The Steel Bonnets. George Fraser MacDonald
fighting chief she married. In her influence on him, and on her adopted country, she was one of the most important women in Scottish history; through her, much that was English was imported, and remained with lasting effect on southern Scotland.
But the vital event of Malcolm’s reign took place far outside Scotland: in 1066 William of Normandy conquered England. In settling his kingdom he dealt ruthlessly with its northern areas, making a scorched desert from York to Durham, and floods of refugees poured over into Scotland; among them was the Princess Margaret who Malcolm of Scotland married. William was a thorough king, and as hardy a ruffian as Canmore himself; when Malcolm gave asylum to the refugees, and took up arms on their behalf, the Conqueror marched into Scotland in 1072, confronted Malcolm, made peace with him, and obtained his submission.
The last three words demand some explanation. Scottish kings had reached agreements with English rulers before; submission had been made, homage paid, and forms of superiority acknowledged. After Birnswark, Constantine of Scotland had become the vassal of Athelstan. But exactly what such agreements implied we cannot say; it is doubtful if the consenting parties could have said, either. Forms might be agreed publicly, but private interpretations would obviously vary. In later years, when Scottish kings were also English titled land-owners, the matter of vassalage had a real meaning, at least so far as their English possessions were concerned, and if an English king chose to understand vassalage in a wider sense, he was simply exploiting the situation to his own advantage, but without good moral ground.
Out of the historic tangle, there certainly emerged among English kings a belief that they had, traditionally, some kind of superiority over the Scottish king, and no doubt a feeling that for the sake of political security and unity—one might say almost of tidiness—it would be better if Scotland were under English control, or at best, added to England. This attitude can be charitably seen as politically realistic, or at the other extreme, as megalomaniac; it is all in the point of view.
Canmore made his submission, then, for what it was worth, but before long he was harrying in England again. In his earlier inroads he had done fearful damage, and carried off so many prisoners that “for a long time after, scarce a little house in Scotland was to be found without English slaves”, which no doubt helped the process of Anglicisation in southern Scotland. Now Malcolm was back again, but he came once too often, and was killed at Alnwick in 1093.
By then the Conqueror was dead, but his energetic successor, Rufus, was an equally powerful influence in the making of the Border. It was he who had finally taken Carlisle from the Scots in 1092, settled an English colony, and rebuilt the city which had long lain in ruins, adding to it the castle which was the parent of the present fortress, and which complemented the “New Castle” which his father had built on the eastern seaboard. In addition Rufus helped Edgar, Canmore’s son, to recover the Scottish throne, which had been in dispute after Canmore’s death.
And then peace broke out. It seems surprising, in view of what had been and what would one day follow, but there now began an era of tranquillity between England and Scotland, and consequently along the Border, which was to endure almost uninterrupted for nearly two hundred years. It began when, following Rufus, Henry I married Malcolm Canmore’s daughter; the close blood tie between the rulers, England’s preoccupation with the Continent, and the absence of any major Anglo-Scottish difference, all helped to keep the peace.
In this quiet time the independent state of Scotland was finally made. The three sons of Canmore and Margaret—Edgar, Alexander, and David—shaped it in the decisive half century from 1100 to 1150. They were friends of England’s, and they helped to fashion their kingdom in England’s likeness; at the same time, England was content to leave the Scots alone.
Like their mother, the three sons were godly folk, and under them the great religious houses rose and flourished, in the Borders as much as elsewhere. They saw that organised religion was a prime instrument of political stability, and used it; they also encouraged what has been called the Norman invasion of Scotland. By promoting Norman settlement, they introduced another civilising influence in the shape of the Norman gentleman-adventurer loyal to the monarch and capable of keeping order in the area he was given to rule. Gradually the feudal system was introduced into Scotland, but although Normans were settled extensively in the Border area, the new system never entirely displaced the old pattern of clanship and family chieftainship. This never died; Border, like Highland blood, was a lot thicker than charters, and the traditional tribal loyalties endured up to and beyond the union of the crowns. Its importance in the Border country cannot be over-rated.
Under the three kings there emerged a southern Scotland very like the England over the Border. The language was the same, as were the habits and customs and systems of government; the frontier was perhaps less of a barrier then than at any other time in British history. The day was dawning which later centuries were to look back on as Scotland’s golden age. For the Borderers, on either side, it was a time when they began to forget the horrors that war had once unleashed on them from beyond the line; when the peasant in Teviotdale and Berwickshire, in Tynedale or among the Cumbrian fells, could go to sleep secure.
Not that the temple of Janus was permanently closed; on three notable occasions the armies were busy across the Marches, and there was blood and fire from the Solway to the Tyne. But three wars in a century and a half, between England and Scotland when they were still in a semi-civilised condition, is not bad going; it was tranquillity itself compared with what was to come.
These outbreaks stemmed mainly from the fact that since the Scottish kings were part-English, and had considerable stakes in England—David, for example, held land in half a dozen English counties and was an English nobleman—they took an active interest in the question of the English succession. At the same time, their political duty marched with expansionist interest, and the northern English counties, to which there was at least an arguable Scottish claim, might in the process of settling the English domestic problem be secured to the Scottish side of the frontier.
Thus the Borders suffered again. In the period 1136–38 David was over the frontier, seizing Carlisle and Newcastle and devastating Northumberland, until, when he was in full cry southwards, he encountered under the shadow of the great holy standards of the saints at Northallerton, a phenomenon that was to astound and terrify all Europe. This was the English peasant with his bow; beaten by the arrow shower, David was stopped, but he still managed to retain control of the northern shires.
Forty years later another Scottish King, William, carried his new rampant lion standard south in the debate between Henry II and his sons; he failed to take Carlisle and Wark, but wasted the countryside; a truce followed, and another invasion, and this time William divided his army, like Custer, into three, the better to scour the countryside. It was a fatal mistake; the English caught him near Alnwick, and Henry II, fresh from doing penance for Becket, no doubt felt his penitence rewarded by the capture of the King of Scots. Becket’s spirit, his religious advisers assured him, had obviously been at work on England’s behalf.
William’s ransom was submission to England, of a most comprehensive kind, hostages of rank, and various Scottish strongholds, including the Border castles of Berwick, Jedburgh, and Roxburgh. However, Richard the Lionheart, when he found himself pressed for money, sold most of these advantages back to Scotland.
Much worse than either of these wars, from the Border point of view, was the outbreak of 1215, when the young Scottish king, Alexander II, became involved in the English civil war of King John and the barons. Aiding the Northern English lords, Alexander provoked a terrible retaliation from John; the Eastern Marches on both sides of the frontier were ravaged; Morpeth, Alnwick, Roxburgh, Dunbar, Haddington, and Berwick were burned, and the inhabitants of the last brutally tortured by John’s mercenaries; “the king himself disgracing majesty by setting fire, with his own hand, to the house in which he had lodged”.1
The Scottish retaliatory sweep through the English Borders was equally barbarous. As in the English inroad, churches and monasteries suffered along with the rest, and one ancient chronicler noted with satisfaction that a great number of the despoilers of one Cumbrian abbey were drowned in the Eden, weighed down with their loot.
But