980-1093: A Note on the British Margins

Regular readers will have noted that we have hardly referred to the areas outside England. There is good reason for this.The prosperity of the British Isles is concentrated in Southern Britain. England has reached a higher level of state formation at each stage in our story than its margins and it became much more linked to continental civilisation as Rome restored its moral authority. It is not a matter of disrespect but simply a recognition that the warlords and small kingdoms of the rest of Britain are still lagging developmentally behind even the rough and ready English polity and that descriptions of their infighting until the eleventh century would be about as instructive as that of African kingdoms only minimally connected to the global system in the Middle Ages.

However, Scotland has by this time become a much more developed Kingdom under Malcolm II (1005-34) and Duncan I (1034-1040) than hitherto but even Malcolm is forced to acknowledge the overlordship of Cnut of England, Norway and Denmark in 1031 without a fight. King of Scotland gives us the wrong image because what is now Scotland was carved up between multiple small kingdoms (not only Scotland but Strathclyde, Moray and the Norse-Gael 'kingdoms' of the North West as well as English eorldoms). This was not a very different situation from Ireland under Brian Boruma or Wales before the brief flowering of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn.

Famously (thanks to Shakespeare), Mac Bethad mac Findlaich murdered Duncan in 1040 and made himself King but there is no romance in this - it is just the standard competitive thuggery of petty kings (much worse was happening in England as we shall see in the next posting). 'Macbeth' is interesting, however, for his introduction of feudalism to Scotland under the influence of Norman exiles and the introduction of feudalism may have had asignificant role in ensuring the resilience of the Scottish State. Mac Bethad found himself embroiled in the struggles for power in England and an English invasion in 1054 resulted indirectly in the Kingship of Malcolm III (1058-1093) since the English appear to have restored Malcolm, son of the murdered Duncan I, to the Kingship of Strathclyde in that year while Mac Bethad's stepson Lulach lasted barely a year as King of Scotland.

Understandably, the successful Norman invasion of England and the brutal conquest of the North of England by the Normans changed the balance of power in Britain considerably. Although Scotland remained an independent entity for the vast bulk of subsequent history (until the Union in 1707), it often had to fight for that independence. The outcome was never certain. Both Wales and Ireland, on the other hand, moved steadily from near-anarchy to Anglo-Norman domination over the centuries, largely missing out (except for very brief experiments by strong men) on the national state option. We might say that Scotland got into the state formation business in the nick of time even if, in the end (or is it the end?), it had to 'sell out' (literally) to the more material business of satisfying its trading interests as the deliberate choice of its own elite in a form of quasi-submission to the Crown.

This Scottish decision, freely made by those who purported to be the leaders of its nationhood, could be seen as a dry run for the current predicament of the United Kingdom in its relationship to the larger if ramshackle European Empire - after all, what invasion could not achieve, elite greed for gold  might deliver. As for the Celtic fringe, its binding to England in a dynastically driven Union only started to unravel seriously within the last hundred years, a process that is still unfolding as we write. In the end, all that may be left will be England and its satellites, Northern Ireland, Gibraltar, the Falklands and a few tiny Crown Colonies - oddities within the new Unholy Roman Empire over the Channel. As the English elite transfers its sovereignty to a larger empire, the 'Celtic fringe' becomes an important factor in shifting the democratic' balance against popular English desire for the same sort of sovereign independence that the 'Celts' have apparently made their 'raison d'etre'. For the Celtic elites, submitting to the European Empire is almost an act of defiance against past and present submission to the British Empire while the poor bloody English, ruled by foreign imperial masters since 1066, and only getting a quasi-democratic State through perpetual struggle over some 350 years, find themselves shunted willy-nilly into the next Empire that comes along. The English may yet end up being the last people on earth to be liberated from any Empire! To the Celts, this is poetic justice. To the English, perhaps the final injustice.

Meanwhile, William the Conqueror was able to turn his attention to Scotland in 1072. Malcolm made obeisance and gave his son Duncan up as a hostage. When the Conqueror's successor, William Rufus, was distracted by a civil war in Normandy, Malcolm tried his luck with an invasion of England in 1091. He was faced with an Anglo-Norman army that was so formidable that he came to his senses and recognised Rufus as overlord, thanks to the mediation of Edgar Atheling and Robert Curthose. However, Malcolm and Rufus quarrelled over property rights and war broke out again. Malcolm was killed in 1093 in an Anglo-Norman ambush. Nevertheless, although defeated, Malcolm can be reasonably said to be Rufus' equal or near-equal to all intents and purposes. Whatever the balance of power, it is true that, by the end of Malcolm's reign, Scotland was holding its own as a viable State. This was not quite the case in Wales and Ireland.

Wales was no different from Scotland a century or so earlier, or indeed England before and even after Offa, in being, normally, a quasi-anarchy of small principalities. Harold Godwinson waged a campaign against Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, King of Gwyneth and Powys since 1039, in 1056, one year after Gruffydd had become King of Wales, following the same trajectory as Brian Boruma and indeed Offa in England. In all these cases, a strong man made himself lord over a whole people but the whole enterprise then collapsed into its former state on his death (in this case, in 1063). The Danish Empire of Cnut (as we shall see) similarly fell apart on his death in 1035. In Gruffydd's case, the English clearly saw his emergence as a potential threat and mounted a further invasion in 1063 after an surprise attack on his court the year before. Gruffydd was forced to hide out in Snowdonia and was murdered by some of his own men in what appears to have been a vendetta. Wales seems to have presented no direct threat to the Anglo-Normans by the time of their arrival on the scene and was relatively easily contained.

In Ireland, the Danish presence around the city that they founded at Dublin (analogous to the trading centre of York or Jorvik in Northern England), alongside the unifying campaigns of King Brian Boruma, helped to kick start the process of state formation in the second island of the British Isles even if it was mostly to prove abortive. By the final quarter of the century, the Danish presence is fully Christianised and mostly committed to peaceful trading so what we have is not the struggle we saw in England between rival ethnic communities. Southern British Kings, both English and Danish, had access to more significant resources in their struggle to own a much more valuable asset than Ireland. Brian Boruma represented only the first stage in Ireland's potential for statehood through his steady, often bloody, slow but still only partial unification of the country as a proto-polity. It is a chaotic business - Boruma dies at the great battle of Clontarf (1014) that is supposed (wrongly) in legend to have defeated Danish raiders and 'saved' Ireland. Ireland is more conceptually united after than before his death but it cannot be called by any stretch of the imagination a coherent well administered state and the unification process stalls as the English equivalent once did after Offa.