Scottish Independence: The Medieval Roots of the Thistle

By the time Edward I invaded Scotland in 1296 and started the Wars of Independence Scots already regarded their country as a sovereign kingdom. You might imagine that this is what they had always thought in the Middle Ages and that Scottish independence began at whatever date this aspiration was first achieved. That is not the case. Scottish sovereignty, and the Scots’ belief that their country was of equal status with England, was a relatively recent idea in the 1290s. If we want to trace the beginning of Scotland as a fully independent kingdom, we should ask at what point did the Scots first start to see their king as on a par with any other king and why?

In the 12th and 13th centuries, when a king held land in another kingdom, it was unavoidable that he would have to perform homage and swear fealty to another monarch. This was awkward. Homage meant a public act of acknowledgement of a vassal to his lord and had to be performed in person. In the 13th century it was accepted that when a king swore fealty this would be done by proxy in order not to compromise royal dignity. In the case of a king of Scots holding land in England there was the extra pressure of the king of England’s claim to homage for Scotland itself. This explains why, after Edward I came to the throne in 1272, negotiations went on for a number of years before Alexander III, King of Scots (r. 1249-86), performed homage to Edward for his extensive lands in England in 1278. The ceremony took place in the king’s chamber at Westminster before an invited audience. Alexander did not swear fealty personally but by proxy. But when it came to the moment when homage was given the bishop of Norwich intervened (presumably with Edward I’s knowledge, if not connivance) to ask specifically if homage was not owed for Scotland, too. Alexander III was ready with an answer: ‘Nobody but God alone has the right to the homage for my realm of Scotland, and I hold it of nobody but God alone.’ As far as Alexander was concerned, he was of equal status with the king of England. As king, he was sovereign in all matters except those relating to the spiritual life of his people, which it was generally acknowledged came under the pope’s authority.

Those new to the topic of Anglo-Scottish relations in the period before Robert the Bruce and William Wallace might expect that the question of Scotland’s status in relation to England was contentious. It is a tribute to the political good sense of Edward I that he did not press the matter as long as there was an able mature occupant of the Scottish throne. Indeed, his relations with Alexander III were very good. It was only when the Scottish royal dynasty died out in September 1290 that Edward pursued his claim to overlordship with single-minded determination. Even so, it took him over six months before he committed himself to this course of action, lighting the fuse for what would become the Wars of Scottish Independence.

Edward I’s father, Henry III (r. 1216-72), had also raised the question of Alexander III’s homage for Scotland in 1251, a couple of years after Alexander’s accession as a seven year old, but had let the matter drop. A half century earlier, however, and you enter a very different mental world, where, rather than illiciting a prickly denial of claims to overlordship, the question of homage for Scotland scarcely seems to be an issue at all.

It seems certain that Alexander III’s grandfather, William the Lion (r. 1165–1214), did not consider himself the king of England’s equal. This is revealed most graphically by the royal seal – the routine symbol of a king’s authority, which was fixed to every document issued in his name. On his seal William is portrayed seated on a throne but without a crown. This was not a mistake; neither his predecessor Malcolm IV (1153–65) nor his successor Alexander II (1214–49) are shown crowned on their seals. Though it did not mean he would never subsequently have worn a crown, when a Scot became king he was not crowned and anointed but instead was inaugurated by being placed (in 1249, at least) on the Stone of Scone. Kings of England, on the other hand, had for centuries been crowned and anointed and were depicted in crowns on their seals. A further indication that Scots kings saw themselves as of lesser status than English kings at this time is revealed in the formula for royal charters. From the reign of Richard I (1189–99) the most formal English royal charters finished by giving the day of the month and the king’s regnal year (e.g. ‘3 May in the 10th year of our reign’) to indicate when the document was produced and under whose authority. When this dating clause was adopted in Scottish royal charters from 1195, however, only the day of the month was stated; the regnal year was omitted in even the most solemn documents. It is difficult to explain this detail unless it was a deliberate attempt to indicate Scottish deference to English royal prestige.

This helps to explain why William the Lion was content to be seen publicly as the King of England’s subordinate: to do otherwise would have been inconceivable. The ceremony of his homage and fealty to King John on November 1200 was very different to that of Alexander III to Edward I in 1278. Far from being held privately, behind closed doors in front of an invited audience, it took place in the open on a prominent mound at Lincoln. William became King John’s vassal in full view of an impressive gathering of archbishops, bishops, regional rulers, earls and barons from across Britain, Ireland and Normandy. The event was not entirely trouble-free. After William’s homage, he and King John became locked in undignified wrangling in front of the bemused onlookers. But the matter in dispute was not Scotland’s status: the homage itself had been performed without a hitch. The cause of the strife was William’s burning desire to be restored to the earldom of Northumberland, which he had held as a teenager between 1152 and 1157. He plainly hoped that King John, having accepted his homage and fealty, would act like a good lord and recognise his claim. Unfortunately insufficient assurance had been sought beforehand to ensure that John was prepared to commit himself to this.

Before the 13th century the only king of Scots who may have thought differently about his royal status in relation to the English crown was David I (1124–53) during the troubled reign of King Stephen (1135–54). David was no ordinary king of Scots: after 1136 he held Carlisle and later controlled north-west England as far south as the Ribble. At the same time, his son and heir, Henry, was Earl of Northumberland. When Henry died in 1152, David I had installed his grandson William as earl, as if Northumberland was now part of the Scottish kingdom. David was the only king of Scots who might have regarded himself politically as the equal of his southern counterpart, though only after Henry I’s death in 1135, when royal power was at a low point in England. Furthermore, his actions were a pragmatic reflection of political power that could ebb and flow, not a statement of unalterable legal status. David I remained uncrowned on his seal. After coming to the throne of England in 1154 it took just three years for Henry II to dismantle David’s dominion in northern England, browbeating his adolescent successor, Malcolm IV, into restoring the border as it was in the time of Henry I.

A significant difference between the expectations of the earlier Scottish kings before the reign of Alexander III is that they did not consider subordination to the king of England as undermining their authority within their own kingdom. This is very clear in the case of Alexander I (1107–24). He was happy to serve in Henry I’s army in Wales in 1114: a campaign that Alexander would have had no personal interest in except for the opportunity to serve the king of England. At the same time, a Scottish bishop who knew Alexander I personally said of him that ‘he wishes in his kingdom to be all things alone, and will not endure that any authority have the least power in any matter, without his control’. This insistence on being the ultimate authority in his own kingdom is something that every king of Scots would have shared, from Alexander I to Alexander III. What had changed by the mid-13th century was that, in order to safeguard his position, the king of Scots could no longer afford to accept a subordinate status. He had to assert that he was as much a king as any other, especially his southern neighbour.

The first challenge to the long-established pattern of relations between kings of Scots and kings of England was triggered by William the Lion’s capture at Alnwick in July 1174, while taking part in a major rebellion against Henry II of England. No doubt William, as he was paraded in public on a nag and taken in chains to the fastness of Falaise Castle in Normandy, was surprised by the harshness of his treatment. This would have been nothing compared with how he must have felt when confronted with the terms of his release. For the first time the relationship between the king of Scots and the king of England was to be set down in writing, in a document known as the Treaty of Falaise, which was concluded in December 1174.

Hitherto the ceremony of homage and fealty had been sufficient. It was essentially between two individuals, with no requirement to spell out in detail what it signified beyond the fact that the king of Scots became the man of the king of England. It was not until the late 12th century that homage was routinely assumed to involve holding land of a lord. What must have shocked William was the way Henry II sought to define this. It was bad enough that William had to surrender all the chief castles in the south of his realm – Berwick, Edinburgh, Jedburgh, Roxburgh and Stirling. Worse was the stipulation that Henry II and his heirs could expect homage and fealty from all the king of Scots’ landholders. It was made clear that no one could avoid this. Scottish barons who performed homage and fealty in person were required to make any absentees swear the same allegiance and fealty to Henry II as they had done themselves. The new process was completed by a public ceremony at York Minster on August 10th, 1175. According to an English royal clerk, who was almost certainly present, King William and all the freeholders of his kingdom, both greater and lesser, came to York and became the men of Henry II and his heirs by giving their homage and their oaths of fealty. Even if the clerk was exaggerating, he captured the treaty’s intention that the ceremony applied to everyone. What was particularly disturbing for a king of Scots was that his people, by performing this ceremony, were undertaking to be loyal to the king of England against all men. Loyalty to the king of England now trumped loyalty to the king of Scots. For the first time the king of Scots’ position within his own kingdom was formally undermined.

Yet this was not a fatal blow to the old relationship between Scottish and English kings. Although the independence of Scottish kings within their own realm was threatened, in practice Henry II only seems to have wielded his newly defined authority in dealing with Galloway, subdued by the king of Scots in 1160. For everyone else in Scotland the only change was probably felt by those living near English garrisons, whose crops, merchandise and livestock may occasionally have been seized. Had the ceremony at York occurred a century later with Edward I rather than Henry II receiving the homages of the Scots, it would doubtless have had a much greater impact. This is not simply hypothetical. In June and July 1291 Scottish freeholders swore fealty to Edward I as their ‘superior and direct lord’; John Balliol paid homage to Edward I in the same terms as soon as he was inaugurated king in November 1292. Judgements by the king of Scots – even in his own parliament – were now subject to appeal to Edward I and his parliament as a superior court. This was a profound change. Alexander III, as a sovereign king of Scots, could guarantee the property of landholders through his courts. This was no longer assured if the king of Scots’ decisions could be overruled by the king of England.

Nothing of the kind happened after the ceremony in York in 1175. The only evidence that anyone in Scotland appealed for assistance directly to Henry II is a writ in which Henry took Abbot Archibald of Dunfermline and his monastery under his protection. Henry II may well have issued more writs on behalf of Scots that are now lost: it would not have been in anyone’s interests in Scotland to have kept them, especially after the Wars of Independence. The Dunfermline example only survives in an early-17th-century transcript and is not included in the formal copy of its charters made by Dunfermline Abbey in the 1250s. This lone document is in other ways exceptional: Abbot Archibald is only given this protection as a special favour because Henry treated him as a clergyman in the king’s own lordship. The writ was also apparently obtained by Abbot Archibald because Dunfermline had been harassed while using the port of Musselburgh by the English garrison stationed in nearby Edinburgh Castle. Abbot Archibald naturally sought Henry II’s help to stop this. The writ is not evidence that Scots looked to Henry II rather than to their own king to resolve disputes among themselves. In practice King William’s routine authority was undisturbed, even though his political standing must have taken a knock.

When Henry II’s successor, Richard I, was crowned in September 1189 William lost no time in getting the Treaty of Falaise rescinded. Richard I was willing to agree to this in December 1189 for the considerable sum of 10,000 marks. All William wanted was to resume his subordinate role without any threat to his authority in his own kingdom. But times were changing. Academic lawyers in Europe were beginning to articulate the shifts in perceptions of kingdoms. For them a king did not simply wield political power: he also exercised jurisdiction as the ultimate authority for making and maintaining the law. This was based on two ideas that were new in the 1190s. The first was that a king should have no superior. The second was that a king had as much authority in his kingdom as the Holy Roman Emperor. The Emperor – seen as the successor of Roman emperors – was the embodiment of all authority: he was ‘lord of the world’. By applying this to a kingdom, the king’s authority over his people was recast as jurisdiction over a territory. The seed of the idea of national sovereignty had been sown.

The notion that no king had a superior, and that all were therefore of equal standing, was at odds with the traditional view of the relationship between the king of Scots and the king of England. The first sign of change was in 1222 when Alexander II began to add his regnal year to the dating clause at the end of his charters. He had also recently discussed the possibility of a coronation with a papal legate visiting Scotland. A more formal attempt to gain the pope’s approval for this in 1233 was blocked by Henry III, who, not unnaturally, perceived the suggestion as a threat to the king of England’s dominant position. The stage was set for a legal formalising of relations between the kings of both countries: the English claimed that homage was owed for Scotland and not just for the king of Scots’ lands in England, and the Scottish asserting that the king of Scots was fully a king and therefore of equal standing with his English counterpart. In practice this continued to be tempered by political common sense. For example, in 1237, when Alexander II signed the Treaty of York formally renouncing all claims to northern England, which he had inherited from his father William, he did not swear in person to keep the terms of the treaty but, like Henry III, gave his oath by proxy, out of respect of his royal dignity.

Although the pope declined a further application from the Scots for coronation and anointment in 1251, at the same time he refused Henry III’s request that he be permitted to collect a tax in Scotland on the pope’s behalf. Pope Innocent IV’s reply to Henry showed that, in practice, Scotland was treated as an equal. He informed Henry baldly ‘that it is utterly unheard of that any king should be allowed to do this in another’s kingdom’.

If we look beyond the esoteric workings of international diplomacy, dramatic displays of Scotland’s sovereignty can first be seen from the time Alexander III became king. The ceremony of his inauguration at Scone in July 1249 was adapted in order to make him appear like an anointed king who held his kingdom directly from God. The seven-year-old Alexander was taken not to the moot hill but to a cross in the abbey cemetery, where he was placed on the Stone of Scone. The nobles then spread their cloaks at the boy’s feet, recalling the moment in the Old Testament where Jehu is proclaimed to rule Israel as God’s anointed. Nobody attending the ceremony can have been left in any doubt that Alexander was their sovereign. It is no surprise that Alexander’s first seal depicted him wearing a crown. The idea of Scottish sovereignty had arrived.

It is striking that this was achieved when the king was still only a boy. It was not driven by him, however, but by those governing in his name – notably Alan Durward, the justiciar, and Robert Kendeleith, abbot of Dunfermline and chancellor. There is no reason to suspect that their drive to assert Scottish sovereignty would have been resisted by anyone in Scotland. The greatest lords there – all with lands or family in England – would have been keen to maintain Scottish independence, because the last thing they wanted was to suffer the same constraints on their power at home that they experienced in England. English royal government was remarkably centralised and intrusive in comparison.

The king of Scots depended on his barons in order to maintain law and order and to raise revenue; the king of England, by contrast, had a highly developed system of royal justice and a sophisticated bureaucracy. Already in William the Lion’s reign it is clear that landholders in Scotland wanted to keep the king of England at bay. When in 1189 William needed to raise the 10,000 marks to pay for the Treaty of Falaise to be rescinded, he had to appeal to his barons for help. They promptly stumped up. This was in sharp contrast to their response a couple of years earlier to raising what was probably a smaller sum in support of a crusade. This they flatly refused, even though it had been agreed by William at Henry II’s request.

In a sense Scottish sovereignty was not a new idea in 1249. It was merely the updating of the old idea that the king of Scots ruled without any interference from another king. To that extent the Scottish kingdom had always been independent. Although this independence was directly threatened between 1174 and 1189, it was still impossible at that time for Scots to imagine an alternative framework for preserving the king’s independence within his realm. The only solution to the Treaty of Falaise was to rescind it and act as if it had never happened. It was only when broader ideas about kingdoms changed in the 13th century that the issue of subordination itself came to seem problematic and the idea of Scottish sovereignty as such was born.

Dauvit Broun is Professor of Scottish History at the University of Glasgow. He is Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded project, ‘The Breaking of Britain: Cross-border Society and Scottish Independence 1216-1314’ (2010-13).