Power and Propaganda: Scotland 1306-1488 9780748694198

Citation preview

Power and Propaganda

The New History of Scotland Series Editor: Jenny Wormald Original titles in the New History of Scotland series were published in the 1980s and re-issued in the 1990s. This popular and enduring series is now being updated with the following published and forthcoming titles: Vol. 1  Warlords and Holy Men: Scotland ad 80–1000 by Gilbert Markus (new edition to replace original by Alfred Smyth) Vol. 2  Kingship and Unity: Scotland 1000–1306 by G. W. S. Barrow (reissued edition) Vol. 3  Power and Propaganda: Scotland 1306–1488 by Katie Stevenson (new edition to replace Independence and Nationhood by Alexander Grant) Vol. 4  Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland 1470–1625 by Jenny Wormald (second revised and updated edition) Vol. 5  Crown, Covenant and Union: Scotland 1625–1763 by Alexander Murdoch (new edition to replace Lordship to Patronage by Rosalind Mitchison) Vol. 6  Enlightenment and Change: Scotland 1746–1832 by Bruce P. Lenman (second revised and updated edition of Integration and Enlightenment) Vol. 7  Ourselves and Others: Scotland 1832–1914 by Graeme Morton (new edition to replace Industry and Ethos by Olive and Sydney Checkland) Vol. 8  No Gods and Precious Few Heroes: Twentieth-Century Scotland by Christopher Harvie (second revised and updated edition) www.euppublishing.com/series/nhs

Power and Propaganda Scotland 1306–1488 Katie Stevenson

© Katie Stevenson, 2014 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4587 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 4586 2 (paperback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9419 8 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 9420 4 (epub) The right of Katie Stevenson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

List of Figures vi Acknowledgements vii 1. Introduction: Power, Propaganda and Perceptions of Scotland in the Late Middle Ages

1

2. Kingship, Power and the Making of a Myth

16

3. Crises of Confidence: Kings, Princes and Magnates

52

4. Governance, the Law and the Scottish Polity

88

5. The Church, Religion and Intellectual Life

117

6. Commerce and Community

153

7. Elite Culture, Iconography and Propaganda

182

Further Reading 215 Index 228

Figures

1.1 The Gough Map, c. 1360 4 2.1 The coronation chair of the kings of England at Westminster Abbey, shown here housing the Stone of Scone 23 2.2 Reproduction of the Tyninghame copy of the Declaration of Arbroath, 1320 27 4.1 Bull of Pope Benedict XIII confirming the foundation of the University of St Andrews, 28 August 1413 110 5.1 A 3D computer-modelled reconstruction of St Andrews Cathedral in 1318 123 5.2 A fourteenth-century pilgrim’s badge from St Andrews excavated at a site in Perth High Street in 1977 137 7.1 The medieval maces of the University of St Andrews 207

Acknowledgements

First, I wish to thank Jenny Wormald, the editor of the New History of Scotland series, for inviting me to write this book. It is a truly salutary experience to be invited to consider the history of late medieval Scotland in its entirety and to think about how to communicate its complexities to a diverse audience. I have found this to be an intellectually enriching process and one that has had a profound effect on my view of the past. In St Andrews I have accrued many debts and there is no question that the support and encouragement of many of my colleagues has enabled me to complete this book. In particular, Roger Mason should be singled out and thanked profusely not only for helping to shape some of the arguments presented herein, but also for his friendship. The colleagues with whom I work most closely, Alex Woolf and Michael Brown, make my day-to-day working life a pleasure. They have both been instrumental in the writing of this book, from inception to completion. Michael had the additional, but I hope not onerous, task of being my official mentor in a formal departmental scheme. He discharged his duties admirably, and he will no doubt be pleased to be relieved of having to ask me if I ‘need any mentoring’. Further thanks are offered to Sarah Peverley at Liverpool, who gave me access to Hardyng material at very short notice, Rebecca Kerry in the School of English at St Andrews, who kept me right on the Roman de Fergus, and my colleague Christine McGladdery, whose neatly arranged books (unlike my own!) I gratefully used as an extension of the St Andrews University Library in the final phases of writing. Many other colleagues, students and friends have helped to shape this book. I would also like to thank the staff at the National Library of Scotland

viii

power and propaganda

in Edinburgh and all at Edinburgh University Press for their patience. Final revisions of this book were made whilst I was a Visiting Fellow with the Research School of Humanities and the Arts, Australian National University, Canberra. On a personal level I wish to express my thanks to my parents, James and Jennifer Stevenson. They probably thought that the time had come when I would no longer be so reliant upon their help, but for eighteen months I have used their dining room as my auxiliary study, while they have looked after my children for increasingly longer periods of time. Without them, nothing I do in my professional life would be possible. My husband’s parents, Brian and Gillian Pentland, have likewise offered much appreciated support with long hours of childcare and by ferrying my family around while I worked. Catriona Elder and Rupert Lezemore said nothing when I rudely disappeared to write instead of spending time with them during their visits to our home. My cat Mycroft, on the other hand, was delighted that I sat in one place for hours on end and produced a lot of waste paper that he could chew. Finally, I thank my husband, Gordon Pentland. Cliché it may be, but without his support, both intellectual and domestic, writing this book would not have been possible. The motivation for both of us is our two little boys, Archie and Alex. Although I suspect that at this point in their lives they won’t care in the slightest about late medieval Scottish history (although there are knights, pirates and swords herein, so I might be mistaken), I hope that in years to come they will appreciate the legacy that the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries have left in modern Scotland and that they, and their generation, will seek to continue to understand the past in new and insightful ways.

1 Introduction: Power, Propaganda and Perceptions of Scotland in the Late Middle Ages On the front cover of this book is a reproduction of a map. Although the image here is faded by a computer program to conform to the house style of the series in which this book appears, the original map is a brilliantly vivid imaginative representation of Scotland. The map appears in the first version of the Englishman John Hardyng’s Chronicle, now held in the British Library at MS Lansdowne 204, and was probably a presentation copy given to Henry VI of England (1422–61, 1470–1) in 1457. When I use this image in teaching my undergraduate classes, a common reaction of students is to exclaim that it looks like a map from a fairy tale. Indeed, the Disney Sleeping Beauty castle is such a familiar image to us that whitewashed turrets immediately evoke an impression of fantasy. Such reactions to the map are not entirely fatuous, for this small kingdom on the outer fringes of Europe – or, at this time, really the edge of the known world – was an established setting for medieval Arthurian fantasy literature. Both the c. 1200 Roman de Fergus (and its later and more celebrated Dutch recasting the Roman van Ferguut) and Froissart’s fourteenth-century romance Méliador take place in an imagined Scotland and were directed at audiences who could envisage no place more distant or exotic than the Highlands. Yet both texts were topographically and geographically well informed by the authors’ own visits to the kingdom during their lifetimes. Although the fifteenth-century Aragonese writer Juan de Flores never visited Scotland, by his lifetime (c. 1455–c. 1525) the kingdom had firmly established

2

power and propaganda

credentials as a ‘far away place’ and was used as the principal backdrop to his 1495 romance Grisel y Mirabella. John Hardyng’s map of Scotland is, of course, much more than a cartographic fantasy, designed only as a kind of medieval dust jacket with which to decorate the presentation copy of his Chronicle. Maps always embody claims to power and this one was part of a subversive campaign to equip Henry VI with sufficient intelligence to prove England’s sovereignty over Scotland. It was nothing short of propaganda. Hardyng had been a spy in Scotland for Henry V of England (1413–22), spending three and a half years in the kingdom. He had first-hand knowledge of its geography, which he used to supply military intelligence. The map, along with an invasion plan and a series of forged documents, was essential to his overarching goal of pushing the English king into a campaign to conquer the northern kingdom. Hardyng’s map is thus an intriguing insight into not only the excessive zealousness of a propagandist for English claims to Scotland, but also into the potential power of the map. The first version of the map in MS Lansdowne 204 was presented on two folios and is designed to showcase Scotland as an attractive parcel of land that was desirable and worthy to be conquered. Scotland here is a land of bounty. Beautiful, rich colours are used; the buildings are large, the towns have high walls, and the churches have grand steeples. These are the principal treasures of the kingdom of the Scots, which are enclosed in a neat square surrounded entirely by sea with only one point of access at Roxburgh. It was an overt message that Scotland was ripe for the taking. When Henry VI was deposed in 1461, Hardyng had already commenced work on a second version of his Chronicle that would prove to appeal greatly to Yorkist tastes. Three of the twelve surviving versions of this revision include an elaborate map of Scotland, British Library Harley 661, Arch. Selden B10 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and MS Eng. 1054 in Houghton Library, Harvard University. These maps are not as richly illuminated as the first version, and are quite different in style. The Harvard manuscript has been particularly



Introduction 3

badly damaged by a scissor-happy vandal of a bygone age, who wanted to extract some of the more detailed drawings of the grand palaces and cathedrals of Scotland for their personal scrapbook project. These three map versions do, however, build upon the 1457 version, extending it from two sides to three. The first side shows the Lowlands, with over seventy place names and beautiful, prosperous-looking towns, ecclesiastical centres and castles. The rest of the map shows the Highlands and is accompanied not by images but by prose notes detailing the best agricultural areas, the points at which to refresh an army and the locations of notable castles and abbeys. Most remarkably, the northern edges of Scotland are shown to be on the borders of Hell. A large castle – the palace of Pluto, home of the king of Hell – is surrounded by four of the five rivers of the classical underworld, the Stix, the Acheron, the Phlegethon and the Cocytus. The juxtaposition of the castle of Pluto and the northerly location of Hell allowed Hardyng to maintain his claim that Scotland was profitable, for Pluto was often conflated with the god of prosperity. But it also suggests that Scotland’s remotest corners were the places furthest from the grace of God and thus in desperate need of salvation, presumably by the hands of an English king. That the Highlands were where the devil resided also had currency throughout Europe, and the French chronicler Jean Juvenal des Ursins suggested precisely this in his early fifteenth-century Histoire de Charles VI Roy de France. Indeed, it was certainly evident that some perceived this small kingdom to be at the remotest fringes of the world. In October 1474 Galeazzo Maria Sforza, duke of Milan, remarked during negotiations for a marriage alliance with James III of Scotland (1460–88) that ‘if we had only one daughter, which is not the case, we should not want to marry her so far off as Scotland would be’. Medieval maps of Scotland were fanciful projections rather than attempts at realistic representations, but, even still, Hardyng’s maps sit in stark contrast to earlier maps of Scotland. Matthew Paris’s famous map of Britain from c. 1250, now in the British Library, shows a dwarfed Scotland, with the only route to the

Figure 1.1  The Gough Map, c. 1360. Bodleian Library, MS Gough Gen. Top. 16.



Introduction 5

north via Stirling Bridge. England dominates the map both in its comparative size and in the level of detail lavished on its features. A similar narrow causeway links Scotland and England in a c. 1320 portolan map of the world by the Genoese cartographer Pietro Vesconte, whereas the mappa mundi of c. 1300 in Hereford Cathedral shows Scotland as a separate island altogether. The Gough map of c. 1360 presents a completely different picture of Scotland again, but like Paris’s map remains Anglocentric in its outlook. The level of detail south of the border is far superior to that appearing in the northern areas and the sheer size of England in comparison to Scotland betrays its provenance. The Scotland of the Gough map is sparsely populated with barely any notable landmarks: it is mostly lowland and east-coast towns that feature and there is virtually nothing north of the Moray Firth. The towns, castles and cathedrals that are recorded match the itinerary of Edward I of England’s (1272–1307) travels to Scotland (indeed, Edward did not go further than the Moray Firth) and it has been suggested that a non-extant earlier version of this map was prepared to assist the English king with his intervention, conquest and governance of the kingdom of the Scots. The Gough map, MS Gough Gen. Top. 16 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, has been the subject of a recent Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project with an online resource that includes a searchable digital version of the map, a wonderful enhancement to our knowledge given the fragility of the original and the difficulty in reading its faded inks in traditional reproduction methods. Accompanying Edward I on his progress in Scotland in 1296 was an observer who provides one of the earliest surviving accounts of a visit to the kingdom, the Voyage of Kynge Edwarde. However, the anonymous writer offers only a scanty impression of the kingdom at the close of the thirteenth century, for the account is little more than a list of the king’s itinerary. Perth, Montrose and St Andrews are marked out as ‘good’ towns, Kincardine a ‘faiour manour’, Aberdeen a ‘faire castell and a good towne upon the see’, and Elgin a ‘good Castell and a good towne’. Little else in the way of judgement is passed,

6

power and propaganda

nor are there more perceptive observations. Edward’s time in Scotland did, of course, have significance beyond the contents of the Voyage of Kynge Edwarde, for by the journey’s conclusion Scotland had been ‘conquerid and serchid [. . .] in xxj wekys’. Edward had deprived the kingdom of the Scots of a king and had brought Scotland under English sovereign authority. It is from the mid-fourteenth century that more complex and sensitive impressions of Scotland have survived. The famous Hainault chronicler of the Hundred Years War, Jean Froissart, visited the court of David II of Scotland (1329–71) in 1365. He spent six months in Scotland, which had a profound influence on his view of the kingdom. Scattered throughout his Chronicles and his poetry are vivid accounts of his visits to both the Lowlands and the Highlands and insights into Scotland in the 1360s. Fifteen weeks were spent with King David II on a progress through the kingdom, during which Froissart remarked that David spoke ‘moult biau françois’, perhaps something to be expected given David’s years exiled in France in the 1330s. Froissart spent a welcome three days at rest at Stirling Castle, the preferred centre of royal power for much of the late middle ages, and this was reinforced by David II through his explanation of the significance of the castle. According to Froissart, the Scottish king told him that Stirling was also called Snowdon, because in the past it was where King Arthur’s knights had gathered for their round tables, providing the groundwork for an alternative Scottish Arthurian tradition which countered the claims to English sovereignty over Scotland inherent in English versions of the legends. Froissart further perpetuated this myth by making Stirling the venue for the staging of splendid tournaments in his Arthurian romance Méliador, where the central action was structured around a five-year quest for the hand of the king of Scotland’s daughter. Froissart was also entertained in Scotland by the earls of Fife, Mar, March and Sutherland on their estates, and he expressed great satisfaction with their hospitality. Two weeks of his visit were spent as a guest of Sir William Douglas at Dalkeith Castle, where he learned of the family history of the renowned Black Douglases. This ensured that when he came to



Introduction 7

write his account of the battle of Otterburn in 1388, the central protagonist James, second earl of Douglas, was portrayed in an unquestionably chivalric light. The words put into Douglas’s mouth by Froissart as he died on the battlefield conform to the style and manner of Douglas family propaganda, which emphasised chivalry, loyalty and military service. As he died, the earl of Douglas uttered his last words: ‘God be praised, not many of my ancestors have died in their beds.’ Froissart’s impression of the Scots he encountered in passing was deeply unflattering. While the aristocracy, who subscribed to the common European ethos of chivalry that Froissart so admired, were left largely unscathed, the common Scots were a different matter altogether. Froissart admired their military ability, remarking that they were ‘bold, hardy, and much inured to war’, but he found them utterly offensive as people. Presumably as the result of an incident where Froissart’s nationality bore some relevance, the chronicler described the Scots as ‘rude and worthless’ racists who particularly hated the French: ‘hated them in their hearts, and abused them with their tongues as much as they could’. Indeed, this same abusive trait was remarked upon in the mid-fifteenth century when the future Pope Pius II stated that ‘nothing pleases the Scots more than abuse of the English’. Froissart’s longest diatribe against the Scots is a virtually verbatim account of Jean le Bel’s Les Vrayes Chroniques. Le Bel’s view was formed by his experiences on Edward III’s campaign in Scotland in 1327. Leaving Le Bel’s original passage mostly untouched, Froissart argued that in Scotland you will never find a man of worth: they are like savages, who wish not to be acquainted with anyone, and are too envious of the good fortune of others, and suspicious of losing anything themselves, for their country is very poor.

In these passages of Froissart, it is really Le Bel’s voice we hear. Le Bel’s description of how the Scots army survived on simple oatcakes, for example, was passed on by Froissart and has helped to ensure this biscuit’s position amongst the top tier of Scottish cultural icons:

8

power and propaganda Under the flaps of his saddle, each man carries a broad plate of metal; behind the saddle, a little bag of oatmeal: when they have eaten too much of the sodden flesh, and their stomach appears weak and empty, they place this plate over the fire, mix with water their oatmeal, and when the plate is heated, they put a little of the paste upon it, and make a thin cake, like a cracknel or biscuit, which they eat to warm their stomachs: it is therefore no wonder that they perform a longer day’s march than other soldiers.

Le Bel’s impressions of the Scots were echoed by others involved in the wars with Scotland. One veteran of the first War of Independence, Sir Geoffrey Luttrell, commissioned a richly illuminated psalter, which is now one of the most renowned manuscripts that survives from the late middle ages; it is held in the British Library at Add. MS 42130. In the Luttrell Psalter there are images of Scots attacking unarmed innocents from behind, hitting elderly widows over the head and hacking babies to pieces with their swords. The faces of some are darkened with woad, a bright blue dye. This is a depiction that shares remarkable similarities to contemporary images of the Saracens, including those within the Psalter itself. It also chimes with ideas about this particular blue colour and its role in Scottish warfare: one of the Scots on folio 169r has a particoloured face, recalling stories circulating about woad-painted armies of Britons described by Roman historians, or more contemporary stories of the blue-painted face of Sir William Wallace. The image of the ‘wild Scottes’ was pervasive in this period; for example, the eleven surviving poems of the English poet Laurence Minot attest to the widespread stereotyping and anti-Scottish propaganda that was circulating in the 1330s and 1340s. The victory at Bannockburn was undermined by Minot’s accusations that the Scots had killed innocents to win: Skottes out of Berwik and of Abirdene, at the Bannok burn war ye to kene! Thare slogh ye many sakles, als it was sene

‘Wild’ and ‘Highlander’ seem to have been inseparable concepts: even Hardyng’s second maps contained labels of the regions of



Introduction 9

the Highlands marked as the ‘Wilde Scottys’ of Mar, Garioch, Atholl, Moray and Ross. Froissart’s Chronicle also reveals much about the Lowlands, where he spent a considerable amount of his time. He remarked that Edinburgh was ‘the capital of Scotland, where the king chiefly resides when he is in that part of the country’. Although Edinburgh’s status as a capital did not genuinely emerge until the mid-fifteenth century, it was the dominant centre for trade by the time of Froissart’s visit. Froissart’s awarding of capital status to Edinburgh is explained also by his drawing of a flattering comparison with Paris, for Edinburgh ‘is the residence of the king, and is the Paris of Scotland’. Nevertheless, he remarked that it ‘is not such a town as Tourney or Valenciennes [Froissart’s place of birth]; for there are not in the whole town four hundred houses’. When Froissart reported an influx to Edinburgh in 1385 of between 500 and 1,000 French soldiers, led by Admiral Jean de Vienne, to launch a joint attack with the Scots on the north of England, he revealed that the lords and their men lodged themselves as well as they could in Edinburgh, and those who could not lodge there were quartered in the different villages thereabout [. . .] Several of the French lords were therefore obliged to take up their lodgings in the neighbouring villages, and at Dunfermline, Kelso, Dunbar, Dalkeith, and in other villages.

In the recounting of the Scots’ general displeasure at the arrival of the French he revealed something of the construction of many of the houses. Putting words into the mouths of the Scots, Froissart wrote: ‘If the English do burn our houses, what consequence is it to us? We can rebuild them cheap enough, for we only require three days to do so, provided we have five or six poles and boughs to cover them.’ In return Froissart pointed out that when the French lords and knights who had been used to handsome hotels, ornamented apartments, and castles with good soft beds to repose on, saw themselves in such poverty they began to laugh, and to say to the admiral, ‘What could

10

power and propaganda

have brought us hither? We have never known till now what was meant by poverty and hard living.’

Of course, all of this was coloured by Froissart’s narrative agenda and his audience, but the popularity of the chronicle ensured that these observations remained a perception of the Scots and life in Scotland for centuries to come. During James I of Scotland’s reign (1424–37) Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, a Sienese secretary (and later Pope Pius II, 1458– 64), visited the royal court to engage in diplomatic business. After a succession of storms which deprived him of all hope of reaching the coast of Scotland, when he did land at Dunbar he immediately undertook a pilgrimage to the nearest shrine of the Virgin Mary at Whitekirk, a ten-mile walk. This journey, undertaken barefoot in a Scottish winter, left him with lifelong pain in his legs and feet. Piccolomini’s sense of Scotland was influenced by these experiences: ‘Here I once lived in the season of winter, when the sun illuminates the earth little more than three hours.’ The Scotland of Piccolomini was ‘wild, bare and never visited by the sun’. Of the king who entertained him we learn that he was ‘robust of person, and oppressed by his excessive corpulence’, although the latter comment does not tally with the accounts of James I from the 1440s by the contemporary Scottish chronicler Walter Bower, the abbot of Inchcolm Abbey. Like Froissart, Piccolomini reported on the poverty he saw: ‘I saw the poor, who almost in a state of nakedness begged at the church doors, depart with joy in their faces on receiving stones [coal] as alms’ and he remarked that the people ate mostly flesh and fish, bread being eaten ‘only as a dainty’. ‘The men’, Piccolomini reported, ‘are small in stature, bold and forward in temper; the women, fair in complexion, comely and pleasing, but not distinguished for their chastity, giving their kisses more readily than Italian women their hands’. That he fathered a child during his visit (who to his deep distress did not survive infancy) may shed some light on these remarks. He recorded the cold climate, the production of few crops, the scanty supply of wood, and the use of peat for fuel. ‘The towns have no walls, and the houses



Introduction 11

are for the most part constructed out of lime. The roofs of the houses in the country are made of turf, and the doors of the humbler dwellings are made of the hide of oxen.’ The Italian noted that there were ‘two distinct countries in Scotland – the one cultivated, the other covered with forests and possessing no tilled land. The Scots who live in the wooded region speak a language of their own [Gaelic], and sometimes use the bark of trees for food.’ The now familiar ‘division’ between Highlands and Lowlands was also perceived by contemporary Scottish observers. In the way that some English writers had referred to their neighbours in the north as ‘wild’ in the context of the Wars of Independence, it is perhaps unsurprising then to find ‘wild’ used in the domestic context by a Scot referring to the ‘other’ within the same kingdom, the Gaelic-speaker. John of Fordun, a Scottish chronicler and chaplain at St Machar’s Cathedral in Aberdeen, writing in the 1380s, reported that ‘the manners and customs of the Scots vary with the diversity of their speech’. He went on: The people of the coast are of domestic and civilized habits, trust, patient and urbane, decent in their attire, affable, and peaceful, devout in Divine worship, yet always prone to resist a wrong at the hand of their enemies. The highlanders and people of the islands, on the other hand, are a savage and untamed nation, rude and independent, given to rapine, ease-loving, of a docile and warm disposition, comely in person, but unsightly in dress, hostile to the English people and language, and, owing to diversity of speech, even to their own nation, and exceedingly cruel. They are, however, faithful and obedient to their king and country, and easily made to submit to law, if properly governed.

Fordun’s Chronicle was amongst the first conscious attempts to create a narrative history of the Scots, and he included much descriptive detail of the landscape, flora and fauna of the kingdom, as well as the types of farming suitable to the different grounds. These ideas were replicated in Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon of the 1440s, which reproduced Fordun’s Chronicle with considerable expansions, before continuing the history into the years of Stewart kingship.

12

power and propaganda

Of course, all of these contemporary impressions from visitors and maps are just that – impressions, usually of one individual based on a single visit or deployed for a specific purpose. The real picture of Scotland in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was far more complex than the fairly stark pronouncements above would imply. The aim of this book is to render that picture with some attention to the nuanced shading, as well as to the bold blocks of colour. This book self-consciously moves away from some of the themes that have dominated late medieval Scottish historical studies over the past decades. In particular, the critical question of Scotland’s relations with her larger southern neighbour, England, one of the shaping influences on all modern Scottish historiography, receives less play than many readers will expect in a book which takes in Robert Bruce and the Wars of Independence within its chronological scope. The period 1306–1488 is a crucial one in what used to be called Scotland’s ‘national development’. At its start Scotland was in a desperate fight to maintain independent sovereign authority in the face of English claims to overlordship. At its end Scotland was a kingdom making preparations to enter marriage negotiations with that same ‘auld enemy’, negotiations that would ultimately lead towards the union of the crowns through James VI of Scotland (1567–1625). Indeed, it was during the late middle ages that the borders of Scotland reached their modern extent and the kingdom took the shape that we know today. While borders are measurable and diplomatic relations leave documentary evidence, historians have also spilt a lot of ink on the more vexed question of the emergence of Scottish national identity during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It is easy to understand why reading national identity into this period of Scottish history is so compelling for the historian. The Declaration of Arbroath of 1320 – with its justly famous pledge that ‘as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule’ – has been shaped and used across the centuries to appeal to patriots, nationalists, separatists and liberal constitutionalists. Its significance has been seen to lie in two principal areas. First, it



Introduction 13

has been claimed as a precociously early statement of contractual kingship and thus deployed as the foundational text of an unbroken t­radition of democratic Scottish populism (however spurious and confected this may be). Second, its rhetorical content has been taken as a pristine statement of Scotland’s national history and identity. Needless to say, both of these uses entail considerable liberties with the actual historical context of the document itself. Indeed, the nineteenth-century French philosopher and one of the first theorists of nations and nationalism, Ernest Renan, observed that ‘historical error is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation’. The passage from the Declaration quoted above was borrowed from the story of the Maccabees. This was a story which likewise inspired John Barbour’s rendering of the events of Bannockburn, when he gives to Robert I the words: we for our lyvis, and for our childer and our wyvis, And for the fredome of our land, Ar strenyheit in battale for to stand.

And so, in common with other medieval European kingdoms, Scottish elites did borrow from diverse sources, many of them biblical, to furnish identities upon which later modern national identities and nationalisms would build (ethnies in the terminology of the sociologist Anthony D. Smith). How widely and deeply such ideas percolated is a question near impossible to answer. Beyond reports, such as that from Froissart, of instinctive hostility to ‘the other’, the evidence on which we might build a properly nuanced inquiry simply does not exist. For that reason, while this book does offer a historically contextualised examination of some of the evidence used to support the idea of a nascent national identity, it is not a theme around which this analysis is structured. The comparative downplaying of Anglo-Scottish relations and Scottish identity may seem perverse to readers keen to reflect on the momentous changes that are possible with the Independence Referendum in 2014. Readers seeking greater illumination on these vexed issues than can be

14

power and propaganda

found in the chapters that follow are directed to the further reading list offered at the back of this volume. But enough on what this book is not substantially about. My principal interest here is in power and authority. Such a focus will be obvious from the first three chapters. These deal in turn with some well-trodden themes of political history: the nature of the power enjoyed by kings, how it was maintained and how it was deployed; the interpersonal relations and struggles between kings and the elites within their kingdoms; and, finally, the structures of governance through which power operated and was felt down to a local level. Late medieval Scotland is fertile ground for an examination of all of these themes. Within this period two new dynasties – the Bruces and the Stewarts – were faced with the challenge of establishing their own legitimacy and authority. They often had to do so against and in conjunction with powerful families such as the Albany Stewarts, the MacDonalds and the Black Douglases. In doing so, and in facing challenges common to other European kingdoms, they oversaw the development of structures of governance (hence the increasing popularity of discussion of the ‘medieval state’) to provide justice and extract revenue. Power and its exercise has long attracted the attention of scholars, but as historians’ interests have shifted from studying power as the imposition of will to something which also values social and cultural dimensions, so too has there been a broadening of the range of sources that are used. Indeed, my own interdisciplinary background in archaeology, art history and literature betrays my tendency to seek a more expansive evidence base to understand the ways in which power was articulated. Both throughout the first three chapters and within subsequent chapters, which deal with religion and the church, with economy and demography, and with elite culture, this expanded and more diffuse definition of power is very much to the fore. So, for example, Chapter 7 examines how power and authority were embodied in the visual languages of iconography and royal propaganda. Chapter 6, which examines Scotland’s experiences as the four horsemen of the apocalypse – pestilence, war, famine



Introduction 15

and death – ran amok across this period, pays attention to what this meant in terms of the agency and opportunities available to different groups in society. There is no question that considering the events and surviving evidence of Scotland in the period 1306–1488 through the explicitly political categories of power, authority and propaganda is not a conventional way of approaching medieval Scottish history. However, these themes are discussed widely and one aim as I started writing this book was to seek my questions not from within the existing national history of Scotland, but more generally from recent work on late medieval Europe. I hope that this book will thus contribute new themes to the outward-looking confidence that has marked so much of the work of Scottish historians over the last decades.

2 Kingship, Power and the Making of a Myth

In 2008 I was the victim of a group (I have been unable to discover the appropriate collective noun) of US Republican Internet trolls and a campaign of e-bullying for daring to suggest to a Guardian newspaper journalist in the UK that John McCain’s claims to descent from Robert Bruce were little more than propaganda. Putting aside the factual accuracy or otherwise of McCain’s claim, this incident demonstrates a number of themes that will be explored in this chapter (and, indeed, throughout the book), chiefly the importance of lineage in the creation of a myth of legitimacy upon which political authority rested. The evidence for the cachet of Robert Bruce in North American culture (incidentally, Robert Bruce was also the inspiration for the first name of Batman’s alter ego Bruce Wayne) and its use in modern political mythmaking would not have been unfamiliar to the elites of the late middle ages. The keen desire for powerful individuals to claim descent from Bruce has a long history, and it was an active process that took place immediately after his death in 1329. In Scotland, Bruce (Robert I, 1306–29) is widely commemorated within a pantheon of political leaders and military heroes who have helped to shape the identity of the nation. His final resting place at Dunfermline Abbey is obvious for miles around, not by the solemnity of the steeple over the royal mausoleum, but by the rather vulgar early nineteenth-century Bell Tower that spells out in giant stone tracery letters ‘King Robert the Bruce’. The principal royal military strongholds of



Kingship, Power and the Making of a Myth 17

Edinburgh Castle and Stirling Castle both display prominent statues of Bruce erected by the gatehouse entrances in the early twentieth century. The esplanade at Stirling also incorporates a large statue of Bruce surveying the surrounding landscape, ever defending the Scots from attack from the south. Indeed, Stirlingshire, the historic heartland of the kingdom and where much of the principal action of the Wars of Independence took place, is saturated with Bruceana. At the site of the battle of Bannockburn an enormous equestrian statue to the king was erected in the 1960s. Plans for new commemorations of Bruce and Bannockburn in Stirling are in advanced stages as the battle’s 700th anniversary draws nearer. Indeed, modern memorials to the king are appearing in increasing numbers as towns and groups throughout Scotland seek to harness some of the power of their historic relationship to Bruce, no matter how tenuous. Outside Marischal College in Aberdeen, for example, the new home of the Aberdeen City Council, a statue to Bruce was erected in 2011 showing the medieval king holding a charter, to represent his 1319 charter that established what later became the Common Good Fund of Aberdeen. While such commemorations bear eloquent testimony to the relevance of Bruce to a range of modern ­preoccupations – ­ including unionism and nationalism, war and martial ­masculinities – these myths thrive on eliding or misrepresenting the context in which Bruce operated. The steely gazes of these monumental representations and their straightforward celebration of martial values would also seem to imply that medieval kingship and leadership rested, above all, on the flat exercise of power or on brute force. In the account that follows, there is much to support this perspective. However, it also seeks to recover the more nuanced aspects of medieval governance and the complexity of the contexts in which kings and princes from Robert I onwards operated. Two issues emerge as central: the role of luck and contingency in a political culture where the biological facts of birth and death made succession the key driver of domestic and international politics; and the importance of being able to create and disseminate myths, which were a reflection

18

power and propaganda

of underlying power as well as a key means of legitimising and extending it. The crisis from which the reign of Robert Bruce emerged and the response of his contemporaries and immediate successors is an exemplar of these two forces at work. Robert Bruce acceded to the Scottish throne in 1306 as Robert I after a long period of wrangling and consternation over the succession. Succession was at the heart of what drove ideas of kingship and dynasty in this period and would continue to dominate much of the politics and policy of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The death of Alexander III in 1286, who left no male heir, and the subsequent death in 1290 of his seven-year-old granddaughter, Margaret, Maid of Norway (who in the first acknowledgement of female inheritance for the Scottish kingship had been recognised by parliament as successor in 1284) left no clear heir to the throne and plummeted the kingdom into political turmoil. The Great Cause which followed, during which Edward I of England was called upon by the Guardians of Scotland to adjudicate between the claims of thirteen competitors for the throne, has been well rehearsed by Scottish historians, not only for what the events reveal about attitudes to succession and the politics of the period, but also for their significance in the chain of events which led to the Wars of Independence (1296–1328; 1332–57). The two main competitors were soon established as Robert de Brus, fifth lord of Annandale, and John Balliol, lord of Galloway, the latter of whom forged an alliance with Antony Bek, bishop of Durham, Edward I’s representative in Scotland. Both Balliol and Brus’s claims originated in the marriages of two of the daughters of David, earl of Huntingdon, the youngest grandson of David I of Scotland (1124–53). Balliol had a claim by seniority of birth as the grandson of Earl David’s eldest daughter Margaret. The strength of Robert de Brus’s claim lay in proximity by degree: he was the son of a younger daughter of Earl David, Isobel of Huntingdon. The basis of his claim was that, as the son of David I’s younger daughter, he was nearer in relationship to the crucial ancestor than was the son of a daughter of David I’s eldest daughter. The Brus claim was nevertheless



Kingship, Power and the Making of a Myth 19

formally rejected in 1292 and Balliol was crowned king of Scots. Undeterred and incensed by Edward I’s consequent influence in having his son Edward elected as heir designate to Balliol, the Brus family relentlessly pursued its claim to the throne, gathering powerful allies with substantial military resources, including the hereditary steward of Scotland, the earls of Atholl, Fife, Dunbar, Mar and Menteith and the MacDonalds of Islay. In response to Balliol’s installation upon the Scottish throne, Robert de Brus formally transferred his claim to the throne to his son, Robert, sixth de Brus, who in turn transferred the earldom of Carrick to his son, also Robert. On the death of his father in 1295, Robert, sixth de Brus, refused homage to Balliol and chose allegiance to Edward I. His son, the new earl of Carrick, also chose English allegiance, and pledged homage and fealty to Edward along with many other prominent Scottish nobles at Edward’s infamous parliament at Berwick in August 1296. It is this act of homage to the king of England which has seen Robert Bruce’s reputation tarnished in the eyes of some who subscribe to fundamentalist forms of Scottish nationalism. Bruce’s flip-flopping often creeps into fictional portrayals of him and needs to be justified to audiences, as if his subsequent actions in defence of the realm were less genuine than William Wallace’s apparently more consistent desperate hatred of the English. The mid-1290s were difficult. Edward I steadily undermined Balliol’s authority by coercing recognition as the feudal superior of the realm, demanding homage, legal authority over the Scottish king, and contributions towards the costs of English defence and military support in his war with France. In 1295, in response to Balliol’s perceived weaknesses and capitulation to Edward’s demands, the Scottish magnates were provoked into a coup d’état by which executive power and governance was transferred from the king to a council of twelve Guardians of Scotland. Almost immediately the Guardians agreed a treaty with Philip IV of France to counter the threats from England, which came to be known as the Auld Alliance. Thus was laid the first plank of a foreign policy that would shape Scottish politics for centuries to come. To Edward I this was in overt defiance of

20

power and propaganda

his authority, and he retaliated by invading Scotland to assert his suzerainty, defeating the Scots at Dunbar in April 1296 and commencing what is now known as the Wars of Independence. Under considerable duress, in July of that year Balliol abdicated, was ritually stripped of the royal arms and was promptly imprisoned in the Tower of London. He remained there for three years before being transferred into papal custody in France, allegedly smuggling to Dover the Scottish crown, the great seal, considerable money and other precious objects that had escaped the attention of the ritual strippers in 1296. This was a highly improbable story that circulated as part of the propaganda for Edward I’s suzerainty over Scotland, where the regalia and symbols of sovereignty that had been captured by Edward on his invasion in 1296 were recast as pawns in the abdication of Balliol. Edward ordered the crown to be offered to St Thomas Becket at Canterbury, but retained the great seal under lock and key, and instead cast a new seal of his own to be used for the governance of Scotland. Crucially, in a clear assertion of sovereign authority, the new seal bore the royal arms of England. Despite Balliol’s abdication and the large number of Scots who had sworn allegiance (however genuine) to Edward I, there were many rebellions against the English king’s authority in Scotland, including the most famous in 1297 under the direction of Sir Andrew Moray and Sir William Wallace. At the same time, in a complete reversal of his political stance, Robert Bruce joined the ranks of the leaders of the Scottish revolt against Edwardian conquest and the English occupation of Scotland, and over the following years he continued to play a leading role in the resistance. At the heart of this resistance was the campaign for the restoration of Balliol as king of Scots and for the official/English recognition of Balliol’s right to the throne. Indeed, this had a significant influence on the policy and conduct of the Guardians of Scotland between 1297 and 1304. Among their ranks from 1298 to 1300 was Robert Bruce, who took up the vacancy created by the resignation of Sir William Wallace. Again, Bruce comes across as a consummate political operator, who might have calculated that Balliol had been safely removed



Kingship, Power and the Making of a Myth 21

from the Scottish political scene. In that context, his public support for Balliol’s restoration was to allow for smooth relations in the kingdom to ensure that he might press his own claim to the throne. Indeed, once Balliol was released from Avignon to his family’s ancestral estates in Picardy in 1301 and he made no further attempts to engage with the situation in Scotland, the Bruce claim to the throne was reasserted with force. Bruce’s political stance remained less than consistent, which not only demonstrates the astuteness of the man but also illuminates the fluid nature of political loyalties in this period. With the potential – although unlikely – return of Balliol possible from 1302, Bruce abandoned the Scottish leadership and reverted to submission to Edward I. In that same year he married Elizabeth, daughter of Richard de Burgh, the Red Earl of Ulster, and for the next two years his activities were consistent with those of a magnate in allegiance to the English crown. In secret, however, Bruce allied himself with William Lamberton, bishop of St Andrews, a high-profile member of the patriotic leadership and a strong supporter and friend of Sir William Wallace. The Bruce–Lamberton agreement implies that the two men had taken the decision to restore Scottish kingship, but, crucially, to abandon Balliol in the process. While in public Bruce supported the English reconquest of Scotland, he engineered support at the English parliament in 1305 to ensure that he was appointed to the governing council of the kingdom from where he might operate to gain support for his claim to the throne. Nevertheless, the 1305 Edwardian settlement was doomed. In February 1306 Bruce met another governing councillor, John Comyn, lord of Badenoch, at Greyfriars Church in Dumfries. At the high altar, after a violent quarrel, Bruce stabbed Comyn with a dagger in hot blood. Mortally wounded, he was left for dead. A later chronicler reported that Bruce then fled to Lochmaben Castle, whereupon he exclaimed to his retainers and kinsmen James Lindsay and Roger Kirkpatrick, ‘I think I have killed John the Red Comyn.’ Lindsay and Kirkpatrick then returned to Dumfries to ensure that Comyn was actually dead, where Kirkpatrick is claimed to have drawn his sword

22

power and propaganda

and announced ‘I mak siccar’ (I’ll make certain). It is most likely that Comyn, a staunch Balliol supporter and himself in line to the throne, refused to support Bruce’s claims, whereupon Bruce accused Comyn of treachery and despatched his most serious opponent for the crown. The English chronicler Walter of Guisborough provides the most probable narrative of the incident and recorded that Bruce was concerned that Comyn would block Bruce’s attempts to claim the throne. In the wake of this heinous sacrilege, for the killing occurred in sacred space, Bruce garnered immediate support from the bishop of Glasgow and sent word throughout Scotland of his imminent enthronement at Scone. In a defiant message to the English chamberlain of Scotland, John Sandale, Bruce threatened to seize castles and towns and to defend himself with maximum force until the king of England accepted his demands for recognition of his right to the throne. Bruce’s inauguration as king of Scots in 1306 was a triumph, albeit a temporary one. The English chronicler Sir Thomas Gray recorded in his Scalacronica that on the eve of the coronation Bruce ‘retained a strong following through kinsmanship and alliance’. There were, nevertheless, several setbacks, including the absence of the Stone of Scone, the traditional seat upon which the Scots kings were inaugurated, which had been removed to Westminster Abbey by Edward I in 1296 along with other symbols of Scottish sovereignty. Duncan, earl of Fife, was a teenager in England and in complete adherence to Edward I, and was either disinclined or not invited to perform the traditional role of the earl of Fife in the ceremony. This role provided legitimacy and authority to the inauguration, so instead the earl of Fife’s aunt, Isabel, countess of Buchan, undertook these duties. It was a carefully managed event designed to instil confidence in Bruce’s authority and in his abilities to lead a unified political community. Yet despite now widespread support amongst the nobility and the clergy in Scotland, within months of his coronation Bruce had been defeated by the English and his rising was labelled a rebellion and treason. Bruce was a fugitive and his queen and many of his family were in English



Kingship, Power and the Making of a Myth 23

Figure 2.1  The coronation chair of the kings of England at Westminster Abbey, shown here housing the Stone of Scone.

24

power and propaganda

captivity. These captives included Isabel, countess of Buchan, who, in the act of placing the crown on Bruce’s head, had unwittingly committed herself to a series of harrowing experiences. First came her estrangement from her husband, John Comyn, earl of Buchan, an adherent of Edward I and Balliol, for Bruce’s murder of Buchan’s kinsman rendered Isabel’s role in the inauguration especially reprehensible. Rumours circulated that Isabel was Bruce’s mistress, which was a logical justification for her disloyalty to her husband. Indeed, she remained with the Bruces after the inauguration until she was captured with the queen and other royal women at St Duthac’s shrine in Tain by the earl of Ross on behalf of Edward I a few months later, whereupon she was incarcerated in a cage within a tower at Berwick Castle, ‘the sides latticed so that all there could gaze on her as a spectacle’. She was removed from her cage in 1310 and installed at the Carmelite friary at Berwick. Finally in 1313 she was handed over to the husband of her husband’s niece, Sir Henry de Beaumont. Relief for the fugitive Robert Bruce came in 1307 with the death of Edward I and the succession of Edward II to the English throne (1307–27), which brought a welcome slackening in pressure from England. The culmination of what had been a long struggle came in 1309 when Bruce held a parliament at St Andrews at which the community of the realm of Scotland made a declaration of Robert’s rights and of the independence of his realm, supported by a letter from Philip IV of France which formally recognised Bruce’s claim to the throne and underscored the Franco-Scottish terms of alliance. Over the course of the next few years, Robert consolidated his grip upon the kingdom and slowly regained control of Scotland, with the exception of several key sites which remained in English hands, including Berwick (to 1318), Roxburgh (to early 1314), Edinburgh (to early 1314) and Stirling (to midsummer 1314). Determined to retain the English hold of Stirling, Edward II led a large army to Scotland in June 1314 to avoid surrendering the castle at midsummer, as terms of a treaty were set to expire. It was evident a battle would ensue and that this would



Kingship, Power and the Making of a Myth 25

be a decisive trial between the two realms. The culmination of this was the much-celebrated Scottish victory of the battle of Bannockburn. The immediate dividends included the return of the queen and the king’s unmarried daughter and heir presumptive, Marjorie, as well as numerous other Scottish notables. It also resulted in the creation of a group of disinherited Scots in England, who had sacrificed their Scottish estates to retain their English landholdings. This gave Robert I large amounts of land to redistribute amongst his allies and supporters. The Stewarts, the Douglases and the MacDonalds were amongst the principal beneficiaries, which would have a significant impact upon their wealth, status and power in the kingdom in the century to come. Thus the groundwork was laid for the transformation of the composition of the Scottish landowning elite. In terms of landholding patterns, Bannockburn precipitated the need for members of the nobility to choose their futures in either England or Scotland, thus marking out the Anglo-Scottish border in bold and furnishing an increasingly politicised sense of Scottish distinctiveness. Although after 1314 there was widespread international support for Bruce’s royal authority, it still stopped short of papal acknowledgement that Bruce was the rightful king of a realm independent of overlordship. Royal policy thus focused on securing recognition from a papacy which was preoccupied with arranging truces between the kingdoms of Western Europe to promote a new crusade against the Turks. A key diplomatic incident occurred in 1317 when, in a letter to Bruce, Pope John XXII (1316–34) failed to address him as the king of Scots, whilst at the same time begging that the Scots observe a truce with England to further his plans for a unified Christendom. Bruce refused, explaining that if the papacy was not willing to use Bruce’s royal title in order to avoid prejudicing Edward II’s case, then by the same token it ought not to favour Edward II: I have possession of the kingdom, my royal title is acknowledged throughout the kingdom, and foreign rulers address me as king. Our father the pope and our mother the church of Rome seem to be showing partiality among their own children.

26

power and propaganda

The result of this dispute was that Scotland was threatened by papal interdict in 1319–20. The most famous of all medieval Scottish letters – the Declaration of Arbroath – was part of the diplomatic correspondence concerning this dispute. The Declaration was an exercise in propaganda from the community of the realm of Scotland and has been exalted as a ‘rhetorical masterpiece’. In the letter, the case for the independence of the realm of Scotland was carefully presented, alongside the validity of Robert Bruce’s royal credentials, based not only on heredity but also, and perhaps more crucially, on the consent of the people of the kingdom. It is this latter element of the letter which has ensured that what was otherwise standard but eloquent diplomatic correspondence has come to inspire and influence constitutional debates across the centuries. Unharnessed from its original historical context, it has been reified as a remarkably precocious statement of popular sovereignty that has informed the content of, among other things, the American Declaration of Independence and the language and sensibility of modern Scottish nationalism. Although the Declaration of Arbroath was not immediately successful with the papal curia, the letter did mark a turning point in the affair and John XXII consequently requested that Edward II desist from attacking the Scots. Bruce continued to pursue recognition of the independence of the king of Scots, but succession issues soon came to the fore. The death of Edward Bruce in 1318 brought the right of succession to the king’s grandson, Robert the Steward, born to his eldest daughter Marjorie and Walter the Steward in 1316. Of course, Stewart succession would not eventuate until 1371, as Bruce was to have a son – David – born in 1324 and who succeeded his father in 1329. In 1327 substantial headway in Robert Bruce’s pursuit for independence was made by the deposition of Edward II and succession of his son, Edward III (1327–77), a minor governed by his mother Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer. An English army, including the new king, met a sizeable Scottish force led by Sir Thomas Randolph and Sir James Douglas at Stanhope Park in County Durham in



Kingship, Power and the Making of a Myth 27

Figure 2.2  Reproduction of the Tyninghame copy of the Declaration of Arbroath, 1320.

the summer of that year, where they were decisively humiliated by the Scots and the English king was nearly captured. The defeat caused the English government to agree to the terms of peace enshrined in the Treaty of Edinburgh–Northampton of 17 March 1328, which recognised that Scotland was a free realm, ruled by a king who bore the lawful title of king of Scots. Scotland’s boundaries were restored to reintroduce Berwick and the Isle of Man and the Treaty enshrined the specific assertion that, henceforth, no king of England could claim overlordship of Scotland. To cement this key tenet of the Treaty, provision

28

power and propaganda

was made that any documents supporting or suggesting rights of the English to overlordship should be presented to the Scots for destruction. This never occurred, and nor was any agreement reached for the return of the Scottish symbols of sovereignty which had been looted by Edward I’s armies. The Edinburgh– Northampton vision of the future was to be an Anglo-Scottish alliance, without prejudice to the Franco-Scottish alliance that had been renewed in 1326, cemented by a substantial cash payment from the Scots to Edward III and the marriage of Robert I’s son David to Edward III’s sister Joan. Robert Bruce captured the hearts of his contemporaries just as he has those of later generations, moved by the romantic and universally appealing notion of the rightful king struggling to have his authority recognised and to free his kingdom from oppressive dominion. Bruce’s achievements did not lie solely in his long campaign for recognition of Scottish independence from English overlordship, or in the recognition of the Bruce claim to the throne. Bruce should also be commended for the many inroads made under his leadership, including his central role in the reconciliation of Scotland with England and France; bringing Norway closer in an alliance at Perth in 1312; and the resumption and expansion of lucrative trading links with Genoa and the commercial centres in the Low Countries and the Hanseatic cities. Bruce aspired to restore the kingdom to the peaceful order it had enjoyed before the death of Alexander III and under his leadership he healed rifts in the political community and through parliament created, maintained and dispensed law, justice and order. An account of Bruce’s death in 1329 at his house at Cardross, which we have (however fancifully rendered) from his late ­fourteenth-century biographer John Barbour, stands as testament to his achievements despite severe disability in later life caused by leprosy and the physical hardships of a lifetime of intense fighting. Flanked at his deathbed by a substantial collection of the most powerful men of the kingdom, Bruce chose one, Sir James Douglas, to take his heart on crusade to the Holy Land. Both Bruce’s heart and Douglas made it only as far as



Kingship, Power and the Making of a Myth 29

Grenada before Douglas was killed during the battle of Teba. Bruce’s heart was returned to Scotland for interment at Melrose Abbey, where in 1996 an archaeological excavation uncovered the lead container in which his heart was probably enclosed. Yet, as successful as Robert Bruce’s kingship was, his death in 1329 considerably weakened domestic and international affairs, for his son, David II, acceded the throne as a minor. David II and two of his surviving older sisters, Matilda and Margaret, were the children of Robert I’s second marriage. He had one further older half-sister, Marjorie, who was the daughter of Robert’s first wife, and this relationship would have a lasting role in negotiating the Scottish succession. Through Marjorie’s marriage to Walter the Steward, their son, Robert, who succeeded his father as Steward in 1327, would have considerable significance over the course of the fourteenth century. In 1318 the two-year-old toddler Robert became one of the most important figures in the kingdom when he was named as heir apparent to Robert I, in the event that Bruce failed to produce a direct male heir. The Steward was eight when David, his uncle and the future king, was born. In 1326 he once again came to prominence when the death of David’s younger twin brother, John, saw Robert named as heir to David by entail. As such, for much of the fourteenth century, Robert the Steward was but one death or one birth from the throne. He was influential in the governance of the kingdom, particularly during David II’s absence in France when he acted as king’s lieutenant and maintained David’s – and, of course, his own – interest in the throne. Although David had acceded to the throne in 1329, there was some delay in the coronation ceremony, which did not take place until 1331. At this time, David became the first Scottish monarch to be anointed, a momentous occasion following the tensions that had existed with the papacy during his father’s reign. Still a minor, David and his young wife Joan were removed from the events of the years following Robert I’s death and were kept first at Dumbarton and then from May 1334 in France, where they were received by Philip VI of France

30

power and propaganda

(1328–50) and given refuge at Château Gaillard in Normandy, the impressive crusader-inspired castle built in 1196 for Richard the Lionheart and captured by Philip II of France in 1204. The removal of the young king and queen to France was to ensure their safekeeping, especially as the events of 1332 and the resurgence of the Balliol threat endangered the king. In 1332 Edward Balliol, the son of John Balliol, erstwhile king of Scots, with the support of Edward III of England, had taken advantage of the king’s minority and the weakened political situation in Scotland. After defeating David’s supporters at the battle of Dupplin Moor, Edward Balliol contrived to be crowned at Scone in September 1332, after which a series of conflicts and struggles for power ensued. Just three months after being crowned, during an attack by David II’s supporters at Annan, Edward Balliol was forced to flee back to England in a shameful state of semi-nudity. Nevertheless, after the defeat of the Scots at the battle of Halidon Hill in July the following year, Edward Balliol was restored to the throne by the English, whereupon Balliol paid homage to Edward III and ceded Lothian to him. More instability ensued: Balliol was again deposed by the Scots in 1334, restored again by the English in 1335, and finally deposed by Brucean loyalists in 1336. David’s return to Scotland with Joan in 1341 to commence his personal rule, at the behest of his nephew and lieutenant Robert the Steward, underlined the termination of any hope that Edward Balliol may have held for restoration. In what is now referred to as his first reign, 1341–6, David concentrated on restoring the mechanics of government and financial order, confirming land rights and convening parliaments and councils. He also faced challenges from the difficult behaviour of the nobles who sought privilege and office: Sir William Douglas of Liddesdale, for example, who desired the office of sheriff of Teviotdale, simply captured the incumbent sheriff, Sir Alexander Ramsay, and starved him to death in order to seize the post for himself. David II’s debt to Philip VI of France was repaid by several invasions of England (for England and France were now engaged in the bitter conflicts of the



Kingship, Power and the Making of a Myth 31

Hundred Years War), one of which was particularly disastrous and resulted in David’s capture (and a couple of arrows lodged in his head) at the battle of Neville’s Cross in 1346. David spent the next eleven years in English captivity, chiefly at the Tower of London, but he was paraded at some notable events including the Order of the Garter’s foundation celebrations at Windsor on St George’s Day in 1348, shortly before the Black Death arrived in the British Isles. At that same time, negotiations commenced with Edward III for David’s release, but Edward’s demands were too costly: he insisted that the king of Scots should hold Scotland as a fief from the king of England. Moreover, Edward wanted provision for succession by the king of England or his son, should David die without an heir. Once again succession was a keen determining factor in Anglo-Scottish relations. Furthermore, in what was to become a sign of things to come, Queen Joan resolutely refused to visit David in England, despite the Scots’ successful negotiations in arranging a conjugal visit to assist in the production of a Bruce heir. In the early 1350s the captive David himself successfully petitioned for a modification of these English demands and he secured an agreement that the Scottish succession would go to one of Edward’s sons, on the proviso that this son was not also an heir to the English crown. This was a significant improvement in the negotiation of the terms of his release, for the object here was to ensure that Scotland was maintained as a separate kingdom. David was temporarily released to put the formal offer to the Scots in 1351–2. This met with considerable resistance at home, for aside from a general objection to an English succession there was an additional problem. Under the entail of 1326 Robert the Steward, now lieutenant in David’s absence, was in line to succeed to the throne on the king’s death. The political community in Scotland favoured this outcome and David’s proposal was consequently rejected. He returned to English captivity, to be released in return for a ransom in 1357 (after another failed effort at negotiation in 1354) as Edward’s successes in France, especially at Poitiers, and the capture of John II of France (1350–64) weakened the Scottish position.

32

power and propaganda

David’s ‘second reign’ commenced rather badly. Still without an heir he suffered from the fundamental weakness that came with a lack of dynastic security. He further alienated his queen by returning from England with a mistress, Katherine Mortimer. Insult was added to injury, for David flaunted his relationship with Katherine and gave her access to power and an exalted position within his household. Within a year the offended Joan retreated to England, remaining estranged from David until her death in 1362, despite the treacherous murder of Katherine in 1360. In 1363 David married Margaret Drummond, but they divorced without issue in 1369. He was in negotiations for a third marriage to Agnes Dunbar when he died in 1371. Like kings before and after, at the heart of David II’s policies and politics was the urgent and acute issue of succession; in this regard David was utterly unsuccessful in securing the Bruce line. Succession issues plagued his reign and he was a hostage to many marital and natal misfortunes. By a combination of circumstance and the very real possibility of his own infertility, David had failed to produce issue; a Bruce son and heir had not been forthcoming and the line ended. Robert the Steward had played his own hand skilfully and done sufficient manoeuvring to preserve the validity of the 1326 entail. On the accession of Robert there was an immediate effort to secure the Stewart dynasty and ensure the widespread acknowledgement of its legitimacy and authority. The first parliament of Robert II’s reign (1371–90), held immediately following his coronation at Scone in March 1371, was evidently intended to establish the dynastic line. Here Robert secured approval of an entail reflecting standard customs of primogeniture, which not only served to ensure the Stewarts’ position as the Scottish royal dynasty, but also helped to reduce opportunities for conflict of the sort witnessed in David II’s reign. Once the entail was sanctioned, a second phase of embedding the Stewart dynasty followed. This concentrated on documenting and creating Stewart lineage, history and iconography and other forms of dynastic propaganda, with the principal aim of establishing Robert II’s family on the throne and without challenge.



Kingship, Power and the Making of a Myth 33

First and foremost Robert II sought to emphasise his direct relationship with his grandfather, Robert I, whose successes had already achieved something of a foundational status in the kingdom. This connection was capitalised upon by the commissioning of a narrative history of Robert I’s life and achievements during the Anglo-Scottish Wars of Independence, an epic poem of 14,000 lines of octosyllabic rhyming couplets known as The Bruce. The poem was met with great acclaim during the lifetime of the author, John Barbour, archdeacon of Aberdeen. The Bruce’s significance to Scots, then and since, is that of a national epic, to be likened, for example, to that of Homer’s Iliad to the Greeks, Virgil’s Aeneid to the Romans, and the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi to the Iranians. Barbour appears to have been appointed to furnish the Stewart dynasty with a suite of history, mythology and documentation of their legitimacy to possess the throne and their authority to rule. In addition to The Bruce, which survives in two manuscripts from the late fifteenth century, Barbour compiled a genealogical history of Robert II, an increasingly popular mode of princely propaganda throughout Europe from the fourteenth century. This genealogy traced Robert’s ancestry back beyond the line of British kings descended from Brutus and claimed a direct relationship with the Welsh royal house through the Stewart ancestor Walter fitz Allan, suggesting that he was the son of a Welsh princess. In this significant genealogical gambit, Barbour hitched the Stewarts’ wagon to the historical framework of the British Isles that favoured the matter of Britain, that is, to the Arthurian tradition. Indeed, from the end of the Wars of Independence the dynastic propaganda of both the Bruce and Stewart dynasties placed a great deal of emphasis on an imagined Scottish connection to Arthur in order to press claims to British sovereignty as a defence against the same claims from the English crown. Robert II, of course, was experienced in the art of politics of lineage and succession and had long been in the habit of drawing connections between himself and his grandfather, forwarding his own claim to the Scottish throne. Following David II’s capture at the battle of Neville’s Cross in 1346, for instance, Robert the

34

power and propaganda

Steward used parliamentary bodies to pursue policies to delay the king’s return. In the general council at Dundee in May 1351, called to debate the latest offer of an English succession to the Scottish throne in return for David II’s release, the Steward successfully evoked the memory of Robert I’s hard-won victories, relying – astutely, as it turned out – on inherent anti-Englishness to further his own cause. In addition to the establishment of the arsenal of Stewart propaganda, Robert II also fought to increase the financial stability and effectiveness of the crown. Grants of land, office and title by Robert II to the Scottish nobility were combined with networks of obligation formed through the careful contracting of marriage alliances, including with his own daughters. Income was raised not only through the vast ancestral lands that the king brought with him, but also by a boom in Scottish wool exports that enabled Robert to distribute his patronage with generosity. Nevertheless, Robert II’s family relations were strained by a growing rivalry between the king and his son, John, earl of Carrick. These tensions manifested themselves in periodic flashes of violence, including the assassination of key members of Robert II’s household by Carrick’s retainers. By 1384 Carrick was able to challenge his father on two counts: first, Robert II’s failure to fulfil his kingly obligations as military leader, and second, his reluctance to tame and check the behaviour of the Wolf of Badenoch (Carrick’s younger brother) in the north of the kingdom. As a result, Carrick forced his father to surrender control of justice to him and he became guardian of the kingdom. This was, nevertheless, to be a short-lived success, as Carrick in turn was declared incapable and was forced to surrender the guardianship to his brother, Robert, earl of Fife and Menteith. The sidelining of Carrick was the consequence of both poor political decision-making following the death of the second earl of Douglas, Carrick’s closest ally, at Otterburn in 1388, and his physical incapacity, the result of an injury by a horse around the same time. On Robert II’s death in 1390 a tense situation was created in



Kingship, Power and the Making of a Myth 35

the political community between those who favoured the rightful heir to the throne, John, earl of Carrick – who had already been declared incapable as guardian – and his brother, Robert, earl of Fife, who had for several years demonstrated his abilities as royal lieutenant. The result was that Carrick succeeded to the title (Robert III, 1390–1406), but Fife retained his powers as guardian. It has been argued that Carrick’s change of name from John to Robert was the result of a desire to distance himself from the problematic reign of John Balliol, and thereby avoided the question of whether to assume the title ‘John I or John II’. This was particularly pertinent as the Bruce and Stewart families had consistently denigrated Balliol’s claim to the throne during the fourteenth century. In choosing Robert as his regnal assignation, Carrick also sought to harness the Brucean legacy established by his father. There are several other indications that Robert III had a strong sense of his kingship and his role in securing the Stewart dynasty. For example, he departed entirely from the hitherto standard monarchic profile portraiture on the Scottish coinage to a front-facing, defiant stare that remained the standard Stewart style until later in James III’s reign. Perhaps predictably, given the inauspicious start to his reign, Robert III’s kingship has been characterised as weak and ineffective, and his reign beset with hostilities and problems caused by the political ambitions of his magnates, which resulted in unrest, violence and instability. This view is not without its detractors and recent scholarship setting the reign in its economic, diplomatic and political contexts has demonstrated that the political community during Robert III’s reign was able to achieve cohesion and productivity through guardianships, which avoided the need for recourse to political violence or deposition of the king. Indeed, the Scots favoured guardianships as a solution because they buttressed the royal house rather than exposed its weaknesses, thereby encouraging stability. Robert’s son, David, duke of Rothesay (from 1398), was appointed royal lieutenant from 1399 to govern with the advice of a council headed up by his uncle, Robert, earl of Fife, now duke of Albany. Within two years Rothesay and Albany were

36

power and propaganda

at loggerheads over Rothesay’s uncontrollable behaviour. The near-contemporary chronicler Walter Bower informs us that the crisis of 1401 was precipitated by both Rothesay’s rejection of the constraints placed upon him by his supervisors and his aggressive, disobedient reactions to the council and Albany’s control. The dispute was not ended until Albany seized Rothesay, arranging for his arrest on the outskirts of St Andrews by members of Rothesay’s own household, and he was shortly thereafter imprisoned in the nearby Falkland Castle. In March 1402, in highly suspicious circumstances, Rothesay died in the Falkland’s dungeons. The approved version of events was that Rothesay had died of dysentery; it now seems most probable that he was starved to death. Indeed, the indemnity that Albany and his supporters sought from the general council that May for their actions in Rothesay’s capture and imprisonment suggests an element of culpability and the terms of their pardon indicate accusations of murder were being forcefully represented. Robert III withdrew from public life and Albany was reappointed as lieutenant. Despite the fairly grim atmosphere that must have dominated the political world of the early years of the fifteenth century, there was a star shining brightly for the Stewarts from 1404 in the form of the younger brother of the aggrieved Rothesay, James, now earl of Carrick and heir to the throne. James emerged as a figurehead for those loyal to Robert III and soon acted as a beacon to which crown supporters flocked. Nevertheless, there was an incident in February 1406 in which Sir David Fleming, one of Prince James’s principal guardians, was killed by an Albany supporter, Sir James Douglas of Balvenie. This was the final straw that led to Robert III’s decision to send Prince James to France for safekeeping; as the heir to the throne, in a climate where dissent was growing against a king already considered to be incapable, and where one heir had already been quietly dispatched, the decision to protect the young prince until his position was more secure was a measured one. Nevertheless, the physical removal of Prince James was not a success. Not only did James fail to arrive in France, he was not even out of



Kingship, Power and the Making of a Myth 37

Scotland before he was captured by English pirates off the Bass Rock, a small rocky island in the Firth of Forth, and delivered to the court of the king of England, Henry IV (1399–1413). This event, and its consequences, had the single most significant impact upon Scottish politics over the next half-century and it entirely changed the dynamics of Stewart kingship. Prince James was soon the uncrowned king, when his father died of the proverbial broken heart within days of hearing the news of James’s capture. James was held as a political prisoner, but this captivity was not as we might understand imprisonment today. Henry IV showed due recognition and respect to James’s royal status and young age; he took the opportunity to develop what might become a mutually beneficial relationship between the two crowns in the future by training James in the art of kingship and allowing him access to the benefits of life at court. But James’s life was still fairly uncomfortable as a prisoner and we hear from fellow captive, his cousin Murdoch Stewart, son of the duke of Albany, that his ‘rotten and worn out’ mattress and blankets ‘had not been renewed for two years’. Ongoing negotiations for his release never came to fruition. On the domestic front James’s uncle Robert, duke of Albany, wielded enough power as regent to satisfy his own ambitions and he had little genuine desire to undertake or assist in campaigns to see the release of the uncrowned king of Scots. Domestic friction was never severe enough to cause major disruption: minor Albany and Douglas wrangling for position in the south of Scotland was of most concern. The Douglases invested considerable energy into building a relationship with James, assuming that his eventual release and return would benefit them directly, which of course it did. James was in captivity for eighteen years during which time Henry IV died and his son, Henry V, ascended the throne. This had a considerable impact upon the way in which the Scottish royal prisoner was treated, and within a few years he was permitted to enjoy life at the English court, effectively under ‘house arrest’. His treatment now accorded to his status and we find him, for example, at the coronation of Catherine de Valois in

38

power and propaganda

February 1421 seated immediately to her left, indicative not only of his royal status in relation to other guests, but also of his position at Henry V’s court. The English king’s influence on James was profound, and there is no question that he was inspired by Henry V’s style of kingship, blossoming into a young man of remarkable ability through observing Henry in close proximity and under the tutelage of those at the English court. This was, in effect, an apprenticeship during a key phase of Henry V’s own kingship, as the English king was establishing his own authority after his father’s death by measures including a prestigious marriage to secure Lancastrian succession and long periods leading his army on campaign in the wars in France. James himself was taken on campaign by Henry, thereby acquiring a quite different experience of France than he would have had if his voyage in 1406 not been interrupted. In France, Henry was able to use his Scottish prisoner to great effect and in doing so revealed his political shrewdness: in an incident at Melun, where Scottish troops working for the dauphin were besieged for several months, Henry used James to intimidate the Scots and demanded that the Scottish king authorise their execution. If it seems a particularly cruel act to force the king of Scots to carry out, it also demonstrates that James was, by this stage, pragmatic, decisive and confident. Here was the first glimpse of James’s unsentimental ruthlessness. It was a quality which, on his return to Scotland a few years later, would radically alter the political landscape. James I’s release in early 1424 was brought about by the sudden dip in his political value to the new minority reign of Henry VI, occasioned by the death of Henry V near Paris in 1422. The release was a carefully orchestrated affair. Several dozen hostages were offered in exchange for the Scottish king and a substantial ransom repayment was agreed. This was an exceptional opportunity for the returning king. With the advice of loyal supporters in Scotland, James was able to reshape completely the political community before he set foot in the kingdom by removing potential opponents, transacting agreements with others where he could gain control, and shifting the balance



Kingship, Power and the Making of a Myth 39

of power in the kingdom to suit his own agenda. In effect this opportunity enabled James to hand-select a substantial number of supporters within the remaining political community and ensure a smooth transition in reasserting his authority as the enthroned king of Scots. There can be no doubt that this contributed to his success. The return was in every way both a new proclamation of confident kingship and a reassertion of Stewart dynastic security. This security – or at least promise of security – was achieved by the important step taken prior to leaving London: his marriage to Joan Beaufort, the granddaughter of John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford, at Southwark Cathedral. Although James’s own voice records his love for the queen in his poem The Kingis Quair, reminiscing fondly of her captivating his heart as he first saw her from his prison in the Tower of London, the marriage was significant for political and dynastic reasons. Joan’s father, John Beaufort, earl of Somerset, was the eldest of the Beaufort children who had been legally barred from succession to the throne of England upon their declaration of legitimacy in 1396. This made Joan an ideal match for the Scottish king. She was of royal blood and, while her issue would have no claim to the throne of England, they would nevertheless retain a Lancastrian link. That the marriage took place prior to James’s return was, from the Scottish viewpoint, essential, not only for reducing the ransom cost by off-setting Joan’s dowry, but also as the immediate prospect of the conception of an heir gave the possibility of quickly securing the Stewart succession, giving stability to the throne. With this taken care of, James was free to concentrate on asserting his control over the kingdom. His coronation was a clear statement of his intention to bring as many of the remaining nobility under his power as possible. Henry Wardlaw, bishop of St Andrews, conducted the coronation and James was installed upon the throne by Murdoch Stewart, duke of Albany, by the right of his privilege as the earl of Fife. Both Walter Bower’s chronicle and the later Liber Pluscardensis record that the central focus of the ceremony was the en masse dubbing to

40

power and propaganda

knighthood of around twenty to twenty-five prominent members of the Scottish nobility and the active political community. This was a calculated attempt to bring an impressive collection of some of the most powerful and prominent aristocratic and noble families in Scotland under crown control and to underscore James’s royal authority over them. Most of James’s subsequent efforts focused on the removal of his remaining political opponents, especially the Albany Stewarts who had governed the kingdom in his absence. The king also ensured loyalty through the careful layering of a variety of bonds and obligations between himself and the political community. Complicity in arranging the execution of the Albany Stewarts (for although there was a trial in parliament it would be naïve to believe their fate was not predetermined), being spared from family members acting as hostages, the gift of honours, land grants and dubbings to knighthood all contributed to form a cohesive empowering of the king and enabled him to consolidate effectively his rule. Nowhere was this method of ensuring loyalty thrown into sharper relief than at the baptism of his twin sons born in 1430 – Alexander and James – who brought double the chances of dynastic security by an increased chance that one of them at least would survive to adulthood. Proof of potent virility and a boost in dynastic confidence ensured the baptism was the focal point of expressions of political relationships and the bestowal of patronage. James chose to dub his baby sons alongside the young sons of prominent Lothian barons, as well as the son of a Roman dignitary in attendance, thereby ensuring the loyalty of the fathers and their children to him and the future king. Although James I did not deny a Brucean legacy in his assertions of royal power, during his reign a Stewart dynastic authority was consolidated, independent of its Brucean heritage. Here was a sure sign of confidence, as the Stewarts moved from appropriating and identifying with pre-existing myths and symbols of legitimacy to confecting and establishing their own. James introduced his own symbols of royal authority, notably the unicorn, which quickly developed as a royal emblem and became part of the Stewart arsenal of iconography. A new



Kingship, Power and the Making of a Myth 41

Unicorn Pursuivant, an officer of the crown, was created as a reflection of this new royal symbol. In this way it is possible to support the contention that from 1424 there was a different style of kingship in Scotland, but one which did value and retain links to the past. Nevertheless, James’s reign and leadership was not without its problems. In his quest for political dominance, for example, he had relentlessly pursued the Lord of the Isles and subjected Lord Alexander to the humiliation of paying homage to him, stripped down to his underclothes. His frequent requests for increased taxation to finance military campaigns and elaborate expressions of his royal power in grand building works embittered members of the political community. The disastrous siege of Roxburgh in 1436, brought about by a lapse that spring of the Anglo-Scottish alliance and the evocation of the Auld Alliance by Charles VII of France (1428–61), made an increasingly hostile situation worse. The king appointed his young cousin Sir Robert Stewart of Atholl as the constable of the host ahead of the earl of Douglas and the earl of Angus, vastly more experienced march wardens. The defeat at Roxburgh was thus a turning point in his reign for it represented a reversal in his royal authority and cast a shadow over his foreign policy and relations. James’s increasingly aggressive and uncompromising kingship caused political tensions throughout his reign that eventually resulted in his assassination in 1437 at the hands of a disaffected faction led by his uncle Walter Stewart, earl of Atholl. According to a contemporary account of the event by an English writer, John Shirley, the conspirators included the king’s own chamberlain, cousin and favourite, Sir Robert Stewart, who was also the grandson of Walter, earl of Atholl. Stewart left the doors to the king’s chamber at the Blackfriars in Perth unlocked and ensured a clear path for the assassins to enter the king’s lodgings. Queen Joan was seriously injured and the king was killed. What is perhaps most remarkable about James I’s assassination is that there was no consequent attempt to usurp the throne: instead the rather conservative political community, incensed by the shock of the regicide, and led by the queen

42

power and propaganda

mother’s anxiety over any threat towards her son, now James II (1437–60), pursued the assassins and arranged for their public and very gruesome execution on the High Street in Edinburgh in May of that year. James II’s accession as a minor brought with it a short period of confused administration, weakened political authority and widespread disorder. Administrative authority soon rested on the shoulders of James II’s nearest kinsman (and a grandson of Robert III) Archibald, fifth earl of Douglas, as regent working alongside the king’s council. From May 1439 James, his mother and his sisters remained entrenched at Edinburgh Castle under the supervision of the Keeper of the Castle and Chancellor of Scotland, Sir William Crichton. On the death of the earl of Douglas in June of that same year, the young king became the object of a tussle for power between the Crichtons, the Douglases and the Livingstons: the king was taken into the custody of the Livingstons at Stirling from September 1439, but was later kidnapped by Crichton and returned to Edinburgh. Possession of the king brought with it immeasurable control over the kingdom and it was the fastest route to power during a minority reign. Crichton soon conspired with Sir Alexander Livingston of Callendar and Sir James Douglas, earl of Avondale, to orchestrate the Black Dinner of 1440, where he enticed the young William Douglas, sixth earl (and a nephew of Avondale) to dine with the ten-year-old king. During the meal Crichton is alleged to have served Douglas with the head of a bull, a symbol of impending death, whereupon William and his only other brother David were marched to the castle hill and executed on trumped up charges of treason. The convenient dispatch of the Douglas brothers went unchallenged by the political community and allowed the comital title of earl of Douglas to fall to the earl of Avondale; his son William Douglas became the eighth earl in 1443. Over the next few years the Douglases and Livingstons co-operated in retaining control of the king and steadily undermining Crichton’s position and authority, resulting first in the forced removal of Crichton from the chancellorship in 1444 and putting down his rebellion the following summer when he occu-



Kingship, Power and the Making of a Myth 43

pied Edinburgh Castle, followed by casting the queen mother out of Scottish political life. During an effort to garner support, Joan died at Dunbar in 1445. William Crichton was not sidelined by the Livingstons and Douglases for long. He returned to the chancellorship in 1447, on the cusp of James’s majority, at the point when negotiations commenced to find the king a suitable bride. The net was cast widely, for the range of contacts the Scottish kingdom had in foreign courts was considerable: over the latter years of James I’s reign and the years of James’s minority all six of his sisters had been sent abroad to be married. James II’s status in European politics was significantly advanced by the high-status marriage negotiations of his sisters. Indeed, much of the European successes of the Stewart dynasty in the mid-fifteenth century can be traced to the number of royal women of marriageable age, who offered an excellent pedigree with prestigious bloodlines. In 1436 James I’s eldest daughter, Margaret, who was ‘a handsome and good lady’ with a ‘very lovely face’, had been married to Louis, dauphin of France; in 1441 John V, duke of Brittany, successfully approached the Scottish crown for the hand of Isabella for his son Francis, count of Montfort; Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, arranged the marriage of his admiral’s son, Wolfaert von Borselen, to the third sister, Mary, in 1444; in the same year Annabella was betrothed to Louis, count of Geneva, although the marriage never took place; and in 1447 Charles VII of France negotiated for the marriage of James’s fourth sister, Eleanor, to Sigismund, duke of Austria. James II’s status through this array of marital and familial ties was significantly advanced and in 1448 negotiations began with Charles VII and the duke of Burgundy for his own betrothal. This resulted in a match being made with the duke of Burgundy’s great-niece, Mary of Guelders, who in July 1449 married James at Holyrood Abbey in Edinburgh. A marriage of this calibre suited both the Burgundians and the Scots and it cemented the good relations between Scotland and Flanders, who were already enjoying significant trading links. As part of the host of gifts that were exchanged in these marriage negotiations, Philip the Good

44

power and propaganda

ordered the making of the great cannon Mons Meg to gift to James II, which was dispatched with great fanfare eight years later in 1457 and still sits today on the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle. From the mid-1440s James had started to take a more involved role in the governance of the realm, and after his marriage in 1449 he began to rule personally. Emerging from a long and at times fraught minority, James II had much work to do when he finally took control. Not only did he need to assert his authority over those nobles who had been steadily gaining power, but he also faced the challenge of imposing his own style of kingship. James I had sought to govern firmly and to introduce parliamentary and fiscal methods similar to those used in England; James II also set about building the Scottish polity on models derived from England and the Continent. By his aggressive campaigning against some of the families who were prominent during his minority, emphasising service and loyalty through patronage, and exploiting English weakness in a time of domestic unrest, James II’s reign can thus be seen firmly in the context of emerging English and European trends, built around processes of monarchical consolidation and dynastic aggrandisement. The young king perceived himself to be a powerful ruler and sought to build appropriate infrastructures of royal government, aiming to provide a royal focal point for service and loyalty, to establish territorial control, to build up and consolidate systems of government, and to cement his place in European politics. The royal ceremonies and pageants of James II’s reign served to bolster the position of the crown at the centre of Scottish political, social and cultural life. This was further evinced in the physical settings where these events took place. James II placed a new emphasis on the importance of Edinburgh, and particularly Holyrood. The king was born, crowned and married at Holyrood and he spent his childhood predominantly in Edinburgh Castle. His desire to capitalise on his personal history and establish Edinburgh as the centre of royal power was natural, and it was from here that he conducted the bulk of



Kingship, Power and the Making of a Myth 45

his administration. James II was also concerned with the more physical challenge of establishing territorial control. The attacks he conducted against the powerful Scottish magnates in the south sought to reduce their control over the localities and to bring their lands under royal jurisdiction. Indeed, James ensured when he redistributed lands that there was never a resulting concentration of power in any one area. To be sustained, territorial control in the late middle ages had to be combined with an effective system of government. In the Spanish kingdoms and England this meant broad representation at frequent parliaments and the devolution of a range of fiscal, judicial and legislative functions. James II’s parliament, which met at least annually, was called more frequently than its English counterpart. There was also a new status of lord of parliament, which had been adopted by individual noblemen in the 1430s and 1440s. This title was formally recognised by the crown from 1445, at precisely the point at which the king began to take a real interest in the affairs of the realm. James plainly saw the value of reinforcing the status and position of men he could trust or from whom he wished to garner support; in the parliament of June 1452, four months after James II had murdered William, eighth earl of Douglas in hot blood at a court feast, three men were raised to earldoms and seven new lords of parliament were created. After 1452, to consolidate his authority, James made regular perambulations of the realm, fitting his travels to the schedule of justice ayres, during which crown vassals used the opportunity to confirm their tenure. Coincident with similar trends in Europe, James’s attempts to establish royal authority necessarily went hand-in-hand with attempts to harness and expand military power. In particular, James developed quite a passion for the new artillery, the boys’ toys of fifteenth-century Europe. In 1449, for example, he received a large amount of armour, weapons and gunpowder artillery as part of Mary of Guelders’s dowry. As part of his attack on Douglas power in the south of Scotland, he imported cannons from Burgundy specifically for the siege of Threave in 1455. At this time the king and his army were in the mood for

46

power and propaganda

war, and James exploited the southward focus of English attentions after the battle of St Albans in May 1455 and a new bout of insanity in Henry VI of England. The parliament of October 1455 was intensely anti-English in its outlook, and from November of that year James started aggressive, offensive action against England, with the recovery of Berwick as his primary goal. After bellicose exchanges with the duke of York, James II was the first to take to the field and made a series of raids into Northumberland in 1456. He had assiduously cultivated his martial agenda in the kingdom and it was evidently conceived of as a campaign in which the whole realm was obliged to participate. In August 1456 the space at Greenside in Edinburgh was reassigned for martial training and parliament legislated for the arming of all men throughout the kingdom. Wapinschawings were ordered on a regular basis and in March 1457 football and golf were banned in order to focus upon preparations for war. James’s kingdom was thus placed on a war footing and encouraged to view England as ‘the enemy’. This deliberate resuscitation of anti-English sentiment would have a lasting legacy across the remainder of the century and beyond. James II’s position and some of his confidence in early 1452 were no doubt inspired by the impending birth of his child and the dynastic security that this would bring. Much hope was invested in this pregnancy as Mary’s first child had died during birth in May 1450. A son, James, was born in May 1452 at Bishop James Kennedy’s episcopal castle of St Andrews, a relatively safe location compared with Stirling at that time. James would be the eldest of six children. He had three brothers: Alexander, duke of Albany and earl of March (b. 1454?, d. 1485), David, earl of Moray (b. c. 1456, d. 1457), and John, earl of Mar (b. 1457?, d. c. 1480); and two sisters: Mary (b. 1453) and Margaret (b. c. 1460). James III was the first Scottish king since the fourteenth century to grow up with brothers close to him in age and this, it has been argued, had a crucial effect on the events of his adult rule. Despite a tumult in Edinburgh following the accidental death of James II in 1460 at the siege of Roxburgh, when he was killed



Kingship, Power and the Making of a Myth 47

by one of his own cannons breaking and backfiring, James III’s reign began with promise. Indeed, within a decade the foreign policy goals set by James II had been achieved, particularly the discussions for James III’s marriage to Margaret, the daughter of Christian I of Denmark-Norway (1449–81). The Boyd family, who would in 1466 wrest control of the king’s person, were integral to the success of negotiations for the Treaty of Copenhagen of 1468, by which it was agreed that James III would marry Margaret. As Christian’s financial situation did not allow him to pay his daughter’s dowry of 60,000 Rhenish florins, the earldom of Orkney and the lordship of Shetland were pawned to make up the required sum, thereby giving Scotland its own empire and James III the impetus to claim imperial iconography and to harbour further imperial ambitions. The marriage took place at Holyrood on 13 July 1469, a date often ascribed to the beginning of something approaching the independent Scotland (1469–1707) which the modern nationalist movement idealises. In the immediate aftermath of James II’s death in 1460, domestic and Anglo-Scottish foreign policy was maintained by Mary of Guelders, the queen mother, who showed a remarkable aptitude for foreign affairs and pursued her late husband’s policy of manipulating the domestic problems in England between the houses of Lancaster and York to achieve gains in the Scottish borders. In 1461, for example, Mary gave temporary refuge to the fugitive Lancastrian rulers Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou, and thereby acquired Berwick through fierce negotiations. Although the contemporary Burgundian chronicler Georges Chastellain was convinced that Margaret of Anjou had a miserable time in exile in Scotland, records show that her treatment was actually rather generous. Mary of Guelders was astute and she was quick to change to Yorkist allegiance when Edward IV (1461–70; 1471–83) emerged as victor. This put her at odds with her principal rival for control of government, James Kennedy, bishop of St Andrews, who had an unfaltering pro-Lancastrian stance. However, Kennedy reluctantly accepted the need for a long truce with Yorkist England in 1464–5 after acquiring total control of James III’s person on the death of

48

power and propaganda

Mary of Guelders in 1463. Kennedy’s influence on James was positive but short-lived: he took the king on a progress as far as Inverness to see his kingdom and he instructed James in good domestic policy. In his adult reign James appeared to have learned none of the lessons taught by his guardian and he must have seemed a remote and aloof figure who did not personally attend royal justice ayres even as close as Haddington, Peebles, Perth, Selkirk, Cupar, Stirling or Ayr, and who on the whole confined himself to Edinburgh, from where he conducted virtually all royal business. Kennedy’s death in May 1465 opened up a bid for the king’s person, and the Kennedys lost possession of the king in 1466 when a group of magnates led by the Boyd family seized James III while he was out hunting near Linlithgow. The architect of this bloodless coup was Robert, Lord Boyd, and the group was headed by his brother, Sir Alexander Boyd of Drumcoll, keeper of Edinburgh Castle and the king’s household chamberlain. James III was immediately installed in Edinburgh Castle. The Boyds used their control of the king to obtain parliamentary ratification of their actions, as well as promotions, including chamberlain and keeper of the principal royal castles for Lord Boyd, and governor of the king’s person and his brothers until the king should reach twenty-one. Lord Boyd also hurriedly raised his eldest son Thomas to earl of Arran and arranged his marriage to the king’s elder sister Mary, much to the protestation of the young king who, in a letter to Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy in the early 1470s, described how he had wept with despair at their wedding. On the marriage of James III to Margaret of Denmark in 1469, Arran and Mary Stewart fled from Scotland to Bruges and were later joined by Robert, Lord Boyd. In a full assembly of parliament in November 1469, the Boyds were forfeited for treason for their acts in 1466 and Sir Alexander Boyd of Drumcoll, who had perhaps imprudently stayed in Scotland, was beheaded. James III, at the age of seventeen, had come of age and in this act took control of his government. The early years of James III’s adult rule were focused on



Kingship, Power and the Making of a Myth 49

consolidating his imperial ambitions now that he had acquired Orkney and Shetland. In 1474 this culminated in a diplomatic volte-face in his foreign schemes and an abandonment of the Franco-Scottish alliance (which was not reinstated until 1484). Instead James III pursued a treaty and marriage alliance with Edward IV of England, to provide for the marriage of James’s son and heir, the future James IV (b. 1473), and Edward IV’s third daughter Cecily (b. 1469). In the meantime, the treaty paid dividends through annual instalments of Cecily’s dowry, amounting to around 2,000 marks each year. With the exception of the Anglo-Scottish war of 1480–2, James pursued a policy of peace with England for the duration of his reign. But the events of 1480–2 had a significant impact: the war negated the marriage agreement and, although the English crown continued at first to pay the instalments of the Scottish dowry, this ceased immediately when, by the Treaty of Fotheringhay on 11 June 1482, Cecily was betrothed to the exiled younger brother of the Scottish king, Alexander Stewart, duke of Albany, who maintained his own ambitions directed firmly towards the Scottish throne. The Treaty of Fotheringhay had significant consequences. Alexander, duke of Albany was immediately sent by Edward IV to invade Scotland, along with Richard, duke of Gloucester and a substantial army. Gloucester returned – ­victorious – with a bond from the merchants of Edinburgh who agreed to repay the dowry instalments, and the muchcontested town of Berwick-upon-Tweed was recaptured. The marriage with Prince James was formally cancelled, although Cecily’s marriage to the duke of Albany did not take place for two reasons. The first was that the Edward IV’s death affected the marriage prospects of his daughters and the second was that Albany was killed in Paris during a joust in late summer 1485. New opportunities for negotiation with England arose with the succession of Richard III in 1483 in unusual circumstances, for Edward IV had died in April and his twelve-year-old son – Edward V – succeeded, only to be publicly declared illegitimate before his coronation could take place. Edward then mysteriously disappeared along with his brother, neither of whom was

50

power and propaganda

ever seen in public again: the story of the Princes in the Tower has captured the hearts of generations since. In 1484 a marriage treaty was agreed at Nottingham to conclude hostilities continuing from the formal end of the war in 1482, which saw an agreement for the future James IV (1488–1513) to marry Anne de la Pole, niece of Richard III. With Richard’s defeat and death at Bosworth in 1485, the new Tudor dynasty had its own diplomatic agenda and ambitions. In 1486, a marriage was agreed with James III between the future James IV and an unspecified daughter of Edward IV. As Henry VII (1485–1509) had himself in that year married the eldest daughter of Edward IV, Elizabeth of York, this was a way of ensuring ties by marriage to the successful Stewart dynasty. A much fuller contract was drawn up in November 1487, which arranged for the marriage of Catherine of York to James Stewart, marquis of Ormond and soon-to-be duke of Ross. James III himself was promised the rather strange choice of the much older Elizabeth Woodville for his bride, Catherine’s mother and the widow of Edward IV. One of her daughters, unspecified in the treaty but probably with Anne in mind, was promised to the future James IV of Scotland. On the death of James III at the battle of Sauchieburn in 1488, this agreement was effectively nullified and James IV did not pursue it further, eventually going on in 1503 to marry Margaret Tudor, Henry VII’s daughter, and laying the foundation for the union of the crowns of England and Scotland in 1603. One might be inclined to daydream about the history of Scotland had the duke of Albany been successful in his attempted usurpation of the throne in 1482–4. Certainly Alexander IV would have been a very different king to James III, but perhaps the march of time would have varied little. What pondering such outcomes serves to illustrate is the importance of succession to medieval kings and political communities, for unstable dynasties fractured social cohesion and undermined power and authority. It is quite remarkable that the Bruce and Stewart lines remained comparatively strong during these centuries, despite absentee monarchs and lengthy minorities. This attests not only to the strong value the Scottish political community placed on



Kingship, Power and the Making of a Myth 51

succession in its system of legitimate dynastic inheritance, but also to the gradual but determined consolidation of monarchical authority in Scotland during the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It also demonstrates the success of the foundation of the Stewart dynastic myth, which capitalised on and propagandised the successes of Robert I and cemented ideas of Stewart legitimacy and royal authority.

3 Crises of Confidence: Kings, Princes and Magnates

The previous chapter explored some of the ways in which the crown attempted to create stability in the kingdom by securing the dynasty, ensuring smooth succession, and maintaining royal authority. However, in the forging of strong kingship, there evidently came conflict and periods of significant tension between crown and community. For in Scotland, as elsewhere in late medieval Europe, the relationship between the king and the group of nobles closest to him is essential to our understanding of how – and how well – the Scots governed themselves. One of the most significant debates amongst scholars of late medieval Scotland has focused on these very issues, wrangling over whether or not tensions between the Scottish crown and the powerful regional nobility were the dominant feature of political life. Despite the independence of some powerful aristocratic families, particularly during the years of minority governments, the consensus is now that the normative state was one of cooperation and stability. There were, nevertheless, some fairly spectacular moments of crisis, which resulted in unfettered destruction, violence and civil war. What remains far too often omitted from the assessments of the relationship between the nobility and the crown is that individual kings and their subjects had the same kinds of impetuous, impulsive and often irrational reactions as humans have today. Whilst perhaps not indicative of the normal state of affairs, many of these convulsions in the body politic were highly significant, for their outcomes reshaped the political landscape



Crises of Confidence 53

and allowed for the renegotiation and reassertion of power and authority. Often these outbursts were simply challenges to curb the political freedom of the king, like, for example, when parliament agreed in 1384 to put Robert II into enforced retirement. However, most problematic for the Bruce and Stewart monarchies were those moments when an alternative focus of power emerged, which naturally undermined efforts to consolidate and secure royal authority. The particularly venomous destruction of the Albany Stewarts in 1425 and the systematic reduction in power of the Black Douglas family in the 1450s bear testimony to the energy with which the crown had to meet such challenges. Violent action against an individual monarch could be legitimised by the wider political community (often in parliament) by representing his behaviour and policies to be incompetent or tyrannous. That same political community could also rally around a king and become complicit in the whitewashing of his murders and slayings, adulterous indiscretions and exclusion of tempestuous or difficult nobles and courtiers. And so, this chapter is not just about the long-term relationship between the crown and the great magnates of the kingdom, a debate that is already well rehearsed for the fifteenth century in particular and entrenched in the existing political narrative. There were, to be sure, several serious points of tension between these groups during the late middle ages, and understanding them can tell us something about the nature of kingship and something about the nature of landholding. They can, however, tell us all the more by being placed into two other contexts. First, that context provided by a wider political community, which could police the limits of those powers claimed or exercised by both the king and his subjects. Second, the context arising from the peculiar constellations of circumstances and contingencies that marked individual crises and to which real men (and sometimes women) responded in different and revealing ways. This chapter explores just some of these tensions and political flashpoints in late medieval Scotland, although there were many more from which to choose. Using several quite well-known examples – that of the Wolf of Badenoch, the Albany Stewarts,

54

power and propaganda

the Lords of the Isles and the Black Douglases – this chapter will explore the way in which power was exercised and renegotiated during crises that both shook the confidence of the crown and tested the limits of that power. Many of the major flashpoints of political violence occurred during the reigns of kings who are now recognised as being strong-willed and determined to control the kingdom. Recent reassessments have rejected the old weak king versus the overmighty magnate paradigm, and it now is far more de rigueur to consider the individual personality of the king in the round and how this impacted upon his decision-making and relationships. No longer can the Scottish kings be characterised simply as weak-willed, tyrannous or politically naïve. Equally, the magnates and greater lordships of the kingdom cannot be seen as solely focused on the ruthless expansion of their own sphere of control. What will be explored in this chapter is the idea that these flashpoints of political violence are not necessarily explicable in terms of strong or weak kingship; something more nuanced was happening. Instead, it is my argument that political violence served to contribute in and of itself to monarchical confidence. The idea that violence against the crown was the natural outcome of a weak monarch and over-mighty magnates has long been untenable; but so too is the idea that the crown and nobility co-operated to create a stable government at all times. Most would now agree that the pendulum has swung back to the middle ground. What is evident is that there was far more political violence than the sources reveal to us. The events discussed herein are not unique or isolated; instead, I argue that these are examples at the extreme end of the spectrum that contributed to a significant change in the constitution of kingship in Scotland or to the balance of power within the Scottish political community. Underpinning this discussion is thus a framework that explores these political crises not only as episodes that can illuminate the limits of power, but also as defining moments in which that very power was renegotiated. Some challenges to royal authority had quite sinister intentions, particularly during Robert I’s reign, when there was



Crises of Confidence 55

r­esidual controversy over legitimacy of right to the throne. Periodic swellings of support for the disaffected Balliol faction ensured that challenges to Bruce’s authority were ever-present. In 1320, for example, a plot was uncovered to remove Robert I from the throne and replace him with Edward Balliol. Historians have been at pains to remind both enthusiastic devotees and serious students of the Declaration of Arbroath that this conspiracy in and of itself casts a shadow of doubt on some of the support shown to Bruce in this letter to the Pope. Lessons can also be learned about the medieval practice of affixing seals to documents as signatures of approval, for there were seals appended to the Declaration of Arbroath by men who cannot have been present at the abbey on that day and who it is known were at that time operating against the interests of the crown. The conspiracy against Bruce is now known as the Soules conspiracy because of the exaggerated part that John Barbour’s Bruce gave to one of the protagonists, Sir William de Soules, the king’s butler and great-nephew of one of the guardians of Scotland, Sir John Soules. Indeed, Barbour claimed, with considerable poetic licence, that Soules himself was intended for the throne, although it has now been demonstrated that the objective was to restore the Balliol dynasty. The principal conspirators were tried for treason in the Black Parliament of August 1320, found guilty and awarded a range of punishments. One key perpetrator, Sir David Brechin, was executed by being drawn and hanged; Soules was sentenced to life imprisonment and incarcerated at Dumbarton Castle, near Bruce heartland. The events of 1320, the writing of the Declaration of Arbroath and the Soules conspiracy saw a renegotiation of the authority of Robert I, for the reaction to the plot to depose Bruce reinforced support for the king and paradoxically allowed Bruce even greater authority once the conspirators had been punished. Moreover, forfeiture for treason afforded Bruce a powerful source of patronage. He was able to build up his own family’s landholdings after Brechin and Soules’s forfeiture, including giving the lordship of Liddesdale from Soules’s estate to his illegitimate son. In the middle ages power derived from control and a­ uthority

56

power and propaganda

over land. While the redistribution of land after 1314 is a landmark in determining patterns of holdings in Scotland, it also marks the beginning of exclusively Scottish landholding, which had consequences for both estate management and sharp rises and falls in wealth. The fourteenth century was a notable period of growth in the landholding of the Scottish regional magnates, with substantial land acquired through war, service and private purchases, often at the expense of barons with smaller landholdings. Moreover, with increasing profits made from a booming wool trade, those whose income came from sheep farming saw a corresponding increase in their wealth. The fourteenth century was thus something of an age of affluence and prosperity for those with huge estates and relatively little in the way of restraint on their increasing local dominance. In the first part of the fifteenth century both landholding and wealth were rapidly diminished and restructured under the authority of the Stewart kings; and, combined with the consequences of a Europe-wide economic recession, this paved the way for a completely new structure of the nobility by the mid-fifteenth century. Land, power and jurisdiction were thus at the heart of many conflicts in fifteenth-century Scotland, both amongst opposing landholders as well as between the crown and its subjects. Indeed, all three – land, power and jurisdiction – were also at the heart of the problems encountered in the second half of the fourteenth century with regional lords who operated beyond the control of the crown. Despite some difficult years in David II’s reign, including the temporary restoration of a Balliol to the throne from 1332–6 and long periods of monarchical absenteeism, the major conspiracies, rebellions and defiance displayed by the great lords and magnates seems to have been concentrated during the reigns of the Stewart kings. In part this was the natural consequence of the gradual, unfettered and substantial acquisition of lands by a small section of the social elite, but at least in some cases the interference and policies of the Stewarts did directly contribute to political and social disintegration. For example, the rebellion of Alexander Stewart, first earl of Buchan, the ‘Wolf of Badenoch’,



Crises of Confidence 57

in the north of Scotland was a direct result of his vexed relationships with his father, Robert II, and eldest brother, the future Robert III. The events that led to the rise and fall of the earl of Buchan also reveal the limits of power that the political community would tolerate in a period of expansion in magnatial landholding. The story is thus not just a tale of a Stewart prince running wild in the Scottish Highlands, defying his family and causing havoc, but it is also a story of the problems of extensive landholding across several regions and the checks to power that were inherent in the responses of the political community to the earl of Buchan’s actions. The earl of Buchan had his powerbase in the western Grampians through the lordship of Badenoch, which had previously been held by his father before his ascent to the throne. This was a significant region that over the previous two centuries had been the key to royal control of northern Scotland. The earl of Buchan’s influence in the region had begun in the 1360s, when he exercised unofficial control by running protection rackets. The region came to be considered so unruly that in a bid to impose order on the Highlands, David II temporarily imprisoned Buchan in 1369. In 1371, once his father was king, Alexander’s position in the north-central Highlands was formalised and was followed by an appointment to royal lieutenant in the north. In the same period, he leased Urquhart from his halfbrother David Stewart, acquired other land in the Grampians and north Perthshire, and was made sheriff of Inverness. In 1382 he gained the earldom of Ross through his marriage to Euphemia, countess of Ross, and other lands in Lewis, Skye and Dingwall became a jointure. Together this provided him with an obscenely large landholding, with estates commanding most of the routes through the central Highlands. Combined with his royal offices, Alexander, earl of Buchan was firmly and unequivocally in charge and in control of the north: he was at the absolute height of his power. Nevertheless, significant tensions in his territories existed partly because Buchan, as son of the king, had been granted regality powers. Regality jurisdiction was part of a system of

58

power and propaganda

delegated governmental administration and was the highest authority apart from the crown. A regality court had a civil jurisdiction of equivalence to the king’s sheriff and an extensive criminal jurisdiction equivalent to the justice ayres (with the exception of treason, which was tried in parliament). Given their considerable privileges, it is no surprise that lords of regality gave the crown a great deal of trouble during the fourteenth century, frequently seeking to usurp royal authority and to establish semi-independent domains. The ability to acquire huge areas of land at the same time exacerbated the problem, and thus Alexander, earl of Buchan provides an excellent exemplar of the manner in which regality power might be extended, flouted and then checked by the political community. Indeed, it would not be until the fifteenth century, as successive Stewart kings sought to reduce the landholdings of the elite and their corresponding independence of authority, that regalities again began to function as a means of delegated government. The most obvious problem in the earl of Buchan’s dominion was a long-running dispute between Buchan and Alexander Bur, bishop of Moray, who was at pains to keep his episcopal lands in Badenoch and Strathspey independent from Buchan’s regality powers. The peak of the dispute was a dramatic confrontation at Kingussie in Badenoch in 1380, where the tussle for jurisdictional authority was exacerbated by Buchan’s widespread use of gangs of caterans to exercise his lordship. Caterans were Gaelic warriors who were used in the Highlands and parts of Ireland to assert local lordship by brute force; their employment in the Highlands provoked bitter hostility. Further tensions surfaced in 1384, when the crown’s executive authority was commandeered by the earl of Buchan’s eldest brother, John, earl of Carrick, the future Robert III. The political community had been active in criticising Robert II for the problems of law and order in the Highlands, a direct criticism of Buchan’s behaviour, and Carrick determined that it was his responsibility to resolve the problem of his younger brother. The result was far from ideal. Instead of concentrating on checking Buchan’s violence and exploitation, what ensued was a bitter power struggle between the earl



Crises of Confidence 59

of Carrick and Robert II, which distracted from the immediate issues in the north. A virtual coup d’état occurred and Robert II lost control of the kingdom to Carrick, and with it the agenda for peace with England that he had been pursuing. War with England promptly resumed, distracting attentions to the south, until an abeyance after the battle of Otterburn in 1388, when the Scots, led by James Douglas, second earl of Douglas, defeated and captured Sir Henry ‘the Hotspur’ Percy. Once conflict with England had ceased, the earl of Buchan soon returned to the forefront of the government’s priorities. In December 1388 the guardianship of the kingdom was passed to the earl of Carrick’s younger brother Robert, earl of Fife (later first duke of Albany) upon the incapacitation of Carrick following an unfortunate accident where he was kicked by a horse. Nevertheless, this did not prevent Carrick from acceding to the throne eighteenth months later, despite what was evidently now permanent physical disability. Robert, earl of Fife immediately took several steps against his brother the earl of Buchan, including using property transactions to become the main landholder in northern Perthshire, thus reducing Buchan’s influence in the area. Within ten days of receiving the guardianship, the earl of Fife had removed the earl of Buchan as justiciar north of the Forth at the demand of the general council, which accused Buchan of ‘being negligent in the execution of his office’. Fife appointed his son Murdoch to the position and expanded his family’s interest in the area, including, for instance, arranging a series of marriage alliances in the 1390s with prominent families in Argyll and Lennox, which strengthened his power in the south-west Highlands. These alliances included major territorial acquisitions, such as that of a deal in 1392 with Duncan, earl of Lennox, by which Murdoch Stewart was to marry Isabella, Lennox’s eldest daughter and the heir to the earldom of Lennox. In 1389 the earl of Fife took matters in the north into his own hands and led a large retinue north to Inverness. Here he resolved some of the quarrels between notable figures in the area, including Bishop Bur and the earl of Moray. He also encouraged the earl of Buchan’s wife Euphemia, countess of Ross, to

60

power and propaganda

sue her husband for annulment. Buchan’s marriage had been a complete failure and he was strongly opposed within Ross by Euphemia’s family and supporters. Moreover, to make matters worse he had displaced Euphemia from the marital home with a long-term concubine Mairead inghean Eachainn, with whom he had several children including Alexander Stewart, later earl of Mar. Buchan’s relationship with Mairead was, of course, not unprecedented and his own father, Robert the Steward (Robert II), had practised a similar long cohabitation with Buchan’s mother Elizabeth Mure, following the Gaelic custom of de facto secular marriage. On 2 November 1389 the bishops ordered Buchan to return to Euphemia, on the threat that the marriage would otherwise be annulled and he would lose the associated marital lands. The earl of Buchan capitulated. This surrender left Buchan humiliated and his power seriously curbed. Bishop Bur promptly ceased further racketeering payments and Buchan was displaced in the protection of Moray’s episcopal possessions and lands by the installation of a new sheriff of Inverness, Thomas Dunbar, the son of the earl of Moray and an adherent of Robert, earl of Fife. In spring 1390 Robert II’s death brought with it the prospect of a power struggle between the earl of Carrick and the earl of Fife, for Carrick was already incapacitated but he nevertheless inherited the throne as Robert III. The solution to the problem of Robert III’s physical inability to rule fully was to place the earl of Fife in the position of governor. Buchan seized the opportunity this distraction presented to reassert his position and authority in the north, against both the bishop of Moray and the earl of Fife. And he did so spectacularly. First he attacked the royal burgh of Forres in Moray, moving on to a full-scale raid on Elgin in June 1390 where, accompanied by a band of ‘wild and wicked’ Highlanders, he set fire to the cathedral, the manse and much of the burgh. The atrocity was a disaster not only for the damage that it caused, but also for the resulting collapse in Buchan’s power. Both church and state were now firmly united against him; he was excommunicated and required to submit before the king



Crises of Confidence 61

and the royal council at Perth to beg for absolution and to make satisfaction to the church. Buchan never regained his prominence in the north. His power had been checked by the political community and sanctions were placed upon him to ensure that he could not act with the independence of authority that he had enjoyed in the past. Buchan retained his title and kept his lands in Badenoch, but his other landholdings were significantly reduced with the explicit aim of curtailing his power in these areas. Urquhart was lost, for example, as was the earldom of Ross, which Euphemia regained in 1392 through a successful petition for judicial separation by annulment to the papal curia at Avignon, stating that her marriage to the earl of Buchan had caused ‘wars, plundering, arson, murders and many other damages and scandals’. In this, Euphemia’s case was put in terms that explicitly demonstrated what were considered to be the limits of power and authority in late medieval Scotland, for Buchan’s extensive landholding had brought about instability and abuse of power that the political community was forced to take steps to reduce. Of course, Buchan’s role in political life did not end in 1390–2. He was still a Stewart prince after all and the brother of the king, but his power and landholding were nevertheless substantially diminished. He was acting as bailie of Atholl in the southern Highlands in 1402 and by 1404 his activities were exclusively centred on Perth. He was buried in Dunkeld Cathedral in Perthshire on his death in June 1405, where a stone effigy commemorated his life, representing him in full armour, as a warrior prince. From 1392 a picture emerges that invalidates the impression that for much of the fourteenth century the Highlands were wild and unruly solely as the result of Buchan’s authority, as his posthumous reputation would certainly lead us to believe. Indeed, the earl of Buchan’s removal from power and authority did little to change the status quo in the frontier lands of the eastern Highlands. If anything, clan warfare might have intensified. Kinship underpinned local society and bloodfeud remained the regulator of conflict. The Raid of Angus in 1392, for instance, was led by Buchan’s son Duncan Stewart with a

62

power and propaganda

huge band of caterans against Sir David Lindsay of Glenesk (later first earl of Crawford), which resulted in a pitched battle at Dalnagairn in Perthshire in which Sir Walter Ogilvy, the sheriff of Angus, was killed and Lindsay brutally wounded. Most seriously of all, Alasdair MacDonald of Lochaber, son of the Lord of the Isles, repeatedly led his caterans up the Great Glen and into Moray, where the bishop and the earl of Moray were pressured by him just as much as they had been by the earl of Buchan. From Buchan’s death in 1405 Stewart authority was returned to the region with the installation of Buchan’s eldest son Alexander, earl of Mar, as the main agent of the crown in the north. Mar’s great success in this post lay in his style of leadership, which contrasted starkly with that of his father. He worked in partnership with the local landowning elites to maintain law and order. Mar’s success in the north highlights what may be the most important points about the Wolf of Badenoch and his reign of terror, revealing to us in their contrasts the nature of the sanctioning of authority by the political community. Complaints against Buchan before 1390 were not about what he did, but about what he did not do, namely that he failed to arrest and punish criminals and proved incapable of maintaining a civil relationship with his wife and her kindred to enable him to keep possession of the earldom of Ross, which was a strategically important holding. More enduringly, perhaps, the earl of Buchan’s legacy was to accentuate the growing belief in lowland Scotland that the Highlands were lawless and dangerous, a belief which from the later fourteenth century would constitute one of the major themes of Scotland’s history. Robert Stewart, earl of Fife, had in effect orchestrated the downfall of his brother the earl of Buchan, and yet during these same years he himself also experienced the struggle of exercising control in the absence of full monarchical authority. Robert, earl of Fife had a long history of power and influence in various official and advisory positions in the government of the kingdom from 1371. From 1382 he was appointed to the role of chamberlain (the chief financial officer of the crown), and after the earl



Crises of Confidence 63

of Carrick’s rise to power in 1384 Fife was appointed guardian of the kingdom by a general council. The earl of Fife had a natural rivalry with his older brother Carrick, which entered a new phase after the battle of Otterburn in 1388. Following the battle, Carrick’s position as guardian was undermined by the impact of the death of the second earl of Douglas and the subsequent tussles over the Douglas inheritance. Moreover, Carrick’s physical disability was readily exploited by his detractors and opponents, who pushed into the foreground questions of his suitability to govern and to act as a military leader. During a general council at Edinburgh in December 1388 Carrick was declared incapable because of ‘the infirmity’ and forced to surrender the guardianship to Fife. The general council stated that after many talks, consultations and a discussion had been held, the three communities [. . .] have amicably chosen Sir Robert Stewart, earl of Fife [. . .] for putting into effect justice and keeping the law internally, and for the defence of the kingdom with the king’s force, as set out before, against those attempting to rise up as enemies.

Less than two years later Carrick inherited the throne; Fife’s position as guardian was maintained throughout this transition due to the new king’s continued incapacity. The real power still lay with Fife. With the increasing influence in royal government of Robert III’s young son and heir, David, the new earl of Carrick (and later first duke of Rothesay), Fife’s guardianship was terminated in February 1393 but despite his removal from formal power, Fife remained a prominent political figure. Indeed, the status of Robert, earl of Fife and his nephew David, earl of Carrick as the most influential and active members of the royal family, who exercised many of the functions of government for the infirm Robert III, was reflected in their joint elevation to ducal rank in a ceremony on 28 April 1398 at Scone, the traditional site of investiture of the kings of Scots. That this solemn ceremony was designed to transmit undertones of Robert’s and David’s real status and authority in the kingdom was reinforced through the investiture’s conscious echoes of a traditional coronation ceremony. Walter Trail,

64

power and propaganda

bishop of St Andrews, the foremost prelate in the kingdom, led the mass and preached a sermon on the state of the realm before the king and queen, an issue hotly debated at the accompanying general council. Robert took the title duke of Albany, which derived from the ancient name given to Scotland north of the Forth, while David became duke of Rothesay. The selection of the title Rothesay was, of course, related to Robert III’s own personal affection for Rothesay on the ancestral Stewart lands of the Isle of Bute. It also underlined the intentions behind the principal crown response against Donald, Lord of the Isles, in the wake of the general council at Perth in 1398. The royal army was to be led immediately into the areas from which the new ducal names derived by one or other of the new dukes. Moreover, the titles invoked the Stewarts’ Gaelic origins and in doing so gave legitimacy to the exercise of an ancient authority throughout Gaelic Scotland in contradistinction to that being forwarded by the Lord of the Isles. This was very powerful Stewart propaganda. The following year Carrick and Fife, now Rothesay and Albany, again worked in tandem to govern the kingdom, when a general council officially appointed Rothesay as lieutenant of the realm for a three-year period, ‘having full power and commission of the king to govern the land in all ways as the king should do in his person if he were present’, to act with the advice of a council of twenty-one named leading men of the kingdom, including his uncle Albany. The general council of 1399 made it clear that Rothesay’s lieutenancy was, in everything but name, a transfer of powers normally reserved for the king: the said duke will be sworn to fulfil after his ability all the things that the king at his crowning was sworn to do for the Holy Kirk and the people, since he is to bear the king’s power in these things, that is to say to keep the freedom and right of the kirk undiminished, to cause the laws and loveable customs to be kept for the people, to restrain and punish manslayers, robbers, burners and all misdoers generally through strength, and especially to restrain at the request of the kirk cursed men, heretics and people excluded from the kirk.



Crises of Confidence 65

The authority to govern in place of the king was further reinforced with the addition of a clause issuing an instruction to Robert III, that the king be obliged that he shall not hinder the duke’s office nor the execution of it by any countermandments as sometimes has been seen; and if anything is done contrary to these letters or in any other way through our lord the king’s bidding, that countermandment will be of no value or effect.

The ducal titles for Rothesay and Albany were not, of course, simply reflections of the status and control of government and the growing importance in the realm of these two particular princes. Instead, they were part of a wider transformation of the constitution of the Scottish nobility, which had begun in the mid-fourteenth century and would culminate in the creation of a parliamentary peerage by 1455. The creations of the two dukedoms in 1398 (in addition to a second earldom, Crawford, which was created just one week earlier) represented a new direction, for these were not bestowals inherently linked to a coherent province. Indeed, the essence of the transformation of the higher nobility in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries lay in the increasing distance between the title of earl and the lands held and supervised as earl. The three 1398 creations were thus honorific and implied a delegation of royal authority and increased prestige. This was a remarkable departure in the history of the higher nobility of Scotland for it was, in effect, the creation of a new tier of the nobility to distinguish the princes from the great magnates. One possible source of this new direction lay in the negotiations that Rothesay, Albany and Crawford had all undertaken with John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, the third son of Edward III of England, in March 1398, which followed a spate of foundations of dukedoms by Richard II (1377–99) in 1397. While it seems improbable that the Scottish dukedoms were created simply to give to the Scottish commissioners an equivalent status to their English counterparts (it had never previously been a matter for concern), the 1398 meeting may have inspired a

66

power and propaganda

solution to a quite different problem: that the Scottish king was on the throne but unable to govern. The creation of the new dukedoms in 1398 would go on to have significant ramifications for the distribution of power in the kingdom during the first half of the fifteenth century, for in the years which followed the creation of the dukedoms, the status gave rise to a new tier of authority which edged extremely closely to the kinds of powers possessed by the enthroned monarch. Indeed, it might be suggested that the ceremony that took place at Scone in 1398, combined with the diktats of the general council the following year, amounted to a creative constitutional rearrangement of the government of the kingdom and allowed for Rothesay to proceed through the rituals of kingship to perform the kingship of the Scots, without needing to depose the rightful king. In effect, the limits to Rothesay’s power were lifted in 1399, which in and of itself may have made a direct contribution to his death shortly thereafter. During the opening years of the fifteenth century there was a great deal of jockeying for power between Albany and Rothesay. The situation soured considerably in 1402 with Albany’s involvement in the arrest of Rothesay and his imprisonment first in St Andrews Castle and then in Albany’s castle at Falkland, where he died. In a true test of the limits of power in the kingdom, Albany survived the resulting political crisis, defended himself against accusations of murder, and justified Rothesay’s arrest on the grounds that his political aggression was harming the kingdom. In doing so he appealed to a political community with a long history of responding to excessive abuse of power through violence. A general council in 1402 officially exonerated Albany for any responsibility for the death of the heir to the throne, declaring that ‘by divine providence and not otherwise, it is discerned that he departed from this life’. Whatever politicking had taken place behind the scenes, this was a clear indication that the political community supported Albany and respected his authority as the most senior Stewart in the kingdom. In an attempt to end decisively any rumours about Albany’s involvement in the death of Rothesay and to



Crises of Confidence 67

reinstate absolute confidence in him, it was stated that he was judged to be innocent, harmless, blameless, quit, free and immune completely in all respects from the charge of lese majesty against us, or any other crime, misdemeanour, wrongdoing, rancour and offence which could be charged [. . .] Wherefore we strictly order and command all and singular our subjects, of whatever standing or condition they be, that they do not slander the said Robert [. . .] by word or action, nor murmur against [him] in any way whereby [his] good reputation is hurt or any prejudice is generated.

Albany was shortly thereafter appointed as lieutenant of the kingdom and retrieved the justiciary north of the Forth from his son Murdoch, who had been captured alongside the earl of Angus and the earl of Moray at the battle of Homildon Hill in mid-September of 1402. Quite unspectacularly, most of Albany’s activities during his lieutenancy seem to have been focused on upholding and exercising the rights of his infant granddaughter, Euphemia Leslie, against the Lord of the Isles in the earldom of Ross. An era of profound instability had been inaugurated. Crisis upon crisis ensued, with the killing of the guardian of James, the new earl of Carrick (and later James I) by Albany’s adherent James Douglas of Balvenie; Carrick’s capture and imprisonment in England in 1406; and the death of Robert III shortly thereafter. In the absence of the late king’s son and heir, Albany was appointed governor of the kingdom by a general council at Perth. This appointment as governor – rather than a guardian or lieutenant for James – reflected the unique situation in which the Scottish government found itself, with a king in English captivity, who was still a minor and who had not yet been through the crucial ritual of investiture as king. The novelty of the title of governor thus enabled an independence from the oversight and authority of James, who had not sanctioned the position or appointment. Crucially, Albany was thus not answerable to someone who was in the control of the English crown. It was this spirit of independence from the authority of the crown and the embedded tradition of near king-like limits of power granted

68

power and propaganda

to the Stewart princes that resulted in the concentrated exertion of power by James I on his release from England in 1424 and his harsh reaction to the Albany Stewarts. Although the contemporary chronicler Andrew of Wyntoun recorded that Albany’s conduct resembled that of a ‘mychty king’ and there were clear indications that Albany saw his future as king of Scots, the important fact remained that Albany lacked the full authority of a king. Thus his abuse of the power which had been granted to him by the Scottish political community, particularly in promoting the interests of his own family and retainers, resulted in widespread rebellion against his authority during his tenure. Albany was routinely defied by the great magnates, which lead to endemic political disorder and the systematic plundering of royal resources and revenues. Chroniclers writing in or shortly after his lifetime were universally positive in their appraisal of his personal qualities and his governance of the realm and so employed the standard rhetoric for discussions of legitimate monarchs. Contemporaries noted that Albany was a strong and active administrator and an able and energetic military leader, but when he personally led royal forces into the west to extract oaths of submission from Donald, Lord of the Isles in 1412, this can be interpreted as the actions of a man protecting his own interests in Ross. While Albany lacked the support to mount a campaign to usurp the throne, he was able to hinder negotiations for the release of his nephew from English captivity. Through the natural course of time, this strategy might have secured the position of his immediate family as Scotland’s royal dynasty without the need for the kind of support a successful coup d’état required. We rely on clues to demonstrate his ambitions, such as his issuing of charters dated by the year of his governorship, rather than by the regnal year of James I. This may, of course, be explained by the fact James had not yet been crowned, an administrative innovation to surmount a difficult and unprecedented constitutional problem. Put beside Albany’s other actions, however, it fits the profile of a governor who considered himself as de facto king of Scots. Albany died in 1420 at Stirling Castle and was buried in



Crises of Confidence 69

Dunfermline Abbey, a traditional burial site for members of the Scottish royal dynasty. This was a carefully planned decision that further reinforced the connections between the Bruce and Stewart dynasties, for Robert I had also been buried at Dunfermline on his death in 1329. Even in death, Albany hinted at a legitimacy of monarchical authority in the kingdom, and he laid the ground for his descendants to use his tomb to underscore their legitimacy and dynasty should they accede to the throne. Albany was immediately succeeded as governor of Scotland by his eldest son and heir to the dukedom, Murdoch, who remained governor until James I’s release from captivity in April 1424. Compared with the reputation that his father had managed to cultivate, Murdoch was not well respected. The chronicler Walter Bower described him as ‘too slack in the exercise of this office’ and criticised him for being unable to control his arrogant sons. The worst offender of his brood was Walter, who opposed and defied the authority of his father in a dispute over the plans for succession to Murdoch’s estates. Nevertheless, Murdoch was a fairly benign governor and was successful in maintaining general peace in the kingdom. Ever mindful of his own position, especially once the possibility of the return of the king was on the political horizon, Murdoch consolidated his ties with the other Stewarts in powerful positions. The political situation in England had certainly changed by the early 1420s and under Henry V the now adult James I was well treated at the English court. Murdoch’s memories of years of imprisonment after his own capture at Homildon Hill in 1402, which had been spent partially at the Tower of London with his cousin, may have shaped his relationship with the imprisoned king now he was governor. Indeed, he did little to resist the Black Douglas campaign for James’s release. Murdoch’s own councillors forced the governor to enter talks with the English, which satisfied the fourth earl of Douglas but alienated – to the brink of open rebellion – his son Walter, whose ambitions of inheriting the governorship (and one imagines subsequently the crown) were quashed by James’s release. Of course, nothing could be done for James until it was the will of the English crown; on the

70

power and propaganda

death of Henry V in 1422 James’s political value plummeted and arrangements were soon put in place for the king’s release. In the first few months after James I’s return, it appeared that Murdoch had survived the transition of power. As earl of Fife he had been integral to the coronation ceremony, which took place at Scone in May 1424, and the immediate arrest of his son Walter was in his own interests as much as it was in the king’s. Murdoch’s third son Alexander was shown a great deal of royal favour, including being dubbed to knighthood at the coronation ceremony and was thus brought firmly into the royal fold. Murdoch may have been planning on keeping a low profile, but the king had different ideas. Determined both to secure loyalty and to reduce the power and landholding of the remaining nobles in the kingdom, James’s return was so carefully orchestrated that his utter single-mindedness in the pursuit of his policies ensured that Murdoch was firmly within the king’s sights. By the end of 1424 James had begun to interfere in Murdoch’s lands, and so began a forceful campaign to erode support for Murdoch beyond repair. In 1425, with the help of many of the duke of Albany’s former allies and many of the nobility that James had carefully groomed, Murdoch, his wife Isabella and their son Alexander were arrested and their principal estates of Doune and Falkland were seized. In essence, this arrest was to enable the crown to gain control of some important lands in the kingdom, in order that James might redistribute them as he saw fit and to prevent any growth of magnate power in the localities. The arrest, subsequent trial and forfeiture were also intended to draw a firm line under the Albany governorship and remove the Albany Stewarts from the Scottish succession. Murdoch was tried for treason before the king and an assize of magnates and the following day he was executed at Stirling Castle, along with his sons Walter and Alexander. Unlike Robert, duke of Albany’s burial at the royal mausoleum of Dunfermline, the executed Albany Stewarts were interred in the Dominican friary at Stirling. The title of duke of Albany lapsed until it was bestowed upon the second son of James II in the 1450s, coinciding with further developments in the constitution of the Scottish nobility,



Crises of Confidence 71

and thus the desire to distinguish and widen the gaps between the ranks of royalty and nobility. In the early 1420s James I had thus removed some of the potentially troublesome Scottish landholders to prison in England, and forcefully asserted his authority in front of his kingdom both in 1424 at his coronation and in 1425 by destroying the Albany branch of his family. James I’s aggressive attack on some of the magnates in his kingdom was coupled with a less aggressive, but no less determined, attempt to reduce the estates of his nobility. In the years after 1424 most of the older hereditary earldoms lapsed or had come into the possession of the crown through forfeiture or escheat: by the end of James’s reign just five earldoms survived as independent (although substantially reduced) entities, with only Ross and Sutherland retaining anything like their former shape. Indeed, the importance of the earldom of Ross in Scottish political life throughout the late middle ages cannot be underestimated. In addition, during James I’s reign the great provincial lordships were gradually broken up and assumed by the crown or packaged into the scattered estates of new-style earldoms. The provincial lordships which were held independently in 1424 were either brought under crown control through patronage, as in the case of Seton of Gordon, Stewart of Lorne and Sinclair of Roslin, or through open warfare to extract submission. In a sense, James I’s policy for his nobility expedited the process of development which had been taking place in the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, whereby honorific titles were introduced to reflect social and political status rather than landownership and wealth. The disappearance of earldoms linked to a specific territory and the simultaneous appearance of new and honorific titles was a contribution made by a king determined to assert his authority not, as once was argued, over a too-powerful landowning class, but over a nobility whom the king wished to bend to his will and to recognise his legitimacy and supremacy. The indirect result of this was to boost the emergence of a new rank of lord of parliament, which entrenched itself in the political constitution during the minority of James

72

power and propaganda

II, for James I’s annihilation of the structure of the nobility had brought about a vacuum of power amongst their ranks. Whereas in 1424 there were eleven earls and one duke sharing seventeen earldoms, a month after James’s assassination there were only five earls with one earldom each. Thus in the first years of James II’s minority the balance of the composition of the higher ranks had shifted away from the earls towards the barons. The barons were unable to generate much more than cursory resistance to royal authority, but between 1437 and 1445 they came close to being the most important men in the land, and for this reason they adopted the personal and honorific titles of a new social and political Scottish peerage. The ferocity with which James I attacked powerful magnate families in his kingdom, with the explicit aim of annihilating their powerbases or to bring them under royal control, demonstrated not just the confidence with which the king asserted his authority on his return, but also the fragility of that authority. In order to rule effectively the king needed co-operation from the nobility, but any threat to that could damage the delicate balance and shake confidence and authority beyond repair. Whilst James I’s style of kingship was not without its opponents, it did nevertheless lay the foundations for similar episodes of the exercise of authority during the rest of the fifteenth century. It is evident that James I had a clear plan to redistribute power in the kingdom and to reduce excessive landholding, but moreover, that he wanted to restore the crown as the central focal point of power in the kingdom. It remained then to curtail the independent authority of the Lords of the Isles and, once the Albany Stewart situation had resolved, James I’s next focus was to the west. The MacDonalds Lords of the Isles – in Gaelic, rí Innse Gall, king of the Hebrides – were a powerful family who had come to prominence in the west of Scotland and the islands through the support of Robert I. Aonghas Óg MacDomhnaill had, for example, assisted in the victory at Bannockburn and he was rewarded with an extensive suite of lands including Lochaber, Ardnamurchan, Morvern, Duror and Glencoe. The Lords of the



Crises of Confidence 73

Isles ruled what can only be described as a semi-independent lordship of scattered communities centred on the west coast and the islands. Some of the complexities of the limits of their authority can be seen by the use in Gaelic Scotland of the title rí (king) for the head of the lordship as opposed to the Latin dominus (lord). With a base at Finlaggan on the island of Islay, the Lords exercised their control through a web of sea channels through which their galleys – birlinns – were used for transport and warfare. This was a difficult region to govern remotely and for much of the late middle ages the Scottish monarchs seem to have been reasonably content to leave the Lords of the Isles to exercise complete control in the locality. Nevertheless, there were points at which the independence of the Lordship came into conflict with the authority the crown wished to assert over the region. Aonghas Óg MacDomhnaill’s son, Eòin Mac Dòmhnaill or John MacDonald (d. c. 1387), was the first of four who adopted the title dominus insularum. He appears to have preferred this Latin tag, indicating a lesser status, in a bid to further his alignment to the Scottish crown and government, and he successfully negotiated for a second marriage to Margaret, the daughter of Robert the Steward (later Robert II). The second Lord of the Isles, Dómhnall Íle or Donald MacDonald (d. 1423), was thus Robert II’s grandson and James I’s cousin. As recently as 1411 the Albany Stewarts and the MacDonalds had fought a pitched battle at Harlaw to resolve competing claims to the earldom of Ross, during which the duke of Albany, acting as ­grandfather and ward of Euphemia Leslie, countess of Ross, defeated Donald MacDonald. Consequently, Donald became a vassal of the crown and surrendered his claim to Ross, which derived from his wife Mariota, Euphemia’s aunt, and the earldom of Ross was resigned in 1415 to Albany’s second son John Stewart, earl of Buchan. On James I’s return in 1424 Mariota’s claim to the earldom of Ross was again pressed and as part of his campaign against the power of the Albany Stewarts, the king awarded Ross to Mariota, which in 1437 passed to her son Alexander, or Alasdair MacDomhnaill, third Lord of the Isles

74

power and propaganda

(from 1423). Alexander inherited his father’s alliance with the Stewarts and appeared in support of the crown, serving on the jury that ordered the execution of the Albany Stewarts in 1425. What happened to the Lordship of the Isles between 1424 and 1428–9 must be read in the context of James I’s successful destruction of the Albany Stewarts. Just as the Albany attack was focused on the reduction of territorial power that may have enabled future substantial opposition to the crown, so too were the calculated attacks that quickly followed against the Lord of the Isles. In 1426 in a charter issued at Finlaggan, Alexander MacDonald styled himself ‘Lord of the Isles and Master [heir] of the Earldom of Ross’, a clear indication of his position now that the king had restored Ross to his mother Mariota. It also suggests that Alexander MacDonald’s territorial ambitions and his desire to extend his sphere of influence were at odds with the king’s agenda to limit landholding in his kingdom. It seems probable that the use of the title ‘Master of the Earldom’ was to provoke James I, compounding increasing tensions over the protection that the Lord of the Isles’ uncle John Mór MacDonald was giving to Seamas Mór Stewart (James the Fat), the son of Murdoch, duke of Albany. James the Fat had been harboured in Ireland since his escape after he rebelled against the crown at Dumbarton in 1425, from whence he garnered substantial support to oppose James I’s throne. James the Fat, as a legitimate heir to the throne, remained a difficult and destabilising thorn in the side of James I, who had yet to produce male issue and thus secure the Scottish succession for his own line. James the Fat concentrated on garnering support from his father’s former vassals in Lennox, Menteith and Fife, and obtained the backing of Henry VI of England, himself enraged that James I was ignoring the terms of his release. Collectively this may have contributed to a crisis of confidence that resulted in an attack by James I on the Lordship of the Isles, aimed at reducing MacDonald power and chipping away at the support James the Fat might utilise to launch an insurrection or usurpation of the throne. Not content to respond simply by forming powerful alli-



Crises of Confidence 75

ances with those opposed to the MacDonalds (who included the Ó Domhnaill (O’Donnell) family, lords of Tír Chonaill (Tyrconnell) in Ulster), James I launched an attack in the north, raising support from amongst the nobles and magnates he had cultivated by giving them status and bestowing patronage. Indeed, amongst the leaders of the forces were the earls of Douglas, Angus and Crawford, William Crichton, Walter Haliburton of Dirleton and Adam Hepburn of Hailes, men to whom James I showed particular favour. The king led the army north and began a bloody campaign of arrests and executions, which brought the western Highlands into widespread revolt. James demanded that Alexander should meet with him at Inverness, whereupon Alexander was immediately imprisoned in Inverness Castle along with his mother Mariota, his uncle John Mór MacDonald, and many other important landholders and allies in Ross. The king is reported to have composed an extempore (and quite terrible) Latin couplet at the point of their imprisonment to entertain his men who were awaiting instruction: ‘Ad turrim forte duacamus caute cohortem, / per Christi sortem meruerunt hii quia mortem’ (let us take the chance to convey this company to the tower with care, / for, by Christ’s death, these men deserve death). Many of these prisoners were shortly released, but Alexander remained in captivity while James tried to undermine and reduce support for him. Before the end of 1428 the king released Alexander on the promise of good behaviour in the wake of a botched attempt by the royal messenger James Campbell to arrest John Mór MacDonald, resulting in his murder. Campbell was executed in a bid by James I to distance himself from the affair. Almost as soon as he was released, the Lord of the Isles declared war on the king. In spring 1429 Alexander led an army into Inverness whereupon he set fire to the burgh. At the same time, a fleet was dispatched to bring James the Fat back from exile in Ireland. According to the Irish Annals of the Four Masters, this was ‘to convey him home, that he might be king’. Once again, one of the dominant themes of Scottish politics was neatly articulated by contemporaries. James the Fat’s sudden

76

power and propaganda

death before he could leave Ireland was a game-changer for James I. The king immediately raised a large royal army and marched north, encountering the Lord of the Isles near the borders of Badenoch, whereupon – according to the chronicler Walter Bower – the Chattans and Camerons defected to the royal side and in the ensuring skirmish the Lord of the Isles was defeated and escaped. The king pushed further north, seized the castles of Urquhart and Dingwall, and sent out search parties to find Alexander. On 27 August the Lord of the Isles surrendered to the royal army in Lochaber without a battle and submitted to the king at Holyrood Abbey in a ceremony of homage designed to cause him maximum humiliation, ‘clad only in shirt and drawers’. Following intercession by Queen Joan, he was shown mercy and imprisoned at Tantallon Castle under the custody of the king’s nephew and close ally, William Douglas, second earl of Angus. James I continued his campaign to bring the dominions of the Lordship of the Isles under his control through exploiting the position of his cousin, Alexander Stewart, earl of Mar as lieutenant in the north and placing another cousin, Alan Stewart, son of Walter Stewart, earl of Atholl in the north to provide Mar with support. Finally the Lord of the Isles was formally pardoned by James and released from captivity; he remained subdued and was eventually granted the earldom of Ross in 1436. Alexander, Lord of the Isles concentrated his efforts on Ross from thenceforth, and remained on co-operative terms with the crown. The balance of power had been renegotiated through these clashes and the crown had firmly established new and substantially curtailed limits to the power of the Lordship of the Isles. In 1449 John, fourth Lord of the Isles and thirteenth earl of Ross succeeded his father. With James II’s support and encouragement, which the king presumably quickly came to regret, John married Elizabeth, daughter of the chamberlain of Scotland, James Livingston of Callendar. This happened shortly before her father was arrested and imprisoned in 1450. Livingston escaped from his imprisonment and took refuge with his new son-inlaw. As a consequence of the marriage, in the early 1450s the



Crises of Confidence 77

Lord of the Isles tipped the balance maintained from the 1430s by his father’s kowtowing to the crown, revolting against the king on behalf of Livingston, and taking the royal castles of Inverness, Urquhart and Ruthven. The rebellion also included the formation of a defensive league with the earls of Douglas and Crawford, which resulted in James II’s vengeful attack and irreparable reduction of the power of the Douglas family in the south of Scotland, and contributed directly to the slaying of the eighth earl of Douglas by the king at Stirling in 1452. John’s loyalty to the crown was questionable to say the least. In 1462 the exiled ninth earl of Douglas used his position in England to renew pressure in Scotland and promoted a treaty – of Westminster– Ardtornish – with John, Lord of the Isles and Edward IV of England. The treaty made provision for the scenario that in the event of England’s successful conquest of Scotland, Douglas and the Lord of the Isles, as vassals of Edward, would divide Scotland between them. Although the Lord of the Isles made some attempt at an attack on crown lands in 1462, it was not until 1474 that the Treaty of Westminster–Ardtornish came to light and brought with it the demise of John, who was promptly arrested and forfeited for treason. In 1476, on renouncing the earldom of Ross, the lordships of Kintyre and Knapdale, and the sheriffships of Inverness and Nairn, he was pardoned, reinstated in his other lands, and created a lord of parliament as Lord of the Isles. Again, the renegotiation of power by crown intervention in limiting the actions of major landholders was central to the stability of the kingdom and to the delicate balancing of the need for authority in the localities. Nevertheless, thereafter John’s hold on the lordship was slippery and the Lordship of the Isles was finally forfeited in 1493. Although during the tenure of the MacDonalds as Lords of the Isles there were evidently ongoing tensions as to the status of the crown and the lords in the Highlands and Islands, and a difficult fusion of Gaelic and mainstream Western European practices, there was nevertheless sufficient stability in the region for the arts, culture and learning to flourish – so much so that the period is now referred to as a golden age of Gaelic heritage.

78

power and propaganda

The treatment from 1449 of John, Lord of the Isles and William, eighth earl of Douglas was, of course, not just a result of their formation of a private bond, which instituted a league of three powerful magnates who would co-operate to effectively exercise lordship throughout much of Scotland and thus threatened the authority of the king in these regions. For while the public authority of the king was paramount, and James II demanded loyal service regardless of private obligations, the severity with which the Douglas family were treated in the early 1450s should also be viewed as part of the king’s emergence from his minority into personal rule. Thus the destruction of the Douglas family reveals much to us about a king who was in the process of negotiating his royal authority. Indeed, the years of 1449–55 would become a defining period in James II’s reign. Nevertheless, the Ross–Douglas–Crawford bond has been highlighted as the cause, or at least the excuse, which led James II to demand William, eighth earl of Douglas to present himself at Stirling Castle for an audience with the king in February 1452. A safe conduct was issued to Douglas in the form of a ‘speciale assourerans and respite under his preve sele and subscrivit with his awne hand’, presumably indicating that there was a strain in their relations that required this level of guarantee that no harm would come to the earl; and ‘all the lordis that war with the king that tyme gaf bodily aithis to kepe that respite and assouerance and subscrivit Ilk man with thair awne hand’. Indeed it would be to this safe conduct that the ninth earl of Douglas would refer in his protest over the murder of his brother, as he paraded the document through the streets of Stirling attached to the tail of a horse ‘spekand richt sclanderfully of the king and all that war with him that tyme’. The murder of William, eighth earl of Douglas is one of the most compelling events in late medieval Scottish history, containing, as is does, many of the elements of melodrama – high politics, violence and gore, betrayal, distrust, defiance and retribution. The contemporary Auchinleck chronicler recorded that Douglas dined with the king as part of the court celebrations of Shrovetide at Stirling:



Crises of Confidence 79 efter supper at sevyne houris the king then beand in the Inner chalmer and the said errl he chargit him to breke the forsaid band [between the earls of Ross, Douglas and Crawford] he said he mycht nocht nor wald nocht / Than the king said / fals tratour sen yow will nocht I sall / and stert sodanly till him with ane knyft and straik him in the colere and down in the body.

Douglas’s refusal to break the bond was, naturally, not just an act of defiance, for bonds defined and regulated the exercise of lordship in the kingdom, and it was not his bond alone to break. It also reveals the ambitions of James II, who exploded violently in an act of extreme frustration against a magnate who persistently refused to conform to the new royal establishment and respect the authority of the king. The Auchinleck chronicler revealed a little more about the circumstances of the murder, claiming that upon James II stabbing Douglas in the neck, and having evidently wounded him, those who were present immediately turned on the earl and continued the violent attack. These men included not only James’s householders but also regular members of Douglas’s own council, William Cranston and Simon Glendenning: thai sayd that Patrick Gray straik him nixt the king With ane poll ax on the hed and strak out his branes and syne the gentillis that war with the king gaf thaim Ilkane a straik or twa with knyffis and thir ar the names that war with the king that strake him for he had xxvi woundis.

If the lessons of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express are anything to go by, the earl of Douglas was evidently a man who had wronged or offended more than just the king. And in the same way that there was no means for Hercule Poirot to determine which of the stab wounds inflicted in Ratchett’s luxury train-cabin killed the victim, thereby absolving a single individual of the stain and responsibility of murder, similar strategies can be seen in both the murder of John Comyn by Robert I (or was it James Lindsay and Roger Kirkpatrick?) in Dumfries in 1306, and also in the murder of the earl of Douglas in 1452. To the late medieval political community then, in the

80

power and propaganda

face of a crisis where violence crossed the lines of acceptability in common and moral law, it was instinctive to immediately absolve the king of guilt in the crime. Thus in the killing of the eighth earl, at that very moment there was a cataclysmic shift in the balance of power, in favour of the king and crown. James II emerged from the murder, and the inevitable fallout with the Douglas affinity, as a much stronger king with a wider powerbase. In the week following the murder he toured the Scottish Borders displaying royal lordship and giving out rewards and securities to the local power-holders. The king capitalised on this further in the crisis parliament of June that same year, which dealt specifically with the death of the eighth earl and the rumours circulating about James’s involvement designed to ‘denigrate his good reputation and rashly dare to slander him’. Parliament heard evidence that Douglas had renounced his royal protection and safe conduct the day before, and the three estates expressly declared that the most serene lord king did not break or violate any respite or other surety in the death of the said late Earl William, and also from the aforementioned conspiracies, bonds, rebellions and evil deeds, in contempt and offence of the most serene royal majesty, wickedly committed and perpetrated by the same Earl William and his accomplices, William procured and produced the occasion of his own death.

Of course it was a whitewashing of the truth, but what mattered was that the king’s actions were publicly justified and he was absolved of all responsibility and guilt in the affair. The king reinforced the bonds of loyalty that had been made in the crisis of Shrovetide and in the aftermath had rapidly distributed the Douglas lands and other honours, employing his power of patronage to secure new Douglas defectors and maintain his existing alliances. At the June parliament he belted three new earls and ‘maid vi or vii lordis of parliament and banrentis’, and ‘thair was sundry landis gevin to sundry men in this parliament by the kingis secret counsall’. His subsequent attacks on Douglas lands in the south, carried out with impressive force and determination, and his gradual reduction of Douglas influence and



Crises of Confidence 81

power led finally to the small but decisive battle of Arkinholm in May 1455 and the long list of charges against James, ninth earl of Douglas, that led to his forfeiture and exile to England. In the same way that achieving majority and marriage resulted in a determined rebalancing of power in favour of the king in 1449, 1469 brought with it similar incentives for James III, who had come to the throne on his father’s death in 1460. In what was fast becoming a typical Stewart style, James III focused his attentions on the family with the most significant power during his minority, the Boyds, whom he charged with illegally obtaining possession of his person as a minor after he was kidnapped by Robert, Lord Boyd during a hunt at Linlithgow. The reversal of the Boyd ascendancy was quite straightforward for the king and was nowhere near as troublesome as the removal of Douglas power had been for James II or the Albany Stewarts for James I. The Boyds were less entrenched in the political elite and the transformation of the nobility that took place during James II’s reign ensured that never again could magnatial power be systematically consolidated over decades. After being found guilty of treason, those Boyds who had not already fled the kingdom were executed. The biggest challenge to James III’s kingship, however, came from his brother, Alexander, duke of Albany. Albany was the warden of the Marches and was the most powerful magnate operating in the south of Scotland where, in the 1470s, antiEnglish sentiment peaked at the point that James III was pursuing a policy of friendship with England at the expense of the Auld Alliance. In 1474 the beginnings of an animosity between James III and Alexander were evident, for the duke of Albany thrived on border warfare and actively opposed a truce with England. Indeed, one of Blind Hary’s authorities for his intensely anti-English epic poem The Wallace, which was written in the Scottish Borders around this time, was the duke of Albany’s steward, Sir James Liddale of Halkerston. By summer 1475 rumours were spreading throughout Europe about the brothers’ deteriorating relationship, and the Milanese a­ mbassador to

82

power and propaganda

the duke of Burgundy, Giovanni Pietro Panicharolla, wrote to Charles the Bold that the king of England has received news that the king of Scotland, his ally, has been poisoned by his brother at the instigation of the king of France, and the brother has made himself king, driving out the sons of the late king and queen from the realm. He seems inclined to make trouble on the English frontier.

The known facts suggest that this report was the result of a kind of ‘Chinese whispers’ effect, but the letter nevertheless retains a kernel of tangible truth. It seems probable the duke of Albany was harbouring serious intentions to usurp the throne with considerable support from at least the nobility in the south. Indeed, the propaganda to support Albany concentrated on his inherently anti-English policies and the qualities that made him a suitable king, so much so that even a century later the Scottish chronicler Pitscottie wrote that Albany was ‘for his singular wisdom and manheid [. . .] estemed in all contrieis aboue his brother the Kingis grace’. For James III, his two brothers Albany and John, earl of Mar posed a peculiar threat to the stability of his line now that the king was both deeply unpopular in the south and had a legitimate son and heir. Thus during the remainder of the 1470s the power and position of the king’s brothers was gradually reduced. In 1479, under increasing threat from the crown, Albany escaped arrest and fled to France in the spring, escaping his indictment for treason in October of that year; by winter his brother the earl of Mar had been imprisoned at Craigmillar Castle near Edinburgh for conspiring against the king through invoking witchcraft. A short, anonymous chronicle dating to 1482 records that there ‘was mony weches and warlois brint on crag gayt and Jhone the erle of mar the kingis brothir was slayne becaus thai said he faworyt the weches and warlois’. Later chroniclers embellished the details and reported that Mar was executed by being bled to death in a bath in the Canongate in Edinburgh. Despite the resolution to the problems with Mar and Albany,



Crises of Confidence 83

there was increasing pressure placed on James III in the early 1480s by disaffected nobles in the south, angry at the favour shown to royal familiars at their expense; the threat of impending invasion by English forces led by Richard, duke of Gloucester (later Richard III of England) in support of the exiled duke of Albany; and James III’s recent debasement of the Scottish coinage. James III summoned the Scottish host to Lauder in July 1482 to deal with the invasion, but was met with resistance from the military leaders and men-at-arms who saw James III’s foreign policy as directly responsible for the situation and who found his domestic policy offensive. His drastic debasement of the Scottish coinage to fund his immediate war efforts was a disaster to the Scottish currency that ‘causit baitht hungar and derth and mony pure folk deit of hungar’. One contemporary chronicler claimed that ‘the lords of Scotland held their counsaill in the kirk of Lawder, and cryit downe the blak silver’. Tensions over-spilled into action: several royal servants were hanged, and the king was seized and removed by force to Edinburgh. What followed was a revolution in the personnel of the Scottish government and a period of intense renegotiation of power and authority within the kingdom through the struggle for land and governmental offices. Moreover, Richard, duke of Gloucester and Alexander, duke of Albany invaded within a few weeks and entered the undefended Edinburgh without opposition. The principal objective of the expedition had been set out in the terms of the Treaty of Fotheringhay made in June 1482, which agreed a marriage between the duke of Albany and Cecily of York, daughter of Edward IV of England, negating the terms of the 1474 agreement with James III whereby Cecily would marry the future James IV. In the Fotheringhay agreement there were several signs of the duke of Albany’s intention to usurp the throne. The most significant and blatant of these was that he signed the treaty as ‘Alexander R’ and styled himself as King of Scotland. Evidently his early anti-English stance was tempered by his exile and the loss of power he had in the kingdom over the course of the 1470s, for Albany agreed to an indenture

84

power and propaganda

whereby he would be given the kingdom of Scotland by the king of England’s gift, and that Edward IV would assist Albany in obtaining the crown in return for Berwick, Liddesdale, Eskdale, Ewesdale, Annandale and Lochmaben Castle. In the event, support on the ground for Albany was so weak that even with his relatively easy arrival into Edinburgh, the Scots were reluctant to allow him to replace James III – one imagines that Albany’s volte-face alliance with the English was far too unpalatable to those Scots who were unsupportive of James III’s pro-English stance – and instead Albany settled on the restoration of his lands and titles. In this agreement, Albany committed himself to accepting James III’s authority and a subordinate position in the kingdom. Although the duke of Albany failed to seize the throne, James III was nevertheless sidelined in 1482–3, the period of a new balancing of power after Lauder. For at this time there were more powerful forces at work led by the Stewart half-uncles, who formed a new government while the king remained incarcerated at Edinburgh Castle. Although James III was liberated by the end of September 1482, the king failed to fully recover his authority in the years to come, despite something of a second chance between 1483 and 1487. From 1483 James was able steadily to reduce any remaining support for Albany. After his loss at the battle of Lochmaben on 22 July 1484, Albany fled back to England and was condemned and forfeited. The death of Richard III at the battle of Bosworth in August 1485 saw Albany’s final support diminished. He clandestinely crossed the border back to Scotland and was caught and imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle, promptly escaping again by killing his keeper and climbing down the castle wall using a rope fashioned from bed sheets. He immediately sailed to France. A few weeks later he was killed at a tournament in Paris by a splinter from the lance of Louis, duke of Orléans. Albany’s posthumous reputation grew and by the end of the fifteenth century his treasonous actions had been justified in contrast to James III’s subsequent perceived failures on the throne. For James III did little to redeem himself in the mid-1480s and proved again and again



Crises of Confidence 85

that he was unwilling to take into account the wishes of many of the leading men in the realm. As further tensions escalated, a group of alienated royal councillors took matters into their own hands and encouraged Prince James – James III’s eldest son – to be the figurehead of their rebellion; the prince was very bitter about the favour shown by his father to James, duke of Ross, the king’s younger brother. The rebels claimed that James III was threatening his son James with the same fate as had befallen his brother the duke of Albany. They proclaimed public charges against the king at Linlithgow, in a shrewd move that might avoid subsequent indictment for treason. The prince’s faction sought support from abroad to oust James III, writing to his uncle King Hans of Denmark (1481–1513) to allege that in 1486 John Ramsay, Lord Bothwell had poisoned Queen Margaret of Denmark, the Danish king’s sister. The implication here was that as Bothwell was still prominent at James III’s court, the Scottish king condoned the murder of the queen. Indeed, the subsequent reputation of James III and the variety and spread of accounts of his appalling treatment of his family in Continental chronicles indicates the success of the anti-James III propaganda coming from the disaffected. Moreover, the smear campaign against the king certainly indicates a sophisticated attempt to undermine the authority of James III with the single purpose of removing him from power. Accusations of incest with his sister Margaret, the murder of his brother the earl of Mar, his sanction of the murder of Margaret of Denmark, and his brutal treatment of his brother Albany and his eldest son James combined to justify a rebellion against the king and to legitimise the violence which ensued. In the wake of the defection from Stirling of Prince James in early February 1488, civil war seemed imminent. With the insurgents using Prince James to bolster the authority of their armed opposition to the king, it seemed to James III that he should regain possession of the prince. From retreat in Aberdeen, the king decided to make war rather than negotiate, and in breaking a signed agreement with the rebels he lost many key supporters. The king moved south, meeting the rebels at Blackness, and after

86

power and propaganda

some sort of skirmish the king agreed to negotiate, but again publicly broke his agreements. Adopting the all-encompassing title of ‘Prince of Scotland’ – further undermining the king’s authority – and with clear aspirations to control the government, Prince James had the upper hand against his increasingly desperate father. In early June 1488 an armed meeting was inevitable, and the forces for both sides mustered. After several minor encounters, including a setback for Prince James when he lost a skirmish at Stirling Bridge, on 11 June the opposing sides met at Bannockburn near Stirling, the site of Robert Bruce’s great victory of June 1314. The conflict that ensued was distinguished in the late seventeenth century from the earlier victory at Bannockburn by being given the name of the battle of Sauchieburn. Having won a second battle of Stirling Bridge, which echoed the major victory in the Wars of Independence of 1297, and now heading for a second battle of Bannockburn, James III carried Robert Bruce’s sword with him to the field. In doing so the king reminded his own forces, as well as the rebels, of his legitimate authority and descent from the great hero king of the recent struggles for independence from English dominion. If Bruce’s sword represented James III’s right to lead his kingdom, Prince James retaliated by leading his army under the royal standard, the king’s own banner of the lion rampant. The physical battle on the field had a ready counterpart in this contest over the ownership of the symbols of authority. In the event, James III’s side was overwhelmed with substantial losses. The king also ‘happinit to be slane’ and parliament of October 1488 – well underway in its retrospective legitimising of the actions of the new king James IV and his co-conspirators – laid the blame firmly at James III’s own feet. Several themes stand out in the tensions and conflicts which persisted in late medieval Scotland. The most significant is that they were nearly always over issues of authority and control, particularly over land. The concern to define and establish limits to the exercise of power, however, was not only an issue between the king and a handful of his most mighty subjects; it was just as common for the political community more generally to object



Crises of Confidence 87

to the way in which the king might abuse his power as it was for the king to curb the exercise of lordship in the localities of his kingdom. Medieval Scotland was an inherently violent place, but much of the violence was controlled through a well-crafted system of bonds and the bloodfeud, which tended to limit rather than increase vendettas. Nevertheless, the bonds of manrent by which noble families formed their alliances and resolved their disputes reserved each party’s loyalty to the king against the other obligations of the bond. Rebellion against a lawful king was a last resort. When in 1488 James III was overthrown and replaced by violent uprising, the rebels’ only prospect of success came from the support of the king’s heir to the throne. The unfurling of the royal banner at Sauchieburn by Prince James, a symbol of legitimate royal authority, was what gave the battle validity to a community which was, on the whole, reluctant to see a king’s subjects take to the field against him. Indeed, the fact that James IV and his government went to great lengths to emphasise that James III’s death had been accidental indicates the unusual nature of the events of the 1480s. The issues at stake throughout all of the moments of crisis explored in this chapter – the exercise and limits of royal power, the obligations of the community and of individual subjects to their king, and the legitimacy of resistance to unjust rulers – were thus of central importance to the Scottish political community and to the functioning of the late medieval Scottish government.

4 Governance, the Law and the Scottish Polity

Around 1302 John of Paris wrote in his treatise On Royal and Papal Power that ‘a society in which everyone seeks only his own advantage will collapse and disintegrate unless it is ordered to the good of all by some one ruler who has charge of the common good’. This idea was the basis of late medieval kingship and governance. In Scotland the growing power and authority of kingship was underpinned by an emerging Scottish common law and a framework for the administration of governance provided by the development of crown institutions. This chapter will explore the ways in which the kingdom of the Scots was actually governed in the late middle ages, by considering two principal themes. First, the laws of the kingdom will be discussed. This was a formative period in the development of the Scottish legal system and the urgent development of the common law, the legislative and judicial functions of the newly created Scottish parliament, and the system of access to justice in the localities will all be considered. Law and justice, however, together constituted only one aspect of governance, and the second theme under consideration here is the way in which the administration of the kingdom functioned. In particular, this chapter seeks to explain why there was a rapidly expanding bureaucracy across the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. For most of the late middle ages the machinery of Scottish government was based upon the royal household at the centre and the encouragement of active local lordship. A further tier was added during the fourteenth century by an assembly of



Governance, the Law and the Scottish Polity 89

three estates – the bringing together of the leading nobility, clergy and burgesses of the kingdom in what came to be called parliament. During the fifteenth century the range of crown officers increased to facilitate further bureaucracy; with this there was increased specialisation and a gradual move towards professionalisation that resulted in incorporation for some in the sixteenth century. Operating in tandem, these developments suggest that during the late middle ages there was an embryonic state, beginning to form as emerging notions of Scottishness worked in combination with an expansion in the demands and authority of kingship. State-building in the context of the late medieval polity is a fairly contested concept: some scholars shun its use entirely, while others see the value in considering the process of creating a system of ‘national’ (or perhaps more accurately of ‘centralised’) governance controlled by the monarchy. Whether or not one agrees with the precise terms, some kind of centralising process, albeit contingent and stuttering, occurred across the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, identifiable in the practice of kingship more generally and as a by-product of the monarchical response to specific problems. Yet, in general terms, during this period Scotland functioned through a system of decentralised administrations operating under the authority, or with the tacit acceptance, of the king. While great stress was laid upon the authority of the king as above that of all other lords in late medieval Scotland (and, as the previous chapter demonstrated, alliances working against the king were rarely tolerated), at the same time there was also a transformation of the Scottish common law. The common law did derive from crown authority and was administered through the king’s courts, but it nevertheless remained distinct from the will of an individual king. Understanding the development of Scottish common law is complicated by the earliest s­urviving comprehensive digest of the laws of Scotland, the Regiam Majestatem, which was compiled during Robert I’s reign, sometime after 1318 when the king had issued his own run of legislation at the symbolic site of Scone. The creation of a written monument to Scottish law and government was the wider

90

power and propaganda

ambition, but it was underpinned by the pressing need to restore a documented past and a bureaucracy removed during Edward I’s attempt to undermine claims to a legitimate, independent Scottish kingdom. The parliament of 1318 – like the Declaration of the Clergy and the Declaration of the Nobles in 1309, the Statute of Disinheritance at the Cambuskenneth parliament of 1314, and later the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320 – was part of a rhetoric used to validate and enhance Robert I’s authority by the display of support for his kingship. The 1318 laws reveal much about the king’s ambitions as well as the insecurities of his reign. The first law in Scotland aimed at criticism of the monarch (lèse-majesté) was enacted, as were laws against conspiring and rumour-mongering. This would be a repeated theme of legislation in periods where power was being renegotiated. In James I’s early legislation, for example, when the king passed fifty-four statutes in his first two parliaments, lèse-majesté was made a capital offence entailing confiscation of goods and property. In effect, it was a crime put on a par with treason. The Regiam Majestatem derives much of its content and inspiration from other sources and it must be regarded in the context of an erratic hurry to rebuild the legal provenance of the kingdom after the success of Bannockburn in 1314. It was thus a tool for defining law in a period when monarchical authority was being firmly established after a long hiatus and there had been considerable external threat to the jurisdictional independence of the Scottish kingdom. It was neither simply part of a programme of royal propaganda nor was it a straightforward record of existing laws; it was a guide to the law that reinforced the king’s position as the fount of justice. The Regiam Majestatem consists of four books treating civil actions and jurisdictions, judgments and executions, contracts, and crimes; it is a compilation of several legal treatises, Roman law and surviving Scottish statutes. Evident in over two-thirds of the work is a practical treatise on the forms of procedure in Henry II of England’s court – Ranulf de Glanville’s Tractatus de Legibus et Consuetudinibus Regni Angliae of c. 1188 – most of which was adopted without change. The Regiam



Governance, the Law and the Scottish Polity 91

Majestatem also incorporates the thirteenth-century Bolognese jurist Goffredo da Trani’s tract on canon law, Summa Super Titulis Decretalium of c. 1243. Book four comprises the legal codes on crime set out during David I’s reign (1124–53), the Leges inter Brettos et Scottos, included specifically to reinstate the ‘laws of David’ after their abolition by Edward I in 1305. In its adoption of some of the English common law, adaptation of other laws to suit the actual conditions in Scotland, and its assertion of what was known of extant Scots law, the Regiam Majestatem is paradoxical but indicative of the determination to establish something approaching a usable legal framework for the Scots. However, despite Regiam Majestatem’s compilation in the early fourteenth century, its significance was not fully felt until the early fifteenth century, to which period the earliest surviving manuscript versions can be dated, both now held in the National Library of Scotland. While the efforts of Robert I’s reign did much to counter the repeated destruction and confiscation of the documents of the Scottish administration particularly on the eve of the Wars of Independence, there was further destruction of Scotland’s legal provenance as a result of more invasions by the English during the second War of Independence (1332–57). Under the first Stewart kings there was a concerted effort by the crown to stabilise the kingdom and assert this new dynasty’s authority. This was done through a range of mechanisms (some of them discussed in previous chapters) and these included underlining the legal framework in which the king and his government might operate. Several legal guides were produced in the second half of the fourteenth century, the most significant being the Quoniam Attachiamenta, a handbook of legal procedure which influenced general legal policy of the kingdom, and the Leges Malcolmi Mackenneth, the key themes of which were royal lineage and succession, Scottish independence and the laws which were made by the kings of Scots. Building upon this emerging documented legal tradition, Regiam Majestatem was given new status in the early fifteenth century as an authoritative source of law for the kingdom.

92

power and propaganda

From James I’s first parliament in 1424, it was clear that justice and the law were at the forefront of this king’s agenda. The chronicler Walter Bower confirms its primacy to the king, who asserted that James was ‘our lawgiver’, who brought peace to the kingdom through his firm-handed dispensation of justice. In what was a period that saw a restatement of the extent of royal power following the long absence of the monarch, parliament declared in March 1426: it is statute by the king and ordained with the whole assent of his parliament and the three estates that all and sundry lieges of the king in the realm of Scotland live and be governed generally under the king’s laws and statutes of the realm, and under no particular laws nor special privileges, nor by the laws of other countries or realms.

Parliament authorised a commission of ‘six wise and discreet men from each of the three estates, who know the laws’ to examine the law books – both Regiam Majestatem and Quoniam Attachiamenta – and revise them if required. This was a clear indication that the new regime intended to use the law as an extension of royal authority. Similar strategies were in play during James III’s reign. In 1469, the newly married king, now in his majority, set in motion a major revision and streamlining of the laws of the kingdom. Parliament committed to ‘the reduction of the king’s laws, Regiam Majestatem, acts, statutes and other books to be put in a volume and to be authorised, and the rest to be destroyed’. One of the men charged with this task, the Clerk Register Sir David Guthrie of that Ilk, had studied arts at Cologne and Paris in the 1440s, and had considerable legal expertise. He had come into royal service as Treasurer in 1461 and was offered a range of distinguished offices over the course of the next decade. The administration of the common law was part of the king’s responsibility for peace and order in his lands, but, given the sheer volume of legal work required, it was impractical for a late medieval king to resolve all the disputes in the kingdom. Instead, the king’s authority was mediated through a complex pattern of devolved jurisdiction. The mainstay of stable late medieval



Governance, the Law and the Scottish Polity 93

local society was lordship through a variety of personal bonds of service (manrent), maintenance and friendship, which survive in written form in increasing numbers from 1442 onwards, and much justice was dispensed locally in informal settings and through arbitration. Nevertheless, there was a marked trend towards the hearing of complaints in the formal setting of the king’s courts. The structure of royal justice was built around two principal courts, the justiciar’s court and the sheriff’s court. The justiciar was the highest office under the crown; his court was held by justice ayre, a regular circuit through the kingdom, and it had responsibility for seeking out and punishing criminal cases. The justiciary was divided on geographical lines with a justiciar north of the Forth and one in the south. The sheriff’s court had more limited jurisdiction than the justiciary, extending only to the sheriffdom, but it heard both civil and criminal cases. By 1300 there were over thirty sheriffdoms in Scotland that held formal courts, most in the eastern and lowland areas, and these continued to increase in number during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Cases were called before the sheriff by complaint or a suit of ‘wrang and unlaw’, the pleas of which were discussed at length in the opening of the Quoniam Attachiamenta. The sheriff’s court typically saw a jury of leading local men called to hear civil cases; in criminal cases the sheriff presided over the assize and had the power to punish by life or limb. Prison was not the principal form of punishment in the middle ages. Confinement was instead intended to keep those regarded as dangerous secure before their trial and punishment, and it was not a punishment in itself. Punishments were mostly either financial or of torture, life or limb. Mutilation and being put to death for crime was appropriate in such cases where the guilty party was caught in the act of killing or if a thief was caught infangthief. Below the courts of the justiciar and the sheriff, local legal jurisdiction lay with feudal lords, who held barony and regality courts, as well as the various burgh courts, which in the royal burghs were presided over by bailies. During the fourteenth century extensive grants were made of baronies and regalities,

94

power and propaganda

which expanded the system of local jurisdiction in response to an increasing level of local business. These courts were permitted to deal with cases that would otherwise have been heard before the court of the justiciar or the sheriff and thus they developed into an extremely important element of the administration of justice in the kingdom during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. By the end of the fifteenth century there were over 400 barony courts, which were permitted to exercise powers comparable to those of the sheriff’s court and might even include the pleas of the crown. Both lay and clerical lords might be granted barony status; for example, the bishop of Glasgow as secular lord had barony jurisdiction from the twelfth century, which was elevated to regality status in 1450. Lords of regality were granted even greater powers than baronies and were enabled to hear civil and criminal cases, including the most serious offences of murder, rape, robbery and arson, which were normally reserved as pleas of the crown. Naturally, this led to tensions over jurisdiction, an issue at the heart of the exercise of power in late medieval Scotland. Some measure of accountability was placed on the burgh courts and a system of appeal was well established by the fourteenth century. Appeals for decisions pronounced in burgh courts were referred to the Curia Quatuor Burgorum, the Court of the Four Burghs. This court was presided over by one of the king’s most senior officers, the Chamberlain, and was made up of representatives of four royal burghs, Edinburgh, Stirling, Lanark and Linlithgow. Before 1332 Roxburgh and Berwick had sent representatives to the court (when the towns were not in English hands) but from this date forward they did not return to their previous status nor were their revenues accounted for in the Scottish exchequer; in 1369 they were replaced permanently by Lanark and Linlithgow. By 1405 the number of burgesses sent to the court had reduced by half and it was determined that a yearly meeting to discuss the commonweal of burghs was sufficient. By this time the court’s remit had also expanded beyond simply acting as a court of appeal. James I moved the annual meetings to Edinburgh, and the court gradually merged with the



Governance, the Law and the Scottish Polity 95

Convention of the Royal Burghs, which in 1487 was formally constituted. Of course, alliances forged between burghs were not unusual in medieval Europe (the Hanseatic League providing the best-known example), and these types of defensive confederations both protected and promoted the interest of the burghs and of the realm. Although the king’s role as the fount of justice was discharged through this system of local courts, direct access to the king’s justice remained a central principle of late medieval Scottish common law. The king heard complaints in person and through his council, but parliament remained a space in which justice might be done, particularly in matters of the four pleas of the crown. The late medieval Scottish parliament had several functions, which were diplomatic, fiscal, judicial and legislative, but it was also a political event at which the leading men of the kingdom gathered together, argued, debated, jostled and made alliances. It was an itinerant meeting place, centred on the king. Parliament has been the focus of a significant amount of scholarly attention in the past decade as a result of a major project, the Records of the Parliaments of Scotland to 1707, which was undertaken at the University of St Andrews and launched online for public access in 2007. It has now been demonstrated that parliament emerged in the mid-thirteenth century, broadly in line with parliaments that were appearing in other European kingdoms: the first Scottish parliament took place at Kirkliston in 1235 but parliaments did not become a prominent feature of political life until after 1286. Over the course of the fourteenth century, parliament’s political and constitutional importance was established and the body became essential for the maintenance of the kingdom’s legal and political independence. Certainly by 1390 prominent members of the political community held copies of books of ‘statutes of the kingdom’ in their personal libraries: James Douglas, lord of Dalkeith in his will of that year left his books of parliamentary statutes and romance literature to his son and heir. In 1399 parliament’s judicial role was signified in a statute that ‘ordained that each year the king shall hold a parliament so that his subjects are served by the

96

power and propaganda

law’, a clear indication of the close relationship between this body and the king’s obligations to dispense justice. The records for the parliaments of Scotland can be frustrating. They document very little of the legal discussion that occurred and almost nothing of the influence of common law on justice. What is clear is that legislation was a function exercised by the king in council, rather than by him personally, and thus parliament was of utmost importance to the successful governing of the kingdom. Attendance at parliament rapidly expanded and developed during the late middle ages, for the collective nature of judgement by a representative council encouraged the development of a regular institution within which not only was royal authority exercised but also the council itself had considerable influence. By the early fourteenth century parliament was attended by a range of clerics, aristocrats, the lesser nobility and freeholders; from 1326 burgh commissioners attended. Parliaments were summoned at the will of the crown with attendance of representatives of the ‘three estates’ of elite medieval society – promoting the interests of the church, the aristocracy and commerce – commanded and required by the king. Of these elites, the nobility enjoyed political pre-eminence, and most of the time this estate was the dominant force in parliament. Possibly inspired by his captivity in England, James I had attempted to remodel the Scottish parliament in 1428 along English lines to resemble the House of Commons, where commissioners of the shire would be required to attend parliament instead of the personal attendance of small barons and free tenants, and the commissioners were to choose a speaker of the commons. It was an unsuccessful attempt to pirate English institutions. In particular, the bicameral system did not fit the Scottish context, where all lay tenants-in-chief had always been entitled to come to parliament in person and sit in the estate of the nobility. Of course, with infrequent meetings and busy agendas, parliament alone could not absorb the bulk of legal business and yet as the highest court of law, parliament was under increasing pressure from demands for access to justice. A major



Governance, the Law and the Scottish Polity 97

step forward in the progress of a more efficient and streamlined system of government was the first attempt in Scotland to establish a central structure to administer justice. In 1426 James I instituted the sessions of council, a specially constituted statutory judicial tribunal under parliamentary authority, with its own parliamentary judges, but wholly separate from the meetings of parliament. During subsequent decades the remit of the sessions of council expanded as they found themselves dealing with unfinished parliamentary business and matters arising between the meetings of parliament. In tandem, parliament itself gradually came to focus on its legislative function. Under increasing pressure from this rising quantity of work, in the 1460s the king’s council inherited some of the remit of the statutory sessions of council and the general judicial functions of parliament, following a pattern that was replicated throughout Europe of royal councils developing into central court institutions. From 1468 onwards it would be the king’s council that was the main central forum for judicial complaints apart from parliament. None of this, however, represents a conscious attempt to replace the decentralised medieval system. Rather it was a series of more-or-less ad hoc efforts to meet the increasing demands of an expanding educated, financially astute, property-holding population, who used the legal mechanisms available to them to further their own interests. Indeed, evidence of these demands can be seen in courts of all levels. For instance, in 1468 the burgh of Aberdeen wrote to the burgh of Edinburgh to seek advice on a matter of complex inheritance laws. Edinburgh responded after seeking advice themselves from ‘men of law’ in the burgh. It was not until 1490 that the king’s council, as chief advisory body of the king, developed explicit judicial functions and the Scottish court system really began to centralise. The establishment of the sessions of council was thus the beginning of a century of experimentation in legal institutions which culminated in the foundation of a centre for the practice and coherent development of the civil law in 1532, the College of Justice, important not only for its legal jurisdiction but also for its role

98

power and propaganda

as a professional centre. It would not be until 1672 that criminal jurisdiction would follow. This pattern was mirrored in the relationship between parliament and the granting and law of arms. Parliament’s legal remit was broad, for not only did it pass legislation to ensure the regular governance of the kingdom, but it also passed judgement on matters of nobility. The granting of armorial bearings was a concern of parliament for arms were property and thus might be inherited and forfeited. From as early as 1324 we find evidence of parliament making such grants, including for instance the grant of the name and arms of Keith to the heirs of the lands of Keith-Marischal and the office of the Marischal of the kingdom, which became a hereditary senior office of great significance. It was not until the late sixteenth century that these functions were detached from parliament, when they were instituted in an independent court system headed by Lyon King of Arms, which still today – as the Court of the Lord Lyon – has independent authority over the law of arms in Scotland. The behaviour of the membership of parliament indicates that at numerous points the estates viewed their role to be crucial in restraining royal policy and, at times, in initiating policy against the wishes of the king. For although parliament was a royal institution, called into existence by the king to implement the law, approve taxation and ratify royal policies, parliament was never under his complete control. Parliament was often willing to defy the king, and all medieval Scottish monarchs had to endure sessions of parliament where their demands were moderated or refused by the estates. Thus parliament’s most crucial role in governance, though not formally recognised as such, lay in the informal limitations it placed on the king’s power. For example, David II’s reign gives substantial evidence of the ability of parliament to exert its will over the king when the need arose, specifically over the policy of an English succession favoured by David II after 1346. As parliament’s own authority grew, so too did its powers to provide a counterbalance to the king’s authority, in the name of the crown. As a consequence, Robert II was sidelined by a parliament in 1384:



Governance, the Law and the Scottish Polity 99 because our lord king himself is unable on each occasion to be attentive continually to the execution of justice and the law of his kingdom in person, he has desired, granted and ordained by the counsel and ordinance of his council that his firstborn son and heir the lord [John Stewart], earl of Carrick, should cause execution of common justice throughout the realm, for all who have suffered troubles or injuries at the hands of all and singular persons offending against law, either personally or by persons to be deputed by him, for whom the same earl shall be held to answer to the king and council.

The radical actions of the estates here were articulated as being in defence of the crown, if not the person of the king. The estates thus empowered themselves with the authority to act in the interests of the kingdom, quite independently from the authority of the monarch. As with similar bodies elsewhere in Europe, taxation was the issue that most frequently raised hackles in the Scottish parliament. So, for example, parliament repeatedly opposed James I’s requests for taxation to pay his English ransom in the 1420s. James I’s strength and determination in his style of kingship was certainly tempered by parliament’s resistance, and in 1431 parliament granted a tax to James for a campaign in the Highlands on the condition that it be kept in a ‘kist of four keys’ under the keepership of men who were experienced financiers but not royal councillors. In 1436 there was even an attempt made to arrest the king ‘yn the name of all the Thre Astates of your reum’ for breaking his oath to maintain the kingdom and the law. Parliament was openly hostile to James III in the 1470s and early 1480s; and between October 1479 and March 1482 parliament was completely out of the control of the king: it refused to forfeit his brother the duke of Albany, blocked attempts by the king to lead his army against the English, and appointed men to the Lords of the Articles (a parliamentary committee that drafted legislation) in March 1482 who were shortly to be involved in a coup d’état against the king and his government. Nevertheless, even when parliament created obstacles for the king, it still perceived itself as acting in the interests of the crown

100

power and propaganda

rather than as an autonomous body constituted upon a different principle. The interests of the crown and community were seen as inseparable and when parliament stood in the way of the king’s wishes, it did so using language that made it clear that it acted on behalf of the crown. In the same vein, parliament was consistent in its disapproval of nobles who abused their position and it sought to reduce the limits of their power on behalf of the crown. James I’s murderers in 1437, along with the Livingston, Douglas and Boyd families in succeeding reigns, all discovered that parliament had no sympathy for actions that threatened legitimate royal authority. James II revived parliament on attaining his majority by using it to attract support for his attacks on the Douglases, to reward his allies and to detach Douglas dependents. Following the king’s killing of the earl, James II manipulated parliament to declare on 12 June 1452 that Douglas ‘procured and produced the occasion of his own death’. The estates supported the king in his successful war on the Douglas kindred and in carrying out extensive forfeitures in 1455. Their fate demonstrated that no noble family could resist the combined power of king and parliament. Indeed, parliament was now seen as the only legitimate means by which nobles might oppose the crown. During the parliament of summer 1445 steps were taken to put the crown in a position that would ensure it never again faced these kinds of challenges. This included the taking of oaths that were part of a process to bind the king to his government and magnates through mutual obligations. By these oaths James II vowed: I shall be loyal [. . .] to the three estates of my realm, and keep, defend and govern each estate in their own freedom and privilege, with all my goodly power, according to the laws and customs of the realm; neither to add to nor diminish the law, custom and statutes of the realm without the consent of the three estates, and nothing to work nor use touching the common profit of the realm without consent of the three estates; to keep the law and statutes made by my forbears in all points, with all my power, to all my lieges in all things.



Governance, the Law and the Scottish Polity 101

In this oath the king consented to something approaching the collective authority of parliament and acknowledged that his royal power was limited by his obligations to the political community. Moreover, the oaths reflected the reality that the members of the three estates already believed: that when assembled in parliament, they had de jure authority over the crown. Of course, the statement of parliament’s role and authority was nothing new; as early as the 1320s the Modus Tenendi Parliamentum had been written in England, expressing ideas of representative power, as well as the role parliament might have in limiting the power of the monarch. Limits to power were one thing: the oaths also reflected the co-operative element of government, which included the very real ability of the estates to influence royal policy. Nevertheless, it was only fourteen years later that James III undermined this equilibrium when, in 1469, he declared an overriding imperial authority, heralding a new style of Renaissance monarchy in Scotland. While parliament supported the king with his duties in maintaining law and order, there were other administrative structures to assist in the exercise of kingship. In this, the officers of the king’s household were especially crucial, for the most senior officers who managed the household also had major responsibilities in the administration of the kingdom. An early fourteenthcentury manuscript in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, known as ‘The Scottish King’s Household’, sheds much light on the important household officers and their responsibilities. The document was drawn up by Scottish commissioners attending the London assembly of 1305, which issued ordinances for the settlement of Scotland. The commissioners had been asked to give good advice, reveal any hindrances to good government and the means by which these might be overcome, and to offer any suggestions for what might be amended. In effect the ‘The Scottish King’s Household’ is a statement of how Scotland was administered before 1296 and it provided a model for the new administration of Bruce from 1306. The Chancellor emerges as the most significant officer of the

102

power and propaganda

crown, as collector and spender of royal income. The commissioners found that there was first, the Chancellor, wise, suitable and of good discretion, impartial to rich and to poor, as head of his Council, and who ought to know the Chancery forms and know the laws of the land, to stay by the King when it pleases him [. . .] for if this office be well governed, it is the key and the safety of the Great Seal and the prevention of all errors which can arise in the Court between the King and the Baronage.

The Chancellor’s role as the king’s most senior officer was thus of extreme importance in the governance of the realm and the exercise of justice. The Chancellor also had the duty of visiting the king’s hospitals annually with the Almoner, who was responsible for the management of the masters of the hospitals. Medieval hospitals were religious foundations of charitable houses that were not only places where the sick were cared for, but also refuges for social outcasts like lepers or shelters for pilgrims. The Almoner was to ‘know how to advantage the houses and maintain the brethren and sisters; and the servants of the King’s household who grow old, and his poor bondsmen who cannot help themselves, shall be received and governed in the said hospitals according to the means of the said houses’. He also distributed the king’s alms to the poor on saints’ days. According to the 1305 inquiry, the Chancellor selected the chief financial officer of the kingdom, the Chamberlain, although one suspects that in reality the king had rather more to do with it. The Chamberlain’s principal function was to order the household. He ‘shall make the purchases wholesale and regulate the King’s dwelling [. . .] and the state of his household according to the season of the year, so that the household may live by purveyance without ravaging the country’. The Chamberlain also had jurisdiction in connection with the burghs, including the holding of a yearly ayre, as well as regulating trade and ensuring good standards of burgh governance. It was thus considered paramount that he be a man who ‘knows how to guide and govern the burghs, the demesne lands of the king, and his poor husbandmen in demesne, and will deal with



Governance, the Law and the Scottish Polity 103

the wards, reliefs, marriages, and all manner of the realm’s issues to the profit of the Crown’. The principal emphasis of this office was fiscal. Taxation was not the normal source of royal revenue in the middle ages and it was only raised in extraordinary circumstances with the explicit consent of parliament. The ordinary sources of revenue included the rents from crown lands, the fines imposed by the justiciary and the sheriffs’ courts, the escheats of the attainted, the few-mails or few-fermes of the royal burghs and the customs on merchandise. From this income the Chamberlain provided for the royal household and other miscellaneous expenses including the cost of war that exceeded that covered by the normal obligations of the martial class. The Chamberlain did not collect the rents directly. Instead, the immediate receivers of rents and fines were magistrates, custumars of the royal burghs and sheriffs, who in each sheriffdom ‘should be elected [. . .] by advice and election of the good people of the country, and such as know how to maintain the law for poor and rich’. An annual audit by the exchequer of the accounts of these officers took place and was carried out by the Lords Auditors, ‘people of substance and discretion enjoined by commission with the Chancellor and the Chamberlain to take such account and make reasonable deductions to the king’s profit’. The Auditors recorded abbreviations of the receipts they had verified in rolls, which have survived and are housed in the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh, forming one of the most important collections of records for late medieval Scotland. The earliest original exchequer roll dates to 1326, although there are earlier fragments that have survived in seventeenthcentury transcripts. Consequently, the rolls give us a fair picture of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century financial transactions and a reasonable amount of detail about many aspects of medieval life. The insights they afford are critical to our understanding of the movements and needs of the royal court and the management of the kingdom. The Lords Auditors worked in conjunction with the principal clerk, the Clerk of the Rolls, who controlled ‘all the charters and muniments issuing from the Chancery, and all the accounts of the Exchequer’. This was done through a system of

104

power and propaganda

double-entry, a new system of accounting that developed in the Italian city-states in the thirteenth century and which quickly found favour throughout Europe. The real power of the royal household was in the office of Steward, who according to the 1305 assessment ‘shall order the household of the King in certainty by the counsel of the Chamberlain’. He was the internal regulator of the household economy and had considerable access to the king’s person, and was, as a consequence of this, an extremely important member of the political community. The office was hereditary from the twelfth century and was the foundation of the position and power of the Stewart dynasty itself. There were two other hereditary household offices, that of the Constable and the Marischal. Much confusion surrounds these offices, principally because they were quite different from their counterparts in England and elsewhere in Europe. In general terms the Constable was the chief military officer of the kingdom and responsible for guarding the king’s body. The Marischal had a military function, although this was obscured in the 1305 household account where his duties in the hall were amplified: It pertains to him to array the hall in honour of the King, and at table he shall arrange the eaters after the King’s table is set, by the discretion of the Stewart and Constable [. . .] and to do what shall be enjoined him privately on behalf of the Stewart and the Clerk of Liverance. And the Marshal shall have his court in time of war of all manner of trespasses done under the banner and promptly to be adjudged.

In this we find the evidence of two separate military courts, one operating in the field under the Marischal’s authority and the other in the king’s court under the authority of the Constable. Although the Marischal was often involved, the Constable made arrangements for the lists when knights were judged in a trial by battle. Both the Constable and the Marischal ‘shall have guard of the barrace [. . .] for the day, and they shall have the fees that belong, according as Constables and Marshals have in other realms, wherever knights fight on horseback’ in a trial



Governance, the Law and the Scottish Polity 105

by duel. Judicial duels in trials of treason were arranged by the Constable’s court, with the help of the king’s heralds and the Marischal. Several cases are known, including that of 1412 where a duel was fought between two undistinguished men, John Hardy and Thomas Smith, presided over by Archibald, fourth earl of Douglas, who was justiciar south of the Forth: ‘Thomas Smith fell there as an accuser who falsely charged the said John with the crime of treason.’ In 1426 James I presided over a judicial duel between a man-at-arms Henry Knox and a ‘common tailor’, who had accused Knox of verbally abusing the king. One wonders if this complaint was laid in response to James’s new suite of legislation reinforcing the severity of lèsemajesté and raising it to a capital crime akin to treason. Indeed, when Knox was prosecuted and denied the charges against him, the tailor accused him of treason; the judicial duel was the only means to resolve the dispute. A seventeenth-century transcript of a document possibly dating to James I’s reign, ‘The Order of Combats’, details the roles of these officers during judicial duels. It was found in the nineteenth century in the private archive of the earls of Erroll, the hereditary constables of Scotland, which certainly suggests some claim to authenticity. It reveals that a ‘bill of quarrell’ was brought before the Constable’s court and when the truth of the matter could not be proven, a trial by arms was decreed. The Constable assigned the day and with the king’s consent requested the lists to be constructed. On the day of the duel, the king would sit on a high seat or scaffold, at the foot of which was a seat for the Constable. The challenger would come to the east gate of the lists ‘and brought with him such armours as wer appoynted by the Constable, and wherwith he determined to fight’. The Constable approached him, asked him to state his business, then opened the visor of his headpiece ‘to see his fface, and therby to know that man to be he who makes the challenge’. Once the defendant had been similarly identified, the duel took place and the man who lost was punished. The Constable and the Marischal received remuneration from the accoutrements of the event itself: the Constable ‘a spear, a shield, a long sword,

106

power and propaganda

a square sword, and a knyfe, with the haill jewells and rings the vanquisht had about him at his entring the quarrell’. The Marischal received ‘all horses, broken armour, or other ffurnitur that fell to the ground efter the combatants did enter the lists, als weill from the Challenger as from the Defender’ and all the bars, posts, rails and other parts of the lists. As an extension of their role in the arrangement of judicial duels, in which the king’s heralds also had a part to play, the Constable and the Marischal together had an important ceremonial function in the rites of the court and kingdom. A seventeenth-century description of a mid-fifteenth-century coronation service, probably that of James II at Holyrood, demonstrates the important role they had in this ritual. The Marischal performed the quasi-coronation of Lyon King of Arms, including crowning him ‘with his auen Croune wich he is to wear at that Solenitie’, and laid down the structures of authority in their relationship. Both the Marischal and the Constable were handed the two vessels containing the holy oil for anointing the king; they in turn handed the two flasks to the bishops who ‘poured it one the kinges head and vpoune one side and the vther’. Anomalies between the ‘Scottish King’s Household’ and the situation in Robert I’s reign have sometimes been used to suggest that the situation described therein was untenable from 1306. This is not borne out by the evidence. Although it is certainly true that Robert I petitioned parliament in 1326 to improve his financial situation by providing approval for a taxation for the duration of his life, this does not indicate that he was unable to sustain the costs of a household. Finances were obviously tight and it was suggested by Robert ‘that the lands and rents which were accustomed of old to pertain to his crown had become so diminished by various gifts and transfers made because of the war that he did not have appropriate support for his position’. This did not alter the situation that the great officers of state never seem to have been at threat, for they were utterly essential to the administration of the kingdom. Indeed, only shortly before this request to parliament, Robert I had made the formal confirmation of the posts of Constable and Marischal



Governance, the Law and the Scottish Polity 107

as hereditary offices: at Cambuskenneth in November 1314 Sir Gilbert Hay of Erroll was confirmed in the office of Constable, now in heredity; in Berwick in November 1324 Sir Robert Keith was confirmed as Marischal of the kingdom in heredity. These appointments are not indicative of a king who saw no value in the continuity of the household structures. However, in the last quarter of the fourteenth century there were necessary adjustments to the household as one of the principal hereditary office-holders, the Steward, ascended the throne. Dissatisfaction was evident over the next decades as the unique difficulties of the reigns of Robert II and Robert III changed the nature of the distribution of power within the administrative structures. However, formal change would not come until the reign of James I, when on his return from captivity in 1424 he reshuffled the administration of the kingdom and expanded the machinery of government. Throughout the fourteenth century it is evident that the specialised governmental roles of the household officers had continued to develop and the officers themselves were becoming ever more powerful. Thus the reorganisation of these offices was prudent. One of James I’s first departures from centuries-old practice was to diminish the importance of the office of the Chamberlain by devolving some of its core functions to a number of new and more specialised offices. This was in direct response to the experiences during the height of the power of the Chamberlain, particularly between 1382 and 1407, when the office was held by Robert, earl of Fife, and later duke of Albany. From 1407 the office was held by Albany’s son, John Stewart, earl of Buchan, who appropriated crown revenue to maintain Albany’s household in the absence of a royal equivalent. James I’s policy towards the Albany Stewart family resulted in the restructuring of the royal household and the fiscal arrangements of the kingdom. For instance, the Chamberlain lost one of his most important roles, that of maintain trading standards in the burghs, which was given to the Court of the Four Burghs. In 1424, perhaps inspired by the structure of the English royal household, the entire management of the king’s revenues was

108

power and propaganda

assigned to two newly introduced officers, the Comptroller and the Treasurer, thereby removing the last remaining powers of the Chamberlain. The Comptroller assumed the role of receiving the steady income from rents from crown lands, from burgh mails and from customs duties, from which he met the basic expenses of the royal household. The losses of both the Comptroller’s accounts and the financial records created by the Treasurer for most of the fifteenth century has been disastrous not only for our understanding of these individual offices, but also for the history of the period more generally. The Treasurer received the rather more variable revenue from feudal dues, the fines from punishments in the courts of the kingdom and any taxation. From this he financed the domestic economy and furniture of the king’s house, the expenses of the king and queen, their apparel, the liveries for their men, the state dresses, the royal stable and building repairs. Less than eighteen months of accounts survive from James III’s reign (from August 1473 to December 1474) but from James IV’s reign the Treasurer’s accounts are more revealing, showing the ways in which the income was spent by the royal family. Other household records extant from 1429 and instituted as part of James I’s fiscal reforms have also been completely lost, including the Libri Domicilii or day books of the pantry, buttery and kitchen, which do not survive until 1525. During the 1450s there was a range of new accounts kept in James II’s household that included purchase books or the Liber Emptorum and the accounts of the clerk of expenses, all of which have been lost. Despite the loss of their records, it is clear that together the offices of the Comptroller and the Treasurer, in conjunction with other new creations such as the Master of the Household, formed a new administrative structure that was less susceptible to domination and exploitation by the leading political families of the day. The general consequence of the reorganisation and expansion of government under James I was a growing emphasis on bureaucracy, which required ever increasing numbers of men with clerical, financial and legal skills. Dozens of lead seal matrices have been uncovered by archaeologists and metal-



Governance, the Law and the Scottish Polity 109

detectors in recent decades, showing not only how widespread the need for a seal was in conducting everyday business but also that clerics of the lowest ranks were purchasing and using mass-produced seals as a means of communicating their authority. Even though there were three universities established in the fifteenth century, it was still quite usual for Scottish students to study in the major universities of Europe and return to Scotland with an array of useful administrative skills. One such student, Master Alexander Guthrie of Kincaldrum, studied arts at Paris between 1411 and 1417; by 1425 he was acting as the ‘king’s receiver’ in exchequer audits, moving on to a post as clerk of the justiciary north of the Forth within a decade. There are records of Scottish students in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries at Kraków, Vienna, Heidelberg, Caen, Bourges, Siena, Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, Cologne, Louvain, Bologna, Pavia, Padua, Ferrara, Rome and Orléans. While universities that taught jus civile spread across southern Europe and England by the end of the thirteenth century, Orléans was a particularly attractive option for the many scholars who wished to study civil law, including the Scots. Indeed, there was a separate Scottish nation (a corporation of students) established there between 1336 and 1538, whose minutes have partially survived in the Vatican Library. In these accounts one can read about the students’ protracted financial problems (plus ça change) as they sought to raise the capital to purchase their own symbol of authority, a Mace of the Scottish Nation, in the decades after 1397. Certainly there was something of a legal profession emerging during James I’s reign and there was some educational provision made in Scotland for the study of civil law. At the University of St Andrews, where theology and canon law were dominant, there was space made for the teaching of civil law; the university’s founder Bishop Wardlaw had studied canon law at Avignon and civil law at Orléans. Indeed, the foundation bull of the university mentions a separate Faculty of Civil Law, but not all five faculties listed were instituted immediately. It was not until 1432 that the teaching of civil law at St Andrews was explicitly authorised by the papacy and from that point onwards

110

power and propaganda

Figure 4.1  Bull of Pope Benedict XIII confirming the foundation of the University of St Andrews, 28 August 1413. University of St Andrews Library, UYUY100. Reproduced courtesy of University of St Andrews Library.

practitioners in both laws were to be found in the seaside town. The University of Glasgow, founded in 1451, met some of the needs of James II’s even more intense emphasis on clerical and legal skills. One of the foundational intentions was for Glasgow to be a university of the laws, both canon and civil. Indeed, at the suite of inaugural lectures on its foundation Master William Lennox read a lecture on the civil law. However, it would not be until William Elphinstone, an early graduate of Glasgow, returned from his years as a student of civil law at the University of Orléans that a plan for a proper centre for university education in civil law in Scotland emerged. In 1495, Elphinstone, then bishop of Aberdeen, founded the University of Aberdeen. Elphinstone’s career is a leading example of the changing nature of the administration and governance of the kingdom. Elphinstone attended a grammar school at Glasgow Cathedral



Governance, the Law and the Scottish Polity 111

in the 1430s and 1440s, and then attended the University of Glasgow between 1457 and 1462. A favourite of the bishop of Glasgow and evidently destined for a clerical life, Elphinstone continued his studies in canon law at the University of Paris, where he enlisted in 1465, graduating three years later. By this stage Elphinstone was giving lectures on the principal set texts of canon law. Two years later, perhaps inspired by his own father’s study of civil law at Louvain in the 1430s (three sets of his lecture notes are now preserved in Aberdeen University Library) and well aware of the need in Scotland for those trained in both laws, he moved to the University of Orléans to take up the study of civil law. There he was exposed to an intellectual community amongst whom were the best civil lawyers in France, grappling with the most engaging problems of their day, including the nature of sovereignty and the relationship between common law and statutory law. Elphinstone, like many others, favoured the views of the civilist Bartolus de Saxoferrato, whose work was well known in Scotland by the second half of the fifteenth century. In this Elphinstone believed that a king should express the will of his people because his very authority to rule came from those same people. He also believed that although full sovereignty belonged to the king, common law could not be overruled and nor could laws be arbitrarily changed once they had been accepted by the governed. The issues Elphinstone grappled with at university were of paramount relevance to Scotland and in his later career he drew on his learning at Orléans. Indeed, so formative was this experience that the foundation of the University of Aberdeen explicitly modelled the provision for the teaching of civil law on the Faculty of Civil Law at Orléans. Elphinstone quickly returned to Glasgow where he was appointed to the post of chief legal officer in the diocese of Glasgow and resumed his relationship with the university there as dean of the faculty of arts and rector. In June 1478 he moved to Edinburgh as an official of Lothian and sat as a lord of council in parliament. James III used him in diplomatic embassies with France and England from the following year, for which he was rewarded with the bishopric of

112

power and propaganda

Ross in 1481 and then of Aberdeen in 1483. He was a leading member of the king’s council, a judge in civil causes as a lord of council and justice ayres, an auditor of the exchequer, and from 1488 Chancellor of Scotland and 1492 Keeper of the Privy Seal. This gave him a thorough insight into the administrative, fiscal and legal structures of the kingdom and how they might be improved, which culminated in reforms in the diocese of Aberdeen including the foundation of the university and the printing of the Aberdeen Breviary fifteen years later. Elphinstone’s personal petition to Pope Alexander VI in Rome to request the authority to found Aberdeen University had stressed that both his diocese and Scotland suffered from a shortage of lay administrators, civil lawyers, doctors of medicine and schoolmasters. His university, which had already received full support from James IV, would resolve this. Legislation in the ‘Education Act’ of 1496 further supported these changes. Parliament declared that all barons and freeholders [. . .] put their eldest sons and heirs into school from the time they are eight or nine years old, and to remain at the grammar schools until they are competently instructed and have perfect Latin, and thereafter to remain three years at the schools of art and law, so that they may have knowledge and understanding of the laws, through which justice may reign universally throughout the realm, so that those who are sheriffs or judges ordinary under the king’s highness will have the knowledge to do justice [and] that the poor people should have no need to seek our sovereign lord’s principal auditors for each small injury.

Certainly by this time a knowledge of the law was expected of the leading men of the kingdom. For instance, on the death of Robert, Lord Lyle in 1497 his son and heir took steps to recover property that had belonged to Lyle including both a book of ‘storeis’ and a ‘buke of law’. Lord Lyle may have acquired this book during his trial for treason in 1482 brought about by his alleged contact with the outlawed James, ninth earl of Douglas, during his period as an ambassador in England. His son’s pursual of the books indicates not only the worth of the physical property but also the value of their contents.



Governance, the Law and the Scottish Polity 113

In many ways, the justification for a third university in Scotland was brought about by the rapid expansion of bureaucracy and administration during James II’s reign. Indeed, the central institutions which were founded in the sixteenth century – including famously the College of Surgeons (1506) and the College of Justice (1532) – were only milestones in a long-term tendency towards specialisation and centralisation of skill, which was certainly grounded in the fifteenth century and accelerated particularly during James II’s reign when there was an increasing need for a large body of educated men with clerical, legal and administrative skills. This need was evident at all levels and included the increase in the purchase records of James II’s own household, the Liber Emptorum, which were kept from as early as 1453 although they no longer survive. Among the most important of the records, now lost, were those of the clerk of expenses, first mentioned as existing in 1456. James II also did something else that had a more general significance in the government of the kingdom. It was during his reign that a new emphasis was placed on the importance of Edinburgh, and Holyrood in particular, as a royal and administrative centre. The elevation of Edinburgh to a capital has often been attributed to his son James III, who for much of his reign completed his business there and rarely ventured beyond the burgh, but the favour given to Edinburgh had already been established during James II’s reign. James II was born, crowned and married at Holyrood and he spent his childhood predominantly in Edinburgh Castle. It was natural then that he had a desire to capitalise on his personal history and establish Edinburgh as the centre of royal power, and it was from here that he conducted the bulk of his administration. Of the surviving documents from James II’s reign 346 were issued from Edinburgh, 127 from Stirling, 53 from Perth, 23 from Falkland and only 14 from Linlithgow. As with other contemporaneous European states, James II’s expansion in the administration of his kingdom went hand-inhand with the harnessing of military power. This king had a passion for artillery, the must-have military hardware of the

114

power and propaganda

mid-fifteenth century, and much of the best artillery was being made in the Low Countries. Indeed, James II must have been delighted when, in 1449, he received a large amount of armour, weapons and gunpowder artillery as part of the dowry of Mary of Guelders. To bolster his attack on Douglas power in the south of Scotland, the king imported cannons from Burgundy specifically for the siege of Threave in 1455. In August 1456 James reassigned the land of Greenside in Edinburgh as space for martial training. On that same space there is now a multiplex cinema, leisure complex and multi-storey car park; Greenside evidently has a long history of use for the pressing concerns and fashions of the times. In 1456 parliament also legislated for the arming of all men throughout the kingdom and wapinschawings were required to be held monthly; in March 1457 football and golf were banned in order to focus upon preparations for war. James’s kingdom was thus placed on a war footing and encouraged to view England as ‘the enemy’, reflecting not only the real state of affairs in which the Scottish king was determined to recover Berwick from English hands, but also demonstrating a crucial stage in the formation of something approaching a national identity through the identification of a common enemy. Indeed, the vehement opposition to England by much of the Scottish political community in the second half of the fifteenth century (seen in the likes of Blind Hary’s Wallace, which betrays the entrenched anti-Englishness that had currency in the south of Scotland) is indicative of the long process of the formation of an imagined national identity and its translation into a political state. James II’s reign was also a period of outward-looking Europeanisation of the king, his household and the court. Not only was James II’s status in European politics significantly advanced by the high-status marriages of his sisters, but his own marriage to Mary of Guelders at Holyrood in July 1449 also brought with it a perceptible increase in ordinary servants, royal householders and officers who were from the Low Countries. The Master of the Queen’s Stable, the Keeper of the Queen’s Wardrobe and the Queen’s Cook were all listed in the 1450



Governance, the Law and the Scottish Polity 115

exchequer as Dutch, as was her tutor Henry van Velde who had arrived at court by 1452. By 1458 the king had appointed Dedrik from the Low Countries as King’s Gunner, presumably seeking to capitalise on the expertise of this region in military technology and exploiting the connections of his wife and many of those in the household. The implications for rich cultural and intellectual cross-fertilisation in household, court and burgh settings were evident. James II, like all late medieval Scottish kings, was aware that he needed continually to assert royal authority to govern his kingdom and he achieved this in several ways: by promoting the crown as the centre of power; by establishing territorial control; by building up parliament and systems of government of his kingdom; and by declaring himself a king of status in Europe. Building on his father’s legacy, James III’s focus on Edinburgh set in motion its confirmed status as the capital but it was also a crucial stage in the centralisation of government. On achieving his majority, the king laid out a system of central justice administration through the encouragement of appeals from local jurisdictions to be heard in the sessions of council in Edinburgh. Indeed, the records of the lords of council begin in 1478 and ten years later James III reiterated and affirmed that his subjects had the right of direct appeal to the sessions. Of course, this was not entirely suitable to the needs of the late fifteenth-century Scottish community, who anticipated that the king would be personally present at royal justice ayres throughout the kingdom and that he might intervene and settle local feuds. Instead, in opposition to a streamlined system of government centred in one place, the reality was that there were long-running feuds that remained unresolved in key areas of the kingdom, which without royal intervention resulted in polarised rivalries and local disputes that boiled over into national politics and a political community willing to oppose the king. John Ireland articulated the essence of kingship at this time in his Meroure of Wyssdome, which was nothing short of a warning to James III in the long-established genre of advice to princes. In the Meroure Ireland described, in a complex theory of politics, that the king was central to justice

116

power and propaganda

but that he had to personally ensure the proper conduct of his government and administration. Whether by a lack of appetite for governance, a charge often levied against James III, or a grand vision of an imperial kingship underpinned by centralised bureaucracy, the Scottish political community was dissatisfied with the practice of his kingship and took action in the rebellions of the 1480s. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries witnessed profound changes to Scottish governance, the common law and the body of institutions used to administer the kingdom. These changes not only demonstrate the sophisticated nature of the Scottish polity in the late middle ages, but also laid the foundations for centralisation, professionalisation and further expansion of bureaucracy in the sixteenth century and beyond. There was also something else starting to take shape, and while it would be difficult to argue that in the late middle ages a fully formed Scottish state existed, the foundations were certainly laid. Although there was, as yet, no complete control by the king and his government over the legitimate use of violence, or over the regulation of the way in which the Scots lived (although one might see something of this in the legislation banning football and golf in 1457 to channel the energies of the men of the kingdom towards war), the institutions of government by which such control would be achieved – through taxation, law-making and law-enforcement – were rapidly developing. Moreover, something approaching the Scottish border lines that we recognise today had become fixed: the borders were defined in the fifteenth century with both the acquisition of Orkney and Shetland in 1469 and the final loss of Berwick in 1482 (although it was rarely in Scottish control from 1333). The emergence of some kind of Scottish identity is also indicative of the process by which the early state was founded, for the Scots were not only subjects of the sovereign but also a horizontally bonded society, whose members began to articulate what they had in common and what made them different from their neighbours in the south.

5 The Church, Religion and Intellectual Life

The medieval church was an institution that was ever-present in everyday life, politics and culture. It was a complex pan-­ European corporation that had an instrumental role in international politics and a significant place in domestic affairs. Within the kingdom of the Scots the church ran parallel structures of justice and administration and played crucial roles within national politics. Church property and landholding was extensive and temporal lordship was a major feature of church life. As a spiritual organisation that was oriented to the cure of souls, the church’s influence stretched to the local and individual level. The church in medieval Scotland was thus wealthy and influential, and had important functions at the heart of the local community. Not only did church and religious buildings dominate villages, townscapes and the countryside, but the church also provided a focal point for community life and employment and careers for many Scots. Rites such as mass and holy festivals organised the Scottish calendar and provided structure to everyday life. Moreover, many of the richest surviving medieval records were produced by clerics or belonged to churches, so our knowledge of the period is inherently shaped by a clerical world-view. Scottish historical studies have been transformed over the past few decades and in no area is this more evident than in the history of the Scottish church. While the sixteenth century – the century of the Reformation – has received most of the attention, the late middle ages has not been overlooked, and

118

power and propaganda

a wide range of pioneering studies have been undertaken on monasteries, parishes, clergy and clerical officials, universities and libraries, saints and pilgrimages, and religious architecture. This chapter will discuss some of the major features of church and religion in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries including the relationship between Scotland and the papacy; the decline of monastic orders and the rise of friaries; lay piety, including the increasing popularity of pilgrimage and the cults of saints; libraries, literacy and the foundation of the universities; and heresy. The people of Scotland belonged to the Catholic church, which they entered formally through the rite of baptism. It has been estimated that there were around 4,000 Scottish churchmen in the late middle ages, whose duty it was to administer the sacraments and to defend their flocks from sin through divine worship, prayer and mass. These men were part of a much bigger supra-national organisation, at the centre of which was the greatest administrative machine of the middle ages, the papal curia. The home of the papacy was normally in Rome but for most of the fourteenth century (1309–76) it was based in Avignon in France. This, of course, made papal power much closer geographically to Scotland, but it also had a much more profound impact upon international and diplomatic relations throughout Europe. The papal curia maintained ties with its hierarchy in Scotland by a constant stream of letters, petitions, appeals, commands and personal visits both to Scotland by papal legates and by Scots to Rome and Avignon. The direct relationship with the papal curia was particularly important in Scotland, because until 1472 there was no Scottish archbishop. An archbishop had extensive authority to act on behalf of the papacy in quite significant areas, including the granting of ecclesiastical appointments. Instead the relationship between Scotland and the papacy was a unique arrangement. After much wrangling and petitioning to separate Scotland from the jurisdiction of the archbishop of York, in 1192 the Scottish church had been given the extraordinary status as a ‘special daughter’ of the papacy, with a direct relationship not filtered



The Church, Religion and Intellectual Life 119

through an intermediary archbishop. The Scottish bishoprics were thus directly subject to the pope. In essence, the pope himself performed the supervisory function of a metropolitan archbishop. In the late middle ages, therefore, Scotland’s anomalous connection with the papal curia provided an extra layer to an already complex relationship. In particular, it encouraged close liaison between the two and an active interest in church appointments on the part of Scottish kings. The relationship also brought Scotland much closer to the main theatre of events in Avignon and Rome. Running parallel to the power of the Scottish crown was a system of justice and authority which looked to the papacy rather than a monarch. The church provided a range of institutions and structures that mirrored secular ones. For example, ecclesiastical courts administered canon law, which codified, amongst other things, the principles of marriage, confirming a range of impediments such as forbidden degrees of consanguinity and affinity. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 had determined that no marriages should take place within four degrees, which permitted, for example, the (politically convenient) annulment for consanguinity of the first marriage of Alexander Stewart, duke of Albany in 1478. A substantial proportion of Scottish supplications to the pope that survive from the late middle ages are concerned with marriages within the forbidden degrees of consanguinity, in particular asking for papal dispensation for those which have already occurred or would like to be contracted. Age was also considered significant for marriage and was forbidden before the age of puberty – twelve for women, fourteen for men – although in reality marriage occurred more commonly around eighteen to twenty-five years of age. Canon law also dealt with a range of crimes, especially those involving the clergy such as theft or the slaughter of priests, and had freedoms including the quite remarkable medieval concession of equality of men and women under the law of marriage. In early fourteenth-century Scotland, the power of the papacy had been felt directly when Robert I was excommunicated by Pope John XXII. Excommunication was the ultimate spiritual

120

power and propaganda

deterrent available to the medieval church and Bruce’s excommunication was not a trivial matter. International politics also played their part in the ongoing lack of resolution. There was subsequent further deterioration in relations, largely brought about by the interference of Edward II of England, which resulted in a general interdict being placed on the kingdom, and the bishops being threatened with excommunication in 1320. The problem was rooted in the pope’s somewhat controversial assumption that Bruce was a lawful subject of the king of England who had defected from his allegiance. Particularly offensive was Bruce’s refusal to circulate in Scotland the news of John XXII’s papal coronation on the grounds that the bulls announcing the event were not addressed to Bruce as king: ‘We will inspect and have read out to us the pope’s open letters, but we will not open the pope’s sealed letters, for they carry no royal title and are not addressed to us.’ Three letters were sent from the Scots in May 1320: one from Bishop Lamberton (who along with three other bishops had been requested to appear at the papal curia), one from the king and the third from the community of the realm (the earls, barons and freeholders). The king’s letter dealt specifically with the issue of Pope John’s refusal to use the royal title, but it also objected to the petitions from Edward II for an English candidate for the see of Glasgow and claims of unjust treatment of Scots clergy in Avignon. In the letter dated 6 April 1320 from the community of the realm of Scotland, now known as the Declaration of Arbroath, was an elegant exposition of the righteousness of their cause in the eyes of God. The letter was determined to demonstrate the long-standing and historical independence of the kingdom of Scotland, thus supporting the recognition of Bruce as king and invalidating Edward II’s claims to superiority. But it was also part of a tradition of baronial letters that challenged the legitimacy of papal involvement in temporal affairs. Headway was made in early 1324 when the pope wrote to Edward II to explain that in future he would acknowledge Bruce as king in order to bring nearer peace between England and Scotland. While much energy was invested in bringing Bruce and the



The Church, Religion and Intellectual Life 121

realm back into grace, the king never regarded himself as lawfully excommunicated. Avignon itself was becoming an increasingly difficult and dangerous location for the papal residence with the outbreak of war between France and England in 1337. Scotland was drawn into these wars (which continued until 1453) through an alliance with France which granted Scottish military support in return for French aid. A brief period of peace in the 1360s gave some respite to the papacy, but by 1369 war had recommenced after Charles V of France (1364–80) declared that Edward III had failed to observe the terms of the Treaty of Brétigny. In 1376, Pope Gregory XI (1370–8) took the decision to leave Avignon and return to Rome, a contentious move that evoked considerable opposition. The almost immediate death of Gregory on his relocation to Rome kick-started a sequence of events that caused a massive rift in the church now known as the Great Schism, during which the church was divided in its adherence to one of two different popes (and, at one point, three!), who each believed himself to be the rightful pope, chosen by God. Such contests between pope and anti-pope over the papal tiara were manifested in both official religion and in international relations. The question of which pope a region followed was at one and the same time theological, political and cultural. Although the conclave in Rome elected Urban VI in 1378, the cardinals were soon so dissatisfied with his appointment that a powerful group of them denounced Urban’s election as invalid. They retreated from Rome, whereupon they elected a rival pope, Clement VII, and returned to Avignon. Scotland immediately subscribed to the restored Avignon papacy; England, at war with France, supported Rome. Over the next few years the main fault-lines of a political division of Western Europe into two obediences emerged and two papacies and two central administrations were created. Urban’s principal acquisitions were Luxembourg, the Netherlands, northern Italy and England; Clement VII was successful in France, Naples, the Iberian Peninsula and Scotland. Scotland’s stubborn support for Clement VII and his successor Benedict XIII cannot be explained solely by her relationship with

122

power and propaganda

France or hostility to England. Additional explanations can be found in the domestic context, where factional politics caused a difficult period for the assertion of monarchical authority. Scotland was amongst the last to abandon the Avignon line and adhere to the decision of the Council of Constance in 1417, which recognised Martin V as a compromise pope. Nevertheless, Scotland’s steadfast loyalty to Avignon did have a number of important consequences and lasting legacies. These included the foundation of the first university in Scotland at St Andrews around 1413, which should be considered in the context of the withdrawal of French support for Benedict XIII and the suggestion that there may have been consequent difficulties for Scottish clerics at French universities. The schism lasted for a generation and its effects were profound. It highlighted the inherent fallibility of papal authority and power, and it encouraged intellectuals to develop an alternative conception of the nature of the church and its internal sources of authority. The result was the development of a theory known as conciliarism, which argued that supreme authority rested with a governing council rather than the individual will of the pope. This was in distinct opposition to the idea of the pope as a clerical king and it seriously threatened papal power and authority. Conciliarism was a very popular idea across Europe and many of the Scottish elite subscribed wholeheartedly to views that emphasised the cooperative authority of the whole church and the governmental role of representative councils, which allowed them to operate separately from and sometimes in opposition to the pope. There were obvious parallels here to ideas surrounding power and authority in secular governance that chimed with the political community in Scotland. The complex relationship between Scotland and the papal curia was only one element of religion in Scotland and in many ways it had only a small part to play in the experience of Christian belief and practice. The organisation of the church in Scotland was fairly straightforward. In the late middle ages there were around 1,000 parishes that were grouped into a dozen dioceses (sometimes called bishoprics or episcopal sees), each centred on a



The Church, Religion and Intellectual Life 123

Figure 5.1  A 3D computer-modelled reconstruction of St Andrews Cathedral in 1318. Reproduced courtesy of the University of St Andrews and with thanks to Prof. Richard Fawcett, Dr Alan Miller and Sarah Kennedy. The live version can be accessed at www.openvirtualworlds.org/ start

cathedral – St Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Brechin, Dunkeld, Dunblane, Caithness, Ross, Moray, Argyll, Sodor (the Isles) and Galloway. At the head of the diocese was a bishop, but the routine administration of dioceses was usually conducted by archdeacons. Archdeacons and deacons had control over the clergy in their dioceses, but they had powers that extended beyond this to touch the population more generally. Diocesan courts had jurisdiction over the laity in matters of wills, contracts, promises, debts, marriage and morals. The church also had institutions that operated in addition to diocesan structures, principally its network of religious houses. There were, for example, around thirty priories, fifteen nunneries and twenty friaries throughout the kingdom by the early fourteenth century. Until the late fifteenth century there was little change to this presence, apart from a general decline in monasteries and nunneries in conformity with trends occurring elsewhere in Europe. The most significant shake-up of Scottish ecclesiastical organisation occurred in 1472 with the elevation of St Andrews to metropolitan status by Pope Sixtus IV (1471–84), which meant that Scotland received its first archbishop. Its second would follow in 1492 when Glasgow was raised to an archdiocese. From the papal point of view, the elevation of St Andrews enhanced the functioning of the Scottish episcopate. While much debate has

124

power and propaganda

surrounded the granting of the new archbishopric, particularly as regards the significance of this step in terms of Scotto-Papal relations, it can also be interpreted as a sign of rising royal ambitions to control the church in the realm. Indeed, the declining authority of the papacy in Scotland allowed the crown to gain control of major ecclesiastical appointments, which in turn provided opportunities for those practices that would become staples on the charge-sheet waved by sixteenth-century reformers: simony (paying for positions in the Church hierarchy), venality (selling of services for reward, especially in being susceptible to bribery) and nepotism (patronage granted to kinsmen or allies). By 1504, for instance, James IV was able to nominate his eleven-year-old illegitimate son Alexander as archbishop of St Andrews after the death of the king’s brother James Stewart, duke of Ross, who had himself been nominated to the post by the king in 1497. The real crux of the corruption here was not in the appointments themselves, but in what happened to the income derived from the archbishopric, which in these cases went directly to line the king’s coffers as the incumbents did not reach canonical age of consecration until twenty-seven, at which time they could receive archiepiscopal revenues. Each diocese was made up of smaller units known as parishes. The rector in charge of a parish often delegated his duties to a vicar, who received an arbitrary proportion of the revenues. This gave parish clergy an income that was often barely enough to ensure their subsistence and, as a consequence, in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the regular clergy descended into real poverty through the combination of price inflation and their fall in income in real terms. A late medieval Scottish vicar was supposed to have a minimum of £10 per annum in addition to a house and glebe, but devaluation and chronic non-payment reduced this considerably. Prestigious building plans that commandeered available resources, nepotism, pluralism (the acquisition of extra ecclesiastical offices and the attached salary and other benefits) and barratry (the sale of church appointments) did not help. Not everyone in the Scottish church was becoming poorer.



The Church, Religion and Intellectual Life 125

Instead, the increasing costs of papal provision to benefices combined with recovery from a long period of intermittent warfare, a trade slump and other financial difficulties accentuated the gap between those who appropriated and those from whom revenue was appropriated. There were also clear regional disparities. In the bishoprics of Argyll and Sodor, in the Western Highlands and the Isles, geography and scattered communities meant that travel was principally by water rather than land. As a consequence these dioceses stayed underdeveloped and there was only a limited investment in cathedrals. During the Great Schism the diocese of Sodor itself was divided. The Isle of Man and its cathedral at Peel stayed under English control and supported the Roman papacy, while the Isles remained under Scottish control and supported Avignon and, as a consequence, had no effective diocesan centre. All of this caused a uniquely difficult situation and contributed to further impoverishment. The falling income of the parish clergy resulted in a significant loss of status in the community and, in conjunction with the church hierarchy’s failure to divert enough resources to maintain the ordinary parish system, underpinned a growing disaffection with the church. Indeed, a good indicator of the importance of the issue of clerical incomes is the prominence that sixteenth-century reformers gave to their call that ministers should have a stipend derived from the teinds of their own parishes. Such impoverishment made for a stark contrast when placed next to the opportunities afforded to the upper crust of the Scottish clergy. Many had been deflected (although not entirely) from attending the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and were attending instead the universities of Paris, Orléans, Louvain and Cologne, within striking distance of the papal court at Avignon from 1309. Ambitious young Scots were thus encouraged to court patrons and favours at Avignon, which raised costs and reduced the income that could be enjoyed by new benefice-holders: these costs were passed on through the appropriation of Scottish parish revenues. Indeed, appropriation was one of the greatest flaws in the structure of the medieval church in Scotland for it was detrimental to the parish. By

126

power and propaganda

the sixteenth century at least 800 of the 1,000 parishes had their rectories appropriated to support bishoprics, cathedral chapters and monasteries. With estimates that the church in Scotland enjoyed an income around ten times that of the Scottish crown, it clearly was an exceptionally wealthy organisation. Despite the desperately poor financial situation in which many Scottish clerics found themselves, they remained integral to the functioning of the church in the service of their congregations. The principal duty of a priest was the performance of the liturgy in Latin, a text that was incomprehensible to most of the laity, but part of the ritual of signs, symbols, movement and sound that was comfortingly familiar by its regular repetition at daily or weekly services. Rites of baptism and the consolation of the dying were regarded as an essential part of a priest’s duty, as were basic bureaucratic and legal services such as the making of wills and testaments. The intellectual standard of those who served the parishes was not very high and those who lived in the country probably spent as much of their time farming their glebes as did their parishioners. Even at this humble level within the church hierarchy lesser clergy must have attained a minimum of literacy in order to perform their duties. Moreover, as the assiduous record-keeping that distinguishes the late middle ages increased in volume, so too did the demand for literate administrators. Schools became a more prominent feature of the ecclesiastical landscape, intended to prepare at least a few for occupations that required literacy, from the bureaucracy of royal and church administration through to international trade, moneylending and credit, and the personal administration of the wider population. Whilst Latin language was used for the service, proficiency in Latin was not a principal requirement for the post of priest. The papacy did, however, have strict regulations on priests who were unable to speak the vernacular – the language of their flock – and those unable to do so were not permitted to hold benefices with cure of souls. In Gaelic-speaking Scotland this policy was especially important, for circumstances had arisen where clerics unable to speak Gaelic were placed in Gaelic-speaking areas,



The Church, Religion and Intellectual Life 127

such as in 1454 when John Gardener was exempted from the usual linguistic requirement in order to hold the vicarage of Kilfinan on Loch Fyne in Argyll. In 1466 the Scottish crown’s envoy to the papal curia, Cailean Campbell, requested a confirmation of the language policy in the context of the problems in the diocese of Argyll, but by the following year the regulations were already being disregarded and John Frog obtained papal confirmation in that same diocese despite his lack of Gaelic language skills. These concessions do appear to have been exceptional cases and it was far more usual for an incumbent’s lack of Gaelic to bring about his deprivation. So, for example, in June 1433 John Arous, the secretary of Queen Joan, was removed from the vicarage of Kilcalmonell in Argyll on the orders of Eugene IV (1431–47), because he could not speak Gaelic; in 1441 it was claimed that Peter de Dalkeith, a non-Gaelic speaker, had been intruded into the vicarage of Lochgoilhead and efforts to remove him from his position began. Beyond the parish and the diocese, religious orders also shaped the landscape and community of medieval Europe. Monasteries and nunneries were introduced to the British Isles in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the Benedictines, Tironensians, Cluniacs, Cistercians, Augustinians, Premonstratensians and Valliscaulians all had foundations in Scotland. The thirteenth century saw the arrival of mobile preaching and pastoral forces, the Dominican, Franciscan and Carmelite friars, who based themselves in modest houses in urban centres. Scotland’s mix of houses and orders was quite distinctive. There was an emphasis on Cistercian and Augustinian houses (the majority of houses in other European regions were Benedictine or Cluniac) and the Tironensians and Valliscaulians were rare outside of France. Indeed, in the case of the Valliscaulians, the three Scottish houses (Pluscarden, Beauly and Ardchattan) were the only examples outside of France. Cathedral chapters of canons regular were also uncommon, but Scotland had two. Even rarer still were Cluniac abbeys, of which Scotland also had two. By the fourteenth century monasteries were already in something of a decline, in part because of the success and popularity

128

power and propaganda

of the mendicant orders (the friars) who continued to receive endowments. Monks and canons were already widely criticised for being corrupted and, as the 1365 and 1369 visitation reports of the abbey of Scone by the bishop of St Andrews reveal, they were irregular in their devotions, absent for periods from their monasteries and guilty of frequenting booths and taverns. That the monastic houses had deviated from the ascetic zeal of their founders attracted widespread criticism. Further decline in the orders during the fourteenth century was also brought about by the discounting of the value of the prayers of the regulars in monasteries and nunneries and there was a noticeable change in lay attitudes towards them. In part this can be attributed to the Wars of Independence, which had a profound effect on the buildings, material wealth and power of the religious houses, most poignantly seen in Edward I’s removal of the inauguration stone from Scone in 1296 during the sacking and destruction of the abbey. The Scottish Borders were badly affected: neither Bruce’s victory at Bannockburn in 1314 nor the Treaty of Northampton of 1328 brought immunity from the effects of invasion to the religious houses at Kelso, Melrose or Dryburgh. Worse still, some smaller houses on the border never recovered: the nunnery in Berwick completely disappeared in the aftermath of the wars. Many other nunneries suffered similar fates as links between Scottish dependent priories and their motherhouses in England were severed. The decline in the nunneries throughout Scotland was not of course simply a result of war. The social composition of the convent also came to have a significant effect on its moral and spiritual authority. In Scotland, as elsewhere, members of the community of nuns were drawn from those daughters of the elites who had no other resort, rather than from those who had a clear religious vocation. Although scholarship on Scottish nunneries has been woeful, recent research has been encouraging and has determined that family and locale were the most important factors influencing recruitment for convents in Scotland. In other words, in the late middle ages most women who lived in a convent were either related to someone living on the monastic



The Church, Religion and Intellectual Life 129

estate, were from a family who lived locally or were related to a benefactor or patron. The concentration of nunneries on the east coast, and particularly in Fife and Perthshire, is indicative of these patterns. The Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century also had a profound effect on the monastic houses. Throughout Christendom the impact of plague on the clergy was appalling. They were among the worst affected largely because, in addition to the close-knit conditions in which they lived, they performed basic duties of ministry and comfort to the sick and dying. Estimates of the clerical body-count inflicted by the plague in England have hovered around a staggering 45 per cent and, although figures are harder to determine for Scotland, it would seem probable that there were comparable death rates amongst the Scottish clergy. Walter Bower certainly indicated this when he recorded that twenty-four of the canons of St Andrews (around a third) died in the first outbreak of plague. The critical shortage of clergy in the aftermath of the plague helps to explain the questionable appointment of unsuitable replacements and pluralism, which further deepened the deterioration in clerical recruitment and the provision of spiritual care and religious services. There was no marked improvement in this state of affairs by the 1420s. James I directed a letter to the abbots and priors of the Benedictine monks and Augustinian canons in the kingdom, which outlined that he deplored the decadence of monasticism in his realm, urging immediate reformation of their orders. In order to encourage strict religious observance and with an apparently genuine desire to restore the vitality of the Scottish religious houses, James I founded a Carthusian Charterhouse at Perth to demonstrate what he deemed to be ideal monastic life. Yet by this point monasteries were in apparently terminal decline and James’s Carthusian foundation had limited impact. It was instead the mendicant orders, located in urban settings, that were more suited to the needs of the times. Friars of the mendicant orders were established in most towns of importance and probably played a considerable role in the life of the towns, in the royal court and in the universities. There

130

power and propaganda

were Dominican and Observant Franciscan friaries (but no Conventual Franciscans) in the episcopal centres of Aberdeen (where there were also Carmelites), Elgin, Glasgow and St Andrews. Observant Franciscans were the ecclesiastical novelty from 1467 and they differed from their parent Conventual order by their more convincing model of religious life. As well as their presence in the episcopal centres of Scotland, Observant Franciscans were also located in all the important royal centres. Friaries had a considerable impact on the development of the Scottish townscape, and account for a significant proportion of the architectural patronage of the later middle ages. Nevertheless, their influence in the development of towns has been obscured by their survival rate. Friaries have tended to survive less well than monasteries or collegiate churches: only six of the forty-nine known mendicant foundations have any remaining visible architecture. Their lack of survival is largely explained by their location. Their urban setting made them a target for the destructive campaigns of reformers and later they were readily sacrificed to the needs of urban expansion. As a result, a surprisingly small amount of scholarly effort has been spent on uncovering and understanding the history of the mendicant orders in Scotland. Some mention should, of course, be made of the military orders in this period. Their emergence and dominance came in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when crusading was a major European preoccupation and both the Knights Hospitaller and the Templars founded houses in Scotland. The Templars came to Scotland in 1128 as part of a recruitment drive, accumulating lands and manpower for the defence of the Holy Land. At the turn of the fourteenth century there was a sharp decline in their prestige and significance, as the prominent members of the order were put on trial in France. Consequent arrests and trials elsewhere led to the dissolution of the order in 1309. Other factors besides these official proscriptions were important. By the fourteenth century the military support function of these types of order seems to have been an ideal rather than a reality, and their reduced possessions and lack of appetite for crusading



The Church, Religion and Intellectual Life 131

c­ ontributed to a decline in desire for and need of the martial protection they offered. Instead, peaceful activities dominated their everyday lives. Support from lay patrons was still forthcoming but it was undoubtedly offered to show the donor’s support for the orders’ benevolent work. The fall of the Templars in 1309 has attracted a great deal of attention from the popular press and conspiracy theorists and provides material apparently custom-made for the Internet age. In part this is because the trumped-up charges laid against them – especially heresy, blasphemy and sodomy – have a subversive appeal; in part it is because the extensive use of torture in the proceedings against them fascinates and compels anyone interested in a time when violence and cruelty were normative parts of the judicial process. Although there is little extant information on the history of the Templars in Scotland (an additional boost to conspiracy theories, which thrive on fragmentary rather than complete evidence), certain things are clear. Contrary to the popularly held belief, the Templars did not use Scotland as a refuge from persecution after the execution of their Grand Master in France in 1309. Nor is there evidence that they came to the aid of the Scots at Bannockburn to play an instrumental role in the victory. In fact, the Templars were also arrested in Scotland – at that time under English governorship – and their trial commenced on 17 November 1309 at Holyrood in Edinburgh. The abbot of Dunfermline reported at the trial that he had heard sinister tales from others regarding the Templars’ clandestine ceremony of admission and their holding of chapters at night, with the implication being that they were worshipping the devil, although he stressed that he knew nothing for certain. Several Lothian-based clerics also testified against them. The rector of Ratho and the chaplain of Kirkliston reported that they had never seen a Templar buried or heard of one dying a natural death. One Newbattle monk accused them of unjust acquisitions, stealing from their neighbours and withholding hospitality from all except the rich. Perhaps the most extreme accusation of all was brought about by an elite layman, who claimed that his ancestors had asserted that if the Templars had

132

power and propaganda

been faithful Christians the Holy Land would never have been lost. It is clear that their unpopularity at local level led to a gross distortion of reality and perspective. The Holyrood court came to no conclusions and it was not until 1312 that the Templars in England and Scotland were finally abolished. The fate of some of the Templars who served in Scotland is known: many went into the confines of the Cistercian houses in the Scottish Borders and some may have been assimilated into the order of the Knights Hospitaller. Templar properties were certainly handed over to the Hospitallers in a piecemeal process, which was a remarkable windfall as the wealth of the Templars in Scotland seems to have been substantially more than that of the Hospitallers. From the early fourteenth century then, the only military order operating in Scotland was the Knights Hospitaller, who up until the Wars of Independence comprised both Englishmen and Scotsmen. ‘National’ boundaries were indeed of little concern to the military orders, for English Templars administered the Scottish properties of Maryculter and Balantrodoch, and Scottish Templars were active in France, Cyprus and the Holy Land. The Hospitallers’ preceptory in Torphichen during the early fourteenth century may have been comprised entirely of Englishmen, for the brothers were granted permission from Edward I to take refuge during the wars in the nearby Englishgarrisoned castle of Linlithgow. In response to the changing political landscape after Bannockburn, towards the end of 1314 the Hospitallers came into Robert I’s peace, and for the duration of their history in Scotland preceptors of the Hospital were nearly always Scottish. The order was hard hit by the Wars of Independence and almost all of its property had been destroyed before 1338, at which time a report was made on the extreme situation in which it found itself. There were also other d ­ ifficulties including the familiar problems of authority and independence, for the Scottish preceptory was under the jurisdiction of the English priory. This led to significant problems, such as between 1374 and 1378 when the Grand Master discovered that he was unable to manage his order’s lands in



The Church, Religion and Intellectual Life 133

Scotland as he wished because Edward III supported the English prior’s rights to control it. The Great Schism caused further difficulties for all of the orders – monastic, mendicant and military – but this was particularly marked in the case of the Hospitallers in England and Scotland. There is no evidence for any contact between English and Scottish brothers between 1388 and 1402, and the headquarters of the Knights at Rhodes adhered to a different pope to Scotland. The decisive end of the Schism in 1417 did not resolve these tensions: in 1420 it was asserted that the Scottish preceptory was not annexed or subject to the priory of England and that Scottish brothers should not be subject to brothers of another province, but in 1422 the return to dependent status was confirmed by the chapter-general of Rhodes. Papal confirmation was received in 1426 on the grounds that the preceptory of Scotland was being reintegrated into the priory of England after the Schism. This decision was accepted without much dispute by the Scottish brothers, some of whom began to attend English provincial chapters by the 1430s. Although the Fall of Acre in 1291 had changed the nature of and fervour for crusading, there nevertheless remained some appetite for it in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and in this area the military orders still played a considerable role. Crusading provided the opportunity for medieval people to participate in an armed defence of the Christian faith, which they believed to be the will of God and an opportunity for the salvation of their souls. Nevertheless, with war and other distractions at home, mobilising for crusade was proving increasingly difficult. In the first half of the fourteenth century the Scots used the recent Anglo-Scottish wars to explain their absence from crusading. Appealing to papal sympathies, the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath claimed that the Scots were prevented from crusading by English aggression, referring specifically to the English desire to reap material benefits from their smaller neighbours rather than to gain the spiritual reward of fighting in the Holy Land. The desire for crusade was articulated by Robert Bruce himself and, unable to undertake a crusade in his own lifetime, it was

134

power and propaganda

on his death in 1329 that Sir James Douglas was charged with carrying the king’s heart to the Holy Land, a task which failed only in that Douglas himself was killed en route in Granada fighting against the Moors. By the second half of the fourteenth century it had become clear that alongside a general European decline in zeal for crusade, Anglo-Scottish and Anglo-French warfare (which involved large numbers of Scottish soldiers) had distracted the Scots from crusading. Nevertheless, crusading opportunities had opened up closer to home and the Scots were active participants in crusades in north-eastern Europe, particularly in periods of relative peace, during which belligerent young Scottish knights could usefully expend some military energy and gain some crucial experience. In Prussia the Teutonic Knights were engaged in fighting against the pagan duchy of Lithuania and large numbers of Scottish knights served with them. In 1363, the Scottish king David II was quick to support Peter I of Cyprus’s launch of a new crusade against Alexandria, the principal trading port in the Eastern Mediterranean, despite a widespread apathy for this mission. Although Peter I gathered some forces and Alexandria fell in October 1365, this crusade seemed to represent the further corruption of the crusading ideal – with religion subsumed and playing second fiddle to commercial and political motives – following the debacle of the fourth crusade and the invasion of Constantinople in 1204. If the second half of the fourteenth century saw a temporary revival of enthusiasm for the war against the heathen, the fifteenth century saw the demise of the prospect of a united Christian crusade to recover the Holy Land. The final nails in the crusading coffin were first, the failure to gain widespread support for the crusade against Alexandria; second, the battle of Tannenberg in 1410, which brought an abrupt end to the crusades in Prussia; and third, the distraction of the Great Schism, which deprived the crusading movement of leadership. Nevertheless, over the course of the fifteenth century some attempts to revive past enthusiasm were made, and although individual peaceful pilgrimages to the Holy Land were more fashionable, there were Scots, such as Sir Colin Campbell



The Church, Religion and Intellectual Life 135

of Glenorchy, who were drawn to the armed campaigns against the Turks into the middle years of the century. There were, of course, many other less spectacular ways in which a late medieval person might express his or her Christian devotion. One popular way in which this might be achieved was in devotion to saints. Religious and secular buildings across Europe were adorned with images of saints and reliefs of their lives. Although the Scottish medieval buildings that survive today are either mostly ruined or stripped of their original riot of colour, ornament and furnishings, 700 years ago they were glistening with powerful and vibrant icons of devotion to individual saints. Medieval people believed in the powers of saints and their abilities to act as protectors and intercessors. The best way to communicate with saints or experience their miraculous powers was through contact or close proximity to their relics, that is, their enshrined remains, or through objects which were intimately connected to them. Although the principal purpose of images was to instruct the laity and to arouse appropriate feelings of empathy and devotion, they also allowed devotees to address a saint. In essence, the image stood proxy for the saint. As a consequence, an entire industry of pilgrimage to the shrines of saints developed across Europe. The church offered indulgences (a reduction of the time one might have to spend in purgatory for sins committed in the mortal world) for those who undertook a pilgrimage, or offered assistance and hospitality to those on a peregrination. For example, in a supplication made to the pope in 1441 by Margaret, countess of Douglas, she asked to be granted an indulgence in return for offerings in support of the rebuilding of a bridge over the River Bladnoch where pilgrims to St Ninian’s shrine at Whithorn assembled. Moreover, saints offered cures to those who were suffering from illness and deformity. In 1445 the crippled Aberdonian Alexander Stephenson, who had tried local pilgrimage sites with no success, went further afield to Canterbury. He dragged himself on his knees as his feet were unusable, and when he was cured at the shrine of St Thomas Becket he danced non-stop for three days.

136

power and propaganda

Scotland had a number of sites of pilgrimage, several of which attracted considerable hordes of pilgrims from all over Europe. Some of the most popular pilgrimage sites included St Andrews and the shrine of St Ninian in Whithorn. Pilgrim badges were available as souvenirs and a few have been uncovered from St Andrews, including a lead pilgrim badge found in Crail showing the apostle on his cross. Recent archaeological excavations and new historical research have indicated that Ninian’s shrine attracted pilgrims from as far afield as Ireland and Scandinavia, presumably to benefit from this saint’s associations with healing. St Kentigern’s Cathedral in Glasgow was also a major site of pilgrimage. According to an inventory of 1432, Glasgow Cathedral possessed relics of equivalent importance to the highest-ranking Continental churches, including two silver crosses containing pieces of the True Cross, reliquaries containing hair and milk of the Blessed Virgin, part of the manger of the Lord, a phial with oil distilled from the tomb of St Kentigern and his hand bell. Other pilgrimage sites were also popular in this period: the shrine of St Margaret at Dunfermline was a detour for pilgrims who had crossed the Forth en route to St Andrews. Margaret’s English ancestry also made her attractive to English pilgrims and this was certainly the case during her feast day in 1355, when English soldiers besieging Lochleven Castle interrupted hostilities to attend the festivities in Dunfermline. St Columba’s relics were in a far more remote shrine on the island of Iona and it required considerable effort to encourage pilgrims’ attentions. In 1428, the abbot of Iona petitioned the pope to grant an indulgence of three years to all pilgrims visiting Iona on Columba’s feast day to encourage pilgrimage to his abbey. The shrine of St Andrew in north Fife was in the first rank of European pilgrimage sites, attracting pilgrims from far and wide. So, for example, William Bondolf of Dunkirk in northern France was granted a certificate of pilgrimage to St Andrews in 1333. In this period the idea of national patron saints was developing and St Andrew was gaining this status in Scotland. From 1286, during the interregnum, the clear use of St Andrew as a figure who represented some kind of Scottish authority was



The Church, Religion and Intellectual Life 137

Figure 5.2  A fourteenth-century pilgrim’s badge from St Andrews excavated at a site in Perth High Street in 1977.

evident. The cross of St Andrew adorned the reverse of the seal commissioned for the Guardians of Scotland after the death of Alexander III and the inscription borne upon it appealed to the saint as leader of the Scots. It soon became a priority to house the saint’s relics in appropriate fashion and building works at St Andrews Cathedral were completed to enable a splendid consecration to take place in the presence of Robert I in July 1318. The Scottish relics of St Andrew, a martyred apostle of Christ and brother of St Peter, the father of the Church, included three of his fingers, his arm bone, a tooth and a kneecap. The case for a concerted interest in home-grown Scottish saints in this period is also compelling. In the early fifteenth century James Haldenstone, prior of St Andrews, co-ordinated a campaign to have St Duthac officially canonised. Elsewhere there were efforts to relocate the relics and to promote the cults

138

power and propaganda

of St Kentigern, St Ninian and St Triduana. It is reputed that a relic of St Columba was carried in the Brecbennach (identified sometimes as the Monymusk Reliquary, now housed in the National Museum of Scotland) into battle at Bannockburn in 1314, and there are countless other examples. Recent research has uncovered a wealth of material relating to this and the subject is bound to flourish in the coming decades as the results of the Edinburgh-based Arts and Humanities Research Council project, the Survey of Dedications to Saints in Medieval Scotland, are analysed and debated. All of this interest in Scottish saints culminated in the early sixteenth century with the lavish production of the Aberdeen Breviary, a book of the feast days of over seventy saints connected with Scotland. This was a scheme designed by William Elphinstone, bishop of Aberdeen, so that the included saints could henceforth be celebrated in Scottish churches. Despite bankrupting the only Scottish printing house, Chepman and Myllar, the Aberdeen Breviary stands testament to the significance of the myriad of local saints in their local contexts. The Scots themselves visited domestic shrines regularly, but they were also drawn to the great shrines in Jerusalem, Rome, Santiago de Compostela, Amiens and Canterbury, as well as to the smaller shrines throughout western Christendom. Compostela in particular seems to have attracted Scottish pilgrims, and archaeologists and metal-detectors have uncovered many scallop shell pilgrim badges in Scotland. The challenges of travel to local and national shrines paled into insignificance when compared with the great hardships involved in pilgrimage to the Holy Land – including the risk of death, as was the fate of Sir Alexander Lindsay who died on Crete in 1382 on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem – but this remained the ultimate goal of both the devout poor and those who had the resources to enjoy some comfort along the way. For those unable to go, particularly kings, there were other more unusual ways to undertake this pilgrimage. Both Robert I and James I arranged for their hearts to be removed from their corpses and taken to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, to atone for being unable



The Church, Religion and Intellectual Life 139

to undertake the pilgrimage in life. James I’s heart was carried to Jerusalem by Sir Alexander Seton of Gordon, via Bruges, Basel, Venice and Rhodes, where the Order of the Knights Hospitaller had their headquarters. Seton of Gordon died on his return at Rhodes, whereupon a member of the Hospitallers brought the king’s heart back to Scotland, where it was buried at the Perth Charterhouse. In the later middle ages there was a tendency for the localised cults of Scottish saints to be supplemented by new pan-European devotions introduced to Scotland through dynastic, commercial and cultural contacts with the Low Countries, England and the Baltic. There was, for instance, an increased popularity of the Three Kings of Cologne, Corpus Christi (popular in England and introduced in Scotland by 1327), the Holy Blood (particularly fashionable in Flanders) and other devotions centred on Christ and the Holy Family, especially the Virgin Mary. For example, a major pilgrimage resort developed at Whitekirk, near North Berwick, where the curative powers of a well dedicated to the Virgin Mary became the focal point. Indeed, it was to Whitekirk that the Italian diplomat Aeneas Piccolomini (later Pope Pius II) made a pilgrimage in 1435. Such evident cosmopolitanism means that it can no longer be claimed that the emergence, development and celebration of native saints’ cults in late medieval Scotland reflected and reinforced only a growing national and specifically anti-English sentiment in religious observance. Instead, the devotional culture of late medieval Scotland seems to have mirrored wider trends in Western European piety, with an increased emphasis on cosmopolitan Christocentric, biblical and Marian cults developing alongside, not in opposition to, a renewed interest in the veneration of local and regional figures. One significant and popular way in which the noble elite might demonstrate dedication to the Christian faith and provide for the salvation of his and his family’s souls was in the foundation of collegiate churches, a marked trend in late fourteenth and fifteenth century lay patronage in Scotland, which replaced the endowment of much longer-standing religious orders and other foundations. Secular colleges (that is, regulated ­communities of

140

power and propaganda

priests who had not taken monastic orders) stand as the most characteristic late medieval religious foundation, with hundreds established across fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europe; but they remain by far the least studied. By comparison with England or the Continent, secular colleges in Scotland were late in appearing and their foundation became increasingly intense in the late fourteenth century and flowered in the middle of the fifteenth century. By the 1440s, then, to found a college in Scotland was to participate in a well-established pattern of noble ecclesiastical investment. For the founders, the matters of immediate importance were the appearance of an impressive new building, the nature of collegiate liturgy, the place of the college in the family’s devotional practices and the use of the college for patronage. Another distinctive feature of the collegiate initiative in Scotland, as compared with England, is that it was not the crown that was at the vanguard of these foundations. Indeed, recent research has demonstrated that it was probably the Douglas family who were responsible for encouraging a standard model of collegiate foundation in the Lowlands. The notable exception to this model was Sir William Sinclair, earl of Orkney’s unique foundation of Rosslyn Chapel in 1446, which can be seen as a deliberate attempt to transgress the dominance of the Douglas model. Rosslyn’s curiosities and unusual appearance have, unfortunately, served no greater purpose than to encourage fantasists to believe that the only explanation for such a building is for the higher purpose of protecting the Holy Grail. Apart from the Chapel Royal in St Andrews, which did little to influence noble foundations, Scottish kings showed no interest in colleges until 1430, and even then no royal foundations were made until 1460, when Trinity College was founded in Edinburgh by the recently widowed Mary of Guelders. Collegiate church foundations were thus a specific expression of noble piety and culture before 1460, particularly of a group of new lay nobles based in the Lowlands. Authorised Christian doctrine was not the only system of belief to be found in late medieval Scotland, although the records are certainly quieter about non-orthodox beliefs. Some



The Church, Religion and Intellectual Life 141

scholars have suggested that there may have been a small Jewish population in late medieval Scotland and, while this is certainly not beyond the realms of possibility, there are significant reasons to remain doubtful. It has been suggested that when the Jews were formally expelled from England in 1290 they fled northwards to Scotland rather than across the Channel. However, the distribution of Jews in England in 1290 seems unlikely to have encouraged mobilisation to the north. Newcastle had expelled its Jewish community in 1234, and in 1290 the most northern Jewish population in England was at York. It has also been suggested that Edward I’s invasion of Scotland in 1296 and his influence until 1306 makes it unlikely that any Jewish population settled in Scotland in this period. However, what can be ascertained is that the Scots were just as intolerant and as prone to the persecutory imperatives of the medieval mind as other European populations. The abbot of Inchcolm Abbey’s chronicle, for example, demonstrates both anti-Semitic and antiIslamic thought. Indeed, at the very heart of the crusading ideal was the assumption that the only correct belief was an orthodox Christian one. As ever, the persecuting society looked inwards as well as outwards and those whose thinking deviated too greatly from the church’s teaching, or who thought the church was an unnecessary intermediary between God and the individual, were branded heretics, and persecuted and punished with a vigour reserved for the most heinous of criminals. Although there was no native form of heresy in Scotland, there is evidence that the expressions of discontent by and the reformist ideals of Wycliffites and Hussites were preached and practised in the kingdom in the early fifteenth century. Certainly authorities and religious alike were concerned with the corrupting effects of heretical thoughts and were keen to root out this evil danger to society. English Lollardy had documented contact with the Scots in many different ways. There were Scottish students at Oxford during Wycliffe’s active years there in the midfourteenth century, and in 1400 the English Lollard leader Sir John Oldcastle was stationed at the (then) English garrison at

142

power and propaganda

Roxburgh on the Scottish border. In 1401 followers of Jerome of Prague – a student of Wycliffe and chief follower of Jan Hus – fled across the Scottish border to avoid prosecution, followed in 1403 by two priests who were accused of heresy. In 1408 an English friar and disciple of Wycliffe, James Resby, was preaching Lollardy in Scotland when he was arrested, tried and burned at the stake in Perth. The chronicler Walter Bower warned that although this James was sometimes regarded as a celebrity in his preaching to simple people, he had mingled some very dangerous opinions with his religious teaching. Of these the first was that the pope in fact is not the vicar of Christ; and the second that no one is pope or vicar of Christ unless he is a saintly man. He maintained forty opinions on similar matters or worse.

The earliest known home-grown heretic was Quintin Folkhyrde who came from a modest landed family in Douglasdale. His doctrinal views and criticisms of the clergy echoed those of Lollards in England. In 1410 Folkhyrde sent four letters, together known as Nova Scocie, to Prague – at that time the intellectual centre of Jan Hus’s reformist views – containing reports on the state of the church in Scotland. Folkhyrde addressed these letters to all Christians, the bishop of Glasgow and the clergy of Scotland, but their content made them of particular interest to Wycliffite and Hussite sympathisers for they contained recognisably Lollard overtones. These included the sharp criticism of the Scottish clergy for failing to deliver the spiritual services for which they received remuneration, complaints that the clergy refused to use the vernacular scriptures, and an attack on their immorality, corruption and profligacy. Even the Council of Constance in 1414 considered Scotland to be rife with Lollardy, which was remarked upon by Dietrich von Nieheim, a contemporary German chronicler of the Schism. On James I’s return from English captivity in 1424, parliament passed an act giving civil support to the church authorities in combating Lollardy and other heresies present in the kingdom. With such a flurry of recorded activity, and much more



The Church, Religion and Intellectual Life 143

besides no doubt, it is no wonder that a Papal Inquisitor of Heretical Pravity in Scotland was appointed to root out and quash heresy. The best known of these Inquisitors (and also the first) was Lawrence of Lindores, a graduate of the University of Paris and a theologian and philosopher at the University of St Andrews, who held senior posts including Dean of the Faculty of Arts, and Bursar, Principal, Rector and Governor of the University. Lindores had fairly considerable academic success and his commentaries on Aristotle were widely read in universities at Paris, Prague, Leipzig, Vienna, Freiburg and Kraków. Indeed, Nicolaus Copernicus, the father of modern astronomy, was influenced by his commentaries, which had an important role in shaping Copernicus’s understanding of physics. Lindores was responsible for the vigorous seeking-out of heretics and seems to have interpreted heresy in its broadest sense. When Robert, duke of Albany invited the Franciscan, English theologian and conciliarist Robert Harding to argue the case against the measures taken by the Council of Constance (1414–18) to end the papal schism, Lindores charged Harding with heresy. The view of the Council of Constance that Scotland was a significant home of heresy only served to increase the intensity of Lindores’s inquisition during these years. And, indeed, the Council of Constance was perhaps correct to make this suggestion, despite the historical evidence being rather thin, for there were contemporary rumours circulating that point the accusatory finger firmly at the Scots. An envoy of the University of Paris, Jean d’Archery, preached before the pope on the heresy in Bohemia and in Scotland in particular; the bishop of Moray was called upon to investigate the spread of heresy in his diocese; and Lawrence of Lindores used his influence and connections at the new University of St Andrews to insist on a promise to be included in the oath taken by graduates from 1417, that they should be vigilant against heresy. Indeed, Lindores’s status at the university ensured that heretical thinking was routed out in the intellectual community in St Andrews. In the 1420s John Shaw, a monk of Dunfermline Abbey who was studying at the university, was challenged by the academic

144

power and propaganda

authorities for unorthodox comments on the sentences of Peter Lombard, the standard textbook of theology at medieval universities. Two of Lindores’s cases ended in recantations at an early stage. The first of these was the case of John Fogo, abbot of Melrose, one of those who had pressed Lindores to act more vehemently and quickly against Robert Harding, but who later exposed his own views inadvertently to the inquisition. The second of these recantations occurred in 1435, when in a lecture to canonists at St Andrews, Robert Gardiner disparaged canon law. On Lindores’s inquiry, he quickly recanted the propositions that had been found objectionable. There were, however, two further and more serious cases presided over by Lindores, which saw the accused found guilty and burned at the stake: that of Resby in 1408 and that of the Bohemian Pavel Kravarˇ on 23 July 1433. A physician and academic, Kravarˇ was in Scotland to win support for the Hussite cause at the Council of Basel. He had almost certainly read Quintin Folkhyrde’s Nova Scocie, which had been translated from Latin into Czech when the letters arrived in Prague in 1410, and they had considerable impact in reformist circles as their Wycliffite contents had much in common with Hussite teachings. Moreover, Kravarˇ may have been familiar with the philosophical works of Lawrence of Lindores, which were used at the University of Prague, and thus St Andrews was in more than one way the obvious location to preach Lollard and Hussite reformist beliefs. Lollard activity continued after Kravarˇ’s death, a fact borne out by the excommunication of men who in 1436 wrote a letter of denunciation expressed in Lollard terms against the prior of St Andrews. A third heretic was burned at the stake in Glasgow in 1422, although nothing is known of him or whether Lindores was responsible for the judgment which led to his execution. It is not surprising to find St Andrews as the centre for heretical thought in Scotland in the fifteenth century, for heresy was often found in the intellectual communities of universities. The lateness of the arrival of heresy to Scotland may be the result of the lack of universities in the kingdom until 1413. The founda-



The Church, Religion and Intellectual Life 145

tion of the Scottish universities in the fifteenth century was the single biggest change in the intellectual life and the provision of education in the kingdom. Until the early fifteenth century, those who wished to attend university had to travel to England or to the Continent. War between Scotland and England in the fourteenth century made attendance at Oxford or Cambridge either impractical or undesirable and Scots generally went to France. Most of the eminent churchmen, including the founders of the Scottish universities and the lecturers, had attended French universities. Paris was pre-eminent in theology and philosophy, while Orléans was renowned for law. Many Scots studied at Paris, such as the son of William of Livingston, who in 1448 was granted gifts of custom towards expenses of his son’s studies there. From 1340 onwards 260 Scottish names are recorded at Paris, where the Scots were grouped with the English nation (a student association). After the outbreak of the Hundred Years War in 1337 the English nation at Paris contained almost no Englishmen at all and was comprised almost entirely of Scots. At Orléans the Scots studied in sufficient numbers to justify a separate Scottish nation from 1336. The situation was transformed when the University of St Andrews was founded, followed by the University of Glasgow in 1451 and the University of Aberdeen in 1495. Universities were, on the whole, for the education of clerics but increasingly these institutions were attended by laymen seeking careers in government and the law. A library was central to the purpose of an academic institution in a way that it was not for a monastery, for although books were fundamental to monastic life, university study was distinctively based on the close reading of texts and their comparison with other texts. Aristotle dominated the university arts courses at Scottish universities just as much as elsewhere. At St Andrews the arts curriculum consisted almost solely of Aristotle’s logic, physics, natural philosophy and metaphysics, after a foundation year of elementary logic, probably based on Summulae Logicales Magistri Petri Hispani. St Andrews students were required not only to have studied these set texts before o ­ btaining a degree,

146

power and propaganda

but also to have copied out the texts themselves. Copies of Aristotle were thus widely available amongst the academic community. The most characteristic form of academic writing was the commentary on another text, and the commentaries produced by intellectuals at the Scottish universities and by Scots studying abroad had a wide circulation. The Franciscan scholastic John Duns Scotus (c. 1265–1308), the most famous medieval Scottish thinker and one of the most important philosophers and theologians of the period, was educated at the universities of Oxford and Paris. His commentaries on the sentences of Peter Lombard and Aristotle were used by students in universities all over Europe. The commentaries of Lawrence of Lindores were studied avidly from Paris to Prague and to this we can also add the commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics that were owned by Robert Anderson, a regent of St Salvator’s College, St Andrews, the lecture notes made by William Elphinstone senior in the 1430s on civil law at Louvain, and the transcriptions by Magnus Makculloch of lectures on logic he heard during his studies at Louvain in 1477. Many university founders considered that part of their obligation was to provide their colleges with a collection of books; the University of Glasgow received two gifts of book collections in 1475 and a further gift of twelve volumes in 1482. As the importance of the universities in the intellectual life of the kingdom grew across the fifteenth century, they simultaneously displaced the monastic houses as the focal point for learning. In the fourteenth century the intellectual life of the kingdom was focused upon the monastic foundations, where the great libraries were housed and the history of the kingdom was chronicled. In this period libraries were not organised in the way modern libraries are, but nor were they scattered in the manner of early medieval libraries. In fact, it was in the fourteenth century that the first library rooms began to appear and by the second half of the fifteenth century many cathedrals, abbeys and colleges had purpose-built library rooms with a permanent reference collection, indicating the rapid expansion and changes in the use of these collections. The invention and widespread use of the printing press in the second half of the fifteenth century had



The Church, Religion and Intellectual Life 147

a considerable impact on the configuration and promulgation of libraries too, although in Scotland the comparatively late arrival in 1508 of a domestic printing press must be recalled. Indeed, Scotland was unable to sustain a viable domestic printing industry until the end of the sixteenth century. In 1300 English Franciscans compiled a catalogue of the holdings of significant libraries in England and Scotland in the Registrum Anglie de Libris Doctorum et Auctorum Veterum, which included seven Scottish libraries and 160 English ones. According to the Registrum, Melrose Abbey, Kelso Abbey and St Andrews Cathedral Priory all held around 100 books, Jedburgh Abbey had just over eighty, and there were smaller holdings at Dunfermline Abbey with nearly fifty volumes, Newbattle Abbey with around thirty-five and Holyrood Abbey with nearly thirty. Most of these volumes did not survive the significant destruction of monastic libraries during the Anglo-Scottish wars: monastic buildings were destroyed at Dunfermline in 1303, charters and muniments were burned at Kelso in 1305, and a fire at Melrose also destroyed parts of the monastery around this time. By the early fourteenth century, the great Scottish monastic libraries were thus already in decline. There was further destruction across the course of the fourteenth century. Holyrood Abbey was sacked in 1322, Melrose Abbey was attacked and in 1332 Coldingham Priory also had its collections spoiled. Melrose, Newbattle and Dryburgh monasteries were burned in 1385 during Richard II’s destructive expedition into Scotland, and Jedburgh Abbey was attacked in 1410, 1415 and 1464. These repeated episodes of destruction have certainly hampered scholars’ ability to form an accurate picture of the reading habits and intellectual activity of the learned in late medieval Scotland, but the surviving booklists and the books themselves do at least indicate that reading materials were unexpectedly varied and widely available. In rare instances, we can move beyond such general conclusions. The happy survival of the Glasgow Cathedral inventory of 1433 gives us insight into the holdings and organisation of a fifteenth-century Scottish cathedral library. It is clear that

148

power and propaganda

the choir books were located within the cathedral at specific altars or stalls and many were chained. There was, for example, a small volume chained by the precentor’s stall, which may have been the undecorated thirteenth-century Lives of Serf and Kentigern now in Archbishop Marsh’s Library in Dublin. Other locations where manuscripts and books could be found included chests placed around the cathedral, such as one in the nave that contained a miscellaneous collection of civil and canon law, scripture, liturgy, patristic commentaries, theology, sermons and classical texts, such as Francis Petrarch’s humanist moralising dialogue, De Remedies Utriusque Fortunae, an unusual find for this period in a library in the British Isles. There was also a proper library room in the south-western tower containing over seventy volumes of theology, scripture, commentaries, and civil and canon law. Although it was long believed that chronicles and manuscript production were not a major feature of Scottish monastic life, the evidence indicates otherwise. Melrose Abbey, Kelso Abbey and Iona Abbey, for example, all featured scriptoriums and there was a tradition of chronicle production taking place in at least some of these houses, with the thirteenth-century Chronicle of Melrose being a notable example. The widespread destruction wrought by Edward I’s invasions of Scotland did result in large-scale losses of original chronicle material and it is likely that what has survived is only a small sample. Indeed, if the survivals of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are in any way indicative, there was a thriving tradition of manuscript production in medieval Scottish religious houses. Consider, for example, the survival of both major and minor chronicles and their ­ abridgements, including the fourteenthcentury Gesta Annalia II; the late fourteenth-century Chronica Gentis Scotorum by John of Fordun, a chaplain of St Machar’s Cathedral in Aberdeen; the Original Chronicle by Andrew of Wyntoun, prior of St Serf’s on Loch Leven and later prior of St Andrews, which was revised until about 1420; the Scotichronicon of the 1440s, the work of Walter Bower, abbot of Inchcolm Abbey; the Liber Pluscardenis made at Pluscarden



The Church, Religion and Intellectual Life 149

Abbey in the early 1460s; the Auchinleck Chronicle of James II’s reign; and the Short Chronicle of 1482. Many of these chronicles survive in numerous manuscript versions, attesting to their popularity and influence. We know also that John Barbour, archdeacon of Aberdeen, wrote a verse history of the Douglas family and Robert I in his Bruce of the 1370s and was responsible for other works which have not survived the centuries including a genealogy of the royal house of Stewart, The Stewartis Oryginalle. One of the two earliest surviving versions of The Bruce is bound together with the earliest copy of Blind Hary’s Wallace in a manuscript created by John Ramsay for the vicar of Auchtermoonzie in Fife. Manuscript production was flourishing in late medieval Scotland, with production in clerical and secular contexts and for patrons from a range of backgrounds. In the 1450s, for example, Sir William Sinclair, earl of Orkney appointed Sir Gilbert Hay, recently returned from military service in France, to translate into Scots a range of French chivalric texts and a mirror for princes, The Buke of the Ordre of Knychthede, The Buke of the Law of Armys and The Buke of the Governaunce of Princis. Hay’s skill and success in this enterprise saw him move on to commissions that included a new version of The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour for Thomas, Lord Erskine in the 1460s. Indeed, there was a boom in the literary culture of late medieval Scotland as both literacy and scribal skills increased, and it is during this period that we find versions in Scots of many of the great works of the late middle ages, including Lancelot of the Laik, as well as original Scots poetry like the allegorical Buke of the Howlat of c. 1448 by Richard Holland. The surprising number of writing leads uncovered across the country by metal-detectors and archaeologists certainly demonstrate that literacy was widespread. The clergy and merchants used the leads like modern pencils, making grey marks that could be erased or written over in ink. From the end of the fourteenth century a cadre of highly skilled notaries came to assume a great significance in the legal and economic life of Scotland. One such notary was Robert of Glenesk, working in Edinburgh

150

power and propaganda

in 1383, who drew up an agreement to end the dispute brought forward by fifteen Hansards, who between them had had five ships seized near Edinburgh by three men of Sluys. Notaries were at the same time indicative of the increasing need for writing and integral to its spread. Although they remained unincorporated, there were notarial apprenticeships that developed skills in Continental secretary hands, which also had a profound influence on the move away from Latin texts produced by clerics and a distinct rise in the use of the written vernacular. Across the course of the fifteenth century, Scots came to dominate written culture in all forms; Gaelic barely survives in written form before the sixteenth century. Nevertheless, it was not just notarial apprenticeships that provided education in literacy. In late medieval Scotland education was dominated by the Church and largely aimed at the training of clerics. There was a rapid increase in the numbers of educational institutions from the 1380s, no doubt the result of the increasing demand for education by the laity. Educational provision offered by clerics included private tuition in the families of lords and wealthy burgesses, and song schools attached to most major churches that aimed to provide training for clerical careers, such as in the small schoolroom recorded in Dunfermline in 1433. There were an increasing number of grammar schools, particularly in the expanding burghs, and schools for girls teaching sewing and reading were rare but not unknown. Tutelage was certainly the chief means of education of the nobility and probably played a significant role in any house of means. For example, we know that Alexander Lesley was tutor to Walter Barclay of Grandtully in the 1460s; and in the 1470s Alexander Blindseil was tutor to the heirs of William Wricht, and Master Simon Doddis was the instructor of the earl of Mar. The importance of tutors during the royal minorities of this period is inestimable, for during these lengthy minorities attention was concentrated on influencing the king through education and possession of his person. As a consequence, royal tutors often were, or became, powerful politicians. We know very well that the Scottish royal family was highly



The Church, Religion and Intellectual Life 151

educated and literate from the talents and interest in writing and book collections of its members. James I was an accomplished poet, writing the Kingis Quair during his confinement in England. Three of his daughters had considerable personal book collections and literary abilities. The French chronicler Alain Chartier used Margaret Stewart’s passion for poetry in a campaign of slander against her, claiming that she spent her evenings writing French rondeaux and ballads rather than attending to her husband the dauphin, and that in a moment of indiscretion she kissed the lips of Chartier while he slept to demonstrate her admiration of his poetic genius. Margaret’s sister Eleanor, married to Sigismund, archduke of Austria, also possessed many fine books, and she was a patron to writers and translators like Heinrich Stainhowel. Eleanor herself translated into German the French romance Ponthus and Sidonia, an edition of which was published in Augsburg in 1483, shortly after her death. Their nephew, James III, is also known to have collected and commissioned spiritual and secular books, including the copy of the Travels of Sir John Mandeville that he had the royal chaplain produce in 1467. In 1471 a Brugeois ambassador, Anselm Adornes, presented him with a manuscript account of his journey from Scotland to the Holy Land. James III’s tutor, Archibald Whitelaw, a leading humanist, had in his own library editions of Lucan, Horace and Sallust, and his influence upon the king was no doubt considerable. Something very remarkable happened in James III’s reign that signifies, amongst other things, the changed relationship between Scotland, the papacy and the church over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In 1486 the high honour that the papacy wished to accord to the Scottish crown was indicated by a gift of the Golden Rose from Innocent VIII (1484–92) to James III. In the letter from the pope that accompanied the gift to Scotland, Innocent laid out the significance of the custom of sending a Golden Rose. Each year he chose to make the gift to a:

152

power and propaganda

meritorious Christian prince and on this occasion his thoughts had turned to the young king of Scots, who has shown himself to be endowed, not only with kingly valour, but also with a singular devotion to the Catholic Faith and the Apostolic See. In recognition of this, and as a mark and pledge of the pope’s paternal regard for him, the king is asked to accept the gift of the Golden Rose.

This was a clear indication of the pope’s esteem for the Scottish monarch and his ongoing benevolence towards Scotland: it was an important and tangible symbol of the entente cordiale that existed between the papacy and Scotland by the second half of the fifteenth century. This was a marked change from the beginning of our period when the ‘special daughter’ relationship had quickly deteriorated in the early fourteenth century with the excommunication of Bruce and then the kingdom being placed under papal interdict for most of the 1320s. While this was resolved by 1329 and the privileges of remission, crowning and unction were granted (which delayed the coronation of David II until 1331 while he awaited the arrival of the holy oil with which to be anointed in his coronation ceremony) relations between the papacy, church and crown could nevertheless be quite strained in the late middle ages, where international politics was always a factor in the exertion of papal and religious authority.

6 Commerce and Community

While scholarly interest in the economic and social history of modern Scotland boomed from the 1960s onwards and reshaped much of what we thought we knew about Scotland’s past, this historiographical revolution left medieval Scotland relatively untouched. Since the inception of the journal Scottish Economic and Social History (now the Journal of Scottish Historical Studies) in 1981, for example, only two articles published to date have discussed the middle ages and even these did not venture into the period before the Stewarts were on the throne. There is something of a paradox here. After all, the principal surviving records from the fourteenth and fifteenth ­centuries – land transactions, customs records, ledgers – seem to lend themselves to the types of question that economic and social historians have asked fruitfully of other periods. They have, however, been deemed too fragmentary to enable the sort of research on which such history rests, only rarely providing the kind of complete ‘dataset’ required for systematic interrogation. Nevertheless, some inroads have been made. We now have, for example, an excellent understanding of currency and coinage, and models for research into trade. Some of this absence of detail at a national level can be compensated for by a wide comparative lens: it is certain that Scotland was affected by the same economic booms and busts, and the demographic changes brought about by natural disasters, as the rest of Europe. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were perhaps not as dismal as we might like to think. The popular Monty

154

power and propaganda

Pythonesque vision of the medieval past is a story of social inequality, squalid living conditions, pandemic disease and relentless famine, but this rests on bizarre comparisons with modern standards and social systems. Of course, living in the late middle ages could be pretty awful, especially for the poor. Seven hundred years ago, before there was a centralised state bureaucracy or any real notion of social inequality, it was the church that saw itself as responsible for the care of the very poor as the fulfilment of a fundamental Christian duty. Nevertheless, alongside horrific hardships and an ever-present sense of insecurity for some social groups, there were others who enjoyed great prosperity, especially those operating in commercial enterprises. Robert Henryson, the later fifteenth-century poet from Dunfermline, revealed something of the divide between rich and poor. In his rendering of Aesop’s fable of the town mouse and the country mouse, The Two Mice, Henryson wrote: This rurall mous into the wynter tyde Had hunger, cauld, and tholit grit distres. The tother mous that in the burgh couth byde, Was gild brother and made ane fre burges, Toll-fre alswa but custum mair or les And fredome had to ga quhairever scho list Amang the cheis and meill in ark and kist.

Those who enjoyed enormous influence and power – Scotland’s elite – flocked to the royal court, the noble households and parliament. Upward social mobility was not common in this period, but it was not impossible. Of course, it was far less likely that a farmhand or fisherman would be able to save enough to buy himself out of his lot in life, but it was increasingly possible for the kingdom’s prosperous merchants and commercial traders to gain power, influence and status with the acquisition of property and the accumulation of wealth. In part this was due to a slight lessening in the power of land in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which could quickly drain resources or be wasted in catastrophes like war or famine. There was a concurrent increase in the power of money, built upon expanding



Commerce and Community 155

trade, commercialisation and the rise of urban centres, where control and influence was being exercised by politically and socially dominant merchant guilds. With this came a rise in consumerism and conspicuous consumption, two key features of that always rising middle class, whose origins some historians have traced, however implausibly, to these centuries. This chapter will examine these experiences of wealth and poverty by considering the economic trends and social developments in late medieval Scotland. Scotland’s economy was booming in the thirteenth century. An increase in the money supply in Scotland – but also generally across Europe – facilitated a growth in wealth. Such increases occurred far more quickly and on a much larger scale than was sustainable through the storage of goods. If wealth was growing, it was also moving around with greater frequency, because cash transactions were inherently more flexible than bartering. Despite a concurrent rise in the population, which might normally have put pressure on resources, wool sales were buoyant. This allowed for better wages for the peasants who farmed the sheep and, to an extent, offset the demographic downsides of pre-modern population growth. It also saw increased competition for land and upwards movement in rents. The main beneficiaries of this were, of course, the landed classes who could afford to purchase lands further afield: by the early fourteenth century the majority of earls, lesser nobles and monasteries owned land in England and/or Ireland from which they almost certainly profited. This was, however, curtailed by the post-Bannockburn diktat that Scottish landholders were not permitted to hold land on both sides of the border. In the closing years of the thirteenth century and the early decades of the fourteenth, commercial expansion reached its peak, and by the later fourteenth century Western European commerce was languishing in a state of depression. Something had gone badly wrong. A rapid collapse into worldwide recession is a story all too familiar to those who have kept abreast of recent international economic news. In medieval Europe the two causes that were instrumental in the transition from boom

156

power and propaganda

to bust came from the east rather than from the west. First was the collapse of the Mongol Empire, especially in Persia (modern Iran) and China, which caused widespread chaos and put an end to direct commercial contacts between Europe and Asia. Second was the Black Death, a pandemic plague that originated in the east and was of such horrendous ferocity that it swept away a substantial percentage of the population of Europe between 1347 and 1350 and has persisted in popular memory ever since. Furthermore, demographic recovery was stunted by recurring outbreaks of plague during the second half of the fourteenth century and beyond. Dunfermline, for example, enclosed the town in 1444–5 to try to protect its inhabitants from further outbreaks of pestilence. There is almost nothing known about Scottish population in the middle ages and the lack of evidence means that demographic studies are largely based on best guesses. Estimates vary and are mostly drawn using English population figures and extrapolating these using Scottish land ratios. Scottish figures for population around 1300 range anywhere between half a million and a million people, depending on which method of assessment has been used, an approximate ratio of one sixth of England’s population. In itself this is not particularly helpful, but what is clear is that the population of Scotland was far smaller and the land was less densely populated than in most other parts of Europe. Of this half to one million, a reasonable (although unsupported) assumption is that around 10 per cent of the Scottish population lived in towns: by 1306, there were thirty-eight royal burghs and eighteen non-royal ones, but no town maintained a substantial population until much later. Berwick was the wealthiest town in thirteenth-century Scotland – indeed one Lanercost chronicler, impressed by its hustle, bustle and commercial dynamism, referred to it somewhat optimistically as a ‘second Alexandria’. Immediately following the loss of Berwick to the English after the battle of Halidon Hill in 1333, there was no clearly dominant town in Scotland. In 1348 a Brugeois visitor remarked that there were four great towns of Scotland, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Perth and Dundee, holding no



Commerce and Community 157

more than 2,000 inhabitants each. By the time of the Hainault chronicler Jean Froissart’s visit to Scotland in 1365, Edinburgh had begun to assert its commercial dominance and even the well-travelled Froissart spoke of the town of just 400 houses with a warmth and picturesque fondness, exalting its status as the ‘Paris of Scotland’. It is probable that many of these houses were stone, double-storey merchants’ houses of high-quality construction, like that of a fourteenth-century merchant’s house excavated in Peebles, showing two rooms used as workshops on the ground floor and the living accommodation on the upper floor. We should, of course, be wary of making generalisations about the experience of life in towns. There certainly was an expansion of population in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries that led to pressure and overpopulation, but this was not the case everywhere. Recent major archaeological excavations in Perth and Aberdeen, for example, have demonstrated a remarkable variety of experience. In Perth there is evidence of subdivision of plots, which confirms the picture of population pressure and overcrowding in the early fourteenth century, whereas there is no substantial evidence to suggest there was any overcrowding in Aberdeen in the same period. New evidence continues to change the picture of the early fourteenth century. Once, crop cultivation in high-altitude areas such as the Highlands and the southern uplands was considered to be an irrefutable indication of population pressure. Recent research on climate change in this period has altered the interpretation entirely and the farming of crops in high fields is seen as indicative of a drop in temperatures, which provided favourable conditions for farming at high altitudes. The best answer, of course, may be a combination of these two explanations, demographic and environmental. Population was evenly distributed across the country, in part because there was, as yet, no real dichotomy between urban and rural living. The vast majority of people – current estimates are around 90 per cent – lived in scattered rural communities known as touns, whose distribution was based on the pastoral

158

power and propaganda

system that characterised Scotland’s agriculture. Touns, a distinctive feature of Scotland, were clusters of farmsteads housing anything up to six tenant families, who worked open-fields and the infield-outfield system of farming. The evidence for this system first appears in the fifteenth century although it is possible that it had been practised as early as the tenth century. The tenants of the touns paid rent (in cash or kind) to their landlord, whose total amount of land varied considerably from huge earldoms and lordships through baronies of between ten and twenty touns to much smaller estates. Population was not concentrated in the Lowlands as it is today. Instead people were fairly equally spread between the Highlands and the Lowlands, for in the south of Scotland royal forests dominated the landscape, and had not yet been razed to make way for industrialisation, while the Highlands had not yet suffered from the clearances of their inhabitants to make way for agricultural revolution. This should make us pause and consider the well-worn idea of the Highland–Lowland divide. In the early fourteenth century it is clear that any division between the Highland and Lowland regions was far more muted, except that the emphasis in the north was on pastoral rather than arable farming, particularly of cattle rather than sheep. Geophysical aspects did not prevent settlement in the north and neither was there a significant linguistic divide, as Gaelic was spoken in the south too, as far east as Fife and as far south as Galloway. Nevertheless, with the drop in population in the mid-fourteenth century as a result of the Black Death, there was some acceleration in the divisions between the Highlands and Lowlands. Pressure on the land lessened and pastoral farming was reduced in the hilly areas of the south, making divisions between north and south more acute. Moreover, the Scots language, which had been pushing back the frontiers of Gaelic since the eleventh century, saw its dominance finalised by the late fourteenth century. Gaelic was maintained as the mother tongue only in the Highlands and Western Isles. Nevertheless, neither linguistic nor geographical differences made effective governance impossible, although parliamentary records from 1369 onwards do make references to the problem



Commerce and Community 159

of governing the Highlands. However, this is has more to do with the style of government, which was ever so gradually becoming more centralised around the king’s person, than with any inherent problem with the Highlanders themselves. Town life was clearly very different to rural life, though we should be careful not to overdraw the comparison. The proximity and the congestion in which people lived made life more visible in towns. The larger the town, the more cosmopolitan the population and its encounters, but the greater social mix also highlighted the greater extremes of wealth and poverty. Towns themselves were conscious of their difference, and town councils spent vast sums of money on visible boundaries and defensive walls that were statements of identity as much as they were a military necessity. This point was made even more clearly in Scotland where there were often town gates, but no walls. Whereas the boundaries signalled a distinction between town and country, the most prominent buildings within the town – churches, guildhalls and townhouses – served to underline the value system and social order they shared. An appreciable sense of community was focused on the marketplace, the centre of a town, the site of institutions of government, a trading centre and a meeting place. The mercat cross, the symbol of the burgh’s authority to trade, provided a tangible monument to that very authority around which stalls could be gathered and public proclamations made. Medieval urban political theory was based on the commonplace that town government should be carried out for the common good. In Scotland the ideology of community was important as well: here the term ‘community of the burgh’ was first recorded in 1290 and quickly became an important concept in urban identity. The extent to which this vision of community involved a popular voice is debatable. Burgesses were required to attend their town’s three annual head courts to give their voice in town business, although by the fifteenth century in larger towns like Edinburgh this became impractical. Moreover, it was possible to be a burgess of more than one town, which impacted upon the level of possible administrative involvement:

160

power and propaganda

John son of Clement in 1374 was recorded as both a burgess of Linlithgow and a burgess of Dumbarton. The assent of the community was not just a formality, although the government of smaller towns was particularly likely to involve broader participation. Town councils had increasing control over their governance: in 1469, for example, parliament gave outgoing town councils the power to choose their own replacements, which represented more explicitly exclusive forms of town government. Trade was the mainspring of urban society, and merchants tended to become the wealthiest and the most influential members of that society. Guilds of merchants (distinct from any crafts or trades because they did not specialise in one type of commodity) were formed in many Scottish towns by the mid-fourteenth century. Dundee, for instance, was permitted by Robert I in 1327 to form a guild like that of Berwick. A guild was a single body of men, motivated to ensure that their profits and businesses were protected by encouraging and enforcing town regulations, controlling competition and developing a system of support within the guild. In their earlier manifestations in Scotland, there were no individual guilds for separate crafts, but there is evidence that some craft guilds began to appear in the fifteenth century, much later than similar developments elsewhere in Europe. Thirteen burghs are recorded as having guilds by 1400. The Edinburgh guild admitted a woman, Alison Duscou, in March 1407 as heir of her brother, confirming patterns of guild membership elsewhere in Europe, where their exclusivity could restrict membership by heredity (and providing a tantalising suggestion that, in Scotland at least, heredity trumped gender). Guild activities brought considerable benefits to the town as a whole and fraternities worked alongside the burgh officials to control the price and quality of commodities such as wheat, ale, malt and bread. One of the principal duties of merchant guilds was to preserve any territorial monopolies that their burgh enjoyed. In 1370, for example, the guild members of Cupar contested the rights of the men of St Andrews to purchase



Commerce and Community 161

fleeces, skins and hides. In 1448 members of the Dunfermline guild contested the right of men from Kirkcaldy to trade in goat’s milk. Towns also benefitted directly from the generosity and agendas of the guilds: for example, the Dunfermline guild was known to waive payment of the customary guild entrance in exchange for a new member purchasing and maintaining the town weights, repairing aisles in the parish church, upgrading sections of road in the town or assisting in the repair of the tolbooth. The tolbooth was a landmark building of a town and served several functions, including collecting tolls, acting as a prison and housing the burgh administration. It was also a prestigious symbol; for example, Robert II granted the burgh of Irvine land upon which to build a ‘decent and fair house to hold public and secret councils that it might be a courthouse for the enhancement of the burgh’. Of equal importance to the daily life of members of the guild were both the convivial fellowship and the religious activities it provided. Through the guild the members were able to act collectively in the upkeep of the burgh church, an activity at the heart of many burgesses’ spiritual concerns. Guilds also helped to sustain community and social cohesion, which could be manifest in various ways such as the staging of cycle plays associated with Corpus Christi. One problem was, of course, the internal tensions that such a dominant group caused in the Scottish towns. Guilds could act as social glue but they could also create tension and there were many disputes between merchants and craftsmen. Merchants had an enormous amount of power within the towns and they sometimes endeavoured to prevent crafts and guilds from infringing upon their trading rights. In turn, craftsmen sought to increase their own opportunities by their power over price setting and standards of workmanship. Merchants maintained their power through cementing their political position in statutes that ensured their continued dominance on burgh councils, which had a part in the control of trade regulation and the allimportant weights and measures. Merchants themselves have not attracted nearly enough attention from historians of this period in Scotland and there

162

power and propaganda

is substantial work to be done. In part this has been a problem of sources, for the records of this period are notoriously poor, especially when compared with the early modern survivals. It is also the result of the material remains of the Scottish towns, which might, at best, give an impression of urban spaces in the seventeenth century (when more substantial survivals date to) and this has encouraged scholars to focus on later periods. Were Edinburgh or Dundee to have survivals of a similar significance to the Merchant Adventurers’ Hall in York of 1357 or the early fifteenth-century Guildhall in London, then this might have encouraged more research into Scotland’s medieval merchants. However, much work has been done on this group in other towns throughout Europe and it is thus possible to extrapolate general patterns. Economic historians, particularly those operating on Marxist assumptions, have often been critical of merchants, arguing that they used their gains to purchase their way into a more elevated lifestyle, thereby merely propping up a retrograde social order, acquiring country estates and coats of arms and betraying the bourgeoisie. Yet the picture is far more complex, as merchants who bought land rarely retired to emulate aristocratic country life. Instead they maintained their businesses but made more creative use of their material resources, investing only in the symbolic capital of property in order to consolidate their public standing and political influence. For example, Adam Forrester, a prominent Edinburgh merchant in the late fourteenth century, acquired substantial estates outside the city and within a few decades his grandson, John, was a prominent member of James I’s Lothian-based inner circle. With the scale of credit as it was in the later middle ages, a creditworthy businessman was one who had appropriated at least some of the trappings of the old aristocracy, with their connotations (however misleading) of durability, chivalry and trust. And we know these men must have been significant, for at the same time as building work commenced on the Merchant Adventurers’ Hall in York, Scottish merchant adventurers became established as a significant group within both the burgh and the realm more generally. In 1357 when David II was



Commerce and Community 163

released from English captivity and required a large ransom to be agreed for his return, a substantial proportion of this was to be raised from customs revenues. Thus it was in the crown’s interest (in David’s case, acutely) to encourage the merchants’ businesses. In 1364 David II issued a charter confirming their privileges, and this increasing status on a national level was reflected in their increasing status at burgh level. David II’s release in 1357 under the terms of the Treaty of Berwick also marked the end of the Wars of Independence and some relief from a range of economic difficulties that these wars had created. In fact, in the opening years of the fourteenth century the Wars of Independence had a considerable economic impact. This was due not least to the fact that Scotland was at war with one of its main trading partners, and trading routes to France and the Low Countries were exposed to attack by the English. Nevertheless, the extent of the impact varied by location, with the greatest effect felt in the regions of southern Scotland, which bore the brunt of the wasting from the destruction of crops, dwellings and the disruption of rural life and the reduction in agricultural production. Areas north of the Forth did suffer also. For instance, in 1336 Aberdeen was burnt and sustained considerable damage, but within five years it had recovered and the inhabitants were delivering their fermes to the crown as usual. Indeed, it might be surmised that one of the advantages of the basic Scottish homes of simple wooden construction that Froissart had observed in 1365, was that they might be rebuilt quickly. Economic resilience in the face of adversity was a common story of the wars. Despite the slaughter in Berwick in 1296, merchants continued to trade under English occupation until 1318 (and then again under Scottish control); and by 1327 Berwick had recovered its position as the main exporter of Scottish wool, although it was being increasingly challenged by Edinburgh. Indeed, almost all of Scotland’s overseas trade in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was channelled through eastcoast ports, notably Aberdeen, Dundee (which had captured much of Perth’s trade) and to an ever-increasing degree – and

164

power and propaganda

at the expense of the volume of trade carried on elsewhere – Edinburgh. Indeed, one of the most notable features of late medieval Scottish trade was the extent to which it was monopolised by Edinburgh’s merchants: in the 1320s Edinburgh handled 21 per cent of the export trade in wool, by the 1370s it was 32 per cent and by the 1440s it was as high as 57 per cent. Market fluctuations like this imply that in periods when wool was not exported in large quantities, there was a significant rise in the level of domestic weaving. Indeed amongst the most ubiquitous everyday medieval objects found by archaeologists and metal-detectors in rural, urban and burial contexts (especially burials of women) are decorated and plain lead whorls, a circular weight that was spaced on the end of a spindle to keep momentum whilst spinning. War was only one of a number of disasters to have affected the Scottish economy during the first half of the fourteenth century. Disease struck at animal populations, often with catastrophic effect upon the small-scale peasant economy. In 1344, for example: there was so great a pestilence among the fowls, that men utterly shrank from eating, or even looking upon, a cock or a hen, as though unclean and smitten with leprosy; and thus, as well as from the aforesaid cause, nearly the whole of that species was destroyed.

The climate in the British Isles and Continental Europe dropped noticeably from the end of the thirteenth century until around 1500. So severe was this Little Ice Age that the Baltic Sea froze over twice in the early 1300s. A remarkable pair of medieval bone ice skates excavated in King Edward Street in Perth suggests that the River Tay must also have frozen over in this period. Winters were so bad that the Gesta Annalia II chronicler tells us that ‘in the year 1321, there was a very hard winter, which distressed men, and killed nearly all animals’. With the drop in temperature came rain, including for example, seven consecutive summers of constant, heavy rain between 1315 and 1321. One need only recall the disastrous effect that the constant rains of the summer of 2012 had on British crops to



Commerce and Community 165

imagine how utterly devastating this must have been in the early fourteenth century. Major flooding in Lothian in September 1358 saw further hardship and crop destruction. Fordun’s retelling of floods reveals some of the suffering it caused: Such a great flood of rain burst forth in Lothian, as had not occurred in the kingdom of Scotland from the time of Noah until now; so that the waters were swollen, and, overflowing their beds and banks, poured over the fields and towns, cities and monasteries, utterly overthrowing and sweeping away, in their rush, stone walls and the strongest bridges, hamlets and houses. Moreover, tearing up by the roots lofty oaks and sturdy trees which grew near the streams, the resistless tide washed them down to the sea-coast. The crops, also, and stubble, reaped and left out to dry where it was cut, it filched from the use of man.

Such environmental catastrophes made life hard for the peasantry. It was scarcely alleviated by the prevailing social structures: demographic expansion of the thirteenth century led to fragmented land holdings which made self-sufficiency incredibly difficult, and in many cases impossible. Other factors also contributed to poor trade and economic instability in the early fourteenth century, in particular the panEuropean famine that struck between 1315 and 1317. Although the famine has left few traces in the Scottish record, there is some indication of widespread harvest failure at Berwick in 1315 and 1316. Certainly famine was known around this time, for the Gesta Annalia II chronicler records that ‘so great was the famine and dearth of provisions in the kingdom of Scotland, that, in most places, many were driven, by the pinch of hunger, to feed on the flesh of horses’. The distaste and unease caused by the horsemeat scandal of 2013 evidently had a deep cultural inheritance. Conservative estimates of population loss during the course of the Great Famine hover around the 10 per cent mark, although in some areas death rates were likely as high as 50 per cent. Worse, the famine had repercussions that continued to affect population and the economy beyond these years. Further famine struck in the late 1330s, after another bout of war and coinciding with a Scottish monetary contraction, the

166

power and propaganda

indirect result of Edward III’s efforts to finance a military campaign in France. So desperate was the situation that Wyntoun recorded a case of cannibalism in Perth as a result of the extremes of starvation. The relentless misery of the first half of the fourteenth century continued with the arrival of the singlemost horrific pandemic of its age, the Black Death. From 1347 plague swept through Europe – including Scotland – killing anywhere between a third (as the chroniclers estimated) and threequarters (the proportion suggested by more recent estimates) of the population. Regardless of the exact percentage, this was a significant and sudden disappearance of an enormous number of people. Contemporaries did not understand this scourge sweeping across Europe, and tried to pinpoint causes for God’s wrath. Jews were blamed and subjected to the most prolific and horrific types of persecution, with mass executions and other vengeful acts taking place in Germany, France, Italy and Switzerland. Arabs, too, were accused and persecuted. In regions where there were no Jewish or Arabic communities, like Scotland, lepers, paupers and pilgrims received the brunt of the abuse, borne out of frustration and fear. Although evidence for plague in Scotland is minimal compared with the survivals from elsewhere (such as the introduction to Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron of 1350, which gives excruciating details of the author’s experience of plague in Florence, or the 1348 reports on the plague by the Paris Medical Faculty), there is ample evidence to indicate that the Black Death in Scotland was just as fierce as elsewhere. The Gesta Annalia II chronicler described ‘the evil [that] led to a strange and unwonted kind of death, insomuch that the flesh of the sick was somehow puffed out and swollen, and they dragged out their earthly life for barely two days’. Although the sources that survive barely make reference to the initial outbreak in 1349, we know that in Dunfermline the guild fraternity worked alongside burgh officials to impose restrictions on the sale of food supplied from outside the town, in an effort to keep the pestilence in check. There was very little understanding of the ways in which the disease might be spread, but there were some apparently



Commerce and Community 167

logical guesses including food and water, and wells in particular were seen as potential sources of poisoning. Of course, medical knowledge was not completely lacking in late medieval Scotland and there were medical texts which concentrated on epidemic disease, including Raymond Chalin de Vinario’s late fourteenth-century De Epidemia, which belonged to Archbishop William Scheves (d. 1497) and may have been acquired while studying medicine at the University of Louvain. Three plague texts were appended to the Corpus Christi manuscript of Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon, which included a shorter version (1390) of John of Burgundy’s Tractatus contra pestilenciam. Moreover, there is ample evidence for a steady stream of physicians in the kingdom, trained at the major medical faculties across Europe. These included John Gray, the son of a Scottish nun, who graduated from Paris in 1392 and stayed to study medicine. In 1386 Robert II generously rewarded his physician Ferchard with the island of Jura and the Sutherland lands of Hope and Melness. And there were foreign doctors employed at the royal court, including a Venetian physician who was recorded at James II’s court in 1455. There was also a prominent domestic tradition of Gaelic physicians; the MacBeth family (better known by their later sixteenth-century adoption of the name Beaton) are particularly well known in this context and served the MacLeods and the MacDonalds. There were other Gaelic medical families including the O’Connachers and the McLeans, who were hereditary physicians to the MacDonalds. The fame of these healers extended beyond the Highlands and they might be called to court as well. Indeed, the Stewarts’ connections to Gaelic-speaking Scotland may have contributed to this relationship, a suggestion supported by the late thirteenth-century Murthly Hours, which were owned by the Stewarts of Lorne by the fifteenth century (now in the National Library of Scotland) and contained Gaelic marginalia of medical charms. Surviving Gaelic medical manuscripts outnumber the handful of Latin medical manuscripts rescued from monasteries after the Reformation, and here the Beaton manuscripts are particularly rich and demonstrate that s­ ophisticated

168

power and propaganda

medical knowledge extended throughout the kingdom. The first vernacular Scottish plague tracts were written by the Aberdeen physician Gilbert Skene in 1568. The register of Kelso monastery contained a copy of ‘Ane Tretyse Agayne the Pestilens’, which was a fifteenth-century translation into Scots of the plague tract written by John of Burgundy in 1365. Although modern understanding of the disease has helped scholars to interpret the evidence of the Black Death, there has been much debate about its precise form. Current thinking is that it is most likely that this plague was not wholly bubonic (that is, spread by fleas on rats), but that the nature and spread of the epidemic is more characteristic of pneumonic plague, a virus affecting the lungs, spread through human contact, and killing much more quickly than the bubonic strain. It is almost certain that the plague in Scotland, which arrived in the winter months of 1349–50, was pneumonic, as this strain thrives in colder climates. Of course, this new thinking calls into question some of the assumptions about plague in Scotland, in particular that the Highlands could not have been affected. Indeed, if the strain of the Black Death in Scotland was pneumonic then the Highlands as well as the Lowlands must have suffered considerable population depletion, for population was evenly distributed across the kingdom. Given how significant the Great Famine and the Black Death are in the histories of the late middle ages in Europe, it is perplexing that we do not have a better understanding of these phenomena in Scotland. Although one Scottish chronicler referred to the disease as the ‘foul death of the English’, this was perhaps an understandable conclusion given that plague did reach England first. Scholars who have attributed plague in Scotland to the English and the Wars of Independence present a flawed view that takes no account of the plethora of other contacts that the Scots had with the rest of Europe, most obviously through their thriving trading links. It is certain that the outbreak of 1349 left an impoverished landscape, for this was described in the first surviving sheriff’s accounts in the immediate aftermath of the plague. The accounts recorded the lands that were unable



Commerce and Community 169

to yield income to the crown because they had been wasted. Fisheries, ferries, lands and brewhouses were without tenants or let at low rents on temporary leases in Forfar, Kincardine, Ayr, Kinross, Stirling, Clackmannan, Roxburgh, Peebles, Kinghorn, Fife, Perth and Banff. At Coldingham Priory, the accounts show that problems abounded as unpaid rents increased Priory arrears. There is no question that the Scots were severely damaged by the Black Death, and the formerly held view that Scotland suffered less severely than elsewhere cannot be sustained. Indeed, as in the rest of Europe, the catastrophic impact of the Black Death in demographic and economic terms determined much of the course of the next century. Scottish historians are blessed with one very important source for Scotland’s economy in the immediate post-plague era: a tax assessment of 1366, Verus Valor, which suggests a dramatic fall of almost half of the value of baronial and ecclesiastical revenues compared with those indicated by comparison with the surviving thirteenth-century assessments. In fact, the fall in values is so sharp that had contemporaries themselves not compared the situation in 1366 to the earlier figures of Bagimond’s Roll of the 1270s or Halton’s taxation of the 1290s, historians would have shied away from making such links. To set this in context, Verus Valor provides an assessment of average income from lay and ecclesiastical estates that represents a fall of nearly half of the figures from the reign of Alexander III. A number of interpretations have been put forward to account for the collapse of landed values by the mid-fourteenth century, with the dramatic decline in population after 1349 being the most probable immediate cause. Some have argued that the values fell due to a restricted money supply, but the evidence does not support this interpretation as Scottish money was in relatively abundant supply in the 1360s and prices indicate there was no deflation. Instead, the low level of the assessments might be the result of resistance to the customs on exports of wool and hides to fund David II’s ransom, which quadrupled in the decade after 1357. In Scotland an evident shortage of labour brought on by famine and then plague is probably the underlying explanation

170

power and propaganda

for the changing economic trends of the second half of the fourteenth century, such as the leasing of demesnes and increases in the size of peasant holdings, which can be discerned from the few surviving estate documents of the late fourteenth century. For a generation or more – before a slump in exports set in – conditions may have been especially favourable for prosperous peasant farmers who may have been able to lease large holdings at comparatively low rents. A rental compiled for the lord of Dalkeith in 1376–7 demonstrates that some rural labourers were taking advantage of the considerable opportunities for economic and social advancement that the post-plague years had generated. There is a general agreement amongst scholars that around 1350 the peasants of Scotland had experienced a dramatic transformation in economic circumstances, which in turn led to significant change in their personal and legal status. Nevertheless, the Malthusian interpretation of the Black Death – that plague was nature’s (or God’s) answer to a demographic crisis, arriving just in time to check a population spiralling wildly out of control – has through recent scholarship become questionable in the Scottish context, as it is clear that the medieval agriculture of Scotland could support the population in this period. Instead, the Black Death was not the single event which kept the population in check: the frequency of harvest failures and the high death rate resulting from serious food shortages, coupled with the finite amount of land available, served to check the natural growth in population and ensured that the level remained fairly static. In England the problems of labour and land were considered serious enough for legislation to be passed to attempt to freeze wages and prices at pre-plague levels. The Ordinance of Labourers of 1349 and the Statute of Labourers in 1351 both tried to check inflation and restrict social mobility and were instrumental in causing the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. On the whole these statutes were ignored, although the legislation did help to force down wages, if not as far as was demanded. In Scotland there was no such legislation, although workers were demanding higher wages and there is convincing



Commerce and Community 171

evidence that landowners in Scotland faced a deteriorating situation in the second half of the fourteenth century. For example, the Strathearn demesne at Fowlis Wester spent three-quarters of its outgoings in 1380 on wages. The steep increase in labour costs forced many landowners to lease their lands in order to avoid them becoming neglected: by 1376 James Douglas of Dalkeith had done so with Kilbucho and Aberdour; by 1380 the extent of the earl of Strathearn’s demesne had been reduced and by 1445 it was completely rented out; and all of Coupar Angus Abbey’s demesnes were leased over the same period. The situation was exacerbated for landowners by tenants demanding (and obtaining) significantly reduced rents. After a second outbreak of plague in 1362 when ‘a death-sickness among men raged exceedingly’, national land assessments were revised in 1366 and there was a sharp fall of around 50 per cent in rents throughout the kingdom. Contemporaries blamed the wars for the falls in rents, but historical evidence proves that there was no direct correlation between cheaper rents and areas affected by war; neither was it the result of monetary contraction that was occurring across the later fourteenth century. It was population loss in conjunction with these other factors that led to enormous palpable social unrest. One of the characteristic features of the second half of the fourteenth century was the rebellions, riots and revolts by groups of peasants that occurred throughout Europe. Widespread unrest, mainly concentrated in or near urban economic centres, was evident and a wave of major rebellions against authority spread across Europe from as early as 1323–8 with the Peasants’ Revolt in Flanders. This escalated in intensity in the wake of the Black Death, with uprisings including that of the Jacquerie in Northern France in 1358, the Ciompi Revolt in Florence in 1378, the English Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, and the Harelle in Rouen and Maillotins Revolt in Paris in 1382. Scotland is not known to have had its own native, large-scale ‘peasants’ revolt’, but there are indicators that suggest similar tensions were present and that these were produced by the same causes. The decimation of population had many consequences, but the most

172

power and propaganda

profound effect was on labour and production. The pressure on land and resources that had been building throughout the thirteenth century with demographic growth was immediately eased and the population fall resulted in a reversal of fortunes for landlords and tenants, tipping the scales in favour of the latter and allowing, for some, a greater degree of social mobility and standards of living. The shortage of labour meant the worker was able to demand higher wages and better conditions, and to exercise some, limited, freedom of choice over where he worked. This allowed for increased mobility, including across the border to England, where, in Northumbria for example, Scottish migrants became sufficiently numerous to be considered a political threat: legislation was passed in 1398 demanding their removal south of the River Tyne. The circumstances in Scotland thus certainly indicate that there must have been similar pressures to those felt in England and elsewhere, and yet there was no organised resistance, or at least none that has made the archival record. It is certainly evident that news of the English Peasants’ Revolt made it across the border, as John of Gaunt was sheltered in Scotland and was helped by, amongst others, Sir James Lindsay of Crawford, a Stewart familiar. In Scotland, however, serfdom (which enabled the maintenance of cheap labour and high rents) had already virtually disappeared by the middle of the fourteenth century, the result of a combination of a rising population being less tied to a particular landlord and the social dislocation of the Wars of Independence. Short-term leases were thus favoured in Scotland, which in the event of a serious population fall such as that which occurred after the Black Death, benefitted the tenant rather than the landlord. Certainly this system made it more difficult to impose high rents, as tenants could move more readily and thus were far less trapped than their revolting counterparts to the south. Moreover, with the absence of standing armies there was less dissatisfaction than there was, for example, in France about ongoing taxation at lower levels to fund the war effort. In France the defeats of the 1350s exacerbated the situation and taxation was a cause for bitter resentment. It has been argued



Commerce and Community 173

that the situation in Scotland was instead comparable to that in Switzerland, where peasant consciousness was focused on foreign rather than domestic enemies and where peasants also failed to revolt. The lack of financial abuse of the peasantry in Scotland by the crown also contributed to a more stable post-plague society. In England sustained taxation caused a revolt, after a round of severe poll taxes; in Scotland royal revenue mostly came from the rent of crown lands (including royal burghs) and from customs on wool and leather exports. Although direct taxation could be levied when required, it was infrequent, and parliament was required to ratify these decisions (and often refused the king’s wishes to tax). In the fourteenth century this kind of direct taxation occurred only in 1326–30, 1341, 1358–60, 1365–6, 1368, 1370, 1373 and again in 1399, and was mostly fairly light – around a shilling in the pound on the assessed value of individual property. The only heavy taxation was in 1328 as a result of payment for peace. There has been much argument about whether or not the post-plague period was a ‘golden age’ for the peasantry and for women in particular. It has been suggested that women were given an unprecedented opportunity in the workforce as a consequence of post-plague labour shortage, but it is difficult to be certain that they had any greater scope for activity. Indeed, it seems that women were and always had been central to the household and small-scale production, particularly in brewing. Female traders begin to appear more frequently in the records of the fourteenth century, but rather than attributing this to a liberation brought about by the plague, it might also be explained by changes to the nature of surviving evidence. Indeed, whether they were wives of merchants, brewers or prostitutes, women have been straightforward to find in the records of medieval Scottish towns and over the last couple of decades scholars have started looking for them. While women’s history and gender studies are now well-trodden fields, historians of Scotland have been slow to ask the kinds of questions they suggest. Recent inroads have begun to be made, but there is scope for further

174

power and propaganda

interrogation of the sources. Excavations from Aberdeen and Linlithgow prove that women were involved in heavy labour in the fourteenth century, as both the male and female skeletal remains showed the type of bone damage inflicted by repeated exertions with a vertical stress indicative of heavy-weight lifting. Life expectancy seems to have been poor amongst the labouring classes: of the 207 individuals excavated at Linlithgow, for example, nearly 60 per cent had died before the age of eighteen. One area in which an increase in the opportunities for women did seem to have an effect was in the curious plateauing of the population during the second half of the fourteenth century, which might be explained by the availability of choices. Many women delayed marriage until much later than before, while many others did not marry at all. This resulted in childbearing being delayed until much later and women simply having fewer children. In sum, although the evidence can sometimes be difficult to find, the post-plague economy did benefit the peasantry. The general pattern throughout Europe in this period was of falling prices caused by the supply of goods outstripping demand. The disposable income now available to peasants meant that they could afford some luxury items that their subsistence existence had previously denied them, with the result that the price of staple goods fell and the price of luxury goods rose. Although only temporary, the consequent demand for wool and leather particularly benefitted Scotland. Trade with the Low Countries, especially Flanders, was of crucial importance from the fourteenth century and Scotland’s main export here was wool. Indeed, Scotland supplied a significant proportion of the wool consumed in Flanders and Artois. Bruges had become the trading hub of northern Europe and with such easy access to the east-coast ports of Scotland, manufactures and other goods from the Low Countries and further afield flooded into Scotland. The Scottish community of poorters in Bruges (amongst the foreigners who became poorters, second in size only to the French), as well as the daily influx of temporary Scottish visitors, made the Scots a significant p ­ resence in the



Commerce and Community 175

city. Some kind of trading staple at Bruges probably existed by the 1340s, and the importance of Scottish trade with Bruges was confirmed in a treaty of 1407 that confirmed privileges established by earlier grants in 1359 and 1394 and added new ones, including the appointment of a Scottish conservator in Bruges to regulate and safeguard Scottish trade. Staple status provided Bruges with a monopoly over the trade of specific Scottish products in return for certain privileges being extended to Scottish merchants. The staple remained in Bruges until 1467 when James III temporarily removed it, before transferring it permanently in 1473 to Middelburg. Trade with the Baltic and Scandinavia seems to have been regular but fairly minor, consisting mostly of imports of grain that could no longer be regularly obtained from England (one of the consequences of ongoing war), along with arms, iron and herring. This trade opened up fully on the marriage of James III to Margaret of Denmark, when Orkney and Shetland were given to Scotland and Scandinavian economic and political power over northern trade immediately decreased as it lost out to the Hanseatic trading posts in Shetland. Trade with the Mediterranean was also regular, demonstrated by the Ancona navigator and cartographer Grazioso Benincasa’s 1473 portolan chart atlas, now in the British Library, which features the main east-coast trading ports and sea routes to Scotland. The 1370s were a significant decade in Scottish economic history as markets had stabilised in the post-plague decades and there was an economic boom that coincided with the Scottish staple’s relocation to Middelburg. Wool exports peaked in 1372, when around 9,252 sacks of wool were exported and the volume of Scottish wool exports was over a quarter of the English total, giving some indication of the size of the Scottish share of the market. However, by 1376 wool exports were down sharply and exports of hides were on the rise, peaking in 1381 with over 72,000 hides being exported. Hides in general held up much better than wool in trade. Only the best Scottish wool could be exported but even then it was not the best available to the market; Scottish hides, on the other hand, were

176

power and propaganda

more c­ompetitive. Scottish salmon was, as it is today, of an unrivalled quality, although it is difficult to judge the size of the trade as customs returns survive only from the 1420s, and there are notable absences from Aberdeen, where burgesses were exempted from customs on salmon until the 1530s. Nevertheless, it is clear from the records from Aberdeen that salmon export was a major component of the town’s trade, as from the fifteenth century a method of salting and barrelling was in place to prolong the storage of the fish, which enabled shipping further and further afield as the process was perfected. Consumers in the Baltic, Germany, France and the Low Countries could enjoy a regular supply of Scottish salmon. Indeed, so confident were merchants in their ability to sell salmon abroad that the fish became a crucial part of the Scottish system of credit. The short-lived economic boom of the 1370s soon turned to bust, as the whole of Europe began to slide into recession. Wool exports were in decline in the 1380s and 1390s, dropping to a low point in the early fifteenth century. Figures indicate that the late 1380s saw 3,100 sacks of wool exported each year, but over the first two decades of the fifteenth century this decreased to 2,600 annually. There was some balancing in revenues from the expansion of the production of low-quality cloth, as in England for example, but this was exported at a low price and only made a modest return. Nevertheless, customs accounts cannot be fully relied upon and substantial amounts of goods went missing quite deliberately and were thus never recorded. So while the market for the traditional exports of wool and hides had collapsed in the last decade of the fourteenth century, traditional arguments that have been put forward – that Scottish merchants were unable to diversify into other commodities – do not hold water. Cloth cargoes of 1444 demonstrate that Scottish merchants were finding alternatives to wool and hides, and that such a lucrative trade could escape the purview of the customs officials. It would seem that previous thinking on Scottish cloth, as a small export and a poor-quality product, may not be the best interpretation of evidence and that there may have been an undocumented and thriving trade in cloth which more than



Commerce and Community 177

compensated for the falling wool exports. In addition to this, there was a growing domestic market for Scottish-made cloth, for it enjoyed a marked price advantage especially after the currency debasement of 1367. Nevertheless, as the European market shrank from the late fourteenth century, the overall volume of Scottish wool and cloth exports also declined. With recession and the decline of trade from the end of the fourteenth century came a rise in Scottish piracy. Letters of complaint survive; for example, both the earl of Crawford and Robert III received complaints from Ypres about piracy by Scots from Edinburgh and Aberdeen. In the early years of the fifteenth century Aberdeen skippers, in particular, were notorious for large-scale, organised piracy, with the support of powerful landholders and officials including the earl of Mar and the provost of Aberdeen. The obvious conclusion is that a decline in the town’s trade in wool drove its skippers to piracy, but it may also be true that trade fell off due to a focus on piracy as a more lucrative source of income. Aberdeen’s export trade was directed mainly towards the Low Countries, Normandy and England, although there was a demand for goods imported from the Hanseatic towns and for Scandinavian timber. The activities of Aberdeen’s pirates were directly responsible for the Hanseatic League imposing an embargo on Scottish trade in 1412; the reluctance of the Scottish authorities to compensate victims of Scottish piracy also soured relations with Burgundy from 1416 and Flanders in the 1420s. Joining recession and declining trade was a further economic problem from the late fourteenth century, and that was the chronic shortage of bullion in Scotland. The net loss may have been the result of a fall in exports and a correspondingly steady demand for imports, but there was also a more general shortage of silver throughout Europe. Although Scottish devaluation was significantly worse than that which occurred in England, it was, for example, no worse than devaluation in the commercial centre of Milan. One effect of the shortage of money was the creation of coins of reduced weight in a deliberate devaluation of the currency to ease deflationary trends (medieval ­quantitative easing).

178

power and propaganda

When done to excess, this did of course bring about higher inflation. James I and parliament tried to tackle the problem of loss of bullion by placing a tax on all silver and gold that left the country, and by requiring fixed amounts of bullion to be brought into Scotland for each sack of wool or its equivalent that was exported. Of course, the periodic enactment of these measures is ample evidence of their ineffectiveness. Sumptuary laws were enacted in the 1450s, 1460s and 1470s to limit the wearing of silk (there is a particularly fine thirteenth-century Spanish silk head scarf decorated with birds that was excavated in Perth Kirk Close in the late 1970s), to ban the import of certain cloths and to make other restrictions on food and dress, as it became clear that profits from exports were being spent on luxury imports rather than returned to Scotland as bullion. This helped to protect local producers and preserve the social hierarchy. But bullion continued to flow out of Scotland as the demand for luxury goods increased. Barratry became an offence on the authorities’ realisation that a substantial amount of bullion was being lost to Rome in the form of sweeteners to encourage the confirmation of benefices. The economic slump of the late fourteenth century was the start of a long period of economic instability and decline. War between France and England, the hostility of the Hanseatic League and the deteriorating political conditions in Flanders all combined to make trading tougher for the Scots. From 1424, after the return of James I, difficulties were alleviated and trade with England resumed on a scale not seen since the reign of David II. In part, this was due to James I’s attempts to boost trade by cutting duty on wool exports in 1426. Although providing only temporary success, a short-lived recovery occurred. There are also other indications of a recovery and from the 1430s onwards the internal economy was not in such a dismal shape as has hitherto been supposed. Burghs of barony – a specific type of Scottish town which had trading rights – were founded in considerable numbers and continued to appear unchecked until well into the sixteenth century. These foundations are in stark contrast to England, where growth in the overall number



Commerce and Community 179

of towns stalled, and to Wales, where the number of towns fell across the same period. In recent years one of the most significant contributions to our understanding of Scottish medieval economic history has come from detailed work on price history. For instance, it is now clear that the lack of good-quality arable land, but the plentiful supply of rough grazing combined with a short growing season, together explain why corn was considerably more expensive in Scotland than in England and, given the pastoral bias of the agriculture, why meat was cheaper north of the border. Price evidence has also been used to interpret the otherwise difficult-to-use sources for the Black Death. Although problematic, it seems that the fall in Scottish population as a result of plague resulted in a sharp rise in wheat and malt prices (which follows the English pattern) but a fall in barley prices and no change in oats and oatmeal. In other areas Scottish prices differed from English trends: there was no immediate rise in the Scottish price of livestock, as there was in England in the 1340s, and prices in Scotland were no higher in the 1460s than they were in the 1450s. The post-plague prices for coal and iron all rose, and the increased costs of labour may have been an important factor here. In the broadest terms it can now be suggested that the price of the labour-intensive produce of the best-quality land seems to have been higher in post-plague Scotland, while that of more easily produced goods from the poorer land remained stable or even fell. This really means that Scottish cereals got more expensive and Scottish livestock grew even cheaper. So plague did not change the basic structures of prices in Scotland, and the economic differences between England and Scotland did not diminish on account of the pestilence, but were, in fact, accentuated by it. Of course there are other factors to consider. Even though the prices of Scotland’s exports were more or less static after the plague, imports were generally more expensive. So in theory this should have stimulated Scottish domestic production as an alternative to importing and promoted the price competitiveness of Scottish exports. Moreover, after 1367, Scottish debasement (working rather like a modern devaluation) should have

180

power and propaganda

­ agnified price contrast of imports and exports. Scotland was, m after all, a widely monetised society and coins have been found all over Scotland in both urban and rural contexts and in both the Highlands and Lowlands. When David II returned to Scotland from captivity in 1357 he took steps to restore the Scottish coin issues to match the English standard. This was a penny of eighteen grains and an agreement that the coins were interchangeable to counter Edward III of England’s 1356 proclamation that the Scottish money was no longer fit to pass in England. In 1357 Adam Tor, Master of the Mint, received a charter by which he was required to begin a new coinage. Ten years later in 1367 a decision was made to reduce the Scottish coin to sixteen grains, an adjustment which brought the intrinsic value of the Scottish coinage more closely in line with the true market price of silver; but it was a conscious devaluation, which might discourage imports into Scotland by making them more expensive, while at the same time making Scottish exports seem better value abroad. In theory this should also have stimulated Scots’ domestic production as an alternative to importation. What this amounted to was a decision by the Scottish government to leave ‘the Sterling zone’ and the termination of a direct currency connection between the hitherto equally valued Scottish Sterling and English Sterling. When the bottom fell out of the wool trade at the end of the fourteenth century, this widening gap between the price of Scottish imports and her exports became ever more critical. The picture of Scottish currency is, however, further complicated in the fifteenth century by a new variable. In this century the Scottish government made alterations to the intrinsic value of money not by recalling the coins and physically changing their weight, as had happened in the fourteenth century, but by leaving the coins themselves unchanged and simply giving them a greater nominal value. This has led to much hair-tearing by Scottish medieval historians unable to access information about consequent variables from the sources and can account in part for the woeful lack of research into the late medieval Scottish economy.



Commerce and Community 181

Medieval Scots were entrenched in the mainstream of European commerce, protected their trading rights and interests, and gave the market both luxury items and coarser products. Nevertheless, the comparatively poor survival of the records has meant that historians of medieval Scotland have been hesitant to contribute to major debates on the European economy owing to a lack of reliable data. As economic and social history progresses in the twenty-first century, there is no doubt that this will change as new approaches, new ways of assessing evidence and the incredibly nuanced results that can be achieved through the use of new technologies, will re-open many of the questions about Scotland’s late medieval money, economic history and population. Indeed, the People of Medieval Scotland project at the University of Glasgow has already begun to change the way in which we can interpret the evidence for the period 1093– 1314. The survival of certain types of document has encouraged Scottish economic historians to concentrate on exports, customs and tax returns. In truth, however, international trade might have made up only a tiny percentage of gross domestic product and creative ways of examining domestic exchange are needed. As historians begin to assess the evidence in ever more innovative ways, a picture will no doubt emerge of the largest part of Scotland’s economic life, its domestic economy and urban centres.

7 Elite Culture, Iconography and Propaganda

One of the most salutary effects of late twentieth-century developments in historiography has been to complicate our understandings of power and its exercise. No longer defining power simply as a matter of coercive force (where one individual, group or class can impose its will), historians have looked at an expanded range of sources to examine power as something with vital cultural dimensions. For political historians, material culture and customs provide rich resources for the study of the representations of authority and the way in which status, position, and lineage were expressed by rituals, objects and cultural activities. In late medieval court society everything was imbued with meaning and the display of power was essential to the assertion of that very power. The late middle ages was an inherently visual culture, and political life and governmental structures were thus underpinned by a rich iconography of authority. Elite culture – that of the king, the court, the church and the political community – served to underline power, but most importantly it served to represent authority, for without authority there was no legitimacy. During the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there were crucial developments in both the sense of royal authority and its visual expression. The two Bruce kings, Robert I and David II, saw value in creating a strong image in promoting their authority, but from 1371 the Stewarts took this to a new level, slowly building ideas of dynasty for use in royal propaganda. Although the Stewarts could run their line back legitimately,



Elite Culture, Iconography and Propaganda 183

their propaganda still concerned itself with the presentation and manipulation of lineage, pedigree and genealogy in its representations of the dynasty, for royal authority stemmed from legitimacy of descent. Indeed, the Stewarts profited by the use of a stable of royal icons that could be particularly associated with the myths, history and lineage that they sought to emphasise, constructing a cult of monarchy that was the foundation of a strong dynasty. While the scale of the image-building and the deployment of a sophisticated system of propaganda did not reach its apotheosis until the early sixteenth century, the profusion of propaganda was a recognised feature of the consolidation of monarchy. Of most obvious relevance to the Stewarts, it was especially important at the point of the accession of a new dynasty. It was, however, part of a more pervasive process that had been occurring across Britain and the Continent throughout the later middle ages as symbols were slowly being acquired and given meaning to particular dynasties. This chapter is concerned with the way in which the king and his government undergirded and furthered their authority and hence their legitimacy by the use of carefully crafted crown propaganda, which not only was deployed within elite circles but also intruded into and shaped the daily life of many Scots. If the principal theme of this book has been power and the exercise of authority, it is fitting then to end by considering the propaganda that served to underpin and enhance that power. In medieval society, as today, crucial ideological statements could be delivered through the wide distribution of carefully constructed images. The late medieval Scottish monarchs, particularly the Stewarts, understood this well. Banners, furnishings, pageant decorations, sculpture, architecture, seals, coins and jewellery combined together to present a king (or his dynasty) to his public and to mark crown ownership and authority. Icons and symbols enabled the ruler to be present and focused attention towards him. The image of the monarch on coinage, the proliferation of royal arms in towns and on crown property, and the king’s peripatetic itinerary, meant that the crown was present in the everyday life of a large section of

184

power and propaganda

the Scottish population. The projection of the image of the king and the crown was thus an important part of asserting authority within and throughout the kingdom. It is clear from the documentary record that Robert I was acutely aware of the power of propaganda. After all, the rhetorical fireworks of the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320 were only a small part of a wider cultivation of image during his reign. Bruce was the first in his dynastic line and thus not only did he have to gain authority to govern as king in complex circumstances but he also had to consolidate the legitimacy of a new ruling dynasty. An innovative and combative iconography was deployed, including a new great seal that showed the Scottish royal arms on an equestrian shield. This was not unusual in itself, but what was new was that the royal arms were shown in full and faced outward to the viewer, the shield raised by the king, mounted in full armour brandishing a sword. This was in stark contrast, and in quite deliberate response, to Edward I’s great seal for the governance of Scotland used between 1296 and 1306. On one side Edward I’s seal showed a traditional representation of a king enthroned and on the reverse a large feature of the royal arms of England. Edward I’s seal was intended to be provocative and its use was a powerful message of authority which was used alongside other acts of assertion of his suzerainty over Scotland, including the removal of the Stone of Scone and its rehousing in a new coronation chair at Westminster Abbey, purpose-built to house the stone. There it remained (apart from a brief and picaresque return after its theft in 1950) until it was restored to Scotland in 1996. Robert I’s great seal was a clear representation of Scottish royal authority in direct response to the events of a political crisis which remain to this day embedded in the Scottish national psyche. Although Edward III developed a complex programme of royal propaganda in England, including the foundation of the chivalric Order of the Garter in 1348, at the same time in Scotland the promotion of the house of Bruce during David II’s reign was rather stunted. It was not until 1371 upon the accession of the first Stewart king that a self-conscious programme



Elite Culture, Iconography and Propaganda 185

of royal propaganda was put in place, a clear indication of the especial importance placed on propaganda by ‘new’ dynasties. The gifted writer and cleric John Barbour was quickly commissioned to promote the Stewarts’ ancestry and authority. His work was integral to Robert II’s desire to see the dynasty recognised through a counter-claim to the Brutus legend, which placed Scotland and Wales as inherited kingdoms of England. Robert II commissioned Barbour to produce a genealogical history of the king’s ancestors, an increasingly popular mode of princely propaganda throughout Europe from the fourteenth century. Although Barbour’s genealogy has not survived, it is possible to infer from other sources that it traced the Stewart ancestors beyond the line of British kings descended from Brutus. From the outset, claimed Barbour, the Stewart kings were evidently in competition with the English crown for claims to British sovereignty. Robert II was also the patron of a heroic poem by Barbour, The Bruce, which commemorated the life of his grandfather and drew the Bruce and Stewart lines closer together in the minds of the political community. A phenomenally popular work, The Bruce provided a ‘history’ of the two most recent Scottish heroes, Robert Bruce and Sir James Douglas, the founder of the family most loyal to the Stewarts. Barbour’s full suite of works together suggests a carefully orchestrated programme of propaganda. The foundations laid down by Robert II were elaborated in subsequent decades by Stewart monarchs keen to display architectural representations of power and authority in the kingdom. Linlithgow Palace, for instance, tells us a very clear story of the changing priorities of Stewart authority and the messages that this dynasty wished to convey through its use of the royal coat of arms. In 1424 there was a major fire in Linlithgow, which consumed much of the town, a large section of the palace and the nave of the church adjacent to the palace. This disastrous event nevertheless proved to be fortuitous for James I. Here was a king, only recently returned to his kingdom from a lengthy exile in English captivity and determined to assert his authority, who was provided with the opportunity to remodel a well-positioned

186

power and propaganda

royal residence. The design and layout were reordered and a major rebuilding programme commenced that was so ambitious it remained unfinished at the point of the king’s assassination in 1437. James’s scheme was principally concentrated on the erection of an east range, which contained amongst other new features a grand entrance passage running beneath a great hall. While the erection of the new Linlithgow entrance may have been precipitated by fire damage, this was nevertheless a deliberate and carefully planned statement of royal power and authority. The king had to purchase additional acres to relocate the entrance from its previous position on the south range, which was the more natural line of approach. The east range entrance was more circuitous, but the ground there lay at a lower level, which made it possible to construct the gateway to be approached by a flying bridge. The palace was not fortified by corner towers or a gatehouse, but instead was a show-front of domestic appearance, projecting a confidence that there was no danger from either invasion from the south or from domestic rebellion. The new approach from the east was deliberately contrived for visual effect, with the palace intended to be seen rising above Linlithgow Loch, and this certainly had parallels in designed landscapes across medieval Europe, some of which also made use of large expanses of water and examples of which James I himself may have visited in the south of England. However, it is the sculpted stone coat of arms that was the most significant element of the new palace range, for in its grand size it made a clear statement that the king was present in his kingdom and that his authority was unchallengeable. Painted in red and gold and visible for miles around, the royal arms sitting above the new entrance, under which each visitor had to pass, were an eloquent display of the king’s power and his magnificence to his subjects. The royal arms of Scotland were simple and striking, showing a red lion rampant on a gold field surrounded by a double tressure (a border pattern of fleurs de lis). It is claimed that the first use of the lion as a representation of Scottish royal authority was by William I (1165–1214), reinforced by the moniker



Elite Culture, Iconography and Propaganda 187

of ‘the Lion’ that was attached to him during the fourteenth century. The emergence of this royal symbol was very powerful and the lion was quickly adopted as the foremost symbol of sovereign authority, appearing on all sorts of items from military banners to the royal seals. Following the troubles surrounding the Scottish throne during the late thirteenth century and early fourteenth century, both the Bruce and Stewart monarchs utilised the now well-established royal arms to signify their legitimate authority. They also extended the visual representation of power beyond just the use of the royal arms and extracted the symbol of the lion to be deployed in new contexts. For example, Robert III introduced a new style of coinage in his reign, which included a heavy-weight gold coin called a ‘lion’. This coin showed the royal arms topped with a large crown on the obverse (instead of the more conventional royal portrait), and on the reverse was shown St Andrew on his cross. In James I’s reign the lion could be entirely removed from its heraldic context. In 1430 this king had a large brass bombard gun brought from Flanders, with an inscription around its girth in gold lettering saying: For the illustrious James, worthy prince of the Scots. Magnificent king, when I sound off, I reduce castles. I was made at his order; therefore I am called ‘Lion’.

Guns were still relatively new military technologies and their ownership – particularly customised in this way – was an indication of not only military power but also prestige and wealth. By the late fourteenth century Flanders was established as the premier manufacturer of gunpowder technologies and many Flemish gunners were employed in royal households throughout Europe, including at Edinburgh in the 1380s by which time cannons had arrived in Scotland. The royal lion could be represented in many ways, including in the body of the principal heraldic officer of the kingdom, Lyon King of Arms. This was a title and office introduced to Scotland during Robert II’s reign as part of his suite of initiatives to consolidate and enhance Stewart royal authority. Robert II’s introduction of Lyon very much reflected the European vogue

188

power and propaganda

for new titled heraldic offices, which were appearing throughout Europe in the late fourteenth century. Lyon was the chief representative of the crown in matters of royal communication and diplomacy; kings of arms were ambassadors, orators and commissioners for the king. Thus the choice of the title Lyon for the man who represented royal authority in various areas of public life was an additional indication of the significance of this symbol. The development of the heraldic officers in Scotland broadly follows the process of the emergence of the symbols of Scottish royal identity: they are an excellent key to the use and importance of the royal emblems and give us unique insights into the way in which the Scottish crown wished to portray itself domestically and internationally. Lyon King of Arms was quickly joined by Unicorn Pursuivant, an office created by James I and in whose reign the unicorn emblem first appeared. But it was during James III’s reign that the use of the unicorn in royal iconography rapidly accelerated. He introduced a new design of a unicorn collared by a crown for the royal signet, and in the 1470s he gifted at least one presentation collar (a large ceremonial necklace worn around the neck and shoulders) from which hung a pendant of a unicorn. In 1484, James again used coinage to circulate the royal image and he minted a gold coin called a ‘unicorn’. The coin is significant for several reasons. First, and perhaps most revealing, the coin was issued in the aftermath of James III’s survival of the rebellion of 1482 and the ongoing challenges to the throne from his brother Alexander, duke of Albany during the period of 1482–4. The coin may indeed have been minted in the immediate aftermath of the battle of Lochmaben in July 1484, which saw a decisive end to the threat of Albany. Second, the unicorn coin was one of the most attractive of the Scottish gold coins and thus it was often used by James III as a gift to foreigner visitors. Coinage was an excellent way in which to circulate the image of a ruler and a dynasty to a wide audience, for coins of this quality were frequently seen in powerful circles at home and abroad. Finally, the design of the coin itself is highly significant. It was produced around the same



Elite Culture, Iconography and Propaganda 189

time as other considerable modifications to the Scottish coinage, which taken together indicate a very clear sense of a new phase of the Stewart dynastic image-building. In conjunction with the minting of the unicorn coin, James III issued a groat that has attracted considerable attention from scholars. This silver groat was the first three-quarter profile ‘Renaissance-style’ portrait of a monarch used on coinage outside of Italy. It is exceptional in the coinage not only of late medieval Scotland, but also of late medieval Britain and northern Europe, and its artistic value as domestically produced high-quality and imaginative art is without question. Of particular interest is the display of the king wearing an imperial crown, which suggests a change in the ambition of kingship and an enhanced vision of the place of Scotland in Europe. Thus the groat was integral to James III’s expression of territorial power, particularly in the context of the acquisition of Orkney and Shetland on his marriage to Margaret of Denmark in 1469. Perhaps it also referenced ambitions for the restoration of Berwick to Scottish hands after its latest (and final, as it would turn out) loss to England in 1482. Moreover, between 1471 and 1473 James III considered the invasion of Brittany and the acquisition of the duchy of Guelders as heir to his mother, and resurrected a claim to the French duchy of Saintonge. James’s imperial rhetoric was thus part of an effort to underpin the consolidation of his territories and sovereign authority over them. In historians’ excitement about the silver groat, what has been overlooked is that the issue of these two coins coincided, indicating a new phase in Stewart royal propaganda. For the Stewarts, iconography of dynasty was more vital than that of any individual ruler, so during the fifteenth century, as portraiture was increasing in popularity across Europe, the Scottish kings still tended to favour adorning their spaces with the royal symbols that represented dynastic and crown authority more generally. For instance, James I added the royal arms in stained glass and stone sculpture to many buildings – the Linlithgow entrance is just one example of this – but he also commissioned two luxury Arras tapestries depicting the royal

190

power and propaganda

arms, which were sent from Flanders in 1434. Tapestries were used as wall-coverings (wallpaper was developed in the sixteenth century and did not gain widespread popularity until much later) and Arras produced the finest examples available, both for speculative commercial sale and by commission, the more expensive choice. Tapestries were important for the creation of an instant impression that provided a backdrop to court life: they defined the spaces of political power, and their visual richness and meticulously chosen iconography were important in helping to define the king and his realm. The predominant use of the royal arms by the Stewarts in these contexts served to reinforce the coherence of their dynasty and its authority to rule. These royal symbols provided an iconography of crown and government that offered an antidote to some of the problems posed by absentee monarchs and lengthy minorities in Scotland in the late middle ages; symbols could be deployed in periods that lacked full monarchical authority. For example, just such a substitution of symbolic for physical presence was apparent between 1286 and 1292 when the Guardians used a seal which showed the royal arms of Scotland on the obverse, to represent the inherent crown authority placed in the acts of the Guardians despite the interregnum. The reverse of the seal showed the cross of St Andrew, which replaced the traditional emblem of the enthroned king, an elegant solution during an interregnum. The accompanying inscription of Andrea Scotis dux esto compatriotis (Andrew, be leader of the compatriot Scots) reinforced the idea that the authority of St Andrew, an emerging patron saint for Scotland, could replace that of a king in a time where there was no monarchical authority. In effect, the iconography of the crown in general permitted a sense of collective identity, but perhaps even more significantly it also provided a visual constitutional language. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the cross of St Andrew increasingly came to represent a badge of collective Scottish identity. For example, in 1385 parliament legislated that in the forthcoming planned invasion of England all men in the host should ‘have a sign in the front and at the back, namely,



Elite Culture, Iconography and Propaganda 191

a white cross of St Andrew and if his jacket or jerkin is white, he shall wear the said white cross on a piece of black cloth, round or square’. The usability of the cross of St Andrew was pertinent here for it allowed the Scottish army to collectively identify with a difficult political situation where the king, Robert II, had been sidelined and his son John, earl of Carrick (later Robert III), was acting as guardian of the kingdom. Carrick had pushed the agenda of war with England and it may have seemed impossible to launch an army under the king’s banner when the constitutional status of the king in his kingdom was complicated by his removal from power only seven months earlier. Thus the symbol of St Andrew could be deployed to represent the authority of the community of the realm. While crown iconography was in the process of becoming fully developed, there is little indication, or perhaps more pertinently little survival, of the images of individual monarchs. While coinage obviously played a role in the circulation of the image of an individual ruler and it was an effective form of royal propaganda, painted portraiture by its very nature had a different type of exposure. The audience for the portrait was necessarily restricted to those who might view it at court and in dedicated portrait galleries in private residences; these certainly existed on the Continent by the early fifteenth century, and notable examples include John, duke of Berry’s gallery at his castle of Bicêtre. Portraits were vital components in diplomacy, treaty and marriage negotiations and from the documentary records of these it is possible to establish that there were portraits of the Scottish royal family that have not survived the centuries. For example, having heard of the great beauty of Egidia Stewart, the daughter of Robert II, Charles VI of France sent an artist to the Scottish court secretly to ‘do her portrait and portray her charms, intending to take her to wife’. Portraits were also used in the public affirmation of a ruler’s authority in civic and religious spaces. It was common, especially from the fifteenth century, for portraits to be displayed at royal entries and during processions and yet, in Scotland, barely any art has survived from this period. However, we do know that each monarch in the fifteenth

192

power and propaganda

century had his portrait painted. Aside from the fanciful early sixteenth-century Renaissance portrait of James I by Pinturicchio, part of a series of frescos commemorating the life of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (later Pope Pius II) in the Duomo in Siena, where James sits enthroned in the middle of his court hearing an oration by Piccolomini, there is also a surviving midsixteenth-century portrait of him in Recueil d’Arras, a volume of portrait copies by a heraldic painter of Valenciennes, Jacques le Bouq. Folio 18 is thought to be a copy of a 1430s portrait of James I by a Netherlandish painter, who may have been brought to Scotland by the king himself, for James I was reported to have ‘brocht oute of Ingland and Flanderis ingenius men of sindry craftis to instruct his pepill in vertewis occupacioun’. His son, James II, was sketched by an artist who accompanied the Swabian knight Jörg von Ehingen to Scotland in 1458, the only surviving contemporary portrait of the king, showing the large port-wine stain birthmark on his face which earned him the nickname James of ‘the fiery face’. The French poet François Villon described the mark as ‘vermillion like an amethyst, from the forehead to the chin’ and this chimes with the von Ehingen portrait. James III, Queen Margaret of Denmark and the future James IV appear on the magnificent Trinity Altarpiece of c. 1478–9 by the Flemish master Hugo van der Goes, now hanging in the National Galleries of Scotland, commissioned by the first provost of Trinity College, Edward Bonkil, a member of a leading Edinburgh mercantile family, several of whom traded with the Low Countries. Bonkil himself was painted from a personal sitting in Bruges and appears on one panel of the triptych. Most effort in the middle ages was expended on religious themes in paintings, manuscript illuminations and statues and so the iconoclasm of protestant reformers in the sixteenth century took a heavy toll on Scotland’s artistic output as a whole. Some brief glimpses of the quality of the art of religious buildings can still be seen in the carvings of the late fourteenth-century effigy of a recumbent mason in prayer found in the wall of the northeast tower of the abbey wall at St Andrews, and in the opulent visual feast of Rosslyn Chapel in Midlothian, whose variety of



Elite Culture, Iconography and Propaganda 193

curious carvings have charmed the ill-informed into believing this to be the final resting place of the Holy Grail. The remarkable survival in the aisle of the Collegiate Church of Guthrie of painted scenes of the Last Judgement and the Crucifixion can be dated to the last quarter of the fifteenth century. The written record affords tantalising glimpses of art that has not survived down the centuries. Textual sources reveal, for example, that in 1475 Thomas Lauder, bishop of Dunkeld had an elaborate decorative scheme made for the high altar at Dunkeld Cathedral of a mural of twenty-four miracles of St Columba. If religion dominated, the market for secular subjects was considerable of course and included hunting scenes, heraldic motifs and portraiture. At least one painting of Joan of Arc was acquired in Arras by a passing Scot. There was enough of a market for art in Scotland that foreign artists sent their work for speculative sales, including a ‘panel decorated with the most beautiful pictures’ valued at 12 nobles that was recorded in 1438 aboard a ship belonging to a burgess of Haarlem, Coenrardus de Eyke. Ready-made art and objects, including carved and painted altarpieces, were easy to acquire and Bruges, Paris and Antwerp were markets most readily accessible to the Scots. For example, at Antwerp by December 1439, William Knox, a burgess of Edinburgh, had purchased ‘a gilded panel with images’ from a prominent painter Jan van Battel, who had studios in Mechlen. It is evident even from the fragmentary records that there were expensive works of art being purchased by the Scots, to adorn the spaces they occupied. The greatest demand for art came from the royal court, and the Scottish household employed highly skilled masters from outside of Scotland to undertake artistic work on royal buildings, such as the glass work completed in 1434 by a highly esteemed master of stained glass from Tuscany, Francesco di Domenico. Nevertheless, most art work that was produced in Scotland was done by local men. Here the records are comparatively rich and we know the names and locations of many of the painters working in Scotland for the royal household. In 1301 Richard of Dunfermline and Reginald the painter were given nine shillings to purchase colours and

194

power and propaganda

eggs (for the egg tempera technique) in Newcastle upon Tyne, to be used in decorating the chapel of Edinburgh Castle. Verdigris and olive oil were used to paint Robert I’s bedchamber at Cardross in 1328. John of Linlithgow painted the chapel erected over the body of Robert I in 1329, although the king’s elaborate gilded alabaster tomb itself was imported from Paris. John of Aberdeen painted heraldic banners for David II on his marriage to Margaret Drummond in 1364. In 1434 Matthew, the king’s painter, was working at Linlithgow Palace and in 1435 John, the king’s painter, was painting in Aberdeen. John Taverner painted a standard for James II in 1448, Alan painted the king’s gitterns and guitars in 1449 and 1453, and John Rate painted the king’s mumming costumes, scenery and furnishings during the Christmas celebrations of 1466–7. One imagines that there must have been some very fine domestic art produced given the range and volume of painting work that was undertaken in the kingdom by local painters. Many Scottish artists benefitted from training and working in England and on the Continent, particularly in the Flemish cities where artistic achievement was at great heights. Indeed, some Scots had substantial successes in Flanders including John Brown and Alexander Bening, who were among the artists employed to decorate the scenery for the marriage of Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy to Margaret of York at Bruges in 1468. It would seem that after this Alexander Bening settled permanently in the Low Countries and established himself as a miniature painter of exceptional quality in the artistic community in Ghent, becoming a member of the Guild of St Luke in 1469, amongst whose notable members were Hugo van der Goes and Gerard Horenbout. Bening married Kathelijn van der Goes, a sister of Hugo, and they had two sons, one of whom, Simon, trained in his father’s craft and became a specialist in painting books of hours. Scots patronised these foremost masters of their day, including Hugo van der Goes for the Trinity Altarpiece and Gerard Horenbout, who painted miniatures in the book of hours James IV presented to his wife Margaret Tudor in 1503. The indication that art was flourishing in Scotland during



Elite Culture, Iconography and Propaganda 195

the late middle ages reveals a wider cultural patronage amongst the elites of the kingdom and suggests something of the culture of the royal court. Although knowledge of the early Scottish royal court is patchy, recent research indicates that in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the Scottish court was neither impoverished nor isolated, as has often been implied. During the fourteenth century, of course, political circumstances made it difficult to establish a flourishing court culture, but the opportunity for cultural exchange within the kingdom and with England and the Continent was pronounced. Historians are still some way from understanding the development of the Scottish royal court, but what is clear is that by James I’s reign there was something approaching a court at the centre of cultural and political life, defined by display, ritual and pageantry, engaged in patronage of the arts and embodied in elaborate new palaces. Indeed, this was a distinct change to the culture of the court and its prominence in political life. The rich trappings of royal life were designed specifically to raise kingship beyond the reach of the Scottish magnates and to attract these men to the king’s court, where patronage and preferment might give them a taste of court luxuries. Entertainment of the king and his court took place at all royal residences, particularly Edinburgh, Stirling, Perth and Linlithgow, and foreign visitors were entertained at lavish expense. One such visitor was Reginald of Chartres, the archbishop of Reims, who was entertained at Linlithgow Palace in 1428 during a visit to discuss the terms of a treaty. From 1434 James also began the construction of a new chamber for himself at Edinburgh and a new palace in Leith, and ordered his two new Arras tapestries with the royal arms in that same year. James I was certainly keen to possess the finest tapestries available and further commissions were made in 1435 and 1436. The market for Arras tapestries in Scotland was so strong that by 1467 Edinburgh had a regular weaver, John Dolas, textori de arras, who received regular income from the crown to provide the king and household with woven objects, and to repair and clean the royal tapestries that were regularly transported as the king travelled from one residence to another.

196

power and propaganda

From early in his life James I had a developed a taste for luxury goods, and it seems likely that he received Arras ­tapestries – without question the best on the market – in the forfeiture of the duke of Albany in 1425. In 1414 Regent Robert, duke of Albany had received a gift from John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy of a series of Arras tapestries called Figures of Fine Ladies and Little Children and it seems probable this transferred to the king’s possession in 1425. With increased financial resources available to him from 1429, James I imported a vast number of luxury goods from Flanders. The royal court regularly tasted local and foreign foods including spices like saffron, ginger and pepper, almonds, apples, salmon, cheese, sugar, white fish, herring and, as Piccolomini noted, oysters ‘larger than those found in England’. The Sienese secretary also reported that ‘there is no wine in the country unless what is imported’ and, indeed, the court’s wines came from Beaune, Gascony and the Rhine and its beer and ale were brewed locally or imported from Hamburg. There was a range of entertainers kept by the court, including four performers sent from Bruges around 1436, one of whom, Martin Vanartyne, remained in Scotland and performed at James II’s coronation. James I was keen to display his taste, extravagance, wealth and power to an ever watchful Europe and he purchased satins, silks, velvet, furs and expensive jewellery adorned with gems and pearls to dress himself and his queen. Like dress, jewellery was a means of displaying authority and the item that most reflected this was the collar. Many collars were presented by the king as gifts and symbols of livery, and many men at court wore them to display their office and loyalty to the crown, including Patrick Charteris, provost of Perth and sheriff of the burgh of Perth, who wore a gold collar worth £3 6s 8d in the early 1440s. In 1456 James II commandeered a silver collar worth £20 from Adam Hepburn, the son of the lord of Hailes, and presented it as a gift to Gill’Easbuig of the Isles, the half-brother of the Lord of the Isles. At this time James was focused on securing stability in the west of Scotland and such lavish gifts were one means of achieving this. James III



Elite Culture, Iconography and Propaganda 197

gave a silver collar as a gift to Dederico Grutare in 1464, and at Christmas 1473 the king gave £11 to Robert of Crawford, the nephew of Archibald Crawford, abbot of Holyroodhouse, as compensation for a collar he reclaimed to give to a visiting Danish man-of-arms. James III also presented a collar to Anselm Adornes, an ambassador from Bruges who came to be a close familiar of the king. The design of the collar has survived on Adornes’s effigial tomb in the Jerusalem Kirk in Bruges and shows a highly decorative chain from which hangs a pendant of a unicorn. By the 1430s a Scottish royal court was flourishing. In a lengthy eulogy to the assassinated king in the 1440s, the chronicler Walter Bower revealed much about court life in James I’s reign. He divulged that the king and his court were skilled in music, literature and art and James I in particular was ‘naturally gifted’ in the fine arts. He was reputed as: a distinguished musician, not only in singing but also in a high standard of performance on the drum, [. . .] the fiddle, [. . .] the psaltery and organ, the flute and lyre, the trumpet and pipe; certainly not as an enthusiastic amateur, but attaining the highest degree of mastery.

Irish and English musicians had visited the Scottish court in the 1420s and 1430s and had admired ‘the incomparable preeminence and mastery of the royal skill in music’, attributing to James I ‘outstanding distinction’ in this sphere. This ‘distinction’ also extended to musical composition, an area where musicologists believe that James I may have excelled. While the king’s compositions have not survived, they were probably influenced by the consonant style of the most advanced English composer of polyphonic music, John Dunstaple, with whom James was almost certainly in contact at the English court. Music formed a crucial facet of princely magnificence and auditory splendour enriched the spectacles presented to court, congregation and community. Musicians, some native and some itinerant, are known to have been composing and performing in Scotland during the course of the fifteenth century: the records reveal

198

power and propaganda

Scots who were luters, harpists and trumpeters of both Highland and Lowland origin, as well as a pair of organs that were purchased by the king in 1449, and another pair in 1467 for Trinity College. Music was also essential to communicating religious messages and it is in the church context that we find the most evidence for the playing of music. Organ music accompanied the mass, and in 1436 the library of Aberdeen Cathedral contained two books of organ music. Two fragments of fifteenth-century music inscribed on slate have recently been uncovered at Paisley Abbey. James I was also an accomplished poet. The best-known of his compositions, the Kingis Quair, was written about his future wife Joan Beaufort and took inspiration from the works freely available to him whilst in English captivity including the poems of Chaucer and Lydgate, both of whose allegorical dream-state visions James paid homage to in his poem. James also composed at least two other poems, At Beltayn and Yas Sen, which have not survived, but the sixteenth-century chronicler John Mair, who knew the poems, informs us that James’s compositions in Latin were mediocre, although ‘when he wrote the language of his own country he showed the utmost ability’. James I’s proclivity for literature and fine arts extended to an interest in compiling a library, the existence of which is recorded in 1437 when his son James II inherited his primers and book collections. James II and his sisters seem to have benefitted from education and exposure to literature and the fine arts. Indeed, their mother’s Beaufort family were noted patrons of literature and owners of books, although nothing is known of Queen Joan’s literary tastes or abilities. James I’s eldest daughter, Margaret, wrote French rondeaux and ballads, and her patronage of men of letters, particularly Alain Chartier, is well known. None of her writing has survived and it is recorded that upon her death the dauphin demanded that her papers be destroyed: the inquiry held to investigate Margaret’s death in 1445 heard that her intense writing had contributed to her frailty. Her younger sisters Isabella and Eleanor were notable book collectors. They both possessed a number of richly illuminated



Elite Culture, Iconography and Propaganda 199

books, including the exceptionally lavish book of hours now MS 62 at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. This book of hours was illustrated by the Rohan Masters probably in Angers around 1431. It was customised to include extensive use of Isabella’s coats of arms upon her marriage to Francis I, duke of Brittany, including on the skirt of what may be a portrait of her being presented by St Catherine to the Virgin and child. We are on firmer ground with the 1464 La Somme le roi (or Le Livre des vices et des vertuz/The Book of Vices and Virtues by Laurent de Premierfait) that was commissioned for Isabella, now in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France MS Fr. 958, which contains an image of her and her two daughters. Eleanor gifted to the monastery of Neustift in Tyrol a printed edition of 1467 of St Jerome’s Epistolae which had belonged to her, and she also had a Lancelot romance and a psalter that bore the incorporated arms of Scotland and Austria. A splendidly illustrated copy of Virgil’s works, now in Edinburgh University Library, was produced in Paris in the third quarter of the fifteenth century by the scribe Florus Informatus and bears initials that might belong to Eleanor; the manuscript was certainly made for a member of the Scottish royal family. Eleanor, like her father and her eldest sister, had literary aspirations and she wrote poetry herself. Her finest surviving accomplishment, however, was the production of an enormously popular German translation of the French romance Ponthus and Sidonia that was published after her death in Augsburg in 1483. The Scottish princess’s patronage and participation in the arts reminds us that the role of women in shaping elite culture cannot be underestimated, and it is remarkable that in Scotland more research has not been undertaken on female patronage and networks in the late middle ages. Aside from the royal collections, Scottish noble families also had substantial libraries. The circulation and discussion of books of philosophy, law and the secular romance classics was evidently practised and possibly expected at the royal court. The anonymous Pluscarden chronicler, who abridged Walter Bower’s work in the 1460s, wrote that after dinner a king should stand up and deliver a talk on a subject such as ‘the

200

power and propaganda

r­ elative merits of glorious deeds; and then let him hear the opinions of others’. Discussion and debate at the royal court might take inspiration from the chivalric literature in wider circulation, including Gilbert Hay’s 1456 translation at Rosslyn of the essential handbooks of chivalry The Buke of the Law of Armys, The Buke of the Ordre of Knychthede and a further treatise, The Buke of the Gouernaunce of Princis. In the mid-1460s, Gilbert Hay, under Thomas, second Lord Erskine’s patronage, penned a version of the story of Alexander the Great, one of the nine worthies, a group of heroes who had been collected together and had risen to prominence in late medieval chivalric circles. This was the second version of Alexander to be translated into Scots around this time, the first dating to 1438. Other domestic and international stories of chivalry were circulating in manuscript form including The Ballet of the Nine Nobles, Lancelot of the Laik, The Knightly Tale of Golagros and Gawane, The Tale of Syr Eglamaire of Artoys, The Tale of Syr Valtir the Bald Leslye, Ferrand erl of Flandris, The Tail of Syr Euan Arthours knycht and The Tail of the Brig of Mantribil. Of course, the major Scottish heroic poems, The Bruce and The Wallace, provided much food for discussion, as they still do. A noticeable influx of Burgundian and Netherlandish luxury goods arrived at the Scottish royal court with Mary of Guelders when she married James II in 1449. As part of her dowry, the duke of Burgundy had provided around 60,000 crowns-worth of opulent clothing, textile furnishings for her chapel and for the cabin of her ship, and a substantial quantity of gold and silver metalwork objects for her chapel, her personal adornment and her table. Undoubtedly this immediately resulted in a demand for more of these goods from the Low Countries by the women who were in the elite circles of the kingdom. Luxury clothes were significant in the display of status and authority in social, political and religious contexts and there were complex codes woven into the fabrics worn by individuals and used in furnishings. Sumptuary laws strove to regulate the clothes worn at different levels of society for the simple reason that dress was an eloquent form of communication, and might pose a threat to the



Elite Culture, Iconography and Propaganda 201

status quo. Indeed, possibly inspired by the influence of Queen Mary, the 1450s was a peak period of opulence in clothing throughout the kingdom, leading to evident concern that both men and women were dressing above their station. By March 1458 parliament took action. Item, that since the realm in all estates is greatly impoverished through sumptuous clothing of both men and women, and especially within burghs and the commoners to landward, the lords think it profitable that the restriction thereof be made in this manner: that no man within a burgh that lives by merchandise, unless he is a person constituted in dignity, such as an alderman, bailie or other good worthy person that are of the town council and their wives, wear clothes of silk nor costly scarlets in gowns or marten furs; and that they make their wives and daughters be dressed in like manner, suitable and corresponding to their estate, that is to say on their heads short caps with little hoods, such as are used in Flanders, England and other countries. And as to their gowns, that no woman wear marten furs nor white weasel nor trains of ‘unsitting’ length, nor furred underneath, except on holidays. And in like manner outside the burghs of other poor gentlemen and their wives that are within ten pounds of old extent. And as concerning the commons, that no labourers or husbands wear any colour except grey or white on work days; and on holy days only light blue, green or red; and their wives likewise, and caps of their own making, and that it not exceed the price of 40 d. per ell. And that no woman come to church nor market with her face hidden or muffled so that she may not be known, under pain of escheat of the cap. And as to the clerks, that none wear gowns of scarlet or marten fur, except if he is a person constituted in dignity in cathedral or collegiate churches, or else may spend 200 merks, or great nobles or doctors. And this is now to be proclaimed and put to execution by 1 May, under the pain of escheat of the habit, that is to say of the clerks by the ordinaries, and the rest by the king’s officers.

Shortly thereafter the Swabian knight Jörg von Ehingen noted with pleasure that ‘much honour was shown to me in hunting, dancing and feasting’, listing the gifts he received of tents, cloth and jewels from both James II and Mary of Guelders. Revealingly, he wrote with only a perfunctory interest in

202

power and propaganda

describing his time at the courts of Henry V of England and Charles VII of France. James II’s court had evidently achieved its apogee. The rise in conspicuous consumption and a passion for the latest extravagances in the 1450s was not simply the result of the influence of the foreign queen. Indeed, one Burgundian observer at the wedding celebrations in 1449 approved thoroughly of James II’s court and noted that there were expensive and luxurious dishes at the banquets presented with fitting ceremony and protocol. The hunting, dancing and feasting at James II’s court that Jörg von Ehingen experienced in 1458 was far from an unusual activity for Scottish elites. James I had enjoyed the sport of hunting at grounds like Strathearn and during his reign he enlarged the number of hunting reserves in crown hands and passed legislation to ensure their protection. James II also enjoyed hunting and he participated in hunts at Loch Freuchie and Glenfinglas in Perthshire, where he erected a new hunting lodge. Most of the permanent royal residences provided facilities for hunting and other elite recreations. Parks were an important feature of royal and aristocratic residences, such as that which still survives today intact as the King’s Park at Stirling. Hunting scenes, as well as visual representations of court activities, were common decorations featuring in the possessions of the elite. The fourteenth-century Taymouth book of hours, now in the British Library, is thought to have belonged to Queen Joan, the wife of David II and depicted many scenes which included the hunt. Many games were played at the court. Some of these are revealed by the English writer John Shirley, who remarked that James I was engaged in a range of courtly pastimes on the night of his murder: Soo bothe to-foor supper, and long aftyr into quarter of the nyght, Athellis [Walter Stewart, earl of Atholl] and Robart Stuarde ­[grandson of Atholl] were aboute the kinge, where thei were occupied at pleying at the chesse, at the tables, in reding of romannse, in singing, in pyping, in harpying, and in other solaces of plessaunce and dysporte.



Elite Culture, Iconography and Propaganda 203

Archaeological evidence reveals that games were, naturally, played widely throughout the kingdom. Graffiti-incised slate gaming boards have been found at Finlaggan, Dundonald Castle and Ballumbie Church in Angus; graffiti-on-stone merelles boards (nine men’s morris) have been found predominantly in monastic contexts, notably at Arbroath, Dryburgh, Jedburgh and Inchmarnock; pieces for a variety of games dating to the late middle ages have been found at Finlaggan, Iona, Rum, Rothesay, Threave and Perth; and dice made of bone are quite commonly found. Royal tennis was established in Scotland long before James V built his enormous court at Falkland in 1539. Shirley also noted that royal tennis was played at James I’s court, a fact corroborated by a description in official records of a ‘fair playing place’ for the king alongside the royal apartments at the Blackfriars in Perth. There was also a tennis court at James II’s lodgings in the burgh of Aberdeen, which this king visited in 1460. From the mid-fifteenth century, Scottish kings regularly gambled on cards, which had been introduced to Scotland from Lille by the late fourteenth century and increased in popularity during the fifteenth century. James II was certainly gambling considerable sums on card games by 1457 and in the 1470s James III gambled on cards in his chamber each night during Yuletide (Christmas). Gambling was also increasing in popularity in towns and must have been causing considerable problems in Peebles in 1468, when the burgh council enacted a statute forbidding householders to receive dice players in their homes. The author of The Thre Prestis of Peblis commented that burgess families did not prosper in the third generation because third-generation burgess sons gambled wildly and were easily enticed into taverns, an observation not dissimilar to that on American immigrant culture made by Jack Donaghy, the CEO of NBC, in the comedy series 30 Rock: ‘The first generation works their fingers to the bone. Second generation goes to college and innovates new ideas. The third generation goes snowboarding and takes improv classes.’ The records of court entertainment are poor for this period,

204

power and propaganda

and with the exception of the poetry of James I it is not until the reign of James IV that any sustained evidence of court poetry has survived. Nevertheless, it is evident that courts throughout the late middle ages were well entertained by stage players, musicians and jesters, often on tours of the great courts of Europe. At James II’s coronation in 1437, stage players performed, and king’s jesters and stage players were retained on annual fees from as early as 1442. Plays were also part of the attraction of town life, and all levels of society might be able to see the performances, processions and spectacles at Yule or Maytime. In 1440, for example, a play of the Holy Blood was staged in Aberdeen and from this date onwards we find religious processions on feast and holy days including merchants and members of craft guilds accompanying the sacrament and saints’ images paraded through the towns. Much of the cultural life of the elites of the kingdom was similar to that across Europe, but chivalry was perhaps the single-most significant pan-European common culture. Chivalric values and ideals were an entrenched part of royal and aristocratic life, derived from the military setting in which many of these men operated. Knightly status was expensive to support, with pricey accoutrements, horses to maintain and obligations that generally involved a financial element to a range of people. The trappings of chivalric culture were also inherently elite. Thus subscription to chivalry was reserved to the upper echelons of late medieval society, who could in turn use this exclusivity to project prestige and wealth (and thus authority) to their communities and beyond. During the fourteenth century, described sometimes as the ‘age of chivalry’, there were several distinctive developments in chivalric culture, including the rapid spread of the foundation of orders of chivalry across Europe, and the emergence of a similarly widespread cult of the nine worthies of chivalric history. The grouping of Joshua, Judas Maccabeus, David, Hector, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Arthur, Charlemagne and Godfrey de Bouillon first took literary form in the Voeux du Paon, composed for the bishop of Liège by Jacques de Longuyon about 1312/14, which thereafter inspired pageants,



Elite Culture, Iconography and Propaganda 205

literature, murals, sculptures, engravings and decorative arts across Europe. Like all ‘flowers of chivalry’, the nine worthies were quickly compared to contemporary leaders, who sought to associate their good qualities with those being esteemed. This sometimes gave rise to the concept of the tenth worthy. Robert I received one of the most forceful attestations of tenth worthy status and even as early as the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320 Robert Bruce was aligning himself with Judas Maccabeus and Joshua. This was a motif reiterated by Barbour in The Bruce in the 1370s, where on the eve of Bannockburn the words of Judas Maccabeus were given to Bruce in his rousing speech. A manuscript of Sweetheart Abbey of about 1380 also records Bruce as the tenth worthy: ‘Robertus rex Scotorum denus est in numero meliorum’. The 1438 Scottish Buik of Alexander, a translation of the Voeux du Paon, includes the excursus on the worthies, and The Ballet of the Nine Nobles of about 1440, which is heavily indebted to the Buik of Alexander, extols Bruce as a tenth worthy as illustrious as the other nine. The raising of Robert I to tenth worthy was a clear attempt to portray him as the ‘ultimate chivalric hero’, a persona with clear applications in dynastic and military propaganda. Bruce’s military prowess was widely known and commented on throughout Europe: for example, the fourteenthcentury Florentine Giovanni Villani recorded that he had heard of the ‘valente’ Robert Bruce and knew of the ‘great war and battles which he fought’. This prowess was also transferred to inanimate objects that became associated with him, in particular his sword. Two separate swords were claimed to be Bruce’s. The first was a gift to the dauphin from James I in 1436, and was worn by him at his wedding to James I’s daughter Margaret. This sword was adorned with an image of the Virgin and one of the Archangel St Michael. It was described in an inventory of the armoury in 1489 as ‘l’espée du roy d’Escosse qui fust fort hardy’ and has been long associated by French historians with Robert I. James III also claimed to have carried Bruce’s sword into battle at Sauchieburn in 1488, in an effort to channel the powers and successes of the great warrior into his own military endeavours.

206

power and propaganda

Away from the royal court, noble households enjoyed a rich cultural lifestyle, which was criticised by Abbot Walter Bower in the 1440s for ‘the building of elaborate manor-houses, oversumptuous garments, the consequences of dice and games of chance, or luxurious dinner-parties’. The royal court was evidently not the only space in which there was flourishing cultural achievement. The Bute Mazer, one of the most remarkable survivals of this period, gives an indication of aristocratic tastes in the early fourteenth century. The mazer dates to the early 1320s and is an elaborate silver-mounted maple-wood drinking bowl, with an intricate design including six applied enamelled armorial shields and a central figure of a lion couchant cast in the round. It was probably owned by the Gilbertson family, aspirant up-and-comers rather than established great magnates, and it indicates that well-made and carefully designed pieces could be afforded and obtained by families of this level. One can only imagine the quality and design of pieces owned by the more prominent and wealthy families. Indications can be seen in the leather baldric lavishly decorated with silver mounts, which was made for Sir Thomas Randolph, nephew of Robert Bruce, on the grant to him of the earldom of Moray in regality in 1312. The elephant ivory Savernake Horn decorated with intricate silver gilt mounts, now in the British Museum and which was attached to the Randolph baldric, is equally an object of display and elite status (although an English provenance seems more likely for the horn and its connection with the baldric remains unexplained). The two earliest mounts on the horn date to the second quarter of the fourteenth century, and form two parallel bands close to its mouth. The engravings on the upper band include sixteen hawks preening themselves; animals of the chase, including a lion and a unicorn; and a king and a bishop facing each other, each with a raised hand, and nearby a forester blowing a horn, possibly depicting a hunting agreement now long forgotten. The second band similarly depicts hunting dogs and animals of the chase, which are gilded. Survivals of these kinds are, of course, quite rare. Despite the dramatic loss of the material culture of medieval



Elite Culture, Iconography and Propaganda 207

Figure 7.1  The medieval maces of the University of St Andrews. They are (left to right) the mace of the Faculty of Canon Law, the mace of the Faculty of Arts and the mace of St Salvator’s College. Reproduced courtesy of the University of St Andrews.

Scotland, there has been a curiously high rate of survival of the maces of the medieval universities, the single-most important object of the medieval university in representing authority and to enhance the dignity of those involved in its ceremonies. The University of St Andrews (founded in 1413) has its three medieval maces still in use, paraded during important university events and at graduation ceremonies; they are now on permanent display at the Museum of the University of St Andrews. Two of these, the mace of the Faculty of Arts (commissioned by Lawrence of Lindores and dating to 1416) and the mace of the College of St Salvator’s (commissioned by Bishop Kennedy, made in Paris by Johne Maiel in 1461), as well as the surviving medieval mace of the University of Glasgow (acquired in 1465, re-formed in 1490), were made by French goldsmiths. The mid-fifteenth-century mace of the Faculty of Canon Law

208

power and propaganda

of St Andrews, modelled on the mace of the Faculty of Arts but of slightly inferior craftsmanship, was made in Scotland. Maces were evidently in vogue during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, but they were costly: the records of the Scottish students at the University of Orléans, now in the Vatican Library, reveal that from 1397 subscriptions to the Scottish nation were elevated to fund the purchase of a mace, which had still not been acquired in 1408 due to lack of sufficient finance. Propaganda played a role in ensuring social status and political power in all areas of elite society, not just at the royal court. In the same way that the royal family from the late fourteenth century capitalised on its descent from Robert Bruce, so too did the Douglas family, who put up its own hero, Sir James Douglas, to a similar end. Moreover, the main emphasis of the propaganda and reinforcing of the legend of Sir James occurred at the point that there was a change in the family branch, for like Robert II with Bruce, the seventh earl acquired the comital title and lands on the extinction of the senior line. At the heart of Douglas family status was the role that the ‘Gud’ Sir James Douglas had played in the kingdom’s history. Sir James Douglas was immortalised in Barbour’s Bruce as the second hero of the poem, cast by Barbour as the most loyal of the king’s knights. Barbour celebrated the story that would forevermore define the Douglases’ special relationship with the Scottish crown, when he recounted the scene at Robert Bruce’s deathbed. The king called his magnates to him and asked them to choose from amongst themselves the one That be honest wis and wicht And off his hand a noble knycht to carry his heart on crusade against God’s enemies.

The nobles chose Sir James Douglas, ‘quham in bath wit and worschip was’. Sir James dutifully took Bruce’s heart on crusade, and himself died fighting in Spain at Grenada, ensuring the Douglas family’s place as the leaders of chivalry in Scotland. The Black Douglases carefully manipulated the reputation of Sir James for their own ends. The Douglas coat of arms



Elite Culture, Iconography and Propaganda 209

quickly reflected Sir James’s final deed for the Scottish crown and their shield bore a central heart shape intended to symbolise Bruce’s heart. This served to preserve and reinforce the family’s chivalric and royal links, a connection which was even more strenuously cultivated in the mid-fifteenth century. The eighth earl of Douglas sought further to exploit Sir James’s reputation in the late 1440s. His brother Archibald Douglas, earl of Moray was married to Elizabeth Dunbar, to whom Richard Holland dedicated his pro-Douglas poem of around 1448, The Buke of the Howlat. The poem relied heavily on the Brucean heart heritage and the associations between the Douglases and chivalry. Holland remarked that the Douglases were known throughout Christendom for their appropriately designed coat of arms and he underscored their connection with Robert I. The arms served as a visual display of the service and loyalty of the Douglas lineage to the Scottish crown and kingdom. The Douglases had also built up a high reputation outside of Scotland. The ‘Gud’ Sir James had achieved some Continental fame whilst on crusade in Spain, but subsequent Douglases also achieved renown. Jean Froissart, the famous Hainault ­chronicler, further cemented the prominence of the Douglases when he commemorated James, second earl of Douglas, who died at the battle of Otterburn in 1388. Archibald Douglas, fourth earl, was a powerful and aggressive warlord who had built up a power-base by patronage in the south of Scotland. He also secured a place in French service to further his personal ambitions. From 1402 Douglas’s commitment to war with England earned him a reputation as a military leader and chivalric knight, when he led around thirty French knights in a full-scale attack on the north of England. By 1413 France was the primary focus of Douglas’s ambitions. In 1424 he was made the first duke of Touraine and named lieutenant-general of Charles VII of France. This was a position with particular cachet, as no other foreign noble, nor indeed a Frenchman not connected to the royal house, had been given the ducal rank by a late medieval French king. Shortly afterwards, in August 1424, Douglas was killed at the battle of Verneuil. William Douglas,

210

power and propaganda

eighth earl and his brother James also achieved something of the status of the earldom’s predecessors, emphasising not only their territorial power and dominance in Scotland but also their very impressive chivalric reputation throughout Europe. The family clearly operated in a framework that extended beyond its loyalties to the Scottish crown. Many Scots, of course, engaged in a wide array of cultural interactions, many of which came about through trade and diplomatic routes. As Scotland’s nearest neighbour, England had a close cultural relationship. This was evident in literature and in music – in which English composers excelled. In part, this was because of the closeness in the dialects of Scots and English. In Scotland of course there were two distinct languages, Gaelic and Scots. However, linguistic differences did not make for isolated cultures, and there was rich cross-fertilisation between Scots-speaking cultures and Gaelic-speaking cultures, as well as the non-native languages which were present in the kingdom, including Flemish, Danish, French, Spanish, German and Latin. Recent archaeological evidence has shown that Norman French was used in amatory inscriptions on a fourteenth-century gold brooch found in Falkirk, which appears to have been a gift from a husband to his wife. Although evidently an object beyond the reach of the poorest in society, the brooch is not a luxury item and thus suggests the influence of Continental courtly love traditions in the middle layers of society. Indeed, similar brooches in pewter and bronze have also been uncovered that bear inscriptions along the same lines. One of the principal research inroads in the last decades has been to undermine previous assumptions about the relationship between Gaelic- and Scots-speaking parts of the kingdom. These had been assumed to be uneasy and difficult because of linguistic and cultural disparities and this argument was sharpened by the perceived injustices done to a ‘more native’ Gaelic culture by the incoming Anglo-Norman culture of the Lowlands, bolstered by its immediate dominance in law, customs and government. Scholars have now swept these misconceptions away. Gaelic language and Gaelic culture flourished in late medieval Scotland



Elite Culture, Iconography and Propaganda 211

and was still at home as far south as Perth, Angus and the Mearns for most of the fifteenth century. Indeed, the Book of the Dean of Lismore, now in the National Library of Scotland, was produced in the early sixteenth century in eastern Perthshire. It was written in secretary hand, which was favoured by Lowland Scots, rather than in the Gaelic hand known as corr-litir, but contained mostly Gaelic poetry. It also contained a substantial number of verses in Scots and Latin and a lot of diglossia, which suggests that the scribe was thoroughly immersed in both Gaelic and Scots cultures. Gaelic poetry and music were widely known throughout the kingdom, not only through the long-lasting bardic dynasties such as the MacMhuirichs, but also through the widespread use of the clarsach (or Irish harp) especially in the performance of poetry. Under the MacDonald Lords of the Isles the arts in the west of Scotland achieved new heights in the first half of the fifteenth century, when the lords patronised major construction schemes at Iona, echoing the rich carving of the monumental sculpture that was thriving in the western Highlands. Iona was the first of several main workshops of Gaelic stone carving, which became evident in the fourteenth century and survived as late as the eighteenth century. This style was distinctive and revived Celtic art (or more properly, Insular art), which was characterised by horror vacui, or the filling of an entire surface with detail. There was also a large amount of carving that suggests the late survival of twelfth-century Romanesque style. The Iona School was soon followed by Oronsay, Kintyre and finally Loch Awe, and by the beginning of the sixteenth century much of the work was done by travelling artists rather than an established workshop. Decoration was not limited to religious themes, but was made up of elaborate foliage designs with many representations of Highland life including Highland galleys, hunting scenes and warriors on horseback, such as those found on the Cross of Reginaldus of around 1380 or Cristin’s Cross from the second half of the fifteenth century. The remarkable survival of two west Highland clarsachs give further insights into the design and quality of the work p ­ roduced in

212

power and propaganda

western Scotland in the fifteenth century. The older of the two harps dates to around 1450 and is known as the Queen Mary Harp, now in the National Museums of Scotland; and the Lamont Harp, also in the National Museums, dates to around 1500. A crude but clear drawing of a clarsach appears in the manuscript of the Liber Pluscardensis dating to 1489 and now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. It should also be pointed out that the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were a transitional period between oral and written cultures. During these centuries there were key developments, such as the use of signatures in place of seals from the midfifteenth century and the professionalisation of written culture, most notably in government and the law. Lay literacy was evidently on the rise. The favouring of signatures instead of seals was particularly important as it may have been brought about by the availability of the mass-produced inferior-quality seal matrix and the increased commissioning of individual seal matrices by more sections of society (notably merchants from the fourteenth century), which diminished their validity as a means of communicating identity and authority. Individual seal matrices were usually broken or scored upon the death of the owner to avoid their use illicitly; with shop-bought inexpensive matrices more widely available in the later middle ages, it was increasingly difficult to trust the system of sealing alone. The transition from oral to written culture can also be demonstrated in the way in which the past was presented, in the shift from simple king lists to much more complicated histories presented in chronicles, which were a fusion of both oral and written sources. For in the thirteenth century, Gaelic bards read the list of kings at the start of the inauguration, shown most memorably in the late medieval manuscript illustration in Bower’s Scotichronicon of the inauguration of Alexander III in 1249. Yet by the fifteenth century, not only had the Scottish king list lost its Gaelic heritage, but also the royal genealogy was read at the coronation by a new officer of late medieval western European creation, a herald. Narrative histories, as opposed to king lists or early chronicles, were able to reflect a more nuanced



Elite Culture, Iconography and Propaganda 213

vision of the past and its inheritance. John Fordun’s Chronica Gentis Scotorum, Andrew Wyntoun’s Original Chronicle and Bower’s Scotichronicon individually and together provided a coherent historical narrative of the Scots to underpin the idea that they had a continuous history of sovereign rulers independent from any other authority. The creation of national histories was very much in vogue throughout Europe at the same time and the production of so many Scottish histories in this period reflects the crown’s desire to link itself to a certain perceived past. Indeed, the promotion of a common history is a signifier of the emergence of a sense of national identity. This was clearly articulated in France by the appointment of Jean Chartier as chroniqueur du roi to Charles VII. Similar positions of historiographer royal were created in Portugal and Burgundy at the same time, which signal that history was being put to work in the service of monarchy. Perhaps the most significant point to make about the emergence of ‘national’ histories in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is that a substantial proportion of them were written in the vernacular, and it is true that Wyntoun and the Auchinleck chronicler, as well as John Barbour and Blind Hary, all wrote their works in Scots. Wyntoun explained this choice in his chronicle: In vii. bukis tretit has he [Wyntoun] Out of Latyne in oure langage, That quha will may haif full knawlege, Quhat space of eris wes gane beforne

As elsewhere throughout Europe, the use of the vernacular was used in crown business so that by the end of the fifteenth century most crown business was recorded in Scots. Across the course of the late middle ages there were thus some profound changes to the languages of power. While important changes occurred within written and spoken languages – such as the replacement of Latin by vernacular Scots as the dominant language of court and administration – this chapter has laid particular emphasis on the visual and material aspects of culture. Power existed in and through visual signs and symbols

214

power and propaganda

as well as in objects and artefacts. Arguably, this was all the more important in a kingdom where absentee kings and prolonged minorities meant that legitimacy and authority had to be effectual through their representation rather than through the physical presence of the king himself.

Further Reading

1: INTRODUCTION: POWER, PROPAGANDA AND PERCEPTIONS OF SCOTLAND IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES G. W. S. Barrow (ed.), The Declaration of Arbroath: History, Significance, Setting (Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 2003). J. M. Brown (ed.), Scottish Society in the Fifteenth Century (London: Edward Arnold, 1977). P. H. Brown, Early Travellers in Scotland (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1891). P. Contamine, ‘Froissart and Scotland’, in G. G. Simpson (ed.), Scotland and the Low Countries, 1124–1994 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1996). A. S. G. Edwards, ‘The Manuscripts and Texts of the Second Version of John Hardyng’s Chronicle’, in D. Williams (ed.), England in the Fifteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1986 Harlaxton Symposium (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1987). C. Fleet, M. Wilkes and C. W. J. Withers, Scotland: Mapping the Nation (Edinburgh: Birlinn with the National Library of Scotland, 2011). A. Grant, Independence and Nationhood: Scotland 1306–1469 (London: Edward Arnold, 1984). A. Hiatt, ‘Beyond a Border: The Maps of Scotland in John Hardyng’s Chronicle’, in J. Stratford (ed.), The Lancastrian Court: Proceedings of the 2001 Harlaxton Symposium (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2003). M. A. Penman, ‘Anglici caudati: Abuse of the English in FourteenthCentury Scottish Chronicles, Literature and Records’, in A. King and M. Penman (eds), England and Scotland in the Fourteenth Century: New Perspectives (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007). S. L. Peverley, ‘Anglo-Scottish Relations in John Hardyng’s Chronicle’,

216

power and propaganda

in M. P. Bruce and K. H. Terrell (eds), The Anglo-Scottish Border and the Shaping of Identity, 1300–1600 (New York: Palgrave, 2012). S. L. Peverley, The Chronicle of John Hardyng: Edited from Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Arch. Selden B. 10 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2014). J. Simpson and S. L. Peverley (eds), John Hardyng’s Chronicle: Edited from British Library MS Lansdowne 204, Vol. 1 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2013).

2: KINGSHIP, POWER AND THE MAKING OF A MYTH G. W. S. Barrow, Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland, 4th edn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005). A. Beam, ‘Edward Balliol: A Re-evaluation of his Early Career, c. 1282–1332’, in A. King and M. Penman (eds), England and Scotland in the Fourteenth Century: New Perspectives (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007). A. Beam, The Balliol Dynasty, 1310–1364 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2008). S. Boardman, The Early Stewart Kings: Robert II and Robert III, 1371–1406 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1996). M. Brown, James I (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000). M. H. Brown, ‘“Vile Times”: Walter Bower’s Last Book and the Minority of James II’, Scottish Historical Review, 79 (2000), pp. 165–88. M. H. Brown, The Wars of Scotland, 1214–1371 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004). M. Brown and R. Tanner, Scottish Kingship, 1306–1542: Essays in Honour of Norman Macdougall (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2009). F. Downie, She Is But a Woman: Queenship in Scotland, 1424–1463 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2006). A. Grant, ‘The Death of John Comyn: What Was Going On?’, Scottish Historical Review, 82:2 (2007), pp. 176–224. A. Grant and K. J. Stringer (eds), Medieval Scotland: Crown, Lordship and Community: Essays Presented to G. W. S. Barrow (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993). N. Macdougall, James III: A Political Study, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2009). C. McGladdery, James II (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1990).



Further Reading 217

C. McNamee, The Wars of the Bruces: Scotland, England and Ireland, 1306–1328 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1997). M. Penman, David II, 1329–71 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2004).

3: CRISES OF CONFIDENCE: KINGS, PRINCES AND MAGNATES S. Boardman, ‘Alexander, Earl of Buchan, the Wolf of Badenoch’, Northern Scotland, 16 (1996), pp. 1–29. S. Boardman and A. Ross (eds), The Exercise of Power in Medieval Scotland, c. 1200–1500 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2003). T. Brotherstone and D. Ditchburn (eds), Freedom and Authority: Scotland, c. 1050–c. 1650: Historical and Historiographical Essays Presented to Grant G. Simpson (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000). M. H. Brown, ‘“Scotland Tamed? Kings and Magnates in Late Medieval Scotland: A Recent Review of Work’, Innes Review, 45:2 (1994), pp. 120–46. M. H. Brown, ‘Regional Lordship in North-East Scotland: The Badenoch Stewarts. II. Alexander Stewart Earl of Mar’, Northern Scotland, 16 (1996), pp. 31–53. M. H. Brown, ‘The Development of Scottish Border Lordship, 1332– 58’, Historical Research, 70 (1997), pp. 1–22. M. H. Brown, The Black Douglases: War and Lordship in Late Medieval Scotland, 1300–1455 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1998). E. J. Cowan and R. A. McDonald (eds), Alba: Celtic Scotland in the Medieval Era (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000). A. Grant, ‘The Revolt of the Lord of the Isles and the Death of the Earl of Douglas, 1451–1452’, Scottish Historical Review, 60 (1981), pp. 169–74. A. Grant, ‘Crown and Nobility in Late Medieval Britain’, in R. A. Mason (ed.), Scotland and England 1385–1815 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987). A. Grant, ‘Scotland’s “Celtic Fringe” in the Late Middle Ages: The MacDonald Lords of the Isles and the Kingdom of Scotland’, in R. Davies (ed.), The British Isles 1100–1500: Comparisons, Contrasts and Connections (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988). A. Grant, ‘Service and Tenure in Late Medieval Scotland, 1314–1475’, in A. Curry and E. Matthew (eds), Concepts and Patterns of Service in the Later Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2000).

218

power and propaganda

A. J. MacDonald, Border Bloodshed: Scotland and England at War, 1369–1403 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000). L. Maclean (ed.), The Middle Ages in the Highlands (Inverness: Inverness Field Club, 1981). R. Mason, ‘Kingship, Tyranny and the Right to Resist in Fifteenth Century Scotland’, Scottish Historical Review, 66 (1987), pp. 125–51. C. J. Neville, Native Lordship in Medieval Scotland: The Earldoms of Strathearn and Lennox, c. 1140–1365 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2005). R. D. Oram, ‘Alexander Bur, Bishop of Moray, 1362–1397’, in B. Crawford (ed.), Church, Chronicle and Learning in Medieval and Early Renaissance Scotland: Essays Presented to Donald Watt on the Occasion of the Completion of the Publication of Bower’s Scotichronicon (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1999). K. Stevenson, ‘Contesting Chivalry: James II and the Control of Chivalric Culture in the 1450s’, Journal of Medieval History, 33:2 (2007), pp. 197–214. K. J. Stringer (ed.), Essays on the Nobility of Medieval Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1985). R. Tanner, ‘“I Arest You, Sir, in the Name of the Three Astattes in Perlement”: The Scottish Parliament and Resistance to the Crown in the Fifteenth Century’, in T. Thornton (ed.), Social Attitudes and Political Structures in the Fifteenth Century (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2000). J. Wormald, ‘Taming the Magnates?’, in K. J. Stringer (ed.), Essays on the Nobility of Medieval Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1985). J. Wormald, Lords and Men in Scotland: Bonds of Manrent, 1442– 1603 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1985). J. Wormald, ‘Lords and Lairds in Fifteenth-Century Scotland: Nobles and Gentry?’, in M. Jones (ed.), Gentry and Lesser Nobility in Late Medieval Europe (Gloucester and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1987).

4: GOVERNANCE, THE LAW AND THE SCOTTISH POLITY A. R. Borthwick and H. L. MacQueen, ‘“Rare Creatures for their Age”: Alexander and David Guthrie, Graduate Lairds and Royal Servants’, in B. Crawford (ed.), Church, Chronicle and Learning in Medieval and Early Renaissance Scotland: Essays Presented to



Further Reading 219

Donald Watt on the Occasion of the Completion of the Publication of Bower’s Scotichronicon (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1999). K. M. Brown and A. R. MacDonald (eds), The History of the Scottish Parliament, Volume III: Parliament in Context, 1235–1707 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). K. M. Brown and R. J. Tanner (eds), The History of the Scottish Parliament, Volume I: Parliament and Politics in Scotland, 1235– 1560 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004). J. W. Cairns, ‘Historical Introduction’, in K. Reid and R. Zimmermann (ed.), A History of Private Law in Scotland: Volume 1. Introduction and Property (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). R. Feenstra, ‘Teaching the Civil Law at Louvain as Reported by Scottish Students in the 1430s (MSS. Aberdeen 195–7) with addenda on Henricus de Piro (and Johannes Andreae)’, The Legal History Review, 65 (1997), pp. 245–79. J. Finlay, Men of Law in Pre-Reformation Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000). A. M. Godfrey, Civil Justice in Renaissance Scotland: The Origins of a Central Court (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009). A. Grant, ‘The Development of the Scottish Peerage’, Scottish Historical Review, 57 (1978), pp. 1–27. R. J. Lyall, ‘The Medieval Coronation Service: Some SeventeenthCentury Evidence’, Innes Review, 28:1 (1977), pp. 3–21. H. L. MacQueen, ‘“Regiam Majestatem”, Scots Law, and National Identity’, Scottish Historical Review, 74:1 (1995), pp. 1–25. R. J. Mitchell, ‘Scottish Law Students in Italy in the Later Middle Ages’, Juridical Review, 49 (1937), pp. 19–24. A. L. Murray, ‘The Comptroller, 1425–1488’, Scottish Historical Review, 52 (1973), pp. 1–29. C. J. Neville, Violence, Custom and Law: The Anglo-Scottish Border Lands in the Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998). C. J. Neville, Land, Law and People in Medieval Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). G. C. H. Paton (ed.), An Introduction to Scottish Legal History (Edinburgh: Stair Society, 1958). D. Sellar, ‘Law, Courts and People’, in N. Baxter (ed.), A Tale of Two Towns: A History of Medieval Glasgow (Glasgow: Glasgow City Council, 2007). W. D. H. Sellar, ‘The Common Law of Scotland and the Common

220

power and propaganda

Law of England’, in R. R. Davies (ed.), The British Isles, 1100– 1500: Comparisons, Contrasts and Connections (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988). R. Tanner, The Late Medieval Scottish Parliament: Politics and the Three Estates, 1424–1488 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2001). I. D. Willock, The Origins and Development of the Jury in Scotland (Edinburgh: The Stair Society, 1966).

5: THE CHURCH, RELIGION AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE M. Ash and D. Broun, ‘The Adoption of St Andrew as a Patron Saint of Scotland’, in J. Higgit (ed.), Medieval Art and Architecture in the Diocese of St Andrews (Leeds: British Archaeological Association, 1994). A. D. M. Barrell, ‘The Papacy and the Regular Clergy in Scotland in the Fourteenth Century’, Scottish Church History Society Records, 24:2 (1991), pp. 103–21. A. D. M. Barrell, The Papacy, Scotland and Northern England, 1342– 1378 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). A. D. M. Barrell, ‘The Church in the West Highlands in the Late Middle Ages’, Innes Review, 54:1 (2003), pp. 23–46. G. Barrow, ‘The Pattern of Non-Literary Manuscript Production and Survival in Scotland, 1200–1330’, in R. Britnell (ed.), Pragmatic Literacy, East and West, 1200–1330 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1997). J. H. Baxter, ‘Scottish Students at Louvain University, 1425–1484’, Scottish Historical Review, 25 (1928), pp. 327–34. S. Boardman, ‘The Survey of Dedications to Saints in Medieval Scotland’, Innes Review, 59:2 (2008), pp. 189–91. S. Boardman, J. R. Davies and E. Williamson (eds), Saints’ Cults in the Celtic World (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009). S. Boardman and E. Williamson (eds), The Cult of Saints and the Virgin Mary in Medieval Scotland (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2010). H. Brown, ‘Secular Colleges in Late Medieval Scotland’, in C. Burgess and M. Heale, The Late Medieval College and its Context (York: York Medieval Press, 2008). R. C. Burns, ‘Papal Gifts to Scottish Monarchs: The Golden Rose and the Blessed Sword’, Innes Review, 20 (1969), pp. 150–94. R. G. Cant, The University of St Andrews: A Short History (Edinburgh and London: Scottish Academic Press, 1970).



Further Reading 221

A. Coutts, ‘The Knights Templars in Scotland’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 7 (1938), pp. 126–40. I. B. Cowan, The Medieval Church in Scotland (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1995). I. B. Cowan and D. E. Easson, Medieval Religious Houses: Scotland, with an Appendix on the Houses in the Isle of Man (London and New York: Longman, 1976). I. B. Cowan, P. H. R. Mackay and A. Macquarrie (eds), The Knights of St John of Jerusalem in Scotland (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1983). B. Crawford (ed.), Church, Chronicle and Learning in Medieval and Early Renaissance Scotland: Essays Presented to Donald Watt on the Occasion of the Completion of the Publication of Bower’s Scotichronicon (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1999). K. Curran, ‘Looking for Nuns: A Prosopographical Study of Scottish Nuns in the Later Middle Ages’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 35 (2005), pp. 28–67. M. Dilworth, ‘The Social Origins of Scottish Medieval Monks’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 20 (1980), pp. 197–209. M. Dilworth, Scottish Monasteries in the Late Middle Ages (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995). J. Durkan and J. Kirk, The University of Glasgow, 1451–1577 (Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press, 1977). J. Durkan and A. Ross, Early Scottish Libraries (Glasgow: John S. Burns and Sons, 1961). D. E. Easson, ‘The Collegiate Churches of Scotland’, parts I and II, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 6–7 (1938–9). D. E. Easson, ‘The Nunneries of Medieval Scotland’, Transactions of the Scottish Ecclesiological Society, 13:2 (1940–1). J. Edwards, ‘The Hospitallers in Scotland in the Fifteenth Century’, Scottish Historical Review, 9 (1912), pp. 52–68. R. Fawcett (ed.), Medieval Art and Architecture in the Diocese of Glasgow (Leeds: British Archaeological Association, 1998). A.-B. Fitch, ‘Power Through Purity: The Virgin Martyrs and Women’s Salvation in Pre-Reformation Scotland’, in E. Ewan and M. M. Meikle (ed.), Women in Scotland, c. 1100–c. 1750 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1999). G. Hay, ‘The Architecture of Scottish Collegiate Churches’, in G. W. S. Barrow (ed.), The Scottish Tradition: Essays in Honour of Ronald Gordon Cant (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1974).

222

power and propaganda

L. Hellinga and J. B. Trapp, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume III, 1400–1557 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). J. Higgit, ‘Imageis Maid with Mennis Hand’: Saints, Images, Belief and Identity in Later Medieval Scotland (Whithorn: Friends of the Whithorn Trust, 2003). J. Higgit, ‘Dunfermline Abbey and its Books’, in R. Fawcett (ed.), Royal Dunfermline (Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 2005). J. Higgit (ed.), Medieval Art and Architecture in the Diocese of St Andrews (Leeds: British Archaeological Association, 1994). J. Higgit and J. Durkan (eds), Scottish Libraries (London: The British Library, 2006). R. M. T. Hill, ‘Belief and Practice as Illustrated by John XXII’s Excommunication of Robert Bruce’, in G. J. Cuming and D. Baker (eds), Popular Belief and Practice: Papers Read at the Ninth Summer Meeting and the Tenth Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 135–8. S. Layfield, ‘The Pope, the Scots, and their “Self-Styled” King: John XXII’s Anglo-Scottish Policy, 1316–1334’, in A. King and M. Penman (eds), Scotland and England in the Fourteenth Century: New Perspectives (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007). E. Leedham-Green and T. Webber (eds), The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland: Volume 1 to 1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). R. J. Lyall, ‘Scottish Students and Masters at the Universities of Cologne and Louvain in the Fifteenth Century’, Innes Review, 36:2 (1985), pp. 55–73. R. J. Lyall, ‘Books and Book Owners in Fifteenth-Century Scotland’, in J. Griffiths and D. Pearsall (eds), Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). R. J. Lyall, ‘The Lost Literature of Medieval Scotland’, in J. D. McClure and M. R. G. Spiller (eds), Bryght Lanternis: Essays on the Language and Literature of Medieval and Renaissance Scotland (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1989). M. Lynch, ‘Religious Life in Medieval Scotland’, in S. Gilley and W. J. Sheils (eds), A History of Religion in Britain: Practice and Belief from Pre-Roman Times to the Present (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).



Further Reading 223

L. Macfarlane, William Elphinstone and the Kingdom of Scotland, 1431–1514: The Struggle for Order (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1985). M. MacGregor, ‘Church and Culture in the Late Medieval Highlands’, in J. Kirk (ed.), The Church in the Highlands (Edinburgh: Scottish Church History Society, 1998). A. Macquarrie, ‘A Problem of Conflicting Loyalties? The Knights Hospitallers in Scotland in the Later Middle Ages’, Scottish Church History Society, xxi (1983), pp. 223–32. A. Macquarrie, Scotland and the Crusades, 1095–1560 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1997). D. McRoberts, ‘Scottish Pilgrims to the Holy Land’, Innes Review, 20:1 (1969), pp. 80–106. N. Morgan and R. M. Thomson (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume II, 1100–1400 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). H. J. Nicholson (ed.), The Proceedings Against the Templars in the British Isles (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011). R. D. Oram, ‘Dividing the Spoils: War, Schism and Religious Patronage on the Anglo-Scottish Border, c. 1332–c. 1400’, in A. King and M. Penman (eds), England and Scotland in the Fourteenth Century: New Perspectives (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007). M. Penman, ‘The Bruce Dynasty, Becket and Scottish Pilgrimage to Canterbury, c. 1178–c. 1404’, Journal of Medieval History, 32:4 (2006), pp. 346–70. K. Perkins-Curran, ‘“Quhat say ye now, my lady priores? How have ye usit your office, can ye ges?” Politics, Power and Realities of the Office of a Prioress in her Community in Late Medieval Scotland’, in J. Burton and K. Stöber (eds), Monasteries and Society in the British Isles in the Later Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008). J. Sarnowsky (ed.), Mendicants, Military Orders, and Regionalism in Medieval Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999). G. G. Simpson, ‘The Heart of King Robert I: Pious Crusade or Marketing Gambit?’, in B. Crawford (ed.), Church, Chronicle and Learning in Medieval and Early Renaissance Scotland: Essays Presented to Donald Watt on the Occasion of the Completion of the Publication of Bower’s Scotichronicon (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1999). P. Skinner (ed.), The Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary and Archaeological Perspectives (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003).

224

power and propaganda

P. Yeoman, Pilgrimage in Medieval Scotland (London: Historic Scotland, 1999).

6: COMMERCE AND COMMUNITY J. W. M. Bannerman, The Beatons: A Medical Kindred in the Classical Tradition (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986). B. M. S. Campbell, ‘Benchmarking Medieval Economic Development: England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, c. 1290’, Economic History Review, 61:4 (2008), pp. 896–945. E. J. Cowan and L. Henderson (eds), A History of Everyday Life in Medieval Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). D. Ditchburn, ‘Cargoes and Commodities: Aberdeen’s Trade with Scandinavia and the Baltic, c. 1302–c. 1542’, Northern Studies, 27 (1990), pp. 12–22. D. Ditchburn, ‘Piracy and War at Sea in Late Medieval Scotland’, in T. C. Smout (ed.), Scotland and the Sea (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1992). D. Ditchburn, ‘Bremen Piracy and Scottish Periphery: The North Sea World in the 1440s’, in A. I. Macinnes, T. Riis and F. Pedersen (eds), Ships, Guns and Bibles in the North Sea and Baltic States, c. 1350–c. 1700 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000). D. Ditchburn, Scotland and Europe: The Medieval Kingdom and its Contacts with Christendom, c. 1215–1545. Volume I: Religion, Culture and Commerce (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2001). P. Dixon, Puir Labourers and Busy Husbandmen (Edinburgh: Birlinn with Historic Scotland, 2002). R. A. Dodgshon, ‘The Nature and Development of Infield-Outfield in Scotland’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 59 (1973), pp. 1–23. J. Donnelly, ‘An Open Port: The Berwick Export Trade, 1311–1373’, Scottish Historical Review, 78:2 (1999), pp. 145–69. K. Duncan, ‘The Possible Influence of Climate on the Bubonic Plague in Scotland’, Scottish Geographical Magazine, 108:1 (1992), pp. 29–34. E. Ewan, Townlife in Fourteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990). E. Ewan, ‘Mons Meg and Merchant Meg: Women in Later Medieval Edinburgh’, in T. Brotherstone and D. Ditchburn (eds), Freedom and Authority: Scotland, c. 1050–c. 1650: Historical and



Further Reading 225

Historiographical Essays Presented to Grant G. Simpson (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000). A.-B. Fitch, ‘Assumptions about Plague in Late Medieval Scotland’, Scotia: American-Canadian Journal of Scottish Studies, 11 (1987), pp. 30–40. E. Gemmill and N. Mayhew, Changing Values in Medieval Scotland: A Study of Prices, Money, and Weights and Measures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). D. Hall, Burgess, Merchant and Priest: Burgh Life in the Scottish Medieval Town (Edinburgh: Birlinn with Historic Scotland, 2002). A. Hanham, ‘A Medieval Scots Merchant’s Handbook’, Scottish Historical Review, 50:2 (1971), pp. 107–20. P. Holdsworth (ed.), Excavations in the Medieval Burgh of Perth, 1979–1981 (Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 1987). K. Jillings, Scotland’s Black Death: The Foul Death of the English (Stroud: Tempus, 2003). M. Lynch, M. Spearman and G. Stell (eds), The Scottish Medieval Town (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988). N. Mayhew, ‘The Status of Women and the Brewing of Ale in Medieval Aberdeen’, Review of Scottish Culture, 10 (1996–7), pp. 16–21. M. P. Rooseboom, The Scottish Staple in the Netherlands: An Account of the Trade Relations Between Scotland and the Low Countries from 1292 till 1676, With a Calendar of Illustrative Documents (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1910). M. Rorke, ‘English and Scottish Overseas Trade, 1300–1600’, Economic History Review, 59:2 (2006), pp. 265–88. W. W. Scott, ‘Sterling and the Usual Money of Scotland: 1370–1415’, Scottish Economic and Social History, 5 (1985), pp. 4–22. G. G. Simpson (ed.), Scotland and Scandinavia, 800–1800 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1990). G. G. Simpson (ed.), Scotland and the Low Countries, 1124–1994 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1996). P. Spufford, Handbook of Medieval Exchange (London: Royal Historical Society, 1986). A. Stevenson, ‘Medieval Scottish Associations with Bruges’, in T. Brotherstone and D. Ditchburn (eds), Freedom and Authority: Scotland, c. 1050–c. 1650: Historical and Historiographical Essays Presented to Grant G. Simpson (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000). H. Swanson, Medieval British Towns (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). A. Tuck, ‘A Medieval Tax Haven: Berwick upon Tweed and the

226

power and propaganda

English Crown, 1333–1461’, in R. Britnell and J. Hatcher (eds), Progress and Problems in Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Edward Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). I. D. Whyte, Scotland Before the Industrial Revolution: An Economic and Social History, c. 1050–c. 1750 (London and New York: London, 1995).

7: ELITE CULTURE, ICONOGRAPHY AND PROPAGANDA N. Adams, J. Cherry and J. Robinson, Good Impressions: Image and Authority in Medieval Seals (London: British Museum, 2008). S. Boardman, ‘Chronicle Propaganda in Fourteenth-Century Scotland: Robert the Steward, John of Fordun and the “Anonymous Chronicle”’, Scottish Historical Review, 76 (1997), pp. 23–43. S. Boardman, ‘Late Medieval Scotland and the Matter of Britain’, in E. J. Cowan and R. J. Finlay, Scottish History: The Power of the Past (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002). D. Broun, R. J. Finlay and M. Lynch (eds), Image and Identity: The Making and Re-making of Scotland Through the Ages (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1998). E. J. Cowan and L. Henderson (eds), A History of Everyday Life in Medieval Scotland, 1000 to 1600 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). J. G. Dunbar, Scottish Royal Palaces: The Architecture of the Royal Residences during the Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Periods (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1999). J. M. Gilbert, Hunting and Hunting Reserves in Medieval Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1979). L. Maclean (ed.), The Middle Ages in the Highlands (Inverness: Inverness Field Club, 1981). S. Mapstone, ‘Was there a Court Literature in Fifteenth-Century Scotland?’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 26 (1991), pp. 410–22. R. A. Mason, ‘This Realm of Scotland is an Empire? Imperial Ideas and Iconography in Early Renaissance Scotland’, in B. Crawford (ed.), Church, Chronicle and Learning in Medieval and Early Renaissance Scotland: Essays Presented to Donald Watt on the Occasion of the Completion of the Publication of Bower’s Scotichronicon (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1999). R. Oram and G. Stell (eds), Lordship and Architecture in Medieval and Renaissance Scotland (Edinburgh: Tuckwell Press, 2005).



Further Reading 227

G. Small, ‘The Scottish Court in the Fifteenth Century: A View from Burgundy’, in W. Paravicini (ed.), La Cour de Bourgogne et l’Europe: Le Rayonnement et les limites d’un modèle culturel (Ostfildern: Thorbecke Jan Verlag, 2012) K. A. Steer and J. W. M. Bannerman, Late Medieval Monumental Sculpture in the West Highlands (Edinburgh: Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, 1977). J. H. Stevenson and M. Wood, Scottish Heraldic Seals (Glasgow, 1940). K. Stevenson, ‘The Unicorn, St Andrew and the Thistle: Was there an Order of Chivalry in Late Medieval Scotland?’, Scottish Historical Review, 83 (2004), pp. 3–22. K. Stevenson, Chivalry and Knighthood in Scotland, 1424–1513 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006). K. Stevenson (ed.), The Herald in Late Medieval Europe (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009). I. H. Stewart, The Scottish Coinage (London: Spink and Son, 1955).

Index

Aberdeen, 5, 8, 17, 85, 97, 112, 123, 130, 156, 157, 163, 168, 174, 176, 177, 194, 203, 204 Aberdeen Breviary, 112, 138 Aberdeen Cathedral, 198 Aberdeen, John of, 194 Aberdeen, University of, 110, 111, 112, 113, 145 Aberdour, 171 Acre, Fall of, 133 Adornes, Anselm, 151, 197 Alan, king’s painter, 194 Albany Stewart family, 14, 37, 40, 53, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 81, 107 Alexander III, 18, 28, 137, 169, 212 Alexander VI, 112 Alexander the Great, 200, 204 Alexandria, 134, 156 Almoner, office of the, 102 Amiens, 138 Anderson, Robert, 146 ‘Ane Tretyse Agayne the Pestilens’, 168 Angers, 199 Anglo-Scottish border, 12, 25, 27, 116, 142, 172 Angus, 211 Angus, raid of, 61 Annals of the Four Masters, 75 Annan, 30 Annandale, 84 Anne of York, 50 Antwerp, 193 Arabs, 166 Arbroath Abbey, 55, 203 Arc, Joan of, 193 Archery, Jean d’, 143 Ardchattan, 127 Ardnamurchan, 72 Argyll, 59, 123, 125, 127 Aristotle, 143, 145, 146 Arkinholm, battle of, 81

Arous, John, 127 Arras, 189–90, 193, 195–6 Arthur, legendary king of Britain, 6, 33, 204 Artois, 174 Atholl, 9, 61 Auchinleck Chronicle, 78–9, 149, 213 Auchtermoonzie, 149 Augsburg, 151, 199 Augustinians, 127 Auld Alliance, 19, 28, 41, 49, 81 Avignon, 20, 61, 109, 118, 119, 120, 121–2, 125 Ayr, 48, 169 Badenoch, 57, 58, 61, 76 Bagimond’s Roll, 169 Balantrodoch, 132 The Ballet of the Nine Nobles, 200, 205 Balliol dynasty, 55 Balliol, Edward, 30, 55, 56 Balliol, John, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 35 Ballumbie Church, 203 Baltic, 139, 175, 176 Baltic Sea, 164 Bannockburn, battle of, 8, 13, 17, 25, 72, 86, 90, 128, 131, 132, 138, 155, 205 Banff, 169 Barbour, John, 13, 28, 55, 149, 185, 208, 213 The Bruce, 33, 55, 149, 185, 200, 205, 208 The Stewartis Oryginalle, 33, 149, 185 Barclay, Walter, of Grandtully, 150 barony courts, 93–4 Basel, 139 Basel, Council of, 144



Index 229

Bass Rock, 37 Batman, 16 Battel, Jan van, 193 Beaton family, 167–8 Beaufort, Joan, queen consort of James I, 39, 41–2, 43, 76, 127, 198 Beaufort, John, earl of Somerset, 39 Beauly, 127 Beaumont, Henry de, 24 Beaune, 196 Bek, Anthony, bishop of Durham, 18 Benedict XIII, 110, 121, 122 Benedictines, 127 Benincasa, Grazioso, 175 Bening, Alexander, 194 Bening, Simon, 194 Berry, John, duke of, 191 Berwick, 8, 19, 24, 27, 46, 47, 49, 84, 94, 107, 114, 116, 128, 156, 160, 163, 165, 189 Berwick Castle, 24 Berwick, Treaty of, 163 Bicêtre, 191 birlinns, 73 Black Death, 31, 129, 156, 158, 166–71, 172, 179 Black Dinner, 42 Black Douglases, 6, 7, 13, 37, 42, 45, 53, 54, 69, 77, 78, 80–1, 100, 208–10 Black Parliament, 55 Blackfriars Church, Perth, 41, 203 Blackness, 85 Bladnoch River, 135 Blind Hary, 81, 114, 213 The Wallace, 81, 114, 149, 200 Blindseil, Alexander, 150 bloodfeuds, 87, 115 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 166 The Decameron, 166 Bohemia, 143 Bologna, 109 Bondolf, William, of Dunkirk, 136 bonds, 78–9, 87, 93 Bonkil, Edward, 192 Book of the Dean of Lismore, 211 Borselen, Wolfaert von, 43 Bosworth, battle of, 50, 84 Bouq, Jacques le, 192 Recueil d’Arras, 192 Bourges, 109 Bower, Walter, 10, 11, 36, 69, 76, 92, 129, 141, 142, 148, 197, 206

Scotichronicon, 11, 39, 141, 148, 167, 199, 212–13 Boyd, Sir Alexander, of Drumcoll, 48 Boyd family, 47, 48, 81, 100 Boyd, Robert Lord, 48, 81 Boyd, Thomas, earl of Arran, 48 Brecbennach, 138 Brechin Cathedral, 123 Brechin, Sir David, 55 Brétigny, Treaty of, 121 Brittany, 189 Brown, John, 194 Bruce, Edward, 26 Bruce family and dynasty, 14, 28, 31, 32, 33, 35, 50, 69, 182 Bruce, John, 29 Bruce, Margaret, 29 Bruce, Marjorie, 25, 26, 29 Bruce, Matilda, 29 Bruce, Robert see Robert I Bruges, 48, 139, 174–5, 192, 193, 194, 196, 197 Brus, Robert de, fifth, 18–19 Brus, Robert de, sixth, 19 Brutus, 33, 185 Buik of Alexander, 205 bullion, 177–8 Bur, Alexander, bishop of Moray, 58, 59, 60, 62 burgh commissioners, 96 burgh courts, 93, 94 Burgh, Elizabeth de, queen consort of Robert I, 21, 22, 24, 25 Burgh, Richard de, Red Earl of Ulster, 21 burghs, 156, 161 burghs of barony, 178 Burgundy, 45, 114, 177, 213 Burgundy, John of, 167, 168 Tractatus contra pestilenciam, 167 Bute Mazer, 206 Caen, 109 Caithness Cathedral, 123 Cambridge, 109, 125, 145 Cambuskenneth, 90, 107 Cameron family, 76 Campbell, Cailean, 127 Campbell, Colin, of Glenorchy, 134–5 Campbell, James, 75 canon law, 109, 110, 111, 119, 144, 148 Canterbury, 20, 135, 138

230

power and propaganda

Cardross, 28, 194 Carmelite Friary, Berwick, 24 Carmelites, 127, 130 Carthusians, 129 caterans, 58, 62 Catherine de Valois, queen consort of Henry V, 37–8 Catherine of York, 50 Cecily of York, 49, 83 Chalin, Raymond, de Vinario, 167 De Epidemia, 167 Chamberlain, office of the, 102–3, 107–8 Chancellor, office of the, 101–2, 103 Chapel Royal, 140 Charles V, king of France, 121 Charles VI, king of France, 191 Charles VII, king of France, 41, 43, 202, 209, 213 Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, 48, 82, 194 Charterhouse, Perth, 129, 139 Charteris, Patrick, 196 Chartier, Alain, 151, 198 Chartier, Jean, 213 Chartres, Reginald of, archbishop of Reims, 195 Chastellain, Georges, 47 Château Gaillard, 30 Chattan family, 76 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 198 Chepman and Myllar, 138, 147 China, 156 chivalry, 204–5, 209–10 Christian I, king of Denmark and Norway, 47 Christie, Agatha Murder on the Orient Express, 79 Chronicle of Melrose, 148 Ciompi Revolt, 171 Cistercians, 127, 132 civil law, 97, 109, 110, 111, 146, 148 Clackmannan, 169 clarsachs, 211–12 Clement VII, 121 clergy, 118, 123–6, 142, 149 Clerk of the Rolls, 103 climate change, 164–5 cloth, 176–7 Cluniacs, 127 coinage, 35, 83, 153, 177–8, 179–80, 183, 187, 188–9, 191 Coldingham Priory, 147, 169

College of Justice, 97–8, 113 College of Surgeons, 113 collegiate churches, 139–40, 193 Cologne, 92, 109, 125 common law, 88, 89, 92, 95, 111, 116 Comptroller, office of the, 108 Comyn, John, earl of Buchan, 24 Comyn, John, lord of Badenoch, 21–2, 79 conciliarism, 122 Constable, office of the, 104–7 Constance, Council of, 122, 142, 143 Constantinople, 134 Convention of the Royal Burghs, 95 Conventual Franciscans, 130 Copenhagen, Treaty of, 47 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 143 coronations, 22–4, 29, 30, 32, 37, 39, 49, 63, 67, 68, 70, 71, 106, 152, 196, 204, 212 Corpus Christi, 139, 161 Coupar Angus Abbey, 171 Court of the Four Burghs, 94, 107 Court of the Lord Lyon, 98 Craigmillar Castle, 82 Crail, 136 Cranston, William, 79 Crawford, Archibald, abbot of Holyroodhouse, 197 Crawford, earldom of, 65 Crawford, Robert of, 197 credit, 162, 176 Crete, 138 Crichton, Sir William, 42–3, 75 Cristin’s Cross, 211 Cross of Reginaldus, 211 crown see regalia crusades, 25, 28, 130, 133–5, 141, 208 Cupar, 48, 160 Curia Quatuor Burgorum see Court of the Four Burghs currency, 153, 165, 177–80 Cyprus, 132 Dalkeith, 9, 170 Dalkeith Castle, 6 Dalkeith, Peter de, 127 Dalnagairn, battle of, 62 David I, 18, 91 David II, 6, 26, 28, 29–31, 33, 56, 57, 98, 134, 152, 162–3, 169, 178, 180, 182, 184, 194, 202



Index 231

David of Scotland, earl of Huntingdon, 18 Declaration of Arbroath, 12–13, 26, 27, 55, 90, 120, 133, 184, 205 Declaration of Independence, 26 Declaration of the Clergy, 90 Declaration of the Nobles, 90 Dedrik, king’s gunner, 115 Dingwall, 57, 76 Doddis, Simon, 150 Dolas, John, 195 Domenico, Francesco di, 193 Dominican friary, Stirling, 70 Dominicans, 127, 130 Donaghy, Jack, 203 Douglas, Archibald, earl of Moray, 209 Douglas, Archibald, fifth earl of Douglas, 41, 42, 75 Douglas, Archibald, fourth earl of Douglas, 69, 105, 209 Douglas, David, 42 Douglas family see also Black Douglases, 25, 37, 42, 45, 77, 78, 80–1, 100, 140, 208–10 Douglas, George, first earl of Angus, 67 Douglas, James, earl of Avondale, seventh earl of Douglas, 42 Douglas, James, lord of Dalkeith, 95, 171 Douglas, James, ninth earl of Douglas, 77, 78, 81, 112, 209–10 Douglas, James, second earl of Douglas, 7, 34, 59, 63, 209 Douglas, James, third earl of Angus, 41 Douglas, Sir James, of Balvenie, 36, 67 Douglas, Sir James, ‘the good’, 26, 28–9, 134, 185, 208–9 Douglas, Margaret, countess of, 135 Douglas, Sir William, of Liddesdale, 30 Douglas, William, eighth earl of Douglas, 42, 45, 77, 78–80, 100, 209–10 Douglas, William, first earl of Douglas, 6 Douglas, William, second earl of Angus, 75, 76 Douglas, William, sixth earl of Douglas, 42 Douglasdale, 142 Doune, 70 dress, 200–1 Drummond, Annabella, queen consort of Robert III, 64

Drummond, Margaret, 32, 194 Dryburgh Abbey, 128, 147, 203 Dublin, 148 Dumbarton, 29, 74, 160 Dumbarton Castle, 55 Dumfries, 21, 79 Dunbar, 9, 10, 20 Dunbar, Agnes, 32 Dunbar, Elizabeth, 209 Dunbar, Thomas, 60 Dunbar, Thomas, earl of Moray, 60, 67 Dunblane Cathedral, 123 Duncan, earl of Fife, 22 Dundee, 34, 156, 160, 162, 163 Dundonald Castle, 203 Dunfermline, 9, 147, 150, 154, 156, 161, 166 Dunfermline Abbey, 16, 69, 70, 136, 143, 147 Dunfermline, Richard of, 193 Dunkeld Cathedral, 61, 123, 193 Dunstaple, John, 197 Dupplin Moor, battle of, 30 Durisdeer, Andrew de, bishop of Glasgow, 111 Duror, 72 Duscou, Alison, 160 dynasticism, 32–3, 35, 38, 39, 44, 51, 69, 81, 86, 91, 182–92, 205, 208 Eachainn, Mairead inghean, 60 ecclesiastical courts, 119 Edinburgh, 9, 42, 43, 44, 46, 48, 49, 63, 82, 83, 84, 94, 97, 111, 113, 114, 131, 149–50, 156–7, 159, 162, 163–4, 177, 187, 192, 193, 195 Edinburgh Castle, 17, 24, 42, 43, 44, 48, 84, 113, 194 Edinburgh–Northampton, Treaty of, 27–8 Education Act, 112 Edward I, king of England, 5–6, 18, 19, 20, 22, 24, 28, 90, 91, 128, 132, 141, 148, 184 Edward II, king of England, 19, 24, 25, 26, 120 Edward III, king of England, 7, 26, 28, 30, 31, 65, 121, 133, 166, 180, 184 Edward IV, king of England, 47, 48, 49, 50, 77, 83, 84 Edward V, king of England, 49

232

power and propaganda

Ehingen, Jörg von, 192, 201, 202 Elgin, 5, 60, 130 Elgin Cathedral, 60 Elizabeth of York, queen consort of Henry VII, 50 Elphinstone, William, 146 Elphinstone, William, bishop of Aberdeen, 110–11, 138 England, 5, 9, 12, 19, 25, 28, 30, 31, 44, 45, 46, 47, 59, 71, 77, 81, 84, 101, 104, 111, 112, 114, 120, 121, 122, 128, 129, 132, 133, 139, 140, 141, 142, 145, 155, 156, 170, 172, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178, 186, 189, 190–1, 194, 195, 196, 201, 210 Erroll, earls of, 105 Erskine, Thomas, second Lord Erskine, earl of Mar, 149, 150, 200 Eskdale, 84 Ewesdale, 84 Eugene IV, 127 Euphemia, countess of Ross, 57, 59–60, 61, 62 exchequer, 103–4 Eyke, Coenrardus de, 193 Falkirk, 210 Falkland, 70, 113, 203 Falkland Castle, 36, 66 Ferchard, 167 Ferrand erl of Flandris, 200 Ferrara, 109 Fife, 74, 129, 136, 149, 158, 169 Figures of Fine Ladies and Little Children, 196 Finlaggan, 73, 74, 203 Firth of Forth, 37 fitz Allan, Walter, 33 Flanders, 43, 139, 171, 174, 177, 178, 187, 190, 192, 194, 196, 201 Fleming, Sir David, 36 Florence, 171 Flores, Juan de, 1 Grisel y Mirabella, 2 Fogo, John, abbot of Melrose, 144 Folkhyrde, Quentin, 142, 144 Nova Scocie, 142, 144 football, 46, 114, 116 Fordun, John of, 11, 148, 165 Chronica Gentis Scotorum, 11, 148, 213 Forfar, 139

Forres, 60 Forrester, Adam, 162 Forrester, John, 162 Fotheringhay, Treaty of, 49, 83 Fourth Lateran Council, 119 Fowlis Wester, 171 France, 6, 19, 20, 28, 29, 30, 31, 36, 38, 82, 84, 111, 118, 121, 122, 127, 130, 131, 132, 136, 145, 149, 163, 166, 172, 176 Francis I, duke of Brittany, count of Montfort, 43, 199 Franciscans, 127, 147 Freiburg, 143 friars, 128, 129–30 Frog, John, 127 Froissart, John, 1, 6–7, 9–10, 13, 157, 163, 209 Chronicles, 6, 9–10 Méliador, 1, 6 Gaelic, 11, 60, 64, 72, 73, 77, 126–7, 150, 158, 167–8, 210–11 Galloway, 123, 158 Gardener, John, 127 Garioch, 9 Gascony, 196 Gaunt, John of, duke of Lancaster, 39, 65, 172 Genoa, 5, 28 Germany, 166, 176 Gesta Annalia II, 148, 164, 165, 166 Ghent, 194 Gilbertson family, 206 Glanville, Ranulf de, 90 Tractatus de Legibus et Consuetudinibus Regni Angliae, 90 Glasgow, 130, 136, 144 Glasgow, archbishopric of, 123 Glasgow, bishopric of, 120, 123 Glasgow Cathedral, 110–11, 136, 147 Glasgow, University of, 110–11, 145, 146, 181, 207 Glencoe, 72 Glendenning, Simon, 79 Glenesk, Robert of, 149–50 Glenfinglas, 202 Goes, Hugo van der, 192, 194 Goes, Kathelijn van der, 194 Golden Rose, 151–2 golf, 46, 114, 116 Gough map, 4, 5



Index 233

Grampians, 57 Gray, John, 167 Gray, Patrick, 79 Gray, Sir Thomas, 22 Scalacronica, 22 Great Cause, 18 Great Famine, 165, 168 Great Schism, 121–2, 125, 133, 134, 142 Greenside, 46, 114 Gregory XI, 121 Grenada, 29, 134, 208 Greyfriars Church, Dumfries, 20 Grutare, Dederico, 197 Guardians of Scotland, 18, 19, 20, 190 Guelders, duchy of, 189 Guelders, Mary of, queen consort of James II, 43, 45, 46, 47­–8, 114, 140, 200, 201 Guildhall, London, 162 guilds, 155, 160–1, 166, 194 Guisborough, Walter of, 22 Guthrie, Collegiate Church of, 193 Guthrie, Sir David, of that Ilk, 92 Guthrie, Master Alexander, of Kincaldrum, 109 Haarlem, 193 Haddington, 48 Haldenstone, James, prior of St Andrews, 137 Haliburton, Walter, of Dirleton, 75 Halidon Hill, battle of, 30, 156 Halton’s taxation, 169 Hamburg, 196 Hans, king of Denmark, 85 Hanseatic League, 28, 95, 150, 175, 177, 178 Harding, Robert, 143, 144 Hardy, John, 105 Hardyng, John, 1­–3, 8 Chronicle, 1–3 Harelle, 171 Harlaw, battle of, 73 Hay, Sir Gilbert, 149, 200 The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour, 149, 200 The Buke of the Governaunce of Princis, 149, 200 The Buke of the Law of Armys, 149, 200 The Buke of the Ordre of Knychthede, 149, 200

Hay, Sir Gilbert, of Erroll, 107 Heidelberg, 109 Henry II, king of England, 90 Henry IV, king of England, 37 Henry V, king of England, 2, 37­–8, 69, 70, 202 Henry VI, king of England, 1, 2, 38, 46, 47, 74 Henry VII, king of England, 50 Henryson, Robert, 154 The Two Mice, 154 Hepburn, Adam, of Hailes, 75, 196 heralds, 105, 106, 212 Hereford mappa mundi, 5 heresy, 141–4. Highlands, 1, 3, 6, 8–9, 11, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 75, 77, 99, 125, 157–9, 167, 168, 180, 198, 211 Holland, Richard, 149, 209 The Buke of the Howlat, 149, 209 Holy Blood, 139, 204 Holy Grail, 140, 193 Holy Land, 28, 130, 132, 133, 134, 138, 151 Holy Sepulchre, 138 Holyrood, 44, 113, 131, 132 Holyrood Abbey, 43, 44, 47, 76, 106, 114, 147, 197 Homildon Hill, battle of, 67, 69 Horenbout, Gerard, 194 hospitals, 102 House of Commons, 96 Hugh, abbot of Dunfermline, 131 Hundred Years War, 31, 121, 145, 178 hunting, 202, 206, 211 Hus, Jan, 142 Hussites, 141 Iberia, 121 Inchcolm Abbey, 10, 141, 148 Inchmarnock, 203 Independence Referendum, 13 Innocent VIII, 151–2 Insular art, 211 Inverness, 48, 57, 59, 60, 75 Inverness Castle, 75, 77 Iona, 211 Iona Abbey, 136, 148, 203 Iona School, 211 Iran, 156 Ireland, 58, 74, 75, 76, 136, 155 Ireland, John, 115 Meroure of Wyssdome, 115

234

power and propaganda

Irvine, 161 Isabel, countess of Buchan, 22, 24 Isabella of France, queen consort of Edward II, 26 Isabella of Lennox, 59, 70 Islay, 73 Isle of Man, 27, 125 Isobel of Huntingdon, 18 Italy, 121, 166, 189 Jacquerie, 171 James I, 10, 36–41, 43, 68, 69, 70–6, 81, 90, 92, 94, 96, 97, 99, 100, 105, 107, 108, 109, 129, 138, 142, 151, 162, 178, 185–6, 187, 188, 189–90, 192, 195, 196, 197–8, 202, 204, 205 At Beltayn, 198 The Kingis Quair, 39, 151, 198 Latin couplet, 75 Yas Sen, 198 James II, 40, 42–6, 47, 70, 71–2, 76, 78–80, 81, 100–1, 106, 108, 110, 113–15, 167, 192, 196, 198, 200–2, 203, 204 James III, 3, 35, 46, 47­–9, 50, 81–3, 84–6, 87, 92, 99, 101, 108, 111, 113, 115–16, 151–2, 175, 188–9, 192, 196–7, 203, 205 James IV, 49, 50, 83, 84–6, 87, 108, 112, 124, 192, 194, 204 James V, 203 James VI, 12 Jedburgh Abbey, 147, 203 Jerusalem, 138 Jerusalem Kirk, Bruges, 197 Jews, 141, 166 Joan of England, queen consort of David II, 28, 29–30, 31, 32, 202 John II, king of France, 31 John V, duke of Brittany, 43 John XXII, 25, 26, 119–20 John, king’s painter, 194 John, son of Clement, 160 John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, 196 Joshua, 204, 205 Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, also Scottish Economic and Social History, 153 Judas Maccabeus, 204, 205 Jura, 167 justice ayres, 45, 48, 58, 93–4, 103, 115

Keith, Sir Robert, 107 Kelso Abbey, 9, 128, 147, 148, 168 Kennedy, James, bishop of St Andrews, 46, 47, 207 Kilbucho, 171 Kilcalmonell, 127 Kilfinan, 127 Kincardine, 5, 169 king’s council, 97 king’s household, 88, 101–8 King’s Park, Stirling, 202 Kinghorn, 169 Kingussie, 58 Kinross, 169 Kintyre, 211 Kirkcaldy, 161 Kirkliston, 95, 131 Kirkpatrick, Roger, 21, 79 The Knightly Tale of Golagros and Gawane, 200 Knights Hospitaller, Order of the, also Knights of St John, 130–3, 132, 139 Knox, Henry, 105 Knox, William, 193 Kraków, 109, 143 Kravař, Pavel, 144 Lamberton, William, bishop of St Andrews, 21, 120 Lamont Harp, 212 Lanark, 94 Lancelot of the Laik, 149, 200 Landallis, William de, bishop of St Andrews, 128 landholding, 25, 56–8, 59, 61, 65, 70, 71, 72, 74, 80, 81, 86, 117, 158, 165 Lanercost Chronicle, 156 Latin, 126, 144, 150, 167, 198, 210–11, 213 Lauder, 83, 84 Lauder, Thomas, bishop of Dunkeld, 193 Lauder, William, bishop of Glasgow, 142 Le Bel, Jean, 7–8 Les Vrayes Chroniques, 7 Leges inter Brettos et Scottos, 91 Leges Malcolmi Mackenneth, 91 Leipzig, 143 Leith, 195 Lennox, 59, 74



Index 235

Lennox, Duncan, earl of, 59 Lennox, Master William, 110 Lesley, Alexander, 150 Leslie, Euphemia, countess of Ross, 67, 73 Lewis, 57 Liber Emptorum, 108, 113 Liber Pluscardensis, 39, 148, 199, 212 libraries, 145–7, 199–200 Libri Domicilii, 108 Lichton, Henry, bishop of Moray, 143 Liddale, Sir James, of Halkerston, 81 Liddesdale, 55, 84 Lille, 203 Lindores, Lawrence of, 143, 146, 207 Lindsay, Alexander, 138 Lindsay, Alexander, fourth earl of Crawford, 77, 78, 79 Lindsay, Alexander, second earl of Crawford, 75 Lindsay, David, of Glenesk, first earl of Crawford, 62, 177 Lindsay, James, 21, 79 Lindsay, James, of Crawford, 172 Lindsay, Robert, of Pitscottie, 82 Linlithgow, 48, 81, 85, 94, 113, 132, 160, 174, 185, 195 Linlithgow, John of, 194 Linlithgow Loch, 186 Linlithgow Palace, 185–6, 189, 194, 195 Lithuania, 134 Little Ice Age see climate change Lives of Serf and Kentigern, 148 Livingston, Sir Alexander, of Callendar, 42 Livingston, Elizabeth, 76–7 Livingston family, 42, 100 Livingston, James, of Callendar, 76–7 Livingson, William of, 145 Loch Awe, 211 Loch Freuchie, 202 Loch Fyne, 127 Loch Leven, 148 Lochaber, 72, 76 Lochgoilhead, 127 Lochleven Castle, 136 Lochmaben, battle of, 84, 188 Lochmaben Castle, 21, 84 Lollardy, 141, 142, 144 Lombard, Peter, 144, 146 London, 39, 101, 162

Longuyon, Jacques de, 204 Voeux de Paon, 204–5 Lords Auditors, office of, 103 lords of parliament, 45, 65, 71–2, 77 Lords of the Articles, 99 Lords of the Isles, 41, 54, 72–7 Lothian, 30, 165 Louis, count of Geneva, 43 Louis XI, king of France, 43 Louvain, 109, 111, 125, 146, 167 Low Countries, 28, 114, 139, 163, 174, 176, 177, 192, 194, 200 Lowlands, 6, 9, 11, 140, 158, 168, 180, 198, 210 Luttrell Psalter, 8 Luttrell, Sir Geoffrey, 8 Luxembourg, 121 Lydgate, John, 198 Lyle, Robert Lord, 112 Lyon King of Arms, 98, 106, 187–8 MacBeth family see Beaton family McCain, John, 16 MacDomhnaill, Aonghas Óg, 72 MacDonald, Alasdair, of Lochaber, 62 MacDonald, Alexander, third Lord of the Isles, also Alasdair MacDomhnaill, 41, 73–6 MacDonald, Donald, second Lord of the Isles, also Dómhnall Íle, 64, 67, 68, 73, 74 MacDonald family see also Lords of the Isles, 14, 19, 25, 72–7, 167, 211 MacDonald, Gill’Easbuig, 196 MacDonald, John, first Lord of the Isles, also Eòin Mac Dòmhnuill, 73 MacDonald, John, fourth Lord of the Isles and thirteenth earl of Ross, 76–8, 79 MacDonald, John Mór, 74, 75 McLean family, 167 MacLeod family, 167 MacMhuirich family, 211 maces, 109, 207–8 Maiel, John, 207 Maillotins Revolt, 171 Mair, John, 198 Makculloch, Magnus, 146 Mar, 9 Mariota, countess of Ross, 73, 74, 75 Marischal College, 17 Marischal, office of the, 104–7 Margaret, Maid of Norway, 18

236

power and propaganda

Margaret of Anjou, queen consort of Henry VI of England, 47 Margaret of Denmark, queen consort of James III, 47, 48, 85, 175, 189, 192 Margaret of York, 194 marriage, 60, 119, 174 Martin V, 122 Maryculter, 132 Master of the King’s Household, office of the, 108 Matthew, king’s painter, 194 Mearns, 211 Mechlen, 193 medicine, 167 Mediterranean, 175 Melrose Abbey, 29, 128, 147, 148 Melun, 38 Menteith, 74 Merchant Adventurer’s Hall, York, 162 merchants, 149, 161–3, 173, 175, 176, 192, 212 Middelburg, 175 Milan, 177 military orders, 130–3 Minot, Laurence, 8 Modus Tenendi Parliamentum, 101 Mongol Empire, 156 Mons Meg, 44 Montrose, 5 Monty Python, 153–4 Monymusk Reliquary, 138 Moray, 9, 62, 123 Moray Firth, 5 Moray, Sir Andrew, 20 Mortimer, Katherine, 32 Mortimer, Roger, 26 Morvern, 72 Mure, Elizabeth, 60 Murthly Hours, 167 music, 197–8 Naples, 121 nationalism, 12–14, 26, 47, 184 Netherlands, 121 Neustift Monastery, 199 Neville’s Cross, battle of, 31, 33 Newbattle, 131 Newbattle Abbey, 147 Newcastle upon Tyne, 141, 194 Nieheim, Dietrich von, 142 nine worthies, 200, 204–5 Normandy, 177

North Berwick, 139 Northampton, Treaty of, 128 Northumberland, 46 Northumbria, 172 Norway, 28 notaries, 149–50 Nottingham, 50 nunneries, 128–9 Observant Franciscans, 130 O’Connacher family, 167 Ó Domhnaill (O’Donnell) family, lords of Tír Chonaill (Tyrconnell), 75 Ogilvy, Sir Walter, 62 Oldcastle, Sir John, 141 ‘The Order of Combats’, 105–6 Order of the Garter, 31, 184 Ordinance of Labourers, 170 Orkney, 47, 49, 116, 175, 189 Orléans, 109, 110, 111, 125, 145, 208 Orléans, Louis, duke of, 84 Oronsay, 211 Otterburn, battle of, 7, 34, 59, 63, 209 Oxford, 109, 125, 141, 145, 146 Padua, 109 Paisley Abbey, 198 Panicharolla, Giovanni Pietro, 82 papacy, 118–19, 122, 124, 126, 152 Papal Inquisitor for Heretical Pravity, 143 Paris, 9, 38, 84, 92, 109, 111, 125, 143, 145, 146, 157, 171, 193, 194, 199, 207 Paris, John of, 88 On Royal and Papal Power, 88 Paris, Matthew, 3–4 Paris Medical Faculty, 166, 167 parliament, 21, 24, 28, 30, 32, 34, 40, 45, 46, 48, 53, 55, 80, 86, 88–9, 90, 92, 95–101, 103, 106, 160, 173, 190, 201 Pavia, 109 Peasants’ Revolt, England, 170, 171, 172, 173 Peasants’ Revolt, Flanders, 171 Peebles, 48, 157, 169, 203 Peel Cathedral, 125 People of Medieval Scotland: 1093–1314, 181 Percy, Sir Henry ‘the Hotspur’, 59 Persia, 156



Index 237

Perth, 5, 28, 41, 48, 61, 64, 67, 113, 129, 137, 139, 142, 156, 157, 163, 164, 166, 169, 195, 196, 203, 211 Perthshire, 57, 129, 202 Peter I, king of Cyprus, 134 Petrarch, Francis, 148 De Remedies Utriusque Fortunae, 148 Philip II, king of France, 30 Philip IV, king of France, 19, 24 Philip VI, king of France, 29, 30 Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, 43–4, 200 Picardy, 20 Piccolomini, Aeneas Sylvius see Pius II pilgrimage, 135–9 Pinturicchio, 192 piracy, 37, 177 Pitscottie (chronicler) see Lindsay, Robert, of Pitscottie Pius II, 7, 10, 139, 192, 196 plague see Black Death Pluscarden Abbey, 127, 148–9 Poirot, Hercule, 79 Poitiers, battle of, 31 Pole, Anne de la, 50 population, 156–8, 179 portraiture, 191–2 Portugal, 213 Prague, 142, 143, 144, 146 Prague, Jerome of, 142 Premierfait, Laurent de, 199 La Somme le roi, 199 Premonstratensians, 127 prices, 179–80 Princes in the Tower, 50 printing see Chepman and Myllar Prussia, 134 Queen Mary Harp, 212 Quoniam Attachiamenta, 91, 92, 93 Ramsay, Sir Alexander, 30 Ramsay, John, 149 Ramsay, John, Lord Bothwell, 85 Randolph, Sir Thomas, 26, 206 Rate, John, 194 Ratho, 131 recession, 56, 155–6, 176–7, 178 Records of the Parliaments of Scotland to 1707, 95 regalia, 20, 22, 24, 28, 86, 106, 128

regalities, 57­–8, 93–4, 206 Regiam Majestatem, 89–91, 92 Reginald, 193 Registrum Anglie de Libris Doctorum et Auctorum Veterum, 147 religious orders, 127–30 Renan, Ernest, 13 Resby, James, 142, 144 revolts, 171–3 Rhine, 196 Rhodes, 133, 139 Richard I, king of England, 30 Richard II, king of England, 65, 147 Richard III, king of England, 49–50, 84; see also Richard, duke of Gloucester Richard, duke of Gloucester, 49, 83 Richard of York, third duke of York, 46 Robert I, 12, 13, 16–18, 19, 20–2, 24–6, 28–9, 33–4, 51, 54, 55, 69, 72, 79, 86, 89–90, 91, 101, 106, 119–21, 128, 132, 133, 137, 138, 152, 160, 182, 184, 185, 194, 205–6, 208–9 Robert II, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32–4, 53, 57, 58­–9, 60, 98–9, 107, 161, 167, 185, 187, 191 Robert III, 33, 34, 35, 36, 42, 57, 58–9, 60, 63, 64, 65, 67, 73, 83, 107, 177, 187, 208 Rohan Masters, 199 Roman de Fergus, 1 Roman van Ferguut, 1 Rome, 109, 112, 118, 119, 121, 138, 178 Ross, 9, 60, 68, 71, 123 Ross, earldom of, 57, 61, 62, 71, 73, 74, 76, 77 Rosslyn, 200 Rosslyn Chapel, 140, 192–3 Rothesay, 64, 203 Rouen, 171 Roxburgh, 2, 24, 41, 46, 94, 142, 169 royal arms, 20, 40, 86, 87, 184, 186–7, 189, 195, 199 royal tennis, 203 Rum, 203 Ruthven Castle, 77 St Albans, battle of, 46 St Andrew, 136–7, 187, 190–1

238

power and propaganda

St Andrews, 5, 24, 36, 123, 129, 130, 136, 137, 144, 160 St Andrews, archbishopric of, 123–4 St Andrews Castle, 46, 66 St Andrews Cathedral, 123, 137 St Andrews Cathedral Priory, 147, 148, 192 St Andrews, University of, 109–10, 122, 143, 144, 145, 207 St Catherine, 199 St Columba, 138, 193 St Columba, shrine of, 136 St Duthac, 137 St Duthac, shrine of, 24 St Kentigern, 136, 138 St Machar’s Cathedral, 11, 148 St Margaret, shrine of, 136 St Michael, 205 St Ninian, shrine of, 135, 136, 138 St Peter, 137 St Salvator’s College, 146, 207 St Serf’s Priory, 148 St Thomas Becket, 20, 135 St Triduana, 138 Saintonge, 189 saints, cult of, 135–9 salmon, 176 Sandale, John, 22 Santiago de Compostella, 138 Sauchieburn, battle of, 50, 86, 87, 205 Savernake Horn, 206 Saxoferrato, Bartolus de, 111 Scandinavia, 136, 175, 177 Scheves, William, archbishop of St Andrews, 167 schools, 126, 150 Scone, 22, 30, 32, 63, 66, 70, 89, 128 Scone Abbey, 128 ‘The Scottish King’s Household’, 101–6 Scotus, John Duns, 146 secular colleges see collegiate churches Selkirk, 48 sessions of council, 97, 115 Seton, Sir Alexander, of Gordon, 138 Sforza, Galeazzo Maria, duke of Milan, 3 Shaw, John, 143 sheriff’s court, 57, 93–4, 103 Shetland, 47, 48, 116, 175, 189 Shirley, John, 41, 202, 203

Short Chronicle of 1482, 149 Siena, 109, 192 Sigismund, duke of Austria, 43, 151 Sinclair, Sir William, earl of Orkney, 140, 149 Sixtus IV, 123 Skene, Gilbert, 168 Skye, 57 Sluys, 150 Smith, Anthony D., 13 Smith, Thomas, 105 Snowdon, 6 Sodor, 123, 125 Soules conspiracy, 55 Soules, Sir John, 55 Soules, Sir William de, 55 Southwark Cathedral, 39 Spain, 45 Stainhowel, Heinrich, 151 Stanhope Park, County Durham, 26 Statute of Disinheritance, 90, 155 Statute of Labourers, 170 Stephenson, Alexander, 135 Sterling zone, 180 Steward, office of the, 104, 107 Steward, Robert the, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 60, 73, 107; see also Robert II Steward, Walter the, 26, 29 Stewart, Alan, 76 Stewart, Alexander, 40 Stewart, Alexander, 70 Stewart, Alexander, archbishop of St Andrews, 124 Stewart, Alexander, duke of Albany, 46, 49, 70, 81–4, 85, 99, 119, 188 Stewart, Alexander, earl of Mar, 60, 62, 76, 177 Stewart, Alexander, first earl of Buchan, the Wolf of Badenoch, 33, 53, 56–8, 59–61, 62 Stewart, Annabella, 43 Stewart, David, duke of Rothesay, 35–6, 63–7 Stewart, David, earl of Moray, 46, 57, 59, 62 Stewart, Duncan, 61 Stewart, Egidia, 191 Stewart, Eleanor, archduchess of Austria, 43, 151, 198–9 Ponthus and Sidonia, 151, 199 Stewart family and dynasty, 14, 25, 26, 32, 33, 35, 39, 40, 43, 50, 56, 64,



Index 239

66, 68, 69, 74, 84, 85, 91, 104, 167, 182–90, 208 Stewart, Isabella, 43, 198–9 Stewart, James, 40; see also James II Stewart, James, earl of Carrick, 36–7, 67; see also James I Stewart, James, marquis of Ormond, duke of Ross, 50, 85, 124 Stewart, James the Fat see Stewart, Seamas Mór Stewart, John, earl of Buchan, 73, 107 Stewart, John, earl of Carrick, 33, 34, 35, 57, 58–9, 60, 63, 99, 191; see also Robert III Stewart, John, earl of Mar, 46, 82, 85 Stewart, Margaret, 46 Stewart, Margaret, 73, 85 Stewart, Margaret, dauphine of France, 43, 151, 198, 205 Stewart, Mary, 43 Stewart, Mary, 46, 48 Stewart, Murdoch, duke of Albany, 37, 39, 59, 67, 69–70, 74, 196 Stewart, Robert, earl of Fife and Menteith, duke of Albany, 33, 34, 35–6, 37, 59, 60, 62–9, 73, 107, 143, 196 Stewart, Robert, of Atholl, 41, 202 Stewart, Seamas Mór, 74, 75–6 Stewart, Walter, 69, 70 Stewart, Walter, earl of Atholl, 41, 76, 202 Stewarts of Lorne, 167 Stirling, 17, 42, 46, 48, 70, 78, 85, 94, 113, 169, 195, 202 Stirling Bridge, 5, 86 Stirling Castle, 6, 17, 24, 68, 70, 77, 78 Stone of Scone, 22, 23, 128, 184 Strathearn, 171 Strathspey, 58 succession, 17–18, 24, 26, 29, 31, 32, 34, 38, 39, 51, 70, 74, 75, 82, 91, 98 Summulae Logicales Magistri Petri Hispani, 145 Survey of Dedications to Saints in Medieval Scotland, 138 Sutherland, 71, 167 Sweetheart Abbey, 205 Switzerland, 166, 173 Swynford, Katherine, 39

The Tail of Syr Euan Arthours knycht, 200 The Tail of the Brig of Mantribil, 200 Tain, 24 The Tale of Syr Eglamaire of Artoys, 200 The Tale of Syr Valtir the Bald Leslye, 200 Tannenberg, battle of, 134 Tantallon Castle, 76 Taverner, John, 194 taxation, 41, 98, 99, 103, 106, 108, 116, 169, 172, 173, 178 Tay River, 164 Taymouth book of hours, 202 Teba, battle of, 29 Templars, 130–3 Teutonic Knights, 134 The Thre Prestis of Peblis, 203 Threave, 45, 114, 203 Three Kings of Cologne, 139 Tironensians, 127 Tor, Adam, 180 Torphichen, 132 touns, 157–8 Touraine, 209 Tower of London, 20, 31, 39, 69 towns, 157, 159–63, 178–9, 204 trade, 160–5, 168, 173, 174–7, 178, 181 Trail, Walter, bishop of St Andrews, 63–4 Trani, Goffredo da, 91 Summa Super Titulis Decretalium, 91 Travels of Sir John Mandeville, 151 Treasurer, office of the, 108 Trinity Altarpiece, 192, 194 Trinity College, Edinburgh, 140, 192, 198 Tudor dynasty, 50 Tudor, Margaret, queen consort of James IV, 50, 194 Tuscany, 193 Tyne River, 172 Tyrol, 199 Uilleam, earl of Ross, 24 Ulster, 75 underworld (classical), 3 unicorn, 40, 188, 197 Unicorn Pursuivant, 41, 188 union of crowns, 50

240

power and propaganda

universities, 144–7 Urban VI, 121 Urquhart, 57, 61, 76 Urquhart Castle, 77 Ursins, Jean Juvenal des, 3 Histoire de Charles VI Roy de France, 3 Valenciennes, 192 Valliscaulians, 127 Vanartyne, Martin, 196 Velde, Henry van, 115 Venice, 139 vernacular (Scots), 150, 158, 198, 200, 210–11, 213 Verneuil, battle of, 209 Verus Valor, 169 Vesconte, Pietro, 5 Vienna, 109, 143 Vienne, Jean de, 9 Villani, Giovanni, 205 Villon, François, 192 Voyage of Kynge Edwarde, 5–6 Wales, 33, 185 Wallace, Sir William, 8, 19, 20, 21 wapinschawings, 46, 114 Wardlaw, Henry, bishop of St Andrews, 39, 109

Wars of Independence, 11, 12, 18, 20, 33, 86, 91, 128, 132, 145, 147, 163, 168, 171, 172 Wayne, Bruce see Batman Westminster Abbey, 22, 23, 184 Westminster–Ardtornish, Treaty of, 77 Whitekirk, 10, 139 Whitelaw, Archibald, 151 Whithorn, 135, 136 William I, 186–7 Windsor, 31 Wishart, Robert, bishop of Glasgow, 22 witchcraft, 82 women, 173–4, 199, 200–1 Woodville, Elizabeth, queen consort of Edward IV, 50 wool, 34, 36, 163, 164, 169, 173, 174, 175–7, 178 Wright, William, 150 Wycliffe, John, 141, 142 Wycliffites, 141 Wyntoun, Andrew of, 68, 148, 166, 213 Original Chronicle, 148, 213 York, 141, 162 York, archbishopric of, 118 Ypres, 177