Scotland: The Story of a Nation. Magnus Magnusson
Local tradition in Inverness insists that the murdered King Duncan was buried in Culcabock, a village to the east of the town (now a suburb of it). In front of a petrol station on the Old Perth Road, at the junction with Culcabock Avenue, is a stone marked with a plaque which reads: ‘Behind is the supposed burial place of King Duncan 1040’ – that is to say, underneath the present petrol station. On the opposite side of the road is a ‘Duncan’s Well’ (Fuaran Dhonnachaidh). According to this tradition, the king’s body was later removed and buried in the royal cemetery on the Holy Island of Iona. In fact, Duncan was killed in battle in Aberdeenshire (see here).
1 Just for the record (literally), the ‘Birnam Oak’ stands next to the largest sycamore tree in Britain; it has a height of thirty metres and a girth of eight metres.
1 The Culdees (Cele dei, ‘Friends of God’) formed early monastic communities which attached themselves to hereditary secular priests.
1 ‘Motte-and-bailey’ is the term used for an early Anglo-Norman fortification consisting of a timber tower raised on an artificial mound. The word ‘motte’ comes from Old French, meaning mound, and the ‘bailey’ was the fortified courtyard within the surrounding ditch, or moat. In English, ‘motte’ came to mean the moat rather than the mound.
1 John of Fordun (c.1320–84) has often been called ‘the Father of Scottish History’. Not a great deal is known about him; he is believed to have been a chantry priest at Aberdeen Cathedral, and may have come from Fordoun in the Mearns. His history was a compilation of (now lost) earlier historical writings on Scotland and took the story down to 1383. His work formed the basis of the Scotichronicon of Walter Bower, which was written in the 1440s.
Chapter 5 MALCOLM CANMORE AND ST MARGARET
Malcolm III, called Canmore (or Great Head) … was a brave and wise prince, though without education. He often made war upon King William the Conqueror of England, and upon his son and successor William, who, from his complexion, was called William Rufus, that is, Red William.
TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER IV
The accession of Malcolm Canmore in 1058 marked the end of what Michael Lynch has called ‘the crisis of the mac Alpin succession’ (Scotland: A New History). It also marked the start of a highly formative period in the development of ‘Scotland’ as a modern state; in particular, Scotland’s boundaries along the lines we recognise today began to take shape now (apart from the later inclusion of the Northern Isles). For the next 230 years, until the death of Alexander III in 1286 (see Chapter 8), the throne of Scotland was occupied by a powerful royal dynasty which is called variously the ‘Canmore Dynasty’ or the ‘House of Dunkeld’. In comparison with preceding centuries, and with what was to come during the ‘Wars of Independence’, this was to be a period of considerable prosperity and relative peace.
Malcolm III, who reigned for thirty-five years (1058–93), has come down in history with a mixed reputation. Commentators have made much mock of his Gaelic nickname: ‘Canmore’ is from the Gaelic ceann mòr, meaning ‘Great Chief’, but it is frequently translated as ‘Big-head’. Nigel Tranter, in The Story of Scotland, called him ‘something of a boor, bloodthirsty and without statesmanlike qualities. His one delight was in raiding, pillage, slaughter.’ The historical records, however, are too scanty to justify such a sweeping judgement.
Malcolm’s chief preoccupation throughout his reign was the consolidation and extension of his kingdom of ‘Scotia’, or ‘Alba’. Thorfinn the Mighty, Earl of Orkney, died some time between 1057 and 1065 (it is, alas, impossible to be sure of the precise date), and with his death his widespread empire in the north, which was said in Orkneyinga Saga to have included nine earldoms on the mainland of Scotland, began to disintegrate. Malcolm helped the process by marrying Thorfinn’s widow, Ingibjörg; some sources say that Ingibjörg was Thorfinn’s daughter, not his widow, but no matter. Before her death, some time before 1069, Ingibjörg bore Malcolm two sons: Duncan (the future King Duncan II) and Donald (d.1085); more importantly, however, the marriage helped to neutralise or at least diminish the insistent pressure on Scotland from the north.
Malcolm’s main objective was to seize the perennially debatable lands of Northumbria and Cumbria. At this time there was no recognised border between the kingdoms of ‘Scotland’ and ‘England’; and once again the events in England were to provide an opportunity for an ambitious and energetic King of Scots. After the death in 1055 of Earl Siward of Northumbria, who had helped Malcolm gain a foothold in Scotland in 1054, the new earl was a Wessex warlord named Tostig (the half-brother of the future King Harold Godwinsson who would die at Hastings). During Tostig’s absence abroad in 1061, Malcolm launched a major raid into Northumbria. It was the first of no fewer than five incursions into the north of England which he was to make during his reign – none with lasting success, and the last, in 1093, at the cost of his life.
But Malcolm Canmore will always be overshadowed, in Scottish eyes at least, by the woman who became his second queen sometime between 1069 and 1071: Margaret, a princess of the old Saxon royal house, who would become Scotland’s only royal saint.
Queen Margaret, the Saint
At the summit of the citadel of Edinburgh Castle stands a tiny, simple building which is the oldest surviving structure in the castle: St Margaret’s Chapel. It was built in the 1130s or 1140s by Margaret’s youngest son, King David I (see Chapter 6), and dedicated to his mother, who had died in the castle in 1093. It began as a private oratory for the royal family; in the sixteenth century it passed out of use as a chapel and was converted into a gunpowder magazine. Its original purpose was rediscovered in 1845 and it was restored to its present condition. It is now a very popular venue for weddings and christenings: castle guides tell visitors, tongue in cheek, that it is the ideal place for a Scottish wedding, for it only holds twenty people and the bride’s father can have the reception in the telephone box on the way down!
The interior is as charming as the exterior is austere. The semi-circular chancel at the east end which housed the altar now has stained-glass windows depicting St Andrew and St Ninian. St Columba is represented, too, as is William Wallace in full battle array. But pride of place goes to St Margaret herself, flaxen-haired and beautiful, flanked by handmaidens at their sewing and holding an open book on her lap.
Margaret arrived in Scotland as a direct result of the Norman Conquest of 1066. She was of the English royal family which was swept aside by William of Normandy. Born in Hungary about the year 1047, she was a granddaughter of Edmund Ironside (half-brother of Edward the Confessor, r.1042–66), who had been killed resisting the conquest of England in 1016 by the Danish king Knút (Canute); she was the daughter of Edmund’s son Edward, who had married a Hungarian princess during his long exile in Hungary but died soon after the family’s return to England in 1057; and she was the sister of Prince Edgar (‘Edgar the Atheling’), whose claims to the throne at the death of the childless Edward the Confessor early in 1066 were passed over in favour of the warrior Harold Godwinsson.
After the Conquest, William the Conqueror treated Edgar and his family well, despite the fact that Edgar had been, rather optimistically, declared king-elect after Harold’s death at Hastings. But this cosy state of affairs did not last long, and in 1068, after an abortive rebellion in the north of England which he supported, Edgar tried to escape back to the greater safety of Hungary