Each month we present a chapter in the history of Scotland. We move forward in time each month.
The MacMalcolm Dynasty (continued)The year 1215 had seen the last great rising in the north. But if it had shown that one key to the pacification of the kingdom was a wider involvement of the nobility and baronage, the subduing of Galloway in the 1230s and the expeditions into the west - beginning in 1221-2, continuing throughout the 1240s and resuming in the 1260s - showed that the other lay in a more stable relationship with England. Between 1215 and 1217 Alexander staged five incursions into England, but these were the final macMalcolm gestures to recover its lost territories in Northumbria and Cumbria rather than the harbingers of a renewed hostility against England's Angevin kings. The restoration of the'Honour' (or earldom) of Huntingdon, which accompanied the marriage of Alexander to Joan, sister of Henry III (1216-72) in 1221, eased Anglo-Scottish relations without reimposing the stricter demands of homage and fealty which had straitjacketed the relationship in the 1170s and 1180s. By 1237 the new sense of realism had induced Alexander to forego all claims to territory in the English north, and the line of the border between the Tweed and Solway was in effect agreed. In 1174, William the Lion had needed the agreement of his liege lord Henry II of England before he launched an assault on Galloway. In 1234, Alexander II, a much freer agent of his own destiny, moved quickly to take advantage of the death of Alan, Lord of Galloway, who had left no legitimate male heir. The instruments of the royal will in Galloway were both, significantly, already trusted agents in the north and they came from different strains of the hybrid nobility of the thirteenth century. It was Farquhar macTaggart, a native lord who was now Earl ofRoss, who led the royal army into Galloway, and Walter Comyn, Earl of Menteith and a member of the first Anglo-Norman family to secure an earldom, who policed the province after 1235. You can find more Scottish history here.
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