The thirteenth century in perspective

Important allies of the macmalcolm kings were, of course, the descendants of the Anglo-Norman, French and Fleming settlers first invited by David I. The role of the native nobility, the old mormaers, was no less important. Three notable examples help to illustrate the political and cultural cross-currents at work in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The macduff earls of Buchan, themselves related to the royal house of the eleventh century, were the emblems of the continuing survival and influence of a native aristocracy in the next century. They fell prey, not to royal aggression or to Norman ambition, but to the usual curse of noble houses, a lack of male heirs.

David, Lord of Garioch and Earl of Huntingdon, brother of William the Lion, was symbolic of the great new lords planted by that king and his son in the far-flung provinces of the kingdom and was also the most striking case of magnates who held estates in both Scotland and England. The mixed loyalties of a noble such as Earl David, 'a man of great power in both England and Scotland', or of a family such as the Balliols who held estates extending from Picardy and through seventeen English counties to Scotland, complicated both the growing sense of national identity which marked late twelfth- and thirteenth-century Scotland and its relations with its southern neighbour. Variously interpreted as infiltrators in Scottish society and as a force for reconciliation in Anglo-Scottish relations, these vast international networks of aristocratic interests were, however, by the last quarter of the thirteenth century already beginning to be severed. National shutters were beginning to come down before the Wars of Independence tested these loyalties to breaking point. Old Anglo-Norman families were fast becoming - in other parts of the British Isles as well as in Scotland - part of a territorial rather than an international nobility.