Scotland: The Story of a Nation. Magnus Magnusson
David was a most excellent sovereign … He founded bishoprics, and built and endowed many monasteries, which he vested with large grants of lands out of the patrimony of the kings … He had many furious wars with England, and made dreadful incursions into the neighbouring provinces, which were the more easy that the country of England was then disunited by civil war.
TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER IV
The noble remains of four magnificent abbeys punctuate the landscape of the Borders: four great monastic foundations which survive today only as monastic monuments, piercing reminders of the transience of greatness and power. They were all founded by one King of Scots – King David I – and all brought to ruin by the punitive onslaught on the Borders, known as the ‘Rough Wooing’, ordered by King Henry VIII of England in the 1540s (see Chapter 19).
Kelso Abbey is now just a stump – but what an elegant stump it is. Only the west end of the abbey church survives, with its Galilee porch islanded by traffic in the middle of the town. It was founded by King David in 1128 for the Tironensian order of monks (reformed Benedictines) from Tiron, near Chartres, who had originally been settled in Selkirk but who wanted to be closer to the formidable royal castle of Roxburgh on the other side of the Tweed. Kelso became one of the country’s wealthiest religious houses, as well as being one of the most spectacular achievements of Romanesque architecture in Scotland. It was where the young King James III was crowned King of Scots in 1460, following the untimely death of his father, James II, at the siege of Roxburgh when a cannon burst during a ceremonial firing (see Chapter 15).
Melrose Abbey, the largest and, some would say, the finest of the four, was founded under the patronage of King David by Cistercian monks from Yorkshire in 1136. Even in ruin it is strikingly handsome, and it is still of great importance to the local economy of Melrose – it is one of the most popular visitor attractions in Scotland.
Jedburgh was founded as a priory under the patronage of King David in 1138 and raised to the status of abbey in 1154. It is a graceful and almost entire ruin of an Augustinian abbey, sitting high and proud on a ridge above its associated monastic and domestic buildings. In the course of its history it suffered the usual ransackings due to its strategic position at one of the main gateways to Scotland. It was rebuilt on several occasions, but finally succumbed to the English hammer during the ‘Rough Wooing’ and was later suppressed by the Scottish Reformers in 1559. It is now served by a splendid new Visitor Centre which explains and illuminates its story with exemplary clarity.
Finally there is Dryburgh Abbey, perhaps the most hauntingly exquisite of the four. It stands in a beautiful sylvan setting on a horseshoe bend of the River Tweed, with fine parklands sweeping down to the river. It was established in 1150, towards the end of King David’s reign. Because of its nearness to the border it, too, was severely damaged on several occasions, and never recovered from the final indignities of the ‘Rough Wooing’. It was in one of the chapels of the ruined north transept that Sir Walter Scott was buried in September 1832 (see Chapter 29).
With these four great foundations, and many others besides, so resonant with the echoes of the nation’s history, King David I created the fabric of the great period of medieval civilisation which Scotland was to enjoy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
David the king
David was the most ‘English’ of the three Canmore brother kings, and perhaps the luckiest. He was an attractive person in every sense, well-favoured physically and good-natured; he had spent much of his youth in England, where he was groomed as a Norman knight and ‘polished from his boyhood by his intercourse and friendship with us’, as an English chronicler put it. His sister’s marriage to Henry I of England in 1100 added to his social standing as a prince who, from 1107, was viceroy of the southern half of Scotland. In 1114 he married a wealthy forty-year-old widow, Maud de Senlis, Countess of Northampton and a ward of the king; she was also the daughter and heiress of Waltheof, the Earl of Huntingdon. This brought David the earldom of Northampton and the earldom (‘Honour’) of Huntingdon, with manors in eleven counties across the Midlands of England, making him one of the greatest barons in the country. Such was the premier nobleman of Norman England who turned into one of the greatest kings of medieval Scotland.
When David succeeded his brother on the throne in 1124 he brought with him to Scotland many of his friends from England who were to help him reshape the organisation and administration of Scotland, both civil and ecclesiastical, and become its new feudal aristocracy. We now meet for the first time the families who were to mould Scotland’s future, powerful names like the Bruces, the Balliols and the Stewarts (David’s first ‘Steward’ in Scotland was Walter Fitzalan, originally from Brittany, whose father had acquired lands in Norfolk and Shropshire). To these families David gave huge grants of land to establish their authority: to the Bruces he gave the vast lands of Annandale around the river Annan, which runs from the southern uplands to the Solway Firth; the hereditary ‘Stewards’ were given land which corresponds to modern Renfrewshire.
David’s ecclesiastical foundations were the most spectacular of his reforms. In addition to the four great Border abbeys, he converted the wooden church of Drumselch Forest outside Edinburgh into the Abbey of Holyrood; he promoted the Benedictine priory of Dunfermline to the rank of an abbey, in honour of his mother Queen Margaret; he founded Newbattle on the Esk and St Mary of Cambuskenneth on the Forth. To all the churches and monasteries he founded he gave extensive estates and extravagant benefactions. So generous was he with the royal lands and revenues that he was later to be called ‘a sair sanct [sore saint] for the crown’ – that is to say, his pious activities cost the crown dear.
But there was prudence as well as religious devotion involved. Abbeys were good for the national economy. The Cistercians were the international wool merchants of their time, for instance; and David’s monks engaged in all kinds of business enterprises, in farming, fishing, forestry, coal-working and salt-mining. The fledgling village of Kelso consisted almost entirely of people employed by the monks.
On top of this, David was assiduous in promoting commerce through the granting of royal charters to burghs from which he could collect regular revenues, and many of the towns and cities in today’s Scotland date their origin or their first charters to David’s reign. The first royal burghs, at Berwick-upon-Tweed and Roxburgh, were fortified with castles: Berwick Castle, standing high above the left bank of the Tweed, was to play a critically important role in Scottish history for centuries; Roxburgh Castle, sited between the Tweed and the Teviot, was to become the strongest bastion anywhere in the border lands. These developments may be seen as the beginning of a fortified ‘border’.
All these important innovations were designed to give cohesion and stability to the realm, held together by a feudal system looser than its English model. Norman castles provided royal and baronial authority and security for the king’s officers and tax-gatherers. His personal chaplains – well-educated priests all – formed the basis of an administrative bureaucracy, headed by a chancellor (for legal advice) and a chamberlain (for financial control). King David brought Scotland, as a kingdom, into the medieval European mainstream.
Steve Boardman, lecturer in Scottish History at Edinburgh University, says:
David is regarded as a pivotal figure in the development of Scotland and the Scottish kingship, because it was during his reign that so many novel and important features begin to develop and all the attributes of a medieval kingdom appear in Scotland. He was a very international figure in terms of Scottish kingship, part of the great cosmopolitan world which embraced Norman Europe. He had first-hand experience of Norman military techniques and tactics. He was part of the fashionable scene in terms of wider developments in Europe. Through David the Scottish kingdom began to develop along the same path as other European kingdoms, along similar lines to the accepted norms in France and England; so, in that sense, his kingship was crucial and has to be seen as extremely important.
Ted Cowan urges caution in