Scotland

Conquest of Lothian.

The most important attempt of the latter kind occurred in 937 when the Scottish king, Constantine III., was defeated by Athelstan of England at Brunanburh (probably Burnswark on the Solway). Constantine's object was the realization of a persistent ambition which is, perhaps, the most remarkable feature of Scottish history in the two centuries fol lowing the union of the Picts and Scots—the severance of the Lothians from the kingdom of Northumbria. These attempts continued throughout the loth century but did not attain any per manent success till, in 1018, Malcolm II. completely defeated the Northumbrians at the battle of Carham, near Coldstream. The victory was followed by the gradual extension of Scottish rule to the Tweed. Malcolm was followed, in 1034, by his grandson, Duncan, who had already succeeded, by inheritance, to the throne of Strathclyde, and thus Scots, Picts, Angles and British were all included within the kingdom which came to be known as Scot land. The Norsemen still held the islands ; the Hebrides were not recovered till after the middle of the 13th century, and the Ork neys and Shetlands not till the middle of the 15th century, when they passed from Denmark to Scotland through the marriage of a Danish princess to James III.

Macbeth and Malcolm III.

Duncan, the Duncan of Shake speare's "Macbeth," the first ruler of the historical kingdom of Scotland, did not experience the "plenteous joys" which brought tears into his eyes in the play. He met with defeats both from the Northumbrians and from the Norsemen, and in 1040 he was slain in a civil war by his own general, Macbeth, who had a claim to the succession, probably in his own right, and also as the repre sentative of his wife and stepson. Macbeth was almost certainly in alliance with the Norwegian earl of Caithness and Sutherland, a cousin of Duncan, named Thorfinn. While Thorfinn lived, at tempts to dethrone Macbeth, who proved himself an efficient ruler, were unsuccessful, at all events in Pictland, though Strath clyde and the Lothians may have acknowledged Malcolm Canmore (Bighead) the son of Duncan. After Thorfinn's death, Malcolm, in 1057, defeated and slew Macbeth at Lumphanan in Aberdeen shire. The kingdom of which Malcolm III. took possession was a Celtic kingdom, though one of its provinces was peopled by Angles. Local and tribal custom prevailed alike in Scotland proper (the district north of the Forth and Clyde) and in Gallo way; the speech was Celtic ; the court and the administrative sys tem, so far as the latter can be said to have existed, were Celtic. The church still retained, to a large extent, the structure and cus toms of Irish Christianity, although, in the beginning of the 8th century, a powerful Pictish monarch had ordered his people to keep the Roman date for Easter (one of the points disputed at the Synod of Whitby) and this rule had afterwards been followed in Dalriada and probably in Strathclyde. The Irish Church did

not repudiate papal authority, but there was no opportunity for the exercise of papal jurisdiction. Diocesan organization did not exist. There was only one bishop of the Scots; his see was St. Andrews and he could enjoy little influence outside his own neigh bourhood. Such organization as the Columban Church had origi nally possessed was based upon powers claimed by the abbots of the monasteries, but the abuse of appointing lay abbots had de stroyed the early monasticism, and a later order of monks, the Culdees, which had developed in the 9th century, had no adminis trative authority.

Queen Margaret.

The disorganized state of the Scottish Church, and some peculiar customs which marked its ritual, shocked the conscience of Malcolm's wife, an English princess, Margaret, who, after the Norman Conquest, sought refuge in Scotland. Margaret was a woman of saintly life—she was canon ized a century and a half after her death—and her own desire was to be a nun. She would have been the glory of a cloister, but she accepted her mission to redeem an ignorant and almost schismatic nation. She was not destined to fulfil that mission herself, but its accomplishment was, none the less, her work. There were many difficulties in her way. She could not introduce a diocesan system till there was a vacancy in the one Scottish bishopric, and none occurred in her lifetime. She could not reform the monastic sys tem and bring it into line with European monasticism, because Malcolm, though amenable in many ways to his wife's influence, refused to surrender the gains which he and other laymen, the great men of the land, enjoyed from the secularization of monastic revenues. She did succeed in changing some Scottish customs. She brought English clergy to convince the Scots of the error of their ways (Malcolm who had been in exile in England, acting as inter preter) ; she restored the monastery of Iona which had been destroyed by the Northmen ; and she encouraged the Culdees as the nearest approach to the religious life which she admired. Her most important personal achievements were the introduction of an English-speaking court and of English-speaking clergy, and the education of her children in English ways and traditions. She bore six sons to Malcolm, but he was not allowed to give any one of them his own name, or the name of any of his predecessors; four of them were named after Saxon kings of England.