Scotland

Relations with England.

While this process of Angliciza tion was in progress, political relations with England were not, for many years, entirely friendly. The border-line between the two countries had not been definitely ascertained. As the rulers of Strathclyde, the Scottish kings imagined themselves to possess a claim to Cumberland and Westmorland, and they cherished an ambition of annexing portions of the old Northumbrian kingdom beyond the Tweed. The raids of Malcolm III. (Canmore) had led William I. to found Newcastle-on-Tyne in 1079 and William II. to fortify Carlisle in 1091, and the boundary line might be re garded as stretching from the Tyne to the Solway, although the English did not admit Scottish claims between Tweed and Tyne. The wife of David I. was the heiress of two English earldoms, of which Northumbria was one. Henry I. recognized his brother-in law's claim to the earldom of Huntingdon, which descended to the Scottish queen from her father, but refused to acknowledge that Northumbria had passed to her from her grandfather (Earl Siward, who had played an important part in the reign of Edward the Confessor). When the English throne was disputed between Stephen and the Empress Matilda, David invaded England in sup port of the empress, who was his niece. His real purpose was to take possession of Northumberland, and he succeeded in effecting it in spite of his defeat at the Battle of the Standard, fought near Northallerton in Aug. 1138. Stephen, whose wife was also a niece of David, granted Northumberland as an English fief to Prince Henry, the heir to the Scottish throne. The gift did not secure David's loyalty, for when the future Henry II. made his first, and unsuccessful, attempt to gain the English throne in 1149, David aided him and was promised the whole area north of the Tyne. This promise was repudiated by Henry II. on his accession in 1154. David had died in 1153, his son had predeceased him, and his grandson, Malcolm IV. (1153-65), had to surrender David's territorial gains.

Treaty of Falaise.

The ambition of annexing Northumbria continued to guide Scottish policy, and William the Lion (1165 1214), the brother and successor of Malcolm IV., hoped to attain it by joining the English rebels against Henry II. in 1173-74. His capture, near Alnwick Castle, in July 1174, not only put an end to such expectations but resulted in the temporary loss of Scottish independence. The loth-century alliances against the Danes, in which the English king had been "father and lord" of the king of Scots, were by this time interpreted in England as having involved a feudal subjection of Scotland to England, and since the time of William the Conqueror, the Scottish kings had held English fiefs and had done homage for them. The precise nature of this homage had not been defined and the meaning of the ceremony was left deliberately ambiguous. What the Scottish kings gave as homage for English lands, English kings could receive as homage for the crown of Scotland. Henry released William only after forcing him to consent to the Treaty of Falaise (1174) by which he did homage avowedly for the Scottish crown. The treaty was cancelled 15 years later by an agreement between William and Richard I., who sold the rights extorted by his father, receiving in return a sum of money, required for the Third Crusade. The bargain (which

forms almost the only link between Scotland and the Crusading movement) merely annulled the Treaty of Falaise and left the question of homage precisely where it had been in 1174. One ancient controversy was, however, settled immediately after the agreement was made. The Treaty of Falaise had expressly ad mitted the subordination of the Scottish to the English Church, but its provisions had not come into operation because it had failed to discriminate between the rival claims of Canterbury and York. In 1192, after the close of a controversy between William the Lion and the papacy, Pope Celestine III. issued a Bull declar ing the Scottish Church to be the special daughter of the Holy See, "with mediation of none."' The church in Scotland was still denied the privilege of a metropolitan see, although in 1225 Hon orius III. granted the clergy permission to hold regular provincial councils under the presidency of an elected "Conservator of the Privileges of the Scottish Church." It was not till 1472 that St. Andrews was given metropolitan jurisdiction in Scotland; 20 years later a province was detached and placed under the newly founded archbishopric of Glasgow.

The Golden Age.

William the Lion (the ascription of that title to him is an unsolved problem) continued to hope for the restoration of Northumberland. He offered to purchase it in but refused to accept it when Richard I. proposed to exclude from the bargain the right of holding fortified castles; and he made further unavailing efforts, including an admission of the right of King John to choose a wife for his son Alexander, the heir to the Scottish throne as well as to the possessions of the Scottish Royal House in England and to their Northumbrian claims—a dangerous expedient in view of English pretensions to overlordship. Alex ander II. (1214-49) tried to seize Northumberland during the struggle which followed the grant of Magna Carta; but in 1236, by the Treaty of York, he resigned his claims to the earldom of Northumbria, and also his possessions in Huntingdon, in return for a grant of lands in the north of England. His reign witnessed the last of the Celtic revolts against the policy of Anglicization, and in his later years Scotland entered upon a period of consolida tion and prosperity which continued throughout the reign of his son, Alexander III. (1249-86). The recovery of the Western Isles, which had been under Norse rule, was achieved by Alexander III. after the battle of Largs (1263), in which the Norwegians were defeated. In 1266 Eric of Norway surrendered the Hebrides 'The date 1192 was established by Prof. R. K. Hannay in an article on the subject in the Scottish Historical Review, April 1926.

in return for a money payment. There was continuous peace with England. Alexander was the nephew and also the son-in-law of Henry III., and his relations both with him and with his brother in-law, Edward I., were friendly. The Borders, about to be the scene of almost incessant fighting for two and a half centuries, were quiet and peaceful. Later tradition did not err in regarding the reign of the last of the old line of Scottish kings as a golden age. His death closed the period of Anglicization and in the later middle ages Scotland drew its inspiration rather from France than from England.