Scotland: The Story of a Nation. Magnus Magnusson
I think David masterminded, quite brilliantly, a combination of what he wanted from the Norman world and what he perceived as being desirable in the old Celtic world.
But this question of feudalism’ is a highly problematical area. Many historians are no longer sure that there was any such thing as feudalism. If it is to he understood at all, it is best thought of simply as a system of landholding, whereby all land is held of the king; the king is the absolute proprietor of all land in the country. This is interesting, because in Celtic law all land was held communally by the clan. There were no absolute proprietors in the Celtic world. So there was a potential conflict there, but it is largely in the way in which landholding is described: the two systems could be accommodated quite well. And David was intelligent enough, and opportunistic enough, to achieve it.
It all suggests a sunshine reign of success and untroubled prosperity. There were rebellions in the Celtic north-east in 1130 and again in 1134, but with southern help David was able to suppress them both and put his own men in place there. At home (which by now, for a King of Scots, meant Edinburgh) David’s wife Maud (who died in 1130) provided him with three children. The only one to reach adulthood, however, was Henry (c.1114–52), the heir apparent, who became Earl of Northumberland and Northampton. He was a dashing young man of whom David was manifestly very proud. But not everything was to go David’s way.
The Battle of the Standard (Northallerton, 1138)
At the side of the A167 between Northallerton and Darlington, in North Yorkshire, stands a plain stone obelisk, its plinth marked with the simple legend: ‘Battle of the Standard: AD 1138’. It also bears a metal shield with a stylised picture of a four-wheeled cart with a ship’s mast festooned with banners. The monument marks the site of the most spectacular military event in David’s long reign – the crushing defeat of a marauding Scottish army on a stretch of rolling moorland some three miles north of Northallerton on 22 August 1138.
The moorland has long been cultivated for agriculture, but the battle-site is easy to make out. Behind and in line with the monument is a rise in the ground on which sit the buildings of a farm called Standard Hill Farm; this was where the English army took up position around the curious ‘standard’ which gave the battle its popular name. To the left (i.e. the north) the ground dips and rises again towards another farm (also called Standard Hill Farm), which was where the Scottish force was deployed.
What was the battle about? England at that time was in the grip of a civil war following the death of Henry I in 1135. Henry’s daughter Matilda, who was David I’s niece, had the most obvious claim to the vacant throne and had been nominated by the late king as his heir. But another claimant stepped in – the king’s nephew, Stephen of Blois, a grandson of William the Conqueror and husband of another of David I’s nieces. Stephen had sworn fealty to Matilda (as had David I as a baron in England), but no sooner was Henry I dead than Stephen seized the throne for himself. It was to lead to nineteen years of bitter conflict within England; but its chief significance for Scotland was that it gave David I an opportunity to try to push Scotland’s boundaries southwards. Claiming that he was supporting Matilda, he moved south in force and seized the English fortresses of Newcastle and Carlisle.
This was his great chance, it seemed, to recover the ‘lost provinces’. From all corners of his kingdom he mustered a huge army (twenty-five thousand strong, according to English chroniclers, but this is now considered a substantial over-estimate) and set off in July 1138 towards York, harrying and pillaging on the way. Stephen had his hands full with a baronial uprising near Bristol, and the defence of the north fell to Thurstan, the ageing but militant Archbishop of York. Thurstan called for a ‘holy crusade’ to repel the Scottish invaders; from every pulpit in the county the call went out for able-bodied volunteers.
The English army – much smaller than the Scottish force – mustered at York and marched north to Thirsk; on Sunday, 21 August King David crossed the River Tees from Durham into Yorkshire. The English army thereupon marched north to stop his advance, and drew up in battle order early next morning just north of Northallerton. They were a motley collection of knights, peasants and priests, led by prelates; and because the resistance was Church-inspired, the English monastic chroniclers of the time took particular interest in what happened. Prior Richard of Hexham, writing in 1154, mirrored the propaganda war which preceded the encounter:
The king [David] then passing by Durham … and according to his usual practice, caused the towns and churches which had previously escaped uninjured to be dismantled, plundered and burnt. Crossing the Tees, he commenced a similar career of violence. But God’s mercy, being moved by the tears of innumerable widows, orphans, and victims, no longer permitted such wickedness to remain unchastised.
The rallying-point of the English army was a cart on which had been erected a ship’s mast topped by a cross. From the pole hung a silver pyx containing the consecrated host, with the sacred banners of St Peter of York, St Cuthbert of Durham, St John of Beverley and St Wilfred of Ripon.
The Scots army presented a formidable array. In the centre were the lightly-armoured Pictish Galwegians from Galloway (known as Gallgaels), spoiling for a fight; on the left flank David’s eldest son Henry led a force of mounted knights and well-equipped men-at-arms from the Borders and Cumbria; the Highland brigades were on the right flank, and King David himself commanded a reserve comprising the men of Moray and the eastern shires in the rear.
The battle was fought with tremendous heroism, and at terrible cost. The Gallgaels, dashing forward in a furious charge with their war-cry of ‘Albanaich!’, fell in droves under a storm of English arrows, but charged again and again at the English van. As the impetus of the reckless Gallgael attack faltered, Prince Henry charged the English centre with his mounted knights, but found himself isolated and extricated himself only with great difficulty. The Scottish attack stalled, and King David was pragmatic enough to realise that there could be no victory that day. Covered by the mounted reserve, the Scottish troops withdrew from the field. An old tree-lined lane just to the south of the English position, known as ‘Scotpit Lane’ (now disused and barred), is named after the burial pits into which some of the Scottish dead were thrown.
Surprisingly, after such a defeat in the field, David was able to salvage a great deal from this reverse. Neither Stephen nor the Empress Matilda was in any position to follow up the English victory. By the Treaty of Durham, which was signed in 1139, Stephen granted Northumberland to David’s son, Earl Henry of Huntingdon, and to David I he granted Cumberland (with Carlisle) as far as the Ribble. It opened up the possibility, at least, that the Scottish frontier would run on the line of the Tees rather than the Tweed – which was precisely what David had hoped to achieve. Ten years later, in 1149, Matilda’s son Henry of Anjou (subsequently Henry II of England) swore that should he become king, he would give David all the land between the Tweed and the Tees, and Cumberland on the west. But by the time Henry of Anjou became Henry II in 1154 he had little compunction about ignoring this promise to make the northern counties of England a part of Scotland for ever.
The Battle of the Standard left another and more enduring legacy. The invasion brought out all the deep-rooted English prejudices against the Picts and the Scots as murderous barbarians, which Walter Scott reflected so faithfully in his Tales of a Grandfather. An English chronicler, Henry of Huntingdon, wrote of David’s troops:
They cleft open pregnant women, and took out the unborn babe; they tossed children upon the spear-points, and beheaded priests upon the altars … There was the screaming of women, the wailing of old men; groans of the dying, despair of the living.
HISTORIA ANGLORUM
What seems to have shocked the English was the fact that one of ‘their own’, a flower of Norman chivalry like David, should have unleashed such a savage horde to ravage a civilised kingdom. According to the English version, one of David’s own Norman-English knights, Robert de Brus (the ancestor of the future King Robert Bruce), whom he had made Lord of Annandale, was so appalled by the Scots’ brutality that he went over to the English camp; another of his new