer in Scottish History at Edinburgh University, says:

David is regarded as a pivotal figure in the development of Scotland and the Scottish kingship, because it was during his reign that so many novel and important features begin to develop and all the attributes of a medieval kingdom appear in Scotland. He was a very international figure in terms of Scottish kingship, part of the great cosmopolitan world which embraced Norman Europe. He had first-hand experience of Norman military techniques and tactics. He was part of the fashionable scene in terms of wider developments in Europe. Through David the Scottish kingdom began to develop along the same path as other European kingdoms, along similar lines to the accepted norms in France and England; so, in that sense, his kingship was crucial and has to be seen as extremely important.

Ted Cowan urges caution in an uncritical use of the term ‘feudalism’ as it applies to David’s Scotland:

I think David masterminded, quite brilliantly, a combination of what he wanted from the Norman world and what he perceived as being desirable in the old Celtic world.

But this question of feudalism’ is a highly problematical area. Many historians are no longer sure that there was any such thing as feudalism. If it is to he understood at all, it is best thought of simply as a system of landholding, whereby all land is held of the king; the king is the absolute proprietor of all land in the country. This is interesting, because in Celtic law all land was held communally by the clan. There were no absolute proprietors in the Celtic world. So there was a potential conflict there, but it is largely in the way in which landholding is described: the two systems could be accommodated quite well. And David was intelligent enough, and opportunistic enough, to achieve it.

It all suggests a sunshine reign of success and untroubled prosperity. There were rebellions in the Celtic north-east in 1130 and again in 1134, but with southern help David was able to suppress them both and put his own men in place there. At home (which by now, for a King of Scots, meant Edinburgh) David’s wife Maud (who died in 1130) provided him with three children. The only one to reach adulthood, however, was Henry (c.1114–52), the heir apparent, who became Earl of Northumberland and Northampton. He was a dashing young man of whom David was manifestly very proud. But not everything was to go David’s way.