The Exercise of Power in Medieval Scotland, 1250-1500 1851827498, 9781851827497

Citation preview

The exercise of power in medieval Scotland, c. 1200-1500 Steve Boardman and Alasdair Ross EDITORS

FOUR COURTS PRESS

Set in 10.5 on 12.5 Ehrhardt for FOUR COURTS PRESS LTD

7 Malpas Street, Dublin 8, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] http://www.four-courts-press.ie and in North America FOUR COURTS PRESS

c/o ISBS, 920 N.E. 58th Street, Suite 300, Portland, OR 97213.

© Four Courts Press and the several contributors 2003

ISBN 1-85182-^49-8

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

General Library System University ct Wisconsin - Madison 728 State Street Madison, W1 53706-1494

U.S.A.

Published in England by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wilts.

Contents 2.003 6

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

g

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

EDITORS* INTRODUCTION

Old and new in the far North: Ferchar Maccintsacairt and the early earls of Ross, c. 1200-74 R. Andrew McDonald

23

Continuity, adaptation and integration: the earls and earldom of Mar, r.ii5o-f.i3oo Richard D. Oram

46

Survival and success: the Kennedys of Dunure Hector L. MacQueen

67

The Campbells and charter lordship in medieval Argyll Steve Boardman

95

Hostiarii Regis Scotie\ the Durward family in the thirteenth century /f. Hammond BCings of the wild frontier? The earls of Dunbar or March, f. 1070-1435 Alastair J. Macdonald

The lords and lordship of Glencarnie Alasdair Ross ‘Kingis rabellis’ to ‘Cuidich *n Righ’? Clann Choinnich: the emergence of a kindred, 4'.i47s-f.i5i4 Aonghas MacCoinnich

Earldom and kindred: the Lennox and its earls, 1200-1458 Michael Brown INDEX

118

13g

159

175

201

Contributors

STEVE BOARDMAN is a lecturer in Scottish history. School of History and Classics, University of Edinburgh.

MICHAEL BROWN is a lecturer in the department of Scottish history. University of St Andrews.

MATTHEW H. HAMMOND is a researcher in the department of Scottish his­ tory, University of Glasgow. ALASTAIR J. MAC DONALD is the Mackie lecturer in Scottish history, department of history, University of Aberdeen.

R. ANDREW MC DONALD is a lecturer in the department of history, Brock University. AONGHAS MAC COINNICH is a researcher in the departments of Celtic and history, University of Aberdeen. HECTOR L. MAC QUEEN is ptofessor of Private Law, Edinburgh University.

RICHARD D. ORAM is a lecturer in Scottish medieval history and environ­ mental history at the University of Stirling. ALASDAIR ROSS is a teaching fellow in the department of Celtic, University of Aberdeen.

Acknowledgments

The editors would like to acknowledge the generous financial assistance pro­ vided for the publication of this volume by the Department of History and the Department of Celtic at the University of Aberdeen, the Trustees of the Marc Fitch Fund, Oxford, and the Trustees of the Strathmartine Trust. Work on the volume was greatly assisted by a period of leave funded by an AHRB Research Leave Award in 2002-3. Steve Boardman would like to thank the various contributors for keeping faith (and an even temper) through a process that has been far too long. Special thanks are due to Alasdair Ross who took on the responsibilities of a co-editor late in the day and who introduced his colleague to the rather bewildering concept of effi~ ciency.

Abbreviations

Aberdeen-Banjy Illustrations [A.B. III.]

Illustrations of the topography and antiquities of the shires of Aberdeen and Banff (Spalding Club, 1S47-69). Aberdeen Registrum Registrum Episcopatus Aberdonensis (Spalding [Abdn. Reg.] Club, 1845). Acta Concilii (Stair) Acta Dominorum Concilii 1501—3^ ed. J.A. Clyde (Stair Society, 1943). of Council [y4Z)C] The acts of the lords of council in civil causes, ed. T. Thomson and others (Edinburgh, 1839 and 1918-) Acts of Council Acts of the lords of council in public affairs, (Public Affairs) [ADPC] selections from Acta Dominorum Concilii, ed. R.K. Hannay (Edinburgh, 1932). Acts Pari. Scot. [y4P*S3 The acts of the parliament of Scotland, ed. T. Thomson and C. Innes (Edinburgh, 1814-75) Anderson, Early Sources Early sources of Scottish history, 500-1286, ed. A.O. Anderson (Edinburgh, 1922). Anderson, Scottish Annals Scottish annals from English chroniclers, 500[SAEC] 1286, ed. A.O. Anderson (London, 1908). Ann. Ulster The annals of Ulster (to AD 1131), ed. S. Mac Airt and G. Mac Niocaill (Dublin, 1983). Arbroath Liber [Arb. Lib.] Liber S. Thome de Aberbrothoc (Bannatyne Club, 1848-56). Ayr-Galloway Coll. Archeological and historical collections relating [AHCAG] to Ayrshire and Galloway (1878-99; volumes for 1878-84 bear the title ... relating to the counties of Ayr and Wigton}. Ayrshire Coll. [CAAS] Collections of the Ayrshire Archeological and Natural History Society (1947-). Balmerino Liber \_Balm. Lib.] Liber Sancte Marie de Balmorinach (Abbotsford Club, 1841). Barrow, Chrs. David I G.W.S. Barrow, The charters of King David I: the written acts of David I King of Scots, 1124-53 of his son Henry earl of Northumberland (Woodbridge, 1999). Beauly Chrs-. The charters of the priory of Beauly (Grampian Club, 1877), BL British Library, London Black, Surnames G.F. Black, The surnames of Scotland: their origin, meaning and history (New York, 1946).

9

10

Buchanan, History.

Cal. Docs. Scot. [CZ)5]

CCR CFR Cal. Feam

Cal. Papal Letters [CPi]

Cal. Papal Petitions [CPP]

Cal. Scot. Supp.., v {CSSR, v] Cambuskenneth Registrum [Camb. Reg.} Cawdor Bk.

Chron. Bower (Watt) CAron. Fordun

Chron. Frasers Chron. Holyrood'. Chron. Lanercost Chron. Lanercost (Maxwell)

Chron. Melrose

Chron. Pluscarden Chron. fVyntoun

Cold. Cart. Coll, de Rebus Alban. Coupar Angus Chrs. [C. A. Chrs.}

Abbreviations G. Buchanan, The history of Scotland^ translated J. Aikman (Glasgow and Edinburgh, 1827-9). Calendar of documents relating to Scotland., i-iii, ed. Joseph Bain (Edinburgh 1881, 1884, 1887); v, ed. Grant G. Simpson and James D. Galbraith (Edinburgh, 1986). PRO, Calendar of close rolls preserved in the Public Record Office (London, 1892-). PRO, Calendar offine rolls (London, 1911-). Calendar of Feam: text and additions, 1471-1667, ed. R.J. Adam (SHS, 1991). Calendar of entries in the papal registers relating to Great Britain and Ireland: papal letters, ed. W.H. Bliss and others (London, 1893-). Calendar of entries in the papal registers relating to great Britain and Ireland: petitions to the pope, ed. W.H. Bliss (London, 1896). Calendar of Scottish supplications to Rome, 1447-1471, ed. J. Kirk (SHS, 1997). Registrum Monasterii S. Marie de Cambuskenneth (Grampian Club, 1872). The Book of the Thanes of Cawdor (Spalding Club, 1859)Walter Bower, Scotichronicon, gen. ed. D.E.R. Watt (Aberdeen, 1993-8). Johannis de Fordun, Chronica Gentis Scotorum, ed. W.F. Skene (Edinburgh, 1871-2). Chronicles of the Frasers: The IVardlaw MS (SHS, 1905)A Scottish chronicle known as the Chronicle of Holyrood, ed. M.O. Anderson (SHS, 1938). Chronicon de Lanercost (Maitland Club, 1839). The Chronicle of Lanercost 1272-1346, translated by H. Maxwell (Glasgow, 1913). The Chronicle of Melrose (facsimile edition), ed. A.O. Anderson and others (London, 1936). Liber Pluscardensis, ed. F.J.H. Skene (Edinburgh, 1877-80). The Original Chronicle of Andrew of Wyntoun (STS, 1903-14). Chartulary of the Cistercian priory of Coldstream (Grampian Club, 1879). Collectanea de Rebus Albanicis (Iona Club, 1847). • Charters of the abbey of Coupar Angus, ed. D.E. Easson (SHS, 1947).

Abbreviations

II

Cott/flr Angus Rental Rental book of the Cistercian abbey of Cupar [C. A. Rent.} Angus (Grampian Club, 1879-80). Crossraguel Chrs. [Ooa. CAri.] Charters of the abbey of Crossraguel (AHCAG, 1886). Dalrymple, Historic The Historic of Scotland, wrytten first in Latin by the most reverend and worthy fhone Leslie, bishop of Rosse, and translated in Scottish by Father fames Dalrymple, iggb (STS, 1888-95). Dryburgh Liber [Dryb. Lib.} Liber S. Marie de Dryburgh (Bannatyne Club, 1847). Duncan, Kingdom A.A.M. Duncan, Scotland: the making of the kingdom (Edinburgh, 1975). Dunfermline Registrum Registrum de Dunfermelyn (Bannatyne Club, [Dunf. Reg.] 1842). Easson, Religious Houses D.E. Easson, Medieval religious houses Scotland \_MRHS} (London, 1957). Exch. Rolls [^7?] The exchequer rolls of Scotland, ed. J. Stuart and others (Edinburgh 1878-1908). Familie of Innes Ane Account of the Familie of Innes (Spalding Club, 1864). Family of Rose A genealogical deduction of the family of Rose of Kilravock (Spalding Club, 1848). Foedera Foedera, Conventionae, Litterae et Cuiuscunque Generis Acta Publica, ed. T. Rymer, London 1816-1869 (Record Commission), vols. I & II. Fraser, Buccleuch W. Fraser, The Scotts of Buccleuch (Edinburgh, 1878). Fraser, Carlaverock W. Fraser, The Book of Carlaverock (Edinburgh, 1873)Fraser, Colquhoun W. Fraser, The chiefs of Colquhoun and their country (Edinburgh, 1873). Fraser, Cromartie W. Fraser, The earls of Cromartie (Edinburgh, 1876), Fraser, Grtzw/ W. Fraser, The chiefs of Grant (Edinburgh, 1883). Fraser, Keir W. Fraser, The Stirlings of Keir (Edinburgh, 1858). Fraser, Lennox W. Fraser, The Lennox (Edinburgh, 1874). Fraser, Menteith W. Fraser, The Red Book of Menteith (Edinburgh, 1880). Fraser, Sutherland W. Fraser, The Sutherland Book (Edinburgh, 1892). Glasgow Archeol. Trans. Transactions of the Glasgow Archeological Society (i857")Glasgow Friars Munimenta Munimenta Fratrum Predicatorum de Glasgu [Gias. Friars} (Maitland Club, 1846). Glasgow Registrum Registrum Episcopatus Glasguensis (Bannatyne and [Glos. Reg.} Maitland Clubs, 1843). Highland Papers Highland Papers, ed. J.R.N. Macphail (SHS, 1914-34).

12

Hist. MSS. Comm. [//AfCj

Abbreviations

Reports of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (London, 1870-). Holyrood Liber [Holy. Lib.} Liber Cartarum Sancte Crucis (Bannatyne Club, 1847)Inchaffray Chrs. Charters, bulls and other documents relating to [Inchaff. Chrs.} the abbey of Inchaffray (SHS, 1908). Inchaffray Liber [Inchaff. Lib.} Liber Inside Missarum (Bannatyne Club, 1847). Inchcolm Chrs. Charters of the abbey of Inchcolm, ed. D.E. Easson and A. Macdonald (SHS, 1938). Innes Review [//?] The Innes Review (1950-) Inguis. Retom. Abbrev. Inquisitionum ad Capellam Domini Regis [Retours} Retomatarum, quae in publicis archivis Scotiae adhuc servantur, Abbreviatio, ed. T. Thomson (1811-16). Inverness Gaelic Trans. Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness [TGSL} (1871-). Inverness Rees. Records of Inverness (New Spalding Club, 1911-24). Kelso Liber [Kel. Lib.} Liber S. Marie de Calchou (Bannatyne Club, 1846). Kinloss Rees. Records of the monastery of Kinloss, ed. J. Stuart (Edinburgh, 1872). Laing Chrs. Calendar of the Laing charters 854-1837, ed. J. Anderson (Edinburgh, 1899). Lamont Papers An inventory of Lamont papers (SRS, 1914). Lawrie, Charters (£5'C] Early Scottish charters prior to 1153, ed. A.C. Lawrie (Glasgow, 1905). Lennox Cartularium Cartularium Comitatus de Levenax (Maitland Club, [Lenw. Car^.] 1833)Lindores Chartulary Chartulary of the abbey of Lindores (SHS, [Lind. Cart.} 1903)Lindores Liber [Lind. Lib.} Liber Sancte Marie de Lundoris (Abbotsford Club, 1841). MacFarlane, Geographical Geographical collections relating to Scotland Coll. [Geog. Coll.} made by Walter Macfarlane (SHS, 1906-8). Macphail, Pluscardyn S.R. Macphail, History of the religious house of Pluscardyn (Edinburgh, 1881). Major, History J. Major, A history of Greater Britain (SHS, 1892). May Rees. Records of the priory of the Isle of May, ed. J. Stuart (Edinburgh, 1868). Melrose Liber [Meir. Lib.} Liber Sancte Marte de Melros (Bannatyne Club, 1837)Midlothian Chrs. Charters of the hospital of Soltre, of Trinity College, [Midi. CAn.] Edinburgh, and other collegiate churches in Midlothian (Bannatyne Qub, 1861). Moray Registrum Registrum Episcopatus Moraviensis (Bannatyne [Moray Reg.} Club, 1837). Morton Registrum Registrum Honoris de Morton (Bannatyne [Afor?. Reg.} Club, 1853).

Abbreviations Munros, Acts Lords Isles

13

Jean and R.W. Munro, Acts of the lords of the Isles, 133^^93 (Edinburgh, 1986). NAS National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh Nat. MSS. Scot. Facsimiles of the national manuscripts of Scotland (London, 1867^1). Newbattle Registrum Registrum S. Marie de Neubotle (Bannatyne [Netvb. Reg.1 Club, 1849). Neip Spalding Misc. Miscellany of the Neto Spalding Club (New Spalding Club, 1890-1908). NLS National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. North Beripick Carte Carte Monialium de Northbenoic (Bannatyne [N.B. Chrs.} Club, 1847). Origines Parochiales [OP5] Origines Parochiales Scotiae (Bannatyne Club, 1851-5)Raisley Registrum Registrum Monasterii de Passelet (Maitland [Pais. Reg.] Club, 1832; new club, 1877). Palgrave, Docs. Hist. Scot. Documents and records illustrating the history of Scotland, ed. Francis Palgrave (London 1837). Perth Blackfriars The Blackfriars of Perth, ed. R. Milne (Edinburgh, 1893). PRO Public Record Office Proc. Soc. Antiq. Scot. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (1851-). Reg. Mag. Sig. [PA151 Registrum Magni Sigilli Regum Scotorum in Archivis Publicis Asservatum, ed. J.M. Thomson and others (London, 1882-1914). Reg. Privy Council [PPG] The register of the privy council of Scotland, ed. J.H. Burton and others (Edinburgh, 1877-). Reg. Sec. Sig. [RSS] Registrum Secreti Sigilli Regum Scotorum, ed. M. Livingstone and others (Edinburgh, 1908-). Robertson, Index An index, drawn up about the year 1629, of many records of charters, ed. W. Robertson (Edinburgh 1798). Rotuli Scotiae [Rot. Scot.] Rotuli Scotiae in Turri Londinensi et in Domo Capitulari fVestmonasteriensi Asservati, ed. D. Macpherson and others (1814-19). Regesta Regum Scottorum Regesta Regum Scottorum, ed. G.W.S. Barrow and others (Edinburgh, i960-). St Andreips Liber [S'f A. Lib.] Liber Cartarum Prioratus Sancti Andree in Scotia (Bannatyne Club, 1841). Scalachronica Scalachronica, by Sir Thomas Gray of Heton Knight (Maitland Club, 1836). Scone Liber Liber Ecclesie de Scone (Bannatyne and Maitland Clubs, 1843). Scot. Antiq. Scottish Antiquary (1886-1903: volumes for 1886-90 bear the title Northern Notes and Queries).

14

Abbreviations

Scottish Gaelic Studies (1926-). Scottish Genealogist (1954-). The Scottish Historical Review *947“)Scottish Studies (1957-). 7%e peerage, ed. Sir J. Balfour (Edinburgh, 1904-14). Handlist of the Acts of Alexander H, ed. J. Scoular Scoular, Handlist (Edinburgh, 1959). The Miscellany of the Scottish History Society SHS Misc. (SHS, 1893-). Handlist of the Acts of Alexander III, the Simpson, Handlist Guardians, fohn 124g—g6, ed. Grant G. Simpson (Edinburgh, i960). W. Douglas Simpson, The province of Mar Simpson, Province of Mar (Aberdeen, 1943). Miscellany of the Spalding Club (Spalding Club), Spalding Misc. 1841-52). Documents illustrative of the history of Scotland Stevenson, Documents 1286-1306, ed. J. Stevenson (Edinburgh 1870). The Black Book of Taymouth (Bannatyne Club, Taymouth Bk. 1855)Transactions of the Dumfriesshire and Galloway TDGAS Natural history and Antiquarian Society. Vetera Monumenta Hibemorum et Scotorum Theiner, Historiam Illustrantia, ed. A. Theiner (Rome, Mon.j 1864). Accounts of the lord high treasurer of Scotland, ed. Treasurer Accts. [TA] T. Dickson and Sir J. Balfour Paul (Edinburgh, 1877-19^6). W.J. Watson, The history of the Celtic placenames of Watson, CPNS Scotland (Edinburgh, 1926). Charter chest of the earldom of Wigtown (SRS, IVigtojpn Charter Chest 1910)Wigtownshire Chrs. CArj.J Wigtownshire charters, ed. R.C. Keid (SHb, igbo).

Scot. Gaelic Stud. [5G5] Scot. Geneal. Scot. Hist. Rev. [5/Z7?] Scot. Stud. Scots Peerage [•S’/’]

We have wherever possible followed the guidelines as supplied for Scottish sources in the ‘List of Abbreviated Titles of the Printed Sources of Scottish History to 1560’, supplement to the Scottish Historical Review, October 1963.

'

Editors’ introduction

This volume is the third to be produced under the auspices of the Baronial Research Group, an informal association of Scottish medieval historians interested in investigating various aspects of the history of the kingdom’s aristocratic elite.' It is generally accepted that the history and development of the aristo­ cratic class in those areas subject to the authority or ambition of the Scottish crown experienced a significant change of direction in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. The inauguration of David I (1124-53) as king of Scotia in 1124 gave ultimate authority to a man comfortable in the Frenchspeaking household of his brother-in-law Henry I of England. Henry was the son of William the Conqueror, whose military annexation of the English throne in 1066 had initiated a rapid and near complete dispossession of the established English aristocratic elite and its replacement by a new Franco­ phone aristocracy drawn from Normandy, Brittany, the Low Countries and elsewhere. Enjoying a marked military, economic and (as they themselves judged) cultural and moral superiority over the noble societies they encoun­ tered, the new aristocracy embarked on a seemingly unstoppable piecemeal campaign of territorial expansion which saw their native rivals stripped of their landed power and social status.* David I, by upbringing and kinship, lay at the very heart of this ebul­ lient self-confident Anglo-Norman culture. It was hardly a surprise that in his reign the Scottish royal dynasty was seen to embrace and promote the social, political, cultural and economic changes unleashed elsewhere in the British Isles by the events of 1066. The main innovations introduced in the north during King David’s time are well known and widely discussed.^ In relation to the theme of this volume the most significant development was I The first volume was: K.J. Stringer (ed.), Essayt on the nobility of medieval Scotland (Edinburgh, 1985). Publication of the second volume on Lordship and architecture, edited by Geoff Stell and Richard Oram, is imminent, a R.R. Davies, Domination and conquest: the experience of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, 1100-1300 (1990); R. Frame, The political develop­ ment of the British Isles, 1100-1400 (1990); R. Bartlett, The making of Europe: conquest, coloni­ sation and cultural change, ggo-ijgo (1994); R.R. Davies, Conquest, coexistence and change: Wales 1063-1413 (Oxford, 1987); J.F. Lydon, ‘Lordship and crown: Llwelyn of Wales and O’Connor of Connacht’, in R.R. Davies (ed.), The British Isles, 1100-1300 (Edinburgh, 1988), 48-63. 3 G.W.S. Barrow, The Anglo-Norman era in Scottish history (Oxford 1980); idem. Kingship and unity: Scotland, 1000-1306 (1981); A.A.M. Duncan, Scotland: the making of the kingdom (Edinburgh, 1975). 15

16

Steve Boardman and Alasdair Ross

the physical settlement within many of the territories subject to the Scottish king of French-speaking aristocrats often drawn, as Geoffrey Barrow has shown, from areas in England with which David already had territorial or social connections/ The effects of this rapid aristocratic advance were made more extensive and enduring because it tended to combine with and rein­ force other developments - the expansion of an English-speaking peasantry; the spread of privileged entrepreneurial trading communities; the reform of ecclesiastical life and institutions; the re-definition and intensification of monarchical government. The most spectacular aristocratic introductions could involve huge tracts of lands and wide-ranging jurisdictions, such as the settlement on Walter fitz Alan of Renfrew, Strathgryfe and other lordships around the Firth of Clyde. In this region at least, the wide-scale displacement of the existing aristocratic strata seems likely. Moreover, the lines of recruitment remained open for the rest of the twelfth century with new arrivals from the continent (the prog­ enitors of the Cornyn, Barclay and Hay families for instance) in the reign of David’s grandson William I (1165-1214). However, as has long been acknowledged the cumulative effect of these introductions hardly amounted to a comprehensive physical conquest of the Scottish monarch’s dominions by the new king’s Anglo-Norman followers. Most lordships within the core of the Scottish realm north of the Forth for example remained, as far as can be told, in the hands of well-established aristocratic dynasties. This contrast between established and new settlement can be seen in some of the charters issued by David and his immediate successors. These occasionally use address clauses that list the king’s subjects as a series of ethnic and linguis­ tic groups. The clauses both confirmed the new prominence of the ‘French’ among the Scottish king’s subjects while emphasizing that they were only one of the constituencies in the service of the Scottish crown. Yet the apparent equality of status in the eyes of the crown is probably deceptive. The influence of David’s ‘French’ subjects in defining the shape and future of aristocratic life in late medieval Scotland may have been far greater than their absolute numbers might suggest. Most significantly, of course, the Scottish royal house had itself become a centre of Frankish cul­ ture, language and attitudes, an adopted position reinforced by the marriage policies of the dynasty for the remainder of the twelfth century and interna­ tional developments in the cult of kingship.5 Recent general studies of the British Isles and Ireland in the late medieval period have tended to view the Scottish monarchy from the time of David I onward as a type of alternative route through which Frankish personnel, values and institutions established 4 Barrow, The Anglo-Norman era in Scottish history. 5 For which now see A.A.M. Duncan, The kingship of the Scots, 842-12^2 (Edinburgh, 2002).

Editors’ introduction

17

themselves in the British Isles. Rees Davies, for example, has recently emph­ asized that political, social and cultural domination could be achieved by means other than outright military conquest.^ The cosmopolitan world of knighthood and chivalry entered through attendance at the courts of the English and Scottish kings or great magnates could impress, beguile and overawe men from different social and cultural traditions. Moreover, the impact of relatively small settlements of Frankish aristocratic adventurers was heightened because these groups were associated with wider changes in economic, religious, tenurial and administrative practice. One feature that has been taken as especially characteristic is that David’s ‘new men’ held their lands from the crown by the terms of formal written grants that established a more rigid, fixed and closely defined social relation­ ship between lord and vassal. The relationship revolved around and depend­ ed on continued possession of the initial gift of land. The definition of social and tenurial relationships through these grants has been viewed as so charac­ teristic of the new world order that the term ‘feudalization’ has vied with ‘Normanization’ as a way to conveniently summarize the many interrelated changes apparently at work in twelfth-century Scotland. Charter tenure soon spread beyond those of the king’s subjects who were French in speech or descent and this has been taken as a key indicator of the willingness of estab­ lished nobles from other linguistic and ethnic backgrounds to become part of ‘feudal society’. The notion that those who accepted or issued Latin charters were automatically adopting a wider set of societal and cultural values is, to say the least, open to question. At the general level, of course, Susan Reynolds has suggested that ‘feudalism’ is little more than a historical con­ struct, with limited value in determining ‘real’ social systems. Even if this fundamental re-assessment goes too far, more detailed studies emphasize that the issuing of charters by, for example, the earls of Strathearn and the lords of Galloway represented discrete and carefully controlled, not to say con­ tained, settlement that preserved as much as it changed existing social struc­ tures.’ Despite these caveats the extension of formal tenure beyond a narrow incoming clique was clearly crucial in the subsequent development of the Scottish aristocracy. It was in marked contrast to the unwillingness, or the

6 Davies, Domination and conquest-^ Frame, Political development of the British Isles\ Bartlett, The making of Europe', B. Smith (ed.), Britain and Ireland, goo-i^oo: insular responses to medieval European change ( Cambridge, 1999). R.D. Oram, ‘A family business.’ Colonisation and set­ tlement in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Galloway’, Sf/R, 72 (1993); C. Neville, ‘A Celtic enclave in Norman Scotland; Earl Gilbert and the earldom of Strathearn’, in T. Brotherstone and D. Ditchburn (eds). Freedom and authority: historical and historiographical essays presented to Grant G. Simpson (East Linton, 1997), 75-92; K.J. Stringer, ‘Periphery and core in thir­ teenth-century Scotland: Alan son of Roland, lord of Galloway and constable of Scotland’, in Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer (eds). Medieval Scotland (Edinburgh, 1993).

18

Steve Boardman and Alasdair Ross

inability, of the English crown to recognize or protect the tenurial rights and lordly status of established magnates in the face of the aggressive expansion of Anglo-Norman adventurers in Wales and Ireland? Nevertheless, the history of the twelfth and thirteenth century kingdom of Scotia has occasionally been portrayed as a long drawn out struggle between the crown and its ‘Normanized’ and ‘feudalized’ aristocratic sup­ porters and a recalcitrant ‘native’ (normally in the sense of Gaelic speaking) elite. Despite some episodes, such as the revolts against Malcolm IV in the 1160S, that were explained by near contemporaries in these terms it is prob­ ably more appropriate to view crown action and dynastic or regional rebel­ lion in relation to the immediate political objectives of the participants. This raises a wider issue about the definition and use of the term ‘native’ in this volume. From its inception the study was designed to highlight the conti­ nuity in aristocratic and noble power that reached across the apparent watershed represented by the appearance of a Frankish nobility in the twelfth century. Yet the editors acknowledge that the word ‘native’ also car­ ries with it a number of less helpful associations and assumptions that are probably not appropriate when discussing many of the families examined below. Most notably, of course, native can be used to describe an indige­ nous people denied the full exercise of rights over land or participation in government by a superior colonial elite. In medieval Wales and Ireland divi­ sions based on ethnic origin and language maintained their sharpness and political relevance because they continued to affect access to a wide range of economic and legal privileges and political and territorial rights.” The vision generated in this context of a prolonged and inevitable struggle 8 Davies, Domination and conquest\ Frame, Political development of the British Isler, Bartlett, The making of Europe', Davies, Conquest, coexistence and change", J.F. Lydon, ‘Lordship and crown: Llwelyn of Wales and O’Connor of Connacht’, in R.R, Davies (ed.). The British Isles, 48-63; D. Broun, ‘Anglo-French acculturation and the Irish element in Scottish identity’, in Smith (ed.), Britain and Ireland, 135-53. 9 A.D. Carr, ‘An aristocracy in decline: the native Welsh lords after the Edwardian conquest’, Welsh History Review, 5 (1970-1); R.R. Davies, ‘Colonial Wales’, Past Present, 65 (1974); idem, ‘Race-relations in post-Conquest Wales: confronta­ tion and compromise’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1974—5); idem, ‘The peoples of Britain and Ireland, 1100-1400’, I-IV, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (1994-7); idem ‘The English state and the “Celtic” peoples, i loo-i400’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 6 (1993); J. Gillingham, ‘Foundations of a disunited kingdom’, in A. Grant and K.J. Stringer (eds). Uniting the Kingdom? (London, 1995), 48-64; idem, ‘Henry of Huntingdon and the twelfth-century revival of the English nation’, in L. Johnson and A. Murray (eds). Concepts of national identity in the middle ages (Leeds, 1995); D.H. Owen, ‘The Englishry of Denbigh: an English colony in medieval Wales’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1974-5, 57-76; M.T. Flanagan, Irish society, Anglo-Norman settlers, Angevin kingship (Oxford, 1989); R. Frame, Colonial Ireland, ii6Q-i36g (Dublin, 1981); R. Frame, English lordship in Ireland, 1318-1360 (Oxford, 1982); K. Simms, Prom kings to war-

Editors' introduction

19

between a native culture and language and an incoming one has provided an influential yet perhaps not entirely relevant model for the development of the Scottish aristocracy after 1124. In Scotland, despite the twelfth cen­ tury attachment of the Scottish royal house to Frankish ways and the resentment that this might generate, the simple fact was that across most of the areas dominated by the Scottish monarch power and status remained in the hands of established aristocratic dynasties. The definition of the ‘King’s friends’ and the ‘King’s enemies’ in late medieval Scotland seems, on the whole, to have been decided on the basis of political loyalty and behaviour rather than ethnic or linguistic attachment.'” The twelfth centu­ ry campaigns against the royal dynasty’s enemies in the north, for example, seem to have relied heavily on Gaelic lords who were the principal benefi­ ciaries of the crown’s territorial settlement in the region. The expression of surprise when major Gaelic lords are found co-operating with the Scottish crown is surely a reflex of the assumption that the king, through his Frankish agents, was somehow engaged in a deliberate campaign to under­ mine the Gaelic landowning class in its entirety. Older studies did present the history of medieval Scotland as a straightforward and prolonged battle for supremacy between ‘Celt’ and ‘Teuton’. Despite the fact that these arguments have long since been put to the sword there is still a tendency to talk about the Scottish kingdom and aristocracy after the twelfth centu­ ry as an admixture of fundamentally opposed impulses or forces. ‘Celtic’ or ‘Gaelic’ are contrasted with ‘Norman’ or ‘English’ families or institutions. The term ‘hybrid’ has increasingly been used to describe the nature of the late medieval Scottish crown and aristocracy. This certainly has the virtue of reflecting the results of recent scholarship highlighting a continual inter­ play between different traditions. However, the term again places the Scottish realm somewhere between two ‘purer’ and presumably more ‘nor­ mal’ types of society rather than accepting it as a perfectly natural devel­ opment in its own right. With these general observations in mind we can review the varied expe­ rience of ‘native’ lords revealed by the studies that make up this volume.

lords: the changing political structure of Gaelic Ireland in the later middle ages (Woodbridge, 1987); S. Duffy, ‘The first Ulster Plantation: John de G)urcy and the men of Cumbria’, in T.B. Barry, Robin Frame and Katharine Simms (eds). Colony and frontier in Medieval Ireland, 1-27; J. Gillingham, ‘The English invasion of Ireland’, in B. Bradshaw, A. Hadfield, and W. Maley (eds). Representing Ireland: literature and the origins of conflict, 1534-1660 (Cambridge, 1993), 24-42; J.F. Lydon, ‘Lordship and crown’; J.F. Lydon, ‘Ireland and the English crown, 1171-1541’, Irish Historical Studies, 29 (1994-5), 281-94; H. Perros, ‘Crossing the Shannon frontier: Connacht and the Anglo-Normans, 1170-1224’, in Barry et al. (eds). Colony and fron­ tier in Medieval Ireland, 117-38. 10 Despite the best efforts of the fifteenth-century chroni­ cler Walter Bower to suggest that the Gaels were natural rebels and law-breakers.

20

Steve Boardman and Alasdair Ross

Andrew MacDonald points to the role of the rather mysterious Ferchar Maccintsacairt in enabling twelfth- and thirteenth-century Scottish kings to deal with dynastic challenges based in Moray and Ross. As much a ‘new man’ as any of David Fs or William Fs continental or English imports, and certainly as opportunistic, Ferchar founded an aristocratic dynasty that sur­ vived in the male line into the second half of the fourteenth century. Moreover the title bestowed on Ferchar outreached the honours gifted to any of the Frankish lords brought in to police the borders of Galloway or the great lordships on the Anglo-Scottish border. In any attempt to trace the consolidation of royal authority in the northern reaches of the kingdom Ferchar’s career was surely as significant as the settlement of Flemings in the Moray coastal plain. Later in the collection Aonghas MacCoinnich returns to pick up the Story of the earldom of Ross, or more particularly the irresistible rise of Clann Choinnich to regional dominance from the second half of the fifteenth century onwards. The study traces the way in which later clan historians struggled to deal with the obscure origins and political­ ly dubious behaviour of their medieval forbears in an age where past service to the crown had become a major element in defining the ‘nobility’ of aris­ tocratic families. Richard Oram’s examination of Mar deals with a rather different lord­ ship, for in the twelfth century Mar, unlike Ross, was an integral part of the older core kingdom of Scotia. Here the story seems to be one of controlled change and adaptation in which the earls maintained (or even enhanced) their political, social and military leadership over the province. A similar and perhaps even more striking example of provincial stability and continuity well into the fifteenth century is provided by Michael Brown’s piece on the earldom of Lennox. Whatever the effect of the changes seen in Scotland after 1124 it is clear that the provincial dynasties of Scotia remained in place, and that even where power was transferred into new hands by marriage or forfeiture, the political and social effectiveness of these lordships remained. It would seem then that the structures of provincial lordship in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Scotland were strong enough to act as foci around which new institutions, ideas and personnel might be introduced and integrated into a local society. A concentration on the great established provincial lordships alone might support the view that Gaelic lords essentially belonged to an older world order, conservative and concerned only to prevent or regulate change. Hector MacQueen’s article alerts us to a quite different phenomenon by out­ lining the way in which a family of Gaelic origin could adapt with success to the cultural, political and social conditions of the late medieval Scottish court while maintaining the distinct traditions of their own lordships. The Kennedies belonged to a large and significant group within the fifteenth cen­

1

J

Editors’ introduction

21

tury nobility that was familiar and comfortable with Gaelic language, histo­ ry and culture, even if it was not demonstrably engaged with the literary and material culture that is now held to be characteristic of Gaelic aristocracy. In that sense the supposed cultural and political distance between the royal court and Gaelic lordship has probably been overemphasized. It is tempting to suggest that the appearance of royal councillors from Gaelic speaking areas ensured not the imposition of centrally imposed ‘norms’ on the local­ ities, but the maintenance of an awareness at the heart of royal government that the kingdom was a culturally diverse polity with constituencies that had to be governed in slightly different ways. There was no institutional bar to the rise of men from Gaelic backgrounds in royal service, lay or ecclesiasti­ cal. Indeed, the new dynasties of fourteenth-century Scotland, the Bruces and the Stewarts, had their origins in west coast lordships and commanded extensive followings in Gaelic Scotland. Bruce and Stewart kingship thus created a cohort of dependent west coast lords that held land and local office directly from the crown and that came to exert a considerable influence within the royal administration. At the time of Bishop Kennedy’s domina­ tion of royal government in the 1460s, one of his fellow royal councillors was the head of another family recruited into royal service through the Stewart dynasty’s western patrimony, Colin Campbell, ist earl of Argyll, Master of the King’s Household. Steve Boardman’s article examines how the Campbell lords adopted charter lordship in the fifteenth century and sug­ gests that it was a complicated and ambiguous process that tended to rein­ force trends already evident within the lordship rather than impose entirely new ways of organizing landownership and succession. Matthew Hammond and Alastair MacDonald contribute papers that question the established historiography in a number of ways. Through a close study of the rise of the Durwards, Hammond rejects the appropriate­ ness and relevance of ‘ethnocultural* terms when discussing thirteenth cen­ tury baronial politics. Instead, he argues, the competition for local power and status lay at the heart of aristocratic life. MacDonald, on the other hand illustrates the way in which the development of ‘national’ historiographies can distort the analysis of men or families, such as the Dunbar, earls of March, whose lordships extended beyond a kingdom’s political borders. MacDonald goes on to argue that far from being overtaken by an inability to respond to the new realities of Anglo-Scottish warfare and diplomatic hostility after 1296 the family were remarkably successful in maintaining their power and influence. Finally, Alasdair Ross’ examination of the lordship of Glencaimie gives further weight to the view that the royal house’s interests in the north were predominantly advanced through a network of Gaelic lords. The foundation and expansion of the lordship of Glencarnie may have been highly signifi-

22

Steve Boardman and Alasdair Ross

cant in the consolidation of royal authority in Badenoch and Strathspey but has received little attention in a tradition that has largely equated royal ambi­ tion with the spread of families of Breton, Norman, Flemish or English descent in the Laich of Moray. The importance of Glencarnie lordship is highlighted in a curious way by the involvement of the family with the English crown after 1306. Here were men of substance, used to exercising social authority and capable of performing a number of tasks in the English king’s service, a situation that presumably reflected their previous role inside the Scottish kingdom.

Old and new in the far North: Ferchar Maccintsacairt and the early earls of Ross, c. 1200-1274 R. Andrew McDonald*

The process by which the kingdom of Scotland was Normanized in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries seems continually to defy classification into any particular paradigm. It has been characterized as a peaceful Norman Conquest, though there was neither invasion nor military conquest, and Scotland certainly had no northern version of Hastings. The process may more accurately be described as a Norman infiltration, and Scotland as a king­ dom that was Norman by adoption rather than by conquest.’ There were, however, significant contrasts in the process of Normanization between the northern and western uplands and the southern and eastern lowlands, not the least of which is the fact that the evidence is much more plentiful in the south where the process took root earliest and most deeply. But if the Normanization of Scotland was a largely peaceful process, it would also be true to say that the attitude of the native elite in the north remained, for most of the twelfth century, at best ambivalent, and generally hostile, to foreign influence. Take, for instance, the comments of an anonymous Augustinian chronicler writing at Barnwell in Cambridgeshire, who noted in the context of an uprising against royal authority in the north in the early thirteenth century, that ‘more recent kings of Scots profess themselves to be rather Frenchmen, both in race and in manners, language and culture: and after reducing the Scots to utter servi­ tude, they admit only Frenchmen to their friendship and service’.^ Professor Duncan has observed that these remarks, because of their context, provide ‘a valuable indication of the feelings aroused by the gradual transformation of I This investigation began life as a paper presented to the 31st International Medieval Congress at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1996, and I am grateful to the participants for many helpful comments. In its more refined form it has benefited from the scrutiny of my colleague Margaret McIntyre, whom I would like especially to thank. 2 See, among others, D. Walker, The Normans in Britain (Oxford, 1995), 75; R.L.G. Ritchie, The Normans in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1954), xi, xiv; G.W.S. Barrow, The Anglo-Norman era in Scottish history (Oxford, 1980), 49. 3 SAEC, 330, n. 6. 23

24

R. Andrew McDonald

Moray and Ross into another feudalized province?* Indeed, between c.iiio and 1230 the stability of the kingdom was compromised by a series of upris­ ings originating, for the most part, in the northern regions of Moray and Ross, and led by individuals associated with those territories.^ So when the Chronicle of Melrose records how an insurrection in 1215 was suppressed, not by the king or one of his Anglo-Norman supporters, but rather by a northern noble named Ferchar Maccintsacairt, we are conscious that a new era was dawning in the north. Despite the groundbreaking work of scholars like Barrow and Bannerman, which has taken as its common focus the earls of Fife, perhaps the most prominent (and well-documented) of the native kindreds of medieval Scotland, the theme of relations between natives and newcomers in the twelfth and thir­ teenth centuries has often fallen into the background. ^The issues were per­ haps best defined by Barrow over forty years ago: ‘What,’ he asked, ‘was the position in this social revolution, or al least upheaval, of the existing holders of power, the native magnates, whose counterparts in England had practically disappeared after 1075.’*’ Nowhere is this question more relevant than for the native nobility of the far north and west of the kingdom, where foreign influ­ ences both came late and encountered considerable opposition. It is the aim of this essay to explore this issue with particular reference to one intriguing member of the northern Scottish nobility: Ferchar Maccintsacairt, a native magnate who was willing and able to uphold the interests of the Scottish kings in the north in the early thirteenth century. What follows is neither an exhaus­ tive biography of Ferchar nor an attempt to write the comprehensive history of the earls of Ross descended from him (although it is hoped that light will be shed on both topics), but rather an assessment of the position of the native nobility in the later twelfth and early thirteenth century, and, more specifi­ cally, the role of the native elite in upholding royal authority in the north. As a northern noble of native stock who was knighted and elevated to the top­ most ranks of the Scottish elite as an earl, Ferchar provides the perfect medium for such a case study. The role of Ferchar as a native supporter of Scottish royal authority in the north is all the more remarkable, and can better be understood, when the 4 Duncan, Kingdom, 198. 5 On which see: R.A. McDonald, ‘Treachery in the remotest ter­ ritories of Scotland: Northern resistance to the Canmore dynasty, 1130-1230’, Canadian Journal of History, 33 (August 1999), 161-92, and idem, Outlaws of medieval Scotland: challenges to the Canmore kings, 1058-/266 (East Linton, forthcoming). 6 G.W.S. Barrow, ‘The earls of Fife in the 12th and 13th centuries’, in PSAS, 87 (1952-3), 51-62; J. Bannerman, ‘MacDuff of Fife’, in A. Grant and K.J. Stringer (eds). Medieval Scotland: crown, lordship and community (Edinburgh, 1993), 20-38; C. Neville, ‘A Celtic enclave in Norman Scotland; Earl Gilbert and the earldom of Strathearn’, in Terry Brotherstone and David Ditchburn (eds). Freedom and authority (East Linton 1997), 75-92. 7 Barrow, ‘Earls of Fife’, 51.

Ferchar Maccintsacairt and the early earls of Ross, c.!200~i2y4

25

persistent and tenacious opposition that the kings descended from Malcolm III (1058-93) and Queen Margaret faced from the largely unassimilated north­ ern reaches of their kingdom is considered. From the iiios until 1230 the northern regions of Moray and Ross raised many challenges to, and served as a rallying point for, those who opposed the Scottish monarchs of the Canmore dynasty. In what is one of the earliest examples of such opposition, King Alexander I (1107-24) was attacked at Invergowrie by men of Moray, probably between about 1115 and 1120.® David I (1124-53) ^^s challenged in 1124 and 1130 by individuals associated with Moray (and perhaps Ross), while the enigmatic bishop of the Isles, Wimund, who may also have had con­ nections to the region, harried him later in the reign, probably in the late 1140S.’ Malcolm IV (iiS3-€s) experienced trouble from Argyll, the Isles, and Galloway between 1153 and 1160, but unrest may also have been brewing in Moray since the Holyrood Chronicle cryptically stated under the year 1163 that et rex Malcolmus Murevienses transtulit (and King Malcolm moved the men of Moray).’® By the reign of William I (1165-1214), the Canmore dynasty was well-established, but it had not yet eliminated all of its rivals and a new welter of uprisings broke out in the late 1170s or early ii8os. In 1179 William and his brother, David, led a large army into Ross, and it was probably at this time that two new strongholds were constructed at Redcastle and Dunskeath.” In 1181 Donald MacWilliam invaded Scotland with what the chroniclers called a large army, but was disposed of in 1187 when Roland, the lord of Galloway (d. 1200), with a force of some 3000 warriors, hunted him down on a moor in Ross and brought his head to the king.” Nonetheless, by the early thirteenth century the descendants of MacWilliam were stirring up further trouble: in 1211 or 1212 a royal expedition tracked down Guthred, the son of Donald, and despite his execution at Kincardine, the embers of unrest still smouldered.'3 When they burst into flame again, it was Ferchar Maccintsacairt who took a leading part in extinguishing them. Careful reading of the sources for these uprisings, both contemporary and later, pinpoints several important facts. First, there is the geographical set­ ting: there are many indications that the rivals of the Scottish kings used Moray beyond the Great Glen and Wester Ross as bases and staging points

8 Ckron. IFynloun, ii, 174-5. Wyntoun goes on to relate how the king’s enemies were chased into Ross, where they were slaughtered. See also Ckron. Bowtr (Watt), iii, 104-7. 9 M. Qubnall (ed. and trans.), The ecclesiastical history of Orderic Vitalis (Oxford, 1968-80), 6 vols., iv, 276-^; S. MacAirt (cd. and trans.). Annals of Inisfallen (MS Rawlinson 8.503) (Dublin, 1951), 292-3. For Wimund see: R.A. McDonald, ‘Monk, bishop, imposter, pretender: the place of Wimund in twelfth-century Scotland’, in TCSI, 58 (1992-4), 247-70. 10 Chron. Holyrood, 142; Chron. Fordun, 256-7. ii ES, ii, 301-2, and n. 6; Chron. Fordun, i, 268. 12 W. Stubbs (ed.), Gesta Henrici Secundi, 2 vols. (London, 1867), i, 277-8; ES, ii, 311-12. 13 Chron. Fordun, 274 and at 276-7.

26

R. j4ndreip McDonald

for their operations. These inaccessible and remote regions, with their rugged mountains, heavy forest, and peat bogs, made an ideal base for enemies of the Kings, giving them the ability to disappear into the wilderness or even, via the Great Glen, to flee to Ireland and the Isles. The terrain also had the advantage of making it difficult for large groups of mounted horsemen to operate.'* Second, the persistent role of two families in mounting resistance to the Scottish kings is clear: the MacHeths and MacWilliams. This is not the place for an extended discussion of the very problematic question of the origins and identity of these families, or the motivation behind their insur­ rections; these issues remain opaque and contentious. Conventional wisdom associates Malcolm MacHeth (d. ii68) with the earldom of Ross, and the MacHeth uprisings have been seen as agitations for the restoration of that earldom, which MacHeth had indeed held at his death in n68.*s The MacWilliams, on the other hand, descended from William fitz Duncan, the son of King Duncan 11, the eldest son of Malcolm III and his first wife Ingibjorg, who reigned briefly in 1094. They are best regarded as a cast-off segment of the royal kindred, one that was squeezed out by the consolida­ tion of the kingship in the line of Malcolm III and Margaret in the twelfth century; a Moray connection is also possible since a thirteenth-century source of questionable value styled William fitz Duncan ‘earl of Moray’. Whatever the pedigree of these kindreds and the motivation behind their persistent challenges to the kings of Scots, it is clear that their opposition forms a prominent but neglected theme in Scottish history of the eleventh to thir­ teenth centuries.''’ It is also clear that the MacHeth and MacWilliam rivals of the Scottish kings garnered considerable support in the northern territo­ ries of Moray and Ross and perhaps elsewhere. Donald MacWilliam’s chal­ lenge of the 1180s, for instance, was said to have been made with ‘the man­ date of certain powerful nobles of the kingdom of Scotland’. An unfortunately lost roll from the time of William the Lion and Alexander II listing those who stood with the kings and those who stood with the MacWilliam con­ firms that this is not just exaggeration on the part of the chronicler.” Finally, it is also noteworthy that Irish support was instrumental in these challenges: several were launched from Ireland and made use of Irish levies, including those of 1211-12 and 1215.'®

14 The comments of Gerald of Wales on the inability of the mounted knight to fight effectively in the wilderness of Wales or Ireland are significant; cf. L. Thorpe (trans.), The Description of fVales in The foumey through Wales/The Description of Wales (London, 1978), 11.8. 15 £5, ii, 266, 16 On MacHeth and MacWilliam see: RRS, ii, 13, but compare Duncan, Kingdom, passim, for a slightly different view. A more detailed investigation is McDonald, ‘Treachery’; sec also the important discussion by A. Grant, ‘The province of Ross and the kingdom of Alba’, in E.J. G)wan and R.A. McDonald (eds), Alba: Celtic Scotland in the medieval era (East Linton, 2000), 88-126, esp. 106-9. *7 Gesta Henrici Secundi, I, 277-8; APS, i, 114. 18 McDonald,

Ferchar Maccintsacairt and the early earls of Ross, c,i20O-i274

27

The expansion of the authority of the Scottish king into the northern regions of Moray and Ross gained momentum only in the later part of the twelfth century and the early years of the thirteenth. Anglo-Norman settle­ ment in Moray appears sparse during the reign of David I, and only a single grant pertaining to the region is known from these years; it was made to a Fleming named Freskyn who was the ancestor of the Murrays. Further set­ tlement of Fleming colonists was undertaken by Malcolm IV, who granted Innes and Nether Urquhart to Berowald in 1160. The advance of royal author­ ity formed the ‘major domestic concern* for William the Lion, who established lordships and baronies in the more rugged regions of Strathspey and Badenoch, and set up his brother, Earl David (d. 1219), as lord of Garioch.” This process of settlement by families loyal to the Canmore kings was accompanied by eco­ nomic, administrative, and religious consolidation, too, as royal burghs were established at Banff, Cullen, Elgin, Forres, Auldearn, Nairn, and Inverness (all by 1214); sheriffdoms at Inverness (1205x7) and Invemaim (1204); bish­ oprics at Caithness (r.1150) and Ross (f.1130); and religious foundations at Urquhart (1130x50) and Kinloss (r.1150). The place of native kindreds in this process of consolidation is difficult to gauge, but appears ancillary to that of the Anglo-French colonists. Flemish settlers, for instance, played an impor­ tant role in the consolidation of Moray in the twelfth century, as did the Cornyns as earls of Buchan (and later lords of Badenoch) at about the same time that Ferchar emerged on the scene. But while it is true that the earls of Strathearn and Fife held strategic lordships in the north - the former hold­ ing Kinveachy and Glencairnie in Strathspey; the latter Cromdale and Stratha’an in the Spey valley basin - it remained in about 1200 for the king to engage the loyalty of a powerful member of the indigenous northern elite.’® It was a dangerous uprising in 1215 that provided the opportunity. By 1215, as we have seen, both the MacHeths and the MacWilliams had made several separate and unsuccessful challenges to the Scottish Kings. In the summer of that year, perhaps because of the stellar lack of success of ear­ lier uprisings, the two kindreds united - a not insignificant occurrence since there is little if any indication that they had ever cooperated before. The Chronicle of Melrose states that Donald Ban MacWilliam (the son of Donald ‘Treachery’, 184. 19 KJ. Stringer, Earl David of Huntingdon: a study in Anglo-Seottisk history (Edinburgh, 1985), 30-4. 20 A summary of the situation in the north may be found in Stringer, Earl David, 30-4; J. Roberts, Lost kingdoms: Celtic Scotland and the middle ages (Edinburgh, 1997), ch. 4; G.W.S. Barrow, ‘Badenoch and Strathspey, 1130-1312: i’, in Northern Scotland, 8 (1988), 1-17; A. Young, ‘The carls and earldom of Buchan in the thirteenth century’, in A. Grant and K.J. Stringer (eds), Medieval Scotland: croan, lordship and community (Edinburgh, J993), 174-202; A. Young, Robert the Bruce’s rivals: the Cornyns, J212-1214 (East Linton, 1997); see also the maps in; P.G.B. McNeill and H.L. MacQueen (eds), The atlas of Scottish histoty to lyo? (Edinburgh, 1996).

28

R. Andrew McDonald

MacWilliam) and Kenneth MacHeth invaded Moray, along with the son of a ‘certain king of Ireland,’ unfortunately not named. They were met and defeated by Ferchar Maccintsacairt, who at this point made his first appear­ ance in the documentary record: ‘Machentagar’ attacked them, and mightily overthrew the king’s ene­ mies; and he cut off their heads, and presented them as gifts to the new king [Alexander II] on the seventeenth day before the Kalends of July. And because of this, the lord king appointed him a new knight ...” It is a dramatic entrance: but who was Ferchar? And where did he come from? The most basic issues of his origin and ancestry are murky and noth­ ing, in fact, is known of him before this, his earliest appearance on record. Since the late nineteenth century, scholarly consensus has regarded Ferchar as a west-coast magnate, a descendant of the hereditary abbots of Applecross, the monastery in Wester Ross founded by St Maelrubha.” Alexander Grant, who has shown that neither the Rosses themselves, nor the fifteenth-century pedigree writers, had any ideas as to Ferchar’s real ancestry, has recently and systematically demolished this suggestion. There is little, if any, evidence to connect him with Applecross; indeed, if he were descended from a line of hereditary abbots we might expect him to bear the surname MacNab (mac an Aba, ‘son of the abbot’) rather than mac an t-sagairt ‘son of the priest’. Instead Grant, following the suggestion of E.W. Robertson (which seems to have been ignored in favour of W.F. Skene’s hypothesis), gives Ferchar a place of origin in Easter Ross and a possible association with the sanctuary of St Duthac at Tain. In Grant’s view, Ferchar becomes a man without a pedigree; if he were going to make his way in the world, he would have to do so through the opportunities for social advancement offered up by service to the Canmore dynasty?3 All of this would make Ferchar a far cry from W.F. Skene’s view of him as a ‘powerful west highland chieftain commanding the population of an extensive western region’.’* Yet if Skene’s assessment now has little to recommend it, it does allude to one key point that Grant does

21 Chron. Melrose, 59-60. ES, ii, 404.1 have silently amended Anderson’s translation to include the form ‘Machentagar’ found in the original. 22 W.F. Skene, Celtic Scotland, 3 vols. (Edinburgh 1876-80), i, 483-4; W. Reeves, ‘Saint Maelrubha: his history and churches’, PSAS 3 Part 2 (1858-9), 275-6: I. Moncreiffe, The Highland clans (London 1967), 155. 23 Grant, ‘Province of Ross’, 88-126, especially 106-9; E-W. Robertson, Scotland under her early kings (Edinburgh, 1862), ii, n. 4. See also G.W.S. Barrow, ‘MacBeih and other Mormaers of Moray’, in L. MacLean (ed.). The hub of the Highlands: the book of Inverness and district (Inverness, 1975), 109-^3 at 121. On Tain see J. Durkan, ‘The sanctuary and college of Tain’, in Innes Revtea> 13 (1962), 147-56. A connection with Rosemarkic was suggested in passing (cf. Beauty Chrs., 187),

Ferchar Maccintsacairt and the early earls of Ross, Q.J200-1274

29

not satisfactorily address: lack of pedigree notwithstanding, Ferchar did com­ mand the resources with which to smash the MacWilliams and MacHeths in 1215. This was no mean feat since these kindreds had shown themselves capa­ ble of raising substantial forces, including levies from Ireland, in support of their political and territorial ambitions. The effectiveness and capacity of MacWilliam armies is reflected in the fact that Guthred MacWilliam pos­ sessed siege engines and brought a substantial royal garrison to its knees in 1211—12.*5 The actual composition of the forces in 1215 is not known, and while it is possible that the MacWilliam armies had begun to feel the effects of cooperative Anglo-Scottish efforts against their bases from 1212, the sources still speak of the family as a significant and imminent danger. Ferchar’s defeat of the king’s rivals does not, then, appear as either a cakewalk or a fluke, and it is hard to dismiss him as entirely without standing or influence in Ross. Although little is known of Ferchar’s background, his significance is clear. Dickinson and Duncan succinctly captured the importance of Ferchar’s intervention in 1215: ‘It shows a Celtic [i.e. Gaelic] leader in the north now on the side of the royal house descended from Malcolm and Margaret; and, because of his services, the Celtic [Gaelic] leader is made a feudal knight.’*^ Set against the persistent opposition to the Canmore kings from the turbu­ lent northern reaches of their kingdom, the significance of Ferchar’s actions in throwing his support behind the dynasty cannot be overstated. For the first time of which we are aware, a northern noble of native stock was acting in concert with, and, indeed, serving as an agent of, royal authority. It is unfortunate that we do not know the motivations for Ferchar’s slaying of the leaders of the insurrection. Did he harbour some longstanding or sim­ mering feud with the MacHeths and MacWilliams, perhaps over lordship in the far north.^ Had their invasion of Moray from Ireland in 1215 ravaged Easter Ross, thereby earning the enmity of the powerful chieftain? Was Ferchar, for some reason, favourably disposed toward the Canmore kings from the beginning? Or had he, like other native chieftains before him, felt the winds of change blowing and trimmed his sails accordingly? Whether rooted in local rivalries or the broader scope of early thirteenth-century Scottish politics, Ferchar’s motivation remains an unanswerable question. But one thing is certain: when the MacHeths and MacWilliams lost the sup­ port of men like Ferchar, their cause was doomed. If Ferchar’s motives in defeating the rebels remain obscure, the results, and rewards, are easier to discern. As a result of his intervention, Ferchar was eventually made an earl, placing him in the ‘undisputed first rank among the nobihty’,’’ whether Gaelic or Anglo-Norman. The origins of the Scottish earl24 Skene, Celtic Scotland, i, 484. 25 Chron. Sower (Watt), iv, 465-7. 26 W.C. Dickinson, Scotlandfrom the earliest times to 1603 (3rd cd. Oxford, 1977), 74. 27 G.W.S. Barrow, Robert

30

R. Andrew McDonald

doms are shrouded in mists of obscurity, and constitute a major problem in medieval Scottish history. This is not the place to enter upon an extended discussion of the early history of the earldoms, which in any case only emerge into the historical record in the twelfth century. By then the Gaelic title of mormeur (great steward), which seems to have been applied to the provincial governors and military commanders of the pre-Anglo-Norman era, had given way to the Latin title of comes or earl, and it was not unusual, by the twelfth century, for the holders of earldoms to have accommodated themselves to the new social order by adopting European practices of succession, depicting themselves as mounted warriors, or by marrying their sons and daughters to members of the incoming aristocratic elite. This last phenomenon was par­ ticularly important, since it was by virtue of matrimonial politics that some of the earldoms passed into the hands of new families when the native line failed. Buchan was the first earldom to come into the possession of a Frankish family when, in about 1212, William Cornyn married Marjorie, the daughter of the last native earl, Fergus.’® Sometime between about 1215 and 1230 - it is difficult to be sure exactly when, but probably closer to the later date - Ferchar was created earl of Ross by King Alexander II (1214-49). date of his installation as earl is prob­ lematic and, as the original act does not survive,’? it can only be deduced approximately from other scattered references of varying reliability. The Chronicle of Melrose, a contemporary source, styles Ferchar ‘earl of Ross’ in its entry for the year 1235. The Chronicle of Man, less reliable than Melrose and at times very confused, described Ferchar as earl in an undated entry that refers to events in the Western Isles between 1188 and 1223 - not a par­ ticularly helpful span of dates, and, as it turns out, the chronicler must be projecting the use of the title backwards.^® The evidence of the charters is rather like the narrative material for Ferchar: it is tantalizing, but always leaves us wanting more. In an act from 1232, preserved in the Moray Register, fV. Jilio. F. comstis de Ros appears as a witness: this is William, Ferchar’s son and eventual successor, but the attestation shows Ferchar to have been earl by 1232.3* Another charter, this one from 1234, lists a P. comitis de Ros as the first of the lay witnesses: the P must be a scribal error for P, and indeed, it is as P. comitis de Roff that Ferchar appears in another act, also from 1234.3* But it is not until 1237 that a scribe noted among the witnesses to another document domino Fercardo comite de Ros.^^ Finally, in a charter that likely Bruce and the community of the realm of Scotland (3rd ed. Edinburgh, 1988), 3. 28 Young, ‘Buchan’, 176--7. 29 Secular, Handlist, no. 358; RMS, i, App. 2 no. i. 30 G. Broderick (ed.), Cronica Regum Mannie & /nsulanim. Chronicles of the kings ofMan and the Isles (Douglas, 1991) (hereafter: Chron. Man), f. 4iv-43r. 31 Moray Reg., no. 80. 32 Ibid., nos. 85 and 86. 33 Ibid., no. 87.

Ferchar Maccintsacairt and the early earls of Ross, c.1200—^2^4

31

belongs to the period between 1224 and 1231, and which grants two davochs of land to Walter de Moravia, Ferchar styled himself, as the granter of the charter, comes de Roff.^^ In none of the charters is Ferchar called ‘Maccintsacairt;’ this style is used only (and perhaps somewhat curiously) in the Chronicle of Melrose. Taken altogether, the evidence of the charters and the chronicles shows beyond much doubt that Ferchar had been made earl by 1232, and it is just possible that the appointment might be as early as about 1226, a date that has often been suggested.’® Certainly there were ample opportunities for Ferchar’s installation during these years: King Alexander’s itinerary took him to the north in 1221, 1226, 1228, and 1230-1, and Professor Duncan’s suggestion that it was on the latter occasion, when Alexander spent Christmas at Elgin, perhaps in Ferchar’s company, that Maccintsacairt was created earl, must carry a good deal of weight.’^ A date of about 1230 for the creation of Ferchar as earl would fit well with the extant charter evidence, which makes it difficult to believe that he had been appointed to the position much before this time. Thus, although the Moray Registrum contains a number of charters issued in the north and having lay witnesses through the 1220s, nowhere does Ferchar appear among the attestors until the mid 1230s. Surely this is more than coin­ cidence, and the message must be that, not only had Ferchar risen from rel­ ative obscurity, but also that a considerable amount of time passed between Ferchar’s defeat of the MacWilliams and MacHeths in 1215 and his appoint­ ment as earl. This therefore creates something of a mystery as to why Alexander waited so long - nearly 15 years - before conferring the title of earl upon Ferchar, though this does not preclude a leadership role for Ferchar in Ross long before his appearance as earl. Perhaps Alexander needed to be cer­ tain of his sympathies before conferring the grant upon him, in which case the years following his knighting represented a sort of probationary period, or per­ haps earlier mentions of Ferchar as earl of Ross have simply slipped through the considerable cracks in both the charter and documentary evidence. In the absence of the survival of the charter conferring the earldom upon Ferchar, or a later copy of it, the exact terms of the grant remain unknown. Yet it is important to try to reconstruct them. Given the feudalization of Scotland and the assimilation of many members of the native aristocracy within the new social order by r.1200, it is difficult to see how the grant could have differed from, say, that conferring Fife upon the native earls of that province in f.1136, the terms of which are known from a document that also dates from the reign of Alexander II.” Moreover, and in the more recent

34 Ibid., no. 259. 35 SP, vii, 232. 36 Secular, Handlist, nos. 56, 95-6, 103, 122, 144 and 161-2. See also Duncan, Kingdom, 529. 37 Scoular, Handlist, no. 87; Nat. MSS. Scot., i, no. 50-

32

R. Andrew McDonald

past, King William had conferred first Lennox (r.1174) and later Garioch (r.1180) upon his brother, Earl David. If it remains impossible to guess the precise service for which Ross was held, there can be little question that it was held in dependent tenure, thereby making Ferchar a tenant-in-chief of the crown. Whenever it occurred, then, and whatever its terms, the significance of the installation of Ferchar as earl of Ross is profound, and casts important light on the processes whereby royal authority was expanded and consolidated in the north. This was, of course, a foremost concern for both William I and his son, Alexander II, By rewarding Ferchar with an earldom for his loyal service, the king was establishing what Keith Stringer has called a ‘strict and durable relationship on the basis of dependent tenure’s^ with a native northern mag­ nate, thereby fitting yet another, and nearly the final, piece into the complex mosaic that represented the various territorial fiefs held by royal appointees in the northeast and far north. This region, a ‘turbulent marchland’,3’ posed an obvious and serious threat to royal power as well as the territorial integrity of the kingdom. William the Lion’s domestic policies were primarily aimed at controlling the north through two means: drawing great lords toward these peripheral regions through grants of lands, often in concentrated blocks, where they could become agents of royal control, and through the controlling of the descent of the northern earldoms.*® The infeftment of Ferchar as earl of Ross in f.1230 must be viewed against the backdrop of these processes. On the one hand, Ferchar’s elevation to an earldom provides yet another example of the phenomenon whereby a provincial fief was held by a royal appointee, thereby buttressing royal authority. His actions in 1215 established his support for royal authority against the unrest so prevalent in the north, while first his knighting, and, later, his creation as an earl, bound him firmly to the Scottish monarchs intent on controlling the outer zones of their kingdom. Yet on the other hand, if the appointment of Ferchar fits into this general pattern, it pro­ vides a contrast in other respects. Whether we are considering the Cornyn earls of Buchan and lords of Badenoch, Earl David as lord of Garioch, or even Hugh Freskin s claim (0.1222) to hold Sutherland, we are dealing with cases where the king imposed, through infeftment or manipulation of the succession to an earldom, newcomers as instruments of royal authority. The appointment of Ferchar moves in the opposite direction. Instead of a strategic frontier zone or a native earldom passing to a newcomer, the earldom was awarded to a native who was not only sympathetic to the cause of the Canmore dynasty but who, through the holding of an earldom in dependent tenure and indoctrina­ tion into knighthood, had also come to terms with the new social order of the thirteenth-century kingdom. Native dynasties in possession of provincial lord-

38 Stringer, Earl David, 17. 39 Ibid., 32. 40 Ibid., 31-2.

Ferchar Maccintsacairt and the early earls of Ross, c.i200-J2y4

33

ships were by no means as unusual in thirteenth-century Scotland as we are sometimes led to believe, but Ferchar’s appointment certainly seems to cut across the grain of royal policy in the far north. Accordingly, the case of Ferchar provides a good opportunity to study both the feudalization of an earl­ dom, albeit in a rather different fashion than Buchan under the Q)myns, and the extension of royal authority into the far north. There must have been many advantages to this arrangement, especially in the turbulent frontier zone. The fact that the holder of the earldom was of native stock must have greatly enhanced his credibility and authority in a region where support for the Scottish kings was reluctant, at best, and must have greatly facilitated his administration of this still largely unassimilated region. One of the means through which this might have been achieved was the recasting of established forms of lordship and authority using a new vocab­ ulary. One of the Gaelic notes in the Book of Deer reveals that the mormaer was also toisech^ probably of his own kindred, so that the same individual could fill two of three ruling grades in the kin-based society (the third being the king of Scots).*’ Even though, as earl of Ross, Ferchar held his lands as a tenant-in-chief of the crown and appeared as comes de Ros in Latin docu­ ments, he might have been styled mormaer in the vernacular, and could have continued to be toisech, providing, perhaps, an illustration of how kin-based and feudal societies could mesh by the thirteenth centuries. Whatever the case may have been, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that with the grant of the earldom of Ross to Ferchar, this hitherto remote and troublesome region was brought more firmly into line with the dominant political and social order of the early thirteenth-century Scottish kingdom. One important question remains: did King Alexander forfeit, and Ferchar displace, an established dynasty in Ross? The history of the earldom of Ross is one of the more opaque issues in twelfth- and early thirteenth-century Scottish history. Closely associated with Moray in early historic times, it was, apparently, still regarded as a sub-district of that region in the mid-twelfth century, when the author of the tract ‘De Situ Albanie’ noted, ‘the sixth king­ dom was Moray and Ross.’*’ We also search in vain for any mormaers or earls of Ross before the time of Malcolm MacHeth, styled earl of Ross on his death in 1168 - although the evidence is not so plentiful that it can be asserted with­ out question there were no native mormaers before this time. Nevertheless, what evidence there is would seem to suggest that the province of Ross came into being only in the second half of the twelfth century. This then raises the important question of when and how it came into existence, which will require a return to Malcolm MacHeth and the events of the iisos. 41 K. Jackson, The Gaelic notes in the Book of Deer (Cambridge, 1972), 30; Bannerman, ‘MacDufP, 26-^ for further discussion. 42 ES, i, cxvi, cxviii.

34

R. Andrew McDonald

The Holyrood chronicler recorded that Malcolm MacHeth, who had been imprisoned at Roxburgh since 1134 and whose sons, aided by Somerled, had been locked in conflict with Malcolm IV since 1153, was reconciled with the king of Scots in 1157 « This brief mention must, in reality, represent an over­ simplification of a very important matter, which can only be glimpsed imper­ fectly. Since he was styled earl of Ross at his death in 1168, it does not require a great leap of the imagination to conclude that Malcolm MacHeth had been granted the earldom of Ross in 1157 as part of his reconciliation with the king, perhaps in exchange for an agreement to terminate his opposition to the Scottish kings (whatever its basis).** However, it may also be that MacHeth was not merely installed in an existing office, but that this agreement actu­ ally created the earldom of Ross, which was severed from the larger region of Moray, thus truncating that province and creating a new frontier zone in the north. Unfortunately, the fate of the earldom after the death of Malcolm MacHeth in 1168 is unknown. No earl of Ross appears on the record until Ferchar in r.1230, and the most likely suggestion is that the earldom was under crown control between about 1168 and 1230*5 It would appear, then, that Ross had been created as an earldom some fifty or sixty years before the time of Ferchar, but that there had been no native mormaers or earls since the death of Malcolm MacHeth. The appointment of Ferchar would therefore represent the revival of the earldom as both a reward for a loyal supporter and as part of the policy of extending royal authority in the north. In this context it is noteworthy that controlling the descent of the northern earldoms was another strategy employed by William the Lion in his quest to make his authority felt throughout his kingdom, but whatever the case may be, there is little doubt that Ferchar represents a *new man* in the north. From rela­ tive obscurity he had stepped into the topmost ranks of the Scottish elite. The implications of Ferchar’s rise are evident when we consider the sub­ sequent history of the MacHeth and MacWilliam insurrections. Indeed, the execution of the rebel leaders by Ferchar in 1215 marked the beginning of the end for the challenges to the Scottish kings from the northern regions of their realm. From that point onward opposition was on a slippery downhill slope into extinction, and by 1230 its demise was complete. After the cooperative venture between MacHeths and MacWilliams in 1215, subsequent uprisings seem half-hearted and impotent, particularly by comparison with those of the preceding decades. In 1228 the lord of Abertarff, Thomas de Thirlestane, was 43 Ibid., ii, 232. 44 A precedent for such an arrangement might be found in the earls of Fife, themselves a cadet branch of the royal kindred, who seem to have foregone their claims to the kingship in return for the earldom of Fife and the privilege of inaugurating the Scottish mon­ archs (cf. Bannerman, ‘MacDufF, 24-7). 45 G.W.S. Barrow, Kingship and unity (Edinburgh, 1981), SI.

Ferchar Maccintsacairl and the early earls of Ross, c.1200-1274

35

attacked in his castle and slain, and part of Inverness burnt, by Gillescop MacWilliam, and in 1230 he, along with Ruairi, the son of Ranald, Somerled’s son, ‘raised up treachery in the remotest territories of Scotland’?^ But this proved to be the last gasp of resistance, for they were soon defeated. The Chronicle of Lanercost goes on to tell how, in the aftermath of the uprising: [...] the same Mac-William’s daughter, who had not long left her mother’s womb, innocent as she was, was put to death, in the burgh of Forfar, in view of the market-place, after a proclamation by the public crier: her head was struck against the column of the [market] cross, and her brains dashed out.*’

The chronicles are silent on the crucial matter of who was responsible for putting down these insurrections of the 1220s. The Cornyns almost certainly played a role in restoring order in 1228, and might well have received the lord­ ship of Badenoch as a reward,*® but it is not clear whether Ferchar took a hand since he is not named in any source as having done so. We are on firmer ground in suggesting that it was the creation of Ferchar as earl of Ross that drove the final nail into the coffin of the northern challenges. Along with the installation of Earl David as lord of Garioch in c.iiSo and the passing of Buchan and Badenoch to the Cornyns in 1212 and the 1220s respectively, the elevation of Ferchar to earl of Ross meant that the opposition led by the MacWilliams and MacHeths in westernmost Moray and Ross was caught in a fatal stranglehold. Most obviously, with Ross held by a supporter of the royal dynasty and, for the first time, fully and firmly incorporated into the king­ dom, the MacWilliams and MacHeths lost Ross as a base of operations. Less obviously, but no less importantly, the fact that Ferchar’s prestige and reach (if not his formal title) extended right across Wester Ross to the west coast also had profound ramifications for the MacWilliams. These inveterate oppo­ nents of the Scottish Kings had launched their incursions from bases in north­ ern Ireland and Irish levies made up an important part of their armies. The Scottish kings had reacted to these circumstances as early as 1212 when, in the wake of another MacWilliam challenge in 1211, Anglo-Scottish campaigns were undertaken in the north of Ireland with the apparent aim of crippling MacWilliam incursions at source.*’ Even though the province of Ross did not yet incorporate Wester Ross, the appointment of Ferchar cannot but have 46 Chron. Bower (Watt), v, 143. 47 ES, ii, 471. 48 Chron. Bower (Watt), v, 143; Barrow, ‘Badenoch and Strathspey: i’, 6; Duncan, Kingdom, 529. 49 K.J. Stringer, ‘Periphery and core in thirteenth-century Scotland: Alan son of Roland, lord of Galloway and constable of Scotland', in A. Grant and K.J. Stringer (eds). Medieval Scotland: crown, lordship and community (Edinburgh, 1993), 82-J13, at 87-8.

36

R. Andrew McDonald

played a role in - indeed perhaps completed the process of - choking off the MacWilliam lifeline to Ireland. Once this umbilical was severed MacWilliam challenges were doomed: those of the 1220s show little evidence of Irish assis­ tance and appear more desperate than dangerous. By 1230, the so-called ‘pacification of the north was complete’®® — and Ferchar must have played no small role in it, however imperfect our sources. For the first time a native magnate loyal to the king of Scots held power in the far north, and from this date the Scottish kings were no longer troubled by uprisings there, allowing them to turn their full attention toward the assim­ ilation of the western seaboard in the decades from 1220s.®’ As we shall see, the Rosses played their role in these momentous events as well. Moreover, Ferchar’s career is of fundamental importance to Ross itself, and has been seen as representing a turning point in the history of that province. Whether or not Malcolm III had been able to exert much influence there, throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Ross and western Moray were a ‘wild debatable land knowing little peace.’®’ Under Ferchar, Ross ceased to repre­ sent the effective limit of royal authority and became an integral part of the Scottish king’s realm.®® The role of Ferchar as a supporter of royal authority was underlined 20 years after his involvement in the suppression of the 1215 uprising, and in equally dramatic style. The context was a succession crisis in Galloway. In February of 1234, Alan, the son of Roland, the Lord of Galloway, died, having failed to leave an imdisputed heir. King Alexander II sought to uphold feudal law, which dictated a division among Alan’s three legitimate daughters as co­ heiresses, while the Community of Galloway petitioned the king to preserve the integrity of the region intact. Conflict soon ensued. The Chronicle of Melrose describes how, in the summer of 1235, a royal army was ambushed as it made camp in Galloway and was only saved when Ferchar and his army from Ross arrived on the scene; In the beginning of the contest, the earl of Ross, named Maccintsacairt, arrived, and attacked the enemy in the rear, and after the enemy was aware of this, he turned his back and made for the mountains and woods. But the aforesaid earl, and many others besides, pursued them, making a great slaughter, and harassing them until after dark.®*

It has been said that the victory of Ferchar and his northern host over the Galwegians represents ‘bitter retribution for the Gallovidians’ defeat of the

$0 Duncan, Kingdom, 529. 51 R.A. McDonald, The kingdom of the Isles: Scotland's western seahoard, c.s!oo-c.ijj6 (East Linton, 1997), chs. 4-5. 52 Stringer, Earl David, 32. 53 Grant, ‘Province of Ross’, 122-3. 54 ii, 496.

Ferchar Maccintsacairt and the early earls of Ross, c.i200-12^4

37

men of Ross and Moray under Roland’s leadership in ii86’.ss While at one level, that of the rank and file, this may well be true, it nonetheless misses much of the significance of both Ferchar’s actions in 1235 and Roland’s in 1186/87. In both cases a native leader loyal to the Canmore kings had sup­ pressed an uprising in a remote corner of the kingdom, demonstrating not only the integration of native dignitaries into the new order of society, but also their crucial role as arbiters of royal authority. Robin Frame has demonstrated that much of the basis of the king’s con­ trol in Scotland in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries rested upon his ability not only to bring traditional figures into his service, but also to strike a balance between old and new in Scottish society.®^ The case of Ferchar illus­ trates both points nicely. There can be no doubt that Maccintsacairt repre­ sented a traditional figure — a member of the northern aristocracy — drawn into royal service, and tied to the political and social core of the kingdom through his promotion to an earldom, held in dependent tenure. It has also been demonstrated how the appointment of Ferchar as earl of Ross fitted into the larger pattern whereby royal authority was consolidated in the north through the creation of territorial lordships held by men loyal to the crown. What remains, however, is to consider other factors that facilitated the merg­ ing of old and new, and in particular, the social processes of assimilation at work on Ferchar. As will be evident from the events discussed in this paper thus far, the processes whereby the peripheral zones of the kingdom were brought into alignment with the core are most often considered in military or political terms. We have, indeed, seen Ferchar primarily as a military figure, in both 1215 and 1235, and as a political one by virtue of his appointment as earl of Ross. But although these mechanisms are important and cannot be ignored, historians have increasingly devoted their attention to exploring other, more subtle, processes that facilitated the closing of the gap between core and periphery. In a European-wide context, Robert Bartlett has assessed the roles of colonization, accommodation, and acculturation in contributing to what he has termed the ‘Europeanization of Europe’, while in the context of England’s relations with its neighbours. Professor R.R. Davies has demonstrated the importance of social processes like overlordship, gift giving, hospitality, knight­ hood and marriage.®’ If the parameters of our investigation are broadened to consider mechanisms of acculturation and accommodation, then we can explore

55 D. Brooke, Wild men and holy places (Edinburgh, 1994), 136. $6 R. Frame, The political development of the British Isles, 1100-1400 (Oxford, 1990), 39-44. 57 R. Bartlett, The making of euTope: conquest, colonization and cultural change, (Princeton, 1993); R.R. Davies, Domination and conquest: the experience of Ireland, Scotland and Wales rioo-t^oo (Cambridge, 1990).

38

R. Andrew McDonald

the significance of Ferchar’s knighting in 1215, his matrimonial politics, and his religious patronage. As we have seen, as an immediate reward for his role in suppressing the 1215 uprising, Ferchar was knighted. This action was not without its conse­ quences, and, like his appointment as earl, it served not only to bind him to the king, but also to indoctrinate him into the new order of Scottish society. The cult of knighthood reached the zenith of popularity in Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and was imported into Scotland by the Europeanizing monarchs of the Canmore dynasty. David I, Malcolm IV, William I and the two Alexanders were all knighted, and Malcolm IV and William I were such ardent devotees of chivalry that a contemporary chron­ icle remarked that recent kings of Scots appeared more French than Scottish.5® But interest in knighthood and in the social conventions that accompanied it was not the exclusive preserve of the Scottish kings or their Anglo-Norman supporters. Many members of native kindreds also adopted the conventions of knighthood, including the earls of Fife, Strathearn and Dunbar, all of whom portrayed themselves as equestrians, with the trappings of knighthood on their seals. But these were families with close connections to the royal family and the feudalized inner zones of the kingdom. In the margins, the penetration of Anglo-French culture proceeded more slowly. In the Hebrides, for instance, the descendants of Somerled adopted the styles and status of knighthood from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, while Lachlann (d. 1200), the son of Uhtred, the son of Fergus of Galloway, who is better known by his French name of Roland, was simultaneously lord of Galloway and constable of Scotland.®’ The adoption of knighthood by native kindreds is particularly important because, as Professor Davies has reminded us, it ‘opened the door into an exhilarating international world of aristocratic fellowship and cus­ toms’,^ thereby promoting accommodation and acculturation between AngloNormans and members of the Gaelic elite in Britain. Through his knighting at the hands of Alexander II in 1215, Ferchar joined the ranks of other mem­ bers of the Gaelic elite in coming to terms with wider European trends, and he fits well into the pattern whereby not only Scottish lords but also Welsh princes and Manx kings sought entry into this exclusive club. As a great Gaelic noble who was also knighted, Ferchar straddled two worlds, Gaelic and Anglo-Norman. In this he bears comparison with other contemporary

58 See n. 2 above. There is no study of knighthood in Scotland, but the subject is considered in a British context by D. Crouch, The image of aristocracy in Britain, 1000-1300 (London, 1992), ch. 4. Also valuable on the topic of European influences in Scotland is D.D.R. Owen, ffllliam the Lion, 1143-1214: kingship and culture (East Linton, 1997). 59 On the MacSorleys: McDonald, Kingdom of the Isles, -jh-q, 145-8; on Roland: £S, ii, 356 and n. 3; Duncan, Kingdom, 182-6. 60 Davies, Domination and conquest, 51.

Ferchar Aiaccintsacairt and the early earls of Ross, c.1200-1274

39

figures of the periphery that were moving closer to the inner zone of the king­ dom. Ewen of Argyll, one of the MacSorleys and still very much a formida­ ble Hebridean sea-king between about 1248 and 1268, was nevertheless described as a ‘vigorous and very handsome knight’ by the English chroni­ cler Matthew Paris.*^’ And the bicephalous nature of Alan of Galloway’s lord­ ship has been recently revealed in a masterful way by Keith Stringer, who has shown how that great magnate moved comfortably in both the immedi­ ate, Gaelic-Norse, maritime world of his lordship, and the larger, Europeanized, thirteenth-century kingdom of the Scots.®* Knighthood was one route to social assimilation, and marriage was another. An important social and political tool for cementing alliances, forging good relations, and increasing social status, marriage inevitably blurred linguistic and ethnic distinctions, helped natives and new > I S

104

Steve Boardman

.seems to have been a direct response to the premature death of Duncan’s eldest son and designated heir, Gillespie, sometime shortly after lo July I432.*5 The granting of a substantial heritable estate to Colin was almost cer­ tainly the immediate price that Duncan paid to secure the recognition of Gillespie’s infant son (also Colin) as heir to the Campbell lordship. Significantly, Duncan was to retain the Glenorchy lands for his own life­ time, so that the elder Colin would receive full possession only after his father’s death. The settlement of October 1432 may also have seen Colin of Glenorchy achieve formal recognition within the clan as the man who could be expected to play an increasingly prominent role in running the affairs of the kindred on behalf of his ageing father. Traditional Campbell histories certainly describe Colin of Glenorchy acting as ‘tutor’ to his young nephew.’^ It is difficult to view this in a strict legal sense as indicating that Colin oversaw the exploitation of the lands and offices pertaining to the younger Colin during the latter’s legal minority. Duncan Campbell lived on to 1453, and his longevity meant that his grandson must already have been of age when he succeeded to the estates; it also meant that Colin of Glenorchy’s restraint in regards to his own possible claims to the chieftain­ ship was never fully tested. The entire concept of a minority was, of course, supposedly alien to a lordship where the prime concern was to place control of a clan’s resources and men in the hands of an active adult male from the ruling lineage. That Duncan, however, was prepared to countenance minori­ ties both in the main line and in cadet branches is borne out in charters issued in 1447 and 1450 in favour of Ranald Malcolmson of Craignish and John Alexanderson Campbell of Melfort. In 1447 it was specified that the offices of steward, toschachdor and mair of Craignish would be exercised by Ranald Malcolmson and his heirs male and that, in the event of a minority, the offices would be administered by the heir’s tutor with the advice of his ‘parentelae videlicet Clandowil Craginche’. A similar right was given to the heirs of John Alexanderson Campbell in respect of the hereditary toschachdorship of Melfort. During a minority the office would be exercised by the ‘nearest friends’ of the heir, of his country {patria} and ‘clan’ {nacio}. The offices would thus be effectively and continuously discharged, but there would be no permanent challenge to the rights of the lineal heir.*’ 25 Gillespie’s assent to grants and agreements made by his father Duncan had been expressly noted up to 10 July 1432. There were, however, no references to Gillespie’s approval of the Glenorchy charter or any charters issued thereafter. Gillespie was certainly dead by 1440. 26 Highland Papers, ii, 96-7. 27 NAS, RHI/2/87; NAS, RH6/335. For the use of these terms elsewhere (cf. Moray Reg., 382; Munros, Acts Lords Isles, no. 5). In the first ‘parcntela’ describes the two kindreds involved in the infamous fight on the north inch of Perth in 1396. In the second, ‘parentela’ and ‘de nacione clan Fynwyne’ occur in a 1354 agreement between John, lord of the Isles and John, lord of Lorn.

J

The Campbells and charter lordship in medieval Argyll

105

After 1432 and the death of the heir-designate Gillespie, the role of Duncan’s remaining sons in the maintenance of the Campbell lordship was obviously heightened. Moreover, the continued goodwill of these men was required if the lordship was to pass uncontested to their half-nephew Colin. It was hardly a surprise, then, that before his death in 1453 Duncan seems to have alienated considerable estates and local offices, in heritage, to his sur­ viving sons and other Campbell cadets.®^ The adverse effects of Duncan’s grants on the power and resources of the chiefly lineage should not be exag­ gerated. Many of the heritable estates were created from conquest lands that the clan had obtained during Duncan’s own lifetime. More importantly, the controlled creation of dependent heritable appanages for junior members of the chiefly lineage was not a threat to the territorial and political unity and integrity of the Campbell lordship, but a means of preserving it against internal dispute and the division of the lordship by force. The Campbell charter form seems to have been adopted by other kin­ dreds in mid-Argyll and Cowal either independently or in direct emulation of the lords of Lochawe. As early as November 1410 Robert Lamont of Inveryne granted a male entail charter with a reversionary clause in favour of his kinsman ‘Celestino Angusii dicto Maksowirle’.®’ By the 1430s the MacLachlans of Strathlachlan were also granting out male entailed estates and offices in formal charters to cadet branches.3° A more explicit example of the motivation behind the introduction of charter tenure into the rela­ tionship between heads of kin and their kinsmen occurred in an arbitration of 17 February 1433 between Robert Lamont, lord of Inveryne, and his near cousin and ‘man’, Finlay Ewenson, lord of Ardlamont. Significantly, the chief arbiter in the dispute was none other than Duncan Campbell, lord of Lochawe. The terms of the agreement make plain that Robert, lord of Inveryne, had been pursuing claims to the superiority and ‘grounde rycht’ of Ardlamont and Ardcalmisaig against Finlay, who was the head of a cadet branch of the Lamonts.3' The basis of Robert’s claim to Ardlamont and 28 Charters issued by Duncan towards the end of his life had the significant effect of reserv­ ing property rights to cadet branches of this generation before the reversionary clause in favour of the main line became effective. On 6 July 1452, for example, Duncan granted his grandson Colin mac Niall Campbell of Ormidale lands in the barony of Kinlochruel at the southern end of Cowal, to be held by Colin and his heirs male, whom failing Duncan Campbell of Kilmichael, Duncan’s son and his heirs male, whom failing Gillespie of Otter and his male heirs, whom all failing, legitimate heirs of said Colin whomsoever (cf. RMS, iv, no. 791). The lands had been granted to Duncan by James II the month before (cf. RMS, ii, no. 571). As such the grant involved the redistribution of conquest rather than core lands. 29 Significantly, the witnesses to the charter included two of Duncan Campbell’s brothers, John and Duncan Mor, as well as John MacLachlan, lord of Strathlachlan. 30 Argyll and Bute District Archives, Poltalloch Writs, Dunadd nos. I and 2. Summaries in NAS, GD43 Poltalloch Writs Inventory. 31 NLS, Ch.7364.

io6

Steve Boardman

Ardcalmisaig is not made explicit, although it seems likely that he regarded them as lands that he had the right to dispose of as the Lamont chief. The terms of the arbitration suggest that as part of his attempt to remove the established cadet branch represented by Finlay from Ardlamont, Robert was seeking a formal grant of the lands from the king. Finlay agreed that if Robert did obtain the king’s licence and goodwill he [Finlay] ‘salbe redy and weyl wylland to hald the said lands of the said Robert and his ayris under ward, raleff and mariage’. If the king’s licence was not forthcoming, then Robert would continue his ‘good lordship* and cousinage towards Finlay and ‘mak na chalans na clam to the grounde rycht’ or superiority of Ardlamont. If and when Robert obtained the superiority he would ‘chartyr the said Finlo and his ayris als sekyrly as ... thar parte wyl ask to be chartyryt be law and reson ... ward, releff and mariage’. If Robert’s ‘nevo and ayr’, ‘Duncane Gyllaspyson’, refused to be bound by the agreement, then Robert was to act against him ‘be the consal and ordinance of the said Lord Duncan Campbele’. It is clear that chartered tenure under the conditions of ward, relief and marriage was regarded as a solution to the problems between the two men. The securing of the relationship in this way clearly established the rights of Robert and his heir as overlords of Ardlamont, but it also provid­ ed significant guarantees for Finlay Ewenson, ensuring security of tenure, an honourable status, and the rendering of relatively light and closely defined services. The definition of tenure in these terms seems to have been advan­ tageous to cadet branches. Lack of definition, on the other hand, strength­ ened the position of the chief, not only in terms of the territorial resources he could lay claim to, but also the type of services he could extort from the occupiers of land under his lordship. The granting of male entail charters to kinsmen thus seems to have become established at around the same time in the Campbell, Lamont and MacLachlan kindreds as a means of responding to tenurial disputes. It is, of course, tempting to see a direct causal relationship between the expansion of formal charter lordship, the granting of heritable appanages to cadet branches, and the long term easing of internal political tensions in Clan Campbell and other mid-Argyll and Cowal kindreds. Yet the idea of a pro­ found and irrevocable change in attitude towards succession and land own­ ership brought about by the deliberate and calculated policies of one or two individual Campbell lords is far too neat. The charters themselves, as we have seen, tended to confirm rather than overthrow existing inheritance pat­ terns. They were moreover, drawn up in a particular context to deal with specific relationships and were not intended to address the issue of ‘expan­ sion from the top downwards’ in the abstract. Most importantly, they were produced at a point when wider circumstances made this type of settlement both possible and desirable.

The Campbells and charter lordship in medieval Argyll

107

For a variety of reasons, political and territorial tensions within Clan Campbell during the fifteenth century were likely to have been negligible even without the recasting of the relationship between the main line and the cadet branches in formal terms. First, the rapid accumulation of ‘conquest’ lands and lordships in the second half of the fourteenth century meant that the resources available to Colin (d. 1412-13) and Duncan for dispersal to their sons were considerable. The generous territorial settlements on the cadet branches founded by these two men probably also reflected the two minor succession crises that affected the family in the period. The setting aside of Duncan’s elder brother John Anfhann before 1393, and the prema­ ture death of Duncan’s son and designated heir Gillespie in 1432 may well have placed the cadet branches in a powerful position to press for heritable tenure by ward, relief and marriage.3’ The situation was compounded by the fact that fifteenth-century Campbell lords produced remarkably few sons to compete for resources with the families descended from Duncan’s sons and brothers. Between f.1430 and the early sixteenth century the main line of the clan produced only one cadet branch, that of Lundie in Angus. The established Campbell cadets thus enjoyed relative tenurial security without the need to resort to dynastic challenges to the chiefly line or to assert their political and territorial independence. The natural removal of downward pressure on older Campbell cadets through the biological failure of the main line to produce numerous sons during the fifteenth century may well explain the low-key nature of dynastic politics within the family. The descendants of Duncan’s sons continued to dominate the kindred during the later fif­ teenth century since Colin, who became earl of Argyll in 1457-8, had no brothers and naturally employed his uncles and cousins in the expansion of Campbell interests. A strict formula was employed in Campbell charters nar­ rating the destination of newly acquired estates, on the failure of the main line, to male heirs of the cadet branches descended from Duncan in order of seniority. Thus a royal grant of 160 merks worth of land in the lordship of Knapdale to Colin, earl of Argyll, on 26 February 1481, was entailed in favour of the cadets of Glenorchy, Kilmichael, Otter, Ormidale and Ardkinglass.53 Moreover, the cadet branches continued to receive direct patronage from the first and second earls of Argyll in the new areas, such as Knapdale and Lorn, brought under Campbell overlordship late in the fif­ teenth century .3* 32 Similarly, the Lamont arbitration of 1433 may have been prompted by the fact that Robert’s son Duncan had pre-deceased him, leaving Robert’s grandson in a vulnerable position. 33 RMS, ii, no. 1464. 34 In 1479, for example, Colin, first earl of Argyll’s sheriff depute in Argyll was his uncle Duncan Campbell of Kilmichael (cf. NAS, GD137/3783). In 1490 Colin granted Dugald Campbell, Duncan’s son and heir, the office of Steward of Knapdale with an appropriate territorial settlement to act as his fee (cf. NAS, GD103/2/43); see NAS,

io8

Steve Boardman

Even if the stability of Clan Campbell in the fifteenth century was large­ ly a product of short-term and specific circumstances, the underlying atti­ tudes towards succession and inheritance may well have been slowly modi­ fied. The drawing up of charters implied, in theory at least, that ownership of clan lands and leadership of the family were rights that pertained per­ sonally to Duncan and that they should thereafter pass to his ‘lawful’ heirs. The succession of Colin, the first-born son of Gillespie, the first-born son of Duncan to the chieftainship in 1453 might thus appear a triumph for the principle of primogeniture over '^traditionaF customs such as tanistry and elective chieftainship. However, work on succession patterns in Ireland and Wales has challenged the idea that ‘primogeniture’ and ‘tanistry’ ever really represented opposed ideologies in terms of regulating inheritance and suc­ cession, and has emphasized that both were essentially driven by the same concern to ensure the integrity and unity of aristocratic lordships through several generations. Moreover, it is clear that protecting and promoting the lineal descent of unified lands and rights of lordship was a goal shared by aristocratic families across the British Isles and Ireland, whether descended from Frankish incomers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries or from estab­ lished Welsh and Gaelic speaking elites. There was thus a potential conver­ gence between the ambitions of ‘native’ lords in terms of regulating succes­ sion to their lordships and the principles underlying feudal law. The con­ vergence became especially obvious where the choice of heirs to ‘native’ lordships became restricted by the pre-designation of a successor during the lifetime of the incumbent lord. Where the pre-designated heir was the lord’s son (although not necessarily his eldest son), a pattern of father to son inher­ itance through several generations could result. In twelfth and thirteenth century Wales, for example, the princely houses of Gwynedd, Powys and Deheubarth struggled to establish lineal succession and the impartibility of their lordship through pre-designation of the prince’s son as heir and the creation of a system of politically and tenurially dependent appanages with­ in the larger lordship to provide for junior members of the royal house. This looks remarkably similar to the strategies adopted by Campbell lords in the period after 1350. From the mid-fourteenth century onwards the heir to the Campbell patrimony, invariably a son of the incumbent lord, was des­ ignated during his father’s lifetime and was associated with his father in run­ ning the lordship.3^ Indeed, it is more than possible that Duncan, and then

GD437/160/1-3 for the patronage of Glenorchy cadets. 35 J. Beverley Smith, ‘Dynastic suc­ cession in medieval Wales’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 33 (1986), 199-232; idem, ‘The succession to Welsh princely inheritance: the evidence reconsidered’, 64-81. See also Duncan O Corrain, ‘Irish regnal succession; a reappraisal’, in Stadia Hibemica, ii {1971), 7‘U9-’ 3^ NAS, RHi/2/87, 16 August 1361. Colin Campbell ‘filio et heredi’ of Gillespie

The Campbells and charter lordship in medieval Argyll

log

his son Gillespie {d. 1432), were recognized as heirs at the same time as their fathers succeeded to the lordshipJ’ This could have been an adaptation of the practice of nominating a successor, or tanist, at the succession of a new lord. The status of the ‘heirs’ to the Campbell lordship recorded in the four­ teenth and fifteenth century may thus reflect not simply the expectation of feudal law, but also the fact that these men had been expressly accepted as their father’s successor, with an uncontested right to succeed to his lordship, through the consent, nominal or otherwise, of the wider kin-group.3^ The steady entrenchment of lineal succession in Clan Campbell was encouraged by two additional factors. First, the longevity of three successive chiefs, Gillespie (d. 1385x93), Colin (d. 1412/13) and Duncan (d. 1453) ensured that their named heirs were adults by the time that succession to the lordship became an issue. Second, royal charters conveying land and office to Campbell lords and their preferred heirs provided an external val­ idation of, and support for, a distinct line of descent within the kindred.39 The recognition of a named heir or a line of descent by the king as overlord clearly gave that individual or group a privileged status. The repeated royal grants in favour of Campbell lords and their legitimate lineal descen­ dants (whom failing named collateral branches and, finally, the nearest heirs bearing the Campbell name and arms) effectively narrowed the range of men who could ha^e been regarded as eligible for lordship by adding the criteria of acceptability to the crown.*® The general willingness of the late medieval Campbell of Loch Awe; the 138a grant of a lieutenancy within Argyll was made to Gillespie Campbell and Colin his son and Colin’s heirs male. In 1393 and 1395 Duncan Campbell apppeared as ‘filio et herede Colini Cambell’ A.T. and St A. Lib., p. 5. Duncan’s own son, Gillespie was consistently noted as his father’s heir in charters issued between, 1414, when Gillespie was probably around twenty years of age, and his death in 1432 [cf. NAS, GD79/3/4]. When Duncan made provision for masses for Gillespie in 1440 it was thought worth recording that he was Duncan’s first-born son (cf. RMS, ii, no.346). Most strikingly of course, Duncan’s grandson, Colin, was acknowledged as his heir from 1440 onwards at a time when at least two of Colin’s uncles were alive and active (cf. NAS, RH6/304 and 325). 37 Duncan was named as heir in the first charter issued by his father as lord in January 1393. Similarly Gillespie was described as heir in Duncan’s first formal charter in June 1414. 38 The late medieval Irish material provides a rather different picture of the role of the tanist in that society (cf. Simms, Kings, 54-7) where the evidence seems to indicate that Irish tanists were most often contemporaries of the ruling lord rather than his children (cf. Nicholls, Ireland, 25-8). Initially, the father to son succession in Clan Campbell could have been an example of what Nicholls has described as ‘pseudo primogeniture’, where the underlying inheritance patterns arc obscured by the fact that successive chiefs outlived their younger brothers to be succeeded in effective control of the kindred by adult sons (cf. Nicholls, Ireland, 27). See also J.W.M. Bannerman, ‘The lordship of the Isles: historical background’. Appendix II in Late medieval monumental sculpture in the Wess Highlands (Edinburgh, 1977), 99-100, 113, 114, 127, 132-3 and at 148 for a discussion of tanistry in a Hebridean context. 39 vi, no. 203; 7?M5, ii, nos. 989, 1464, 2354 and 3622-3. 40 All charters issued to or by Campbell

no

Steve Boardman

Scottish crown to confirm the property rights of west coast kindreds in male entail charters and, thereafter, to ratify succession arrangements designed to preserve and unify lordships provides a clear contrast with the situation in Ireland and Wales, where the English crown (or more accurately its local agents and representatives) regularly sought to undermine powerful native lordships by fomenting internal conflict and competition?' The attitude of the Scottish royal house harmonized with the interests of a widening Campbell establishment whose territorial security was, increasingly, bound up with and guaranteed by the continuation of the dominant lordly lineage established in the fourteenth century. The reality of succession to the Campbell lordship as a process deter­ mined and dominated by father to son descent was exemplified in the grant made in 1440 by Duncan Campbell in favour of the parish kirk of Dunoon. The beneficiaries of the candles to be maintained in front of the image of the Virgin Mary were to include Duncan’s grandfather, Gillespie Campbell, Duncan’s father, Colin Campbell, and Gillespie, Duncan’s recently deceased son and heir. The grant traced three generations, and mapped out the expect­ ed fourth and fifth, of a lordly lineage, for amongst the witnesses was Colin Campbell, described as Duncan’s grandson and heir.^^ The lineal succession from father to son over five generations outlined in the 1440 grant was not, however, an unqualified celebration of primogeniture. Duncan, his father Colin, and his grandfather Gillespie had all succeeded to the lordship ahead of elder brothers or half-brothers. That the succession to the Campbell lord­ ship retained a discretionary element is most strongly suggested by Duncan’s own rise to power, and the setting aside of his elder brother John Anfhann, who may have been physically or mentally incapacitated.*^ Indeed, both the Campbells and the Clan Donald often seem to have employed charters to help in re-routing the succession away from a lord’s eldest son in favour of his preferred heir. Against this background, the adoption of charter lordship by Campbell lords can hardly be seen as a development that radically transformed establords stipulated that the descent of lands and office should be limited to legitimate heirs of the original grantee. In theory, the insistence on canonical legitimacy also limited the number of men eligible to compete for clan lands and control of the lordship. In practice, any theo­ retical Campbell preference for canonical legitimacy was combined with a willingness to grant considerable lands to the ‘illegitimate’ sons of the lord’s irregular liaisons. These ‘natural sons’, although allowed to occupy their own estates in heritage, seem to have been excluded from wider rights to clan property, for cadet branches founded by ‘natural’ sons were not named in any of the general Sfteenth century entails of Campbell property rights (cf. W.D.H. Sellar, ‘Marriage, divorce and concubinage in Gaelic Scotland’, In TXjSI, 51 (1978), 464-93). 41 Sec Aonghus’ article below/above, pp 000-00 for the adoption of these tactics by the Scottish crown in relation to the lordship of the Isles late in the fifteenth century. 42 NAS, RH6/304. 43 Highland Papers, ii, 93-4.

The Campbells and charter lordship in medieval Argyll

111

lished practice in terms of the succession to lands and power, for there was already a well entrenched preference for father to son descent. The real test for the primacy of lineal descent, of course, was whether the wider kindred could accept a minority for the son of a previous chief, a period of poten­ tial political weakness that the nomination of an adult successor could pre­ vent. The issue was never fully put to the test during the fifteenth century because the premature death of Gillespie Campbell in 1432 did not produce a conventional minority. The vulnerability of Colin’s claim to headship of the clan was largely mitigated by the longevity of his grandfather Duncan, who did not die until shortly after 14 February 1453.*^ By March 1440 Colin was formally acknowledged as his grandfather’s heir, and thereafter gave his consent to formal grants made by his grandfather until Duncan’s death.*s By 1453 Colin was an adult whose right and suitability to succeed to the lord­ ship had been firmly established. Overall, it seems that succession practices regarded as ‘characteristic’ of Gaelic lordships in late medieval Ireland (and by extension Scotland), were not to be found inside Clan Campbell in the fifteenth century precisely because there was no reason for the clan elite to resort to them. Indeed, it could be argued that the entire notion of a set of well-defined principles gov­ erning the succession to ‘Gaelic lordships’ is rather misleading, especially when the model is drawn from the practice found in a political and social context that was different in crucial ways from that of medieval Argyll. Studies of native society in Wales and Ireland during the later middle ages have emphasized the flexibility, diversity and practicality of succession arrangements.**^ The development of Campbell (and indeed Lamont and MacLachlan) lordship in Argyll was yet another variant that reflected local conditions, opportunities and accidents; it certainly did not represent the abandonment of one set of rules governing the exercise of lordship, and the adoption of a new set of opposed principles. The care taken by Campbell lords in protecting male descent within their own kindred stood in marked contrast to their exploitation of claims against other families. Where they stood to benefit the chiefs of Clan Campbell explicitly recognized the validity of the transfer of property rights through females and obtained possession or superiority over a number of major lord­ ships through the rights of heiresses or by manipulating uncertain succes­ sions.*’ Once the Campbells had established their rights through female suc­ cession in a particular territory, they generally moved swiftly to ensure that the title to all or part of the lordship would never be lost through the same 44 NAS, GD103/2/40. 45 NAS, RH6/304 and 325. 46 Sec Smith, ‘Dynastic succession’; idem, ‘Welsh princely inheritance’; 0 Corrain, ‘Irish regnal succession’. 47 For example, Craignish (1360s) SHS Misc., iv, 219-20, Otter (1430s) and most strikingly Lorn (1470)

II2

Steve Boardman

process by establishing strict male entails.*’ Once the Campbell lord had obtained title or possession of lands and lordships they became part of a closed tenurial system, access to which was controlled by the clan chief, that remained essentially unconnected to, and unaffected by, the workings and conventions of the wider property market and the common law, especially in respect to female descent. The final unusual feature of the charters issued by Duncan Campbell early in the fifteenth century was the stipulation that the recipient of the grant and his heirs male should render their homage, service and special ret­ inue {homagio et servicio ac speciali retinencia) to Duncan and his heirs. Duncan’s grandson and successor, Colin, and the Campbells of Glenorchy also granted lands to their kinsmen and allies using the special retinue clause. In the fourteenth century and early in the fifteenth century ‘special retinue’ was the term commonly used to describe the obligations incorpo­ rated in formal contracts of retainership and service.*’ The granter of a bond of special retinue service was typically bound to serve the recipient of the bond whenever required in peace and war with his council and help and all his power against all mortal men for the duration of his life.®® It has been suggested that the recourse to written bonds reflected the concerns of an age in which relationships based solely on landholding were increasingly inade­ quate in terms of guaranteeing ‘real’ personal lordship or service and in which the oaths and ceremonies of homage and fealty accompanying grants of land had become, or were becoming, routine acts of commercial con­ veyancing that no longer automatically implied the personal loyalty or ser­ vice of the grantee and his heirs to their feudal superior.®' As a response to the inadequacies of the ‘feudal contract’ as a genuine determinant of politi­ cal and social loyalty, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are said to have seen an increased use of formal bonds of retinue, manrent, and maintenance, 48 In 1469-70 Colin Campbell acquired the lordship of Lorn ostensibly on the basis of his marriage to a daughter and co-heiress of John Stewart, lord of Lorn. On 17 April 1470 James HI confirmed the lordship of Lorn to Colin Campbell, carl of Argyll and his heirs male, whom failing Campbell of Glenorchy and his heirs male and thereafter to the male heirs of the cadet branches of Ormidale, Kilmichael and Otter, whom all failing to Colin’s legitimate heirs bear­ ing his arms and surname (cf. RMS, ii, no. 989). Argyll’s acquisition of Lorn, which was in a male entail, was only superficially a case of succession by co-heiresses. The crucial element was Argyll’s exploitation of a dispute between John, lord of Lorn, and his natural sons on the one hand, and John’s brother and heir by entail, Walter Stewart (cf. NAS, RH6/372; RMS, ii, no. 573). 49 J. Wormaid, Lords and men in Scotland: Bonds of Manrent, 1^42-1603 (Edinburgh, 1985), 42-5. Thereafter, Wormaid argues, contracts of special retinue were super­ seded by Bonds of Manrent, although the latter fulfilled a similar function and reuined much of the terminology of the ‘special rednue’ agreements. Indeed, bonds of manrent could bind men to be ‘of specbl retinue’ to a particular lord. 50 RMS, i, no. 823. 51 Wormald, Lords and men, 8-11, 22-^ and at 26; Duncan, Kingdom, 407-8.

The Campbells and charter lordship in medieval Argyll

113

through which the reciprocal obligations of lordship and service were assured in a relationship that was not necessarily dependent on a transfer of land from lord to man. Overall, the separation of bonding from landholding is perhaps less per­ vasive than Wormaid suggests, so that the Campbell charters are not as idio­ syncratic as they appear at first in linking tenure with ‘special retinue’ or ‘manrent’ service.s’ Nevertheless, they do represent a unique and consis­ tently applied charter form that needs to be accounted for. A possible expla­ nation lies in the social and political conditions of Argyll and the Isles, where effective tenure of land was never simply a matter of legal title. The condi­ tions of the region made it essential that those holding land of Duncan Campbell and his successors did indeed perform certain personal services, both military and political, for their overlord. It is thus interesting to note the correlation between the appearance of the ‘special retinue’ clause and the stipulation that the beneficiary of the grant should provide galley service to Campbell lords.s’ The linking of a bond guaranteeing unrestricted military or personal service with tenure may have been an attempt to express and guarantee in feudal form the established obligation of attendance in the over­ lord’s host.54 The lands granted out under the conditions of special retinue were, typically, compact groups of pennylands, an ancient unit of land assessment upon which, among other things, the burden of naval service seems to have been calculated. In the later middle ages the pennyland still served as a basic unit by which forinsec service or service in the common army of Scotland was levied.ss The lands granted out for retinue service by Campbell lords during the fifteenth century thus carried with them an oblig­ ation to provide naval forces, an obligation that the charters recorded as a feudal render. The specification of galley service as a feudal due in charter form was especially noticeable in the reign of Robert I, no doubt reflecting that monarch’s need to secure the western seaboard against the naval forces of the exiled MacDougall lords of Argyll and to provide transportation for the troops involved in the Bruce invasion of Ireland.s® Robert I was not, 52 S. Boardman, ‘Politics and the feud in late medieval Scotland’ (unpublished PhD thesis University of St Andrews, 1989), chaps 1-3 and appendix (hereafter: Boardman ‘Thesis’). 53 For examples besides Duncan’s grants already noted see NAS, GDso/184/io; Strathclyde Regional Archives, T-CL/Bundle LXXXII/ no. ii; NAS, GD5o/25/(i); M.O. Campbell, A memorial history of the Campbells of Melfort (1882), Appendix no. 2; NAS, GDi 12/2/40/1(5); RMS, ii, no. 3622. 54 Duncan, Kingdom, 378-83; J.W.M. Bannerman, ‘The Scots language and the kin-based society’, in Gaelic and Scots in harmony; Proceedings of the Second International Conference on the Languages of Scotland (Glasgow, 1988), 10. 55 A.R. Easson ‘Systems of land assessment in Scotland before 1400’ (unpublished PhD thesis University of Edinburgh, 1986), 117-20 and at 125-6. 56 G.W.S. Barrow, Robert Bruce and the communi­ ty of the realm of Scotland (3rd ed. Edinburgh, 1988), 289-92; RSS, v, p. 54 and nos. 27, 46,

114

Steve Boardman

however, necessarily imposing new or more onerous obligations on the recip­ ients of these charters. In times of conflict galley forces could be raised by means of a general levy calculated on the amount of land held.s’ The appear­ ance of ‘galley service’ charters might imply that Robert was offering loyal west coast lords tenurial rights that they had not previously enjoyed. However, given the general military/political context, the king could hard­ ly write off the military obligations that were potentially due from the lands and so they became enshrined as a feudal due. Without a reliable guide to the typical level of service required from a pennyland or dabhach it is dif­ ficult to tell whether Bruce’s charters represented a lightening or an inten­ sification of the potential military burden. The maintenance of a readily available and effective sea borne host remained a military and political necessity for any magnate active in Argyll and the Firth of Clyde. The Campbells displayed a capacity to mobilize size­ able galley forces in 1306, 1334 and again in 1460.5® In the context of a west coast lordship where political authority was closely connected to military power, it would have been natural for Campbell lords to seek a way to pre­ serve their extensive customary rights to naval service when formal charters were issued. The ‘special retinue* clause may thus have been incorporated into their charters as a means of expressing and securing the necessary and obvious link between tenure, the recognition of overlordship, and the ren­ dering of personal military services. In reality, of course, as long as the tenure of Campbell grantees remained dependent on, or vulnerable to, the political and military resources of Campbell lords the right and ability of the lord to demand extensive services from their tenants was undeniable. The reciprocal obligations of lordship and service were necessarily more intense and wide ranging in a world of small-scale local warfare, of raid and counter raid, where secure possession of land was the acid test of the effectiveness of lordship. In the fourteenth century Anglo-Irish lordship, for example, the demands of localized warfare gave a continued vitality to knight service and its fiscal equivalent, scutage, long after they had ceased to have a military and social significance in English society. Knight service survived here because it was ‘for all its limitations [...] of value in internal war’ and ‘there could be no doubt about men’s duty to contribute towards operations that were near at hand and unambiguously defensive in purpose’.59

239» 366 and 374. 57 CDS, ii, no.1633. In 1304 the MacRuaries apparently attempted to impose a levy of a galley of 20 oars from every dabhach of land (cf. APS, ii, 19). In March 1430 James I ordered that all land within six miles of the West Coast should provide galley service with every four mcrks of land providing one oar. 58 C. McGladdery, ^ames II (Edinburgh, 1990), 170. 59 R. Frame, ‘Military service in Ireland’, in R. Bartlett and A. MacKay (eds). Medieval frontier societies (Oxford, 1989), 101-26 at 105.

The Campbells and charter lordship in medieval Argyll

115

However, tenure by special retinue may not have been concerned solely with galley service, but also with the general behaviour and conduct of those who held land from Campbell lords. In theory, lands held by ‘special ret­ inue service’ could be reclaimed if the tenant or his heirs failed to render appropriate support to their lord. In a sense, the clause reflected a general concern manifest in the Campbell charters, a determination to make occu­ pation of lands granted out as conditional as possible.^ Failure in the male line, failure to render appropriate services, failure to act in the interests of the overlord could all provide a pretext for the return of the estates to the control of the overlord. The Campbell charters seem to take us back to ear­ lier historical models of classical ‘military feudalism’, in which tenure of land was intimately associated with personal service, kinship and loyalty and the ceremonies of homage and fealty were more than just irksome formalities. Even the apparently standard right of the ‘feudal’ lord to his tenant’s ward, relief and marriage may have taken on an unusually intense aspect in the Campbell lordship. Whereas landowners in other areas of the kingdom were increasingly prepared to waive their claims to feudal casualties, fifteenth cen­ tury Campbell grants always reserved the superior’s rights to ward, relief and marriage. The Campbells’ systematic financial exploitation of feudal casualties is revealed in a ‘casualty book’ dating from the 1520s that record­ ed the payments due and made to the then earl of Argyll for the marriages, grassums, entries, maills and compositions of his tenants in Argyll.®* Moreover, although Campbell lords were concerned, like other landowners, to exploit the potential fiscal benefits of these rights, they were also prepared to use them in a direct way to control the political and social behaviour of their kinsmen and followers.®’ Control of marriage ties was, ironically enough, especially important in a society with a relatively relaxed attitude towards marriage and a flexible approach to succession arrangements. Multiple marriages and the consequent emergence of half-brothers, each enjoying the support of his maternal kinsmen and each eager to claim their father’s inheritance, underlay many of the most bitter succession disputes in the west. Powerful lords would seek to extend their political and social influ­ ence by promoting the rights of their sisters’ and daughters’ offspring, while attempting to ensure that their own kinsmen and dependents did not con­ clude damaging marriage alliances with rival lords.®’ 60 In other areas of the kingdom tenure could be linked to the rendering of bonds of retinue or manrent where possession of a certain estate had been a matter of contention. Here again, the aim must have been to make occupation of the disputed land or office highly conditional (cf. Boardman, ‘Thesis’, chaps. 1-3). 61 GD103/2/49. 62 Sec Munros, Acts Lords Isles, no. 96 for an example of the lord of the Isles explicitly attempting to control his half­ brother’s marriages. 63 In an indenture of 1501 between Archibald, second carl of Argyll, and Duncan Stewart of Appin it was agreed that Duncan should ‘mareand quhaire he plesis

116

Steve Boardman

A final question may be raised in relation to the Campbell charters of the fifteenth century. Where did the charter style, with its distinctive combina­ tion of terms and conditions, originate? By f.1400 the dominant families of Cowal and Mid-Argyll seem to have been entirely comfortable with the drawing up of charters and other legal documents in Latin and Scots. Many lords in the region had seals by which to either authenticate their own legal documents or to register their assent to the parchment business of their neighbours or royal officials. In the course of the fourteenth century many of the local kindreds had obtained full title to the estates and offices they held from the crown or from the Stewart overlords of Cowal and had estab­ lished expanding collections of charters and writs.®* The growing volume of formal transactions undoubtedly helped to develop local legal expertise. It is difficult to identify a specific precursor to the Campbell charters in extant record in terms of the combination of conditions and clauses employed in the lord of Lochawe’s grants, although elements like male entails and spe­ cial retinue agreements were certainly to be found elsewhere. It is, then, a distinct possibility that the charter form was an innovation by Campbell clerks around the turn of the fifteenth century. Amongst the witnesses to the earliest charter for which we have a full and reliable text, the 1414 grant by Duncan Campbell in favour of Ranald Malcolmson of Craignish, appeared one Celestine (Gillespie?) MacGillemichael, rector of Melfort, described as Duncan’s ‘clerk’ {clerico nostro). It seems more than likely that Celestine was responsible for drawing up the charter to which his name was appended. Celestine had been in the service of the Campbells of Lochawe for at least a decade, having been presented to the rectorship of the parish church of St Maelrubha of Melfort by Duncan’s father Colin before 6 July 1403.®® Papal records reveal that Celestine was the son of a priest of the same name and an unmarried woman, so that he appears to have been a member of a wellestablished local clerical dynasty.®’ By the opening of the fifteenth century best except Lx)me and the ilis, and he sail nocht mary but the aviss of the saidis Erie ... for the quhilk the saids Duncane Stewart sail pay to the saidis Erie [...] and als the said Duncane sail nocht mary wit na persoun bcand contrair to the said Erie’ (cf. Argyll Muniments, Inveraray, Bundle 1100, no. 163). 64 See Lamont Papers. 65 NAS, RHi/2/87. The use of Celestine as a Ladn equivalent for Gillespie is well-attested. However, in this case the fact that both Duncan’s son (whose approval for his father’s grant was noted) and another witness to the charter were given the style Gillespie is curious. 66 CPL (1394-1419), 125-6, 212-15 and at 243-4. I*' *4O3 Celestine was amongst a group described as Colin’s ‘familiars’. Since the 1414 charter was witnessed by a ‘Martino Malachie’, the lord of Lochawe’s chaplain (capelano nostro}, it seems that Celestine’s title cannot be explained by a responsibility for the personal religious devotions of the lord of Lochawe. 67 A possible kinsmen of Celestine, a Cnstin ‘McGiIlemichel’, obtained possession of the precentorship of Argyll diocese f.1371 (cf. CPP, i, 584). In the mid thirteenth century a charter by a son of Duncan MacDubgaill, lord of Argyll, in favour of the then bishop had been witnessed by two clerics bearing the surname

The Campbells and charter lordship in medieval Argyll

117

some elements within the clerical elite of Argyll and Cowal were clearly con­ versant not only with Gaelic and Latin, but also Scots, the emergent lan­ guage of law and administration in the wider Scottish kingdom.^® The Campbell charters certainly suggest a familiarity not just with Latin legal forms, but also with document types most commonly drawn up in the Scots vernacular, such as bonds of special retinue.^ Given this apparent familiar­ ity with Scots legal forms and social contracts there is no reason to suggest that the personnel responsible for the production of the early Campbell char­ ters were from outwith Argyll. It is true, that by the 1420s Celestine MacGillemichael had been replaced as Duncan’s clerk by Walter Bet, a man with no obvious prior connection to Argyll, but Walter was clearly not responsible for the production of the 1414 charter that was used as the model for Duncan’s subsequent grants. Throughout the fifteenth century, then, Campbell lords adopted the forms and conventions of ‘feudal’ lordship for their own purposes and in a manner that reflected and protected the bases of their power in the west as the leaders of a great kindred. The charters issued by successive lords of Lochawe were modified to accommodate the social and political realities of the region and they provide a striking example of the way in which the ‘forms of feudalism could be used to clothe and camouflage and, on occa­ sion, legitimate older practice’.’® They also, however, suggest that attitudes toward land, lordship and succession were not unchanging and inflexible. Favourable circumstances working over three or four generations had pro­ duced, by the middle of the fifteenth century, a relatively stable aristocratic supremacy that operated through both territorial lordship and kinship. This combination was hardly unique to Clan Campbell, and lay at the heart of most great regional lordships of late medieval Scotland.

or patronymic Mac Gille-Michael (cf. NAS, RHi/2/79). 68 G.W.S. Barrow, ‘The pattern of non-literary manuscript production and survival in Scotland, 1200-1330’, in Richard Britnell (ed.), Pragmatic literacy, East and If^est, t2oo~tjjo, 131-45. 69 Campbell clerks cer­ tainly drew up a wadset agreement in Scots on 13 January 1393-4 for rhe lord of Lochawe and a kinsman in Glossary. AT, at date. The clerk responsible for drawing up the wadset may have been thj Finlay, parson of Lochawe, whose seal was appended to the agreement. 70 W.D.H. Sellar, ‘Celtic law and Scots law; survival and integration’, in Scot. Slud., 29 (1989),

Hostiarii Regis Scotie'. the Durward family in the thirteenth century' Matthew H. Hammond

One of the most enduring themes in the historiography of lordship and nobility in medieval Scotland has been the idea of an ethnocultural struggle between ‘natives’ and ‘Anglo-Norman’ newcomers. Several useful studies over the last decade have focused on issues of continuity and change in Scottish earldoms and lordships.’ Instead, this study is based on the notion that by the thirteenth century in Scotia or Alban^ the heart of the kingdom of the Scots, ethnic background was largely irrelevant in the pursuit of lord­ ship. Many of the accoutrements of the new European culture were adopt­ ed or adapted because they were useful in the struggle for power; monastic patronage, castle-building and knightly households were simply part of the ‘rules of the game’ which could be manipulated to the favour of either newer, more ‘European’ institutions or older, more ‘Gaelic’ ones. The more useful framing concept in the ever-changing and sometimes turbulent world of thirteenth-century nobility is the tendency of families from the second tier, that which would become known as barons, to try to ‘move upwards’ at the expense of the top tier, the earls. The family of royal ushers or door­ wards illustrate this dynamic. The Durwards are relevant in three ways in this context. Firstly, the ori­ gins of the family are obscure but there is no reason to assume they were of ‘Anglo-Norman’ background. They were descended on the maternal side, at least, from the lines of two major earls, Mar and Atholl. The rules of the I I would like to express my gratitude to Professor A.A.M. Duncan and Dr Dauvit Broun for reading and commenting upon earlier drafts of this paper, as well as to the editors. 2 For example, Cynthia Neville, ‘A Celtic enclave in Norman Scotland: Earl Gilbert and the earl­ dom of Strathearn, 1171-1223’, in Terry Brotherstone and David Ditchburn (eds), Freedom and authority (East Linton, 2000), 75-92; Alan Young, ‘The earls and earldom of Buchan in the thirteenth century,’ in A. Grant and K.J, Stringer (eds). Medieval Scotland: crotun, lord­ ship and community (Edinburgh, 1993), 174-202; R. Andrew McDonald, ‘Matrimonial politics and core-periphery interactions in twelfth-century and early thirteenth-century Scotland’, Journal of Medieval History, 21 (1995), 227-47; Richard Oram, ‘A family business? Colonisation and settlement in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Galloway,’ in SHR, 72 (1993),

I18

The Durward family in the thirteenth century

119

power game took no account of ethnic background, and major players were as likely to be old families as new. Secondly, they show that families attempting to gain earldoms were not always ‘Anglo-Norman’ newcomers and such struggles were not always ‘native’/’Norman’ oppositions. Instead, the important factors at work here were the desire for nobles of the lower tiers to gain a foothold in the higher levels of power, as well as the desire on the part of the king to have loyal supporters in positions of power and to maintain a balance between competing noble factions. Thirdly, the story of the Durwards shows that competition over large northern earldoms and lordships took place in a highly competitive world where control of such jewels was much less about the destruction of ‘native’ society than it was about gaining and maintaining power. The first member of the Durward family whose name survives is Malcolm (Mael Coluim), who must have lived in the late twelfth century. Historians have assumed that Malcolm was the lord of Lundie in Angus and the hereditary royal doorward, although there is no definitive proof.3 The only surviving name of a twelfth-century doorward is that of Jocelin, door­ ward of William I,* and there is no evidence for a link between these two. No charters or witnessing attestations of Malcolm survive, and his name is known only from three charters of his son, Thomas de Lundin, royal door­ ward. 5 The style employed, ^Thomas filius Malcolmi de Lunden hostiarius regis\ could possibly suggest that Malcolm was either from Lundie or lord of Lundie, while the case endings make it clear that Thomas, not Malcolm, is the ‘hostiarius’ in question. Later evidence makes it likely that Malcolm married a daughter of Gille Criosda/Gilchrist, earl of Mar, for reasons which will be explored below. Thomas de Lundin, however, was clearly the king’s doorward, and he enjoyed a long career (about thirty years) in royal service.^ In Thomas’ only surviving written attestation to a charter of William I, dated 1201 or 1202 at Stirling, he is called simply ‘doorward’.’ The extent to which Thomas was 3 Duncan, Kingdom, 188. 4 ii, no. 351. S Scone Liber, no. 91; C. A. Rent., no. 62; RRS, ii, no.414. 6 Some confusion has arisen over the fact that there was another family calling itself ‘de Lundin’, descended from Philip the chamberlain, whom Malcolm IV gave Lundin by Largo in Fife (cf. RRS, i, no. 255). Philip was a frequent witness to the acts of William I, and his son Walter and his wife Christina were prominent patrons of Cambuskenneth, St Andrews priory, Inchcolm, where they were to be admitted into fratemitas, and Arbroath, where they were to be buried (cf. Camb. Reg., nos. 36 and 37; St A. Lib., 263; Inchcolm Chrs., nos. 3 and 4; Arb. Lib., i, no. 138). Their son Thomas was probably sher­ iff of Fife and patron of North Berwick priory (cf. N. B. Chrs., no. 10). The following char­ ters were probably witnessed by Thomas son of Walter, though the first two are less clear. St A. Lib., 381; C. A. Chrs., i, no. 10; Inchcolm Chrs., no. 12; Scone Liber, no. 84; Dunf. Reg., no. iSSi G.W.S. Barrow, ‘Some East Fife documents of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,* in G.W.S. Barrow (ed.). The Scottish tradition (Edinburgh, 1974), 23-43, at 25, no. 2. 7

120

Matthew H. Hammond

at William’s court is questionable, but the accession of Alexander II seems to have brought a swift reversal of this situation. Thomas turns up shortly after Alexander became king, in a series of three charters dated at Edinburgh on 3 and 4 April, 1215, in which the young king described Thomas as ‘Aojtiario meo\^ Thomas continued to witness royal charters with some regular­ ity between 1215 and 17 August 1228, however, he was apparently at the king’s court far less frequently than the household knights.’ Thomas also served the king as military leader and sheriff in the north.’® Furthermore, Thomas was one of twelve nobles who swore to uphold the planned mar­ riage of Alexander II to Joanna, sister of Henry III, in a 1220 agreement.” Between art kings, 181-3, 212-12- As well as being Earl Duncan’s brother-in-law, Colin Campbell of Lochawe had a daughter married to Malcolm MacFarlane of Arrochar, the major lord in western Lennox (cf. Lenn. Cart., 65). 46 Lenn. Cart., 65, 73, 74 and 79. 47 Boardman, Early Stewart kings, 212-13, 256-8; Chron. IVyntoun, iii, 76. In 1406 Earl Duncan entered a bond with Arthur of Ardencaple in which the latter promised to be ‘lele and trew til my said lord’ in return for a grant of land. Such a bond may suggest previous problems between the two men. Ardencaple had been part of the lordship of Walter of Faslane and Arthur presumably his tenant. This connection may have led to difhculties with his new earl, which were not resolved until the dust settled in the 1400s. Walter Danielston could have found support from men like Arthur of Ardencaple (cf. Fraser, Lennox, ii, no. 43). 48 NLS, Adv.MS.34.3.25; Fraser, Lennox, ii, no. 18; Boardman, Early Stewart kings, 256-8.

2i8

Michael Brown

extending the powers which his son, Murdac, and grandsons would ulti­ mately inherit. Alongside the apparent extension of his own lordship, Duncan was absorbed into the network of family, lands and influence which formed Albany’s power-base. Even before his rights as earl were confirmed, Duncan showed a readiness to uphold Albany’s interests. On 25 July 1392, five months after the marriage indenture, Earl Duncan entered an agreement with a burgess of Perth, William Spens. Duncan guaranteed Spens’ rights to lands on the west shore of Loch Lomond and undertook to pay rent for them. It is likely that Spens had been unable to recover anything from these lands previously and that the arrangement was to his advantage. Spens and his family were closely connected to the duke of Albany, and the latter wit­ nessed the agreement along with his adherent, and Lennox’s vassal, Patrick Graham. From 1392 the interests of Albany’s supporters in the Lennox would be protected.