Scotland - A History

Each month we present a chapter in the history of Scotland. We move forward in time each month.

Peoples of the Kingdom


In 1138, at the Battle of Standard, David I (1124 -53) led a diverse army made up of 'Normans, Germans, English, Northumbrians and Cumbrians, men of Teviotdale and Lothian, Glaswegians, and Scots'. It was, to the English they confronted, an astonishing assembly of the diverse people who comprised the kingdom of the Scots. David, who in his time at the court of Henry I of England (1100 -35) had 'rubbed off all the tarnish of Scottish barbarity', led an army which 'bellowed the war-cry of their fathers', heard against the Viking Ivar in 903 and at Corbridge in 918, Albanaich, Albanaich! The different gentes which comprised this army - new settlers such as the French, Anglo-Normans and Flemings, as well as natives such as the men of Moray who were close to the king's own line and the men of Lorn in the third rank - also made up the kingdom of the Scots. David and his successors, of the line of Canmore or macMalcolm, managed to be at once both Celtic and feudal kings. By the end of the twelfth century, the notion of a territorial kingdom, stretching to the north and south of the 'Scottish sea' of the Forth and embracing both Scotia and Lothian, was also widely accepted. Yet the tradition of submission to a king of Scots did not begin with the Canmore dynasty; it was already more than two centuries old.

Their kingdom was regulated by a complex patchwork combining a typically western European feudal framework with Celtic custom, which can be traced in many of its details to Irish law tracts of the seventh or eighth century. The result was what has been called a 'hybrid kingdom', and one of its marks was the emergence of composite common law of Scotland by the twelfth century. The conjunction of old and new marked every aspect of life in twelfth-century Scotland. The king's army was a mixture of feudal knights, products of typical western European system of knight service, and a 'common army' of infantry and bowmen, which had for centuries acknowledged, 'forinsec' or 'Scottish service' to the king. At Bannockburn in 1314 they still comprised the bulk of Robert I's army. The king's revenue was raised through a combination of the new land assessments of feudal tenure - knights' fee and the older obligations such cain. The difficulty lies in terminology, for phrases such a 'Scottish service' or 'the custom in that country' (in this case Argyll) were the invention of the king's clerks. The older, established nexus of law, custom and kingship had no convenient name - nor has to this day. Yet by 1100 Gaelic law and custom had reached almost every part of what we now know as Scotland, including Lothian in the southeast. The new feudalism of twelfth century came into contact not with a receding Celtic culture but with a still expanding one.

You can find more Scottish history here.


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