INTRODUCTION: KINGS, MASCULINITY AND SIGILLOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE

IN A TREATISE CELEBRATING the illustrious rulers of ancient Britain the northern English historian Aelred of Rievaulx narrated the tale of an encounter between the Scottish king, Malcolm III (1057–93), and a would-be assassin. Informed of a plot to kill him, Aelred wrote, Malcolm staged a dramatic confrontation with the treacherous knight, where he fearlessly placed his life in the hands of the killer. The king demanded, however, that the knight promise to commit his abominable deed neither by resort to poison (for ‘who does not know that that is womanish?’), nor by stealth at night in the royal bedchamber – for that was the way of ‘adulteresses’ – but rather ‘like a man’, that is, in open combat, with drawn sword. The chronicler had him utter his challenge with the bold words ‘[d]o rather what becomes a soldier; act like a man; fight me while alone with me alone, so that your betrayal, which cannot be free of perfidy, will at least be free of disgrace’. Aelred's story is almost certainly fictitious, but it offers historians valuable insight into twelfth-century understandings of idealised manhood, and a useful basis from which to explore the ways in which the high medieval kings of Scots drew on contemporary British and European mores in their efforts to fashion for themselves widely accepted images of masculine authority.

In the Europe of Aelred's day the figure of the king occupied a position at the apex of several different hierarchies and a central place in a host of imagined communities. He was at once the source of all political authority in his realm, more powerful than even the greatest of his magnates; the fount of all justice in the kingdom, yet generous with his mercy; the divinely appointed protector of his clerical subjects, from the humblest clerk to the most exalted prelate. He was also husband to his queen; father to his royal children and more generally to all his people; the truest of knights; the most devout of God's servants.