The Enemies of the Kings of Scotland
We shall see that very often it seemed as if the kingdom would break up, and that there would again be several kings instead of one. The reason of this…
From: 810 C.E. To: 1603 C.E.
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The Enemies of the Kings of Scotland
From A Short History of Scotland by Peter Hume Brown, 1908.
We have now finished the first part of the history of the Scottish people, which tells how there came to be a kingdom of Scotland ruled over by one king. The question now was—Would this kingdom hold together, and would all the people agree to live under one ruler?
We shall see that very often it seemed as if the kingdom would break up, and that there would again be several kings instead of one. The reason of this was that the king of Scotland had so many enemies to fight against, that it was very difficult for him to overcome them all. First he had difficulties within his own kingdom, and, if we think for a moment, we can easily understand how this was.
The people over whom he ruled spoke different languages; those to the north of the Forth spoke Gaelic, those in Strathclyde or Cumbria spoke a language like the Welsh, though not quite the same, and those in Lothian spoke English. Then these different peoples had long been enemies, and had often fought against each other. In those days, also, men did not go from one part of the country to another as they do now, but remained all their lives where they were born; so that there could be no mixing of the different peoples by marrying or making friends with each other.
How could a Scot from the north of the Forth go and make his home in Lothian, when the people living there could not speak his language? Indeed, it was just the people of Scotia and the people of Lothian who came to hate each other most bitterly, and we shall soon see why this was so, and how it was that this hatred between them made it so difficult for one king to rule over them both.
But the kings of Scotland had still another danger to fight against within their own kingdom. There was a part of the country called Moray, much larger than the present county of Moray, in which there lived a family who claimed that the crown of Scotland belonged to them and not to the family that possessed it. For fully two hundred years the descendants of this family kept trying to win the crown for themselves. Almost every time a new king came to the throne, they rose in rebellion, and very often there were more rebellions than one in the course of a single reign.
These "mormaers" of Moray, or earls of Moray, as they came to be called, were, therefore, a thorn in the side of the kings of Scotland, as they could never be sure when a new rebellion would break out.
Besides these enemies within their kingdom, the kings of Scotland had two enemies without, against whom they had often to fight the Northmen and the English.
The Northmen were people who came from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, and their chief business was to sail to places where they could find anything to plunder, and then land from their ships and carry off everything on which they could lay their hands.
They were the boldest sailors in the world, and so fond of fighting that they would sometimes fight among themselves for amusement. The ships in which they sailed were called galleys, and were shaped like dragons, with a dragon's head for the bow and its tail for the stern. To make their ships go as fast as possible they had twenty and even thirty oars on each side, and they had also a square sail with stripes of red, white, and blue.
At first when the Northmen began to come, they only landed for a short time till they had got all they wanted, and then sailed away, carrying with them not only property, but men and women and children, whom they sold as slaves. They were so little afraid of long voyages, that they sailed along the coasts of France and Spain, and even into the Mediterranean Sea, landing to burn and plunder wherever they found a convenient place.
It was in summer, when the sea is quietest, that they went on their expeditions, and then the people who lived on the coasts never knew when they might come; and so great was the fear of them, that in the churches there was a prayer said in these words: "God save us from the Northmen."
Before the period we have now come to, these terrible vikings, as they were called, had already paid several visits to Scotland. Among other places, they had landed at lona; and, as they were heathens and cared nothing for the sacred things of Christians, they carried off everything they thought of any value, destroying the rest, and killing many of the monks.
But a time came when the Northmen were not content with merely landing and sailing away with booty. They now tried to conquer lands and to settle in them; and so, about the year 890, long before Scotland had become one kingdom, a king of Norway, called Harold the Fair-haired, came with a great fleet and conquered the Orkneys and the Shetlands and the Western Isles.
Not long afterwards, the Northmen got possession of Caithness and Sutherland, so that the whole of Scotland did not belong to its king. It will now be seen what dangerous enemies the Northmen were to the kings of Scotland, who could never be the real masters of their kingdom till they got rid of them.
The other enemy of the kings of Scots was even more to be feared than the Northmen. This enemy was England. Just like North Britain, South Britain had for a long time been broken up into a number of kingdoms, but now South Britain also was ruled over by one king. Now, therefore, there were two great kingdoms in the whole of Britain, one to the north of the river Tweed, and the other to the south of it Would they agree to live peacefully side by side with the Tweed between them?
We know that they did not live peacefully together. On the contrary, they went on quarrelling and fighting with each other for more than five hundred years, till at last, in the year 1603, James VI. of Scotland became king over both countries.
And why was it that they could not agree to be friends? The truth is that both countries were equally to blame. The kings of the Scots thought that the three northern counties of England Northumberland, Durham, and Cumberland belonged to them, and we shall see that one Scottish king after another tried to conquer them, and sometimes succeeded. On the other hand, the kings of England claimed that Lothian and even the whole of Scotland belonged to them, and that the kings of Scots were their vassals, that is, that they were bound to obey them.
We see, therefore, why the two countries came to be constantly at war with each other; but as Scotland was much the smaller of the two, and its kings had so many enemies in their own kingdom, there was a great danger that the country of the Scots would be the one that would be conquered in the end. For hundreds of years, indeed, Scotland had to fight in order to be a free country, and in doing so she had to spend so much money and blood that it kept her people poor, though it also made them brave, and hardy, and stubborn.
In this second part of our history, then, we have to see how the kings of Scots held their kingdom together, now fighting one enemy and now another, and all the time trying to make their subjects in Highlands and Lowlands more and more obedient to their commands.
Brown, Peter Hume. A Short History of Scotland. Oliver and Boyd, 1908.
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