Kingdom of Alba

William Wallace (c1270 - 1305) by Roy Campbell

William Wallace is one of Scotland's greatest national heroes, undisputed leader of the Scottish resistance forces during the first years of the long and ultimately successful struggle to free Scotland from English rule at the end of the 13th Century.

Records of Wallace's life are patchy and often inaccurate. This is partly because early accounts of his heroic deeds are speculative, and partly because he inspired such fear in the minds of English writers at the time, that they demonised him, his achievements, and his motives.

Many of the stories surrounding Wallace have been traced to a late-15th Century romance "The Wallace", ascribed to Henry the minstrel, or "Blind Harry". This epic is vehemently anti-English in language and tone. The most popular tales about Wallace are not supported by documentary evidence, but they show his firm hold on the imagination of his people. He represented the spirit of the common man striving for freedom against oppression, and exposed the Scottish nobility of the time as a group of unprincipled opportunists.

Wallace's place as a hero in Scottish history is assured. There can be little doubt that he has always been revered as a self-effacing and passionate patriot by later generations of Scots. Unlike the conniving Scottish nobles who had collaborated with the English in return for financial benefits, Wallace had never sought personal fame nor benefited from it. He had accrued neither wealth nor land.

Wallace was born in around 1270, probably near Ellerslie (now Elderslie), in Ayrshire, Scotland. His father was Sir Malcolm Wallace, Laird of Elderslie and Auchinbothie, a small landowner and little-known Scottish knight. [Note: in 1999 the seal of Sir Wallace was translated from the archaic latin. On his seal it says he is the son of 'Alan'.] His mother is believed to have been the daughter of Sir Hugh Crawford, Sheriff of Ayr, and he is thought to have had an elder brother, also called Malcolm. Because he was the second son, William did not inherit his father's title or lands.

At the time of Wallace's birth, Alexander III had already been on Scotland's throne for over twenty years. His reign had seen a period of peace, economic stability, and prosperity and he had successfully fended off continuing English claims to suzerainty. King Edward I (known as Edward "Longshanks") came to the throne of England in 1272, two years after Wallace was born.

There is almost no reliable information about William Wallace's early life. He is said to have spent his childhood at Dunipace, near Stirling, under the supervision of his uncle, who was a priest. Wallace probably led a comfortable and peaceful life as the son of a nobleman. He and his brother Malcolm must also have trained in the martial arts of the time, - including horsemanship and swordsmanship. Contemporary chroniclers say that William was a large, powerful man. He reportedly stood more than six and a half feet tall, - a veritable giant at a time when the average height of an infantryman was only slightly more than five feet.

In this climate of lawlessness, William Wallace's father was killed in a skirmish with English troops in 1291. It is likely that the death of his father at the hands of the English contributed to Wallace's lifelong desire to fight for his nation's independence. However, little is known about Wallace's life during this period, except that he lived the life of an outlaw, moving constantly to avoid the English, and occasionally confronting them with characteristic ferocity.

Outside the south-east corner of Scotland, there was widespread disorder, and defiance against the English was increasing. Wallace was involved in a fight with local soldiers in the village of Ayr. After killing several of them, he was overpowered and thrown into a dungeon where he was slowly starved. Wallace was left for dead, but sympathetic villagers nursed him back to health. When he had regained his strength, Wallace recruited several local rebels and began his systematic and merciless assault on the hated English and their Scottish sympathisers.

As his support grew, Wallace's attacks broadened. In May 1297, with as many as 30 men, he avenged his father's death by ambushing and killing the knight responsible and some of his soldiers. Now, he was no longer merely an outlaw but a local military leader who had struck down one of Edward's knights and some of his soldiers. William Wallace had become the king's enemy.

Although most of Scotland was in Scottish hands by August 1297, Wallace successfully recruited a band of commoners and small landowners to attack the remaining English garrisons between the Rivers Forth and Tay. Wallace and his co-leader, Sir Andrew de Moray, marched their forces towards Stirling Castle, a stronghold of vital strategic importance to the English. The English commanders must have been falsely confident that the upstart Scots would retreat or surrender. On Sept 11, 1297, the English army under John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey, confronted him near Stirling. Wallace's forces were greatly outnumbered, but Surrey had to cross a narrow bridge over the River Forth before he could reach the Scottish positions. Wallace's men lured the English into making an impulsive advance, and slaughtered them as they crossed the river. English fatalities are reported to have approached 5,000, gaining Wallace an overwhelming victory. He had shown not only that he was a charismatic leader and warrior, but also that his tactical military ability was strong. Never before had a Scottish army so triumphed over an English aggressor. Wallace captured Stirling Castle and for the moment Scotland was almost free of occupying forces.

On Aug 5 1305, Wallace was betrayed by a Scottish knight in service to the English king, and arrested near Glasgow. He was taken to London and denied the status of a captured soldier. He was tried for the wartime murder of civilians (he allegedly spared "neither age nor sex, monk nor nun"). He was condemned as a traitor to the king even though, as he correctly maintained, he had never sworn allegiance to Edward.

On 23rd August 1305, he was executed. At that time (and for the next 550 years), the punishment for the crime of treason was that the convicted traitor was dragged to the place of execution, hanged by the neck (but not until he was dead), and disembowelled (or drawn) while still alive. His entrails were burned before his eyes, he was decapitated and his body was divided into four parts (or quartered). Accordingly, this was Wallace's fate. His head was impaled on a spike and displayed at London Bridge, his right arm on the bridge at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, his left arm at Berwick, his right leg at Perth, and the left leg at Aberdeen. Edward may have believed that with Wallace's capture and execution, he had at last broken the spirit of the Scots. He was wrong. By executing Wallace so barbarically, Edward had martyred a popular Scots military leader and fired the Scottish people's determination to be free.

Almost immediately, Robert I the Bruce revived the national rebellion that was to win independence for Scotland. He succeeded and was crowned king of Scotland in 1306.

On his way to reconquer Scotland, Edward died near Carlisle.

Several hundred years later in the 19th century, statues commemorating Sir William Wallace were erected overlooking the River Tweed and in Lanark. In 1869, the 220-foot high National Wallace Monument was completed on a hill near Stirling. This huge tower now dominates the area where the Scots fought their most decisive battles against the English in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries at Stirling Bridge and Bannockburn.

 

The Kingdom of Alba (Gaelic : Rìoghachd na h-Alba) for the purposes of this article pertains to the Kingdom of Scotland between the death of Domnall II in 900, and the death of Alexander III in 1286 which then led indirectly to the Scottish Wars of Independence. The name is one of convenience, as throughout this period the elite and populace of the Kingdom were predominantly Gaelic, or later Gaelic and Scoto-Norman, and differs markedly from the period of the Stewarts, in which the elite of the kingdom were for the most part speakers of English or Lowland Scots. The article concerns only the political history of the Kingdom of Scotland in the High Middle Ages, rather than the culture or society of the country.

 

 
The Stone of Scone in the Coronation Chair at Westminster Abbey, 1855. It was the ceremonial coronation stone of Scotland's Gaelic kings, similar to the Irish Lia Fáil. The period between the accession of King Donnchad I (1034) and the death of Alexander I (1124) was the last before the coming of the Normans to Scotland. In some respects, the reign of King Máel Coluim III prefigured the changes which took place in the reigns of the French-speaking kings David I and William I, although native reaction to the manner of Donnchad II's accession perhaps put these changes back somewhat.

King Donnchad I's reign was a military failure. He was defeated by the native English in at Durham in 1040, and was subsequently toppled. Donnchad had only been related to previous rulers through his mother Bethoc, daughter of Máel Coluim II, who had married Crínán, the lay abbot of Dunkeld (and probably Mormaer of Atholl too). At a location mysteriously called Bothgofnane, the Mormaer of Moray, Mac Bethad mac Findláich defeated and killed Donnchad, and took the kingship for himself. After Mac Bethad's successor Lulach, another Moravian, all kings of Scotland were Donnchad's descendants. For this reason, Donnchad's reign is often remembered positively, while Mac Bethad is villanised. Eventually, William Shakespeare gave fame to this medieval equivalent of propaganda by further immortalising both men in his play Macbeth. Mac Bethad's reign however was successful enough that he had the security to go on pilgrimage to Rome.

It was Máel Coluim III, who acquired the nickname (as did his successors) Cenn Mór (Great Chief), and not his father Donnchad, who did more to create the successful dynasty which ruled Scotland for the following two centuries. Part of the success was the huge number of children he had. Through two marriages, firstly to the Norwegian Ingebjørg Finnsdottir, and secondly to the Anglo-Hungarian princess Margaret Ætheling, Máel Coluim had perhaps a dozen children. Máel Coluim and, if we believe later hagiography, his wife, introduced the first Benedictine monks to Scotland. However, despite having a royal Anglo-Saxon wife, Máel Coluim spent more of his reign conducting slave raids against the English, adding to the woes of that people in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest of England and the Harrying of the North, as Marianus Scotus tells us:

 

Máel Coluim died in one of these raids, in 1093. In the aftermath of his death, the Norman rulers of England began their interference in the Scottish kingdom. This interference was prompted by Máel Coluim's raids and attempts to forge claims for his successors to the English kingship. He had married the sister of the native English claimant to the English throne, Edgar Ætheling, and had given most of his children by this marriage Anglo-Saxon royal names. Moreover, he had given support to many native English nobles, including Edgar himself, and had been supporting native English insurrections against their French rulers. In 1080, King William the Conqueror sent his son on an invasion of Scotland. The invasion got as far as Falkirk, on the boundary between Scotland-proper and Lothian, and Máel Coluim submitted to the authority of the king, giving his oldest son Donnchad as a hostage. This submission perhaps gives the reason why Máel Coluim did not give his last two sons, Alexander and David, Anglo-Saxon royal names.

“Donnchad went to Scotland with what aid he could get of the English and French, and deprived his kinsman Domnall of the Kingdom, and was received as King. But afterwards some of the Scots gathered themselves together, and slew almost all of his followers; and he himself escaped with few. Thereafter they were reconciled on the condition that he should never again introduce English or French into the land”

Donnchad was killed the same year, 1094, and Domnall III resumed sole kingship. However, the Norman state send another of Máel Coluim's sons, Edgar to take the kingship. Anglo-Norman policy worked, because thereafter all kings of Scotland succeeded, not without opposition of course, under a system very closely corresponding with the primogeniture that operated in the French-speaking world. The reigns of both Edgar and his brother and successor Alexander are comparatively obscure. The former's most notable act was to send a camel (or perhaps an elephant) to his fellow Gael Muirchertach Ua Briain, High King of Ireland.[12] When Edgar died, Alexander took the kingship, while his youngest brother David became Prince of "Cumbria" and ruler of Lothian.

 

Norman Kings: David I to Alexander III
 
Book of Deer, Folio 29v contains a portrait of the Evangelist Luke; a list of priviledges and legends were written legends in Gaelic and Latin in the margins, in lowland Buchan in the reign of David I. The period between the accession of David I and the death of Alexander III was marked by dependency upon and relatively good relations with, the Kings of the English. It was also a period of historical expansion for the Scottish kingdom, and witnessed the successful imposition of royal authority across most of the modern country. The period was one of a great deal of historical change, and much of the modern historiographical literature is devoted to this change (especially G.W.S. Barrow), part of a more general phenomenon which has been called the "Europeanisation of Europe". More recent works though, while acknowledging that a great deal of change did take place, emphasise that this period was in fact also one of great continuity (e.g. Cynthia Neville, Richard Oram, Dauvit Broun, and others). Indeed, the period is subject to many misconceptions. For instance, English did not spread all over the Lowlands (see language section), and neither did English names; and, moreover even by 1300, most native lordships remained in native Gaelic hands, with only a minority passing to men of French or Anglo-French origin; furthermore, the Normanisation and imposition of royal authority in Scotland was not a peaceful process, but in fact cumulatively more violent than the Norman Conquest of England; additionally, the Scottish kings were not independent monarchs, but vassals to the King of the English, although not "legally" for Scotland north of the Forth.

The important changes which did occur include the extensive establishment of burghs (see section), in many respects Scotland's first urban institutio ns; the feudalisation, or more accurately, the Francization of aristocratic martial, social and inheritance customs; the de-Scotticisation of ecclesiastical institutions; the imposition of royal authority over most of modern Scotland; and the drastic drift at the top level from traditional Gaelic culture, so that after David I, the Kingship of the Scots resembled more closely the kingship of the French and English, than it did the lordship of any large-scale Gaelic kingdom in Ireland.

 

After David I, and especially in the reign of William I, Scotland's King's became ambivalent about, if not hostile towards, the culture of most of their subjects. As Walter of Coventry tells us:

 

The ambivalence of the kings was matched to a certain extent by their subjects. In the aftermath of William's was capture at Alnwick in 1174, the Scots turned on their king's English-speaking and French-speaking subjects. William of Newburgh related the events:

 

 

Walter Bower, writing a few centuries later albeit, wrote about the same event:

 

Opposition to the Scottish kings in this period was indeed hard. The first instance is perhaps the revolt of Óengus of Moray, the Mormaer of Moray, the crushing of which led to the colonisation of Moray by foreign burgesses, and Franco-Flemish and Anglo-French aristocrats. Rebellions continued throughout the twelfth century and into the thirteenth. Important resistors to the expansionary Scottish kings were Somairle mac Gillai Brigte, Fergus of Galloway, Gille Brigte, Lord of Galloway and Harald Maddadsson, along with two kin-groups known today as the MacHeths and the Meic Uilleim.[17] The latter claimed descent from king Donnchad II, through his son William, and rebelled for no less a reason than the Scottish throne itself. The threat was so grave that, after the defeat of the MacWilliams in 1230, the Scottish crown ordered the public execution of the baby girl who happened to be the last MacWilliam. This was how the Lanercost Chronicle relates the fate of this last MacWilliam:

 

Many of these resistors collaborated, and drew support not just in the peripheral Gaelic regions of Galloway, Moray, Ross and Argyll, but also from eastern "Scotland-proper", Ireland and Mann. By the end of the twelfth century, the Scottish kings had acquired the authority and ability to draw in native Gaelic lords outside their previous zone of control in order to do their work, the most famous examples being Lochlann, Lord of Galloway and Ferchar mac in tSagairt.

Such accommodation assisted expansion to the Scandinavian-ruled lands of the west. Uilleam, the native Mormaer of Ross, was a pivotal figure in the expansion of the Scottish kingdom into the Hebrides, as was Alan MacRuadridh, the key pro-Scottish Hebridean chief, who married his daughter to Uilleam, the Mormaer of Mar. The Scottish king was able to draw on the support of Alan, Lord of Galloway, the master of the Irish Sea region, and was able to make use of the Galwegian ruler's enormous fleet of ships. The Mormaers of Lennox forged links with the Argyll chieftains, bringing a kin-group such as the Campbells into the Scottish fold. Cumulatively, by the reign of Alexander III, the Scots were in a strong position to annex the remainder of the western seaboard, which they did in 1265, with the Treaty of Perth. Orkney too was coming into the Scottish fold. In the twelfth century, Mormaer Matad's son Harald was established on the Orkney Earldom. Thereafter, the Orkney earl (also Mormaer of Caithness) was just as much a Scottish vassal as a Norwegian one. Descendents of the Gaelic Mormaers of Angus ruled Orkney for much of the thirteenth century. In the early fourteenth century, another Scottish Gaelic noble, Maol Íosa V of Strathearn became Earl of Orkney, although formal Scottish sovereignty over the Northern Isles did not come for more than another century.

The conquest of the west, the creation of the Mormaerdom of Carrick in 1186 and the absorption of the Lordship of Galloway after the Galwegian revolt of 1135 meant that the number and proportion of Gaelic speakers under the rule of the Scottish king actually increased, and perhaps even doubled, in the so-called Norman period. It was the Gaels and Gaelicised warriors of the new west, and the power they offered, that enabled King Robert I (himself a Gaelicised Scoto-Norman of Carrick) to emerge victorious during the Wars of Independence, which followed soon after the death of Alexander III.

 

 

Sir:

You are hereby ordered to fall upon the Rebels, the MacDonalds of Glencoe, and put all to the sword under 70. You are to have especial care, that the Old Fox and his Sons do upon no account escape your Hands, you are to secure all the avenues that no man can escape: this you are to put in Execution at five a Clock in the Morning precisely, and by that time or very shortly after it, I’ll strive to be at you with a stronger party. If I do not come at five, you are not to tarry for me but fall on. This is by the King’s Special command, for the good and safety of the country, that these miscreants may be cut off root and branch. See that this be put in execution without Feud or Favor, else you may expect to be treated as not true to the King or Government nor a man fit to carry Commission in the King’s Service. Expecting you will not fail in the fulfilling hereof as you love yourself, I subscribed these with my hand.

att Balicholis
Feb 12, 1692

[signed] Robert Duncanson

For Their Majesties Service
To Captain Robert Campbell of Glenlyon