‘In the name of the community of the realm of Scotland’: 1286–c. 1314

On 19 March 1286 tragedy befell Scotland: its king, Alexander III, died unexpectedly as the result of an accident at the age of forty-four. Remarkably, there seems to have been no immediate headlong rush for power; unlike the period of Alexander's own minority reign from 1249 to 1258, there was no overt struggle for regency between the foremost noble families of the kingdom. This may have been because there was no heir to the throne present in Scotland: control of the kingdom could not therefore be gained through possession of the monarch's person. Alexander's three children had all predeceased him: the eldest, Margaret, born in 1261, had been married to Eric II of Norway in 1281, but died, probably in childbirth, in 1283; the older son, Alexander, died at the age of twenty in 1284; and the younger son, David, had suffered a childhood death in 1281. Following Prince Alexander's death in 1284 the succession to the kingdom had therefore, perhaps controversially, been settled by entail upon the king's infant grand-daughter Margaret, the offspring of Princess Margaret and Eric II of Norway, failing the king's having any direct heirs. The document witnessing this agreement, bearing the seals of all thirteen earls and no fewer than twenty-four of the foremost barons of the kingdom, was dated 5 February 1284, only eight days after the death of the Prince Alexander: the issue of the succession was vital, and the king was obviously aiming to ensure as little conflict as possible in the event of his early death.

It appears that Alexander's second queen, Yolande de Dreux, whom he married in October 1285, was believed to be pregnant at the time of the king's death. Certainly, there is an indication that she was known to be pregnant by September 1286, in that a pact made that month by Robert Bruce (grandfather of the future king) and others in support of Richard de Burgh, Earl of Ulster, included a coincidental reference to ‘whoever’ would gain the throne ‘by reason of the blood’ of the late king. The immediate business of government in March/April 1286 was therefore to ensure the immediate political, military, administrative and economic stability of the kingdom, in support of either the infant Margaret or the king's posthumous child.

Across medieval Europe, the distinction between authority (auctoritas or dignitas) and power (potestas) was at the heart of the theoretical reflection on powers, most especially in the form of the division between ecclesiastical authority and temporal power, inherited from Pope Gelasius. An alternative analysis distinguished implicitly between the power and authority held by the prince, and various forms of delegated power: in practice, lords or their representatives exerted power over localities and/or populations, but their legitimacy rested on the authority of a distant prince. In the case of kings, the personal nature of kingship raised specific questions about the continuity of authority and the risks created by the king's absence, incapacity or death. The growing separation between the person of the king and the dignity of the Crown may have helped resolve this issue. In England, the Boulogne Agreement of 31 January 1308 is usually considered as the first textual evidence of the clear separation between the Crown and the person of the king. However, earlier texts had already enhanced the perennial nature of the royal dignitas.

In fact, there were many instances when authority of various ranks and forms was absent: through legal minority, vacancy or physical or mental incapacity; under duress (by captivity or exile); or through conscious choice due to a plurality of business commitments or priorities beyond the physical jurisdiction of the individual(s) in power. These absences were experienced in various ways, and prompted a variety of responses. We might, of course, identify common legal principles and customs which evolved over time to respond to such crises or interregna, and to guide the appointment and management of proxy authority in ruling dynasties and governments, national and trans-national institutions (such as characterized both the secular and regular churches), and thus communities small and large (from individual households, families and businesses through wider associations such as guilds and on to towns and city states). However, given the huge variety of experiences across the many kingdoms, lordships and institutions of medieval Europe which have been highlighted by recent collaborative surveys of similar themes – such as hereditary succession or the development of office-holding and representative assembly – the editors of this present volume chose, quite deliberately, to set no very fixed parameters in inviting contributions which reflected as wide a geographical, socio-political and methodological spectrum as possible.

It is perhaps inevitable that the public and personal piety of Scotland's thirteenth-century kings should appear unremarkable in contrast to that of the long-reigning Henry III of England and Louis IX of France. Henry's consuming investment at Westminster Abbey in the cult of his ancestor, Edward the Confessor, and, from 1247, the veneration at that house of a Holy Blood relic, were but the most outward signs of a deep personal faith wedded tightly to Plantagenet political ends. A number of recent studies have revealed in Henry a commitment to a varied and costly round of religious building as well as regular observances through masses, alms-giving and ritual commemoration. Many of these practices were continued by Henry's son: Edward I's rule can also be shown to reflect a strong personal as well as heavily politicised faith. Nonetheless, the reputations of both these English monarchs have struggled to compete with that of the ‘most Christian’ French king. Louis was a charismatic religious exemplar, canonised in 1297, but during his lifetime already praised throughout Europe for his charity, devotion to his royal predecessors at St Denis, veneration of both local and universal saints and their newly translated relics and, of course, his firm will actually to crusade.

Little wonder, then, that the successive Kings Alexander of Scotland seem, at best – to use a well-worn measure – largely ‘conventional’ in their religious politics and patronage as well as in their religiosity as individuals; or, at worst, they are really ‘unknowable’ as spiritual beings.

The research for this paper began with a simple premise: that it should be a relatively straight-forward task to assemble a survey of Scottish writers' increasingly abusive depictions of the English in fourteenth-century government records, diplomatic papers, propaganda and correspondence, as well as in historical annals and chronicles, verse, literature and song. It might also be assumed, given the generations of war between England and Scotland after 1296 – punctuated by major battles in 1297, 1298, 1314, 1318, 1332, 1333, 1346, 1388 and 1402 – that such Scottish portrayals of their most common enemy would also take on an increasingly heated ethnic tone and adopt a racialist discourse, deploying not merely a conventional canon of English atrocities, sacrilege and villains but graduating to juicy stereotypes, national characteristics and repeated slanders to strong effect. This would build, one might naturally presume, on the infamous Scottish medieval gibe (which seemingly has its origins in fourteenth-century France) that the English had tails. The received Scottish memory of singular incidents such as the sacking of Berwick in 1296, the execution of William Wallace in 1305 or the destruction of the Lothians in the ‘Burnt Candlemas’ of 1356, spring to mind as likely catalysts to such a perceived birth and growth of Scottish racial hatred of the English, passionately expressed in records and compositions, in the ‘long’ fourteenth century.

Were we, indeed, to find this anticipated treatment of their enemy in the extant Scottish chronicles, literary works and relevant records of the day it would be reasonable to conclude, too, that such representation simply reciprocates and fits closely with the historical pattern established for English depiction of the Scots in this century.

A recent volume of conference proceedings on north-east England in the later middle ages makes reference to March 1296, the month in which an English army crossed into Scotland and sacked Berwick-upon-Tweed, as marking the beginning of a ‘Three Hundred Years War’ between those two realms. Of course, like all such generalisations, it is somewhat wide of the mark – as historians of the reign of James VI of Scotland (1567–1603), when the dynamics of dynastic succession ensured that Anglo-Scottish relations were generally peaceful, might reasonably object. Others might cry caution in the face of any impression of an inevitable or uninterrupted road from the battle of Dunbar (1296) to Pinkie (1547), via Bannockburn (1314), Otterburn (1388) or Flodden (1513). However, recent scholarship has done much to confirm that the perception of a long, continuous and unrelieved conflict must have seemed very real, not just for successive English and Scottish kings and their magnates, but more especially for the people of the Anglo-Scottish borders; between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, the lives of successive generations of borderers – peasants, priests, monks, burgesses or lords – were fundamentally affected by full-scale, if intermittent, war, and persistent cross-border raiding.

Indeed, the Wars of Independence (or the Wars of the Scottish Succession), fought between 1296 and 1328, and 1332 and 1356 (when they became entangled with the opening exchanges of the Anglo-French wars), were undeniably formative of a tradition, an identity and a landscape of border defences, as well as a pedigree of written histories of hostility between England and Scotland.