The thirteenth century in perspective

The spectacular rise of the Comyns is a paradigm of thirteenth-century Scotland - an increasingly hybrid noble family as one of the main supports of a still hybrid kingship. In origin an Anglo-Norman family and one of the instruments of royal colonisation in the north early in the century, their rise to real influence is traceable to the marriage made with the daughter of the last Celtic Earl ofBuchan about 1212. A web of marriage alliances with noble families old and new combined with continuing royal patronage in both Church and state to make them the pillars of the aristocratic establishment in the reign of Alexander III. Royal favour gave Comyns bishoprics, national office (such as justiciarship of Scotia), and local offices such as sheriffships. The success stories of Alexander Ill's Scotland were the nobles who exploited the twin assets of local connection and royal patronage. The more hybrid a noble family, the more influence it was likely to have in a society which was still an amalgamation of peoples.

The resurgence of a territorial nobility in the thirteenth century had an important political price. Already well developed was the central paradox of power in later medieval Scotland: the authority of kings depended on local nobles to supply the power in the regions which they themselves lacked. Alexander III, the last king of the macMalcolm line, was in one sense far more powerful than the first, Malcolm Canmore: the status of the monarchy had never been higher, primogeniture had been fully accepted and the notion of a territorial kingdom was already a century old. Yet in another important sense the effective authority of kings of Scots, as it became more explicit, also became more obviously constrained, for it was now also visibly contingent on a nexus of noble power in the regions. The tight feudal reins which had bound nobles to their liege lord in the reigns of the twelfth century were already loosening in those of the thirteenth. Feudal kingship gained strength from a new unity of national purpose, which would later be acknowledged in explicit terms as the 'community of the realm'. But it was also circumscribed by the emergence - or reappearance - of the regional magnate. The outline script for much of the political history of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was already sketched.