1093-1165: Scotland & the English Question

Back to Scotland. Malcolm III was succeeded by Donald Bane (1093-1097), his brother. Malcom's wife, later to be Saint Margaret (canonised 1250), died that same year. Donald Bane was deposed and replaced, after an intervention from William II of England, with Edgar (1097-1107), Malcolm III's son. This is interesting because this made the Scottish monarchy a half-English dynasty through Margaret, a Princess of Wessex. The Norman monarchy to the South seemed to have no difficulty in supporting the claims of a prince from the line of Wessex when it suited it.

As we will see, the ties between royal families were often close even as they were competing. There was more in common between the line of the House of Wessex, the Kings of Scotland and the Norman Kings of England than any of these had with their own populations. These were family businesses treating their subjects as units of taxation and labour in what we would recognise today as 'healthy business competition', albeit that people got killed in a way unacceptable today. An analogy with modern organised crime is probably closer.

Edgar is succeeded by his brother Alexander I (1107-1124). His reign is only noted here for the murder on Eglisay in Orkney of Magnus (later Saint Magnus), Earl of Orkney. The story is interesting because Magnus is presented as an exemplar of piety and gentleness which the Norwegians who dominated the far North West of Britain considered cowardice. He was actually murdered in a fit of frustration about his co-rule with his brother, Haakon. The full story is not relevant. The creation of a gentle Christian hero who fell foul of Viking mores is what is going to be important here because it shows us how Christianity and Kingship were constantly being merged at the frontiers of European society in order to create more stable societies based on the rule of dynastic and church law.

A leader now had to be not only strong but 'good' and a strong king who was not 'good' (meaning accepting of Roman Catholic ideology) was implicitly worse than a weak leader who was 'good' in the rhetorical world of medieval culture. The reality, of course, was that strength had priority but a strong 'bad' king (as defined by the clerics) would be damaged in the eyes of posterity. That was no idle threat in a culture still mired in pagan notions of honour. The Church could dishonour you after your death if you did not play ball with the people who wrote the history and this is what the Church always did with the ending of bardic courtly literature. The power of the Church to dictate the perceptions of kings will become clearer in the Becket story. Eventually, Christian ideology and the culture of honour would merge in chivalric literature in which tamed aristocratic behaviour and 'goodness' became as one in an ideal that still lingers on in modern Western notions of appropriate sexuality.

Alexander was succeeded by David I (1124-1153) who was instrumental in introducing Anglo-Norman culture and feudalism into Scotland during the so-called 'Davidian Revolution'. This transformation strengthened Scotland as a potential military power. It is at this point that English and Scottish history become interwined so that it will be hard to speak of one without the other. The Normanisation of Scotland is one with the Orkney story told above - a process of creating a working ideology (a process happening all over Europe and cross-connected to the aggression of the Crusades) for a new class of aristocrats in transition from pure predation to a sense of their own worth as agents of the divine.

This ideologisation and justification of predation through its moderation by faith-based intellectuals who offer administrative benefits is pretty standard fare in the human story. The British Empire, primarily a trading and predatory operation at its start, went through the same process in the nineteenth century resulting in the pompous aristocratic Tory imperialism of Curzon which presaged the destruction of that which it claimed to preserve. The Divine Right of Kings would be a similar high point for feudalism leading to its destruction in turn in a slew of revolutions but this is half a millenium in the future. History tends to speed up with modernisation.

The Scots, now with the cultural technology to be effective organisers under a strong warlord and adopting a suitable ideology to be called 'civilised', start to become imperial predators exploiting any sign of English weakness. There was an attempted invasion in 1135 as soon as Henry I died and another in 1138 which led to the Scots' defeat at the Battle of the Standard. David's persistence paid off with the cession of Northumbria to Scotland in 1149. However, the Scots did not find it easy to stand up to a unified England under a strong King such as Henry II. Henry II recaptured Northumbria in 1157 during the reign of David's successor, Malcolm IV (1153-1165), only twenty-four when he died.

What is happening here is a political call-and response that will continue through the Middle Ages. All things being equal, England is always stronger than Scotland but, when England is weak, it is only a matter of time before the Scottish Kings try to exploit the situation. It is also only a matter of time before the English Kings are going to feel it necessary to use their superior strength to bring Scotland under English suzerainty. This pattern of threat and response (where the English are not necessarily strong enough actually to crush Scotland any more than Scotland is strong enough to do more than harry the north) continues throughout British history until the Union of 1707 and even after insofar as the Jacobite Rebellion can be seen as part of the same pattern.

It may not have ended yet since the basic truths remain in force even as Scotland moves to independence. England is stronger than Scotland but when England weakens, the Scots take advantage of that weakness - and yet the English can never truly control Scotland. It is like a dysfunctional marriage whose history can be traced even further back into the mists of Anglo-Saxon and Roman tension between the prosperous South and the barbarian North with the Borders and Northumbria the play thing of whoever happens to have the whip hand that year. Only the British Empire, in which the Scots found themselves with a lucrative minority stake, permitted a viable peace between the two major cultural centres of Great Britain. The third centre of power, weaker than both Scotland and England, that is, Ireland, will emerge as an issue for the English soon enough.

Perhaps Scotland will have something to fear (economically) from a resurgent England that chooses on June 23rd to remove its dying Empire from the state-planned integration into the ramshackle European Imperium. The interests of England may always be sacrificiable to the illusion of empire in the long run. Perhaps the ideology of dynastic feudalism and 'romanitas' lives on in the plan to make the country a prosperous province of something larger. We are probably and in practice being led by the belief of the British State that a safe transition from one imperial state to another may be the only way to hold the island (the 'family business') together through acquisition and merger though the business analogy would suggest that the acquired company won't exist for long afterwards. Another view, of course, might be to ensure that England remained strong in its own right and left Scotland (and Ireland) to pursue their own devices happy in their independence. So a great deal is at stake on June 23rd. The issue, as at the time of writing, remains uncertain.

1016-1035: The Reign of King Cnut

If ever there was a gangster-type in early medieval English history, it was Eadric Streona, Ealdorman of Mercia, hit man and enforcer for Ethelred the Poorly Advised and a man who was at the centre of every bit of rumness going on as Danes and Anglo-Saxons slugged it out for control of the Kingdom. In 1015, he had betrayed his own father-in-law Ethelred and switched sides to Cnut, then back to Edmund Ironside, only to walk away from the decisive battle at Assandun, probably in a deliberate act of treachery. He may have been implicated in Edmund's murder. It is a sign of Cnut's consummate ruthlessness and good judgment that one of his most decisive early acts was to kill Eadric and three other allied nobles somewhat ostentatiously at Christmas 1017 for 'treachery' to his own liege lord (Edmund). Eadric is replaced, however, not with a Dane but with a loyal Anglo-Saxon, Leofric - an approach very different to that we will see from the Normans.

We have already reviewed the way the Church became a useful tool for the King and the King for the Church in creating reconciliation between peoples whose mutual hatred had probably reached a pitch of frenzy and fear by the time of Cnut's accession. We should equally be aware of Cnut's determination to restore a proper relationship between Crown and subjects which was one of submission, sanctified by the Church, regardless of ethnic origins.

The ethnic blindness of the State as a core (later 'liberalised') value represents the basic disinterest of Crown power in the petty enthusiasms of its subjects, given the need for order to run a family business profitably. It is an attitude that will compete with democratic racism at the height of the British Empire but find its fulfilment again in the liberalism of the modern British State. Intellectual justifications for anti-ethnicism in modern liberal society may be less decisive in the practice than the blunt realities of maintaining good order under 'auctoritas', an attitude that derives in turn from the techniques for the maintenance of power linked to 'romanitas' for which the Church was still the prime vector of ideas.

Already King by right of conquest, Cnut becomes King formally with his acceptance by an Assembly at Oxford where he promised to obey the laws of Edgar the Peacable, essentially to be a King working within primarily Anglo-Saxon custom and law. By 1028, he is not only King of England (sub-divided into Four Kingdoms which are really viceroyalties in 1017) and of Denmark (from 1019) but of Norway. This latter brings overlordship of the Northern Viking sea-going community (Orkney, Shetland, the Hebrides, the Isle of Man and Greenland). In 1031, Cnut travelled to Scotland (by this point invasions are no longer required) and forced Malcolm I of Scotland to acknowledge his overlordship.

By this time, Cnut could rightly be called an Emperor. The period is now looked on as a valuable nearly two decades of peace and prosperity for England, giving it perhaps a taste for ordered submission to Kings and Empires. This is not to say that Cnut is not anything other than a plunderer like all conquering Kings but only that, unlike the later Normans, he is happy to share the opportunities with the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy for the sake of good order. By 1025, although it was illegal to sell Anglo-Saxons even slaves overseas, it was widely rumoured that Cnut's sister was running a very profitable human trafficking operation exporting English girls to Scandinavia for sex and domestic servitude. Whether true or not (there are reasons to be cautious), the very fact of the rumour suggests awareness of this aspect of conquest as plunder which is, after all, the very basis of monarchy despite all the constraining religious gloss and romantic sentiment put upon it.

955-979: An Interlude of Three Kings

The next quarter century can be disposed of quite quickly as an interlude of Anglo-Saxon complacency between periods of Danish threat under three successive kings - the unpopular Eadwig the All-Fair (955-959), nephew of Edred, Edgar the Peaceable (959-975) and his ill-fated 13 year old son, Edward the Martyr (975-979).

Eadwig's reign is marked by a rebellion by his brother Edgar who is proclaimed King of Mercia in 957 (effectively ruling all England north of the Thames) before he acquires the throne in 959 on the death of his brother. Edgar unites the Kingdom. It is his reign that sees the high point of Church-State relations that we discussed in the previous posting in which Archbishop Dunstan, having engaged in a dynamic process of monastic reform, used his religious authority to buttress the authority of the King as 'Emperor of Britain' in 973.

Edgar's death in 973 placed the Kingdom in a very vulnerable position. Edward the Martyr was murdered at Corfe Castle and became revered as a martyr but his death handed the throne to the notorious Ethelred II the Unready. Within a year, the Danish raids had begun again.

924-955: Athelstan, Edmund I and Edred

The next quarter century sees three Kings of Wessex - Athelstan (924-939), son of Edward the Elder, Edmund I (939-946), half-brother to Athelstan and Edred (946-955), his brother. The Welsh, Scottish and Danish sub-kings' oaths of allegiance to Edward the Elder were renewed in 926, indicating that England was now well established as the overlord of Great Britain. It is already getting close to the imperial multicultural model that is central to the later United Kingdom.

In the following year, England's northern frontier is established at the River Tees with direct rule by the English King over the Danes of York. Clearly the sub-kings are not entirely happy with the overlordship arrangements. Two subordinated kingdoms (the Scots and Strathclyde), directly invaded by the English, combined with the Danes who had founded Dublin to challenge Athelstan only to be defeated at the important battle of Brunanburh in 937.

Overlordship is converting steadily into effective control of the island by the English. There is a Danish rebellion in Mercia and Northumbria in 945 when Edmund works with rather than against the Scots. Edmund, however, is murdered by an outlaw, Leofa, in own hall (Pucklechurch, Gloucerstershire) indicating that this remains a rough and ready and, in some respects, barely civilised society.

Edred continues to be troubled by the Danes. York fell to Eric Bloodaxe in 947. Bloodaxe makes himself King of York before being driven out in 848. Bloodaxe's successor, Anlaf Sihtricson, is then ousted by Bloodaxe in 952. Edred's response is to invade York and Northumbria, driving Bloodaxe out in 954 towards the Solway Forth. Bloodaxe is ambushed and killed in the Stainmore Pass in the Pennines. It is probably from this date that we can start to say that England is unified within the frontiers that we broadly know today.

797-834: Avoiding the Mistakes of the British

In the last posting we saw the arrival of the 'Heathen Men' (the Vikings) in raids on Lindisfarne, Jarrow and Iona in the mid-790s. We have classed these raiders, like the Saxons of the 360s and later, as a form of hungry organised crime. The Roman Empire had been able to hold the Saxons at bay for a while because it was a unified and relatively efficient structure that could command the necessary resources. Britain only became England because the Romans left and because what remained was a set of petty Kingdoms quarrelling with themselves as much as seeking to resist interlopers. We recall that the English invasion started in earnest when the nearest thing to a British 'bretwalda' [Vortigern] invited one set of invaders [the Saxons] in to deal with another [the Picts]. So, before looking at the progress of the Viking raids and how Wessex managed to avert the fate of Vortigern's Britain, we have to look at just how divided and so potentially vulnerable the Anglo-Saxons were to this new incursion, an incursion that might be regarded as a form of poetic justice from the point of view of the Cymry.

At the opening of the period, the dominant petty state is still Mercia. Perhaps Mercia (as we have suggested) could have become strong enough to be the 'Wessex' of the later period. While the Vikings were threatening the North, Mercian ambitions were largely directed at rival Kingdoms. Kent, for example, was laid waste by Cenwulf of Mercia in 798 when it attempted to recover its independence. The Kentish King Eadbert was taken to Mercia, blinded and had his hands cut off. The Kingdom was not made into a tributary but was effectively destroyed, with Cenwulf's brother, Cuthred, acting as Governor (though titled King of Kent). Anglo-Saxon campaigning (noting the laying waste of Cornwall by Egbert of Wessex in 815) and violent court politics continues but without a final resolution until Egbert of Wessex appears. When Cenwulf of Mercia dies in 821 and is succeeded by Ceolwulf, it seems almost normal for Cenwulf's seven year old son to be murdered. Ceolwulf is deposed two years later and succeeded by Beornwulf and so on and so forth.

The two great players by the mid-820s are the chaotic Mercia and the more disciplined Wessex. They eventually came to blows at the Battle of Ellandun (825) in Wiltshire. Egbert of Wessex defeated the Mercians, gaining overlordship over the minor Kingdoms of Kent, Sussex and Essex. Beornwulf is was killed that year by the East Anglians, the fourth of the small South Eastern Kingdoms, but the main change is that Kent, Sussex and Essex are now to be ruled over directly by the Kings of the West Saxons. This unites all Southern England under one dynastic house capable of undertaking some resistance to the Vikings who have not yet emerged as a major force in Southern Britain.

In 827, the possibility of a unified approach is enhanced by Egbert of Wessex's conquest of Mercia, thoroughly weakened by another round of dynastic blood-letting. Egbert of Wessex is now the eighth King or 'bretwalda' to control all England south of the Humber. The early bretwaldas were simply the dominant minor kings of their day (Aelle of Sussex, Ceawlin of a much smaller Wessex, Aethenbryht of Kent, Redwald of East Anglia) but this is the first serious unification of the majority of the English since the age of the Northumbrian Kings Edwin, Oswald and Oswy. Not even Offa had achieved so much.

An acquisition of power in Early English history is never simple or complete. The Mercians make a brief come-back in 830 but the successes of Egbert of Wessex mean that, when the Danes do arrive in force in 835/836, we have one centre of power that can 'roll with the punches' and command greater resources, backed by the power of a Church with a clear interest in defeating the 'heathens' if they cannot be converted. The more divided (internally and externally) Mercian world would be unlikely to be able to do this so the rise of Wessex does seem to presage the survival of England - a territory that might otherwise now be speaking a version of Danish. A severely weakened Northumbria and the smaller Southern Kingdoms would never have been able to command the necessary resources in themselves. The question is simply whether Wessex was internally stable enough and administratively competent enough not only to do what Ambrosius Aurelianus is said to have done to check the Saxon raids after Vortigern but to have sustained that defence and built on it to expel the raider in a way that Ambrosius Aurelianus's successors could not.