Alexander III, 1249-1286

First Among Equals

Norman H. Reid

• Publisher: John Donald
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781910900383
• eBook ISBN: 9781788850957
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Winner of the Saltire Society Scottish History Book of the Year 2019 Presiding over an age of relative peace and prosperity, Alexander III represented the zenith of Scottish medieval kingship. The events which followed his early and unexpected death plunged Scotland into turmoil, and into a period of warfare and internal decline which almost brought about the demise of the Scottish state. This study fills a serious gap in the historiography of medieval Scotland. For many decades, even centuries, Scotland's medieval kingship has been regarded as a close likeness of the English monarchy, having been 'modernised' in that image by the twelfth- and thirteenth-century kings, who had close relationships with their southern counterparts. Recent research has cast doubt on that view, and this examination of Alexander III's reign is based on a view of Scottish kingship which depends on much firmer continuity with its earlier, celtic past. It challenges accepted truth, revealing that the nature of state and government, and the relationships between ruler and subject, were quite different from the previous 'received view'. On the cusp of a dynastic catastrophe which led to economic and political disaster, Alexander III's reign captures a snapshot of Scotland at the end of a period of sustained peace and development: a view of the medieval state as it really was.

CHAPTER 1

Roots of a Kingship

On the west coast of Scotland, just off Oban, lies the island of Kerrera, a tranquil seasonal retreat with a small settled community. Flitting back in time to early July 1249, a scene of startling contrast greets us. In the sheltered waters of the Firth of Lorne lies a fleet of low-gunwaled, high-stemmed, square-rigged galleys, descendants of the once-feared Viking longship. A seaborne army of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of men, from lowly peasants to wealthy noblemen, has been mustered from near and far with the intent of enforcing royal authority. At their head is none other than the king of Scotland himself, Alexander II.¹

The campaign had required careful long-term planning. Despite the uncertain health of the king, who had been given papal dispensation to be less stringent than was normal with his Lenten diet, plans were actioned, doubtless under the assumption that he would be sufficiently recovered.² Quite to the contrary, on Kerrera, with his forces poised for action, on Thursday 8 July at the age of only 50 and in the thirty-fifth year of his reign, Alexander succumbed to a fever and died.³

Shield of the church, giver of peace to his people, guide to the wretched,
a king upright, strict, wise, prudent, honest,
a pious king, a brave king, a most virtuous king, a wealthy king;
he was himself the second of this name (that is Alexander).
He was himself king for three times ten and five years.
The island called Kerrera has carried this man off.
His spirit seeks the heights as it joins the heavenly bodies,
But Melrose retains his buried bones.⁴

Without delay, a select few of the nobles who had accompanied him on the expedition crossed to the mainland and rode hard with the news to the widowed queen and her household, likely in either Dunfermline or Scone, and to those in the aristocratic community who held governmental responsibility.

Meanwhile on Kerrera, over the ensuing days the fleet was dispersed and the operation abandoned, most ships and men returning homewards. A more measured and sombre progress began, carrying the late king’s body towards its final resting place, a burial site which he had previously identified as the great Cistercian abbey of Melrose in the Scottish borders.⁵ In the thirteenth century, Kerrera was remote from lowland Scotland. The journey – over 150 miles at walking pace, or a voyage by sea to Ayr or Dumbarton followed by a further 100 miles overland – would certainly have taken more than a week, lengthened by the pauses demanded by vigils to pray for the deceased.⁶ The fleet-footed messengers to the royal court carried out their business more expeditiously. In an impressive feat of organisation, suggesting that the earlier illness of the king had been serious enough to prompt forward planning, within only five days of Alexander’s death, arrangements had been completed for the inauguration of his successor. On Tuesday 13 July, before his father had been laid to rest, the young Prince Alexander, a boy still shy of his eighth birthday, became king in a ceremony held at the traditional venue of Scone near Perth. The inauguration rituals duly performed, the royal party proceeded to Melrose for the interment of the king’s father. Pause may have been arranged en route for a separate heart burial at Dunfermline.⁷

The precise chronology of death, inauguration and funeral is uncertain, since Gesta Annalia claims that Alexander II’s funeral took place on 8 July.⁸ This is undoubtedly an error, since he was alive on Kerrera on that day, although probably on his deathbed, when he made a grant to the bishopric of Argyll.⁹ That Alexander III’s regnal year began between 1 and 11 July also supports the probability that the Melrose chronicler was correct in giving the date of death as 8 July.¹⁰ It is inconceivable, given the distances involved, that both the funeral and the inauguration of Alexander III could have taken place by 13 July, and the funeral must therefore have taken place some days later. This accords with usual practice, so far as can be told. William I, for example, died (at Stirling) on 4 December 1214, and was buried in Arbroath abbey on 10 December. Alexander II, William’s son and heir, had already been inaugurated, at Scone, on the day following his father’s death.¹¹ Scone is roughly 40 miles from Stirling (by modern roads), a not inconsiderable journey in the thirteenth century, and the successful holding of the inauguration ceremony (at which we are told at least seven earls and a bishop were present) only a day later, even despite the fact that the king’s death was not unexpected, signifies both striking communication and organisation, and a very considerable sense of urgency. There was a practical reason for this: even although it had been increasingly customary for at least a century, the system of primogeniture, by which the eldest son of a deceased king would be assumed to succeed his father, may still have had its challengers. The immediate inauguration of the new king (which included elements of at least nominal election and popular acclamation) therefore reduced the opportunity for any rival to stake a claim to the kingship. There is no evidence of any competition for the throne in 1249 – Alexander’s dynasty was apparently secure – but as recently as the late 1220s it had been subject to challenge.¹² There was, however, a further reason to hold the inauguration before the funeral of the last king, which had more to do with the theoretical basis of kingly rule. If a king was laid to rest before the inauguration of his successor, then there would be a theoretical lapse in the rule of the kingdom, during which there would be no authority; no one could wield the abstract ruling authority known, apparently synonymously, as the regia dignitas (dignity of the realm) or corona (the crown).¹³ That the king had to be inaugurated even when still a child indicates that, although the community of the nobility could govern on his behalf until he was capable of personal rule, there was as yet no effective sense that the king’s person was separate from his office: without an inaugurated ruler, government could not continue.¹⁴

The funerary processes following a king’s death also reveal attitudes to the concept of kingship itself. Unlike the English monarchy (which, between the Norman Conquest and the reign of Henry III had no recognised ‘traditional’ royal burial place), the Scottish kings generally followed an established custom. Before 1097 many of them seem to have been buried on Iona, although it is not known when that custom was established, or with certainty when it ceased. Thereafter most chose Dunfermline, beginning with Máel Coluim III and his second queen, Margaret (who was canonised in 1250), and continuing with the whole of the succeeding dynasty until 1371, other than William, who chose to be buried at Arbroath abbey (which he himself had founded), Alexander II and John Balliol (who died overseas in 1314, having lost the throne almost 20 years earlier).¹⁵ The succession of kings who used Dunfermline as their mausoleum were those who were descended from Máel Coluim III and Margaret; in later times some of them even asserted that the royal couple were the original founders of their dynasty, ignoring earlier generations.¹⁶ The choice of Dunfermline abbey had doubtless to do with the self-identification of these kings with their saintly royal ancestor Margaret, which bolstered both their sense of dynastic right and their pretensions to the increasingly influential European model of Christian kingship.¹⁷ After an initial struggle with the offspring of Máel Coluim and his first wife, Ingibjorg, daughter of Earl Thorfinn of Orkney (a struggle which was to be reprised several times during the reigns of William and Alexander II), the ‘Margaretsons’ prevailed, and their close association with Dunfermline (whose first Benedictine monks had been brought there by Margaret herself) therefore had obvious politico-dynastic advantages.

So why did Alexander II break with tradition and choose Melrose? It is certain that he did not lack his family’s reverence for his great-great grandmother: it was during his reign that the Scots initiated the diplomatic campaign at the papal curia to achieve her canonisation and began the building of a new sanctuary at Dunfermline to house her relics, perhaps in response to Henry III’s extensive rebuilding of Westminster abbey to accommodate the remains both of himself and of his own sainted predecessor, Edward the Confessor.¹⁸ That fact makes the choice of anywhere other than Dunfermline for Alexander’s own sepulchre all the more surprising. The selection of a king’s burial place, however, was not a matter of whimsy; it was a decision of great significance and symbolism. It may not be irrelevant that almost 40 years later Alexander II’s queen, Marie de Coucy, would also opt for burial in a Cistercian house (Newbattle, a daughter house of Melrose), possibly indicating a pious preference by the couple for the more austere, penitential character of the Cistercian order.¹⁹

More lay behind his choice, however. It must be remembered that Scotland in the mid thirteenth century was still a kingdom in the process of formation: it was not the coherent political or national unit which some historians have depicted. Lothian – the area south of the Forth and to the north of the present-day border with England – had for a couple of centuries recognised the authority of the kings of Scots; that is not to say, however, that there were not still significant cultural differences between Lothian and other areas ruled by them. Previously part of the kingdom of Northumbria, Lothian was predominantly English-speaking and reflected English social custom more closely than it did the predominantly Gaelic society of the greater part of Scotland north of the Forth. There is good reason to believe, based on evidence from the great medieval chronicle written in Melrose abbey itself, that people in that area, while acknowledging that they lived within the Scottish kingdom, nonetheless identified themselves as English. Within the reigns of Alexander II and his son, however, changes in attitude can be discerned in the chronicle which point to a closer association with the kingdom of Scotland; it seems too that innovations in legal practice and the increasing definition of law within the area ruled by the king should be taken as suggestive of a trend towards cohesion, leading to a sense of collective identity throughout the kingdom.²⁰ In the pages of the Melrose chronicle, therefore, ‘it is finally possible to see how allegiance to the king of Scots might make Englishmen become Scottish’. It has been suggested that the favour shown to the abbey by Alexander II in both life and death might have encouraged this trend.²¹ Alexander had been a visitor to Melrose not infrequently, observing religious feasts there on more than one occasion, which may ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Plates
• List of Maps
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations used in the Footnotes
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Roots of a Kingship
• Chapter 2: Bequest of a Kingdom
• Chapter 3: A Kingdom in Perplexity
• Chapter 4: The King Emergent
• Chapter 5: Protecting the Realm
• Chapter 6: Beyond Borders
• Chapter 7: Challenge and Response
• Chapter 8: Securing Inheritance
• Chapter 9: ‘That Scotland Led in Lauch and Le’
• Chapter 10: Man and Myth
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Witnesses to Royal Acta and Members of Royal Council, 1249-1262
• Appendix 2: The Wedding Hymn of Princess Margaret and Erik of Norway
• Appendix 3: A Note on Sources
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Picture Section