Each month we present a chapter in the history of Scotland. We move forward in time each month.
Peoples of the Kingdom - Lords and Men (cont.)David, like his grandfather, a more famous David, Earl of Huntingdon (who became David I in 1124), was a member of an Anglo-Scottish aristocracy who brought Anglo-Norman and Flemish clients and retainers from his English to his Scottish estates to act as stewards and constables. In this he was typical of the flood of 'Norman' families recruited by successive kings of the twelfth century from David I onwards - such as Avenel, de Soules, Melville or Somerville. Some, like the family of de Brus (coming from the village of Brix near Cherbourg), were indeed Norman but most were drawn from a concoction of English, Breton, French, Picard or Flemish and their chief attribute was their obscurity. Amongst them, it is worth noting, was Walter, the third son of a steward of the lords of Dol in Brittany; arriving in 1136, he would serve as Steward to three twelfth-century kings of Scots and found a family of Stewart which by 1200 had established a great lordship based largely in Renfrew, Ayrshire, Bute, and Cowal. By 1300 the Stewart family had become one of the most powerful of the west Highland chiefs. Although many of these lords retained estates or interests in England, France, or the Low Countries, only the greatest (including members of the royal house) tried to run their various estates as a single concern. For some the tug of loyalties would not be settled until well into the Wars of Independence, but for most there were already by the 1150s signs that their first loyalty lay with the Kings of Scots. The details of royal patronage of this new foreign aristocracy are to be found in charters for knight service, such as the massive grant of the land of Annandale in 1124 to Robert de Brus for ten knights or the grants in 1161 to the Steward of lands in Renfrewshire for five. Its extent and initial purpose are perhaps most easily grasped by a glance at a map of the motte-and-bailey castles founded in the twelfth century. These primitive earthen mounds, often encircled by a dry ditch and topped by a wooden tower, bespattered the hostile and difficult country in the south-west; the fact that there were sixty-two in Dumfriesshire and Kirkcudbrightshire and a further forty -five in Ayrshire corresponds to the fact that the bulk of David I's grants were south of the Forth but it demonstrates far more graphically how hazardous life could be for these foreign colonists on the frontier of the king's authority. By 1250, a new phase was opening in the king's relations with his far-flung localities; the motte was giving way to the castle, built professionally of stone and lime, and an altogether more formidable construction.
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