Kings, Lords and Men in Scotland and Britain, 1300-1625 - Steve Boardman, Julian Goodare

Kings, Lords and Men in Scotland and Britain, 1300‒1625
Dr Jenny Wormald. (Photo: Luke Wormald)

Kings, Lords and Men in Scotland
and Britain, 1300‒1625
Essays in Honour of Jenny Wormald
Edited by
Steve Boardman and Julian Goodare
© editorial matter and organisation Steve Boardman
and Julian Goodare, 2014
© the chapters their several authors, 2014
Edinburgh University Press Ltd

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and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations
2003 (SI No. 2498).
Contents
List of Illustrations vii

Preface viii
List of Abbreviations ix
List of Contributors xii
Introduction: Kings, Lords and Jenny Wormald 1

Steve Boardman and Julian Goodare
1. The Stewart Realm: Changing the Landscape 19

Keith M. Brown
Part I Lords and Men

2. Lords and Women, Women as Lords: The Career of Margaret
Stewart, Countess of Angus and Mar, c.1354–c.1418 37
Steve Boardman
3. Bastard Feudalism in England in the Fourteenth Century 59
Christine Carpenter
4. Tame Magnates? The Justiciars of Later Medieval Scotland 93
Hector MacQueen
5. King, Lords and Men in Renaissance England: The Poetry of
John Skelton 121
John Watts
6. Rethinking the Justice of the Feud in Sixteenth-Century
Scotland 136
A. Mark Godfrey
7. Bonding, Religious Allegiance and Covenanting 155
Jane E. A. Dawson
8. ‘We Bund and Obleiss Us Never More to Querrell’: Bonds,
Private Obligations and Public Justice in the Reign of James VI 173
Anna Groundwater
vi KINGS, LORDS AND MEN IN SCOTLAND AND BRITAIN
Part II Kings and Lords

19. Murder Will Out: Kingship, Kinship and Killing in Medieval
Scotland 193
Alexander Grant
10. The Lanark Bond 227
Michael Brown
11. James III: Kingship and Contested Reputation 246
Alasdair A. MacDonald
12. Beyond the Declaration of Arbroath: Kingship, Counsel and
Consent in Late Medieval and Early Modern Scotland 265
Roger A. Mason
13. Royal Gifts and Gift-Exchange in Sixteenth-Century
Anglo-Scottish Politics 283
Felicity Heal
14. The Ainslie Bond 301
Julian Goodare
15. ‘Scotland will be the Ending of all Empires’: Mr Thomas
Murray and King James VI and I 320
Jamie Reid-Baxter
Publications of Jenny Wormald 341

Index 346
Illustrations
Figures
Frontispiece: Dr Jenny Wormald ii

12.1 The earls and countesses of Angus in the fourteenth century 43
12.2 The Douglas inheritance, 1388–c.1400 52
11.1 The chapel of St Quirinus, Trier 256
11.2 The chapel of Restalrig: conjectural drawing by Richard
Fawcett 257
15.1 James VI as Protestant warrior 321
15.2 Thomas Murray, Lamentationum Ieremiae Paraphrasis Poetica,
prefatory epigram to James VI 333
Tables
14.1 Earls and the Ainslie Bond in 1567 307

14.2 Lords and the Ainslie Bond in 1567 309
14.3 Bishops and the Ainslie Bond in 1567 310
Preface
We are grateful to our colleague Judith Green for reminding us of the hostage
to fortune that Jenny Wormald left buried in the acknowledgements to her
book Lords and Men in Scotland: Bonds of Manrent, 1442‒1603 (Edinburgh,
1985). By remarking on the coincidence that the earliest known bond of
manrent was dated exactly 500 years before her own date of birth, Jenny had
enabled scholars of 2011 to work out that her seventieth birthday was
approaching. The result was a conference in 2012 celebrating her
achievements – a conference in which Jenny participated with éclat, being
one of the last to leave the restaurant, with her sons, at the end of a long and
enjoyable day.
It was always intended that the conference would be a first step towards
an edited volume, and this book is the result. We are grateful to all those who
spoke at the conference; mention should be made here of Steven Gunn,
whose paper was promised for publication elsewhere but was much appre-
ciated on the day. Revised versions of the other conference papers appear
below, along with a number of other chapters that all address themes
prominent in Jenny’s work. Thanks are due to the School of History, Classics
and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, and to the conference adminis-
trator, Adrienne Miller.
Edinburgh University Press expressed early interest in the project and has
been a consistently supportive publisher.
Steve Boardman
Julian Goodare
November 2013
Abbreviations
AB Ill. Joseph Robertson and George Grub (eds),

Illustrations of the Topography and Antiquities of
the Shires of Aberdeen and Banff, 4 vols
(Spalding Club, 1847‒69)
APS The Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, 12 vols,
eds Thomas Thomson and Cosmo Innes
(Edinburgh, 1814‒75)
BL British Library, London
BUK Booke of the Universall Kirk: Acts and
Proceedings of the General Assembly of the Kirk
of Scotland, 3 vols, ed. Thomas Thomson
(Bannatyne Club, 1839‒45)
Calderwood, History David Calderwood, History of the Kirk of
Scotland, 8 vols, eds Thomas Thomson and
David Laing (Wodrow Society, 1842‒9)
CBP Calendar of Letters and Papers Relating to the
Affairs of the Borders of England and Scotland,
1560‒1603, 2 vols, ed. Joseph Bain (London,
1894‒6)
CDS Calendar of Documents Relating to Scotland,
1108‒1516, 5 vols, eds Joseph Bain et al.
(Edinburgh, 1881‒1986)
Chron. Bower (Watt) Walter Bower, Scotichronicon, 9 vols, eds D. E.
R. Watt et al. (Aberdeen and Edinburgh,
1987‒98)
Chron. Wyntoun (Laing) Androw of Wyntoun, The Orygenale Cronykil of
Scotland, 3 vols, ed. David Laing (Edinburgh,
1872‒79)
Complete Peerage G. E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage, 13 vols in
14 (2nd edn, London, 1910‒1959)
CSP Dom. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, 94
vols, eds R. Lemon et al. (London, 1856– )
CSP For. Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, 25 vols,
eds W. B. Turnbull et al. (London, 1861‒1950).
x KINGS, LORDS AND MEN IN SCOTLAND AND BRITAIN
CSP Scot. Calendar of State Papers relating to Scotland and

Mary, Queen of Scots, 1547‒1603, 13 vols, eds
Joseph Bain et al. (Edinburgh, 1898‒1969)
DOST Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue
(www.dsl.ac.uk)
Dunfermline Reg. Registrum de Dunfermelyn, ed. Cosmo Innes
(Bannatyne Club, 1842)
EETS Early English Text Society
EHR English Historical Review
ER The Exchequer Rolls of Scotland, 23 vols, eds
J. Stuart et al. (Edinburgh, 1878– )
Fraser, Douglas Book Sir William Fraser (ed.), The Douglas Book,
4 vols (Edinburgh, 1885)
HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission
IR Innes Review
James V Letters The Letters of James V, eds R. K. Hannay and
Denys Hay (Edinburgh, 1954)
Knox, Works John Knox, Works, 6 vols, ed. David Laing
(Wodrow Society, 1846‒64)
L&P Henry VIII Calendar of Letters and Papers, Foreign and
Domestic of the Reign of Henry VIII, 21 vols,
eds J. S. Brewer et al. (London, 1864‒1932)
Melrose Liber Liber Sancte Marie de Melros, 2 vols, ed. Cosmo
Innes (Bannatyne Club, 1837)
Moray Reg. Registrum Episcopatus Moraviensis, ed. Cosmo
Innes (Bannatyne Club, 1837)
NLS National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh
NRA(S) National Register of Archives (Scotland),
Edinburgh
NRS National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)
PROME Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, 1275‒
1504, eds C. Given-Wilson et al. (Leicester,
2005)
PSAS Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of
Scotland
RMS Registrum Magni Sigilli Regum Scotorum
(Register of the Great Seal of Scotland), 11 vols,
eds J. M. Thomson et al. (Edinburgh, 1882– )
RPC Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, 38 vols,
eds J. H. Burton et al. (Edinburgh, 1877– )
RPS Records of the Parliaments of Scotland to 1707,
eds Keith M. Brown et al. (2007) (www.rps.ac.uk)
abbreviations xi
RRS Regesta Regum Scottorum, 6 vols, eds G. W. S.

Barrow et al. (Edinburgh, 1960– )
RSS Registrum Secreti Sigilli Regum Scotorum
(Register of the Privy Seal of Scotland), 8 vols,
eds M. Livingstone et al. (Edinburgh, 1908– )
Rymer, Foedera Thomas Rymer (ed.), Foedera, Conventiones,
Litterae et Cuiuscunque Generis Acta Publica,
20 vols (London, 1704‒35)
SHR Scottish Historical Review
SHS Scottish History Society
Spalding Misc. Miscellany of the Spalding Club, 5 vols (1841‒52)
SRS Scottish Record Society
STS Scottish Text Society
TA Accounts of the (Lord High) Treasurer of
Scotland, 13 vols, eds T. Dickson et al.
(Edinburgh, 1877– )
TNA The National Archives, London
TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
Contributors
STEVE BOARDMAN is Reader in History, University of Edinburgh. His

books include The Campbells, 1250‒1500 (2005) and The Early Stewart Kings:
Robert II and Robert III, 1371‒1406 (1996). He has been Director of the
Survey of Dedications to Saints in Medieval Scotland, and is currently
completing the New Edinburgh History of Scotland, volume 5: The First
Stewart Dynasty: Scotland, 1371‒1488.
KEITH M. BROWN is Professor of History, University of Manchester. His

books include Noble Power in Scotland from the Reformation to the Revolution
(Edinburgh University Press, 2011), Noble Society in Scotland (Edinburgh
University Press, 2000) and Bloodfeud in Scotland, 1573‒1625: Violence,
Justice and Politics in an Early Modern Society (1986). He has been general
editor of The Records of the Parliaments of Scotland to 1707 (www.rps.
ac.uk).
MICHAEL BROWN is Reader in History, University of St Andrews. His

books include Bannockburn: The Scottish War and the British Isles, 1307‒1323
(Edinburgh University Press, 2008), The Wars of Scotland, 1214‒1371
(Edinburgh University Press, 2004) and The Black Douglases: War and
Lordship in Late Medieval Scotland, 1300‒1455 (1998).
CHRISTINE CARPENTER is Professor of Medieval English History,

University of Cambridge. Her books include The Wars of the Roses: Politics
and the Constitution in England, c.1437‒1509 (1997) and Locality and Polity:
A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401‒1499 (1992). She was Director
of an AHRC-funded project to complete the calendaring of the fifteenth-
century Inquisitions Post Mortem which published volumes covering the
years 1422‒47. She is at present writing A New Constitutional History of
England, 1215‒1509.
JANE E. A. DAWSON is John Laing Professor of Reformation History,

University of Edinburgh. Her books include Scotland Re-formed, 1488‒1587
(Edinburgh University Press, 2007) and The Politics of Religion in the Age of
Mary, Queen of Scots: The Earl of Argyll and the Struggle for Britain and
contributors xiii
Ireland (2002). She has been Director of the Wode Psalter Project and is
currently working on a biography of John Knox to be published in 2014.
A. MARK GODFREY is Professor of Legal History, University of Glasgow.

He is the author of Civil Justice in Renaissance Scotland: The Origins of a
Central Court (2009) and Editor of the Journal of Legal History. He currently
leads a research group with Professor Remco van Rhee of Maastricht
University on ‘The Comparative History of Central Courts in Europe and
the Americas’, funded from 2012 to 2015 by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung.
JULIAN GOODARE is Reader in History, University of Edinburgh. His

books include The Government of Scotland, 1560‒1625 (2004) and State and
Society in Early Modern Scotland (1999). He has been Director of the Survey
of Scottish Witchcraft, and is currently completing The European Witch-Hunt
for Routledge.
ALEXANDER GRANT is Reader in History, University of Lancaster. He

is the author of Independence and Nationhood: Scotland, 1306‒1469 (1984).
His edited books include Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History
(1995) (with Keith J. Stringer) and Medieval Scotland: Crown, Lordship and
Community: Essays Presented to G. W. S. Barrow (Edinburgh University Press,
1993) (with Keith J. Stringer). His main research area continues to be
lordship and political structures in late medieval Scotland in a comparative
context, as demonstrated by recent and forthcoming studies of twelfth-
century ‘Norman’ settlement north of the Forth, major Scottish bastards
within the European context, and the English border family of Lucy of
Cockermouth.
ANNA GROUNDWATER is an historian of early modern Scotland and

Britain working at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of The
Scottish Middle March, 1573‒1625: Power, Kinship, Allegiance (2010) and the
forthcoming Scotland Connected: The History of Scotland and the World at a
Glance (2014). She is a co-founder of the Borders Forum.
FELICITY HEAL is Emeritus Fellow, Jesus College, Oxford. Her books

include Reformation in Britain and Ireland (2003) and Hospitality in Early
Modern England (1990). She recently edited The Oxford Handbook of
Holinshed’s Chronicles (2013) (with Paulina Kewes and Ian W. Archer) and has
just completed a book on Gifts and Power in Early Modern England.
ALASDAIR A. MACDONALD is Professor Emeritus of English Language

and Literature of the Middle Ages, University of Groningen, and Honorary
Senior Research Fellow, University of Glasgow. He has edited numerous
xiv KINGS, LORDS AND MEN IN SCOTLAND AND BRITAIN
books, including Sixteenth-Century Scotland: Essays in Honour of Michael

Lynch (2008) (with Julian Goodare), Rhetoric, Royalty, and Reality: Essays on
the Literary Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Scotland (2005) (with Kees
Dekker) and A Palace in the Wild: Essays on Vernacular Culture and Humanism
in Late-Medieval and Renaissance Scotland (2000) (with L. A. J. R. Houwen
and Sally L. Mapstone). He is currently engaged on an edition of the earliest
known print (1565) of the Gude and Godlie Ballatis, for the Scottish Text
Society.
HECTOR MACQUEEN is a Scottish Law Commissioner and Professor of

Private Law, University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Common Law and
Feudal Society in Medieval Scotland (Edinburgh University Press, 1993) and
of numerous works on law and legal history. He is Literary Director of the
Stair Society and a Vice-President of the Scottish Text Society.
ROGER A. MASON is Professor of Scottish History, University of St

Andrews. He has edited numerous books, including George Buchanan:
Political Thought in Early Modern Britain and Europe (2012) (with Caroline
Erskine), A Dialogue on the Law of Kingship among the Scots: A Critical Edition
and Translation of George Buchanan’s ‘De Iure Regni apud Scotos Dialogus’
(2004) (with Martin S. Smith) and John Knox and the British Reformations
(1998). He is General Editor of the New Edinburgh History of Scotland and
President of the Scottish History Society. He is currently working (with
Steven Reid) on an edited volume Andrew Melville (1545‒1622): Writings,
Reception and Reputation, and on the New Edinburgh History of Scotland
volume 7: Union, Empire and Reform: Scotland, c.1587‒1690.
JAMIE REID-BAXTER is a Research Associate in Scottish History at the

University of Glasgow. His publications include Jhone Angus, Monk of
Dunfermline, and Scottish Reformation Music (2011) (with Michael Lynch and
E. Patricia Dennison). He is editor of Poems of Elizabeth Melville, Lady
Culross (2010). He is currently editing Robert Bruce’s manuscript sermons
of 1590‒1 for the Scottish History Society and preparing an online edition
of the works of Thomas Murray.
JOHN WATTS is Fellow and Tutor, Corpus Christi College, Oxford. His
books include The Making of Polities: Europe, 1300‒1500 (2009) and Henry
VI and the Politics of Kingship (1996). His most recent edited book is Power
and Identity in the Middle Ages: Essays in Memory of Rees Davies (2007) (with
Huw Pryce). He is currently working on a volume for the New Oxford
History of England series, entitled Renaissance England, 1461‒1547.
Introduction:
Kings, Lords and Jenny Wormald
STEVE BOARDMAN and JULIAN GOODARE
Jenny Wormald’s contribution to the transformation of Scottish historical

scholarship is manifest in a number of areas, as the various studies that make
up this volume confirm individually and collectively. Through a series of
innovative and original monographs and articles she has launched an often
brutally witty iconoclastic assault on hoary misconceptions about the
medieval and early modern kingdom and left a landscape littered with the
battered remains of old prejudices and muddled thinking in her wake. For
festschrift editors, circling the site of battle and attempting to identify juicy
titbits amongst the wreckage, the scale of Jenny’s triumph and the rapidity
of her subsequent advance present their own problems in terms of supplying
a bewilderingly wide choice of possible targets. Rather than flap aimlessly
across a broad and still developing front, we have alighted on a few funda-
mental aspects of Jenny’s work that might repay more detailed consideration.1
The question that lies behind much of our discussion is that of periodis-
ation. When was medieval Scotland? When was early modern Scotland? Why
does this book begin in 1300, and why does it end in 1625? Lord Acton’s
advice that historians should ‘study problems, not periods’ is as wise as ever,
but any investigation of the problem of how relationships among ‘kings, lords
and men’ were articulated in political culture must address the question of
when the main changes occurred. As we shall see, Jenny’s unconventional
approach to this question has generated fresh insights.
A persistent feature of Jenny’s historical approach has been a cheerful disin-

clination to accept the idea that there were necessarily profound differences
between fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Scotland. Indeed, the chronological
sweep of much of Jenny’s published work implicitly brings into question the
11 Jenny’s publications are all listed in full at the end of this volume. Thus they are not
necessarily cited in full in the present introduction.
2 KINGS, LORDS AND MEN IN SCOTLAND AND BRITAIN
usefulness and utility of thinking in terms of the constructed historical cate-

gories of ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’. In the Scottish context, in particular,
Jenny’s studies have ranged widely in both theme and chronology, analysing
social, legal and governmental structures and developments from the fifteenth
to the seventeenth century. The particular breadth and coherence of her
vision for the century and a half between c.1450 and c.1600, straddling what
has occasionally been presented as the shift from the medieval to the early
modern, rests on her identification of basic patterns in Scottish social and
political life that endured, despite a variety of challenges, throughout that
period. The appearance in 1980 of the Past and Present article ‘Bloodfeud,
kindred and government in early modern Scotland’ and, in 1985, of the
monograph Lords and Men in Scotland: Bonds of Manrent, 1442‒1603, estab-
lished the wide chronological and intellectual boundaries within which Jenny
would work, the two studies together laying out the argument that there were
fundamental ties of kinship, lordship and service that bound together Scottish
society at the local, regional and national level from the mid-fifteenth century
to the eve of the union of the crowns.
The strength of local and regional lords was, Jenny suggested, not neces-
sarily a challenge to, or a check on, the status and ambitions of the Scottish
monarchy, but rather provided kings and queens with largely co-operative
and willing partners in the localities through whom they could govern their
land effectively. Moreover, the rivalry between male lineage lordships was
regulated, if never extinguished, by the conventions of feud, which, Jenny
argued, were as much concerned with suppressing and containing disorder
and achieving a sustainable and honourable settlement of disputes as they
were in encouraging violent revenge for perceived wrongs. Against this
backdrop of decentralised political power and deep continuity in aristocratic
structures, social custom and expectations of governance, the various political
crises of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, so emphasised in older inter-
pretations inclined to view Scotland as a kingdom forever teetering on the
edge of internal war and disorder, became less significant.
In her 1972 paper ‘Taming the magnates?’ Jenny directly attacked this
entrenched view of Scotland as a polity naturally and structurally inclined
towards political violence, and laid out a radical new framework that stressed
the overall stability of Scottish society and, in particular, the way in which
crown and aristocracy usually worked together to manage and defend the
realm successfully. Jenny, moreover, argued fiercely against the idea that the
continued vitality of long established social and governmental patterns should
be characterised as a type of medieval ‘backwardness’ or primitivism, a failure
to adhere to a blueprint for governmental and social progress derived from
more precocious medieval and early modern polities. The pre-1603 Scottish
realm had been especially vulnerable to this characterisation, Jenny suggested,
because the union of the crowns, and then the union of the parliaments, effec-
introduction 3
tively brought consideration of the story of the pre-modern kingdom into a

scholarly world where the ‘whiggish’ historiography of the neighbouring
English realm, with its emphasis on the dangers of self-serving baronial
violence and an interest in ‘beneficial’ constitutional and institutional devel-
opment, held sway.
Judged in these terms, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Scottish govern-
ment appeared underdeveloped and lamentably susceptible to malicious
magnate violence – but Jenny argued that these were inappropriate and
anachronistic terms in which to judge. She not only rejected the old image
of the rampantly bellicose and reckless Scottish aristocrat, embroiled in petty
feuds and dismissive of royal power, but also attempted to show that, despite
the supposed weakness of its central institutions, pre-modern Scotland was
remarkably stable and peaceful. In this sweeping re-evaluation of Scottish
political society Jenny was able to build on and develop the ideas of the influ-
ential English historian K. B. McFarlane, who had long before expressed
doubts about the accuracy and usefulness of the idea that late medieval
polities and politics were defined, and marred, by a long struggle between
‘progressive’ monarchs and recalcitrant and disruptive noblemen. In estab-
lishing a more upbeat picture of the late medieval Scottish kingdom as a realm
generally characterised by crown–magnate co-operation and relatively low
levels of political violence Jenny soon found a willing and industrious ally in
the shape of Sandy Grant (also a contributor to this volume). Effective local
and regional lordships were no longer a lurking danger, but the means by
which social order was established and maintained. ‘Lords and men’ had a
culture of co-operation and mutual support, characterised by the bonds of
manrent given by followers to lords, and the bonds of maintenance given by
lords to followers. In this view, the projection of increased royal power into
the localities was no guarantee of good order and harmony, and indeed might
cause disruption and discord. Jenny emphasised the robust effectiveness of
the Scottish kingdom’s political structures and cultures, especially when
managed by monarchs who clearly understood and successfully discharged
their own central role within them.
II
In Jenny’s summaries of her ideas she usually placed Scotland in a European

rather than just a British context. One of the starting points of her analysis
was the ubiquity of European warfare as a motor for taxation and state
formation – and, as a result, for instability, resistance and revolt. Yet, she
pointed out, Scotland was rarely at war. Its only enemy was England, and,
while wars with England sometimes led to Scottish defeats in battle, these
defeats were costly only in lives; the Scots never developed an expensive
military infrastructure, nor did they need to fear English attempts at
conquest. A largely peaceful Scotland meant that the Scottish crown did not
need to make significant demands on local aristocratic society. It was, in one
of Jenny’s celebrated phrases, ‘laisser-faire monarchy’. Political stability and
dynastic continuity were maintained because successive monarchs were not
impelled to interfere with the workings of local aristocratic society – a society
that contained its own stabilisation mechanisms in procedures for dispute
settlement. This was not so much ‘New Monarchy’ (on which more below),
rather it was ‘Old but Effective Monarchy’. The Scots were not backward;
they were astute in avoiding the new problems that other polities brought
upon themselves. Those unhappy kings who ignored or refused to recognise
the implicit limitations on their power soon ran into trouble: Norman
Macdougall’s detailed study of the politically disastrous reign of James III
suggests that the origin of at least some of that monarch’s many problems lay
in a grandiose overestimation of his ability and right as the king to interfere
arbitrarily in the affairs of the kingdom’s various regions without due consid-
eration of the established privileges, roles and interests of the lords who
actually exercised social and political leadership in those localities.2
While subsequent work by others has questioned whether Jenny’s stress
on the enduring stability of local and regional society has tended unduly to
obscure or minimise the disruptive and traumatic effects of individual
political crises within the kingdom, and the significance of the tensions that
gave rise to them, there is little doubt that the overall understanding of the
context and meaning of such political dispute and violence has shifted
dramatically.3 It is no longer credible, and certainly not advisable in Jenny’s
presence, to explain away periods of internal conflict as a reflection of the
inherent inadequacy and weakness of royal government, or the natural incli-
nation of a brutish and rebellious nobility to race to arms in order to pursue
their selfish goals.
Jenny’s view of the essential continuities in the nature of royal power (and
much else) from the fifteenth into the sixteenth century found expression in
the tripartite organisation of her textbook Court, Kirk, and Community:
Scotland, 1470‒1625, published in 1981 as part of the New History of
Scotland series, of which she was general editor. Here the opening and final
12 Norman Macdougall, James III (2nd edn, Edinburgh, 2009).
13 For contrasting contributions to the debate see Michael H. Brown, ‘Scotland tamed?
Kings and magnates in late medieval Scotland: a review of recent work’, IR 45 (1994),
120‒46; Michael H. Brown, ‘“I have thus slain a tyrant”: The Dethe of the Kynge of
Scotis and the right to resist in early fifteenth-century Scotland’, IR 47 (1996), 24‒
44; Alexander Grant, ‘Crown and nobility in late medieval Britain’, in Roger Mason
(ed.), Scotland and England, 1286‒1815 (Edinburgh, 1987), 34‒59; Roger Mason,
‘Chivalry and citizenship: aspects of national identity in Renaissance Scotland’, in
Roger Mason and Norman Macdougall (eds), People and Power in Scotland: Essays in
Honour of T. C. Smout (Edinburgh, 1992), 50‒73; Roger Mason, ‘Kingship, tyranny
and the right to resist in fifteenth-century Scotland’, SHR 66 (1987), 125‒51.
introduction 5
sections of the work were both said to deal with ‘Renaissance Scotland’, the
reigns of James III, James IV and James V covered in the first segment, and
those of Queen Mary and James VI in the last. Sandwiched between these
discussions of ‘Renaissance Scotland’ came consideration of the Reformation,
that bundle of religious, political and social phenomena that has, on occasion,
been taken as causing early modernity to arrive in Scotland and as bringing
an end to the medieval world. Certainly in many other national historiogra-
phies across Europe the various Protestant Reformations of the sixteenth
century have been regarded as ushering in a new set of spiritual, political,
social and cultural attitudes that represented a decisive break from the
‘medievalism’ of the Catholic Church. While Jenny’s schema recognised the
importance of the Scottish Reformation, it also implicitly suggested that its
transformative power was not as extensive or all-embracing as some inter-
pretations asserted, and that a number of the key features that defined
Scottish society before 1560 remained in place through to the end of the
sixteenth century and beyond.
The notion, evident here, that post-Reformation monarchs operated
within a political and social landscape governed by largely the same rules as
their Stewart ancestors, played its part in Jenny’s highly critical assessment
of Queen Mary in her 1987 monograph Mary Queen of Scots: A Study in
Failure. For Jenny, Mary’s failure lay not in an excusable or tragic incapacity
to cope with new conditions brought about by the Reformation, but rather
in her inability or unwillingness to follow the well-established model of
effective active rule, involving regular contact with, and careful management
of, the nobility and the localities, that had underpinned the success of earlier
Stewart rulers. Here was no doomed heroine cursed by the fates, but a
straightforwardly inept ruler.
While Jenny’s estimation of Mary’s political incompetence has not proved
as influential as her analysis of Scottish lordship, it fits logically into the
template first outlined in ‘Taming the magnates?’, which suggested that any
collapse in the authority of a particular ruler was best explained by individual
rather than systematic failings or weaknesses in the institution of monarchy,
or the inherent flammability of the Scottish political community. One part
of her approach has surely been accepted: the need to assess Mary by straight-
forward political criteria as a ruler. Michael Lynch’s review article, which
engaged head-on with Jenny’s negative assessment of Mary, and Julian
Goodare’s article in the ODNB, which can be read as an implicit response to
it, both took the political approach that she advocated so firmly.4
14 Michael Lynch, ‘Mary queen of Scots: a new case for the prosecution’, Journal of
Ecclesiastical History 41 (1990), 69‒73; Julian Goodare, ‘Mary (1542‒1587), queen of
Scots’, ODNB.
III
One of the key points to emerge from all this is that Jenny’s work offers a
perspective that links rather than separates the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, places fundamental changes in Scottish governmental, legal and
political structures as late as the last decade of the sixteenth century or the
early decades of the seventeenth century and, thereby, implicitly rejects
attempts to locate the transition between medieval and early modern Scotland
at any earlier juncture. The term most commonly applied by Jenny to describe
the kingdom in the period 1470‒1600 is ‘Renaissance’ Scotland, a polity
ruled, inevitably enough, by Renaissance monarchs.
Renaissance kingship is hard to define precisely in terms of chronology
and fundamental characteristics, but it clearly developed from the older
scholarly idea of fifteenth-century European ‘New Monarchies’. New
Monarchy was used by historians in the twentieth century to describe what
seemed to be a widespread phenomenon across Western Europe in the second
half of the fifteenth century, namely a strengthening and expansion of royal
government that led to an increase in the level of control exercised by Western
European royal houses within their own territories. These New Monarchies
supposedly represented a transitional phase between medieval kingdoms and
full-blown early modern states. The New Monarchies were distinguished by
the growing ability, or at least ambition, of kings, princes and dukes to direct
the economic, religious and cultural affairs of their subjects. These rulers
were increasingly willing to reject interference in their own domains by
external ecclesiastical authority and simultaneously to crush the pretensions
of those of their subjects who sought to maintain autonomous regional power.
Royal government grew in size and reach, and this expanding bureaucracy
delivered greater resources into the hands of the ruler. The growing wealth
of the crown was displayed through increasingly sumptuous and ostentatious
royal pageantry and ritual, the creation of a court culture that prized,
supported and flaunted the presence of writers, entertainers, artists and
scholars, the construction of elaborate palaces and residences, and heavy
investment in new military technologies.5 Many of the defining characteristics
of New Monarchy were drawn from the development of continental kingdoms,
the resurgent fifteenth-century French monarchy and the dukedom of
Burgundy, in which the elaboration of a princely, courtly culture, the
expansion of bureaucracy and the self-conscious promotion and articulation
of the benefits of good government, acted as a reflection of, and a means of
projecting, political power.
The idea of late medieval New Monarchy briefly fell out of fashion,
15 Anthony Goodman, The New Monarchy: England, 1471‒1534 (Historical Association

Studies, Oxford, 1988).
introduction 7
particularly in English historiography, assaulted on one front by medievalists

unconvinced that there was anything significantly ‘new’ in the aspirations
and policies of fifteenth-century kings, and on another by historians of Tudor
England, most obviously Geoffrey Elton, who argued that a radical, decisive
and near complete break from medieval traditions of government was achieved
by Henry VIII’s regime in the 1530s.6 However, dissatisfaction with, and
extensive debate over, Elton’s notion of a ‘Tudor Revolution’ in government
has allowed, in England, a re-engagement with the idea of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries as a period marked by fundamental continuities, in which
political, administrative and social change tended to be slow, evolutionary and
incremental rather than dramatic and convulsive.7
Jenny’s characterisation of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as an
era of Renaissance monarchy is thus very much in step with the wider drift
of modern historical scholarship in Scotland and the British Isles.8 The clas-
sification obviously has the useful effect of by-passing, or making irrelevant,
any explicit discussion of when, how and why (and indeed whether) the
medieval kingdoms became early modern states: perhaps no bad thing given
the disruptive and distorting impact that the concepts of ‘medieval’ and ‘early
modern’, and the rather fruitless search to define the key distinguishing char-
acteristics of each, are sometimes said to have had on historians’ under-
standing.9 And, for Jenny, the phrase ‘Renaissance monarchy’ is not so much
an exercise in periodisation as an expression of a real process, the linking of
politics with culture. She sees the development of Scottish government as
driven by the expansion of lay literacy, which in turn led to the growth of a
legal profession and the beginnings of a culture of office-holding and office-
16 G. R. Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government (Cambridge, 1953); Goodman, New

Monarchy, 7‒8; Julian Goodare, The Government of Scotland, 1560‒1625 (Oxford,
2004), 276‒80.
17 For recent contributions to the ‘Tudor Revolution’ debate, laying more stress on steady
development, see Natalie Mears, ‘Court, courtiers and culture in Tudor England’,
Historical Journal 46 (2003), 703‒22; John Watts (ed.), The End of the Middle Ages?
England in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Stroud, 1998); John Watts, ‘“A new
ffundacion of is crowne”: monarchy in the age of Henry VII’, in Benjamin Thompson
(ed.), The Reign of Henry VII (Stamford, 1995), 31‒53; Steven Gunn, Early Tudor
Government, 1485‒1558 (London, 1995).
18 Roger Mason also deploys the concept of Renaissance Scotland as a description of the
period from the reign of James III onwards. Roger Mason, ‘This realm of Scotland is
an empire? Imperial ideas and iconography in early Renaissance Scotland’, in Barbara
E. Crawford (ed.), Church, Chronicle and Learning in Medieval and Early Renaissance
Scotland (Edinburgh, 1999), 73‒91; Roger Mason, ‘Renaissance and Reformation: the
sixteenth century’, in Jenny Wormald (ed.), Scotland: A History (Oxford, 2005), 107‒42.
19 See the various articles in Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37, no. 3
(October 2007); Timothy Reuter, ‘Medieval: another tyrannous construct?’, Medieval
History Journal 1 (1998), 25‒45.
seeking. Nor was this just a sixteenth-century phenomenon, for the trend
was already visible in the fifteenth century.
The notion of Scottish Renaissance monarchy has not entirely swept alter-
native chronologies from the field, and there remain some difficulties in
defining exactly when, for example, Renaissance Scotland can be said to begin
and end. The problematic areas remain, largely, those pointed out by critics
of the New Monarchy thesis. There is still uncertainty about the point at
which truly ‘medieval’ kingship can be said to give way to Renaissance
monarchy and what that change actually entailed or signified. While Jenny
and historians such as Roger Mason are content to locate the beginnings of
Renaissance Scotland loosely in the reigns of James III and James IV, it is also
possible to suggest that the reign of James I (1406‒37) marked the advent of
a ‘new kind of princely culture in Scotland’.10
Conversely, historians mindful of Eltonian arguments about ‘modernity’
being defined by changes to the organisation and ideology of royal govern-
ment and bureaucracy are inclined to regard the late fifteenth- and early
sixteenth-century Stewart monarchy as remaining fundamentally medieval
in outlook. For Julian Goodare, the ‘Stewart revolution in government’
(heavily qualified) occurred in the late sixteenth century rather than the late
fifteenth, and James IV and James V remain thoroughly medieval kings.11
Goodare’s analysis is, however, as much European as British, with his ‘abso-
lutist state’ forming a Continental-style ancien régime that to some extent
looks back from (or forward to) the Scottish Revolution of 1638.12 Whether
this is enough to meet Jenny’s repeated demand for historians to stop
assessing Scotland by English criteria may be pondered. A recent study has,
meanwhile, suggested yet another possible line of demarcation in early-
sixteenth-century Scotland with the emergence of a new form of socially
coercive secular and ecclesiastical government, informed by the concerns and
ideologies of Catholic counter-reformation on the Continent.13
10 Alasdair A. MacDonald, ‘Princely culture in Scotland under James III and James IV’,
in Martin Gosman, Alasdair A. MacDonald and Arjo Vanderjagt (eds), Princes and
Princely Culture, 1450‒1650, vol. i (Leiden, 2003), 147‒72, at p. 147.
11 Goodare, Government of Scotland, ch. 12. See also Michael Lynch, Scotland: A New
History (2nd edn, London, 1992), ch. 10, where James III, James IV and (especially)
James V are characterised as late medieval kings employing ‘Old Solutions’ to meet
‘New Problems’.
12 Julian Goodare, State and Society in Early Modern Scotland (Oxford, 1999), ch. 3 and
passim.
13 Mairi Cowan, ‘In the borderlands of periodization with “the blythnes that hes bein”:
the medieval/early modern boundary in Scottish history’, Journal of the Canadian
Historical Association 23 (2012), 142‒75.
introduction 9
IV
One of Jenny’s earliest essays in reinterpretation, in 1973, concerned James

VI and I.14 Here she built on her ideas about laisser-faire kingship to argue
that James was not a pioneer of new-style state formation but the last and
perhaps greatest practitioner of traditional monarchy in Scotland. This was
partly directed against the Eltonian arguments of Maurice Lee, and a stimu-
lating if inconclusive debate with Lee ensued.15 This debate has long since
been overtaken by other works, including those of the participants themselves,
but it raised the question of how the reign of James VI fitted into Jenny’s
broader periodisation of Scottish history with its continuities since the
fifteenth century. The answer to that question would soon emerge.
As noted above, Jenny’s Court, Kirk and Community was part of a project
of which she was general editor, a multi-volume history of Scotland from
earliest times to the present day. When she returned to the long sweep of
Scottish history two decades later, as editor of a one-volume history of
Scotland, followers of her work on the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries might
have asked which of these centuries she would choose to write about in her
own chapter. In fact, she chose the seventeenth century.16 From this chapter,
just one point can be picked out for the present analysis: the argument that
Charles I was just as much a ‘disaster’ as Mary had been, though he was
condemned for authoritarian inflexibility rather than passivity. Charles’
accession, then, formed a watershed that would be followed by further
disasters.
Jenny’s periodisation had in fact been indicated in Court, Kirk and
Community itself. She chose to end her book in 1625, with James’ death,
rather than in 1603, with the union of crowns – leading to an overlap with
the next volume when its author, Rosalind Mitchison, insisted on a more
conventional periodisation.17 The fact that Jenny has written a great deal
about the 1603 union may obscure the fact that, for her, it was not a grand
turning point, at least for Scotland. And, although the present book cannot
cover all the themes of Jenny’s work, it may be noted that 1625 is the terminal
date in its title, too.
14 Jennifer M. Brown, ‘Scottish politics, 1567‒1625’, in Alan G. R. Smith (ed.), The

Reign of James VI and I (London, 1973), 22‒39.
15 Maurice Lee, Jr, ‘James VI and the aristocracy’, Scotia 1 (1977), 18‒23; Jenny
Wormald, ‘James VI: new men for old?’, Scotia 2 (1978), 70‒6. Cf. Maurice Lee, Jr,
John Maitland of Thirlestane and the Foundation of the Stewart Despotism in Scotland
(Princeton, NJ, 1959).
16 Jenny Wormald, ‘Confidence and perplexity: the seventeenth century’, in Wormald
(ed.), Scotland: A History (Oxford, 2005), 143‒76.
17 Rosalind Mitchison, Lordship to Patronage: Scotland, 1603‒1745 (London, 1983).
One of Jenny’s reasons for downplaying the Scottish significance of 1603

has perhaps been superseded by more recent work. She tended to see
‘absentee monarchy’ as being similar to a royal minority: that is, the absence
of an active adult ruler was something that Scottish nobles were used to
coping with; it is, indeed, one of the strengths of Jenny’s interpretation of
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that it can show how the Scottish polity
functioned during royal minorities. But the entire concept of ‘absentee
monarchy’ has fallen from favour with the deepening understanding that
royal policy was active and interventionist in Scotland in the early seventeenth
century.18 The Scottish significance of 1603 can now be downplayed for a
simpler reason: James VI remained king of Scotland, and he and his
government continued to pursue their policies throughout his reign.
As for the English, the union of crowns brought them a new dynasty – a
more significant discontinuity than in Scotland. Having secured completion
of the New History of Scotland series, Jenny went on to undertake the first
of a series of daring raids on English territory. Her 1983 article ‘James VI and
I: two kings or one?’, disarmingly simple in its title, began with an exposition
of her interpretation of the traditional Scottish kingdom as a ‘less developed
monarchy’ which ‘did less governing’.19 This exposition formed the starting
point for a new argument about the kingship of James I of England. Jenny’s
message to English historians was that James’ experience as king of Scotland
gave him advantages as king of England – and that, on the occasions where
James failed, this was to be attributed neither to his temperament nor to his
Scottish experience, but to the unwieldy political culture of England itself.
The existence of these alternative views on the definition of distinctive
phases and turning points in the historical development of kingship, lordship
and political society in Scotland and the British Isles does not, of course,
affect the basic point, borne out by the various contributions to this volume,
that Jenny’s broad outlook has served to challenge historians of the fifteenth,
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to think rewardingly beyond traditional
boundaries. With that thought, we now turn to discuss the contents of the
volume itself.
18 In revising passages from his earlier works for republication in 2011, Allan Macinnes
deleted the phrase ‘absentee monarchy’: compare Allan I. Macinnes, Charles I and the
Making of the Covenanting Movement, 1625‒1641 (Edinburgh, 1991), 173, with Allan
I. Macinnes, The British Confederate: Archibald Campbell, Marquess of Argyll, c.1607‒
1661 (Edinburgh, 2011), 109. For criticism of the concept of ‘absentee monarchy’ see
Goodare, Government of Scotland, 109‒10.
19 Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI and I: two kings or one?’, History 68 (1983), 187‒209, at
p. 193.
introduction 11
A number of the chapters below respond directly to Jenny’s ideas, either by

applying and developing them in new contexts, or by taking issue with and
qualifying her interpretations and conclusions: others offer insight into
parallel issues and concerns in the English realm, fittingly given Jenny’s long
and fruitful engagement with English historiography and her lengthy career
as a teacher and researcher in Oxford. One chapter in particular needs to be
mentioned at once: Keith Brown’s survey of her career, intellectual devel-
opment and influence, which complements the present introduction.20
The remainder of the book is divided into two sections, each dealing with
a set of historical relationships whose shape and operation Jenny has done so
much to illuminate, those between ‘Lords and Men’ and ‘Kings and Lords’.
Discussion of the significance of bonds and bonding and their intertwining
with the ‘formal’ and ‘public’ processes of royal justice, so central to Jenny’s
understanding of the way in which society worked, features heavily in both
sections. Within each section the arrangement of chapters is roughly chrono-
logical, but in what follows they are introduced thematically.
Beginning, then, with the ‘Lords and Men’ section: Anna Groundwater
contributes a study of the importance of structures of private lordship in the
exercise of royal justice in the Scottish borders in the reign of James VI, when
many aspects of feuding kin-based society were under sustained legislative
attack.21 She emphasises the resilience of the mutual ties binding lords and
men and their continued usefulness to the crown, even as formal bonding
and the legitimacy of ‘private’ violence were condemned by the king. Mark
Godfrey, meanwhile, offers a penetrating critique of the interplay between
‘private’ and ‘public’ justice in sixteenth-century Scotland.22 He suggests that
the conventions and procedures surrounding the arbitration and settlement
of feud and violent conflict were entirely consistent with the wider principles
of Scots law, and that therefore Jenny’s stress on the overriding importance
of lordship, kinship and customs and expectations organically and independ-
ently generated within ‘feuding society’ in determining forms of dispute reso-
lution may need to be revised.
Another aspect of the link between private lordship and the formal legal
structures of the realm is explored by Hector MacQueen in his meticulous
20 Keith M. Brown, ‘The Stewart Realm: Changing the Landscape’, Chapter 1 below in
this volume.
21 Anna Groundwater, ‘“We Bund and Obleiss us Never More to Querrell”: Bonds,
Private Obligations and Public Justice in the Reign of James VI’, Chapter 8 below in
this volume.
22 A. Mark Godfrey, ‘Rethinking the Justice of the Feud in Sixteenth-Century Scotland’,
Chapter 6 below in this volume.
review of the men who acted as justiciars north and south of the Forth for
the crown in the late medieval period.23 Every single justiciar is tracked, and
some broad patterns emerge. The chapter raises intriguing questions about
the development of the most important judicial offices in the kingdom and
what seems to have been a slow shift in the social origins and standing of the
men who occupied them. MacQueen’s analysis broadly supports Jenny’s view
that the aristocracy were heavily, and beneficially, involved in the formal and
informal government of the late medieval realm and did not represent an
obstacle to good rule.
One part of the aristocratic elite whose ambitions, role and influence
receive relatively little attention in Jenny’s published work are the wives,
mothers and daughters of Scotland’s noble and lairdly houses. Steve
Boardman’s in-depth study of the colourful and influential career of Margaret
Stewart, countess of Angus and Mar, asks whether the understandable focus
on the male descent lineage and its critical role in a feuding society has tended
to obscure the importance of the social ties and connections enjoyed by, and
established through, female aristocrats, and to downplay their capacity for
active involvement in disputes over land and title.24
Returning to discussion of the tradition of securing agreement and mutual
adherence through the drawing up of written bonds, Jane Dawson offers a
wide-ranging exploration of the significance of religious bonding in Scottish
society, and the practical and symbolic use of such bonds in expressing and
securing religious solidarity and confessional unity in early modern
Scotland.25 Dawson makes the point that this influence did not necessarily
run one way, and that sacramental practice and wider ideas about Christian
community may have had a profound impact on the development and
emblematic power of bonding in ‘non-religious’ contexts, if such could be
said to exist. This chapter is also a key site for considering changes brought
about by the Reformation and continuities from an earlier period.
Christine Carpenter’s rich, sophisticated and multi-layered analysis of
fourteenth-century bastard feudalism in England, and specifically the ways
in which it might differ from fifteenth-century bastard feudalism, is a weighty
contribution to a long-running and vital debate in English historiography.26
In the context of this volume, Carpenter’s work provides a stimulating
comparative perspective on the themes of lordship, service and their
23 Hector MacQueen, ‘Tame Magnates? The Justiciars of Later Medieval Scotland’,

24 Steve Boardman, ‘Lords and Women, Women as Lords: The Career of Margaret
Stewart, Countess of Angus and Mar, c.1354–c.1418’, Chapter 2 below in this volume.
25 Jane E. A. Dawson, ‘Bonding, Religious Allegiance and Covenanting’, Chapter 7 below
in this volume.
26 Christine Carpenter, ‘Bastard Feudalism in England in the Fourteenth Century’,
introduction 13
relationship to wider governmental structures that have so occupied Jenny.

Jenny’s own long-standing willingness to seek inspiration and enlightenment
through engagement with English scholarship is evident in her enthusiastic
review of Carpenter’s highly influential 1992 monograph, Locality and Polity:
A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401‒1499.27 In the context of the
present collection, Carpenter’s chapter may also be mentioned as an important
one that justifies the opening date of 1300 in the title of the collection, though
the chapters of Boardman and MacQueen, and of Sandy Grant (to be
discussed in a moment), are also relevant.
The final chapter to mention from this first part of the book is that of John
Watts. He provides a second offering from south of the border in an elegant,
eloquent and, latterly, thoroughly mischievous, piece on the poet John Skelton,
outlining his potential importance in both articulating and embodying the
jostling intellectual, literary and political cross-currents that converged in
the courtly culture of Renaissance England.28 In its literary focus, this chapter
responds to a frequent theme of Jenny’s work: her sensitivity to literature as
a barometer of cultural and political change.
VI
The second part of the book, ‘Kings and Lords’, continues some of these
themes and develops several others in more detail. Kingship is the linking
element, but specific themes include justice, diplomacy, political episodes,
political theory, court culture and literature, and religion.
In a chapter ranging over more than a millennium but focused on the later
medieval period, Sandy Grant investigates the role of the king in the provision
of justice.29 He sets later medieval Scotland in the context, not just of
England, but also of Germany and France, and even of modern Saudi Arabia.
Having reviewed the processes of dispute settlement and compensation for
killing in the justice of the feud, Grant turns the spotlight on the one type of
killing where these processes could not operate: the secret killing. It was
secrecy that distinguished ‘murder’ from other forms of homicide, and
required the aggrieved kin-group, not knowing the killer, to seek justice from
the king. A brief summary can hardly do justice to the intricacies of the
argument here, but it may be hoped that this chapter will be seen to make a
substantial contribution to a characteristically Wormaldian topic.
The provision of justice is also significant in the one chapter in the book
27 Renaissance Quarterly 47 (1994), 955‒9.

28 John Watts, ‘King, Lords and Men in Renaissance England: The Poetry of John
Skelton’, Chapter 5 below in this volume.
29 Alexander Grant, ‘Murder Will Out: Kingship, Kinship and Killing in Medieval
Scotland’, Chapter 9 below in this volume.
that takes a specific king as its subject. James III has often been seen as an
exception to the view of Stewart kingship as successfully consensual. Alasdair
MacDonald aims to rehabilitate James, or at least to contribute towards the
attainment of a more rounded picture of that much-maligned monarch.30 He
argues that some of the traditional canards are inapplicable: James should
certainly not be regarded as noteworthy for selling justice, and his amassing
of treasure was not ipso facto a fault in a king. In more detail, MacDonald
probes the question of what James was up to in the construction of Restalrig
Chapel. He notes that it was a grand and unusual monument. In stylistic
terms it was definitely late medieval rather than Renaissance. In religious
terms it was linked to Passion devotion. In local terms it was linked to
Edinburgh’s local saint, Triduana, who was then becoming fashionable. In
European terms it was linked to Bruges and to the ‘Burgundian moment’ of
late medieval Scottish court culture – and also to Trier in Germany, where
the chapel of St Quirinus provides a likely model. The striking conclusion is
that ‘As far as culture is concerned, the idea of a new start under James IV
seems to be a myth’.
Scotland’s ‘Burgundian moment’ had passed before the end of the
fifteenth century, whereupon the diplomatic interests of Scottish monarchs
resumed their focus on England and France. Felicity Heal’s chapter provides
a detailed reconstruction of sixteenth-century Anglo-Scottish diplomacy from
an original angle: that of the diplomats’ own experience as recipients of royal
generosity.31 One way of calibrating the perceived importance of diplomatic
missions was through the value of the gifts presented to them by the monarch
with whom they negotiated. Monarchs themselves also exchanged gifts.
Scotland seems usually to have exchanged more valuable gifts with England
than with Continental countries, though France was particularly important
to James V. Along the way we also learn of the importance of chivalry – with
James V in particular seeking membership of the great chivalric orders – and
of environment – with Scotland being in a strong position as the habitat of
hunting hawks that made most acceptable gifts for kings.
Bonds of manrent were about ‘lords and men’, but, along with them, Jenny
has also analysed ‘political bonds’, in which lords made alliances for purposes
of high politics. Two of Jenny’s ‘political bonds’ come under close scrutiny here:
the Lanark bond of 16 January 1453, and the Ainslie bond of 19 April 1567.
Traditionally, the Lanark bond has been seen as an unimportant interlude in
the story of the conflict between James II and the earls of Douglas, the
important episodes being the king’s killing of the eighth earl in 1452 and the
30 Alasdair A. MacDonald, ‘James III: Kingship and Contested Reputation’, Chapter 11

below in this volume.
31 Felicity Heal, ‘Royal Gifts and Gift-Exchange in Sixteenth-Century Anglo-Scottish
Politics’, Chapter 13 below in this volume.
introduction 15
exile of the ninth earl in 1455. As for the Ainslie bond, this has been mentioned
in all accounts of the downfall of Mary Queen of Scots, but hitherto it has
never been thought to offer any insight into how this event occurred.
The Lanark bond, Michael Brown shows, was a serious attempt at a
settlement of the dispute between the king and the earl.32 Both sides would
forgive and forget the past. This would be difficult when the king had just
killed the earl’s brother – but feuds were supposed to be settled eventually, and
by compromise. It was unusual for bonds to be made to the king – he was
supposed to be above that sort of thing – and, perhaps as a result, the Lanark
bond does not follow the precise pattern of bonds of manrent and mainte-
nance that Jenny established. But it certainly operated within that framework.
Disputed rights to the earldom of Wigtown and the lordship of Stewarton
were important to the conflict between the king and the earl. Brown shows
both sides exploiting the rights that they claimed by making grants within
these lands to others, and explains why the lands featured prominently in the
bond. With the bond, James conceded Douglas’ right to the lands, thus in
effect granting compensation for having killed his brother. This was very
much how feuds were supposed to end. Brown argues that the king and
Douglas went on to co-operate constructively in 1453 and 1454, and that the
bond was therefore effective. Only in early 1455 did a fresh dispute arise
between the king and the earl – and, on this occasion, the earl’s political
position was too weak to enable him to withstand royal pressure. Ironically,
this was partly because of the success of the Lanark bond, which had settled
the previous dispute and removed the earl’s ability to present himself as
aggrieved concerning the killing of his brother.
In the Ainslie bond of 19 April 1567, most politically active nobles agreed
to support the earl of Bothwell’s proposal to marry Queen Mary. This has
always been thought unimportant because many of these nobles later
launched an uprising against Bothwell once he abducted the queen and forced
her to marry him; these nobles’ signatures to the bond have been assumed to
be insincere. However, such insincerity has never been explained or proved.
Now, drawing on Jenny’s demonstration that bonds were public, honourable
and intended to be effective, Julian Goodare shows that the Ainslie bond can
be interpreted in such a way.33 Compared with the Lanark bond, the Ainslie
bond was a more conventional ‘political bond’ in Jenny’s terms, in which
political equals committed themselves to common, public action. Recent
factional disputes had threatened the stability of the realm; the leaders of the
various factions were seeking a settlement. If Mary had agreed to marry
Bothwell, thus removing the need for the abduction, the other nobles might
well have kept their part of the bargain.
32 Michael Brown, ‘The Lanark Bond’, Chapter 10 below in this volume.

33 Julian Goodare, ‘The Ainslie Bond’, Chapter 14 below in this volume.
‘Kings and lords’ needed ideologies as well as political mechanisms. Here

we turn to the chapter by Roger Mason, one of the few scholars who, like
Jenny, is at home in both the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Here he offers
a broad survey of the political culture of late medieval and early modern
Scotland, tracing intersections between political theory and political
practice.34 He proposes that there were at least three such traditions of
‘constitutionalist discourse’ – not one of which derived from the 1320 Decla-
ration of Arbroath, which, he shows, remained largely unknown from the time
when it was written until 1680. Having disposed of this red herring, Mason
moves, more constructively, to emphasise ‘baronial conciliarism’. Nobles not
only counselled the king, but also sought counsel from their own followers.
‘Counsel’ here did not require formal institutions, rather a shared under-
standing of political practice. This of course is classic Jenny territory, though
approached from the perspective of ideology rather than bonds. Much
changed with the adult rule of James VI, and his development of the theory
of the divine right of kings; this is beyond Mason’s purview here, though he
has discussed it elsewhere.35
Mason sees Scottish thinkers articulating occasional expressions of
‘constitutionalist’ opposition to James I, James II and James III, but not,
despite their often predatory actions, to James IV or James V. John Mair, who
wrote during the reigns of the latter kings, expressed constitutionalist ideas
in conciliarist terms but did not criticise specific monarchs. George Buchanan
justified the deposition of Mary in constitutionalist terms, but Mason points
out that the actual deposition was much more conservative, with politicians
relying on the fiction of voluntary abdication.
The significance of the fraught relationship between George Buchanan
and his royal pupil James VI has long been recognised. Buchanan, a renowned
neo-Latin poet and ideologue, was also cantankerous and stern as a tutor; he
gave James nightmares in later life. But few scholars have asked whom James
appointed as tutors of his own children. Jamie Reid-Baxter’s chapter on
Thomas Murray, tutor of the future Charles I, shows that Murray also was a
neo-Latin poet and ideologue.36 Although Murray never achieved Buchanan’s
renown, his contemporaries regarded him much more warmly as a person.
Reid-Baxter reconstructs Murray’s poetic oeuvre, much of it written in the late
1580s, and shows that it relates closely to James VI and his self-presentation
34 Roger A. Mason, ‘Beyond the Declaration of Arbroath: Kingship, Counsel and

Consent in Late Medieval and Early Modern Scotland’, Chapter 12 below in this
volume.
35 Roger Mason, ‘James VI, George Buchanan and The True Lawe of Free Monarchies’,
in his Kingship and the Commonweal: Political Thought in Renaissance and Reformation
Scotland (East Linton, 1998), 215‒41.
36. Jamie Reid-Baxter, ‘“Scotland will be the Ending of all Empires”: Mr Thomas Murray
and King James VI and I’, Chapter 15 below in this volume.
introduction 17
at that time as a martial monarch – quite a contrast with the Rex pacificus that
James later became.
VII
Overall, the chapters in this book show us a ‘Stewart realm’ that is organised
around the king but not dependent on him. In diplomatic terms, relations
with England and France predominate (the two explicitly English chapters
in the book provide important points of comparison while also reminding us
of Scottish differences). Meanwhile, the Stewart kings and their Scottish
subjects are also in close touch with the papacy and with Continental devel-
opments in culture and chivalry. The king does not tax regularly or heavily,
but he is involved in allocating landed resources. He is the fount of justice,
exercising both Justice and Mercy – the capital letters are significant – and
seeking to reconcile the two imperatives. There are frequent conflicts, but
people seek means whereby conflicts may be reconciled. These means may
include informal processes of dispute settlement and the reallocation of
resources, but might also rely on more formal judicial processes – both
processes being managed by lords themselves as well as the king. If this is the
‘Stewart realm’ that Jenny Wormald has shown us, then these chapters
demonstrate that her vision has been, and remains, an inspirational one.
chapter 1
The Stewart Realm: Changing the

Landscape
KEITH M. BROWN
Jenny Wormald has significantly enhanced our understanding of early

modern Scotland in three distinct areas. The first concerns the tone and
colour of Renaissance Scotland, which Jenny painted in rich and vibrant
colours, altering forever how we see that period. Secondly she reconfigured
how we think and write about the nobility, their exercise of power, their rela-
tions with the Stewart monarchy, their feuds and culture. Thirdly, she forced
historians of England to recognise that James VI and I was a Scot and that he
cannot fully be understood unless that fact, alongside his experience of ruling
Scotland, is taken into account. The intellectual impact of all three lines of
argument, unleashed in a string of books, essays and articles, especially in the
1980s, was transformative and agenda-setting. So what has Jenny Wormald’s
revision of early modern Scotland done for our understanding of it?
I
Academic life in the 1960s and 1970s was very different from how it is in the
second decade of the twenty-first century. Whether it was better or worse is
open to debate, and those who aggrandise the era as a golden age of small
group teaching, unregulated research and apparent collegiality should reflect
on the social privilege of the student body, the low status attached to research,
and the blatant prejudice and lack of transparency that characterised university
life. In particular, it was extremely difficult for a woman to make inroads into
what was a very male club. Thus, while Jenny began teaching as a lecturer at
the University of Glasgow in 1966, her first publication did not appear until
1972, two years before completing her PhD on bonds of manrent in late
medieval and early modern Scotland. Like an unstoppable charge by mailed
knights crashing into the undisciplined ranks of foot levies, that first publi-
cation, ‘Taming the magnates?’, drove a wedge deep into the prevailing view
of Scotland’s unruly, backward nobility.1 The 1970s saw two other important
11 Jennifer M. Brown, ‘Taming the magnates?’, in Gordon Menzies (ed.), The Scottish
Nation: A History of the Scots from Independence to Union (London, 1972), 46‒59.
publications that laid out the Wormald agenda. An essay on Scottish politics
in the reign of James VI announced that Jenny was a late medievalist who had
something to say about early modern Scotland, a bold move that few Scottish
medievalists have followed.2 Jenny had laid down a marker that signalled an
interest in James VI, a monarch she would later wholly reinterpret, especially
for a wider British audience. Meanwhile, in 1977, Jenny edited a collection
of essays on fifteenth-century Scottish society, offering a radical revision of
a period best known until then for bloody and turbulent politics, weak and
backward government, and an absence of high culture. Jenny’s own contri-
bution to the collection, an essay that trailed the findings of her thesis, added
a profound scholarly critique of power relations in late medieval elite society
to the earlier interrogation of magnate politics in the ‘taming’ essay.3 Three
publications in that timescale would not qualify for submission to the present-
day Research Excellence Framework, but those three publications not only
intimated a radical departure from long-established orthodoxies; they are also
still worth reading today.
Taking time to think, to probe, to read around the topic, to argue and
debate, to engage students in that debate and to hold back publications until
there was something to say paid dividends for Jenny. The following decade
saw a remarkable flow of research released into the historical community in
three distinctive books and a string of provocative and compelling articles.
Her output during this time continued to be dominated by her interest in the
political culture of the nobility. In 1980, the Past and Present article,
‘Bloodfeud, kindred and government in early modern Scotland’, appeared in
print, a publication that is genuinely world-leading and established Jenny’s
reputation as a European historian who happened to specialise in Scottish
History.4 This article is unquestionably the most innovative, brilliant and far-
reaching essay written on late medieval and early modern Scottish History
in the last half century. There is nothing else that comes close in terms of its
intellectual breadth and the tangible fizz of ideas. Citations as a proxy measure
of excellence are not greatly liked by historians, but in this case it is the
breadth of citations from outside Scottish History that is truly impressive.
The article is cited in works on European history, Latin American history,
ancient history, criminology, anthropology, law, sociology and Biblical
studies.5 In the following year, Court, Kirk and Community was published,
12 Jennifer M. Brown, ‘Scottish politics, 1567‒1625’, in Alan G. R. Smith (ed.), The

Reign of James VI and I (London, 1973), 22‒39.
13 Jennifer M. Brown, ‘The exercise of power’, in Jennifer M. Brown (ed.), Scottish
Society in the Fifteenth Century (London, 1977), 33‒65.
14 Jenny Wormald, ‘Bloodfeud, kindred and government in early modern Scotland’, Past
and Present 87 (May 1980), 54‒97.
15 These include: Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Homicide (New York, 1988); V. G.
Kiernan, The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of Aristocracy (Oxford,
THE STEWART REALM: CHANGING THE LANDSCAPE 21
extending the themes of the fifteenth-century collection by offering an upbeat

analysis of Renaissance Scotland, while widening the reach of the Wormald
view of early modern Scotland to a broader student audience.6 In 1983, Jenny
published ‘James VI and I: two kings or one?’, a stunning broadside at gener-
ations of English historians who had failed to take notice of the glaringly
obvious fact that this man was an experienced Scottish king before he
inherited the English throne in 1603.7 Previously, James VI’s Scottishness
had only ever been taken into account to explain his allegedly uncouth behav-
iours, derived entirely from Sir Anthony Weldon’s unreliable sketch of his
character. Instead, Jenny drew attention to James VI’s kingcraft and to his
political ideas in order to help explain his record as king of England and as
ruler of the complex amalgam that was Great Britain and Ireland. To round
off the remarkable period in Jenny’s publication history, in 1985 she unleashed
the stunningly authoritative Lords and Men, which reinforced the arguments
trailed in previous articles with solid empirical evidence.8 Yet again, Jenny
reached out to a scholarly audience beyond the Scottish History community.
For a reviewer like F. R. H. Du Boulay, an expert on late medieval German
History, there was nothing backward or eccentric about the Scottish evidence
that Jenny inserted directly into the European mainstream.9 These four publi-
cations in the space of five years, alongside a supporting hand, represent an
extraordinary achievement that collectively caused a paradigm shift in
Scottish History and created waves outside the field.
Here it might be worth reminding ourselves of what preceded Jenny’s
intervention into the world of the late medieval and early modern Scottish
nobility and their feuds, which is where she made her most intellectually
powerful intervention. In broad terms this might be described as a two-
dimensional picture of unruly and over-mighty magnates who had to be
house-trained by the combined forces of good: the Stewart monarchy, its civil
servants, the legal profession and, in due course, the ministers of the new
Protestant Church of Scotland. This alliance of central government,
1988); Muriel Nazzari, Disappearance of the Dowry: Women, Families, and Social
Change in São Paolo, Brazil, 1600‒1900 (Stanford, CA, 1991); Thomas Kuehn, Law,
Family and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy (Chicago, IL,
1991); John Braithwaite, Restorative Justice and Responsive Regulation (Oxford, 2002);
William I. Miller, Humiliation (Ithaca, NY, 1993); Jesse Byock, Viking Age Iceland
(London, 2001); Pamela Barmash, Homicide in the Biblical World (Cambridge, 2005);
Mark Cooney, Is Killing Wrong? (Charlottesville, VA, 2009); Benjamin Kelly, Petitions,
Litigation, and Social Control in Roman Egypt (Oxford, 2011).
16 Jenny Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland, 1470‒1625 (London, 1981).
17 Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI and I: two kings or one?’, History 68 (1983), 187‒209.
18 Jenny Wormald, Lords and Men in Scotland: Bonds of Manrent, 1442‒1603 (Edinburgh,
1985).
19 F. R. H. Du Boulay, review in International History Review 9 (1987), 162‒5.
bureaucracy and godliness allegedly reflected the interests of a rising middle

class of lairds, merchants and lawyers for whom a stronger monarchy offered
law and order, prosperity and employment. Within the relatively small world
of Scottish History of the 1960s and 1970s, the balance of opinion was critical
of the nobility as a reactionary force delaying Scotland’s development. The
New Edinburgh History authors, Ranald Nicholson and Gordon Donaldson,
reflected this understanding of the nobility as a political elite on the wrong
side of history.10 This view was inherited from Victorian Britain, having its
intellectual roots in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and being trans-
mitted to the post-World War II Britain of the Welfare State with its enthu-
siasm for bureaucratic centralisation and the slaying of privileged dragons.
Another strand of thinking that contributed to the view of a declining nobility
had its roots in Marxism and the methodology of the French Annales school,
leading to a view that nobilities throughout early modern Europe were in
various stages of crisis, if for no other reason than that the theoretical
paradigm required that they be in decline. In confronting this world view,
Jenny was one of a group of historians of late medieval Scotland who from
the 1970s were redefining the period by reinterrogating the primary sources,
creating a new interpretation of a powerful and confident Stewart monarchy.11
But Jenny’s intellectual curiosity was broader than that of her peers, encom-
passing a potent mixture of late medieval English historiography, continental
medievalists, and ideas drawn from sociology, anthropology and law that came
together most potently in the ‘Bloodfeud’ article and Lords and Men.
II
It might reasonably be argued that this body of work pulled sixteenth-century

Scotland back into the parameters of late medieval society, demonstrating
that the decisive shift in political relationships among the landed elites that
took place in the middle decades of the fifteenth century endured through to
the beginning of the seventeenth century. Here, if you like, is a denial, or post-
ponement, of early modernity, which contrasts with many other arguments that
Jenny makes in relation to literacy, religion or law. In what is essentially a struc-
turalist analysis we are confronted with an elite society that does not signifi-
cantly change over the course of the sixteenth century, in spite of the impact of
those other big early modern themes of Reformation, literacy, state formation
and rising middle orders. Instead, change was postponed until the 1600s.
The essential medievalism of Jenny’s view of lords and their men is one
10 Ranald Nicholson, Scotland: The Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh, 1974); Gordon
Donaldson, Scotland: James V – James VII (Edinburgh, 1965).
11 Most notably Norman Macdougall, James III: A Political Study (Edinburgh, 1982) and
Alexander Grant, Independence and Nationhood: Scotland, 1306‒1469 (London, 1984).
that has not generated consensus, not least because of the tension within her
own work with respect to other forms of change. Some scholars pushed back
in defence of the ‘modernisation’ thesis, chiefly Maurice Lee, who was
following an Eltonian agenda from the 1950s, and finding his own Thomas
Cromwell in the person of John Maitland of Thirlestane.12 Julian Goodare
has been a recent advocate of a more subtle version of the argument that there
was a significant shift in the powers and capacity of the Scottish state in the
latter decades of the sixteenth century, and that the principal losers in that
development were those nobles who failed to get on board the state project.13
At the other end of the spectrum, as one of Jenny’s former research students,
I pushed the boundaries more than most in arguing that not only did the
underlying medieval structures and ideals of landed society remain
unchanged throughout the sixteenth century, but that through deft adaptation
to new conditions they extended well into the seventeenth century.14 However,
no one has challenged Jenny’s underpinning analysis of that social structure.
No significant evidence has appeared to suggest that, in terms of managing
social relations and exercising political power, lords and men who time-trav-
elled from the late fifteenth century would have felt out of place in the 1600s.
As a result of Jenny’s revisionism, the nobility of the later sixteenth
century are no longer presented as the bad guys in the narrative – there are
no more overmighty magnates, robber barons, noble thugs, perennial aristo-
cratic plotters and rebels. Nobles, she argued, were not merely self-interested
individuals, ‘thinking only of feuding and fighting’.15 Instead, we have sophis-
ticated political elites working, on the whole, in partnership with government.
Jenny laid into a Whig historiography that from the later seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries had been critical of lordship and nobles generally,
claiming instead that crown and nobility worked in constructive partnerships.
Thus while the nobility ‘came up against individual kings who could act with
great ruthlessness against individual magnates … they were never faced with
a crown which set itself in opposition to them’.16 This point was true for
sixteenth-century monarchs as much as their fifteenth-century ancestors.
12 Maurice Lee, John Maitland of Thirlestane and the Foundation of the Stewart Despotism
in Scotland (Princeton, NJ, 1959). Maurice Lee, ‘James VI and the aristocracy’, Scotia
1 (1977), 18‒23; Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI: new men for old?’, Scotia 2 (1978), 70‒6.
13 See Julian Goodare, ‘The nobility and the absolutist state in Scotland, 1584‒1638’,
History 78 (1993), 161‒82. This view has since been progressively refined: see Julian
Goodare, State and Society in Early Modern Scotland (Oxford, 1999); Julian Goodare,
The Government of Scotland, 1560‒1625 (Oxford, 2004).
14 Keith M. Brown, Noble Society in Scotland: Wealth, Family and Culture, from Refor-
mation to Revolution (Edinburgh, 2000); Keith M. Brown, Noble Power in Scotland
from the Reformation to the Revolution (Edinburgh, 2011).
15 Wormald, Lords and Men, 160.
16 Wormald, Lords and Men, 1‒13, for the historiography; quotation at p. 159.
This underlying analysis explains Jenny’s antipathy to Mary, most in evidence

in her 1988 book, Mary Queen of Scots: A Study in Failure, in which she tells
the story of a monarch who threw away the advantages of a political system
in which the default position of powerful nobles was co-operation with the
crown.17 The book was written at the height of Margaret Thatcher’s premier-
ship; Jenny was disdainful of a weak female ruler who was the architect of
her own downfall.
Even Maurice Lee, when reviewing Lords and Men, was persuaded that
‘the traditional picture of the Scottish aristocracy as a lawless gang of blood-
thirsty feudists needs revision’. He did suggest, however, that Jenny was guilty
of wearing rose-tinted spectacles when reading some of her noble subjects.18
No historian today is seriously advocating either that the nobility opposed a
shared concept of good government, or that as a political and economic elite
the nobility was in serious decline.
In opening up the archives of the nobility, Jenny hinted at a rich research
agenda that others might follow. Michael Brown and Steve Boardman have
led the late medieval investigation with longitudinal studies of the Douglases
and the Campbells, deploying a methodology that owes much to Norman
Macdougall’s sceptical empiricism, while absorbing Jenny’s theoretical pers-
pectives.19 Works on individuals, lineages and regions of the later sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries by Jane Dawson, Maureen Meikle, Alison
Cathcart, Anna Groundwater, Barry Robertson and Allan Macinnes, alongside
the more broadly conceived outputs by Keith Brown, have built up a richly
layered understanding of the nobility that remains broadly consistent with that
mapped out by Jenny.20 Of course, there are aspects of Jenny’s interpretation
17 Jenny Wormald, Mary Queen of Scots: A Study in Failure (London, 1988). Reviewers
noted that Wormald’s reinterpretation of noble politics led her to start from an expec-
tation that Mary ought to have succeeded: see reviews by William K. Emond in Albion
20 (1988), 687‒8; Maurice Lee in Catholic Historical Review 74 (1988), 618; Arthur
H. Williamson in Renaissance Quarterly 42 (1989), 320‒2; and Russell K. Bishop in
Sixteenth Century Journal 22 (1991), 358‒9.
18 Maurice Lee, review in American Historical Review 92 (1987), 402‒3.
19 Michael Brown, The Black Douglases: War and Lordship in Late Medieval Scotland,
1300‒1455 (East Linton, 1998); Stephen Boardman, The Campbells, 1250‒1513 (Edin-
burgh, 2006).
20 Jane E. A. Dawson, The Politics of Religion in the Age of Mary, Queen of Scots: The
Earl of Argyll and the Styruggle for Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2002); Maureen
M. Meikle, A British Frontier? Lairds and Gentlemen in the Eastern Borders, 1540‒1603
(East Linton, 2004); Alison Cathcart, Kinship and Clientage: Highland Clanship, 1451‒
1609 (Leiden, 2006); Anna Groundwater, The Scottish Middle March, 1573‒1625:
Power, Kinship, Allegiance (Woodbridge, 2010); Barry Robertson, Lordship and Power
in the North of Scotland: The Noble House of Huntly, 1603‒1690 (Edinburgh, 2011);
Allan I. Macinnes, The British Confederate: Archibald Campbell, Marquess of Argyll,
c.1607‒1661 (Edinburgh, 2011).
of the nobility that are open to challenge. Her understanding of the kindred,
especially the role of females, and her conclusion that the concept of the
whole kindred was ‘something of a myth’, would repay further analysis.21
Similarly, while Jenny’s assertion that ‘the records of lordship were no longer
primarily concerned with land grants’ is understandable given that at the time
she was looking for bonds, a wider trawl of noble archives indicates that the
overwhelming business transacted by nobles was about land and therefore a
focus on men rather than land is misplaced.22
III
Jenny explained that violence and crime cannot be understood simply from
a modern perspective that takes its cue regarding justice and order from the
formal law and the courts. Instead, justice and order have to be understood
within the context of community and custom, allowing anarchy and bloodshed
to be replaced by cohesion and redress. In particular, she held that feuding
could no longer be perceived as a peculiarly barbaric Scottish practice, a
leftover from a mythical Dark Ages that contrasts with the progressive and
enlightened world of Tudor England, Valois France and the other supposedly
advanced kingdoms of Europe. Feud, therefore, becomes a means of seeking
justice, of restoring relations, of putting things back to where they were before
social relationships were fractured, and it existed in a form that was consistent
with what might be found in much of the rest of Europe. It even provided
what was often a better version of justice than was on offer in formal law
courts, a point that may account for some of Jenny’s apparent distaste for the
seventeenth century when formal law triumphed over informal custom.
On law and order and justice, Jenny’s brilliant analysis is unlikely ever to
be overturned. That the feud was not simply a dark stain in Scottish History
is unanswerable, and even those historians who have since worked on court
records, either to explain the development of the court system or to inves-
tigate crime, all acknowledge a debt to Jenny.23 Custom sits securely alongside
law in our understanding of justice. Thus, she asserts, ‘Condemnation [of the
feud] has been stilled, if not entirely silenced’.24 But did Jenny go too far in
explaining away the unattractive side to feuding? This has been Brown’s

22 Wormald, Lords and Men, 87. The importance of land as the basis of economic power
is stressed in Brown, Noble Society, 25‒112.
23 Hector L. MacQueen, Common Law and Feudal Society in Medieval Scotland
(Edinburgh, 1993); A. M. Godfrey, Civil Justice in Renaissance Scotland: The Origins
of a Central Court (Leiden, 2009); Cynthia J. Neville, Land, Law and People in Medieval
Scotland (Edinburgh, 2010), 198‒9; J. D. Ford, Law and Opinion in Scotland during the
Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 2007).
24 Wormald, ‘Bloodfeud’, 55.
principal criticism.25 One problem with the Wormald analysis stems from the
application of its interdisciplinary borrowings. While the deployment of the
theoretical influence of anthropologists and sociologists like Max Gluckman
and others was stunningly successful in opening up a new avenue of thought,
anthropologists can be notoriously prone to going ‘native’, arguing that tradi-
tional, primitive societies are morally advanced in relation to the tired,
oppressive values of Western capitalism. There has always been a whiff of
Marxist idealism at the heart of anthropology. Furthermore, theory needs to
be empirically tested, and Jenny’s upbeat version of the bloodfeud does not
stack up against the later sixteenth-century evidence of bloody mayhem.
Evidence from earlier periods also cast doubts on the sociological theory that
lies at the heart of Wormald’s analysis.26 Although further research is required,
especially on the period c.1500‒60, the jury is still out on whether late
medieval Scotland was unusually violent.
IV
At this point it is worth pausing to discuss the political context. As indicated
above, the political history of late medieval Scotland was overturned by a
small group of scholars who reconstructed our view of the Stewart monarchy.
Stewart monarchs, it was argued, co-operated much of the time with their
nobles, while operating in what remained an unstable and volatile environ-
ment in which crown and nobility clashed, and in which the outcome was
varied and uncertain.27 Jenny’s world of lords, men and their feuds provided
much of the impetus for this revisionism. Lords, men and their feuds,
therefore, inhabited a political landscape in which some nobles did clash with
some kings, and in which some noblemen and some kings ended up dead, but
in which the underlying political settlement was unperturbed. So, Jenny
argued, ‘there is no need to look for dramas behind the making of most bonds
25 Keith M. Brown, Bloodfeud in Scotland, 1573‒1625: Violence, Justice and Politics in an

Early Modern Society (Edinburgh, 1986).
26 Stephen I. Boardman, ‘Politics and the Feud in Late Mediaeval Scotland’, unpub-
lished PhD thesis (University of St Andrews, 1990); see also A. Mark Godfrey,
‘Rethinking the Justice of the Feud in Sixteenth-Century Scotland’, Chapter 6 below
in this volume.
27 The rewriting of the detailed political narrative was done by Norman Macdougall and
his students at the University of St Andrews. In chronological sequence see the regnal
studies by Michael A. Penman, David II, 1329‒71 (Edinburgh, 2004); Stephen I.
Boardman, The Early Stewart Kings: Robert II and Robert III, 1371‒1406 (East Linton,
1996); Michael Brown, James I (Edinburgh, 1994); Christine McGladdery, James II
(Edinburgh, 1990); Norman Macdougall, James III (Edinburgh, 1982); Norman
Macdougall, James IV (Edinburgh, 1989); Jamie Cameron, James V: The Personal Rule,
1528‒1542 (East Linton, 1998). The methodological emphasis on the chronological
narrative resulted in different conclusions from Wormald’s ideas-driven agenda.
of manrent’. Bonds were written from time to time as a way of keeping

existing social relationships on a steady keel, rather like renegotiating your
home insurance every so often.28 Meanwhile, feuds intruded into the
generally peaceful community as people fell out with one another. In extreme
cases people got killed, but mostly the mechanisms of the feud provided a
way of helping them to ease themselves into more positive social relationships.
And that may all be true given a particular set of circumstances that engender
peace and stability. But what if the underlying political landscape was
anything but settled? This is at the heart of the disagreement between Jenny
and her critics over late medieval political culture. Might it be that bonds and
feuds were always concerned with choreographing the uncompromising
struggle for advantage by powerful lords and their kinsmen in a highly
unstable, competitive and violent environment?
Here the absence of any useful analysis of the first six decades of the
sixteenth century is unhelpful, and it might be that something went horribly
wrong within Scotland’s political culture from the middle decades of the
sixteenth century as the kingdom spiralled into chaos. Brown’s analysis of
the later sixteenth century, where war, religious division, the erosion of royal
power and major economic stresses placed huge pressure on a social system
unable to cope, is also at odds with Jenny’s world of lords and their men at
ease. The alternative to the Wormald interpretation is to take her under-
standing of the structures of royal and noble power alongside her sociological
deconstruction of feuding, while seeing bonding as a desperate means of
addressing immediate political dangers, and bloodfeud as an urgent response
to local and national political threats that were dealt with by the threat and
the application of bloody violence.29 An interesting test case is southwest
Scotland, where changes in the incidence of disorder accorded to shifts in
local political circumstances over very short timescales.30
Before leaving the topic of violence, it should be noted that Jenny argued
that one consequence of the disappearance of the world of lords and men was
greater state violence. The point she makes is that the difference between the
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century attitude to law lay in the former’s ‘will-
ingness to allow conciliation; the state did not yet find it necessary to resort
to brutal punishment’.31 Well, not unless you were the assassins of James I,
or the latest batch of Border reivers strung up on the nearest tree by James V

29 Brown, Bloodfeud; Brown, Noble Power.
30 J. S. Rule, ‘The Anglo-Scottish Western Borders, 1557‒1573’, unpublished DPhil
thesis (University of Oxford, 2001). Dr Rule was supervised by Jenny. Similarly, but
on a grander scale, Stuart Carroll shows what happened in France where a similar set
of adverse political circumstances lit the fuse to hundreds of local feuds: Stuart
Carroll, Blood and Violence in Early Modern France (Oxford, 2006).
or the Regent Morton! On the broader question of whether society –

including government – was getting more violent in the seventeenth century,
without empirical evidence this point can only be a guesstimate.
Jenny argues that something very dramatic happened after 1600. She
concedes that the sudden end of bonding is puzzling because there was no
outright attack on it, unlike feuding, but that it was connected to the fact that
‘the localities were being jolted out of their relative autonomy’ by what she
describes as a more interventionist government. In support of this, Jenny cites
chiefly the crown’s involvement in taxation and the role of the new commis-
sioners of the peace in collecting taxes, alongside the challenges to kin and
lord from the church, especially through the working of church courts.32
Moreover, the developments that altered Scotland in the latter half of the
sixteenth century were, she says, ‘swift rather than slow’ and ‘may be inter-
preted as the growing awareness of public authority’.33 Here Jenny is perhaps
at her most speculative, which is entirely understandable given that her
remarks chiefly concern the period beyond her focus of study. In reviewing
Lords and Men, Michael Lynch pointed out that Jenny’s conclusions
regarding the disappearance of bonding were little more than suggestions,
but that she ‘set the key questions on the agenda for a revision of the mature
reign of James VI’.34 Quite so, and although much work has been done in the
twenty-six years since Lords and Men was published, we have still not fully
addressed that James VI agenda.35
Jenny does offer some explanation for the apparent sudden transformation.
She suggests that changes that undermined the need for bonding and the
recourse to feuding were applied to lords and their men by the king, by the
church and by the lawyers. She argues that ‘Feud can no longer be regarded
as a matter of rival groups slogging it out to the death of themselves and their
descendants, until time, exhaustion or a more powerful authority brought it
to an end’.36 But is that not precisely what she offers as an explanation for the
ending of bonding and feuding – the intervention of forms of more powerful
authority? Much of the debate over the condition of late medieval and early
modern Scottish politics continues to concentrate on government as a prog-
ressive force on the one hand, and a reactionary something else that might
be overmighty magnates, the localities, the clan or whatever on the other. Yet,
oddly enough, Jenny herself allowed remnants of that polarity to linger on in
her own analysis of the end of bonding and feuding where she marches govern-
ment, church and law onto the stage to sweep away the old order. Certainly

33 Wormald, Lords and Men, 164‒5.
34 Michael Lynch, review in EHR 105 (1990), 130‒1.
35 Jenny’s influence on our understanding of James VI’s reign is clear in Julian Goodare
and Michael Lynch (eds), The Reign of James VI (East Linton, 2000).
that is how her conclusions have often been interpreted, for example by S. A.
Burrell whose review of Lords and Men includes the observation that bonding
ended in the early seventeenth century because of the impact of a strong state
and church.37 A modified version of this argument suggests that change was
not so much imposed on lords and their men as embraced by them, and that
the pressure came from nobles who were persuaded by renaissance arguments
about civility and church arguments about godliness. Consequently, nobles
engaged in good governance as willing agents and partners of the crown.38
Jenny also arrived at problematic conclusions regarding the lawyers, whom
she portrayed as a self-contained elite with distinct ideas, values and interests
from the rest of society. Thus she conceived of a noblesse de robe who were
part of the nobility, but whose power base derived ‘not so much from their
lands and followings as from their political role’ and their relationship to the
legal profession, which was enhanced by the regal union.39 However, lawyers
mattered politically in early modern Scotland only if they were also nobles,
in which case they operated from within noble society, not on the outside
where they were simply a service sector dependent for the greater part of
their business on the nobility.40
V
Many historians would be content to make their home in a fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century landscape dominated by their ideas, and to spend the
remainder of their career refining and defending their position. However, the
article on James VI and I in History launched Jenny into the world of English
Stuart History. Two years later, in 1985, she shone a Scottish light into the
very English story of the Gunpowder Plot by suggesting that the target of
the plotters might have been the Scottish king and his Scottish courtiers.41
That same year, Jenny’s brilliant re-evaluation of early Stuart History saw her
take the road south that James VI had followed in pursuit of greater prizes
when she took up an appointment as a Fellow and Tutor in Modern History
at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. In 1987, she was also appointed Lecturer in
History at Trinity College, Oxford. Jenny had taken her fight to get Scottish
History noticed to the very heart of the orthodox Anglocentric world of
British History.
Jenny was now at the forefront of the debate over the ‘New British
37 S. A. Burrell, review in Albion 19 (1987), 140‒2.

38 Brown, Bloodfeud, 183‒274; Brown, Noble Power.
40 John Finlay, Men of Law in Pre-Reformation Scotland (East Linton, 2000); Brown,
Noble Power, 172‒8.
41 Jenny Wormald, ’Gunpowder, treason and Scots’, Journal of British Studies 24 (1985),
187‒209.
History’, which was at its most controversial and creative in the early modern
period. She was in high demand, being awarded Visiting Fellowships at the
Huntington Library and the Folger Shakespeare Library in 1991, and
accepting honorary professorships in the USA in 1992 and 1994. In a series
of articles and essays throughout the 1990s and 2000s to the present decade
(2010s), Jenny argued the case for rethinking the regal union and the creation
of Britain by hammering away at the notion that English historians could
understand James VI and I without reference to Scotland. She published
incisive articles and essays on the multiple kingdom/core and colony debate,
on the regal union of 1603 and on British identity. In characteristic fashion,
Jenny overstated the case from time to time, exaggerating James VI’s pre-1603
achievements, offering an over-optimistic view of post-1603 Scotland, and
blaming English political culture for James VI and I’s failings and for any of
the problems with the regal union.42 Yet, tellingly, it was Jenny who was
invited to write the 27,000-word article on James VI and I for the Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography, published in 2004, a choice that endorsed
her point that no one could understand this often underestimated king unless
they addressed his entire life and political career. At the same time, Jenny
continued to reflect on aspects of late medieval and early modern Scottish
History.43
42 Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI and I, Basilikon Doron and The Trew Law of Free Monarchies:
the Scottish context and the English translation’, in Linda L. Peck (ed.), The Mental
World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge, 1991), 36‒54; Jenny Wormald, ‘The creation
of Britain: multiple kingdoms or core and colonies?’, TRHS 6th series, 2 (1992), 175‒94;
Jenny Wormald, ‘The union of 1603’, in Roger A. Mason (ed.), Scots and Britons:
Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603 (Cambridge, 1994), 17‒40; Jenny
Wormald, ‘The high road from Scotland: one king, two kingdoms’, in Alexander
Grant and K. J. Stringer (eds), Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History
(London, 1995), 123‒32; Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI, James I and the identity of
Britain’, in Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (eds), The British Problem, c.1534‒
1707 (London, 1996), 148‒71; Jenny Wormald, ‘“O brave new world”? The union of
England and Scotland in 1603’, in T. C. Smout (ed.), Anglo-Scottish Relations from
1603 to 1900 (Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 127: Oxford, 2005), 13‒35; Jenny
Wormald, ‘The happier marriage partner: the impact of the union of the crowns in
Scotland’, in Glenn Burgess, Rowland Wymer and Jason Lawrence (eds), The Accession
of James I: Historical and Cultural Consequences (Basingstoke, 2006), 69‒87.
43 For example, Jenny Wormald, ‘Scotland, 1406‒1513’, in Christopher Allmand (ed.),
The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. vii: c.1415–c.1500 (Cambridge, 1998),
514‒31; Jenny Wormald, ‘Godly reformer, godless monarch: John Knox and Mary
Queen of Scots’, in Roger A. Mason (ed.), John Knox and the British Reformations
(Aldershot, 1998), 221‒41; Jenny Wormald, ‘The witches, the Devil and the king’, in
Terry Brotherstone and David Ditchburn (eds), Freedom and Authority: Scotland,
c.1050–c.1650: Historical and Historiographical Essays Presented to Grant G. Simpson
(East Linton, 2000), 165‒80; Jenny Wormald, ‘Thorns in the flesh: English kings and
unco-operative Scottish rulers, 1460‒1549’, in G. W. Bernard and S. J. Gunn (eds),
On her retirement from Oxford in 2005, Jenny accepted an Honorary

Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh where she continues to teach and
to be astonishingly productive in research. In addition to specialist essays,
she has edited three volumes, including most recently in 2012 with Tom
Devine The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History.44 Meanwhile she
has taken on the role of Chair of the Scottish Medievalists Conference, a role
to which she has brought her characteristic energy and determination,
becoming more engaged in public debate than her predecessors.
VI
It would have been much easier to use this opportunity only to praise Jenny,
underlining all the points where she got it right, but I think that would disap-
point her. Mostly she did get it right, but she also left us with some very big
questions that still need to be resolved, with some gaps that need to be filled
in, and with some characteristic overstatements that may need to be modified.
Over forty years since the publication of ‘Taming the magnates?’ she continues
to engage in and provoke discussion, and the agenda Jenny laid out, especially
in the first half of the 1980s, remains at the heart of many of the debates that
light up late medieval and early modern Scottish and British History.
I will end on a personal note, as I had the very great privilege of being
taught as an undergraduate by Jenny and having her as my PhD supervisor.
Both experiences were unforgettable, and it is because of her inspirational
teaching and relentless questioning that I ended up following a career in
Scottish History. My first awareness of Jenny was in the second term of the
1975‒6 session at the University of Glasgow where I enrolled at the last
minute in Scottish History, largely because of the restrictions in the timetable
and because I had read Nigel Tranter’s Bruce trilogy while working in the
steelworks that summer. First term was interesting enough as we made our
way from the Picts through to the late medieval period, but it was Jenny’s
tutorials on early modern Scotland in the Candlemas term that I recall most
vividly. Jenny’s office was on the very top floor of No. 9, University Gardens,
where the Scottish History Department was located; a small, compact room
Authority and Consent in Tudor England: Essays Presented to C. S. L. Davies (Aldershot,

2002), 61‒78; Jenny Wormald, ‘The headaches of monarchy: kingship and the kirk in
the early seventeenth century’, in Julian Goodare and Alasdair A. MacDonald (eds),
Sixteenth-Century Scotland: Essays in Honour of Michael Lynch (Leiden, 2008),
365‒93.
44 Jenny Wormald (ed.), Scotland: A History (Oxford, 2005); Jenny Wormald (ed.), The
Seventeenth Century (Short Oxford History of the British Isles: Oxford, 2008); T. M.
Devine and Jenny Wormald (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History
(Oxford, 2012).
where the teaching was intense, up close and personal. Here I encountered a
tutor who was intellectually challenging and who liked to argue even with an
opinionated, self-righteous teenager. By the end of that term the decision had
been made to dump Philosophy and stick with Scottish History. I had to wait
until Martinmas of 1977‒8 to join Jenny’s class on fifteenth- and sixteenth-
century Scottish politics, a course that a few years later would become Court,
Kirk and Community. Those who have read the book know it to be provocative,
exciting, amusing and rigorous, and a great read. But the real thing was so
much better – it was like the difference between a studio recording and a live
concert 1970s style, with the solo act chain-smoking through the performance.
Most of us on that course signed up for the special subject on James VI in
the following year, and by that time I had decided who was going to supervise
my PhD even if Jenny had not yet agreed! The class was special in every sense
as we were exposed to gripping, energising, inspiring research-led teaching
from a lecturer bursting with ideas and opinions at the very top of her game.
For those of us who had the good fortune to enlist in Jenny’s classes, History
was a living, breathing thing, and Scottish History was mainstream, self-
confident, comparative, interdisciplinary, trendy, relevant and worth devoting
some of your time to reading about it, arguing over it in the pub, or even
making a career out of it.
My decision to undertake postgraduate research at Glasgow (against some
strong advice from senior academics) was never in doubt when the most
exciting scholarship in early modern Scottish History was being conducted
there. Jenny insists that I asked her to be my supervisor while giving notice
that I was going to prove her wrong about feuds. Many academics would not
tolerate such impudence; Jenny, of course, encouraged it. What followed was
three years of rigorous research in which time and again Jenny pushed me to
read outside of the immediate topic, or even the subject, to stretch for the
deep intellectual connections that can make the events of one small place in
one short period in time of universal significance. Of course, supervision then
was very different from the managed and audited world we now inhabit. Jenny
issued an open invitation to come and see her when I had something to talk
about, or something for her to read, and the conversations and the feedback,
which usually involved lunch at the University staff club, were never disap-
pointing. In due course, the thesis was finished on time and I went east to St
Andrews while Jenny went south to achieve fame at Oxford, from where she
wrote one letter of support after another as I chased fellowships and lecture-
ships for the next eight years. Teachers and their students have a curious
relationship of responsibilities and debts – not unlike lords and men – with
its very own homage rituals. Clearly my debts to Jenny are many, both
personal and intellectual.
The most recent tutorial I had with Jenny was in my home in St Andrews
in the late summer of 2010. She had read the manuscript of Noble Power and
had come to give me feedback, and I was as nervous of getting the Jenny
approval as I was when I got my first essay back from her as an undergraduate
thirty-four years earlier. And, as always, we argued. It has been one of the
great privileges of my life to have had in Jenny a teacher, a mentor, a colleague
and a friend.
part 1
Lords and Men

chapter 2
Lords and Women, Women as Lords:

The Career of Margaret Stewart,
Countess of Angus and Mar, c.1354-c.1418
STEVE BOARDMAN
The significance of patrilineal descent, and the concomitant ties of blood and
surname, for the way in which late medieval Scottish aristocrats thought about
and articulated their identity and place in society has been much discussed
in recent scholarship, most notably in two brilliant studies by Jenny Wormald
published in the 1980s.1 One of the most important conclusions arising from
Wormald’s wide-ranging analysis was that the obligations of kinship, feud,
lordship and service, far from acting to disrupt and destabilise local society
(as older interpretations assumed), were vital to the successful operation of
justice and the maintenance of social order and governmental authority. In
evaluating the relative strength of the ties that bound aristocratic society
together, Wormald broadly accepted the evidence for the primacy of links
between male kinsmen, and the fundamental importance of the sense of
belonging to, and being obliged to defend and promote the interests of, an
agnatic kin-group. The bonds established through marriage and the obliga-
tions to marital and maternal kinsmen were seen, in comparison, as essentially
fragile and ephemeral.2
and Present 87 (May 1980), 54‒97; Jenny Wormald, Lords and Men in Scotland: Bonds
of Manrent, 1442‒1603 (Edinburgh, 1985); also Keith M. Brown, Bloodfeud in
Scotland, 1573‒1625 (Edinburgh, 1986).
32 However, while acknowledging the contemporary weight given to connexions, both
real and imagined, between men who bore the same surname, Wormald also pointed
out that the effective limits of these notional mutual obligations were often hazy and
variable. The sense of solidarity between very distantly related and/or geographically
dispersed members of the same surname was often weak, and successful lordship
depended not just on a network of male kinsmen, but also on a lord’s links to a more
heterogeneous group that reflected other forms of close kinship, geographical prox-
imity, a sense of neighbourliness and friendship, and traditions of service to great local
figures. Wormald, Lords and Men, 86.
I
Examples of noblemen expressing commitment to the welfare and prosperity
of their male lineage are certainly not hard to find in late medieval Scotland.
One document type where these sentiments could be invoked with particular
clarity was the charter of tailzie (entail), by which landowners sought to
regulate the descent of property rights to the advantage of family members
who might not otherwise have had strong claims on part or all of a lord’s
estates after his death. The entailing of property to male relatives (typically
brothers, uncles or cousins and their male heirs) at the expense of heirs
general was an intermittent practice in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century
Scotland, although a full assessment of the scale and frequency of this type
of arrangement is still required.3 The concern to avoid female inheritance
could sometimes be articulated with startling vehemence, as in James Douglas
of Dalkeith’s 1369 entailing of his barony and castle of Dalkeith, which
limited the descent of the properties ‘always to heirs male of the said James
having the surname [cognomen] Douglas’, with descent to a female heiress
only countenanced if ‘all heirs male of the forsaid surname of Douglas’ had
‘wholly failed’.4 A more concise formula was employed in other male entails
dating to the second half of the fourteenth century, with grants in favour of
named individuals and their male descendants finishing with a catch-all desti-
nation to the nearest male heirs of the grantee bearing the same surname and
coat of arms, or the same blood and surname.5
These general clauses expressed an attachment to, and a preoccupation
with, the continued wellbeing of the ‘surname’ as an almost abstract entity,
embodied in the coat of arms, that both embraced and existed beyond the
circle of living kinsmen of the grantee: the lineage had a history and (it was
hoped) a future that had to be honoured and safeguarded.6 A charter of entail
of 1356 by Robert the Steward to Sir John Stewart of Crookston (with a
destination to John’s brothers Walter and Alexander and their heirs male) was,
33 Entails were also used to direct resources to younger or illegitimate sons and daughters
or other non-lineal relatives. The vast majority of estates remained unentailed and
liable to descend to heirs general. One family, the Campbells of Argyll, employed them
as their standard charter form throughout the fifteenth century. For discussion of the
impact of entailing in England see S. J. Payling, ‘Social mobility, demographic change,
and landed society in late medieval England’, Economic History Review 45 (1992), 51‒73;
S. J. Payling, ‘The economics of marriage in late medieval England: the marriage of
heiresses’, Economic History Review 54 (2001), 413‒29.
34 RMS, i, no. 335. See also no. 502 for similar phrasing in a charter conveying lands in
Drem to William Lindsay of the Byres.
35 For examples of these phrases in male entail charters see, NRS, Dalhousie Muniments
GD 45/16/no.305 (15 June 1367); NLS, Crawford and Balcarres Muniments B5 (20
December 1379) and B6 (19 October 1378); RMS, i, 653, 686.
36 For discussion of the historical theories explaining the origin and development of the
male lineage in medieval Europe, the importance of heraldic representation as a means
LORDS AND WOMEN, WOMEN AS LORDS 39
it was claimed, made ‘for the honour and utility of our surname [cognomen]’
and ended with a general destination to men bearing the blood of Sir John
and the name Stewart ‘forevermore [literally ‘to eternity’, in eternam]’.7
Robert the Steward’s evident pride in his ‘surname’ and lineage was mani-
fested again when, sometime after becoming king in 1371, he commissioned
John Barbour, most famous as the author of the Bruce, to produce a now-lost
genealogical history which traced the origins of ‘le Stewartis’ back through
the family’s twelfth- and thirteenth-century ancestors into the pseudo-
historical world of the Brut legend.8 Given the offhand references in the
chronicles of Andrew of Wyntoun, Walter Bower and Hector Boece, and
literary works such as Blind Hary’s Wallace, to individuals or episodes (often
mythical) that explained the establishment or etymology of certain surnames
it seems likely that the Stewarts were not alone in cultivating a narrative
account of their patrilineal origins and accomplishments, although full extant
examples of these lineage histories do not survive for the period before the
sixteenth century.9
There were other indications of a late medieval concern with, and an
elevation of, the surname. When, in the first half of the fifteenth century, a
new tier emerged in the Scottish aristocratic hierarchy in the shape of the
Lord of Parliament, the title style adopted generally reflected the lord’s family
name, thus Lord Drummond, Lord Graham, Lord Campbell etc., rather than
the territories they held.10 The imagined or assumed correlation between
lordly title and status as head of kin was made explicit in 1489 in a parlia-
mentary discussion of the competing claims of a number of individuals to
the title Lord Sinclair. It was noted that Sir Henry Sinclair’s father and
grandfather had both held the title and that since they were both dead and
he was the ‘richtwise heretare to tham … that he is cheiff of that blude and
will thar for that he be callit Lord Sinclar in tyme to cum’.11
of representing the continuity and integrity of male descent, and some questioning
of the extent to which the agnatic lineage actually dominated medieval conceptions of
kinship relations see David Crouch, ‘The historian, lineage and heraldry, 1050‒1250’,
in Peter R. Coss and Maurice H. Keen (eds), Secular Society and Social Display in
Medieval England (Woodbridge, 2002), 17‒37.
37 Sir William Fraser (ed.), The Lennox, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1874), ii, 27‒8 (no. 23).
38 Steve Boardman, ‘Late medieval Scotland and the matter of Britain’, in Edward J.
Cowan and Richard J. Finlay (eds), Scottish History: The Power of the Past (Edinburgh,
2002), 47‒72, at pp. 51‒5.
39 For a sixteenth-century compilation see Sir Richard Maitland, The History of the
House of Seytoun to the year M.D.LIX, ed. John Fullarton (Bannatyne Club, 1829).
10 For the emergence of Lords of Parliament see Alexander Grant, ‘The development
of the Scottish peerage’, SHR 57 (1978), 1‒27. Locative titles, such as Lords Crichton
of Sanquhar, Hay of Yester and Abernethy of Rothiemay, seem to have been used where
the surname had already been employed in the designation of an established lordship.
11 RPS, 1489/1/6.
One of the by-products of the recognition of the centrality of male kinship

in the organisation of political society has been a tendency for scholars to
ignore or minimise the role, influence and agency of individual female aris-
tocrats, and to underestimate the overall impact of noblewomen, particularly
as heiresses and dowagers, on the distribution and control of land and
resources in late medieval Scotland. The present chapter is a case-study,
focused largely on the career of one woman, Margaret Stewart, heiress to the
earldom of Angus and dowager countess of Mar, rather than a general explo-
ration of these issues. Nevertheless, Countess Margaret’s career raises some
interesting wider questions, not only about the extent of land and local
authority held by noblewomen, but also about the way in which non-agnatic
relationships such as those established through matrimony, motherhood in
sequential marriages, or the mutual links that shaped and bound together a
local or regional noble community, might be influential in determining an
individual aristocrat’s circle of friends, allies and ‘partakers’.
II
Margaret Stewart’s prominent role in the internal politics of the Scottish
realm in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century has been outlined in
recent narrative accounts of the reigns of Robert II and Robert III and the
history of the Black Douglas kindred. The details of the territorial disputes
in which she became involved can be consulted there.12 For much of her adult
life Margaret’s main concern, aside from defending her own rights and
revenues, was to secure titles and estates for her illegitimate son George
Douglas and his heirs, an endeavour in which, for various reasons, she had
little or no support from her own paternal kin, the Stewarts, or her son’s male
kinsmen, the Douglases. This chapter concentrates, then, on the nature of
the network of kinsmen and friends that allowed Countess Margaret to play
a significant part in the quarrels that convulsed the political community
during the late 1380s and 1390s, and attempts to trace the way in which her
actions reflected her ambitions, duties and obligations as an heiress, widow,
landholder and, above all, as a mother and grandmother.
The role and influence of noblewomen as active participants in political
courtly culture, as administrators of estates on behalf of their often absent
12 Steve Boardman, The Early Stewart Kings: Robert II and Robert III, 1371‒1406 (East
Linton, 1996), 82, 150, 160‒4, 166‒7, 204, 294‒5; Michael H. Brown, The Black
Douglases: War and Lordship in Late Medieval Scotland, 1300‒1455 (East Linton, 1998),
76‒94. See also Alexander Grant, ‘Royal and magnate bastards in the later middle
ages: the view from Scotland’, in É. Bousmar, A. Marchandisse and B. Schnerb (eds),
La bâtardise et l’exercise du pouvoir (XIIIe–début XVIe siècle) (Bruxelles, Publications
des Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis) forthcoming. My thanks to Dr Grant for the
chance to view this work ahead of publication.
husbands, as negotiators between their natal and matrimonial families, as

protectors of the interests of their children and, usually in widowhood, as
wealthy independent landowners, have been widely studied in the much
better documented context of late medieval England.13 In the absence of an
authoritative examination of these themes as they affected the late medieval
Scottish aristocracy any observations offered here must necessarily be
regarded as tentative. It is, however, worth emphasising that Margaret was
not a unique figure in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century realm. The capri-
cious mortality of the age brought male lineages to a premature end on a
regular basis, often leaving extensive lands and rights in the hands of
heiresses.14 Wives frequently outlived their husbands, sometimes by decades,
and, as widows, held claims to a substantial part of their dead spouses’
property. Many of the most disruptive conflicts in the late medieval kingdom
had their origin in a struggle for control of resources legally belonging, on a
heritable or temporary basis, to female aristocrats. Narrative histories have
tended to portray these women as vulnerable and passive figures, prey to the
ambitions of individual male aristocrats and the lineages they represented.
While the physical coercion, abduction or forcible marriage of heiresses and
widows were not unknown, these episodes have to be balanced against
examples of noblewomen playing an active role in the defence of their own,
and very often their offspring’s, rights. Margaret Stewart may provide a
particularly striking illustration of the latter phenomenon, but she hardly
stood alone.
III
Margaret Stewart was the elder of two daughters produced by Thomas

Stewart, earl of Angus (d.1362) and his wife Margaret Sinclair in a marriage
13 For example, Rowena E. Archer, ‘“How ladies … who live on theirs manors ought to
manage their households and estates”: women as landholders and administrators in
the later Middle Ages’, in P. J. P. Goldberg (ed.), Woman is a Worthy Wight: Women in
English Society, c.1200‒1500 (Stroud, 1992), 149‒81; Rowena E. Archer, ‘Rich old
ladies: the problem of late medieval dowagers’, in Anthony Pollard (ed.), Property and
Politics: Essays in Later Medieval English History (Gloucester, 1984), 15‒35; Barbara
J. Harris, ‘Property, power and personal relations: elite mothers and sons in Yorkist
and early Tudor England’, Signs 15 (1990), 606‒32; Barbara J. Harris, ‘Women and
politics in early Tudor England’, Historical Journal 33 (1990), 259‒81; Joel T.
Rosenthal, ‘Aristocratic widows in fifteenth-century England’, in Barbara J. Harris
and JoAnn K. McNamara (eds), Women and the Structure of Society (Durham, NC,
1984), 36‒47.
14 For discussion see Alexander Grant, ‘Extinction of direct male lines among Scottish
noble families in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries’, in K. J. Stringer (ed.), Essays
on the Nobility of Medieval Scotland (Edinburgh, 1985), 210‒31.
that began c.1353.15 The Stewart lineage in Angus was only founded towards
the end of the reign of Robert I (1306‒29), and fate had conspired to ensure
that it had not prospered. The fragility of the male line was marked: the
seventy or so years between the establishment of Margaret’s grandfather, John
Stewart, lord of Bunkle (Berwickshire), as earl of Angus by Robert I shortly
before June 1329 and the close of the century, probably witnessed less than
twenty years in which adult males held the title and exercised control of the
earldom. For the remainder of the time dowager countesses and, latterly,
heiresses held sway. Moreover, the territorial and jurisdictional integrity of
the earldom itself had been weakened by the fact that the title had been in
abeyance for some time before it was revived for John Stewart. The
Umfraville family, which had held the earldom in the thirteenth century, had
remained in English allegiance in the early decades of the fourteenth century
and the earldom had been forfeited by the Bruce regime.
Margaret’s grandfather John Stewart had been married, around the time
of his elevation to comital rank, to Margaret Abernethy, one of the two
daughters and co-heiresses of Sir Alexander Abernethy (d.c.1315), who, like
the Umfravilles, had been pro-English.16 The marriage was short-lived, with
Earl John dying on 9 December 1331, by which stage the union had produced
one child, Thomas Stewart, the sole heir to Angus and the lordships of Aber-
nethy (from his mother) and Bunkle (from his father).17 Countess Margaret
Abernethy proved to be a long-lived dowager, outlasting her husband by
around forty years and living into the 1370s.
Margaret Abernethy’s sister Mary (great-aunt of Margaret Stewart) had a
more adventurous and fecund marital career. She married at least twice, and
produced numerous children.18 Mary’s sons from her marriages to Sir Andrew
Leslie and Sir David Lindsay formed an important political grouping in Scotland
north of the Forth and around the royal courts of David II (1329‒71) and Robert
II (1371-1390).19 Despite Mary Abernethy’s death sometime before 1355 her sons
continued to associate with each other, Mary’s sister Margaret, their maternal
aunt, and Margaret’s son, Earl Thomas – the father of Margaret Stewart.
15 The papal dispensation allowing the marriage was obtained in the summer of 1353:
Augustus Theiner, Vetera Monumenta Hibernorum et Scotorum Historiam Illustrantia
(Rome, 1864), 304. The couple supplicated for the right to a portable altar as earl and
countess of Angus in 1355: Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers relating to Great
Britain and Ireland: Papal Letters [Cal. Pap. Letters], eds W. H. Bliss et al., 16 vols
(London, 1893), iii, 556.
16 Cal. Pap. Letters, ii, 283.
17 Chron. Bower (Watt), vii, 71‒3.
18 Mary is usually portrayed as the younger sister, although she was married at least
twice, first to Sir Andrew Leslie and then, c.1324‒5, to Sir David Lindsay, well before
Margaret’s first recorded marriage to John Stewart.
19 Fraser, Douglas Book, iii, 391 (no. 313), for the Leslie marriage; Cal. Pap. Letters, ii,
241, for the Lindsay marriage.
John Stewart, Margaret Abernethy, Mary (1) (2)
earl of Angus = countess of Angus Abernethy = Andrew Leslie = David Lindsay
(d.1331) (d. after 1371) (d.b.1355)
Sir John Margaret Thomas Donald, Walter Leslie, James Alexander William
Sinclair of = Sinclair, = Stewart, earl of lord of Ross Lindsay, Lindsay, Lindsay
Herdmanston countess of earl of Angus Mar lord of lord of of the Byres
Angus (d.1362) Crawford Glen Esk
(d.1358) (d.1382)
Margaret
John Sinclair James Walter Stewart, Thomas, Margaret, William Douglas,
of countess of = earl of countess = 1st earl of Douglas and Mar
Herdmanston Angus and Mar Mar of Mar (d.1384)
(d.c.1418) (d.1377)
William Sinclair Mary Stewart, George Douglas,

of Herdmanston, daughter of = earl of Angus James Douglas, Isabella Malcolm
tutor of William, Robert III (d.1402/3) 2nd earl of Douglas, = Drummond,
earl of Angus Douglas and Mar countess of lord of Mar
(k.1388, Mar (d.1402)
Elizabeth Douglas Otterburn)
William Douglas, earl of Angus
Figure 2.1 The earls and countesses of Angus in the fourteenth century.
The friendly interaction between Countess Margaret Abernethy, widow

of John Stewart and dowager countess of Angus, and her Leslie and Lindsay
nephews grew more significant in the wake of the death of Margaret’s son
and heir, Thomas Stewart, earl of Angus, in 1362. Margaret Abernethy obvi-
ously did not feel particularly committed to ensuring that her lineal heirs,
her granddaughters, over whose marriages she had no control, would receive
all the lands, rights and titles she held simply to carry them into other
lineages. In the 1360s Countess Margaret thus permanently alienated a
number of estates to her favoured nephew Alexander Lindsay and others,
diminishing the inheritance that would eventually descend to her grand-
children.20
Earl Thomas was the only son of an only son (see Figure 2.1) so that on
his premature death in 1362, aged around 32, Margaret Stewart and her sister
Elizabeth (who is not shown in Figure 2.1) were left with virtually no close
paternal kinsmen, brothers, uncles or cousins.21 They were not, however,
without male relatives. Their mother, Margaret Sinclair, had been married
to, and left a widow by, Sir John Sinclair of Herdmanston (East Lothian)
before her union with Thomas Stewart. The earlier match had produced at
least three sons, John (who succeeded his father as lord of Herdmanston),
James and Walter.22 It is impossible to say anything about the potential
childhood connections established between the children of Countess
Margaret Sinclair’s two marriages, but it is evident that throughout her life
Margaret Stewart enjoyed a close relationship with the Sinclair half-brothers
and nephews who were her nearest kinsmen. Where half-siblings shared a
mother, they were not, of course, members of the same patrilineage, but their
kinship was undeniable and freely acknowledged, and clearly brought with it
some expectation of reciprocal support.
Margaret Stewart’s early life is obscure. As a potential heiress she was
married to a nobleman of suitably high rank, Thomas, earl of Mar, who may
have been her second cousin and was at least twenty years her senior.23
Margaret’s career as a married countess, whenever it began, has left little
20 RMS, i, nos 141, 337, 489, 612; NRS, GD121/3/7.

21 Chron. Bower (Watt), vii, 318‒21. The earl died of the plague in Dumbarton Castle
while a prisoner of David II.
22 RMS, i, App 1. nos 139, 1477; App 2., nos 1320, 1449; ER, i, 510; ii, 78, 115. The
suggestion that Margaret married Sir John Sinclair after the death of Earl Thomas is
mistaken. J. B. Paul (ed.), The Scots Peerage, 9 vols (Edinburgh, 1904‒14), i, 170.
23 For Mar’s career see Fiona Watson, ‘Donald, eighth earl of Mar (1293‒1332)’, ODNB.
Michael G. H. Kelley, ‘The Douglas Earls of Angus: A Study in the Social and Political
Bases of Power of a Scottish Family from 1389 until 1557’, 2 vols, unpublished PhD
thesis (University of Edinburgh, 1973), i, 72, argues that the match was arranged with
paternal approval (i.e. before Earl Thomas’ death in 1362), although that would have
entailed an espousal well before the usual age for such an arrangement.
trace. She presumably took up residence in Earl Thomas’ north-eastern

earldom and gained experience of running an aristocratic household. The
marriage however, remained childless and Earl Thomas died early in 1377.
On 14 July 1377 Countess Margaret was given possession of extensive estates
within the earldom of Mar as her terce (widow’s portion). The countess’
brieve of terce was delivered to the sheriff of Aberdeen at Inverurie by her
half-brother John Sinclair, described as her actornatus (legal representative).
This was an early indication of the central role the Sinclairs of Herdmanston
would play in supporting her interests for the rest of her life.24
The widow’s terce in Mar, combined with her prospective Angus inheri-
tance, would seem to have made Margaret, still only in her mid-twenties at
the time of her husband’s death, a significant target for ambitious lords
seeking social and financial advancement through the marriage market.25
There was, however, to be no new husband, and instead Margaret entered
into an unorthodox arrangement with her late husband’s brother-in-law
William, first earl of Douglas. Douglas was the husband of Thomas of Mar’s
sister (also Margaret) and, following Earl Thomas’ demise without heirs in
1377, he became the new earl of Mar. Douglas would have been under-
standably eager to prevent wide rights within his newly acquired earldom of
Mar falling into the hands of any future husband of his wife’s young and
recently widowed sister-in-law. Earl William’s prospects of concluding a satis-
factory settlement with Margaret were no doubt enhanced by the fact that
the countess’ Sinclair half-brothers were already part of his social and
political affinity in East Lothian. Some time before 2 January 1379 Margaret
moved from Mar to the East Lothian fortress of Tantallon, part of the barony
of North Berwick held by Earl William from the earls of Fife, from where
she issued a charter of Kimmerghame in Berwickshire in favour of her
‘dearest brother’ John Sinclair of Herdmanston.26 Margaret issued a further
charter from Tantallon in August 1381 and was specifically noted as having
her ‘Innys’ [lodgings or dwelling place] in the castle in January 1389: she had,
in effect, abandoned Mar and taken up permanent residence in Earl William’s
fortress.27
The terms of a settlement concluded around 11 May 1381 confirm that
the countess had decided to end her direct involvement in the northern
earldom by renting the estates and lifetime rights she held in Mar to Earl
24 Fraser, Douglas Book, iii, 24‒5 (no. 29).

25 See Rosenthal, ‘Aristocratic widows’, for a witty and humane discussion of the vari-
ability in attitude to further marriages as displayed by widowed late medieval English
noblewomen.
26 AB Ill., iv, 724.
27 HMC, Fourteenth Report, Appendix 3, MSS of Earl of Strathmore, 181 (no. 11);
Fraser, Douglas Book, iii, 32‒3 (no. 40).
William and his wife and their heirs in return for a substantial annuity of 200
merks sterling. It may not be coincidental that four days after the issuing of
Earl William’s letters confirming the terms of this deal his son and heir,
James, received an annuity of 200 merks sterling from Robert II to be taken
from the great customs of Haddington. It is tempting to speculate that the
Douglases were intending to use this royal pension, to be raised from a burgh
conveniently near Tantallon, to fulfil their financial obligations to Countess
Margaret.28
The relationship between William and Margaret strayed beyond the
purely monetary and tenurial, for the couple entered into an amorous affair
that was not only adulterous (Douglas’ wife, Margaret of Mar, was still alive),
but also, in canonical terms, incestuous – Earl William’s letters to Margaret
Stewart in May 1381 had addressed her as ‘our systir’. The association
produced, on an unknown date, an illegitimate son who was given the
baptismal name George. Relationships within the forbidden degrees of
affinity and consanguinity were relatively common, as the steady flow of
supplications to the papal court requesting dispensation from these restric-
tions attests, but few combined such a blatant disregard for canonical stric-
tures with adultery.
IV
It would be easy to interpret Earl William’s transactions with Countess

Margaret after 1377 as little more than a relatively benign Douglas annexation
of her rights to various lands and resources. Douglas and Margaret’s half-
brothers were certainly beneficiaries from the settlements concluded in the
late 1370s, and the ability of Margaret to dispose of elements of her paternal
inheritance. Yet, it would be wrong to assume passivity and powerlessness on
the part of Margaret (or indeed any other fourteenth-century heiresses and
dowagers). The deal struck in the period after Thomas, earl of Mar’s death
allowed Margaret to return to the locale and social circle in which her half-
brothers and other maternal relations moved. She was provided with presti-
gious accommodation in an imposing newly built residence, probably
constructed in the period 1369‒78.29 Her rights as a dowager in Mar were
28 Fraser, Douglas Book, iii, 29-30 (no. 36); ER, iii, 293-4; RMS, i, no.646. Whether 200
merks sterling fully compensated Margaret for one-third of the rental value of Mar
estates is unclear. Mar was part of the royal patrimony for periods in the fifteenth
century and its total rental value then seems to have been c.1,000 merks Scots. The
relative devaluation of the Scottish currency against sterling in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries complicates the issue, but it may mean that the 1381 annuity repre-
sented a sum roughly equivalent to the yearly revenue from the terce-lands in Mar.
29 In 1365 Earl William had entertained a party of visitors to Scotland in his castle at
Dalkeith: the group included Jean Froissart, who gave a favourable account of his
respected, and she obtained significant financial compensation for her aban-
donment of attempts to directly control and exploit her northern estates.
Moreover, the liaison with Earl William brought Margaret the favour of
one of the most powerful figures in the realm who was clearly prepared to
use his considerable influence to advance the interests of his lover and, after
George’s birth, their child. In February 1379 the king, probably prompted
by Earl William, granted Margaret’s unmarried sister, Elizabeth Stewart,
‘younger daughter and an heir of Thomas Stewart, earl of Angus’, licence to
resign all her hereditary rights to Margaret and promised to confirm these
resignations under the great seal.30 In the following year Sir Alexander
Lindsay of Glen Esk gave up his claim against Margaret and Elizabeth, as
the heirs of Thomas Stewart, to discharge their father’s promise to provide
Lindsay with forty merks worth of land once Alexander ‘had tane the ordre
of Knycht’. Lindsay’s abandonment of his right was said to have been made
specifically ‘at the instance of a noble and mighty lord, William, earl of
Douglas’.31
Earl William’s role in securing, protecting (and helping to dispose of
elements of) Margaret’s Angus inheritance was short-lived, for he died in
April 1384, to be succeeded as earl of Douglas and Mar by his son James. Earl
James, no doubt looking to maintain his hold on all of Mar, extended his
father’s arrangement with the dowager Countess who continued to reside in
Tantallon and, presumably, receive her annuity from the new Douglas earl.
encounter with Earl William and his family in his Chronicles, as well as a brief
description of his host’s castle at Dalkeith (‘Dalquest’). At that point Dalkeith was
presumably Douglas’ principal residence in Lothian. However four years after
Froissart was entertained there, Earl William was forced to hand over the castle and
barony of Dalkeith to James Douglas (first of Dalkeith), who had been contesting
possession of the estate with the earl for some time. It seems likely that William
responded to the loss of his Lothian fortress by beginning the construction of
Tantallon, which first appeared on record in 1378. Claims that the fortress was built
much earlier rest on the appearance of the castle (under the name ‘Dentalonne’) on
the so-called Gough Map, which was for many years thought to date to c.1360.
However, recent studies have suggested that the map was possibly created towards the
end of the fourteenth century or even early in the fifteenth century. The architectural
design of Tantallon, and its affinity with other mid-fourteenth-century residences
such as Doune, also supports a dating in the third quarter of the fourteenth century.
Personal communication, Richard Oram; Oeuvres de Froissart publiées avec les variants
des divers manuscripts, ed. Baron Kervyn de Lettenhove (Brussels, 1870) [Froissart],
ii, 294, xiii, 219; RRS, vi, pp.445, 458, 482, 488, nos 419, 435, 459, 465; K. D. Lilley
and C. Lloyd, ‘Mapping the realm: a new look at the Gough Map of Great Britain
(c.1360)’, Imago Mundi, 61 (2009), 1‒28; T. M. Smallwood, ‘The date of the Gough
Map’, Imago Mundi, 62 (2010), 3‒29.
30 NRS, Register House Charters, RH6/173; AB Ill., iv, 160‒1.
The nature of the personal relationship between Earl James and his father’s
mistress is irrecoverable, although James’ mother may have been under-
standably resentful about Earl William’s liaison with Margaret Stewart. In
making arrangements (in the period 1384‒88) for the provision of masses for
her dead husband and brother, and her still living son, Margaret of Mar, as
Alexander Grant has noted, used pointedly less effusive and affectionate
language in relation to Earl William than the other beneficiaries.32
In August 1388 the still childless Earl James was slain at the battle of
Otterburn, precipitating a major succession dispute over the earldom of
Douglas and its associated lordships that plunged the future of Countess
Margaret and her young son into doubt. The immediate victors in the
struggle were Archibald Douglas, lord of Galloway, who claimed most of Earl
James’ border lordships under the terms of an entail dating to 1342 (and who
became third earl of Douglas by or in April 1389), and James Douglas of
Dalkeith, who obtained control over a range of unentailed Douglas lordships,
including Liddesdale. Earl James’ sister, Isabella Douglas, and her husband
Sir Malcolm Drummond, were thereby thwarted in their attempt to acquire
possession of Earl James’ great southern lordships. Countess Margaret and
her young son were, at this stage, not directly involved in, or threatened by,
the struggle over the core Douglas estates between Malcolm Drummond on
the one hand, and Archibald Douglas and Douglas of Dalkeith on the other.
However, Isabella and Malcolm could also legitimately press claims to the
rest of Earl James’ inheritance, including the earldom of Mar, the earl’s
various hereditary annuities (including the 200 merks from Haddington that
may have supported Margaret’s household in Tantallon), the barony of North
Berwick, and its chief castle at Tantallon. Over the winter of 1388‒9
Drummond, backed by the superior of North Berwick Robert, earl of Fife
(who was also Guardian of the realm), attempted to gain possession of the
East Lothian fortress but was rebuffed by the constable Alan Lauder, and
others, who were clearly in the service of Countess Margaret.33 Margaret’s
household may have been based in Tantallon for about a decade, but she and
her men now faced summary eviction from a residence to which she had no
hereditary or marital rights.
The earl of Fife eventually obtained access to Tantallon around 20 January
1389, but only after he had concluded an agreement with Margaret that
allowed her to continue to reside in and use the castle until the issue of
rightful ownership had been settled.34 Fife’s letters specified that Margaret
‘the qwilk we fand suiornand [a term implying temporary lodging and
emphasising that she had no legal right to possession or occupation] in the
32 Grant, ‘Royal and magnate bastards’; AB Ill., iv, 725‒7.

33 Boardman, Early Stewart Kings, 150.
Castel of Temptaloun’ could continue to enjoy her residence in the castle for
as long as Fife had possession as the superior. The guardian also promised
that Margaret would not be forced ‘to do ony thing in the contrar of hir awyn
wil, and qwhen that hir likys to remofe, so sal haf fre issov and leif to pass at
hir wil, and hir mene, hir famyl [household members].’ Margaret was still
issuing charters from Tantallon as late as 21 November 1389 but seems to
have moved from the castle at some point thereafter, for all subsequent docu-
ments placed her either at the Sinclair castle of Herdmanston or the adjacent
manor house of Begbie.35
Despite the difficulties caused by Earl James’ death, the position of Countess
Margaret and her son was far from hopeless. During her long residence in
Tantallon, a number of local men beyond her Sinclair kinsmen had come to
regard her as an influential figure. Moreover her young son, although illegit-
imate, was the offspring of Earl William and thus a living link to the great
comital dynasty that had been extinguished in 1388. The prominence of East
Lothian men in Froissart’s account of the earl’s supposedly heroic death at
Otterburn is striking, and attests to the embedded nature of Earl James’
military and social lordship in the region. Sir John and Sir Walter Sinclair,
Margaret’s half-brothers, had reputedly attended the fatally wounded earl on
the field and had been urged by him to fight on in his name. It was John and
Walter who, Froissart suggested, took the Douglas banner from the earl’s
dead standard-bearer and carried it back into the fray. The account also picked
out the heroic defence of the earl by a priest with the suggestive name William
of North Berwick, and narrated that he had been grievously, but not fatally,
wounded in the encounter that cost the earl his life.36
35 Calendar of the Laing Charters, 854‒1837, ed. Joseph Anderson (Edinburgh, 1899),
97‒8 (no. 379, entry no. 7), letters issued on 30 March 1389 from Tantallon; Fraser,
Douglas Book, iii, 34‒5 (no. 42), charter by Margaret, countess of Mar and Angus, to
‘our dear brother’, Sir Walter Sinclair of lands in the lordship of Abernethy, to be held
by him and his heirs male legitimately procreated from us and George de Douglas,
‘our son and assignee’, and his heirs. Witnessed by John Haliburton, lord of the same;
William Lindsay, lord of the Byres; John Sinclair, lord of Herdmanston, our
[Margaret’s] brother; John Liddale, William Borthwick, knights; Alexander de
Cockburn, Alan de Lauder, at Tantallon, 21 November 1389; ‘Bagby iuxta Hyrdeman-
stone’ as it was described in January 1416: AB Ill., iv, 733‒4.
36 Froissart, xiii, 224‒5; Jean Froissart, Chronicles, trans. Geoffrey Brereton
(Harmondsworth, 1968), 344. Froissart also claimed that the same priest, later in the
year, became an archdeacon and canon of Aberdeen, but there is no such man on
record. It is almost tempting to see in this tale, which Froissart probably
heard from Scottish knights he met in Avignon during 1389, an attempt to present
Earl James had, in his short career as earl of Douglas, been attended by a
number of lairds whose principal residences and interests lay in, or near,
Haddington: William Lindsay of the Byres, John Haliburton, lord of
Dirleton, Robert Lauder of the Bass, William Borthwick, lord of Catcune
and the unknighted Alexander Cockburn and Alan Lauder.37 Members of
this group had also witnessed at least some of the charters issued by Countess
Margaret from Tantallon between 1379 and 1388 and all, with the exception
of Lauder of the Bass, were in attendance to witness Countess Margaret’s
grant from the castle in November 1389, in favour of her half-brother Walter
Sinclair, one of the men who had supposedly been personally delegated by
the dying James to defend the Douglas banner.38 Now, deprived of the
protection and social leadership provided by the Douglas earls, these East
Lothian lairds transferred their loyalty and adherence to the countess and
her young son. While the rest of the Douglas surname were indifferent or
openly hostile to George Douglas, Earl William’s son could count on the
support of his maternal relations and a local lairdly community habituated to
Douglas lordship. The disaster at Otterburn meant that Countess Margaret
had entered a new stage in her career in which she operated as an independent
figure in the politics of the region and indeed the kingdom.
VI
From 1389 there were three distinct issues that called for Margaret’s
attention. First, securing her son’s right to inherit her own Angus estates and
the lordships of Abernethy and Bunkle. Second, re-asserting her claims as
dowager countess of Mar. The settlement with the first and second earls of
Douglas and Mar, which had seen Margaret receive a 200-merk annuity in
exchange for her terce rights inside Mar, had been ended by Otterburn.
Control of the earldom passed to Earl James’ sister Isabella and her husband
Malcolm Drummond (who became lord of Mar in right of his wife):
the Sinclairs of Herdmanston as, symbolically, the posthumous defenders of Earl

James’ honour and legacy. Such a presentation is especially interesting given the post-
Otterburn position of their young nephew, Earl James’ half-brother.
37 See for example his undated grant as lord of Lauderdale: Sir William Fraser, Memorials
of the Earls of Haddington, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1889), ii, 225‒6 (no. 282).
38 The charters/letters issued, or likely to have been issued, by Margaret from Tantallon
after 1379 (in rough chronological order – some have no specified date of issue) were
witnessed by a mix of local men, Douglas adherents and the countess’ own kinsmen,
although in many cases these were extensively overlapping categories: AB Ill., iv, 724,
January 1379; NRS, Murthly Castle Muniments, GD121⁄3⁄21 (1378‒1382); Fraser,
Douglas Book, iii, no. 28 (placed too early in volume, 1378‒82).
Margaret would now have to negotiate with Malcolm and Isabella to ensure
that she received her due from the northern earldom as the widow of Earl
Thomas. Third, and most ambitiously, advancing the position of George
Douglas as a potential heir to lordships that had been held by his father and
half-brother and which had not passed to Archibald Douglas, third earl of
Douglas, under the terms of the entail of 1342. The man most directly
threatened by Margaret’s ambitions in this regard was James Douglas of
Dalkeith, who had claimed the bulk of the unentailed Douglas lordships in
the south of the kingdom, including Liddesdale, in 1388‒9. In 1397 Countess
Margaret and her son concluded a series of agreements with the heirs general
of the 2nd earl of Douglas whose claims had been swept aside by Archibald
Douglas and Douglas of Dalkeith. Thus the rights of the childless Isabella,
sister of the second earl, and Sir James Sandilands of Calder, nephew of
William, first earl of Douglas, eventually became vested in Margaret’s son,
sparking a major confrontation with Douglas of Dalkeith.39
The position of Margaret’s Angus inheritance was the most easily and
swiftly resolved of these issues, with the countess obtaining formal recog-
nition of the right of her son to inherit her Angus lands and titles during the
sitting of a general council in Edinburgh which ran from 29 March to 10
April 1389. On 8 April, at Edinburgh, Margaret issued a charter of lands in
the barony of Kirriemuir to Sir Richard Comyn for his ‘good counsel and
service’. The charter, uniquely for Margaret, was said to have been issued ‘ex
deliberato consilio’ (‘by the deliberation of [our] council’).40 If the countess’
‘council’ was reflected in the witnesses to the charter then the group was
composed of Margaret’s three Sinclair half-brothers, John, James and Walter,
her illegitimate half-brother William Stewart (collectively described as ‘our
dearest brothers’), Sir William Borthwick (of Catcune) and Sir John
Liddale.41 It seems likely that the grant was related to Comyn’s support or
help in arranging the events of the following day (9 April) when, in full
parliament at the monastery of Holyrood, the countess resigned the earldom
of Angus and the lordships of Abernethy and Bunkle into the king’s hands in
favour of her son George and his heirs, whom failing the heirs of Elizabeth,
Margaret’s sister, and her husband Sir Alexander Hamilton. George’s right
to succeed to his mother’s titles was thus officially acknowledged, removing
the threat that his illegitimacy might be used by others after Margaret’s death
to argue against his succession to her lands and rights. On 10 April the king
confirmed the succession arrangements with a charter under the great seal,
39 For this, see Brown, Black Douglases, ch. 4.

41 Probably the same John Liddale who received a grant from Margaret, in the period
1378‒82, of the lands of Balmuir in the lordship of Strathdichty and barony of
Kirriemuir: NRS, GD 121⁄3⁄21.
Archibald, lord of Douglas (d.c.1240)
William Douglas Andrew

(d.c.1274) Douglas
William, lord of Douglas William

(d.1299) Douglas
James ‘of
James, lord of Archibald, lord of Liddesdale Lothian’
Douglas
(k.1330)
Margaret of Mar = William, 1st earl = Margaret Stewart, Eleanor = James John
of Douglas and countess of Angus Douglas Sandilands Douglas
Archibald ‘the Mar (d.1384) (d.c.1418)
Grim’, 3rd earl James
of Douglas Douglas,
James, 2nd earl of Isabella Douglas, = Malcolm George Douglas, James Sandilands lord of
Douglas and Mar countess of Mar Drummond, earl of Angus of Calder Dalkeith
(k.1388) (d.1408) lord of Mar (d.c.1403)
(d.1402⁄3)
Earls of Earls of Angus Douglases

Douglas of Dalkeith
Figure 2.2 The Douglas inheritance, 1388–c.1400.

which also made clear that the countess was actually to retain lifetime
possession of all the estates and rights to which her son was now the acknowl-
edged heir.42
Following the events of 1389 there is something of a lacuna in evidence
relating to Margaret’s affairs, until the spring and early summer of 1397 when
the countess and her son re-emerged on the national scene. In the interim
some important aspects of her life had changed. She was still apparently based
in East Lothian, but she no longer had possession of Tantallon. During 1397,
she concluded agreements in her half-brother’s more modest castle at Herd-
manston and then, latterly, she was to be found in the presumably even more
humble surroundings of the manor of Begbie ‘next to’ Herdmanston.43 The
identity of the occupiers of Tantallon, presumably holding from the earl of Fife,
is mysterious, although the castle would certainly return to the possession of
George Douglas’ heirs in the fifteenth century. The first of a series of agree-
ments concluded by Margaret in 1397 with Sir James Sandilands of Calder
included the striking stipulation that the countess and her son should have a
five-year lease of Sandilands’ castle of Calder (Midlothian), with his rights
to pasturage for the household’s horses in the summer and peat and other
fuel during the winter.44 It would seem that the countess was experiencing
difficulty in obtaining accommodation that befitted her social status and the
needs of her household. Most dowagers would have been accommodated in one
of their departed spouse’s residences, but Margaret had made a decisive break
from Mar shortly after Earl Thomas’ death and had shown no inclination or
ability to return to the north-east. Indeed, as we shall see, it is unclear what
personal benefit Margaret derived from her claims to her widow’s portion in
Mar after the death of James, 2nd earl of Douglas and Mar in 1388, first
through the failure of the heirs to the earldom to hand over the full rents due
from her terce lands, and then the use of her claims there as a bargaining chip
to obtain concessions in other areas of the kingdom for her son and his heirs.
42 RPS, 1389⁄3⁄18. On the same day the king ratified an undated charter by Margaret,
countess of Angus and Mar, in favour of her sister and Alexander Hamilton of the
lordship of Innerwick and lands in the lordship of Abernethy – obviously compen-
sation for Elizabeth’s resignation of her wider potential claims as co-heiress and her
willingness to accept a place in the succession to Angus behind her illegitimate nephew.
The charter was probably issued during, or shortly before, the April general council.
The witnesses included Robert, earl of Fife; George Dunbar, earl of March; John
Dunbar, earl of Moray; John, James and William (recte Walter) Sinclair; and Alan of
Lauder (perhaps indicating the charter was issued from Tantallon): NRS, GD90⁄1⁄30,
RH6⁄195; AB Ill., iv, 161‒2.
43 A notarial instrument was drawn up at the manor at the instance of Countess Margaret
in 1408: Fraser, Douglas Book, iii, 44‒6 (no. 51). This might suggest that Countess
Margaret’s charter chest was at that location.
44 Fraser, Douglas Book, iii, 37‒8 (no. 44). There is no evidence to suggest one way or another
whether the countess and her son actually occupied Calder in the period 1397‒1402.
The sequence of agreements concluded by Countess Margaret in April-

May 1397 had the overall effect of making her son a claimant to all the unen-
tailed Douglas properties that had once been held by the first and second
earls of Douglas, George’s father and half-brother. The settlement set George
on a collision course with James Douglas of Dalkeith; in 1397‒8 a fierce feud
developed between the two men and their adherents in which, once again,
George was almost entirely dependent on the support of his maternal rela-
tions. Certainly George’s Sinclair uncles and cousins took the lead in a series
of raids against Douglas of Dalkeith’s lands in Lothian and the borders during
1397 and 1398.45
At this time, George began to appear alongside his mother in order to give
his formal assent to the deals made. Thus an indenture of 27 April 1397,
finalised at Herdmanston, was said to be ‘betwix a nobil ladi, Mergaret countas
of Marr and Angous and George Douglas, hir sone, lorde of Angus’ on the
one hand and ‘his cosyn Scir Jamys of Sandilands, lord of Caldore’ on the
other. George had no seal of his own and employed ‘the seal of the ladi his
modir’ to indicate his commitment to the terms, but the young lord was
clearly beginning to take an active role in the management of his own affairs.46
In the following month, on 15 May, George concluded another agreement with
Sandilands at Herdmanston, without his mother’s recorded involvement.47
Some nine days after this indenture, Countess Margaret concluded a
marriage agreement with Robert III in Edinburgh by which George ‘lord’ of
Angus was to wed a daughter of the king. Robert agreed to give to George
and his daughter, and their heirs male, regality powers over their lands in
Angus, Abernethy and Bunkle. The royal match was both a triumph for
Margaret in terms of securing her son’s position and status in the realm, and
45 For the details see Brown, Black Douglases, ch. 4; Boardman, Early Stewart Kings,
204‒5. NLS, Morton Cartulary, MS 72, fos 33r.–v., 34r., 36r., 37r., 39r.–v., lists men
who participated in raids against various Dalkeith properties in 1397‒8 in support of
George Douglas. The roll call is dominated by George’s maternal uncles and cousins
from the Sinclair of Herdmanston family, another maternal uncle in the shape of the
illegitimate William Stewart of Angus, and a more distant but powerful maternal
kinsman, Henry Sinclair, earl of Orkney and lord of Roslin.
46 Fraser, Douglas Book, iii, 37‒8 (no. 44); 49‒50 (no. 55), for George, earl of Angus, again
using his mother’s seal to attest another (undated) agreement with Sandilands. George
promised that as soon as he had a seal made he would attest the obligation with it.
47 Fraser, Douglas Book, iii, 39‒40 (no. 46). In the indenture as given, Sandilands referred
to George as ‘earl’ rather than ‘lord’ of Douglas, but the original obligation is only
known through its incorporation in a royal confirmation of November 1397, by which
stage George was definitely using the style earl of Angus. It seems likely that his title
was updated in the November confirmation. The witnesses display the continuity
from the Douglas affinity of the 1380s: John Sinclair, lord of Herdmanston, William
Abernethy, lord of Saltoun, William of Borthwick, lord of Legertwood, James and
Walter Sinclair, William Stewart of Angus and John Liddale.
a further step in the gradual erosion of her control over the fate and direction
of the Angus lordships, since it was another marker of George’s emergence
into adulthood.48 By 9 November 1397 George had married Princess Mary
Stewart and adopted the style earl, rather than lord, of Angus, indicating that
he had assumed full responsibility for his lordship and was no longer exer-
cising authority through, or in collaboration with, his mother.49 In the same
period he was personally involved in the violence directed against his rival
James Douglas of Dalkeith over the winter of 1397‒8, establishing his creden-
tials as the military leader of his affinity.
VII
In 1399 Earl George began to display an interest in his mother’s rights as

dowager countess of Mar, although not necessarily with the intention of bene-
fiting her. Mar had fallen, on the death of Earl James in 1388, to James’ sister
Isabella and her husband Malcolm Drummond (who was using the courtesy
title, Lord of Mar, by 1393). An indenture of 7 March 1399 between George
earl of Angus and Drummond (styled lord of Mar and Garioch) made it clear
that considerable ‘rerage’ (arrears) was owed from the third of Mar and
Garioch, Strathalva, Clova in Angus and the barony of Melginch that ‘pertain
to ane reverend lady dame mergeret cowntes of Angus and of Marr’. Angus
suggested he would make Drummond quit of the sums he owed to Margaret,
and also assign over to Malcolm Margaret’s ongoing rights to these estates.
In return Malcolm would give over to Angus his claims to the contested
lordship of Liddesdale, giving Earl George an immediate right to attempt to
oust Douglas of Dalkeith from the territory. George was to obtain confirma-
tion of the deal from his mother ‘in wyrt ondyr the cowntas’ sele’ before the
following Whitsunday, although the possibility was acknowledged that ‘the
forsaid lady his [Angus’] moder wil nocht assent to this conand [covenant,
compact]’. If it happened that George died before his mother (as, indeed,
later occurred) then ‘it sall be at the forsaid cowntess’ will qwether thait scho
will hald thir conandis forsaidand made [i.e. these covenants made as is
aforesaid] or hafe regress till hir thryddis forsaid’. If Countess Margaret was
not prepared to waive the money owed to her, then Angus agreed to
compensate his mother ‘of his awn gudis’, and specifically from the arrears
of the rents of Liddesdale that he hoped to recover from Sir James Douglas
of Dalkeith.50 The deal certainly went ahead, for on 19 April 1400 Drummond
issued a charter from Kildrummy in favour of George Douglas, earl of Angus,

49 Fraser, Douglas Book, iii, 40‒1 (no. 47); 41‒2 (no. 48); NRS, Mar and Kellie papers,
GD124⁄1⁄421.
50 NRS, Mar and Kellie papers, GD124⁄1⁄120.
of the lands of Liddesdale in exchange for the third of Mar and other lord-
ships that belonged to Margaret Stewart, George’s mother, as the widow of
Thomas of Mar.51 Whether Margaret insisted on compensation for the
trading away of her terce rights by her son is unknown.
While the arrangement between Angus and Drummond could be seen as
displaying a cynical disregard for Margaret’s privileges, the complexity of the
original proposed agreement with its multiple scenarios reflected the fact that
both parties recognised the possibility that the dowager Countess of Mar
could withhold approval for all or part of the deal, and in that sense her rights
and opinions were respected throughout. It may be that she was willing to
forgo part or all of the sums she was owed as an investment in the future of
the lineage she had effectively founded. Certainly in an undated assignation
of a £5 annuity to one Patrick Lindsay, probably issued shortly after her son’s
death in c.1403 and before tutors had been appointed for his children, the
probably fifty-year-old Margaret displayed a sense of having made deliberate
sacrifices for the well-being of George and his heirs and an expectation that,
because of that, those heirs, or those charged with supervising their affairs,
should show consideration for her wishes in terms of honouring the terms
of the gift even after her death. In a touching way she assured Lindsay that:
quhat tyme at that thar be tutoris ordanyt for the barnys of our sone of Angous
that we sal ger thaim conferme this our gift forsayd and the barnys gif we lyf
till thai cum to perfyt eylde, and if we die with this thing unconfirmed we bid
and charge the heirs of our said son of Angous and the tutouris whoever they
be they shall not disturb Patrick in our gift forsaid sen it is anerly done for
thair profyte and at thai will haf in mynde how we made our lyffyng les in our
tyme for lestand profit to thaim.52
It may partly have been the fate of her terce lands that Margaret had in mind
when she claimed that her own ‘lyffyng’ had been diminished in order to
secure lasting profit for her grandchildren, but it also seems a more general
comment on the way she had conducted her affairs over her long career. Her
tone was not one of complaint or resentment, but of pride in the efforts she
had made.
VIII
Margaret received a bitter blow in 1402‒3 with the death of her son George
in English captivity following his capture at the battle of Humbleton Hill in
September 1402. Bower claimed that George succumbed to the plague while
a captive. This is curiously reminiscent of the fate of George’s grandfather,

52 RMS, ii, no. 195.
Thomas Stewart, earl of Angus. Bower’s list of Scottish knights captured at

Humbleton included a number of men who were probably in George’s
company, including his cousin, William Sinclair of Herdmanston, his uncles
James Sinclair of Longformacus (and James’ son) and Sir William Stewart
of Angus.53 George left two infant children by his royal bride, a son William,
who would eventually succeed to the earldom of Angus, and a daughter Eliz-
abeth. If Margaret was initially uncertain about who might be appointed to
look after her grandchildren, she may well have been gratified that the right
eventually fell to her nephew William Sinclair of Herdmanston.54 The
children were presumably initially raised in Sinclair’s residence, with their
grandmother conveniently located in the adjacent manor of Begbie.
One of the social roles expected of female aristocrats was the identification
of suitable marriage partners for dependent children, and Margaret was
clearly the driving force in the search for spouses for William and Elizabeth.
By 1409 Margaret and her kinsmen had settled on a match for the heir to the
earldom and his sister. On 4 December 1409, at Herdmanston, Henry
Sinclair, earl of Orkney, and William Sinclair of Herdmanston, gave their
obligation to Sir William Hay of Lochariot (later Yester) on behalf of Countess
Margaret that they would refund £100 scots to Sir William if the contract of
marriage between William of Douglas, earl of Angus, and one of Hay’s
daughters was never realised because of the earl’s death. The following
December Countess Margaret acknowledged receipt of the payment of £100
from Sir William Hay for the marriage of her son’s son, grandly styled ‘Eryl
of Anguse and Larde of Ledalysdale’.55
Margaret is known to have died sometime before 23 March 1418.56 The
last references we have to her activities come from late 1415 and early 1416:
at this stage she was probably in her early sixties and involved in a dispute
with the prior of the cathedral church of Durham over lands in Berwickshire
claimed by Durham’s dependent priory at Coldingham. Her final known
charter as Margaret, countess of Angus and Mar restored the disputed lands
to Durham; it was issued on 4 January 1416 from the little manor at ‘Bagby
iuxta Hyrdemanstone’, where she had lived since at least November 1408.57
The seal she attached to the document is known from surviving examples,
and from a detailed notarial description dating to 11 September 1409. It
depicted, as was entirely conventional, a standing female figure with her
hands resting on two shields. The figure’s right hand touched a shield bearing
53 Chron. Bower (Watt), viii, 48‒9.

54 Calendar of Papal Letters to Scotland of Benedict XIII of Avignon, 1394‒1419, ed. F.
McGurk (SHS, 1976), 35, 187‒8.
55 Calendar of Writs Preserved at Yester House, 1166‒1625, eds Charles C. H. Harvey and
John Macleod (SRS, 1930), nos 45, 46.
57 AB Ill., iv, 732‒4; Fraser, Douglas Book, iii, 44‒6 (no. 51).
the arms of the earldom of Mar, the lordship of Margaret’s first husband,
depicting her status as dowager countess of one of the kingdom’s great
provincial lordships. Her left hand rested on a shield bearing the Stewart fess
cheque with a bend and three buckles, the arms of her paternal family the
Stewarts of Bunkle. The legend proclaimed that the seal was that of
‘Mergarete Senescalli, comitisse de Marr’.58
The symbolism of the seal reflects a certain understanding of the role and
duties of a medieval noblewoman, standing between the coats of arms of the
two patrilines, the marital and paternal houses, that she supposedly linked.
In Margaret’s case the image was utterly deceptive and unrelated to the reality
of the social and political networks in and through which she lived her life.
To her, the earldom of Mar was a briefly visited and alien province with which
she had next to no direct dealings in the four decades that followed the end
of her childless marriage. The Stewarts of Angus were effectively an extinct
lineage before Margaret reached her tenth birthday. Margaret’s real friends,
allies and partakers were provided instead by her mother’s kin, the brood of
watchful half brothers and their sons, and the affinity of her Douglas lover.
Her world revolved around Haddington and Herdmanston and the lairdly
community of East Lothian. The hardened shields in cold wax were empty
expressions of a largely formal status.
58 Henry Laing, Descriptive Catalogue of Impressions from Ancient Scottish Seals (Bannatyne
Club, 1850), 131 (no. 792); Fraser, Douglas Book, iii, 49‒50 (no. 55). Laing gives the
legend as ‘S’MARGUERITE LE SENESCHALLE CONTESSE DE MARRE’.
chapter 3
Bastard Feudalism in England in the

Fourteenth Century
CHRISTINE CARPENTER
Jenny Wormald has written with distinction on lordship, service and gover-
nance in late medieval Scotland. This is a contribution to the same subjects
in the kingdom on the other side of the border.1 It addresses, at times spec-
ulatively, a conundrum that has of late become increasingly evident: if, as has
been assumed, bastard feudalism in the fourteenth century was the same as
in the fifteenth, why does it look so different in many ways?2
It is necessary to begin with a summary of our present understanding of

bastard feudalism in the fifteenth century. The fons et origo is K. B. McFarlane
and his revolutionary rejection of the Plummer/Stubbs view that this was,
as the name suggests, a debased form of feudalism. Thus, bastard feudalism
did not replace a legitimate and permanent bond, based on land, with an ille-
gitimate and inherently unstable one, based on money, contract and mutual
advantage, thereby undermining government and society and encouraging
terrible violence which culminated in the Wars of the Roses. Rather, it filled
a gap left by the decline of feudalism. At first McFarlane still accepted the
prevailing opinion that linked the emergence of bastard feudalism to the
king’s military needs. But, for him, it was not the case that the requirements
of the French wars gave birth to the military contract and all its alleged evils;
rather, the decline of the feudal host necessitated the recruitment of armies
in a new way: the contract. However, well before his death, he had realised
that we need to think of bastard feudalism not as a by-product of military
11 I am most grateful to Andrew Spencer for his helpful comments on this chapter in
draft form.
12 Historians of the thirteenth century, who have taken up this subject more recently,
are also assuming the same model. See notably P. R. Coss, ‘Bastard feudalism revised’,
Past and Present 125 (November 1989), 27‒64, and David Crouch, D. A. Carpenter
and P. R. Coss, ‘Debate: bastard feudalism revised’, Past and Present 131 (May 1991),
165‒203.
needs but (to use George Holmes’ apposite phrase) as ‘part of the normal
fabric of society’.3
Building on McFarlane’s work, especially as more of it began to come into
print, historians of bastard feudalism, working initially on noble followings
and then increasingly on the localities, where its normal operation lay, came
to a clear understanding of the system in its mature form.4 Much of this
confirmed or amplified McFarlane’s own insights. Just like feudalism, bastard
feudalism was a perfectly respectable tie, binding lesser to greater landowners,
as feudalism had done. Like feudalism, it was highly localised, and nobles
normally recruited their followers in the geographical vicinity of their main
estates. Accordingly, a lord’s followers were not low-class household retainers
with a propensity for violence but members of the local gentry, and they were
not normally recruited in war. In fact, in the fifteenth century, with the
exception of one or two nobles who have proved to be unusual, there was very
little overlap between war and peace retinues. Moreover, as one would expect
from a relationship based on geographical proximity rather than wartime
need, it often had a high degree of permanence and stability, even across
generations and across changes in the tenure of the noble estate. Men who
served more than one lord tended either to be associated with lords who were
themselves linked in local politics or – notably lawyers – who were offering
professional services.
All this has entailed drawing a clear distinction between a lord’s household
menials and his gentry followers. The latter might have close or more distant
relations with their lord’s household, depending on whether they held an
office with him, but they would normally be resident on their own estates in
the neighbourhood of one of the lord’s residences. It was these followers who,
with men drawn from the tenantry on their own estates, would furnish the
greater part of a lord’s retinue if he wished to make a show of any sort, just
as had been the case in the days when a lord summoned the knights who were
13 K. B. McFarlane, England in the Fifteenth Century, ed. G. L. Harriss (London, 1981),

especially McFarlane, ‘Bastard feudalism’, 23‒43, and Harriss, ‘Introduction’, pp. ix–
xxvii; Christine Carpenter, ‘Political and constitutional history: before and after
McFarlane’, in R. H. Britnell and A. J. Pollard (eds), The McFarlane Legacy (Stroud,
1995), 175‒206; George Holmes, The Later Middle Ages, 1272‒1485 (2nd edn,
London, 1970), 167.
14 For this and the paragraph that follows, see the following summaries, which are also
guides to further literature: G. L. Harriss, ‘The dimensions of politics’, in Britnell and
Pollard (eds), McFarlane Legacy, 1‒20; G. L. Harriss, Shaping the Nation: England,
1360‒1461 (Oxford, 2005), chs 4‒6; Michael Hicks, Bastard Feudalism (London, 1995);
Christine Carpenter, The Wars of the Roses (Cambridge, 1997), chs 2 and 3. The
universality of noble leadership in the shires is debated but there is agreement on the
localisation of local administration and justice, and on noble embeddedness in local
society and office-holding when the lord did lead: Christine Carpenter, ‘Gentry and
community in medieval England’, Journal of British Studies 33 (1994), 340‒80.
BASTARD FEUDALISM IN ENGLAND IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY 61
his feudal tenants to come accompanied by their men. The change of

emphasis in the historiography from unstable military and household retinue
to stable local gentry following has also made historians realise that the
indenture of retainder that was formerly placed at the heart of the relationship
was probably more the exception than the rule. Thus, gentry were connected
to lords by a variety of means, some more formal than others. Some followers
were no more than what was known as ‘well-willers’. The fee that might be
part of this relationship was normally not large relative to the recipient’s
income and nobles mostly spent fairly frugally on them. For all these reasons,
historians now prefer to call a late medieval noble’s following his affinity rather
than his retinue. We can sum all this up by saying that it has been realised
that bastard feudalism should not be regarded as an institution with specific
causes and characteristics. As it happens, the historians of the post-Conquest
period have been concurrently coming to the same conclusion with regard
to ‘feudalism’.5 Both are merely shorthand for complex structures of social
and political relationships.
The work on local landed societies, especially through intensive use of
legal records and deed evidence, two sources that came into their own with
these studies, has enabled us to reach a sophisticated understanding of how
these functioned in the fifteenth century and the role that the nobility and
bastard feudalism played within them. It is now understood that the lord’s
main role for the members of his affinity was to help them in the protection
of their estates. This was effected by putting the weight of the lord and the
affinity behind the various transactions that secured the gentry’s property,
marriage settlements, post-mortem transmission and so on; behind arbitra-
tions that prevented disputes reaching the courts or, once they did, got them
privately settled; and, if all else failed, behind the pursuit of land claims
through law or outside the law. The affinity in turn served the lord directly
in various ways but its major role was to make him the key figure in the
management of the locality on the king’s behalf. This was achieved by gentry
followers taking on some of the major local offices and, if enforcement was
required, by placing the local manpower that came from their own lordship
over their peasant tenants at the lord’s disposal, to add to the force he raised
from his own tenantry. It is this mutuality of reciprocal needs and obligations,
between lord and gentry follower, and king and lord, that in many ways lies
at the heart of the relationship by this period. This tripartite symbiotic
arrangement meant that the noble achieved the greatness that he expected in
the areas where his main estates lay (his ‘country’), the gentry got their
protection, and the king’s government was carried on, by this time with a
remarkable depth and reach. It is therefore now understood that, far from
15 See for example Judith A. Green, The Aristocracy of Norman England (Cambridge,
1997), ch. 7.
making a crude distinction, as used to be done, between royal power in the

shires (good) and magnate power (bad), we need to accept that the public
power of the crown in the fifteenth century rested on the private power and
private relationships of nobles and gentry and that neither public nor private
power could function without the other.
II
The problem is that it is becoming increasingly unclear that we should

attribute these same features to bastard feudalism in the century before.
Certainly, for a long time the fourteenth century was regarded as quite as
much a McFarlane century as the fifteenth: these had been the Cinderella
centuries, both of them dismissed as of no interest to serious scholars, other
than as the crucible of parliament, their politics as unrespectable as their
nobles and most of their kings. Both centuries were rescued and given the
possibility of a serious political history by McFarlane. His Ford lectures of
1953 took 1290 as their starting date, and the lecture on ‘service, maintenance
and politics’, although its evidence leans heavily towards the fifteenth century,
assumes a similar pattern throughout the period.6 The first two major school-
of-McFarlane studies to be published were of key nobles under Edward II:
Maddicott’s Thomas of Lancaster and Phillips’ Aymer de Valence Earl of
Pembroke, both from the early 1970s. Both took the same view of the role of
bastard feudalism as would have been held at that time by a fifteenth-century
historian. This was that a lord’s political following comprised an affinity
located in the areas of his principal estates; that his good lordship offered
preferment and protection; and that much of this was effected by the possi-
bilities for influencing and controlling local officers, and by the ability to raise
a local force, for aggressive or defensive purposes, which his affinity gave him.
Members of the affinity, for their part, were an adjunct to the lord’s local and
national political power, and the local pressure on the law and its officers that
could be exerted via the affinity might equally be exerted to the lord’s benefit.
Maddicott, while acknowledging that there were fewer ‘blatant examples of
bribery and corruption of sheriffs, jurors, and justices’ under Edward II than
the fifteenth-century Paston letters reveal, stated that ‘there is little doubt
that Lancaster exercised his influence over royal justice and administration
in his own lands in much the same way as did the Dukes of Norfolk and
Suffolk in the East Anglia of the 1440s’. Conversely Phillips attributed
Pembroke’s failure to use retainder to create a strong local power base to the
fact that ‘it is possible in some way Pembroke remained an outsider in English
society’ because of his strong links to the Continent. Pembroke was therefore
16 Published twenty years later as K .B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval
England (Oxford, 1973), 102‒21.
judged to be in some respects an exception to the ‘bastard feudal’ norm exem-

plified by Lancaster.7
There seemed every reason to make these assumptions from the wave of
noble and local studies that began to appear in thesis form and in print under
the inspiration of McFarlane, of which these two were pioneering examples.
As had long been understood, for this kind of pressure on the local adminis-
tration of the law and peacekeeping to be possible, there had to have been a
change from the centralised, king-focused rule of the localities, which essen-
tially characterised the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, to a localist one. Once
this had occurred, the local gentry, the quintessential ‘local amateurs’, admin-
istered the shires, largely unsupervised by central royal commissions. It was
indeed this change, seen as deleterious to local rule and local order, that had
underpinned much of the older account of bastard feudalism, in the version
of medieval English history which, as McFarlane put it, had been written by
‘King’s Friends’.8 It was generally considered that this process was complete
in some respects and well under way in others by the time of Edward II. The
decline of the great curial sheriff and his replacement by a lesser and local
figure began under Henry III and had been more or less completed by the
end of the thirteenth century.9 The last full eyre was abandoned in 1294. The
replacement of its successor experimental centralised commissions, such as
trailbaston and the itinerant King’s Bench, by the justices of the peace (JPs),
although in train by 1307, took longer. Putnam, the seminal historian of the
JP, had declared that this process had its more or less final act in the statute
of 1361, ‘which gave statutory sanction … for the transformation of keepers
into justices’.10 Historians pursuing local studies realised the enormous
importance of these two officers: the sheriff as the local enforcer of the writs
that set in motion the royal courts at Westminster, which now heard so much
of the gentry’s legal business, and the JPs, as the men who could enable or
disable the first stage of a crown plea, by accepting or rejecting a bill placed
17 J. R. Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 1307‒1322 (Oxford, 1970), 49; J. R .S. Phillips,

Aymer de Valence Earl of Pembroke, 1307‒1324 (Oxford, 1972), 271; also 258‒9. Simi-
larly, Richard W. Kaueper, ‘Law and order in fourteenth-century England: the
evidence of special commissions of oyer and terminer’, Speculum 54 (1979), 734‒84, at
p. 751.
18 McFarlane, Nobility, 2‒3; quotation at p. 2.
19 W. A. Morris, The Medieval English Sheriff to 1300 (Manchester, 1927), 166‒7; Helen
M. Cam, ‘Cambridgeshire sheriffs in the thirteenth century’, in Cam, Liberties and
Communities in Medieval England (London, 1963), 36‒48; more recently, D. A.
Carpenter, ‘The decline of the curial sheriff in England, 1194‒1258’, in Carpenter,
The Reign of Henry III (London, 1996), 151‒82.
10 Bertha Haven Putnam (ed.), Proceedings before the Justices of the Peace in the Fourteenth
and Fifteenth Centuries (The Ames Foundation, 1938), xxxvi–xlviii, lix–lxiii; quotation
at p. xlv. She did recognise that the process was not yet entirely complete (see below,
notes 21 and 23).
before them to be heard by a jury. Fifteenth-century studies of the localities

and of individual disputes were showing how much it mattered to both parties
in a gentry dispute that they should be able to rely on a sympathetic sheriff
and commission of the peace, and how much could be lost when they could
not.11 It therefore seemed reasonable to assume that this was the case for most
of the second half of the fourteenth century, and to a degree for the whole of
the century, despite what was known of the periodic attempts to revive some
sort of centralised system for bringing justice and order to the shires up to
1361.
III
As this summary indicates, the study of fifteenth-century bastard feudalism

has shown the necessity of exploring both the private relationship – its nature,
extent and function – and the public system of local rule within which it
operated and of which it was an essential part. It is in fact recent study of
local government in the fourteenth century that has begun to cast serious
doubt on the appropriateness of the later model for this period. To begin with
the sheriffs of the first six or seven decades of the fourteenth century, it is
true that they were mostly local, in that they were not curialists and they had
landed interests in the counties where they served, as sheriffs were obliged
to have by this time, though there was no specific qualification until 1371.12
However, closer examination is now suggesting that we should be wary of
thinking of either the sheriffs or the other local men appointed to office at
this time as ‘amateurs’ drawn from the leading local gentry. Quite a few of
the local officers were not of the first rank tenurially or socially speaking, and
the sheriffs, as a group, despite individual exceptions, were significantly lower
in rank and tenure than those of the following century. Moreover, the sheriffs,
like many other local officers, including even those from the local elite, tended
to be almost professional in the frequency with which they were appointed
to a variety of local employments. To add to the aura of professionalism,
several of these frequent officers were lawyers or administrators, working for
local nobles or even the king. Some in fact came into royal service after
starting in the shires and were perhaps drawn to the king’s attention by their
excellence as local officers.13 It is well known that, although there was
11 See note 4 for guides to the literature on localities and on individual disputes.
12 Richard Gorski, The Fourteenth-Century Sheriff (Woodbridge, 2003), passim and at
68‒9 for the property qualification; William A. Morris, ‘The sheriff ’, in Morris and
Joseph R. Strayer (eds), The English Government at Work, 1327‒1336, ii, Fiscal Admin-
istration (Mediaeval Academy of America, 1947), 48; PROME, ii, 308, item 39.
13 Morris, ‘The sheriff ’, 50‒3; Nigel Saul, Knights and Esquires: The Gloucestershire
Gentry in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1981), 117‒18, 156‒7; Anthony Musson
legislation in 1340 that sheriffs were to be replaced annually, subsequently

re-enacted more than once, the practice did not become the norm until after
the statute of 1371. Might this be less that kings were routinely ignoring the
legislation because it suited them to do so than that the expertise was simply
not widely enough available?14 To be effective, a sheriff had to be able to read
and write in Latin and to have a basic familiarity with writs and accounts;
someone who had to rely on the probity of his staff could be at a serious disad-
vantage, and a king could not rely on such a sheriff.15 It is striking, judging
by the names in a list of Warwickshire officers between 1290 and 1348, how
many families seem to be effectively hereditary office-holders, a circumstance
one might attribute to the necessary skills being fairly rare and passed down
within families.16
In fact, such work as has been done on local officers in general under the
first three Edwards up to the 1370s suggests that there was quite a small core,
a few of these of greater tenurial status and several who were not. To take
Saul’s figures for Gloucestershire, for example: from the 1290s to the early
1330s up to seven men ‘bore the brunt of county administration’, accom-
panied by some lesser men whose service was not confined to Gloucestershire.
Similarly in Warwickshire between 1310 and 1320 just ten men acted as
officers three times or more and this had hardly changed between 1338 and
1348, when the number was eleven. By 1350, the core group of officers in
Gloucestershire was barely larger, but fewer of them served outside the
county and it was now very rare for a man with no links to the county to hold
a local office. Moreover the group of local men who served as officers was
beginning to grow larger, a development to be expected in the post-Black
Death period with the increasing size of the commission of the peace, the
emergence of justices of labourers and the king’s continuing needs for the
Hundred Years War. So the Gloucestershire officer elite was now accom-
panied by a number of lesser, purely local, men.17 Enlargement and social
and W. M. Ormrod, The Evolution of English Justice: Law, Politics and Society in the
Fourteenth Century (Basingstoke and London, 1999), 70; Anthony Musson, Public
Order and Law Enforcement: The Local Administration of Criminal Justice, 1294‒1350
(Woodbridge, 1996), chs 6 and 7; Peter Coss, The Origins of the English Gentry
(Cambridge, 2003), ch. 7 (but his distinction between knights and professionals is too
sharp); Gorski, Fourteenth-Century Sheriff, 69‒78 (emphasises diversity, but most of
his examples of sheriffs of lower status come from c.1300‒50).
14 Saul, Knights and Esquires, 110‒11; Gorski, Fourteenth-Century Sheriff, 41‒2.
15 For the office and duties, see Morris, ‘The sheriff ’ and Musson, Public Order, 150‒3.
For the advantages to the crown of long service and repeat appointments, see Gorski,
Fourteenth-Century Sheriff, 38, 57‒8.
16 Coss, Origins, Appendix V, using a list supplied by R. Gorski. Also Musson, Public
Order, 140‒4.
17 Saul, Knights and Esquires, 161‒2; Coss, Origins, Appendix V, excluding non-Warwickshire
diversification of the officer class beyond the core group are noted slightly
earlier in Coss’ survey of Warwickshire officers in the first half of the four-
teenth century. Gorski does not disaggregate his figures for sheriffs in the
period 1350‒71 but he shows how dramatic the change was thereafter, when
he comments that ‘several [official] elites were blown wide open’.18 In sum,
over the course of the century, as education and legal training became more
widely distributed among the gentry, even if often only to the level that would
enable them to make use of the law themselves, so the group of local men who
could take office began to expand. It is only then that we can begin to think
of local office as something that the local gentry, as a body, might aspire to.19
More alarmingly still, from the perspective of bastard feudalism in the
fourteenth century, it has become clear that we need to rewrite Putnam’s
history of the JPs.20 Thanks to Musson and Verduyn, it is now well known
that what occurred in the first decades of the century was not a straight-
forward tussle fought out in parliament, between crown and localities, the
former espousing centralised commissions, including assizes and gaol
delivery, the latter the commission of the peace. We now appreciate that there
was plentiful overlap in personnel between the different types of commission
and that many of the various experiments in policing and judicial supervision
had less to do with a tug-of-war between crown and parliamentary Commons
and more with the needs of the moment; often, especially under Edward III,
these were military needs. Even before this work, Powell had shown that the
role of the assize justices, before and after the magic date of 1361, was not to
control the JPs on the crown’s behalf but to integrate them into a judicial
system that had become both centralised and professionalised. Thus, the
power to determine felony, which had been fetishised by Putnam in her
men acting on joint commissions etc. (in each selected period, a small number of men
at either the beginning or end of an extended official career did not make the cut);
Musson, Public Order, 93‒4.
18 Coss, Origins, ch. 7, esp. 200‒1; Gorski, Fourteenth-Century Sheriff, 44‒57 (quotation
at p. 45); also Saul, Knights and Esquires, 162 (but see at p. 116 for a measure of reap-
pointment to the shrievalty post-1371).
19 There is no account of gentry education and literacy in the fourteenth century but
strong indicators are the greater availability of legal education and training, the growth
of law and administration as routes into the gentry, and the increasing number of
surviving texts in English rather than French: see Coss, Origins, 244‒8; Peter Coss,
The Foundations of Gentry Life: The Multons of Frampton and their World, 1270-1370
(Oxford, 2010), ch. 11; Michael J. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism: Lancashire
and Cheshire in the Age of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Cambridge, 1983), 195‒
203; Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 156‒7; Maurice Keen, English Society in the Later
Middle Ages, 1348‒1500 (London, 1990), 225, 237; Musson, Public Order, 136‒44.
20 For a summary of what follows on JPs, see Christine Carpenter, ‘War, government and
governance in England in the later middle ages’, in Linda Clark (ed.), Conflict, Conse-
quences and the Crown in the Late Middle Ages, The Fifteenth Century 7 (2007), 16‒21.
account of the rise of the JP, was not a mark of local independence but a
matter of making sure that no one was hanged after improper administration
of the law. Accordingly, JPs’ acquisition of this power on a permanent basis
went along with the creation of the quorum, which in practice meant that
JPs did not try felonies without the presence of the assize justices, who now
doubled as justices of gaol delivery. Often the JPs did not try them at all,
leaving it to gaol delivery.21 In any case there was no political significance in
the power to try felonies. This was because the pleas that came before JPs
arising from conflict among landowners were principally trespass: vi et armis
(‘by force and arms’), and the new statutory trespasses.22 Furthermore, the
statutory position of the JPs, far from being finalised in 1361, went on devel-
oping in important ways until nearly the end of the century. For example,
determining powers for felonies were last withdrawn in 1382 and restored in
1389, payments to gentry members of the commission were first made
statutory in 1388, and the quorum did not reach its final and permanent form
until 1394.23 Membership followed a similar pattern. It was not until the
second half of the century that it first began to be routine for local nobles
who were not serving abroad to be named to the commission and that the
gentry members grew in number – though numbers were still usually small
compared with later. And many of the gentry JPs were of the semi-profes-
sional officer type that we have touched on already, characterised by Musson
as ‘men of law’. Again – leaving aside some exceptionally large commissions
issued for exceptional reasons – it was only towards the end of the century
that both the size of the commission and the number of JPs who might be
termed amateurs, by contrast with the semi-professionals who had hitherto
predominated, began to grow.24
21 Putnam (ed.), Proceedings, introduction; Edward Powell, Kingship, Law, and Society:
Criminal Justice in the Reign of Henry V (Oxford, 1989), 56‒60; Powell, ‘The admin-
istration of criminal justice in late-medieval England: peace sessions and assizes’, in
Richard Eales and David Sullivan (eds), The Political Context of Law (London, 1987),
49‒59; Musson and Ormrod, Evolution of English Justice, 47‒8, 51; Anthony Verduyn,
‘The politics of law and order during the early years of Edward III’, EHR 108 (1993),
842‒67.
22 See below for statutory trespass. It is likely that anything concerning landowners
serious enough to come to the king’s attention would be handled at this time by special
commission or the itinerant King’s Bench, while landowners might themselves use
the latter (see Carpenter, ‘War, government and governance’, 19‒20). By the late four-
teenth century, it was becoming routine for either defendant or victim to get the case
taken into King’s Bench for trial: J. B. Post, ‘Criminals and the Law in the Reign of
Richard II’, unpublished DPhil thesis (University of Oxford, 1976), 240; Putnam
(ed.), Proceedings, lxiii–iv; Philippa C. Maddern, Violence and Social Order: East
Anglia, 1422‒1442 (Oxford, 1992), 44‒7.
23 Putnam (ed.), Proceedings, xxiv–v, xxviii–ix, xc; Powell, Kingship, Law, and Society, 58.
24 Musson and Ormrod, Evolution of English Justice, 69–71, 62–8; Saul, Knights and
Esquires, 133–4; W. M. Ormrod, The Reign of Edward III (New Haven, CT and
As for the business of the commission of the peace, for most of the four-
teenth century, it is clear that its real work was to enforce the policing and
regulation of the lowest ranks of society that the crown had increasingly
assumed, especially since the Statute of Winchester of 1285. The main reason
for the enlargement of the commission from 1350 and its afforcement with
members of the nobility was the biggest step so far in this: to ensure imple-
mentation of the legislation designed to keep the lower classes in check,
economically and in other ways, after the Black Death. Indeed JPs had
become necessary because since the later thirteenth century, and especially
after the Black Death, the crown had taken so much responsibility for policing
and regulating at the lowest social levels that these tasks were far beyond the
capacity of intermittent commissions sent out from the centre, and required
a permanent presence in the localities.25 The JPs’ sessions seem not to have
achieved their overriding importance as the court of first instance for non-
regulatory business until the later fourteenth century. Although we await a
full analysis of the origins of indictments and presentments heard by King’s
Bench in the fourteenth century, the evidence suggests that JPs did not play
much part in providing these for gaol delivery or King’s Bench until after
1350 and still played only a limited role, if a growing one, towards the end of
the century. One reason for this was the availability of procedure by bill before
the King’s Bench as long as it continued to itinerate, but much of the business
of King’s Bench and gaol delivery still came from the sheriff ’s tourn or
private hundreds.26 Furthermore, the statutory trespasses, like forcible entry
London, 1990), 110. See also commissions under Edward III in Calendar of Patent
Rolls (1343‒77). There were some outsize post-Peasants’ Revolt commissions
(Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1381‒5, 84‒6, 244‒55; cf. ibid., 1391‒6, 587‒8) and two very
large commissions appointed for gross disorder in Lancashire (see below, at p. 85).
For the size of the commission in the fifteenth century, see Susan M. Wright, The
Derbyshire Gentry in the Fifteenth Century (Derbyshire Record Society, 8, 1983), 94
and Christine Carpenter, Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society,
1401‒1499 (Cambridge, 1992), 268.
25 Helen M. Cam, The Hundred and the Hundred Rolls (London, 1930), Parts III and IV;
Helen M. Cam, ‘Shire officials: coroners, constables and bailiffs’, in James F. Willard,
William A. Morris et al. (eds), The English Government at Work, 1327‒1336, iii, Local
Administration and Justice (Mediaeval Academy of America, 1950), 143‒83; Bertha
Haven Putnam, ‘Shire officials: keepers of the peace and justices of the peace’, ibid.,
185‒217; Chris Given-Wilson, ‘Service, serfdom and English labour legislation, 1350‒
1500’, in Anne Curry and Elizabeth Mathew (eds), Concepts and Patterns of Service in
the Later Middle Ages, The Fifteenth Century 1 (2000), 21‒37; Musson and Ormrod,
Evolution of English Justice, 93‒6. For JPs’ business at this time, see for example
Rosamund Sillem (ed.), Some Sessions of the Peace in Lincolnshire, 1360‒1375, Lincoln
Record Society 30 (1910), pp. xlv–vi; E. Chapin Furber (ed.), Essex Sessions of the
Peace, 1351, 1377‒1379 (Essex Archaeological Society, 1953), 38‒55.
26 J. B. Post, ‘Local jurisdiction and judgment of death’, Criminal Justice History 4 (1983),
and livery offences, which concerned matters at the heart of disputes among
landowners and in local politics, and were to furnish a fair proportion of JPs’
business concerning landowners, did not begin to appear until Richard II’s
reign.27 What we know of the commission’s role in local politics in the later
fourteenth century, which is not a great deal, seems to endorse the view that
their role became significant only at this time. Alison Gundy’s study of the
Appellant earl of Warwick shows that, on occasion at least, local nobles, such
as Warwick and Gaunt, and some local gentry were making political use of
the peace sessions in the west Midlands from the mid-1370s. Richard II had
certainly concluded that the sessions throughout England had become a
significant locus for the play of local interests when he removed the nobility
and some of the local knights and esquires from the commissions in 1389.
That he had to restore the nobles the following year, at the request of the
Commons, shows how essential noble power had become to local government
and peacekeeping by this time. Richard was then to show this understanding
in his use of the Worcestershire commission against Warwick in the early
1390s.28 If we examine the other side of the judicial coin, supervision from
the centre, we need to remember that powerful centralised commissions of
enquiry, including the itineration of the King’s Bench as what Putnam called
a ‘superior eyre’, did not end in 1361. These continued off and on in the later
years of Edward III and the early years of Richard II. When, in 1387, Richard II
used the itinerant King’s Bench to attack the earl of Warwick, it does represent
a new dispensation, in which this kind of intervention could be seen as a royal
act of aggressive interference in a noble’s country.29 It is therefore of a piece
with his changes to the commission of the peace two years later.
1‒21; Simon Walker, ‘Yorkshire justices of the peace, 1389‒1413’, in Walker, Political
Culture in Later Medieval England (Manchester, 2006), 105; Musson and Ormrod,
Evolution of English Justice, 118‒19. Cf. Maddern, Violence and Social Order, 31. For
the itinerant King’s Bench, see text immediately following this note and pp. 83, 88.
27 J. G. Bellamy, Bastard Feudalism and the Law (London, 1989), 19‒20, 21‒2.
28 Alison Gundy, ‘The earl of Warwick and the royal affinity in the politics of the west
Midlands, 1389‒99’, in M. A. Hicks (ed.), Revolution and Consumption in Late Medieval
England, The Fifteenth Century 2 (2001), 57‒70; A. K. Gundy, Richard II and
the Rebel Earl (Cambridge, 2013); R. L. Storey, ‘Liveries and commissions of the
peace, 1388‒90’, in F. R. H. Du Boulay and Caroline M. Barron (eds), The Reign of
Richard II (London, 1971), 131‒52.
29 W. Mark Ormrod, Edward III (New Haven, CT and London, 2011), 477‒8; Gundy,
Richard II and the Rebel Earl; Simon Walker, The Lancastrian Affinity, 1361‒1399
(Oxford, 1990), 227 (similarly aggressive visits of the King’s Bench to the north
Midlands in the 1390s against Gaunt).
IV
Broadly speaking, from what we know of noble affinities and local politics in
the last three decades of the fourteenth century, if put together with what we
now know about local government and law, it seems fair to say that from this
time we do have what we might call classical bastard feudalism, as described
at the start of this chapter.30 The question is therefore whether we can find
bastard feudalism in its quintessential late medieval form between c.1300 and
c.1370. We shall begin by looking at the followers of the lords. This is not a
straightforward undertaking. First, there seems to be less evidence, while too
much of that comes from the rather unrepresentative earls and dukes of
Lancaster. Second, until the mid-fourteenth century, perhaps even a little
beyond this date, an ‘esquire’ in a lord’s service may be a landowner below a
knight, a son of a knight who has yet to be knighted and may not yet have any
lands, a landless man-at-arms, or a household servant.31 Third, no historian
has yet attempted to trace noble connections in detail through a particular
locality in this period. But, even if we must proceed with caution, it is a
striking fact that Holmes, whose book on the higher nobility still contains the
most thorough general study of noble followings for this century, does not
suggest that their ties with the gentry were extensive before the 1370s. It
seems that most nobles had only a handful of lesser landowners in their
service at this time. Indeed, Holmes’ account of noble followings in this
period is reminiscent of what has been written on ‘bastard feudal’ connections
in the thirteenth century. As in these studies, he identifies, in most cases, only
a small number of followers of the nobility and discusses their service as
agents, household officers (some of them clerks), councillors, feoffees and
executors, rather than as the lord’s means of influence over local government
and landed society.32 A recent addition to the literature, on the affinity of
30 Gundy, Richard II and the Rebel Earl; Martin Cherry, ‘The Courtenay earls of Devon:
the formation and disintegration of a late medieval aristocratic affinity’, Southern
History 1 (1979), 71‒97; Walker, Lancastrian Affinity (Lancaster’s position, which
makes him untypical, need not obscure the essential template, and the discussion of
the earls of Stafford reveals a typical affinity in fifteenth-century terms); Christian D.
Liddy, The Bishopric of Durham in the Late Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2008), 79‒92.
31 Saul, Knights and Esquires, 6‒25 for a very useful survey. Also Coss, Origins, ch. 9. As
one example, Thomas of Brotherton’s household esquires in 1337 included two tailors:
A. Marshall, ‘An early fourteenth-century affinity: the earl of Norfolk and his
followers’, in Nigel Saul (ed.), Fourteenth Century England 5 (2008), 3.
32 G. A. Holmes, The Estates of the Higher Nobility in Fourteenth-Century England
(Cambridge, 1957), ch. 3. The exceptions are Henry of Lancaster (late 1320s, early
1330s) and Lady Elizabeth de Burgh (1343) (at pp. 58‒9, 67‒9). For work on the
thirteenth century, see note 2; also, for more recent discussion and references, Marc
Morris, The Bigod Earls of Norfolk in the Thirteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2005),
68‒72, 141‒53; Caroline Burt, ‘A “bastard feudal” affinity in the making? The
Thomas Brotherton, earl of Norfolk (d.1338), mentions only a small number

of men who might be considered part of an affinity in the late medieval
sense.33 We can in fact apply the argument that followings grew between the
early and later fourteenth century to the exceptional house of Lancaster. In
1385, John of Gaunt was making payments to over 200 retained bannerets,
knights and esquires, while Thomas of Lancaster’s very large retinue for his
time seems to have been, at its largest, only about a quarter of that number at
any one point.34
There is further evidence to suggest that smaller followings may have been
the rule for much of the fourteenth century. The noticeable fall in the level
of fees paid to retainers and annuitants between the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries may indicate that the decreasing sums were a function of their being
paid to a larger number of retainers and annuitants.35 There is also some
evidence of a fall during the course of the fourteenth century. The atypical
house of Lancaster, which dominates the evidence, seems to have kept them
at much the same level throughout the century: from £20 (sometimes marks)
to £40 for their prominent knights up to £100 (sometimes marks) for their
great retainers, some of whom were noble.36 However, by the 1370s, some of
the more typical nobles were often paying at most £20 to a knight and 20
marks to an esquire, and often rather less.37 By the fifteenth century, it was
followings of William and Guy Beauchamp, earls of Warwick, 1268‒1315’, Midland

History 34 (2009), 156‒80. See Andrew M. Spencer, Nobility and Kingship: The Earls
and Edward I, 1272‒1307 (Cambridge, 2013), Part III for extended research on this
subject.
33 Marshall, ‘An early fourteenth-century affinity’, 1‒12.
34 Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 14; Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 43‒5. By the time
of Gaunt’s registers, an esquire was really a member of the gentry (see note 31).
35 For examples of fees in the fourteenth century, see Holmes, Estates of the Higher
Nobility, 60‒72 and Michael Jones and Simon Walker (eds), Private Indentures for Life
Service in Peace and War, 1278‒1476, Camden Miscellany, 32, Camden Society, 5th
series, 3 (1994), nos 11‒92, comparing with studies of fees in the fifteenth century:
Christine Carpenter, ‘The Beauchamp affinity: a study of bastard feudalism at work’,
EHR 95 (1980), 514‒33, at p. 519; Carole Rawcliffe, The Staffords, Earls of Stafford
and Dukes of Buckingham, 1394‒1521 (Cambridge, 1978), Appendix D; P. A. Johnson,
Duke Richard of York, 1411‒1460 (Oxford, 1988), Appendix III. There are exceptions
in both centuries though most of the outsize fees or expenditure in the fifteenth
century tend to be by Henry IV as duke of Lancaster (Helen Castor, The King, the
Crown, and the Duchy of Lancaster: Public Authority and Private Power, 1399–1461
(Oxford, 2000), 29) or lords of the Welsh or Scottish March (for example, J. M. W.
Bean, The Estates of the Percy Family (Oxford, 1958), 91‒4). See also T. B. Pugh, ‘The
magnates, knights and gentry’, in S. B. Chrimes, C. D. Ross et al. (eds), Fifteenth-
Century England (Manchester, 1972), 101‒6.
36 Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 42, 46; Holmes, Estates of the Higher Nobility, 67‒8,
71‒2; Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, Appendix I.
37 Holmes, Estates of the Higher Nobility, 60‒6. £20 was already a standard fee for a
unusual for a gentry retainer or annuitant outside the northern or Welsh

marches to be given more than £20 and most had much less, while the
percentage of income spent on fees by a non-marcher noble was usually no
more than 10 per cent. This contrasts with the 40 per cent that has been
suggested for the earl of Nottingham in the 1390s and even this large
percentage had fallen to c.20 per cent in the early fifteenth century.38 This
point can also be illustrated by comparing atypical nobles across the two
centuries, for, while the Black Prince, the heir to the throne, was giving his
knights £40 in the 1360s and 1370s, in 1415 John duke of Bedford, then heir
presumptive, awarded the northern knight, Robert Plumpton, a mere 20
marks.39
Before considering the significance of these numbers, we should note the
rather surprising fact that, in Jones and Walker’s collection of indentures,
seventy-seven of those made between a noble lord and a member of the gentry
belong to the period 1307‒99 and only forty-eight to the whole of the fifteenth
century.40 It is thus possible that, for much of the fourteenth century, inden-
tures of retainder did not represent the most formal, and relatively rare,
version of a widespread and varied web of links between nobles and local
gentry, as they do in the fifteenth century, but were, on the contrary, the prin-
cipal, possibly even unique, indicator of a relationship that was still unusual.
Thus, nobles’ links to the local gentry were largely confined to the men they
had retained, with the addition of a small number of senior estate and
household servants; if laymen, these might be members of the minor gentry
and were not always formally retained.
What then was the purpose of indentures at this time? A plausible hypo-
thesis is that they really were primarily military in intention and were nobles’
attempts to ensure that some of their most important knightly followers
would turn out with a force when required. It has been shown that up to half
or more of the local landholders of Nottinghamshire and Cambridgeshire
knight under Edward I (ex inf. Andrew Spencer) but knights at that time could be the
equivalent of quite minor esquires a century later.
38 Chris Given-Wilson, The English Nobility in the Late Middle Ages (London, 1987),
156 (citing the work of Dr R. E. Archer) and references in note 35 above.
39 Jones and Walker (eds), Private Indentures, nos 41‒2, 46, 49‒50, 55‒6, 114. Some of
the Black Prince’s knights had as much as £100 a year: D. S. Green, ‘Politics and
service with Edward the Black Prince’, in J. S. Bothwell (ed.), The Age of Edward III
(York, 2001), 57.
40 Jones and Walker (eds), Private Indentures, 35‒179, excluding agreements between
members of the nobility and, as far as possible, indentures with menial servants. Also
excluding Lord Hastings’ indentures made under Edward IV, which are not printed
in this collection and are effectively agreements with the king: Theron Westervelt,
‘The changing nature of politics in the localities in the later fifteenth century: William
Lord Hastings and his indentured retainers’, Midland History 26 (2001), 96‒106.
named in crown listings under Edward I and II served in the kings’

campaigns.41 Were indentures the nobles’ answer to the post-feudal challenge
of how to play their part in raising these large forces for the king? The fact
that some of the earlier contracts specify the number of men-at-arms to be
brought by the retainer supports this hypothesis, for the later development
of routinely non-feudal recruitment of national armies would have made
these clauses redundant.42 Indeed, in a list of men retained by Thomas of
Lancaster, the number of men-at-arms to be brought by every retainer is indi-
cated, from the eighty next to Warenne’s name, to the single man to accompany
his least significant followers. Maddicott has calculated that Lancaster’s
retainers alone may have been able to supply him with 200 knights and 350
infantry, let alone the 2,000 or more infantry he could raise from his own
lands and those who might come from the resident members of his house-
hold.43 The association of most known retainers at this time with areas where
their lords had lands was natural, for these would be men who, even if not
feudal tenants, came within the ambit of the lord’s influence and local
authority and could therefore be expected to turn out for him. Perhaps signifi-
cantly, under the first two Edwards, and under the third until the 1360s,
grants of land rather than fees seem to be much more common than they
were to be later on. This suggests, first, that lords were still thinking in terms
of substituting for feudal military service and second, that the number of men
they feed was still small enough for this kind of grant not to be damaging to
the estate.44
In Edward III’s reign, when the military recruitment system reached its
full flowering, there may be further evidence that this was the primary reason
for indentures of retainder for much of the fourteenth century. A remarkable
level of continuity of service has been found, from the reigns of the first two
Edwards all the way up to the 1350s. Andrew Ayton concludes that, in its
mature form under Edward III, such continuity was owed to a mixture of
factors, including the development of recruiting networks, some local to the
lords’ estates, some not, and, as a significant element in these networks, the
41 David Simpkin, ‘Total war in the middle ages? The contribution of English landed
society to the wars of Edward I and Edward II’, in Adrian R. Bell, Anne Curry et al.
(eds), The Soldier Experience in the Fourteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2011), 61‒94, at
pp. 75‒6.
42 See for example Jones and Walker (eds), Private Indentures, nos 13, 24‒5, 29, 32, 33,
34, 37, and at pp. 15‒16 for the origins of indentures; Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster,
42‒3.
43 Holmes, Estates of the Higher Nobility, 140‒1; Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 27,
44‒5.
44 See e.g. Jones and Walker (eds), Private Indentures, nos 14, 17‒18, 34, 38, 48, 50;
Holmes, Estates of the Higher Nobility, 69‒70, 72, 74, 122‒3; Maddicott, Thomas of
Lancaster, 42; Phillips, Aymer de Valence, 309‒10.
use of lieutenants who brought their own sub-contracted companies. He

doubts whether by this time the men brought by the lords’ permanent
retainers were ‘more than a small proportion’ of those raised for military
retinues. However, we can assume that having the guaranteed service of the
indentured men and the men-at-arms they brought was important to
Edward’s captains, both in supplying armies for the king and in securing a
measure of permanence and familiarity among their officers.45 We may argue
further for the primarily military purpose of these contracts by relating many
of them directly to the annuities, either implicitly or explicitly linked to war
service, that Edward III granted to some of his nobles and bannerets from
the 1330s to the 1350s, ranging from 200 to 500 marks for the lesser men to
1,000 marks or £1,000 for an earl. The grants often included stipulations
concerning military service and the recipients were in many cases significant
members of Edward’s military establishment at home and abroad. It seems
likely that this is less the ‘budget of noble assistance’ postulated by Given-
Wilson, following Contamine, than a mechanism for delegating recruitment,
coeval with the growth of contract companies.46 Armed with these sums,
nobles would be better placed to offer permanent retainder to those lieu-
tenants whom they used as part of their recruiting networks. The figures
given in some of those contracts of the early part of the century which
dictated the number of men that a retainer was to bring give us an idea of
what might be expected: for example, forty from William Latimer to Thomas
of Lancaster in 1319 or twenty from Sir Ralph Neville to Henry Lord Percy
in 1328. If the development under Edward III of a regular contractual system
for military companies, along with widespread recruitment networks, made
it no longer necessary to specify numbers, grants of sizeable sums of money
from the king could still be very useful for Edward’s major captains in
assuring them of instant access to a regular core force, to be brought by their
main lieutenants.47 Under these circumstances, one would expect that the
permanent indentures made by these nobles would be relatively small in
number, would be made usually with prominent knights and bannerets, and
were generous enough to secure the retainers’ enthusiastic co-operation.
Moreover, if the main intention of these grants from the king was to guar-
antee that the nobles could raise men for war service, the expenditure on
45 Andrew Ayton, ‘Military service and the dynamics of recruitment in fourteenth-

century England’, in Bell, Curry et al. (eds), Soldier Experience, 15‒23; quotation at
p. 20. For examples of the large retinues that a major noble captain might bring, see
George Wrottesley, Crécy and Calais (London, 1898), 193.
46 Given-Wilson, English Nobility, 154‒5.
47 Holmes, Estates of the Higher Nobility, 122. The indentures in Jones and Walker
contain few examples of this from the 1330s onwards. They resurface in some of
Gaunt’s contracts, however (Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 48‒9), perhaps because
Gaunt’s outsize military commitments necessitated a return to earlier practices.
retaining of quite a high percentage of a noble’s income, now enhanced by

that annuity, is logical.48
Pulling all this together, it can be argued that the social, political and govern-
mental system for which bastard feudalism is shorthand barely existed at the
accession of Edward II and emerged in its full form much later in the century.
The main purpose of indentures was initially to furnish the king’s armies,
and lords were not embedded in local societies, as the chief protectors of the
gentry and their lands and as ‘gatekeepers’ to local rule on the kings’ behalf,
until its last three decades or so. There is, however, a gaping hole in this story.
This is the fact that it has become a commonplace that magnate influence
over local government and the law was already rife under Edward II.49
Furthermore, it is often assumed that what we see in the localities under
Edward II is indicative of an inexorable progression to local control, local
corruption and local violence set in train under Edward I, usually attributed
to war or the breakdown of the eyre, or both, and first disclosed in his
enquiries of 1304‒7.50 But there is an alternative way of looking at these
conditions: as a manifestation of the particular circumstances of Edward II’s
reign, combined with the changes in the law made by his father. If we begin
with the reign itself, we might consider whether what we see under Edward II
is not so much magnates and gentry taking advantage of local disturbance, to
use the law as they wished, as a defensive reaction to the failure at the centre.
That would fit with the idea that the country was still accustomed to an essen-
tially centrist kind of rule in 1307. Thus, even if indentures first appeared in
order to furnish the king’s military needs, under Edward II local magnates
began to use them to build up their military power to replace the missing
48 Possible examples of retaining done with the benefit of money received from the king
in this way are seen in Thomas de Bradeston, a banneret (Given-Wilson, English
Nobility, 154; Complete Peerage, s.n.) in 1345‒7 (Saul, Knights and Esquires, 280) and
Grosmont’s larger annuities (Holmes, Estates of the Higher Nobility, 66‒7). Ayton,
‘Military service’, 20.
49 See above, pp. 63‒4; also for example John Bellamy, Crime and Public Order in England
in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1973); Saul, Knights and Esquires, 202; Kaeuper,
‘Law and order’, 751, 782‒3; Scott L. Waugh, ‘For, king, country and patron: the
Despensers and local administration, 1321‒1322’, Journal of British Studies 22 (1983),
23‒58.
50 A. Harding, The Law Courts of Medieval England (London, 1973), 86‒92; A. Harding
(ed.), ‘Early trailbaston proceedings from the Lincolnshire roll of 1305’, in R. F.
Hunnisett and J. B. Post (eds), Medieval Legal Records Edited in Memory of C. A. F.
Meekings (London, 1978), 146‒51; Richard W. Kaeuper, War, Justice, and Public Order:
England and France in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1988), 3‒4.
royal authority. This was primarily to safeguard themselves against local and
national enemies, but we should bear in mind that local order had always been
closely linked with the availability and government control of local manpower:
through the sheriff ’s posse comitatus, the updating of the Assize of Arms in 1242,
the Statute of Winchester of 1285, and the continuing link of the keepers and
justices of the peace with the array. Once local officers could not be trusted
to oversee or deploy these men, the local armati, to keep the peace, and the
king was unable to call to order either his officers or landowners, it made sense
for local lords to turn themselves into the dominant local military power.51
The evidence of indentures is suggestive here. If it was access to military
power, in peace as well as in war, that was the prime mover for nobles’ use of
life indentures for most of the century, then we might well expect the amount
of retaining to increase in the reign of Edward II. Numbers of retainers may
then have fallen as internal peace returned under Edward III, perhaps to rise
again as Edward III’s military ventures encouraged lords to seal permanent
indentures with selected lieutenants. We are not in a position at present to
test the first and third of these propositions, but the fact that the standard
first phrase of indentures of retainder is thought to have emerged from
Thomas of Lancaster’s chancery might suggest that such agreements did
indeed become widespread for the first time under Edward II. Comparison
of the size of the knightly retinues of Thomas of Lancaster and his successor,
Earl Henry, might offer some support for the second proposition: about fifty-
four for Thomas and about twenty for Henry.52 Moreover, in the period between
1313 and 1319, when Thomas’ relations with Edward II were extremely bad,
he probably spent over £7,500 a year of his £11,000 or so annual income on
maintaining and feeing his household. This very large sum suggests that
much was devoted to fees for retainers and to other expenditure designed to
increase the size of his military household. The dimensions of the army that
he could raise via his retinue and household have already been noted.53 By
contrast, in the early 1330s, Henry spent about 6 per cent of his clear income
on fees to permanent retainers, some of them knights. We are unable to
compare Henry’s total household expenditure with Thomas’ but the size of
the force at Henry’s disposal was certainly not commented on at the time as
Thomas’ was.54 It is highly probable that much of Thomas’ outlay was for
personal defence against the king and other nobles.55 And, beyond the risks
51 Harry Rothwell (ed.), English Historical Documents, iii, 1189‒1327 (London, 1975),
357‒9, 460‒2; Morris, ‘The sheriff ’, 57‒61; Musson, Public Order, 15‒17; Musson
and Ormrod, Evolution of English Justice, 50, 52.
52 Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 45; above, at note 36, for Henry.
53 Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 22‒3, 27‒8; above, p. 73.
54 Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 43‒4. The figure for Henry is ex inf. Andrew Spencer.
55 See e.g. Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 53, 154‒7; Andy King, ‘Lordship, castles
and locality: Thomas of Lancaster, Dunstanburgh Castle and the Lancastrian affinity
in Northumberland’, Archaeologia Aeliana 5th series, 29 (2001), 223‒34, at p. 229.
of national politics, there were certainly good reasons for nobles to ensure
that they had enough retainers under Edward II. For example, the Charlton-
Pole feud continued almost throughout the reign, not just unrestrained by
the king but positively encouraged by Edward’s favouring of Charlton and
Lancaster’s of Pole.56 In 1318 Pembroke’s longstanding relationship with the
Berkeleys broke down in a violent attack on the earl’s manor of Painswick in
Gloucestershire. No action was taken for over five months, and it was a year
and more before the oyer and terminer commissions that were eventually sent
to Gloucestershire achieved any restitution for Pembroke. One does not
envisage Edward I permitting a case concerning an attack on a major noble
close to the throne by another prominent family to drag on in this way.57
Lancaster himself was faced with a rebellion in his own county of Lancashire
in 1315, led by his own retainer, Adam Banaster, and the value of a private
force was shown in the rebellion’s suppression.58
As Pembroke’s case suggests, Edward II’s failure to keep the peace or to
punish infractions of it meant also that the judicial system was often insuffi-
cient. The delays in Pembroke’s suit against the Berkeleys were caused by
their refusal to answer the summons of the commission; their subsequent
arrest of the Gloucestershire coroners, to prevent them pronouncing outlawry
on themselves and their fellow defendants; and, once the defendants had
appeared before the justices, the impossibility of summoning a jury, all of
them apparently too scared to turn up. In fact, the proceedings were never
completed and Pembroke’s eventual compensation appears to have come from
an informal settlement.59 Just as Edward I is likely to have acted swiftly in
such a case, it seems unlikely that he would have permitted such a high-profile
affair to have ended in a private compromise in which the king apparently
played no part.60 One of the reasons for the failure of the law in this case was
that the Berkeleys had enough retainers in Gloucestershire at the time to feel
confident in resisting it.61 The whole episode gives substance to the idea that
retaining under Edward II was a response to the lack of effective governance
and the consequent need for private military forces.
But what happened under Edward II also undoubtedly reflected the large-
scale changes in the law in the later years of Edward I, and at this point we
need to return to the public, institutional context. The prosecution of pleas
56 J. C. Davies, The Baronial Opposition to Edward II: Its Character and Policy (Cambridge,
1918), 216‒17; Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 140‒1, 143‒5, 147, 184.
57 Phillips, Aymer de Valence, 261‒7. Cf. Spencer, Nobility and Kingship, chs 6‒8, which
shows how swiftly and effectively Edward I acted as soon as he deemed it necessary.
58 G. H. Tupling, South Lancashire in the Reign of Edward II (Chetham Society, 1949),
pp. xlii–viii; Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 174‒6, and 176‒7 for more on disorder
in the north affecting Lancaster.
59 Phillips, Aymer de Valence, 265‒6.
60 See above, note 57, and, for more on out-of-court settlements, below, p. 89.
61 Saul, Knights and Esquires, 69‒70 (he suggests ‘perhaps a dozen knights’).
through bills of trespass requesting special oyer and terminer commissions

had already been growing in the early years of Edward I. Then, with the
arrival of the trespasses associated with conspiracy in the 1290s and their
incorporation into the crown’s proceedings in 1304‒7, the king’s courts were
entertaining pleas that had a direct impact on landowners: all the more
dubious facets of protecting and laying claim to lands, from corrupting and
threatening officials to outright violence.62 The number of private commis-
sions of oyer and terminer grew fairly steadily in the later years of Edward I
and, throughout the reign, they tended to peak when there was no major
intervention by the crown in the shires.63 These commissions could often
offer a quick resolution, and plaintiffs had the opportunity to name their
preferred justices.64 With Edward II so much less active than his father in
issuing general enquiries to impose the king’s peace, it is therefore hardly
surprising that there was large-scale resort to private oyer and terminer
commissions. This was despite the determination expressed in the parliament
of 1315 that, because such commissions were given too lightly, ‘where a great
lord, or a man of power, wishes to destroy a man’, ‘henceforth they are not to
be granted except for very great trespasses’.65 It is noteworthy that the
percentage of such commissions issued on behalf of gentry plaintiffs, having
been at 52 per cent in 1299‒1301, had risen to 68 per cent by 1316‒19, some
of the worst years of the reign.66 Many of the justices requested at this time
were gentry or minor nobles.67 This implies both that the routine judicial
processes were no longer answering the gentry’s needs and that they were
often looking for assistance from those with local influence. In fact everything
was in place for a ‘bastard feudal’ application of law in the shires, including
retaining not just for military purposes but also to have influence over local
officers.
We do not have to look far for evidence of a perception that this was
occurring. There were complaints in parliament at this time about abuse of
the law in the localities, especially regarding commissioners of oyer and
terminer and sheriffs, and evidence of partiality in the administration of the
law is not hard to find.68 Unsurprisingly, much of it concerns commissions
of oyer and terminer. Maddicott cites three instances between 1315 and 1320
62 Kaeuper, ‘Law and order’, 742‒3; Alan Harding, ‘The origins of the crime of
conspiracy’, TRHS 5th series, 33 (1983), 94‒104; Harding (ed.), ‘Early trailbaston
proceedings’, 146‒51.
63 Kaeuper, ‘Law and order’, 738, 739‒41, 743‒4.
64 Kaeuper, ‘Law and order’, 750‒74.
65 PROME, i, 290, item 10.
66 Kaeuper, ‘Law and order’, 750. For national and local instability at this time, see
Seymour Philips, Edward II (New Haven, CT, 2010), chs 6‒8 and Maddicott, Thomas
of Lancaster, chs 5‒7.
67 Kaeuper, ‘Law and order’, 753.
68 For complaints, see PROME, i, 289‒91.
in which Lancaster was able to influence in his favour the composition of

judicial commissions that were enquiring into matters of personal concern.
With a favourable justice, the proceedings themselves could be manipulated.
A notable example of judicial malfeasance occurred when Maurice Berkeley,
presiding in 1312‒13 over a plea of his retainer, John Botiller, told one of the
defendants that he would make sure that the record of the proceedings would
not arrive in King’s Bench. This meant that there could be neither judicial
oversight nor an appeal against the verdict.69 Then, even on the limited
evidence that we have, there was some justification for the belief that too many
men connected with the nobility were becoming sheriffs.70 For example, at
various dates between 1314 and 1318, retainers of Thomas of Lancaster were
appointed to the joint shrievalties of Warwickshire and Leicestershire, and
Shropshire and Staffordshire, areas where he was a major landowner.71
In the absence of closer study of the localities in this period, it is not
possible to say whether local officials such as sheriffs were regularly exploiting
their position on behalf of noble masters and fellow members of noble
affinities, as would be a common occurrence under classic bastard feudalism;
Lancaster’s almost permanent absence from Staffordshire would suggest that
he took little interest in what happened there.72 Even so, there is some
suggestive evidence. For example, in 1318 the sheriff of Staffordshire had
returned falsely that he had imprisoned Juliana Murdack for the murder of
her husband, a knight of Warwickshire and Northamptonshire, and thereby
provided a basis for the quashing of her outlawry in Warwickshire. This was
clearly a ‘domestic’, in which Juliana was aided and abetted by her household
staff and by her subsequent husband John de Vaux, but equally Vaux was
evidently a man of some importance in Staffordshire, where the killing
occurred, and may therefore have had some influence with the sheriff.73 The
earl of Pembroke’s retainer, William de Claydon, was able to prevent an assize
of novel disseisin against him being heard for three and a half years, with the
69 Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 50; Kaeuper, ‘Law and order’, 769; Saul, Knights and
Esquires, 70. See Powell, Kingship, Law, 54 on King’s Bench’s supervisory jurisdiction.
70 PROME, i, 343.
71 Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 63. It is even true of the much less locally engaged
Pembroke (Phillips, Aymer de Valence, 310‒11). Also Roger Mortimer, especially in
Herefordshire, notably from 1316: Paul R. Dryburgh, ‘The Career of Roger Mortimer,
First Earl of March (c.1287‒1330)’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Bristol,
2001), 162‒3, 166.
72 A. J. Gross, ‘The king’s lordship in the county of Stafford’, Midland History 16 (1991),
24‒44, at pp. 30, 38‒9.
73 ‘Plea Rolls of the reign of Edward II’, Collections for a History of Staffordshire 10 (1889),
27‒8, 35‒6, 37‒9; L. F. Salzman (ed.), Victoria History of the County of Warwick, v (1949),
58; Peter Coss, The Lady in Medieval England, 1000‒1500 (Stroud, 1998), 131‒7. Vaux
was constable of Stourton Castle, where the murder occurred. See Gross, ‘King’s
lordship’, 34‒6 for further suggestive instances.
aid of the sheriff ’s clerk of Suffolk.74 More generally, it is possible to cite

many further examples of abuse of, or resistance to, official power, that took
place throughout the reign and the period of Mortimer power just after. This
was often used to perpetrate or cover up crimes, some of a violent nature, and
some of it committed by men linked to local nobles.75
All this is a world away from what, as far as can be told at the moment, was
the norm under Edward I, even when the enquiries of 1304‒7 reveal much
more of the kind of behaviour that the ‘conspiracy’ part of their remit was
designed to root out.76 However, it is, interestingly, in these last years of
Edward I, when the king was ageing, much concerned about order and much
preoccupied with Scotland, that we have the first evidence of nobles estab-
lishing ‘bastard feudal’ links with local officers on any kind of scale. It may
be that this was their first experience of stepping into the breach locally, in
this case probably with the king’s blessing and support.77 Possibly, it helped
prepare them for their response to what was soon to come. But it is arguable
that, from the middle of Edward II’s reign, when the country was particularly
disturbed, there were efforts to revert to a style of rule more like that of
Edward I. The national trailbaston commissions of 1313‒16 and the experi-
ment in using King’s Bench as an additional itinerant court begun in 1318 could
be seen in this light, as could enquiries into sheriffs and other officers launched
in 1320. This might be applied even to the further development of the King’s
Bench from 1323 as a very aggressive form of trailbaston. There seems also to
have been a greater determination, as early as 1315, to respond in parliament
to complaints and petitions regarding justice and order. Unfortunately, the
schemes of 1313‒16 and 1318 were doomed to failure by divisions and disorder
at national and local level, while parliament was too often dominated by
confrontation or crisis. As for the later King’s Bench itinerations, which might
have been the occasion of a new start after Lancaster’s defeat, they were too
obviously a vehicle for revenge and for the self-aggrandisement of the
Despensers, part of their wider use of the law for their own purposes.78
74 Phillips, Aymer de Valence, 260. Pembroke had substantial lands in Suffolk but Phillips
does not record any link with the sheriff there: ibid., 244, 310‒11.
75 For example, Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 50‒1; Gross, ‘King’s lordship’; Calendar
of Patent Rolls, 1307‒1313, 420; ‘Plea Rolls of the reign of Edward II’, Collections for
a History of Staffordshire 9 (1888), 99‒100; ibid., 10 (1889), 66‒75; S. L. Waugh, ‘The
profits of violence: the minor gentry in the rebellion of 1321‒22 in Gloucestershire’,
Speculum 52 (1977), 843‒69; Saul, Knights and Esquires, 183, 202‒3. Note that care is
needed in using accusations made against the defeated, especially of 1321‒2.
76 Caroline Burt, Edward I and the Governance of England, 1272‒1307 (Cambridge, 2013),
passim and Harding, ‘Early trailbaston proceedings’, 147‒9.
77 Burt, ‘A “bastard feudal” affinity’, 156‒80, especially pp. 178‒80, but she emphasises
the lords’ need to protect their local interests while away at war.
78 Kaeuper, ‘Law and order’, 744; G. O. Sayles (ed.), Select Cases in the Court of King’s
Bench under Edward II, iv, Selden Society 74 (1955), pp. lviii–lxiii, lxxxiv; Gwilym
The Despensers’ attempt to impose their authority on Gloucestershire,

where Hugh the younger was trying to make himself pre-eminent, epitomises
these mutually conflicting aims: what could be seen as the centre’s efforts to
take back control of the legal system actually developed into a form of private
tyranny. As such, it failed. The resurgence of the Berkeley interest in local
government from c.1324 demonstrated the practical limits to domination of
this kind and the continuing need at this time for local magnate power, if local
government was to be in any way effective.79 However, the sharp fall in private
oyer and terminer commissions from 1319, the year after the experiment with
the King’s Bench began, followed by persistently lower levels until the end
of the reign, does make the administration of law look superficially much
more like what it had been under Edward I.80 But, if there was a return to
the forms of the judicial administration of Edward I, even the subjective and
anecdotal evidence, which is all we have at the moment, suggests that there
was no real reversion to more central control and more peaceful local habits.
Indeed, the efforts of the Mortimer regime to restrict the grant of individual
oyer and terminer commissions may well have contributed to its overthrow,
for, unless the government could reclaim control of legal administration, these
commissions were an essential safety valve. The deeds of the Coterels and
Folvilles in the late 1320s and early 1330s and other evidence of continuing
local upheaval reveal the dimensions of Edward III’s problems when he took
power in 1330.81
VI
We should now examine how Edward III dealt with law and governance in
the localities, starting from the premise that noble power in the shires between
1307 and 1330, and the ‘bastard feudal’ practices that accompanied it, had
Dodd, Justice and Grace: Private Petitioning and the English Parliament in the Late
Middle Ages (Oxford, 2007), 74‒6; Waugh, ‘For king, country, and patron’, 23‒58;
Michael Prestwich, Plantagenet England, 1225‒1360 (Oxford, 2005), 188‒204; Natalie
Fryde, The Tyranny and Fall of Edward II, 1321‒1326 (Cambridge, 1979), chs 5 and 6.
79 Nigel Saul, ‘The Despensers and the downfall of Edward II’, EHR 99 (1984), 1‒33
on the narrowness of the Despenser power-base, and Knights and Esquires, 152‒3 on
the resurgence of the Berkeley interest. Julian Turner, ‘Law and Justice in the Four-
teenth Century: Gloucestershire, 1321‒30’, unpublished BA thesis (University of
Cambridge, 1982) on the limits to such a ‘tyranny’ (with thanks for permission to
quote this).
80 Kaeuper, ‘Law and order’, 741, 744‒5.
81 Kaeuper, ‘Law and order’, 745‒6; J. G. Bellamy, ‘The Coterel gang: an anatomy of a
band of fourteenth-century criminals’, EHR 79 (1964), 698‒717; E. L. G. Stones,
‘The Folvilles of Ashby-Folville, Leicestershire and their associates in crime, 1326‒47’,
TRHS 5th series, 7 (1957), 117‒36; Ormrod, Edward III, 106‒7.
been largely a defensive reaction to the failure of royal government under his
father. Edward’s task was to revitalise the system for making local law and
peacekeeping unequivocally the responsibility of the centre. At the same time,
there was now at his disposal the revolutionary option of making constructive
use of the systems for self-help that had developed in the shires under his
father. And, in all his decisions, he needed increasingly to place the needs of
war first. Most of Edward’s responses in the 1330s were in fact centrist,
perhaps on the advice of Sir Geoffrey Scrope, Chief Justice of the King’s
Bench, who had been a young lawyer in the later years of Edward I and had
framed policy under Mortimer, where he had tried explicitly to devise
remedies against ‘diuers oppressions des grauntz’. Even so, in a decade that
was full of experiment, Edward also periodically gave some leeway to the
shires, in the form of responsibility for self-policing.82 Moreover, the overlap
of personnel between the various centralised and localised commissions
demonstrated by Musson shows that neither Edward nor his advisers were
ready to ignore entirely the claims of local men to have some say in peace-
keeping, nor indeed their usefulness.83 However, even though internal order
had almost certainly improved a lot by the end of the decade, the fact that in
1338 the sheriff of Suffolk was unable to assemble for a plea a jury of knights
who were not in some way connected with the plaintiffs – the earls of Norfolk
and Northampton and two other prominent local men – suggests that nobles
were still sufficiently nervous about whether the king could make his legal
system work to continue to retain and fee widely in the shires. Moreover, the
new rise in the number of private commissions of oyer and terminer for much
of this period might indicate a continuing lack of faith in attempts at resur-
recting centrally directed law and justice.84
Edward’s solution from 1341, when he set about serious reorganisation of
82 E. L. G. Stones, ‘Sir Geoffrey le Scrope (c.1285‒1340), chief justice of the King’s

Bench’, EHR 69 (1954), 1‒17, at pp. 2‒3, 11‒12; Stones, ‘The Folvilles’, 126‒7; H.
Cam, ‘The general eyres of 1329‒30’, in Cam, Liberties and Communities, 150‒62
(quotation at p. 159); B. W. McLane, ‘Changes in the court of King’s Bench, 1291‒
1340: the preliminary view from Lincolnshire’, in W. M. Ormrod (ed.), England in
the Fourteenth Century (Woodbridge, 1986), 155‒6; Putnam (ed.), Proceedings, xxxix–
xli; W. R. Jones, ‘Rex et ministri: English local government and the crisis of 1341’,
Journal of British Studies 13 (1973), 1‒20, at pp. 6‒7; Musson and Ormrod, Evolution
of English Justice, 47, 49, 51, 64; Musson, Public Order, 73‒4, 236‒7; Ormrod, Edward
III, 107‒10; PROME, ii, 104‒5, item 10.
83 Musson and Ormrod, Evolution of English Justice, 64; Musson, Public Order, 73‒4 and
chs 3, 5, 6 and 7.
84 Holmes, Estates of the Higher Nobility, 82‒3; Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, viii
(London, 1913), 95 (see Holmes for correction of the calendar); Kaeuper, ‘Law and
order’, 741. The state of the realm regarding order c.1338 remains a matter of
guesswork (Ormrod, Edward III, 112 for a pessimistic view) but it is difficult to believe
that Edward would have left for France had there not been improvement.
his government and country for war, was in many ways to restore the
centralised mechanisms of his grandfather. However, it was carried out in a
manner that took account of the much larger and still growing range and
number of pleas that had come into being as a result of the larger scope of
the law and the greater number of litigants. On the one hand, there were
draconian central commissions and periodically a potentially punitive itin-
erant King’s Bench, in a policy that seems to have been masterminded by his
chief justice, Sir William Shareshull, who had learned his trade under Scrope.
On the other, the itinerant King’s Bench also offered the localities access to
central justice, perhaps most importantly via a court to which they could
bring bills, rather than having to petition by bill for the oyer and terminer
commissions whose partisanship could destabilise local justice.85 It may well
be that one result of all this was that local offices became less politicised in
this period. In fact, we should seriously consider whether, now that the king
was doing a decent job, the nobility, perhaps with a sigh of relief, began to
extricate themselves from the entanglement in the shires, which had become
necessary since 1307. Those who were much abroad (many of them) would
in any case have found it difficult to maintain this degree of involvement.86
However, it would have been impossible to return entirely to the condi-
tions of Edward I’s reign. By the end of that reign, the demands on the king’s
law from both the king and his subjects were making it ever harder for the
old centrist system to work without some local assistance. The later years of
Edward I also demonstrated that, under the pressure of war and the demands
that war made on government and country, it was very difficult for the king
alone to keep the lid on local disorder. This was likely to be all the more true
with Edward III’s still greater and more extended wars. Moreover, the scale
of his need for troops, money and supplies necessitated a more permanent
source of authority in the shires than the king’s delegated agents could offer.87
Even with our present limited knowledge, it is clear that the solution Edward
developed from the 1340s was to use the local powers on whom he knew he
could rely, starting with the use of several major nobles whom he still trusted
for the punitive commissions of 1341‒4. These included such important
figures as the earls of Derby, Northampton, Arundel and Huntingdon.88 Most
notably, between 1344 and 1351, he appointed nobles to be life sheriffs in six
85 Ormrod, Edward III, 259‒60, 371, 477‒8; Jones, ‘Rex et ministri’, 1‒20; Putnam (ed.),
Proceedings, lvii–lxiii, 29‒32; Bertha Haven Putnam, The Place in Legal History of Sir
William Shareshull (Cambridge, 1950), 20; Musson and Ormrod, Evolution of English
Justice, 49, 118‒19; Carpenter, ‘War, government and governance’, 19‒20. For more
on punitive commissions, see below, pp. 86‒7.
86 E.g. Derby/Lancaster, Clinton, March, Northampton, Arundel, Warwick: Ormrod,
Reign of Edward III, 103; Complete Peerage and ODNB, s.nn.
87 Carpenter, ‘War, government and governance’.
88 Jones, ‘Rex et ministri’, 4‒5.
counties. There were also the counties already in noble hands in heredity.89
Nearly all these noble sheriffs were men close to the king; these were not so
much surrenders to local powers as the harnessing of trusted local powers to
do the king’s business, and their role was clearly designed to give them a
widely conceived authority within the shire. For example, Warwick himself
was regularly named to the commission of the peace in Warwickshire between
1345 and 1368, initially in a period when nobles were less likely to feature on
it, along with close family members, servants and associates of the earl. It
seems that the Warwick interest did not dominate the commission but, espe-
cially with the earl as the leading member, it was in a position to see that any
royal wishes with regard to peace-keeping were carried out, even when he
was abroad on the king’s business. Warwick also served as JP in Worcester-
shire, where he was hereditary sheriff, and in both counties in other capacities
also, for example array.90 Similarly, the earl of Devon, who was too unwell to
serve abroad from 1347, although not given the life shrievalty of the county,
led the Devonshire commission of the peace, serving with men linked to
himself or to the Black Prince, who, as duke of Cornwall, had lands and
followers in Devon.91 If the military leaders amongst these nobles were sealing
indentures so they could support the king’s wars, the consequent enlargement
of their connections among the gentry may have helped extend their capacity
to assist his rule at home.
A comparable fusion of centrist and localist approaches to rule eventually
evolved with regard to the powers and structure of the commission of the
peace. The commissions of 1341 to 1344 led to the Commons complaining
in the parliament of 1344 about the enquiries, and demanding that they be
replaced by JPs with determining powers.92 The king relented, and in 1344
the first steps were taken in the direction of having a commission that was
both local and centralised. The JPs were local gentry, afforced in a few cases
89 Life shrievalties: Warwickshire and Leicestershire (Warwick, 1344), Shropshire

(Arundel, 1345), Staffordshire (Derby, 1345), Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire
(Lisle, 1351): Ormrod, Reign of Edward III, 110 and 233, note 94; List of Sheriffs for
England and Wales, PRO Lists and Indexes 12 (1898), 117‒18, 127, 145. Hereditary
shrievalties: Lancashire (Lancaster), Westmorland (Clifford), Rutland (Audley and
Bohun), Cornwall (Black Prince), Worcestershire (Warwick): Gorski, Fourteenth-
Century Sheriffs, 34.
90 For Warwick’s connections in the county, see S. Barfield, ‘The Beauchamp Earls of
Warwick, 1268‒1369’, unpublished MPhil thesis (University of Birmingham, 1997),
ch. 3, with thanks to Mr Barfield for permission to cite his thesis. For commissions,
including of the peace, in Warwickshire and Worcestershire, see Calendar of Patent
Rolls, 1343‒70.
91 See for example Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1350‒4, 87, 1354‒8, 552, 1361‒4, 64; R. J.
Burls, ‘Society, Economy and Lordship in Devon in the Age of the First Two
Courtenay Earls’, unpublished DPhil thesis (University of Oxford, 2002), ch. 4.
92 On the commissions, see below, p. 86.
by mostly minor local nobles, but their power to determine was dependent on
the presence of qualified lawyers.93 From 1351, this developed into the quorum
of assize justices for determining felony and, although there was still occasion
for reversals of such a modified localist policy until the late 1360s, this was
how the commission was to develop.94 We have noted already the growth in
size of the commission, as well as the normal addition of local nobles if they
were not away on campaign, especially from 1350. This was all part of the
JPs’ acquisition of an acknowledged role in the central–local partnership.
The greatest local hegemony of all was bestowed on Edward’s close friend
and aide, the duke (erstwhile earl) of Lancaster, when he was given palatinate
powers in Lancashire in 1351, making the county in effect a sub-division of
the kingdom administered by the duke.95 It seems likely that this was the
consequence of the depressing series of major outbursts of violence and
internecine fighting among Lancastrian landowners, from Banaster’s rebellion
in 1315, to further feuding in the 1320s, and murder and mayhem at the
Liverpool assizes in 1345. The problem was made particularly intractable by
the fact that Henry, earl of Lancaster, the leading nobleman during the first
part of Edward III’s reign, was blind and, it seems, more wedded to his
honour of Leicester than to his Lancashire lands, while his successor in 1345,
the future duke, was the king’s right-hand man militarily, and consequently
more often abroad than not and, when at home, equally reluctant to spend
time in the north. One response had been to issue commissions of the peace
that were outsize even by late fifteenth-century standards: forty-one in 1345
and sixty in 1350.96 Delivering the responsibility for the county to a locally
run administration under a man so close to the king must have seemed a
solution that would offer local effectiveness combined with central direction,
via the personal relationship between king and duke.
Below such frontline nobles as Lancaster and the noble sheriffs and leaders
of the peace commissions were men like Nicholas Lord Cantilupe, a north
Midland landowner and a servant of the king in multiple capacities, including
as justice, soldier, diplomat and adviser. He sat frequently on judicial and
other commissions in the localities, especially in his own home counties of
Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Lincolnshire.97 Another of this type was
93 Musson, Public Order, 17, 77‒8; Musson and Ormrod, Evolution of English Justice, 51;
Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1343‒5, 393‒7.
94 Musson, Public Order, 79; Musson and Ormrod, Evolution of English Justice, 51;
Ormrod, Edward III, 371, 477‒8.
95 Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 142.
96 Tupling, South Lancashire, pp. xlii–li, lix–lx; R. Stewart-Brown, ‘Two Liverpool
medieval affrays’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire 85
(1933), 71‒81; ODNB s.nn. for evidence of their preferred residences; Calendar of
Patent Rolls, 1343‒5, 509‒10, 1348‒50, 533. This insight regarding the creation of the
palatinate comes from the work on Lancashire of my PhD student Gunnar Welle.
97 ODNB, s.n.
Guy de Bryan, technically a banneret rather than a noble but a man summoned
to the Lords, who likewise served in both military and local official capac-
ities.98 In fact Edward seems to have been particularly good at discovering
able men who could function in a number of different spheres. The regular
appointment of nobles to the commission of the peace from 1350 was, as we
have seen, primarily to stiffen its local authority at a time when the landed
classes were under pressure from the lower classes. The great benefit to the
king of using nobles in all these capacities was that their landed power made
them natural local leaders, while their recruitment of many of their own
servants among the local gentry enabled them to discover who would be
reliable and efficient local officers. This is how Edward seems to have lighted
on several of his cadre of trusted local officers after 1340: for example, Sir
John Delves, a servant of Arundel, soldier, Shropshire JP, and then multi-
tasking servant to the Black Prince in Wales and Chester, and finally justice
of the Common Pleas (another of those multiply talented soldiers and admin-
istrators and justices).99 We need to think about reversing the normal
paradigm and consider that a noble may have recommended a servant for
local office, not to make use of his influence, but so that the king was well
served at a time when the requisite expertise was still in short supply.100
VII
One striking aspect of Edward’s attitude to the men he made use of is his
readiness to attack them if he felt they had let him down, especially when his
military exertions were stretching him badly.101 In 1341‒4, a host of greater
and lesser officers, from justices, to sheriffs, to minor local officials, were
caught in the eye of Edward’s storm, and it is evident that in some cases they
were being sacrificed to Edward’s put-upon subjects simply for doing their
jobs, as demanded by the king.102 Even the very great were not always
immune. For example, between 1354 and 1360, Edward reined in his own son,
198 Complete Peerage, s.n.; Burls, ‘Society, Economy and Lordship’, 175‒7.
199 Richard Partington, chapter on law and lawyers, to be published in J.-P. Genet, John
Watts and Christopher Fletcher (eds), Governing in Late Medieval England and
France: Office, Network, Idea, forthcoming, with thanks to Mr Partington for
permitting me to cite his work in advance of publication.
100 An insight I owe to Richard Partington.
101 For the general point, see Richard Partington, ‘Edward III’s enforcers: the king’s
sergeants-at-arms in the localities’, in Bothwell (ed.), Age of Edward III, 96‒106.
102 Jones, ‘Rex et ministri’, 1‒20; Bernard William McClane (ed.), The 1341 Royal
Inquest in Lincolnshire, Lincoln Record Society 78 (1987): see especially several of
the charges against Gilbert Ledred, multiple local official: e.g. nos 1135‒9. For the
context, see G. L. Harriss, King, Parliament, and Public Finance in Medieval England
to 1369 (Oxford, 1979), chs 10‒13.
the Black Prince, when he felt that the Prince’s aggressive use of his powers
as Prince of Wales towards the Marcher lords was alienating men like Arundel
and Warwick who were important to him. Equally, Arundel’s usefulness to
the king had not stopped Edward arresting three men who were close to the
earl in the 1340s.103 A more dramatic example was made of Sir John Moleyns,
soldier, personal agent and strong-arm-man to the king, and Bucking-
hamshire justice of the peace and of oyer and terminer, who was twice prose-
cuted, in each case for a string of apparently appalling crimes.104 Moleyns
has been held up as an example of lawlessness under Edward III, and of the
king’s reluctance to take it seriously unless it suited him personally to do so.105
However, a closer examination reveals a rather different agenda. Moleyns was
almost certainly a difficult and sometimes violent and dangerous man, but
we need to remember that the accusations made against him, often going back
several years, arose when he had fallen foul of the king in 1340‒1 and of the
queen in the 1350s. It was accordingly open season on him, the charges against
him were entirely one-sided, and were not all necessarily wholly true.106 From
our perspective, what is revealing is that he was hauled over the coals in the
early 1340s, in company with so many of Edward’s servants and officials; that
he was pardoned, as were so many others who felt the king’s wrath at that
time; and that he then served the king further, in the Crécy campaign, at a
great council, and as JP. His final downfall, following his appointment as
steward of the queen’s household in the 1350s, seems to have been due to the
emergence of complaints of ‘oppressiveness’ against him, just as the queen
became unhappy with his work and the king had no further interest in
employing him.107 We may see cynicism on Edward’s part in all these
instances of intervention but, as far as he was concerned, these greater and
lesser men were there to help accomplish his work of supplying the war and
keeping the peace and, if they failed, or appeared to him to do so, he would
have no mercy. This was not a man who simply handed over the localities to
local powers and took no interest in the outcome.
What we can observe in Edward III’s rule from 1341 is an attempt by the
crown to harness local power, above all noble power, to its rule, in recognition
103 R. R. Davies, Lordship and Society in the March of Wales, 1282‒1400 (Oxford, 1978),
269‒73; Partington, ‘Edward III’s enforcers’, 105‒6.
104 For what follows, see Natalie Fryde, ‘A medieval robber baron: Sir John Moleyns of
Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire’, in Hunnisett and Post (eds), Medieval Legal Records,
198‒221.
105 Fryde, ‘Medieval robber baron’, 207; John Aberth, ‘Crime and justice under Edward
III: the case of Thomas de Lisle’, EHR 107 (1992), 283‒301, at pp. 293‒301.
106 Similar points can be made about the nature and timing of the charges with regard
to other causes célèbres, for example against Bishop Lisle (Aberth, ‘Crime and justice’)
and Lord Fitzwalter (Ormrod, Reign of Edward III, 112).
107 Jones, ‘Rex et ministri’.
of the sheer scale and reach of its responsibilities. The fact that agitation about
the alleged improprieties of royal justices continued during these years shows
the degree to which the central ministers of the crown still had a major effect
on how the law was administered.108 This was probably for two reasons. First,
the local administration of the cases going through the central law courts was
still in the hands of sheriffs who believed that their responsibilities to the
king, either through direct association or via a noble lord who was a major
servant of the king, normally outweighed those to their locality. Secondly,
there is no argument but that the king continued to police the localities by
means of the itinerant King’s Bench and, on occasion, by special commis-
sions. If he was unhappy about order or the enforcement of his commands in
the shires, he was still very ready to send men in to sort things out. He was
also ready to use his serjeants-at-law, his ‘enforcers’ as Richard Partington
has termed them. These first become prominent in 1340 and were employed
thereafter in a number of different capacities. Mostly they were used to get
what he needed for war and attack those who stood in the way of this aim,
including his own officers. But he also deployed them for other purposes, for
example to arrest obstructive local notables, and to spearhead an attack in the
early 1350s on offenders of all kinds, from nobles to breachers of the new
labour legislation.109
And his system seems to have worked. If we regard oyer and terminer
commissions issued in response to individual petitions as an index of the
efficacy of royal control of the shires and of confidence in the king’s law, rather
than as one of landowners behaving badly, it is telling that the number of such
commissions never again rose to the levels of the 1310s and 1320s, and began
to fall significantly in the later 1340s.110 This was certainly also related to the
availability of the itinerant King’s Bench and the JPs as alternative avenues,
notably as fora which could receive the bills that oyer and terminer
commissions handled.111 It must also have been connected to the significant
fact that Edward III’s government felt confident enough of its rule of the
localities to legislate in 1360 against petitioners naming their desired
justices.112 All the same, as we have seen, when the crown responded
energetically and effectively to problems of local order, the number of private
oyer and terminer commissions did decline. The hypothesis that the decline
108 See e.g. PROME, ii, 136‒7, 141, 167‒8, 286‒7; also Ormrod, Reign of Edward III,
111‒12, on the comparatively few complaints about ‘bastard feudal’ matters in this
period.
109 Partington, ‘Edward III’s enforcers’, 89‒106.
110 Kaeuper, ‘Law and order’, 741.
111 Musson and Ormrod, Evolution of English Justice, 120, 130‒1; Harding, Law Courts,
109‒10; Anthony Musson, ‘Attitudes to royal justice in fourteenth-century York-
shire’, Northern History 39 (2002), 173‒85, at p. 174; above, p. 83.
112 Musson and Ormrod, Evolution of English Justice, 121.
of oyer and terminer commissions went hand-in-hand with the creation of a

workable new system for maintaining local order would also fit with
Maddicott’s well-known account of the feeing of justices. This practice began
to be regulated in the 1340s, and seems to have ceased by the 1380s. Feeing
justices became redundant once oyer and terminer commissions were in
decline; once it was becoming less common to request named justices to hear
a particular plea, even before the practice was banned; and once the admin-
istration of the justice that affected landowners was firmly in the hands of
local sheriffs and JPs.113
VIII
Whether this account of bastard feudalism in the fourteenth century stands

up or not will not be known until there have been local studies for the first
seventy years or so of the fourteenth century that replicate the detailed and
systematic attention to local affairs of some of the work on the last decades
of the century and on the fifteenth. Most importantly, we need to know
whether nobles’ direct and indirect links with local landowners were so
extensive as to amount to what, using our later characterisation, we may truly
term an affinity. Secondly, if there were indeed noble affinities, did they
operate as later ones were to do? Was it normal for significant local officers to
have links with the locally powerful nobility, and for such links to be routinely
exploited to protect the lands of the members of the affinities and expedite
their pleas and, if less frequently, to do the same for their lords?114 And, in
this context, do we find such extended involvement of nobles in the land
transactions of their followers and in private settlements of disputes, in the
areas where their landed power lay, that we may conclude that immediate
responsibility for peacekeeping had now moved firmly from the king to the
nobility? When it came to local conflict, was it new in the later fourteenth
century to use litigation primarily as a means of forcing the other party to an
informal settlement? It could be that, until then, the king’s law was still
regarded as the normal means of bringing disputes to an end among lesser
men, and that conflict among the great was seen as something that the king
himself was expected to deal with, promptly and, if necessary, ruthlessly.115
113 J. R. Maddicott, Law and Lordship: Royal Justices as Retainers in Thirteenth- and Four-
teenth-Century England, Past and Present Supplement 4 (1978).
114 In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, cases concerning lords tended to come
before the king’s council: see for example Harding, Law Courts, 105‒6; Maddern,
Violence and Social Order, 206‒25; John Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship
(Cambridge, 1996), 202‒4.
115 Spencer, Nobility and Kingship shows Edward’s readiness to step in when he was
displeased by the behaviour of his great men. Edward Powell, ‘Arbitration and the law
in England in the late middle ages’, TRHS 5th series 33 (1983), 49‒67, at pp. 54‒5 for
Edward III’s intervention in the prosecutions of men he felt had let him down
might imply that expectations concerning the king still held until c.1370.
Regarding the actual practice of law and peacekeeping in the shires up to
this date, we have seen that we know very little.116 Our knowledge of lords’ part
in the private world of the gentry until the 1360s or 1370s is similarly restricted.
Maddicott has shown that there was a measure of interconnectedness through
marriage and kinship among Thomas of Lancaster’s followers, and one might
well expect that matches were made through meetings in the lord’s house-
hold, while retainers might recommend their relatives to their lord. However,
Maddicott does not pursue Lancaster’s role in his followers’ lives beyond this,
and whether his followers really were ‘a true “affinity”’ in the later sense, as
he believes many were, awaits confirmation. Saul notes the strong local
connections between Gloucestershire lords, especially the Berkeleys, and their
retainers, but does not elaborate further on this subject.117
There is further support for the view that it was only in the 1370s, or
perhaps just before, that what we think of as the late medieval dispensation
in the shires began to emerge. This lies in the Commons’ comments on local
justice and local officers in these decades as recorded in the Parliamentary
Rolls. It must be emphasised that these are perceptions and not necessarily
reality. Moreover, perceptions in the 1370s and 1380s were undoubtedly
coloured by the fact that the massive demands being made for a largely unsuc-
cessful war led the Commons to stipulate that, if the government could not
offer external achievement after all this expenditure, it should at least do its
job of maintaining internal peace.118 Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that,
although complaints about over-assertive crown officers continued, from the
mid-1360s there was an increasing volume of protest about exploitation and
abuse of the law by local officials or powerful men: such matters as local
justices’ favouring of their friends, including the choice of JPs ‘par brocage
des meyntenours’, sheriffs’ improper practices at tourns, the maintenance of
defendants against plaintiffs by the defendants’ powerful feoffees, and more
general allegations of ‘brocage et maintenance’. There were also straight-
forward complaints regarding disorder in various parts of the realm, which
imply a sense of under- rather than over-government.119 Furthermore, it was
evidence of lay arbitration increasing ‘dramatically’ after 1350. McLane, ‘Changes

in King’s Bench’, 160, for a growing trend towards out-of-court settlement in King’s
Bench litigation from the 1320s.
116 Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, has very little about local conflict before the 1370s.
117 Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 58‒61 (quotation at p. 60); Saul, Knights and
Esquires, 70‒9.
118 Christine Carpenter, ‘Law, justice and landowners in late medieval England’, Law
and History Review 1 (1983), 205‒37, at p. 227.
119 For example PROME, ii, 311‒12, 320, 331, 333, 334, 354, iii, 21, 42, 62‒3, 94, 137,
164, 231; Ormrod, Reign of Edward III, 112‒13.
in 1376 that noble life shrievalties first came under fire. This implies that
previous acceptance of what had been a local contribution to centrist rule had
changed to rejection of a means of placing a shire too firmly in the private
power of a noble.120 None of this should be read as an outpouring of disgust
by upright gentry caught up in a novel stew of corruption and hankering for
a return to more interventionist rule, and the Commons still expressed a
dislike of centrist commissions, but it was a new form of rhetoric. The locus
of corruption and oppression, those favourite words of the Commons, was
now not so much central government as local government and local powers.121
It is also arguable that, from the 1370s, legislation and parliamentary petitions
concerning the outward identification of bastard feudal lordship, along with
the appearance of cheap badges and smaller and more standardised fees,
suggest the regularisation of a relationship that was now becoming wide-
spread and commonplace.122
IX
To sum up, all the evidence suggests that bastard feudalism for most of the
fourteenth century was not the same as bastard feudalism as revealed by
studies of nobles and localities in the fifteenth century. When it looks most
similar in the period up to c.1370, that is under Edward II and in the great
decades of Edward III’s reign, this is deceptive. Under Edward II, nobles and
gentry were fire-fighting. Under Edward III, what we see is the king’s
exploitation of the local influence and connections of certain key nobles for
the purposes of military recruitment and to provide reliable local officers and
local order while king, nobles and government were stretched to the utmost
by a massive military project. Equally, these were not evolutionary stages
towards the fully fledged bastard feudalism of the late fourteenth century.
What these two different uses of local power, one by nobles, the other by
the king, did reflect is more profound evolutionary changes in the localities,
whose roots went back much further. This was a development dating back to
the early thirteenth century. More and deeper government ultimately meant
more delegation to local landowners, both because they demanded control
over governance that was exploiting and directing them to an ever greater
degree (on this Putnam was undoubtedly correct), and because it required a
120 PROME, ii, 334. The immediate catalyst for this general request seems to have been
the death in 1376 of Arundel, which led to a petition from Shropshire that there
should be no more hereditary sheriffs (Ormrod, Reign of Edward III, 112), but this
is the first time that hostility to this practice was being voiced.
121 Carpenter, ‘Law, justice and landowners’, 226, 228‒9.
122 Nigel Saul, ‘The Commons and the abolition of badges’, in C. Rawcliffe and L. Clark
(eds), Parliament and Communities in the Middle Ages, Parliamentary History 9 (1990),
302‒15. For legislation, see above, pp. 68‒9.
much larger governmental base and one that was locally resident. Once this
delegation was more or less complete, there had to be a local directing force,
and, in most areas, this would be the local nobility. The structures of local
power and local rule that emerged in the late fourteenth century were the
final stage of this development. However, the exact timing was largely a matter
of contingency: the substantial increase in government at the lowest level
occasioned by the Black Death and its consequences; the relaxation of
Edward III’s hold on government from 1360 once he was at peace; new war
from 1369 coinciding with a failure of energy at the top, through senility
(Edward), illness (the Black Prince) and youthfulness (Richard II). By the
time Richard had grasped the situation and decided he did not like it at all,
it was too late to put the clock back – though that did not prevent him
trying.123
123 This chapter salutes a friendship of many years, during which Jenny Wormald and I
have had numbers of fruitful and stimulating exchanges of ideas, crossing the borders
of countries and periods.
chapter 4
Tame Magnates? The Justiciars of

Later Medieval Scotland
HECTOR MACQUEEN 1
The question mark in the title of one of Jenny Wormald’s earliest papers,
‘Taming the magnates?’, was perhaps more provocative when published in
1972 than it might be now.2 The paper challenged the then established view
that later medieval Scotland was characterised above all by conflict, often
bloody, between a weak Crown and an over-mighty nobility. The arguments
– that actually the Crown–nobility relationship was generally ‘close and co-
operative’, that the Crown smashed noble families that became too powerful
while building up and rewarding those who served the king, and that in
general Crown and nobility were allies with a common agenda – still provoke
debate; but there can be no return to the point of departure.3 This chapter
seeks no more than to highlight a particular contribution to medieval royal
government by members of the nobility that, while much more than negli-
gible, has not yet received the attention it deserves.
Geoffrey Barrow’s seminal study of the Scottish justiciar to c.1306 showed

that by the mid-thirteenth century the office was divided regionally, the two
most important regions being Lothian and Scotia (the region north of the
Forth–Clyde line), and generally held by major figures from the nobility. The
justiciar for each region went through it twice annually on circuit, or ayre,
holding courts exercising both a criminal and a civil jurisdiction.4 Although
11 I am grateful to Alan Borthwick and Sandy Grant for helpful comments on an earlier
draft. Neither is responsible for what I have made of their suggestions.
12 Jennifer M. Brown, ‘Taming the magnates?’, in Gordon Menzies (ed.), The Scottish
Nation: A History of the Scots from Independence to Union (London, 1972), 46‒59.
13 See e.g. Michael Brown, ‘Introduction’, in Michael Brown and Roland J. Tanner (eds),
Scottish Kingship, 1306‒1542: Essays in Honour of Norman Macdougall (Edinburgh,
2008), 1‒19.
14 G. W. S. Barrow, The Kingdom of the Scots (2nd edn, Edinburgh, 2003), ch. 3.
a new structure created in 1305 under Edward I with four justiciary regions
(Lothian, Galloway, Forth to Mounth, and north of Mounth) certainly came
into operation,5 the previous system was revived quickly by Robert I and
continued until the beginning of the sixteenth century. During this period,
the justiciarships were usually said to be either ‘north’ or ‘south of Forth’.6
The present contribution identifies holders of these offices from the reign of
Robert I until the 1513 appointment of Colin Campbell, third earl of Argyll
as justiciar general of the whole realm of Scotland north and south of Forth,7
thereby confirming what had in fact been the position since 1501, when the
offices north and south of Forth were combined in the person of Andrew,
second lord Gray.
The list given in the Appendix is, however, incomplete, with many gaps.
Witness lists to later medieval royal charters do not designate justiciars as
such until the reign of James IV, depriving us of a source of information of
great value for the period before 1306. In James’ reign, certain men held the
office continuously over a number of years, whereas this was rather unusual
earlier in the fifteenth century. Whatever the reason for this, the patchy refer-
ences to justiciars before 1488 make it difficult to determine the precise
succession of office-holders or the duration of their period in office. Thus,
as we shall see, Alexander, lord of the Isles and earl of Ross, was justiciar north
of Forth between 1439 and 1447, but we do not know when he first came or
when he ceased to hold office. He died in May 1449, and the next reference
to a justiciar north of Forth after 1443 is in September 1449. It is quite likely
that Alexander held the office before 1439 – the last reference to any possible
predecessor is in November 1437 – but there is no direct evidence to prove
this, or to show that he kept it until his death.
Nevertheless the list, if examined by reign, shows that the office was held
by royal councillors, often of royal blood, and seldom if ever by persons out
of favour with the king, at least when the king was in active control of
government. Even in periods of royal absence, minority or other incapacity,
the office was held and, it would seem, discharged by men close to the centre
15 E. L. G. Stones (ed.), Anglo-Scottish Relations, 1174‒1328: Some Selected Documents

(London, 1965), no. 33; APS, i, 120. See CDS, iii, nos 181, 211 and p. 403 for Adam
Gordon’s claim in 1310 and 1311 to unpaid fees for his second, third and fourth years
as justiciar of Lothian; G. W. S. Barrow, Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm
of Scotland (4th edn, Edinburgh, 2005), 190 (for English justiciars sitting in Dumfries
in March 1306); The Chronicle of Walter of Guisborough (Camden Society, 1957), 378
(commenting that the justiciars’ use of the penalty of outlawry drove many to side
with the Bruce revolt in 1306); and Fiona Watson, Under the Hammer: Edward I and
Scotland (East Linton, 1998), 216‒17.
16 Hector L. MacQueen, Common Law and Feudal Society in Medieval Scotland (Edin-
burgh, 1993), 58‒65.
17 HMC, iv, 487. For the period after 1513 see Amy Blakeway, ‘Regency in Sixteenth-
century Scotland’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Cambridge, 2009), ch. 7.
THE JUSTICIARS OF LATER MEDIEVAL SCOTLAND 95
of power generally. Nor was the justiciarship a sinecure: it involved a period

usually of months, rather than days or weeks, on circuit and a heavy diet of
cases civil and criminal, as well as giving at least the appearance of good
government and justice while bringing much needed revenue to the royal
coffers. Governmental self-interest, to put it no higher, dictated that the justi-
ciars should take their duties seriously; they certainly earned the fees and
expenses to which they were entitled.8 The offices north and south of Forth
may have occasionally been united in the fifteenth century, but clearly this
was exceptional and only for the briefest of intervals. For the most part there
were two office-holders whose respective jurisdictions were divided by the
course of the River Forth, although sometimes in the later fifteenth century
pairs of justiciars were appointed for one or other region.
II
Just when Robert I began to appoint justiciars is unclear. There is a tantalising

reference to David Muschet as justiciar of Fife in May 1306, two months
after the king’s inauguration at Scone on 25 March.9 It seems most likely that
Muschet was acting under English authority: he had adhered to the English
crown in the 1290s,10 while in May 1306 Bruce had scarcely had time or
opportunity to begin organising justice ayres, even in friendly territory.11 But
there can be no doubt that Robert Keith’s appearances in 1310 and 1312 as a
justiciar north of Forth were under the authority of the Bruce, since, although
appointed in 1305 as one of Edward I’s justiciars for Scotland,12 from
Christmas 1308 he had been ‘one of the [Scottish] king’s indispensable
commanders and administrators’.13 Keith’s appointment also manifests the
return to the pre-Edwardian twofold division of the justiciary defined by the
River Forth.
In November 1320 the northern justiciar was Thomas Randolph, earl of
Moray, until his death in 1332 perhaps the most important man in Scotland
under his uncle the king.14 It is not clear how the post related to Randolph’s
18 See further Archibald A. M. Duncan, ‘The “Laws of Malcolm Mackenneth”’, in

Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer (eds), Medieval Scotland: Crown, Lordship and
Community: Essays Presented to G. W. S. Barrow (Edinburgh, 1993), 239‒73, at pp. 251‒2.
19 See Dunfermline Reg., no. 590 (13 May 1306).
10 See Amanda Beam with others, People of Medieval Scotland, 1093‒1314 (Glasgow and
London 2012), http://db.poms.ac.uk/record/person/17775/# (last accessed 31
December 2012).
11 Barrow, Bruce, 194‒9.
12 See Stones, Documents, no. 33; APS, i, 120. Keith’s Edwardian appointment was for
the region from the Forth to the Mounth.
13 Miscellany of the Abbotsford Club, vol. i (1837), 53; HMC, v, 626; Barrow, Bruce, 370.
14 Liber Ecclesie de Scon (Bannatyne and Maitland Clubs, 1843), no. 130; Barrow, Bruce,
regalian powers in his enormous earldom, which by express royal grant in

1312 extended to both the pleas of the crown in criminal matters and
pleadable brieves in civil ones; the regality may have enabled justice to be
done in more remote areas such as Badenoch, Lochaber and Glenelg that lay
beyond the reach of justice ayres typically held at the head burghs of the sher-
iffdoms.15 No earlier than 1319, William Muschet of Cargill in Perthshire
was designed justiciar north of Forth;16 to judge from his being a witness to
the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320, a not infrequent witness to royal charters
in the 1320s, and present at the ratification of the Treaty of Edinburgh in
1328, he seems to have been a member of the king’s council in that period.17
In the south, a single reference in about 1319 to James Douglas as justiciar of
Lothian precedes the long career of Robert Lauder the elder in that office.18
Douglas stood alongside Randolph in the favour and esteem of King
Robert,19 while Lauder was ‘raised from obscurity’ to a place of high impor-
tance not only as a justiciar but elsewhere in royal government.20 Lauder’s
rise, however, may well have begun within the Douglas power base created
by the king’s grants to the ‘good Sir James’ of extensive lands in the south of
Scotland, in particular in Berwickshire and Lothian.21 The main territorial
360‒1, 368, 383, 395; Michael Penman, David II (East Linton, 2004), 22; A. A. M.
Duncan, ‘Randolph, Thomas, first earl of Moray (d.1332)’, ODNB.
15 RRS, v, no. 389. See also no. 101. A regality’s jurisdiction was only co-extensive with
the justiciar’s by such express grant: P. G. B. McNeill (ed.), ‘Discours Particulier
d’Escosse, 1559⁄60’, in W. D. H. Sellar (ed.), Miscellany Two (Stair Society, 1984), 86‒131,
at pp. 90‒3. See also MacQueen, Common Law, 51, 53‒4, 55‒6, 112.
16 Moray Reg., cartae originales, no. 18.
17 Geoffrey Barrow (ed.), The Declaration of Arbroath: History, Significance, Setting
(Edinburgh, 2003), p. xiii; RRS, v, index s.n. ‘Muschet (Monte Fixo, Montfiquet,
Mountfichet, Mufichet), William’; Barrow, Bruce, 336.
18 Melrose Liber, ii, no. 415 (Douglas). For Lauder as justiciar see Dunfermline Reg., no. 352;
HMC, Various Collections, v, 8; Calendar of the Laing Charters, 854‒1837, ed. Joseph
Anderson (Edinburgh, 1899), no. 27; Melrose Liber, ii, nos 393, 422‒6; Calendar of
Writs preserved at Yester House, 1166‒1503, ed. C. C. H. Harvey and J. Macleod (SRS,
1930), nos 19, 24 (misdated); The Blackfriars of Perth, the Chartulary and Papers of
their House, ed. R. Milne (Edinburgh, 1893), 18; Registrum Sancte Marie de Neubotle,
ed. Cosmo Innes (Bannatyne Club, 1849), no. 149; Registrum Honoris de Morton, 2 vols,
eds Thomas Thomson, Alexander Macdonald and Cosmo Innes (Bannatyne Club,
1853), ii, nos 34, 50; J. Raine, The History and Antiquities of North Durham (London,
1852), nos 432, 586; Fraser, Douglas Book, iii, no. 16; RRS, vi, nos 6, 10; Liber Sancte
Marie de Dryburgh, ed. W. Fraser (Bannatyne Club, 1847), 274; ER, i, 452; Liber Sancte
Marie de Calchou, 2 vols, ed. Cosmo Innes (Bannatyne Club, 1846), nos 477, 479;
Registrum Episcopatus Glasguensis, 2 vols, ed. Cosmo Innes (Bannatyne and Maitland
Clubs, 1843), i, no. 280.
19 Barrow, Bruce, 369.
20 Barrow, Bruce, 371; Penman, David II, 25.
21 See Morton Reg., ii, no. 13 for Lauder as witness to a charter of William lord of
bases of Keith, Randolph and Muschet were all in the north; equally the
landed interests of King Robert’s southern justiciars lay below Forth. All
these individuals belonged to ‘a small group of specially trusted, specially
favoured men, who though not personally related to the king were obviously
his intimate counsellors, prominent in every department of the royal service,
military, diplomatic and judicial’.22
After Robert I’s death in 1329 and the accession of the infant David II,
Reginald Cheyne was justiciario at Elgin in 1330.23 This may however have
been as justiciar of the regality of Moray (still held by Thomas Randolph),
since Elgin was the head place of the earldom according to Randolph’s
original grant.24 A passage in Wyntoun describes ‘a justre … held at Invernys’,
i.e. the royal burgh, by Randolph as guardian in 1331,25 so it is possible that
he was still justiciar north of Forth, or had returned to the office as the most
powerful magnate in the region. Wyntoun adds that Randolph sent his
coroner to Eilean Donan in Wester Ross in an ultimately successful pursuit
of malefactors, showing perhaps the lengthening reach of the royal justiciary
under Randolph’s sway.26 Wyntoun also refers to Randolph holding a ‘justry’
at Wigtown in Galloway that year, however, so he may as guardian have
decided to drive the more peripheral justice ayres himself as the most effective
way of showing that he was in control of the country.27 His success is attested
by Wyntoun:
Wes nevyr nane in justice lyk
Till this Erle in oure kynrik:
He sparyd nowthyre for luwe na awe
As caus wes to do the lawe.28
Douglas 1289 x 1298. See also Michael Brown, The Black Douglases: War and Lordship
in Late Medieval Scotland, 1300‒1455 (East Linton, 1998), 23. A Robert Lauder
appears as steward of the earl of Dunbar 1289 x 1290 (Melrose Liber, ii, no. 365).
22 Barrow, Bruce, 368‒9 (not however mentioning Muschet). It may be noted here that
the appearance of John, son of Adam Bruning as a justiciar specially deputed ad hoc
in 1320 (RMS, i, app. 1, no. 67) was not as a ‘subordinate justiciar’ (Barrow, Bruce, 383),
but is rather an early example of the special (as distinct from general) commission of
justiciary, for which see Hector L. MacQueen, ‘Legal afterword’, in A. A. M. Duncan
(ed.), Scottish Formularies (Stair Society, 2011), 364‒5. Other examples in the reign
of Robert I are RMS, i, app., no. 74 (APS, i, 479) and RRS, v, no. 435. See also note
168 below.
23 Ane Account of the Familie of Innes (Spalding Club, 1864), 58. For Cheyne as ‘Crown
man’, see Penman, David II, 97, 110.
24 RRS, v, no. 389 (p. 634); A. Y. Cheyne, The Cheyne Family in Scotland (Eastbourne,
1931), 40.
25 Chron. Wyntoun (Laing), lines 3188‒9. See also Chron. Bower (Watt), vii, 58.
26 Chron. Wyntoun (Laing), lines 3245‒70. See also Chron. Bower (Watt), vii, 58.
27 Chron. Wyntoun (Laing), line 3210. See also Chron. Bower (Watt), vii, 56.
28 Chron. Wyntoun (Laing), lines 3271‒4. See also Chron. Bower (Watt), vii, 56, 58‒62.
Presumably Randolph’s Galloway ayre was not conducted as justiciar of

Lothian, however, for Sir Robert Lauder continued to hold that office until
at least 1337, when, acting as an auditor of the exchequer, he was once again
designated justiciar of Lothian.29 But it is uncertain how meaningful the title
was by that time. In 1334 most of the territory over which the justiciar of
Lothian had jurisdiction was ceded to the English Crown.30 This led to
Edward III’s appointment of Sir Robert Lauder the younger, son of the
already mentioned Sir Robert, as justitiarius regis Anglie in Laudonia (justiciar
of the King of England in Lothian) in June 1334.31 But ‘even if a vestigial
English administration … set to work in the ceded counties it was almost
immediately displaced’.32 A Scottish rising of gathering strength led to the
renewal of hostilities, in Lothian and elsewhere, lasting until 1338;33 this was
a period of considerable dislocation and difficulty in the government of
Scotland, whether by English or Scottish interests.34 In 1337 and 1338 there
were however still English justiciars of Lothian, respectively Anthony de
Lucy, the king’s lieutenant in Scotland, and Richard Talbot, the warden of
Berwick.35 Their existence may cast doubt on the effectiveness and extent of
the elder Lauder’s position as the Scottish justiciar of Lothian.36
Lauder the younger is however referred to as justiciar of Scotia north of
Forth in March 1336 and February 1337.37 He had re-established himself on
the Scottish side by 1335 when his tenements in the burgh of Berwick were
declared forfeit by Edward III.38 The document of March 1336 styling him
justiciar of Scotia also designs him lieutenant of the guardian of Scotland
(who was almost certainly Andrew Murray by that time),39 while in February
1337 he appears at Falkland alongside such other leaders of the Scottish party
as the guardian Murray and William Douglas, then conducting a campaign
in Fife.40 Despite his obvious political stature at this time there is no sign that
Lauder thereafter played any major role in government, judicial or otherwise,
despite his survival until the 1360s. In 1363 an annual pension of twenty
29 ER, i, 452. Lauder became chamberlain in 1333: Penman, David II, 25.
30 Ranald Nicholson, Edward III and the Scots: The Formative Years of a Military Career,
1327‒1335 (London, 1965), 160‒4.
31 Rotuli Scotiae in Turri Londinensi, 2 vols, eds David Macpherson et al. (London, 1814‒19),
i, 271; Nicholson, Edward III, 162.
32 Nicholson, Edward III, 167.
33 Nicholson, Edward III, 164 ff; Penman, David II, 53‒66.
34 Nicholson, Edward III, 227‒8.
35 CDS, v, no. 767; CDS, iii, no. 1288.
36 On Lauder the elder in the 1330s, see further Penman, David II, 38, 43, 73.
37 Liber Sancte Thome de Aberbrothoc, 2 parts, eds Cosmo Innes and Patrick Chalmers
(Bannatyne Club, 1848‒56), i, no. 290; Spalding Misc., v, 243‒4.
38 CDS, iii, nos 1192‒3; Penman, David II, 210, 297.
39 Arbroath Liber, i, no. 290; Penman, David II, 61.
40 Spalding Misc., v, 243‒4; Penman, David II, 66.
pounds granted to him by Robert I and to be uplifted from the profits of the
justiciary north of Forth was confirmed by David II;41 but this seems to be
his only recorded link with the justiciary after 1337.
The record of a dispute in the exchequer in the late 1330s shows the sheriff
of Aberdeen, William Meldrum, as having been a justiciar, surely north of
Forth, in 1335 (i.e. before the younger Lauder’s first appearance in the office),
while Adam Buttergask, a royal official, was then the current holder of the office
(having perhaps been Lauder’s successor).42 In the accounts of December 1337
it was further noted that Buttergask had held an ayre at Elgin.43 He appears to
have been a significant figure in royal government at this period, holding offices
such as clerk of the wardrobe and chamberlain depute. In origin a Perthshire
man, his landholdings were all in the north, in particular Banffshire.44
By 1339, however, William, fifth earl of Ross had acquired the northern
justiciarship, which he held into the 1350s and perhaps until as late as 1358.45
This was despite a challenge in 1344 to his right to hold it, made by Sir John
Randolph, second son and the surviving heir of Thomas Randolph, northern
justiciar earlier in David’s minority. John abandoned his claim in parliament
when he confessed ‘that he had no right to the office of justiciar north of the
Scottish sea by way of heritage’.46 Ross was a cousin of David II, his mother
having been a sister of Robert I, and he was one of the greatest of northern
landowners at this time. The evidence for regular northern ayres in the period
has been discussed elsewhere;47 this regularity may be attributable to the hold
upon the office north of Forth by one man throughout the period.
There is, however, little evidence in the same period of such continuity south
of Forth. Despite the re-establishment of normal government there is no
mention of justiciars of Lothian in the 1340s, nor, indeed, for most of the
1350s. But for the king’s exemption of Newbattle Abbey from suit at the court
of the justiciary of Lothian in 1346,48 it would be tempting to suppose that
the dislocation of the 1330s and the continuing incursions of the English into
south-eastern Scotland had prevented the re-establishment of the Scottish
justiciary below the Forth.
41 RMS, i, no. 163; cf. RMS, i, app, no. 1479.

42 ER, i, 436‒9.
43 ER, i, 441, 444.
44 See RMS, i, app. ii, nos 769, 782, 842, 892, 1245.
45 Dunfermline Reg., no. 376; Sir William Fraser (ed.), History of the Carnegies, Earls of
Southesk, and of their Kindred, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1867), ii, no. 36; Registrum de
Panmure, ed. J. Stuart (Edinburgh, 1874), 169; ER, i, 543, 546; Registrum Episcopatus
Aberdonensis, 2 vols, ed. Cosmo Innes (Spalding and Maitland Clubs, 1845), i, 79‒81.
46 RPS, 1344⁄3. Sir John succeeded his brother Thomas as earl of Moray in 1332 on the
latter’s death at Halidon Hill in 1332.
47 MacQueen, Common Law, 62.
48 RRS, vi, no. 101; Cosmo Innes (ed.), Registrum S. Marie de Neubotle (Bannatyne Club,
1849), no. 272.
III
On the return of David II from his English captivity in 1357 the justiciarships
again became the subject of royal patronage. Michael Penman has argued
persuasively that the dismissal of William, earl of Ross as justiciar north of
Forth was confirmed no later than a parliament held at Scone in November
1358.49 Ross may have been succeeded by the same William Meldrum who
had been in office in 1335, as he is said in the exchequer rolls to have been
justiciar at Cupar (north of Forth) on 25 January 1358.50 But in the same year
the exchequer accounts also designate Meldrum as lieutenant to the unnamed
justiciar (perhaps Ross?),51 so that it is not quite clear whether or not the other
exchequer roll entry is reliable in giving him promotion to the higher position,
or when Ross finally fell from grace. However, he was certainly out of favour
with David II for the remainder of the reign.52
Robert Erskine first appears as justiciar north of Forth in 1359, and in
1360 he held the office of justiciar of Scotia jointly with Hugh Eglinton.53 It
is possible that the description signifies more than ‘north of Forth’ here how-
ever, as, even before the fourteenth century, the name ‘Scotia’ was commonly
applied to the whole kingdom and not just the regions north of Forth.54 Both
Erskine and Eglinton seem likely to have risen to prominence through the
entourage of the Steward, from whose territories they came. Certainly
Erskine had become chamberlain during the Steward’s lieutenancy between
1347 and 1357.55 But his career under David II, who described him as
‘confederato nostro’ (‘our companion’), was one of startling success.56 He
already held extensive northern lands in 1357,57 so his appointment as
justiciar north of Forth was consistent with the policy of linking office to local
base. The doom (verdict) of a justice court held by Erskine at Dundee was
falsed (overturned) by parliament in June 1368,58 so it is possible that he
retained the office from 1359 until this time. But by 1370, William
Dishington, another of the king’s closest councillors and sheriff of Fife where
his main estates lay, had succeeded him.59
49 Penman, David II, 209‒11.

50 ER, i, 562.
51 ER, i, 559; see also ER, i, 546 and Penman, David II, 147, 152, 158, 161, 176, 208,
211, 228, 395, 409.
52 See e.g. Penman, David II, 363‒4.
53 RMS, ii, no. 3717; RRS, vi, no. 230; APS, i, 504 (all Erskine alone); RRS, vi, no. 228;
Sir William Fraser, The Red Book of Menteith, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1880), ii, no. 29.
54 Barrow, Kingdom, 333‒5.
55 Penman, David II, 142.
56 RMS, i, no. 839. See further Penman, David II, 243‒4.
57 See e.g. RRS, vi, no. 198 (the lordship of Garioch).
58 RPS, 1368/6/1.
59 See RRS, vi, no. 9; Penman, David II, index s.n. ‘Dischington, William’.
In the south, William Douglas held a justice ayre at Edinburgh in 1358

and was presumably justiciar of Lothian at that time.60 In the same year the
king made him first earl of Douglas, recognising his territorial dominance
over much of southern Scotland. But in 1363 Earl William was involved in a
rebellion with the Steward and the earl of March, which probably played a
part in a transfer of the office to the faithful Erskine, who is found as southern
justiciar at this period.61 Erskine may thus conceivably have united the offices
north and south of Forth in the mid-1360s. But when the Steward ascended
the throne as Robert II early in 1371, Douglas again became justiciar south
of Forth,62 and Erskine, despite his original Stewart connections, was ‘pushed
to the fringes of actual power’.63 Extensive southern landholdings and conse-
quent power were obviously important to the royal favour underlying
Douglas’ reappointment, perhaps part of a deal under which the earl agreed
not to oppose the crowning of Robert II as king.64
Indeed it is just possible that the southern justiciarship remained in the
Douglas family from that time until at least the early years of the fifteenth
century. If so, this closely parallels the position north of Forth, the justicia-
rship of which was, as we shall see, more or less a preserve of the Stewarts or
their close relations until 1424. But the evidence for a Douglas hold on the
southern justiciarship is very limited (although there is virtually no evidence
of its being held by anyone else).65 Archibald Douglas (‘the Grim’), who
became the third earl in 1388, held an ayre at Dumfries in 1383, but the
document recording this fact does not state whether or not it was a justice
ayre.66 Even before he achieved the earldom Archibald was a prominent figure
in royal government, keeper of Edinburgh castle under David II and a regular
name in witness lists to charters of David as well as the first two Stewart
kings:67 exactly the type of man who might well have been appointed justiciar.
60 ER, ii, 82.

61 Raine, North Durham, no. 326.
62 ER, ii, 394, 462; Raine, North Durham, no. 147.
63 Penman, David II, 415‒16; Stephen I. Boardman, The Early Stewart Kings: Robert
II and Robert III, 1371‒1406 (East Linton, 1996), 48.
64 Boardman, Early Stewart Kings, 40‒5. On Douglas’ career see also Penman, David II,
index s.n. ‘Douglas, William, lord of Douglas, 1st earl of Douglas (d.1377)’; Brown,
Black Douglases, 43‒9, 54‒5, 57‒8.
65 David Stewart, earl of Carrick, eldest son of Robert III, held an ayre at Lanark in 1392
(ER, iii, 311). He was only 14 at the time, and the appointment probably symbolised
the end of his pupillarity more than his being a fully-fledged justiciar; but cf.
Boardman, Early Stewart Kings, 194‒7.
66 Melrose Liber, ii, no. 485; cf. Fraser, Douglas Book, i, 337. The ayre was not that of the
chamberlain, for that office was held by Robert Stewart, earl of Fife and Menteith
and later duke of Albany, from November 1382 until March 1407.
67 On Archibald the Grim see Brown, Black Douglases, 53‒71, 76‒92; Boardman, Early
Stewart Kings, index s.n. ‘Douglas, Archibald, 3rd earl of Douglas’.
In 1410, during the Albany governorship, the fourth earl of Douglas, another
Archibald, held a justice ayre south of Forth.68 This appointment too must
reflect the position of the Douglases as ‘unquestionably the most powerful
magnates south of Forth’.69
We know far more about the northern than the southern justiciars in the
latter part of the fourteenth century. William Dishington lost not only his
justiciarship, but also his position as sheriff of Fife, on the accession of
Robert II.70 His successors seem by and large to have been close relations,
either by blood or by marriage, of the new Stewart kings. Thus James Lindsay
of Crawford, who held office in the early 1370s, was a nephew of Robert II,
his mother having been the new king’s half-sister, Egidia, and he himself
seems to have been close to John, earl of Carrick, the new king’s heir.71 James
was first appointed jointly with, and then succeeded by, his other uncle,
Alexander Lindsay of Glenesk, whose second wife, Marjory Stewart, was a
niece of Robert II.72 Alexander had also been a significant figure in the
government of David II, and Boardman argues that the Lindsay justiciar-
ships, like the Douglas one in the south, were the result of the king settling
with major regional magnates in order to gain their support for his succession
in 1371;73 but the possible importance of pre-existing family relationships
should not be overlooked. Alexander Lindsay remained justiciar north of
Forth until at least 1380, and died on pilgrimage in Crete, en route for the
Holy Land, in 1382.
The next known holder of the office, Alexander Stewart, earl of Buchan
(better known to history as the ‘Wolf of Badenoch’), was one of the king’s
younger sons and is first referred to as justiciar in February 1387; but he may
have held office from the early 1380s, perhaps in direct succession to
Alexander Lindsay and over the head of James Lindsay (who had also claimed
the Buchan earldom eventually awarded to Stewart in 1382).74 In December
1388, however, Buchan was accused before the king’s council of negligence
in the administration of his position, and was accordingly relieved of his
duties. The ‘negligence’ lay in a failure to hold courts and ayres ‘when and
where he should’.75 He was replaced first by David Lindsay of Glenesk, son
68 ER, iv, 133. On Archibald see Brown, Black Douglases, 95‒121.

69 Ranald Nicholson, Scotland: The Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh, 1974), 203; and see
Brown, Black Douglases, chs 1‒5.
70 Penman, David II, 418; Duncan, ‘“Laws of Malcolm Mackenneth”’, 261‒2.
71 ER, ii, 435, 437, 457; Sonja Cameron, ‘Lindsay family of Barnweill, Crawford, and
Glenesk (c.1250–c.1400)’, ODNB.
72 See ER, ii, 435, 458‒9, 620; iii, 30‒1, 652; Laing Charters, no. 65; Spalding Misc., ii,
319; Cameron, ‘Lindsay family’, ODNB.
73 Boardman, Early Stewart Kings, 48; also Penman, David II, index s.n. ‘Lindsay,
Alexander, of Glenesk (d.1382)’.
74 Moray Reg., no. 168; Boardman, Early Stewart Kings, 76‒9.
75 RPS, 1388⁄12⁄3; Stephen Boardman, ‘Lordship in the north-east: the Badenoch
of Alexander Lindsay and a prominent courtier who was to become the first
earl of Crawford in 1398. His wife was a daughter of Robert II and accord-
ingly the king would occasionally style him as filius (son).76 Lindsay’s justi-
ciarship was however short; in April 1389, perhaps after the spring ayre,
Murdoch Stewart, son and heir of another of the king’s younger sons, Robert
Stewart, earl of Fife, was appointed to hold office for one year.77
These events of 1388‒9 throw much light on contemporary perceptions
of the justiciarship and its political importance. The council general of
December 1388 that dismissed Buchan had also earlier stripped the king’s
eldest son, John earl of Carrick, of his guardianship of the realm and
conferred it upon his brother Robert, earl of Fife.78 Within a few months of
this appointment Fife ensured the passage of the office of justiciar north of
Forth to his own heir, Murdoch.79 In December 1388 council had laid down
that the new justiciar should be a person who was sufficiens (adequate).80 This
was expanded upon at the time of Murdoch’s appointment in April 1389,
when it was agreed that ayres north of Forth could not easily (commode) be
held at that time ‘without sufficient power’ (sine sufficienti potencia). In conse-
quence Murdoch’s father was enjoined as the guardian of the realm to support
him with ‘sufficient power and council’.81 In other words, while ‘regard for
provincial differences and entrenched feudal power’82 continued to be
important in the appointment of justiciars, the political clout and support of
central government was also essential to their success. There may also be some
reflection on David Lindsay’s capacity to hold the office successfully since,
as already suggested, the events of April 1389 probably followed an earlier
ayre presided over by him. But his removal also meant, of course, that the
leading supporter of the displaced earl of Carrick as guardian of the kingdom
was sidelined.
Murdoch Stewart appears to have held two ayres during his year of office,
for he can be found acting as justiciar north of Forth in January and
November 1390.83 In December 1391 however Walter Stewart, lord of
Stewarts I: Alexander Stewart, Earl of Buchan, Lord of Badenoch’, Northern Scotland

16 (1996), 1‒29; Alexander Grant, ‘Stewart, Alexander, first earl of Buchan (c.1345–
1405)’, ODNB.
76 On David Lindsay see Alison Cathcart and David Ditchburn, ‘Lindsay family, earls
of Crawford (per. c.1380‒1495)’, ODNB; Boardman, Early Stewart Kings, index s.n.
‘Lindsay, David, 1st earl of Crawford, lord of Glen Esk’ and RMS, i, nos 761‒4.
Robert III styled him frater: RMS, i, nos 801, 811, 812.
77 RPS, 1389/3/12.
78 RPS, 1388/12/1; Boardman, Early Stewart Kings, 152‒3.
79 Boardman, Early Stewart Kings, 168‒9.
80 RPS, 1388/12/3.
81 RPS, 1389/3/12.
82 Barrow, Kingdom, 109.
83 Spalding Misc., ii, 319; HMC, vii, II, 718.
Brechin was the king’s justiciar.84 He was a half-brother of the new king
Robert III and his guardian, Robert Stewart, earl of Fife, and played a
prominent role in the royal council throughout the 1390s.85 But from 1392
on, Murdoch appears to have regained and then maintained a firm grip on
the northern justiciarship,86 as well as a high place in the king’s councils. All
this ended, however, when he was captured by the English at the battle of
Humbleton Hill in 1402. He was to remain a prisoner south of the border until
March 1416.87 His duties as justiciar were taken over by his father Robert,
now the duke of Albany, who in 1406 received one hundred pounds ‘for office
of justiciar, having held five ayres by the time of the account north of the
water of Forth’.88 If ayres were held annually at this time, the entry in the
exchequer rolls would fit quite neatly into the period from Murdoch’s capture.
Robert III died in April 1406. His heir, James I, was a captive in England
and for almost the next twenty years supreme power in Scotland rested first
in the hands of Albany and then from 1420 in those of his son Murdoch.89
During this period of the Albany governorship, there is very little evidence
about justiciars and justice ayres. The reference to the earl of Douglas as
justiciar south of Forth in 1410 has already been mentioned,90 and there is
also mention of Albany holding an ayre at Stirling (south of Forth) in 1414.91
North of Forth Alexander Stewart earl of Mar, the illegitimate son of the earl
of Buchan dismissed as justiciar in 1388, was an active lieutenant of the
Albanys, and his role may have included that of justiciar.92 He acquired his
earldom in 1404 jure uxoris (i.e. by right of his wife) and, having led the royal
army in the battle of Harlaw (1411), he became one of the most powerful
figures in the north of Scotland.93
84 HMC, iii, 417.

85 Boardman, Early Stewart Kings, 178, 185; see also below, text with notes 102‒4.
86 Fraser, Menteith, ii, no. 43; Sir William Fraser, The Red Book of Grandtully, 2 vols
(Edinburgh, 1868), no. 84*; ER, iii, 316, 347, 376; AB Ill., iii, 263; Moray Reg., no. 180;
RMS, i, no. 886; HMC, iv, 495.
87 E. W. M. Balfour-Melville, James I (London, 1936), 22, 25‒6, 65; Michael Brown,
James I (Edinburgh, 1994), 17, 19, 20, 26.
88 ER, iii, 644.
89 See further Karen Hunt, ‘The governorship of Robert duke of Albany (1406‒1420)’,
in Brown and Tanner (eds), Scottish Kingship, 126‒54.
90 See above, text accompanying note 68.
91 ER, iv, 412.
92 This may be implied in Fraser, Menteith, i, 261‒2.
93 See Michael Brown, ‘Lordship in the north-east: the Badenoch Stewarts I: Alexander
Stewart, Earl of Mar’, Northern Scotland 16 (1996), 31‒53; David Ditchburn, ‘Stewart,
Alexander, earl of Mar (c.1380‒1435)’, ODNB.
IV
Matters become a little clearer with the return of James I to Scotland in 1424.
Robert Lauder of the Bass (East Lothian) and Edrington (Berwickshire),
direct descendant in the male line of the Robert Lauders who had been justi-
ciars a century earlier,94 appears regularly in the witness lists of royal charters
from 1425 to December 1426 as ‘justiciar’, and from then through 1427 as
‘justiciar south of Forth’. Lauder has been described as ‘among James’s
administrative workhorses’, a ‘close councillor’ of the king, and a ‘hard-line
royal loyalist’; in 1431 he sat as an auditor of complaints in parliament.95 He
is referred to as justiciar of Scotia in 1425.96 Since the usage north or south
of Forth was otherwise the norm in the reign of James I, the title here may
suggest that Lauder was justiciar for the whole kingdom in 1425. In 1427 and
1428 Patrick Ogilvy appears in the witness lists with equal regularity as
justiciar north of Forth. Both Lauder and Ogilvy were also sheriffs, respec-
tively of Lothian and Angus. The former played a part in the negotiations for
the release of the king from his English captivity,97 while Ogilvy, a ‘trusted
adviser’ to the king, died in his service as an ambassador to France.98 As well
as having appropriate local connections therefore, both men were active in
diplomacy as well as legal work.
This was probably also true of Thomas Somerville, the only other justiciar
south of Forth of whom evidence has been discovered in the reign of James I;
certainly he ‘acted as a councillor in judicial business, and was also an auditor
of causes in parliament’.99 He was also a considerable landowner in
Lanarkshire whose son was to become a lord of Parliament in the next reign,
and who himself was called the ‘lord of Somerville’ as early as 1430.100 He
may have held his office as justiciar from 1428 to 1435, in succession to
Lauder. Given the earlier Douglas dominance of the southern justiciarship,
it is worth noting that Lauder and Somerville both had strong Douglas
connections, so that their rise to office should not necessarily be seen as an
194 The most thorough account of the Lauder descent (although not necessarily reliable)
is still C. A. B. Lawder, The Lawders of the Bass and their Descendants (Belfast, 1914),
19‒23.
195 Brown, James I, 27, 47, 51, 53, 57; Brown, Black Douglases, 235; Alan R. Borthwick,
‘The King, Council and Councillors in Scotland, c.1430‒1460’, unpublished PhD
thesis (University of Edinburgh, 1989), 30, 33, 37‒9.
196 Laing Charters, no. 81; RMS, ii, no. 29.
197 Balfour-Melville, James I, 93, 96.
198 See Brown, James I, 50, 80, 96, 110; also Balfour-Melville, James I, 162‒3.
199 For his career see Borthwick, ‘Council’, 32, 43‒4; Alan Borthwick and Hector
MacQueen, ‘Three fifteenth-century cases’, Juridical Review 31 (1986), 123‒51, at pp.
124 (where however he is described as ‘specially constituted’), 150; Brown, James I, 51.
100 See Alexander Grant, ‘The development of the Scottish peerage’, SHR 57 (1978),
1‒27, at pp. 12‒17.
anti-Douglas move by James I, despite the king’s uneasy relationship through-

out his reign with the fifth earl, who had succeeded his father in 1424.101
We know of two northern justiciars towards the end of the reign of James I.
Walter Stewart, the earl of Atholl, Strathearn and Caithness, appears in the
office in July 1433 and October 1435.102 An uncle of the king, he had been
active politically at the centre of government since the reign of his half-
brother Robert III. This activity, it will be recalled, had included the office
of justiciar as early as 1391 when his only title was lord of Brechin.103 But
now Walter’s earldoms gave him considerable power and status in the north
of Scotland. While conducting the royal ayre in 1433 he took the opportunity
also to pause at Logierait and consider a civil case in his regality of Atholl,
raised by a pleadable brieve of dissasine that would otherwise have been
within his justiciary jurisdiction.104 Alexander Stewart, earl of Mar, who
likewise had had a long political career and become an active supporter of the
king in the north, held an ayre at Inverness as justiciar, presumably north of
Forth, before June 1435, as well as one at Aberdeen at some other unspecified
but presumably similar date.105 It may be that Walter resumed the northern
justiciarship after Alexander’s death in July 1435, but it is not clear whether
he still held it when playing a leading role in the conspiracy leading to the
king’s assassination in February 1437.
The death of James I led to the lengthy minority of James II. In November
1437, with the fifth earl of Douglas established as the lieutenant-general of
the kingdom, we find his cousin James Douglas of Balvenie, earl of Avondale
as ‘justiciar of the whole realm of Scots generally constituted’,106 showing
again that it was not unthinkable for the offices to be combined in one man.
But by 1441, when he had become the seventh earl of Douglas, his office was
confined to the regions south of Forth; he probably retained it until his death
101 Brown, Black Douglases, 91, 100, 145, 152, 176 (Lauder); ibid., 178, 263 (Somerville);
see also Borthwick, ‘Council’, 34‒6.
102 Charters of the Abbey of Coupar Angus, 2 vols, ed. D. E. Easson (SHS, 1947), ii,
no. 128; Inventory of Pitfirrane Writs, 1230‒1794, ed. William Angus (SRS, 1932),
no. 24.
103 See above, text with notes 84‒5; Brown, James I, index s.n. ‘Stewart, Walter, earl of
Atholl, Caithness and Strathearn, son of Robert II (d.1437)’.
104 Charters of the Abbey of Coupar Angus, ii, no. 128; MacQueen, Common Law, 112,
146. For the earldom of Atholl as a regality see NLS, Adv. MS 34.6.24, p. 39
(note of a royal grant in 1403 but without detail as to the substance of the grant
of regality jurisdiction); also Alexander Grant, ‘The Higher Nobility in Scotland
and their Estates, c.1371‒1424’ unpublished DPhil thesis (University of Oxford,
1975), 120. See above, note 15, on the relationship of justiciary and regality juris-
dictions.
105 ER, iv, 634 (Inverness); vi, 264 (Aberdeen). See further Brown, James I, index s.n.
‘Stewart, Alexander, earl of Mar (d.1435)’.
106 Fraser, Douglas Book, iii, no. 301.
in 1443.107 Douglas has perhaps been maligned too much by historians as a

result of the soubriquet, ‘the Gross’, first attached to him by the later
sixteenth-century chronicler, Pitscottie,108 and the way in which he acquired
his earldom through the execution of his nephew, the sixth earl, at the ‘Black
Dinner’ in 1440 (although James’ presence there may have lent a faint tinge
of judicial respectability to the proceedings).109 The records suggest a long
career in government: as early as 1405 he was warden of the march and later
he was one of the ambassadors who treated for the release of James I from
his English captivity. Thereafter, judging from his quite frequent position as
a witness to the great seal charters, he appears to have been a loyal (if never
fully trusted) servant of the king.110 Douglas became very prominent in the
government of the early years of the royal minority in addition to his work as
justiciar, which reinvigorated his family’s control of southern Scotland.
The same observation holds good for his contemporary as justiciar north
of Forth, Alexander MacDonald, lord of the Isles and earl of Ross.111
Alexander’s dominance of the Highlands and islands must have helped the
northern justiciarship and the minority regime at the same time, perhaps, as
the office reinforced Alexander’s already powerful position in the region. The
man who apparently succeeded Douglas in the south was Alexander Livingston
of Callendar, whom we find holding an ayre at Dumbarton in 1444.112 He
also appears as justiciar of ‘Scotia’ in September 1449, a few months after
the death of the lord of the Isles;113 it is possible therefore that he had by then
become justiciar of the entire kingdom. By this time Livingston had risen to
a supreme position within the minority government, so his occupation of the
office of justiciar manifests its high political significance.114
107 Charter chest of the earldom of Wigtown, 1214‒1681, ed. F. J. Grant (SRS, 1910), no.
24 (1442); The Correspondence, Inventories, Account Rolls and Law Proceedings of the
Priory of Coldingham, ed. J. Raine (Surtees Society, 1841), 148.
108 Robert Lindesay of Pitscottie, The Historie and Cronicles of Scotland, 3 vols, ed. Æ.
J. G. Mackay (STS, 1899‒1911), i, 46. The corpulence that gave rise to the nickname
is however attested by the near-contemporary Auchinleck Chronicle: Christine
McGladdery, James II (Edinburgh, 1990), 161.
109 The reference to the attendance of ‘James the second beand Justice’ at the Black
Dinner in the short chronicle appended to one MS of Wyntoun’s Orygynale
Cronykyl (BL, Royal MS 17 DXX, fo. 307, quoted by McGladdery, James II, 130) is
surely to James, second earl of Douglas of that name, rather than to King James II.
110 See Brown, James I, index s.n. ‘Douglas, James, lord of Balvenie, earl of Avandale,
7th earl of Douglas (d.1443)’; Brown, Black Douglases, 233‒50, 255‒67; Borthwick,
‘Council’, 32, 45‒6; RMS, ii, reign of James I, witness nos 6, 13 and 25.
111 See Jean and R. W. Munro (eds), Acts of the Lords of the Isles, 1336‒1493 (SHS, 1986),
nos 27, 28, 32, 37, 38, 39, 40, 46.
112 ER, v, 249.
113 Rymer, Foedera, xi, 238 (CDS, iv, no. 1216).
114 McGladdery, James II, 14‒54; Borthwick, ‘Council’, 58‒62, 81‒2, 89.
The difference in the justiciary after James II overthrew Livingston in late

1449 and assumed active control of government is striking. The offices ceased
to be held by one person over long periods of time, and the holders of the
office, while clearly king’s men, did not have the same supremacy in
government or the territorial dominance enjoyed by Douglas, Livingston and
the lord of the Isles in the minority years. Indeed, their territorial links were
frequently outside the region in which they acted as justiciars. The pattern
also fits with the way in which the king first cut down, then in 1455 destroyed,
the power exerted by the earl of Douglas, as well as putting a distance between
himself and the lord of the Isles.
Andrew, first lord Gray appears as a justiciar in Aberdeen c.1450; he was
also master of the king’s household as well as being amongst the assassins of
the eighth earl of Douglas on 22 February 1452.115 Sir George Crichton,
admiral of Scotland and ‘a demonstrably consistent king’s man’ who became
earl of Caithness in 1452,116 appears as justiciar in December 1452, while an
entry in the exchequer rolls after his death in 1454 shows him to have been
justiciar at Ayr.117 William Sinclair earl of Orkney, chancellor of Scotland
1454‒6, is designated justiciar south of Forth in the contemporary text Ordo
Justiciarie.118 Laurence, lord Abernethy in Rothiemay, another lord of
parliament and erstwhile Douglas supporter who switched sides after the
eighth earl’s killing in 1452, was justiciar south of Forth in March 1455
(despite extensive landholdings in northern as well as southern Scotland),
and acted earlier as auditor of causes and complaints in councils general of
1441 and 1450.119 John, lord Lindsay of Byres, another Douglas supporter
who changed sides in 1452, was justiciar north of Forth in October and
115 Borthwick, ‘Council’, 496 (citing Aberdeen City Archives, CR 511, p. 751, for which
see now Aberdeen Guild Court Records, 133).
116 McGladdery, James II, 154; Annie I. Dunlop, The Life and Times of James Kennedy,
Bishop of St Andrews (Edinburgh, 1950), 57; Borthwick, ‘Council’, 131‒4, 496.
117 NLS, Adv. Charter B68; ER, vi, 178.
118 For the Ordo see APS, i, 705; MacQueen, Common Law, 61, 84, 153, 161, 162;
Duncan, ‘“Laws of Malcolm Mackenneth”’, 252, 260‒73; Jackson W. Armstrong,
‘The justice ayre in the Border sheriffdoms, 1493‒1498’, SHR 92 (2013), 1‒37, at
pp. 9‒13. On Sinclair, note also Borthwick, ‘Council’, 389.
119 Borthwick and MacQueen, ‘Three fifteenth-century cases’, 128, 150; see also APS,
ii, 76 for Abernethy as the king’s justiciar. The exchequer rolls for 1455 show Aber-
nethy acting with Sir Robert Livingstone of Drumry as justiciars in the former
Douglas regality of Annandale (which had reverted to the king in 1440): ER, vi, 333,
444. Livingstone too sat on the king’s council acting judicially, and had a long
political career from the 1440s until the 1460s: Borthwick, ‘Council’, 65‒7, 296.
William lord Somerville acted as justiciar in Annandale earlier in the 1450s: ER, v,
670 (see further Borthwick, ‘Council’, 296).
November 1457, having become a lord of parliament by May 1452 and also
having been an ambassador and sat judicially on the king’s council.120 His
main lands, Byres and Abercorn, were both south of Forth, so his appoint-
ment in the north was an innovation.
Another lord of parliament, Andrew Stewart, lord Avondale, is designated
justiciar south of Forth when witnessing two royal charters in May 1458.121
The illegitimate son of the elder son of Murdoch Stewart, duke of Albany (a
justiciar in the 1390s), and, like Gray, a participant in the assassination of the
earl of Douglas in 1452, he rose rapidly through the royal household,
receiving a knighthood, the formerly Douglas barony of Avondale in Lanark-
shire and his lordship of parliament, before becoming warden of the west
march in 1459 and chancellor in 1460, just before James II’s death at
Roxburgh in July that year.122
Avondale continued to act as justiciar south of Forth during the minority
of James III, holding an ayre at Dumfries between 1460 and 1464, and another
at Ayr in 1460.123 Clearly an indispensable royal administrator, he would
remain chancellor until 1482. Lindsay of Byres also continued to hold office
during the minority, being again justiciar north of Forth in June 1466.124
There were, however, experiments in justiciary arrangements during the
James III minority (which lasted until November 1469). Although Gilbert,
lord Kennedy appears as a solo justiciar in the treason trial of the earl of
Rothes in Edinburgh in October 1464125 (at the time when, as nearest male
agnate, he was custodian of the young king), two justiciars were quite
frequently appointed to hold ayres jointly on other occasions south of Forth,
both before and after 1464.126 Thus in February 1461 Colin Campbell, first
earl of Argyll and master of the royal household127 and Robert, lord Boyd,
then best known as lord of parliament and long-standing servant of the
120 Dunfermline Reg., no. 452; AB Ill., iv, 205; Spalding Misc., v, 264‒5. See further
Grant, ‘Scottish peerage’, 13; Borthwick, ‘Council’, 224, 312 note 166.
121 NRS, Papers of the Montgomerie Family, Earls of Eglinton, GD3⁄1⁄1⁄41⁄5; Charters
of the Royal Burgh of Ayr (Ayrshire and Wigtonshire Archaeological Association,
1883), no. 19. I owe these references to Alan Borthwick.
122 Alan R. Borthwick, ‘Stewart, Andrew, Lord Avondale (c.1420‒1488)’, ODNB.
123 ER, vii, 281; Muniments of the Royal Burgh of Irvine, 2 vols, ed. J. Shedden-Dobie
(Ayrshire and Wigtonshire Archaeological Association, 1890‒1), i, no. 13.
124 Dunfermline Reg., no. 458.
125 HMC, iv, 507; see also RMS, ii, no. 812.
126 There were precedents: e.g. the joint appointments of Robert Erskine and
Hugh Eglinton as justiciars of Scotia in 1360 (Fraser, Menteith, ii, no. 29; RRS, vi,
no. 228) and of James Lindsay of Crawford and Alexander Lindsay of Glenesk
north of Forth in 1373 (ER, ii, 435). For examples before 1300 see Barrow, Kingdom,
103‒4.
127 See Stephen Boardman, The Campbells, 1250‒1513 (Edinburgh, 2006), 166‒258 on
Argyll’s career.
crown,128 held court together at Dumbarton as ‘justices’ south of Forth.129

Argyll’s landed interests lay primarily north (and west) of Forth, so his
appointment again points to the decreasing significance of the location of a
justiciar’s main estates. In January 1465, two lords of parliament, William,
lord Abernethy in Rothiemay and William, lord Borthwick held an ayre
together at Jedburgh as ‘justices on southhalffe Forthe’.130 In January 1466
William Edmonstone of Duntreath and Gilbert Kennedy of Bargany, respec-
tively half-brother and cousin of Gilbert lord Kennedy,131 were together justi-
ciars south of Forth ‘generally constituted’ at Ayr.132
Such arrangements seem to have been abandoned, however, after Robert,
lord Boyd and his brother Alexander seized control of the young king in a
coup displacing Lord Kennedy in July 1466. In January 1467 Edmonstone
of Duntreath was the only justiciar south of Forth,133 and in October 1468
Robert, first lord Lyle was alone as justiciar in an ayre at Dumfries.134 But in
March 1471, with James III now in control of government, Edmonstone acted
jointly with Master David Guthrie of that ilk at Edinburgh.135 Perhaps
Guthrie was serving a form of apprenticeship, for by November 1472 he was
the sole justiciar south of Forth generally constituted at Ayr, albeit with as
powerful a figure as the earl of Argyll as his depute.136 The experiment of
appointing one man to hold the justiciary for the entire kingdom may have
been renewed, for in 1473 Guthrie appears as justiciar ‘of Scotia’ or ‘of the
realm’.137 His successful career as a ‘graduate laird’, who held numerous other
important offices between 1461 and his death in 1474, is well known. He was
the first justiciar with a university degree, albeit in arts, and was an active
court pleader.138
128 Norman Macdougall, James III (2nd edn, Edinburgh, 2009), 68‒9.
129 Wigtown Charter Chest, no. 31.
130 NRS, Lord Advocate’s Department Writs, AD 1/60, printed Borthwick and
MacQueen, ‘Three fifteenth-century cases’, 136.
131 The Kennedys of Bargany descended from an uncle of Gilbert, lord Kennedy:
Hector L. MacQueen, ‘Survival and success: the Kennedys of Dunure’, in Steve
Boardman and Alasdair Ross (eds), The Exercise of Power in Medieval Scotland,
c.1200‒1500 (Dublin, 2003), 67‒94, at p. 87.
132 Irvine Muniments, i, no. 13.
133 Morton Reg., ii, no. 223.
134 APS, ii, 94.
135 HMC, xiv, III, 27.
136 Irvine Muniments, i, no. 13.
137 NRS, Rollo of Duncrub Muniments, GD 56/11. See also Facsimiles of National
Manuscripts of Scotland, 3 vols, eds Joseph Robertson, Cosmo Innes and Sir William
Gibson-Craig (London, 1867‒71), ii, no. 71 (misattributed to the reign of James II),
showing Guthrie, ‘justiciar of our kingdom’, being sent on embassy to the king of
France, probably in early summer 1473: Macdougall, James III, 119; TA, i, 66, 68.
138 See Alan R. Borthwick and Hector L. MacQueen, ‘“Rare creatures for their age”:
It is also just possible that Edmonstone of Duntreath combined the

southern and northern offices before Guthrie did, as the former appears as
justiciar north of Forth in Perth in November 1470,139 just a matter of months
before he appeared as justiciar south of Forth with Guthrie in March 1471.
Edmonstone had an even longer career as a James III loyalist than Guthrie,
lasting until his death in 1487, and including being elected to the parlia-
mentary committee falsing dooms in 1478.140 He may have been brought into
royal government work during the king’s minority by association with his
brother-in-law Andrew, lord Avondale, whose claim to the Lennox earldom
he supported in return for his own barony (Duntreath, lying within the old
earldom lands) being kept independent of the earl’s jurisdiction as it had been
since James I’s dismemberment of the earldom in 1425.141 Edmonstone’s
mother Mary Stewart was a legitimate daughter of King Robert III, so that
through her he was also related to the king himself as well as more closely to
Gilbert, lord Kennedy, the offspring of another of Mary’s four marriages.142
Apart from a possible reference to Thomas lord Erskine acting at Stirling
in 1474,143 and another in 1478 to ‘my lord of Albanyis justice are’ (an ayre
held probably at Jedburgh by the king’s brother, Alexander duke of Albany),144
there is no evidence for the justiciars south of Forth for the years between
1472 and Archibald, earl of Angus being forced to resign the office in 1483.145
This last, however, should not be taken as an indication of a failure by Angus
to discharge his duties properly. One of the leaders of the opposition party
led by the disaffected Albany that precipitated the crisis with James III at
Lauder in July 1482, there is every reason to suppose that he acquired the
office in consequence, as for a long time before the crisis he had been out of
favour with the king. Indeed, he possibly went on ayre in the autumn of 1482
since his name is conspicuous by its absence from the witness lists of royal
charters during that time. Angus’ dismissal came after James III regained full
authority. The next clear reference to the justiciary south of Forth, in 1485,
Alexander and David Guthrie, graduate lairds and royal servants’, in Barbara E.
Crawford (ed.), Church, Chronicle and Learning in Medieval and Early Renaissance
Scotland (Edinburgh, 1999), 227‒33.
139 NRS, Register House Charters, RH6/428. I owe this reference to Alan Borthwick.
140 RPS, 1478⁄6⁄4.
141 See Macdougall, James III, 139; HMC, Various Colls, v, 79‒80; Sir William Fraser,
The Lennox, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1874), ii, no. 64.
142 Mary Stewart (d.c.1458) was married to George Douglas, first earl of Angus (d.1403),
Sir James Kennedy of Dunure (d.1406), Sir William Graham of Montrose (d.1424)
and Sir William Edmonstone first of Duntreath (d.1460).
143 TA, i, 53.
144 Acts of the Lords of Council in Civil Causes, 1478‒1495, ed. Thomas Thomson
(Edinburgh, 1839), 14.
145 APS, xii, 33.
once again shows two king’s men acting jointly, the veteran Andrew, lord
Avondale and Robert, second lord Lyle.146
North of Forth, however, there is no evidence for the appointment of joint
justiciars for almost the whole of the reign of James III. Robert, first lord
Lyle held an ayre in 1471 alone at Cupar, where, in 1478, John Haldane of
Gleneagles held another ayre.147 George Gordon, earl of Huntly was
appointed justiciar north of Forth in October 1479 and was apparently still
in office in 1482.148 The ayre of Fife in 1487 was however held by David
Lindsay earl of Crawford, trusted servant of James III as master of the royal
household and chamberlain from the early 1480s.149 It looks as though the
rather wavering practice south of Forth did not affect the northern office.
We may therefore look in a new light at an act of parliament in October
1487 stating that one or two justice generals were to be made south and also
north of Forth.150 This places matters in the south on a statutory footing and
considers desirable the extension of practice there to the north. Further acts
in January 1488 effectively commanded double appointments on both
circuits.151 David Lindsay, earl of Crawford and George Gordon, earl of
Huntly, both past holders of the office, were to be justiciars north of Forth.
Two names were to be selected from a list of four for the southern office. Only
one of these four, Robert, second lord Lyle, had previously been a justiciar.
But two others, John, lord Glamis and John, lord Drummond, were to have
long careers as justiciars under James IV. The last of the four, John Ramsey,
lord Bothwell, was designated as a royal justiciar along with Lyle immediately
after the passage of the 1488 act, but, having been a favourite of James III, he
did not attain similar heights in the next reign.152
VI
The justiciars of James III were generally government men, significant coun-
sellors of the king: clearly so with such as Avondale, Argyll, Crawford,
Edmonstone, Guthrie, Huntly, and Lyle, and probably with Haldane as
146 Charters and Documents relating to the Burgh of Peebles, 1165‒1710, ed. William
Chambers (Scottish Burgh Records Society, 1872), no. 16.
147 Acts of the Lords Auditors of Causes and Complaints, 1468‒1494, ed. Thomas Thomson
(Edinburgh, 1839), 12 (Lyle), 66 (Haldane).
148 The Records of Aboyne, 1230‒1681, ed. Charles, marquis of Huntly (New Spalding
Club, 1894), 401; The Book of the Thanes of Cawdor, 1236‒1732, ed. Cosmo Innes
(Spalding Club, 1859), 63.
149 NRS, Acta Dominorum Concilii, CS 5⁄16, fo. 6; Society of Antiquaries Writs,
GD 103/2/42.
150 RPS, 1487/10/6.
151 RPS, 1488/1/13 and 14.
152 Macdougall, James III, 298‒301.
well.153 Similar observations hold good for the justiciars of the next reign.
Moreover, because the office-bearers were so often designated as justiciar in
the witness lists of royal charters under the great seal, their periods of office
can be ascertained.154 From 1488 to 1495 there were normally only two justi-
ciars, but there is no indication of a geographical division of work.
Throughout that period John Lyon, third lord Glamis, a graduate probably
of Paris although in arts rather than law,155 acted as one of the justiciars. His
first colleague was Robert, lord Lyle, but after involvement in a rebellion in
early 1489 he was dismissed.156 John, lord Drummond then held office until
1491 when Lyle, restored to favour,157 was given back his former position,
which he retained until 1495. The earliest surviving justiciary records show
Lyle holding the justiciary court at Lauder and Jedburgh in November 1493
jointly, not with Glamis, but with Laurence, lord Oliphant.158 That may have
been a temporary expedient to meet some difficulty elsewhere, for in February
and March 1495 the records describe Lyle and Glamis as justiciars south of
Forth. This however may have been at the close of their careers in the offices,
as their depute, John lord Drummond seems to have been the man who
actually presided over the ayre.159 From 1494 Drummond was constantly
designated justiciar in the great seal charters, so perhaps he acted then north
of Forth. The only person so designated from 1495 to 1497, he was possibly
sole justiciar for that period. In 1498 he was described as justiciar both north
and south of Forth generally constituted.160 By that time, however, his career
was at an end, and he is not heard of again as a justiciar. In 1497 Andrew,
second lord Gray was a justiciar alongside Drummond, being joined in 1499
by George, earl of Huntly, now the chancellor. Huntly died in 1501 and Gray
continued thereafter as the only justiciar. In 1504 he was described as ‘justice
general of the whole realm of Scots’.161 He can be regarded as the first real
justice general; the office was never again divided, either regionally or
between individuals.
153 See Macdougall, James III, passim.

154 The other sources that can be relied upon for this period are the justiciary records
(surviving from 1493: NRS, JC1/1), the Exchequer Rolls, and the Treasurer’s Accounts.
155 See Alan R. Borthwick, ‘Lyon, Patrick, first Lord Glamis (c.1400‒1460)’, ODNB.
156 Norman Macdougall, James IV (Edinburgh, 1989), 64‒76.
157 Macdougall, James IV, 80‒1.
158 NRS, JC1/1, fos 1r., 7r. See further Armstrong, ‘Justice ayre in the Border
sheriffdoms’, 3‒8.
159 NRS, JC1/1, fos 18r., 29r.
160 ER, xi, 316*.
161 RPS, A1504/3/148.
VII
Glamis, Lyle, Drummond and Gray were all key men in the administration
of James IV.162 The same is also true of Oliphant, and of Huntly, whose
importance is sufficiently shown by his appointment to the chancellorship in
1497.163 Huntly and (to a lesser extent) Lyle apart, all had been frustrated in
career ambitions under James III and had taken the side of James IV in the
struggle leading to Sauchieburn in 1488.164 All, however, had held judicial
positions other than that of justiciar under James III. Glamis, Oliphant,
Drummond and Lyle acted as auditors of causes and complaints in the parlia-
ments of James III, while Gray was sheriff of Forfar and, under James IV, a
fairly regular member of the king’s council in its judicial sessions.165 Lyle and
Drummond (as the lord of Stobhall) were members of a parliamentary
committee appointed to examine the law of purpresture in 1482.166 Thus it
is quite apparent that all these men were seen as having talents for judicial
and legal work. It would be wrong to suppose that they lacked legal skills and
knowledge or were unable to tackle the work falling to their lot.
Quite apart from the fact that in general the justiciars themselves were
members of the king’s government in other capacities, they frequently
received support on their ayres from their fellow royal councillors.167 There
are also numerous examples of deputes holding courts on their behalf, who
appear usually to have been men less involved in the office of central
government than their principals, yet still landowners of local prominence.168
Justiciars north and south of Forth seem each to have had a clerk in the mid-
fourteenth century. Thus Adam Forrester was appointed to ‘the office of clerk
162 See Macdougall, James IV, index s.nn. ‘Glamis, John Lyon, 3rd Lord’, ‘Lyle, Robert,
2nd Lord’, ’Drummond, John, of Cargill, 1st Lord Drummond’ and ‘Gray, Andrew,
2nd Lord’.
163 Macdougall, James IV, index s.nn. ‘Oliphant, Laurence, 1st Lord’ and ‘Gordon,
George, 2nd earl of Huntly’.
164 Macdougall, James III, 336, 338, 340.
165 Trevor M. Chalmers, ‘The King’s Council, Patronage and the Governance of
Scotland, 1460–1513’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Aberdeen, 1982), 180‒3,
459, 462. For Gray as sheriff of Forfar see RMS, ii, nos 1806, 2257; ER, xi, 330*.
166 RPS, 1482⁄3⁄21.
167 MacQueen, Common Law, 64. See also for the 1450s Borthwick, ‘Council’, 193‒4,
384.
168 For references to ‘lieutenants’ of the justiciar early in the fourteenth century see BL,
Add. MS 33245, fos 156v.–157r.; Fraser, Southesk, ii, no. 36 and ER, i, 558‒9. From
c.1360, references are to the justice-depute: ER, ii, 438; Pitfirrane Writs, nos 16, 22;
Peebles Chrs, no. 16; Moray Reg., no. 203; The Protocol Book of James Young, 1485‒
1515, ed. Gordon Donaldson (SRS, 1952), nos 725, 962, 1211. See also on Sir Walter
Moigne as possibly depute justiciar to Robert Erskine in the 1360s, Duncan, ‘“Laws
of Malcolm Mackenneth”’, 262‒70.
of the rolls of the justiciary south of Forth’ in 1362169 and in 1366, as clerk of
the rolls, he inserted a process in the justiciary rolls, having affixed the seal
of the justiciary of Lothian to it.170 He was therefore in attendance upon the
court and kept its records and seal. In 1374 Alan Lauder, a descendant of the
Robert Lauders who had been justiciars under Robert I and David II,
received a pension of ten pounds for his labours ‘in the office of the clerk of
the rolls of the justiciary south of Forth’.171 Alan was a trusted adherent of
the first earl of Douglas, southern justiciar at the time.172 In 1369 William
Chalmer was granted ‘the office of clerk of the rolls of the justiciary north of
Forth’.173 By 1380 Chalmer was designated simply as ‘justice clerk of our lord
king’,174 and in 1398 he was still ‘the justice clerk’,175 without any particular
geographical limitation to the office being apparent. He was also secretary
for a time to the Wolf of Badenoch, but clearly his appointment as justice
clerk comfortably straddled his master’s period as justiciar north of Forth
c.1382‒8, suggesting that in his hands at least the subordinate office was less
vulnerable to the changeable weather of higher politics.176
If however Chalmer did become the sole justice clerk, this did not establish
the office on those lines. The Paris graduate Master Alexander Guthrie was
clerk of the justiciary under Walter Stewart earl of Atholl, justiciar north of
Forth, in October 1435.177 By the middle of the fifteenth century there appear
to have been ‘justice clerkis’,178 one perhaps being Robert Nairn, steward of
the king and depute chamberlain.179 In 1473 James III appointed his familiar
armigerum (esquire) William Haket of Belses (Roxburghshire) clerk of justi-
ciary south of Forth; this must have been a reappointment, for Haket had
held the office in 1465.180 R. K. Hannay was probably correct to suggest that
169 RMS, i, no. 100 and note; cf. RMS, i, app. 2, no. 1461.
170 Raine, North Durham, no. 326.
171 RMS, i, no. 456; HMC, v, 611. For his descent, see Lawder, Lawders of the Bass, 19‒23.
172 Brown, Black Douglases, 83, 165, 168‒70.
173 RMS, i, no. 295.
174 Moray Reg., no. 159.
175 Moray Reg., p. 210.
176 See above, pp. 102‒3; MacQueen, Common Law, 55, 81; Alexander Grant, ‘The Wolf
of Badenoch’, in W. D. H. Sellar (ed.), Moray: Province and People (Edinburgh,
1994), 143‒61, at p. 147; Duncan, ‘“Laws of Malcolm Mackenneth”’, 269. See also
D. E. R. Watt, A Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Graduates to AD 1410 (Oxford,
1977), 76‒8.
177 NLS, Pitfirrane Writs, Charter 6024, noted by Borthwick and MacQueen, ‘“Rare
creatures”’, 228. Note too that Guthrie was earlier (in 1428) secretary to Sir Patrick
Ogilvy sheriff of Angus, at a time when Ogilvy was also justiciar north of Forth.
178 RPS, 1450/1/27.
179 ER, vi, 98. Note also Mark Haliburton as justice clerk of the forfeited Douglas
lordship of Galloway in 1457 (ER, vi, 353). For him see Borthwick, ‘Council’, 161.
180 RMS, ii, no. 1119; NRS, Lord Advocate’s Department Writs, AD1/60.
the final emergence of a single ‘justice clerk general’ came later in the reign,
and it seems likely that the first holder of the office was Richard Lawson, one
of the most prominent lawyers of his time; here we may note in particular his
membership of the parliamentary committee appointed to examine the law
of purpresture in 1482.181 It is probable that legal skills and knowledge were
similarly required of his predecessors.
There can be little doubt that in consequence such skills were readily
available to the justiciars, and there is every reason to suppose that they them-
selves did not lack them. Indeed these may well have enabled rises from
relative provincial obscurity to great national prominence. Men like the first
Robert Lauder, Robert Erskine, Andrew, lord Avondale and John, lord
Drummond are good examples but surely not the only ones. There is a
temptation to make something of the general disappearance of earls from the
justiciarship, but it is too easy to suppose that this reflects a change in the
nature of the office from a possession of the upper ranks of the nobility to
one occupied by ‘professionals’. Those fourteenth- and fifteenth-century earls
who were justiciars were, like their lesser colleagues, also generally active
elsewhere in government; they were ‘political’ earls. Equally the politically
ascending Drummonds, Lyles and Avondales of the later fifteenth century
have equivalents in earlier periods – the Randolphs, Lauders, Erskines and
Somervilles.
What is striking, however, is that before the reign of James III men like
these tended to ‘arrive’ under the personal rule of kings previously hobbled
by war, minority, captivity abroad or some combination of these things: most
notably Robert I, David II, James I and James II. During guardianships, lieu-
tenancies and governorships before the minority of James III, the justiciar-
ships tended to be held – or acquired – by magnates whose territorial power
bases enabled them to exert meaningful control over their regions, such as
the Douglases south of Forth and various branches of the Stewarts in the
north. This was also the situation that seemed to develop under Robert II
and Robert III, when first the former was disabled by age and then the latter
by a horse’s kick before he even became king, and the earl of Fife, later first
duke of Albany, took charge of government.
Whether intentionally or not, James I’s cutting down of his own Stewart
family, and his son’s destruction of the Douglases, together changed perma-
nently not only the overall structure of the Scottish nobility,182 but also the
extent to which a large landed power base either north or south of Forth was
181 R. K. Hannay, ‘The office of the justice clerk’, Juridical Review 48 (1936), 311‒29,
at p. 313; Chalmers, ‘King’s Council’, 188‒9, 245‒6; John Finlay, Men of Law in Pre-
Reformation Scotland (East Linton, 2000), index s.n. ‘Lawson, Richard, of Hie Riggs,
advocate and lord justice clerk’; and see RPS, 1482/3/21 for the purpresture
committee.
182 See on this theme Brown, ‘Taming the magnates?’, 51‒5.
of importance to the effectiveness of the justiciary. A local base clearly did

not matter very much to the justiciars in the minority of James III (although
this might be linked to the experiment at that time of appointing pairs of
justiciars south of Forth), or in his or James IV’s periods of personal rule. It
is true that the earls of Huntly and Crawford, who held office north of Forth
at different times between 1479 and 1500, were important landowners there;
but otherwise the local power base seems not to be especially relevant. All
later medieval justiciars, earls or not, were of course landowners; officers of
law, in the words of a statute of 1424 echoed in 1487, needed to have ‘sufficient
of their own’ in order to function in accordance with the expectations of
contemporary society.183 But where their lands lay, and their extent, mattered
less by 1513 than it had a century before.
The justiciars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were not ‘profes-
sional’ judges as we would recognise that term today, spending their working
lives acting solely in a judicial capacity. If they were of any profession it was
that of ‘politician’ or ‘civil servant’; and evidently being a justiciar was one of
the prizes of a political career. Especially in the fifteenth century, many held
office for short periods – say for a year, or perhaps only for one ayre – but not
infrequently more than once in their careers. Justiciarships appear therefore
to have been delegated from time to time to members of the king’s council.
Although some held office for longer, justiciars were indeed a ‘part-time, lay
magistracy’.184 But it need not follow that they merely masqueraded as judges.
As Bruce McFarlane put it: ‘We are entitled to believe that those who
appeared to function did so until the contrary is proved’.185 If we ask how
these men came to be part of the king’s government and why specifically they
rather than many available others were appointed, the answer must be their
deemed fitness for the task by the standards of the time – whatever those may
have been and however different from our own or those of other countries
then and now.
183 RPS, 1424/6; 1487/10/6; cf. 1388/12/3, 1389/3/12.

184 Thomas M. (Lord) Cooper, Selected Papers, 1922‒1954 (Edinburgh, 1957), 227.
185 K. B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford, 1973), 229‒30.
Appendix: Scottish Justiciars, c.1306‒1513
Dates South of Forth Dates North of Forth

1316 x 1319 James Douglas 1310‒12 Robert Keith
c.1319–c.1337 Robert Lauder ‘the 1319 x 1333 William Muschet
elder’/‘the father’ of Cargill
1320‒32 Thomas Randolph,
earl of Moray, lord of
Annandale and Man
1335 William Meldrum
1336‒7 Robert Lauder ‘the
younger’
1337 Adam Buttergask
1339‒58 William, 5th earl of
Ross
Ante 1360‒3 William Douglas, 1st 1358 (?) William Meldrum
earl of Douglas
1366 Robert Erskine 1359–c.1368 Robert Erskine (and
Hugh Eglinton 1360)
1370 William Dishington
1371‒4 William Douglas, 1st Ante 1373 James Lindsay of
earl of Douglas Crawford (with
Alexander Lindsay
of Glenesk)
1373‒80 Alexander Lindsay
of Glenesk
1383 Archibald Douglas c.1382‒88 Alexander Stewart,
‘the Grim’, lord of earl of Buchan
Galloway
1389 David Lindsay of
Glenesk
1389‒90 Murdoch Stewart
1392 (?) David Stewart, 1391 Walter Stewart, lord
earl of Carrick of Brechin
1392‒1401 Murdoch Stewart
1402‒6 Robert Stewart, duke
of Albany, earl of Fife
and Menteith

1410 Archibald Douglas,
4th earl of Douglas
1414 Robert Stewart, duke
of Albany, earl of Fife
and Menteith
1425‒8 Robert Lauder of the 1427‒8 Patrick Ogilvy
Bass and Edrington
1428‒35 Thomas Somerville 1433‒5 Walter Stewart, earl
of Carnwath of Atholl, Strathearn
and Caithness
c.1435 Alexander Stewart,
earl of Mar
1437‒43 James Douglas of 1439‒49 Alexander, lord of the
Balvenie and Abercorn, Isles, earl of Ross
earl of Avondale, 7th
earl of Douglas
1444‒9 Alexander Livingstone
of Callendar
1452‒4 Sir George Crichton, c.1450 Andrew, 1st lord Gray
earl of Caithness,
admiral of Scotland
1454 x 1456 William Sinclair, earl
of Orkney
1455 Laurence, lord
Abernethy in Rothiemay
1458–c.1460 Andrew Stewart, lord 1457‒66 John, lord Lindsay of
Avondale the Byres
1461 Colin Campbell, 1st
earl of Argyll and
Robert, lord Boyd
1464 Gilbert, lord Kennedy
1465 William, lord Abernethy
in Rothiemay and
William, lord Borthwick
1466 William Edmonstone
of Duntreath and
Gilbert Kennedy of
Bargany

1467 William Edmonstone of
Duntreath
1468 Robert, 1st lord Lyle 1470 William Edmonstone of
Duntreath
1471 William Edmonstone of 1471 Robert, 2nd lord Lyle
Duntreath and
Master David Guthrie
of Kincaldrum
1472‒3 Master David Guthrie of
Kincaldrum
1474 Thomas, 2nd lord
Erskine
1478 Alexander Stewart, 1478 John Haldane of
duke of Albany Gleneagles
1482‒3 Archibald Douglas, 5th 1479‒82 George Gordon, 2nd
earl of Angus earl of Huntly
1485 Andrew Stewart, lord 1487‒8 David Lindsay, 5th earl
Avondale and Robert, of Crawford
2nd lord Lyle
1488 Robert, 2nd lord Lyle 1488 David Lindsay, 5th earl
and John Ramsay, lord of Crawford and
Bothwell George Gordon, 2nd
earl of Huntly
1488‒9 John, lord Glamis and Robert, 2nd lord Lyle
1489‒91 John, lord Glamis and John, lord Drummond
1491‒5 John, lord Glamis and Robert, 2nd lord Lyle
1495‒7 John, lord Drummond
1497‒8 John, lord Drummond and Andrew, 2nd lord Gray
1499‒1501 Andrew, 2nd lord Gray and George Gordon, 2nd earl of Huntly
1501‒13 Andrew, 2nd lord Gray
Names in italic are those of justiciars whose jurisdiction may have extended over
the whole kingdom rather than either north or south of Forth.
chapter 5
King, Lords and Men in Renaissance

England: The Poetry of John Skelton
JOHN WATTS
This chapter relates to the work of Jenny Wormald in two rather different
ways. First of all, the choice of ‘Renaissance England’ in the title picks up
Jenny’s invocation of ‘Renaissance Scotland’ – the title for the first part of
Court, Kirk and Community, and a characteristically daring one, conjuring a
world of Latinate learning, eloquent persuasion, courtly exuberance and
contact with Europe in a period then still seen in ‘thud-and-blunder’ terms;
or, as Jenny put it, ‘fallow’, ‘dreary’, ‘the bread and butter between two layers
of jam’.1 Jenny showed that the kingdom of Scotland in the period 1470‒1542
had a particular kind of identity and dynamic, and I hope, in the following
pages, to suggest the same for the kingdom south of the Border in the period
when John Skelton was writing, from the late 1480s to the mid-1520s.
The second connection is more personal and parochial: happy memories
of my first experience of Oxford Further Subject teaching in the late 1990s,
in classes on ‘Literature and Politics in Early Modern England’, sitting
alongside Jenny in the faded grandeur of the Lady Brodie Room at St Hilda’s
College, Oxford. Having established her right to smoke with a silencing glare
at the undergraduates, Jenny would lead the discussion with a series of shrewd
and pithy observations, while I, like any tyro, would run on verbosely about
the three or four things I knew. The series of classes started with a bang –
More’s Utopia and some of his other writings – but, before the students could
embark on the delights of Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare, there were the
Tudor court poets to get through, and here things tended to slow down. While
Thomas Wyatt normally elicited some animated responses, and the earl of
Surrey could be despatched more quickly than Henry VIII managed, the class
began with Skelton – difficult, inelegant, and very foreign to students who
wanted to study a sixteenth century lit up by Italy, not blasted from Norfolk.
Things would dip, and the students would look nervous, as, for once, Jenny
and I would disagree. My great mistake, it seemed, was to take Skelton
seriously and to see him as important, and – now with more reading behind
11 Jenny Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland, 1470‒1625 (London, 1981),
part 1; quotations from p. 1.
me – I want to persist with that line of argument. It seems to me that he is a

good reflection of the political culture of the English Renaissance, and that
his writings provide a useful insight into what that culture meant. I think that
point could be illustrated in many different ways, but following the theme of
this volume, my chapter will focus on the relationship between the king, the
nobility and the larger political system.
John Skelton was a cleric from a north-country family, who spent his career
on the fringes of a series of great institutions.2 He acquired the new-fangled
status of ‘laureate’ from the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Louvain
between 1488 and 1493. He was loosely associated with the royal court from
the mid-1490s, serving as tutor to Prince Henry from 1495 to (probably) 1502.
He left to become rector of Diss, in Norfolk, apparently a beneficiary of the
patronage of Lady Margaret Beaufort, but then sought to return to court in
1509, finally gaining, or affecting, the nebulous status of orator regius in 1512,
and writing a few official commissions in the wake of Flodden before receding
again. By the late 1510s, Skelton was living in the sanctuary at Westminster,
writing poems and plays for London audiences and patrons, including a series
of remarkably insulting satires on Cardinal Wolsey in 1521‒2. Thereafter, he
finished off his poetic autobiography – The Garlande of Laurell – and wrote
a handful of pieces in support of royal policy (probably at Wolsey’s request),
before laying down his pen in around 1528 and dying in 1529.
Skelton’s output was prodigious and, in certain respects, varied – from
shortish love poems, epigrams and odes in English and Latin, to the polished
courtly drama of Magnyfycence, the bathetic and scabrous lament of Phyllyp
Sparowe, and the complex allegories and linguistic tricks of Speke, Parott,
saturated with references and (I think deliberately) impossible to understand.
His trademarks were a satiric and argumentative style; an insistent, punning
voice, juxtaposed with demonstrations of high learning and aureate diction;
a high consciousness of the functions of the poet (and of his own potential
contribution to the Zeitgeist); and a readiness to comment on the affairs of
the world around him. In his lifetime, he enjoyed intermittent recognition as
an intellectual and writer, but was never in the front rank, and was certainly
not regarded – as he saw himself – as the national poet, or vates Britonum.3
12 For what follows on Skelton’s life, see John Scattergood, ‘Skelton, John (c.1460‒1529)’,
ODNB, supplemented by Thomas D. Penn, ‘Literary Service at the Court of Henry
VII’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Cambridge, 2001), ch. 2.
13 For this self-identification, see e.g. Phyllyp Sparowe, lines 834‒5. References to the
English poems are to the texts as presented in John Scattergood (ed.), John Skelton:
The Complete English Poems (Harmondsworth, 1983).
THE POETRY OF JOHN SKELTON 123
For literary scholars and historians alike, Skelton has often been a problem
figure. He has been hard to place in terms of poetic tradition – ‘late and
decadent’ in his reproduction of fifteenth-century vernacular verse forms,
but ostensibly hostile to humanism and untouched by the Italian styles soon
to become trendy with Wyatt and Surrey.4 Neither ‘medieval’ nor ‘Renais-
sance’ in the sense that these terms are usually meant by literary scholars, he
has long been regarded as ‘maverick and transitional’ – a strange monolith
in C. S. Lewis’ ‘drab age’ between the Chaucerians and the court poets of
the 1530s and 1540s, 1570s and 1580s.5 For historians, the problem is a
different one: Skelton used to be regarded as a convenient illustration of anti-
Wolsey sentiment, whether that was the near-universal perspective of public
opinion, or a posture of the Howard or ‘old noble’ faction, whose mouthpiece
Skelton was assumed to be.6 Since the important work of Greg Walker in the
1980s, neither of these readings is possible: Skelton now appears as a jobbing
author, seeking patronage wherever he could get it and mostly surviving on
a thin diet, as the cognoscenti focused their attention on more fashionable
writers.7 Thanks to John Scattergood and others, we now know that few of
Skelton’s works were printed in his lifetime, or even widely circulated in
manuscript.8 So the problem becomes what to do with a figure who was so
voluble, took himself so seriously, and addressed themes of major public
importance, but who appears to have had little influence or readership.
Standing back from this body of literature, it is hard not to feel that, for
all its virtues, it reflects some of the limitations of pre-1990s writing on liter-
ature and politics – that is, before new historicism and the linguistic turn had
really begun to affect the way we think about public writing and political
culture. Why should someone writing in the fast-growing vernacular of the
decades around 1500, against the background of a very rapid reception of
printed classical texts and of new techniques for learning Latin and Greek,
and in the midst of fast-moving changes in both the domestic and the inter-
national political scene – why should such a person fall neatly into the abstract
14 Jane Griffiths, John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak (Oxford,
2006), 1‒2.
15 These approaches to Skelton are discussed (and challenged) by Andrew Hadfield,
Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge,
1994), 24, 39‒40, 44‒5, 50; quotation from Elizabeth Heale, Wyatt, Surrey and Tudor
Poetry (Harlow, 1998), 73. For a critique of the ‘drab age’ tag, see e.g. Cathy Shrank,
Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530‒1580 (Oxford, 2004), 10‒11.
16 Greg Walker, John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s (Cambridge, 1988), 2‒3, 5‒6.
17 Ibid., chs 1 (for the Howards) and 2 (patronage and the court), 114, 118.
18 John Scattergood, ‘The London manuscripts of John Skelton’s poems’, in his Reading
the Past: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Dublin, 1996), 275‒87; A. S. G.
Edwards, ‘Skelton’s English poems in manuscript and print’, in David R. Carlson
(ed.), John Skelton and Early Modern Culture (Tempe, AZ, 2008), 85‒97; Walker,
Skelton, 119‒23.
and anachronistic literary categories of ‘medieval’ or ‘Renaissance’? Does

Skelton’s failure to do so inevitably cast him as ‘maverick’, and therefore as
unimportant, cranky, marginal? Did the poet’s need for patronage – or, more
properly, for resources and standing (not necessarily to be found in the same
places) – dictate his entire poetic agenda? In considering Skelton’s work, do
we, as Greg Walker argues, have to be guided by the specific circumstances
in which each poem was produced?9 These must be part of the story, certainly,
but such an approach implies a more straightforward relationship between
the writer, his words and his audience than we should be willing to accept.
Did Skelton do exactly what his patrons and paymasters wanted? Certainly
not. Did he know exactly what he was doing at every moment of his writing?
Probably not. And did he know, or control, what that writing was doing, or
where its structures and patterns came from? Absolutely not – or not in every
particular. Since the 1990s, literary scholars have been looking at wider and
deeper contexts for Skelton’s work, Andrew Hadfield locating him at the head
of a sixteenth-century movement to create a national literature in English for
a newly literate mass audience, while, more recently, Anthony Hasler has
treated Skelton as a witness to the figurative and political complexity of the
early Tudor court, and Jane Griffiths has focused on Skelton’s concern with
voice and authority, seeing him grappling with a changing cultural climate
and, in particular, with the phenomenon of readers who answer back and
shape by their reception the meaning and impact of literary utterances.10
It is time that we historians went back to this serious writer and his
engagement with the world around him, and we should do so with the kinds
of perspectives that the linguistic turn has made possible – with attention to
patterns of language, and recognition of their capacity to structure thought
and influence action; with acknowledgement that even the most learned and
deliberate language-user is part of a wider language game and cannot make
every linguistic choice freely, or even knowingly. Seen in this way, Skelton,
who wrote so much, in so many different genres and (apparently, at least) for
such a range of early Tudor milieux; who had such a substantial hinterland
of English and Latin learning, and even a smattering of Greek; and who
19 Walker, Skelton, 219 and passim. See also Greg Walker, ‘John Skelton, Cardinal Wolsey
and the English nobility’, in G. W. Bernard (ed.), The Tudor Nobility (Manchester,
1992), ch. 2, 118‒19 and note 25.
10 Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity, ch. 1; Anthony Hasler, Court Poetry
in Late Medieval England and Scotland: Allegories of Authority (Cambridge, 2011),
chs 2, 6; Griffiths, Skelton and Poetic Authority; see also Robert J. Meyer-Lee, Poets
and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge, 2007), ch. 5 for a somewhat similar
concern with the ‘laureate voice’. Skelton’s relationship to the role of ‘court poet’ is
discussed by Greg Walker and A. S. G. Edwards in their contributions to Jennifer and
Richard Britnell (eds), Vernacular Literature and Current Affairs in the Early Sixteenth
Century: France, England and Scotland (Aldershot, 2000).
showed an interest in how the world around him was changing, must be an
important witness. He was far from alone in moving back and forth between
Oxford and Cambridge, London, the court and the countryside; his educa-
tional formation was, in large part, shared with the leading ministers and
courtiers of the day; and it is worth recalling that this was a time when
dyspeptic schoolmasters – Robert Whittinton, William Lily, John Colet and
Thomas Wolsey himself, master at Magdalen in 1499 and founder of a
grammar school at Ipswich – could find themselves very close to the action.11
Skelton’s view of the nobility has been considered before. As we have seen,
the poet has often been seen as a cultural and political conservative – a
‘Trojan’ against the ‘Greeks’ in the ‘Grammarians’ War’ of the late 1510s,
and a defender of the nobility against Tudor new men, Wolsey above all.12
More recently, that picture has been challenged, with Thomas Mayer arguing
that, like other Tudor public writers – Dudley, Pace, Starkey – Skelton was
highly critical of the nobility, deploring their ignorance and blaming their
supine cowardice for the rise of Wolsey.13 In 1992, Greg Walker took a
different tack, arguing that Skelton’s representation of the nobles was variable
and insincere – sympathetic when writing for noble patrons, as in his 1489
lament Upon the Dolorus Dethe ... of the ... Erle of Northumberlande, but
waspish when reaching for every possible brickbat to hurl at the Cardinal, as
in the 1522 poem Why Come ye Nat to Courte?14 In reality, Walker argued,
relations between Wolsey and the lords were mostly harmonious, and the
dramas depicted by Skelton were essentially poetic licence. Here, a satirist
might be tempted to apply Walker’s mode of reading Skelton to Walker
himself, and to suggest that he was writing for a patron: George Bernard,
editor of the volume on the Tudor nobility in which Walker’s piece appears,
and exponent of the view that nothing really changed in the position of the
nobility as the fifteenth century turned into the sixteenth.15 This revisionist
approach has had quite an impact, but while it has been salutary to challenge
the idea that Tudor kings and ministers set out to destroy the nobility, and to
draw attention to certain continuities in noble landholding, influence and
11 For these men, see the introduction to Beatrice White (ed.), The Vulgaria of John
Stanbridge and the Vulgaria of Robert Whittinton, EETS, os, 187 (London, 1932);
Thomas F. Mayer, Thomas Starkey and the Commonwealth: Humanist Politics and
Religion in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1989), 17‒25; Peter Gwyn, The King’s
Cardinal (London, 1990), 1‒2, 341.
12 For more on the ‘Grammarians’ War’, see David R. Carlson, ‘The “Grammarians’
War”, 1519‒1521, humanist careerism in fifteenth-century England, and printing’,
Medievalia et Humanistica 18 (1992), 157‒81.
13 Mayer, Thomas Starkey and the Commonwealth, 162ff.
14 Walker, ‘Skelton, Wolsey and the nobility’.
15 For a recent statement of Bernard’s views, see ‘The continuing power of the Tudor
nobility’, in G. W. Bernard, Power and Politics in Tudor England (Aldershot, 2000), ch. 2.
ideals, it is important not to miss the ways in which the situation of the
nobility was altered by the cultural and political dynamics of the period. As
will become clear, I think Skelton’s poems illustrate that altered situation
rather well, and expose some of the reasons for it.
II
How, then, did Skelton treat the nobility? First of all, Walker is quite right
that he had more to say in some works than others and that, in certain
respects, his position changed over time. The specific allegation that the
nobles were cowards – ‘their hertes … in thyr hose’ – and that their lassitude
and fear of Wolsey had allowed ‘one man to rule a kynge’, is a peculiarity of
the three poems written against the Cardinal in 1521‒2: Speke, Parott, Collyn
Clout and Why Come ye Nat to Courte?16 Equally, the trenchant account of
aristocratic vices in Magnyfycence (probably 1519) was not so highly
developed in Skelton’s earlier works (the play depicts the tendency of nobles
like the title character to slide into extravagance, rapacity and tyranny, and it
is telling that ‘Fansy’, who, with ‘Lyberte’, is the main source of decay,
‘amonge noble men … was brought up and bred’).17 Similarly, the view that
lack of education and civic commitment held the lords back – they ‘set
nothynge by polytykes’ – did not appear with much explicitness before Collyn
Clout in 1522.18 But elements of these views do feature in earlier poems, and
this suggests that they were not simply contrived to suit the purposes of the
anti-Wolsey satires. Skelton, of course, was always ready to denounce others’
lack of learning, but he specifically juxtaposed the literate scholar with the
swaggering aristocrat in several early pieces – in The Bowge of Courte, for
instance, which probably comes from the late 1490s, but may date back to
1480, and in the famous series of ‘flytyngs’ against Garnesche in 1513 or 1514;
the former poem also contains a prototype of the vices of Magnyfycence in
its characterisation of ‘Ryotte’, who is a randy young nobleman, addicted to
dice and whoring.19
16 Quotations from Why Come?, line 289, Collyn Clout, line 989.
17 Magnyfycence, line 261. For the 1519 dating, see Greg Walker, Plays of Persuasion:
Drama and Politics at the Court of Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1991), ch. 3.
18 Collyn Clout, line 623; cf. Why Come?, lines 309‒11.
19 For the scholarliness of the character ‘Drede’ in Bowge of Courte, see e.g. lines 149,
242ff, 303 etc; ‘Ryotte’, a ‘rusty gallande’, appears at line 344. In the poems Agenst
Garnesche, Skelton presents himself as a man of eloquence and learning and his
opponent as a knightly buffoon, whose rough verses ‘violate / The dygnyte lauryate’
(poem iii, lines 99‒100). Garnesche may have been born a gentleman, but ‘jentylnes
in the ys thred-bare worne’ (poem v, line 70), whereas Skelton’s learning has earned
him status: the ‘senate’ of Oxford made him laureate and ‘a kynge to me myn habyte
gave’ (lines 80‒4).
And there are other ways of depicting the nobility that are pretty
consistent across all the poems. Some of these are conventional: superficially,
at least, Skelton was a defender of the traditional social hierarchy, with the
king at the top, the nobles next, and other grades in succession underneath.
The commons who murdered the earl of Northumberland in 1489 are thus
described as ‘most unkynd’: they had killed their natural lord and defender.20
The Lawde and Prayse presented to Henry VIII in 1509 regards it as quite
wrong that the likes of Empson and Dudley had been ‘wont … over all /
Both lorde and knight to face’, just as it was wrong, a dozen years later, that
the bull-calf, or butcher’s son, Wolsey treated the lords as ‘javells’ and
‘knaves’.21 At the same time, however, there are plenty of postures in Skelton’s
work that were more challenging to noble status. For one, there is a recurring
theme that lords were likely to get drawn into overmightiness and intrigue.
‘Lordly’ is almost always a pejorative term in Skelton’s poems, betokening
anger and wilfulness, traits of the tyrant: the character ‘Magnyfycence’, for
instance, is asked by ‘Courtly Abusyon’, ‘Are you not a lorde? / Let your lust
and lykynge stande for a lawe’.22 The poem marking Henry VIII’s coronation
apparently condemns Henry VII’s ministers, but in its reference to foxes,
wolves and bears that have ‘browght Englond in wo’, it seems to include
noblemen as well, the last of these animals instantly recognisable as the badge
of Warwick the Kingmaker.23 In Upon the Dolorus Dethe, meanwhile,
Northumberland is explicitly praised for not having rebelled against his royal
master, as if such misbehaviour was par for the course among the high aris-
tocracy, and the duke of Albany (somewhat gratuitously) is accused of
planning to depose James V of Scotland in 1523.24 For these kinds of reasons,
the nobility were highly vulnerable to ‘detraccion’ (1489) by ‘fals fickil tunges’
(c.1516), and Skelton might have borne that in mind before condemning aris-
tocratic cowardice in the 1520s’ poems.25
One last persisting feature of Skelton’s handling of the nobility that
deserves comment is their relative effacement. It is clear throughout the
poems that the true seat of chivalry and nobility in the realm – ‘our royall
Englysh nacyon’, the ‘realme royall / And lande imperiall’, as Skelton
20 Upon the Dolorus Dethe, line 56.
21 A Lawde and Prayse Made for Our Sovereigne Lord the Kyng, lines 38‒9; cf Collyn Clout,
line 600ff; Why Come?, line 96.
22 For negative uses of ‘lordly’, see e.g. Collyn Clout, line 595 (‘lordely lokes’), Magny-
fycence, lines 1626‒7 (a ‘lordly mynde’ enjoys beating up his enemies). The quotation
is ibid., lines 1606‒7.
23 For references to the earl of Warwick (d.1471) as ‘the bere’, the earl of Suffolk (d.1450)
as ‘the fox’ and the earl of Worcester (d.1470) as ‘the wolf ’, see Rossell Hope Robbins
(ed.), Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (New York, 1959), 186, 202,
206‒7, 217.
24 Upon the Dolorus Dethe, lines 148‒51; Howe the Douty Duke …, line 87ff.
25 Upon the Dolorus Dethe, line 173; Agaynst Venemous Tongues, lines 55, 57‒8.
repeatedly calls it – is around the king.26 Henry VIII is ‘our royall regent, /
Our pereless president’, ‘our noble champyon’, even at Flodden, in 1513,
when the king was over five hundred miles away.27 The ‘Douty Duke of
Albany’ was defeated in 1523 less by the northern aristocracy than by ‘the
noble powre / Of my Lorde Cardynall’.28 Admittedly, Wolsey had just become
bishop of Durham, and ‘powre’ was probably being used in a literal sense, to
mean a group of armed men, but it is made clear throughout the poems that
the king is the real author of knighthood and nobility. The martial achieve-
ments of the lords – even the Howards – are minimised, treated in passing
and regarded merely as the execution of royal schemes: ‘his noble baronage’,
Skelton says of Henry VIII, ‘he putteth them in corage’; Northumberland
may have been comparable to Hector and Aeneas in 1489, but, a few years
later, Prince Henry was Hector, Marcellus, better than Scipio, the ornament
of Britain; in 1509, he was Adonis, Priam and even Mars; and Scipio again in
1513 and (from the safety of London) in 1523.29
III
So what is going on here, and what does it mean? I think two broad political
terminologies (both literal and conceptual) underlay Skelton’s position on
the lords, and they influenced a third element – his apprehension of what was
going on in the polity. One of these terminologies was Roman – the repub-
lican and monarchical–republican world of the last few centuries bc and the
first century ad. Like many of his contemporaries, Skelton seems to have
absorbed the Roman political model of res publica, in which, as Cicero put it,
res populi (the concern and property of the people) was the basis of the state,
while government was essentially a matter of deliberation on the public good,
carried out by a senatorial group of councillors, whether these were headed
26 Agaynst the Scottes, line 76; Howe the Douty Duke …, lines 393‒4.
27 Howe the Douty Duke …, lines 427‒8; A Ballade of the Scottyshe Kynge, line 25. In this
earlier poem, the earl of Surrey, victor of Flodden, appears only through his badge –
the ‘Whyte Lyon’ (line 68). In the more developed treatment of Flodden in Agaynst
the Scottes, Skelton again refers to Surrey only as ‘White Lyon’ (e.g. line 135), and the
play he makes of the white lion destroying the red lion of Scotland calls to mind
Merlin’s prophecy of the defeat of the Britons (red dragon) by the Saxons (white
dragon), thus nationalising the earl’s victory (lines 137‒8).
28 Howe the Douty Duke …, lines 59‒60.
29 Ibid., lines 465‒6. For the references to classical heroes, see Upon the Dolorus Dethe
(1489); Lawde and Prayse (1509); Agaynst the Scottes (1513), line 117; Howe the Douty
Duke … (1523), line 439. See also Skelton’s Latin poems on the creation of Prince
Henry as duke of York (Hector, ‘semideus’, Narcissus, Hyperion) and on his accession
as king (Hector, Marcellus, better than Scipio, etc.): David R. Carlson (ed.), ‘The Latin
writings of John Skelton’, Studies in Philology 88.4 (Autumn, 1991: special issue), 42‒4.
by a pair of consuls or a beneficent and law-abiding prince.30 It was from this

model that Skelton derived his exasperation at the lords’ failure to prevent
tyranny and also his dissatisfaction with their lack of learning. For Cicero and
other commentators on the fall of the Roman Republic, notably Sallust, it was
the responsibility of noblemen above all to maintain the institutions of counsel
and representation; a training in the humanities – virtue, eloquence, philo-
sophy and history – would enable them to play this statesmanlike role. But the
sad reality of the last decades of the Republic was that well-born men, corrupted
by ambition and greed, like Catiline and Caesar, posed the greatest threat to
the common weal; posing as defenders of the people, they joined forces with
the mob to destroy the state, causing division and civil war, and laying the foun-
dations of the principate, with all its attendant danger of tyranny.
Most of the classically educated political commentators of early Renais-
sance England, from Sir John Fortescue and the Crowland Chronicler to the
era of Polydore Vergil, Thomas More and Thomas Starkey, saw things in
broadly these terms, and Skelton was no exception. If Wolsey was ‘nevyr
suche a senatour’, enjoying an unconscionable concentration of power, the
nobility were no better, preferring ‘lordshype’ to the ‘care’ and ‘thought’ that
went with statesmanship – or indeed, as we have seen, preferring lordship to
‘law’, which was the very foundation of the republic.31 Instead of ‘the wyttys
of many wyse’, engaged in ‘cyrcumspection’ and ‘sad dyrection’, the ‘commune
weale’ was in ‘one mannys hande’ and subject to ‘wylfull affectyon’, ‘for Wyll
dothe rule all thynge, / Wyll, wyll, wyll, wyll, wyll’.32 It did not particularly
30 For an introduction to the impact of these ideas on political culture in England around
1500, see John Watts, ‘“Common Weal” and “Commonwealth”: England’s monar-
chical republic in the making, c.1450–c.1530’, in Andrea Gamberini, Jean-Philippe
Genet and Andrea Zorzi (eds), The Languages of Political Society: Western Europe,
14th–17th Centuries (Rome, 2011), 147‒63. A useful overview of Cicero’s ideas and of
the reception of his writings is Howard Jones, Master Tully: Cicero in Tudor England
(Nieuwkoop, 1998). For the exposure of English intellectuals to Roman ideas in the
second half of the fifteenth century, see R. Weiss, Humanism in England During the
Fifteenth Century, 4th edn, eds David Rundle and Anthony J. Lappin (Oxford, 2013),
available online at http://mediumaevum.modhist.ox.ac.uk/monographs_weiss.shtml
(last accessed 30 September 2013); Daniel Wakelin, Humanism, Reading and English
Literature, 1430‒1530 (Cambridge, 2007); and the works of David Rundle, esp.
‘Humanism before the Tudors: on nobility and the reception of the studia humanitatis
in fifteenth-century England’, in Jonathan Woolfson (ed.), Reassessing Tudor Humanism
(London, 2002), 22‒42.
31 Speke, Parott, line 337; Magnyfycence, lines 286‒7, 1606‒7. For roughly contemporary
statements of the notion that law was the foundation of the res publica, see e.g. S. B.
Chrimes, English Constitutional Ideas in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, 1936), 385
(1493) and David S. Berkowitz (ed.), Humanist Scholarship and Public Order: Two Tracts
against the Pilgrimage of Grace by Sir Richard Morison (Washington DC, 1984), 117
(1536).
32 Why Come?, lines 763‒70, 1015, 105‒6.
matter whether the will was Wolsey’s, as Skelton asserted in the early 1520s,
or Henry VIII’s, as he implied in the figure of ‘Magnyfycence’ (‘I am lyke as
a prynce sholde be’, declares the corrupted hero; ‘I have welth at wyll, largesse
and lyberte’), the problem, from the classical–republican point of view, was
that it belonged to a single individual and was free from the rational and
representative restraint of senatorial counsel.33 Had the lords ‘set [more] by
polytykes’ – which, at this time, still bore some connotations of collective
decision-making, guided by prudence and law – this concentration of power
would not have occurred, but instead of acting as senators, they had preferred
to engage in courtly vices, to hunt and hawk, to rack rent their lands and to
plot against the sovereign and the common weal.34
It was important that lords upheld the social order, so Skelton was not
about to knock their elevated status (and it is worth remembering that
Cicero’s republic was not conceived as a democracy, but – like Starkey’s, or
Milton’s – as a place where virtuous gentlemen should rule deliberatively,
sharing equality before the law with the mass of the people, but not admitting
them all to authority). It also mattered that the lords fulfilled their martial
duty by serving – under princely or senatorial direction – as knights in the
armies of the res publica, and so, in a qualified way, Skelton was willing to
praise noble arms. Indeed, for all his disapproval of lordliness, he was quite
happy with nobility, provided that it was close to the vera nobilitas (true
nobility) of civic and martial virtue, or indeed the nobilitas litterarum (nobility
of letters) of which Skelton himself was an exponent.35 In effect, then, his
poetry contains many of the tensions that run through the classical texts that
were favoured by the scholars of the early Renaissance. It combines an appre-
ciation of princely sovereignty with a republican ethos and anxieties about
the fleshpots of the imperial court, on the one hand, and the intrigues of
noble Catilines, on the other. It allots the nobles a particular kind of role, in
an urbane – indeed urban – and centralised polity, but denies them the
lordship over land and men to which they were accustomed.
33 Magnyfycence, lines 1457‒8.

34 Collyn Clout, line 623 (and see lines 980‒1019 for the lords’ activities and their conse-
quences). For the meaning of ‘polytykes’, see John Watts, ‘“The Policie in Cristen
Remes”: Bishop Russell’s parliamentary sermons of 1483‒4’, in G. W. Bernard and
Steven J. Gunn (eds), Authority and Consent in Tudor England: Essays Presented to
C. S. L. Davies (Aldershot, 2002), 33‒60, at p. 48 and Mayer, Thomas Starkey, 113‒15.
35 For ‘nobilitas litterarum’, see Carlson (ed.), ‘Latin writings of Skelton’, 34, and cf. ‘O
noble Chaucer’ and ‘these noble poetes’ in Garlande, lines 421, 517, and Agenst
Garnesche, poem (v), lines 65‒115, where Skelton argues that his ‘dignite lawreat’ is
equal to, or greater than, gentility of birth.
IV
The second body of political thought and language in Skelton’s writing lacks
a convenient term to describe it, but it is essentially the rich harvest of
medieval learning and literature that was deployed in public poetry and other
kinds of public speech and writing: a sprawling mish-mash of reworked clas-
sicisms (above all from Aristotle and Augustine, but also from the golden and
silver ages of Rome), combined with the products of scholastic learning,
fraternal and communitarian discourses, and the legacy of earlier generations
of English national poets – Chaucer, Gower, Langland and Lydgate.36 Skelton
saw himself as heir to this tradition, and he wove its material into his own
distinctive mélange of vernacular English and Renaissance Latinity, so that a
work like Magnyfycence, for example, combines the fashionable neo-Roman
virtue of its title with the Aristotelian concept of ‘measure’, placing noble
counsellors under a ‘dyreccyon’ that is at once a kind of Ciceronian republican
discipline and a more characteristically ‘medieval’ notion of self-rule, the
bridle of restraint, and so on.37 As far as the depiction of the nobles is
concerned, this second tradition brought them chivalric standing and recog-
nition as the king’s natural companions and advisers. It is also another strand
in Skelton’s representation of Wolsey, as an evil counsellor, brought up of
nought and supplanting the magnates in his search for money and power, just
like the men condemned by popular poets and captains in the Wars of the
Roses.38 In a like way, there is a basis in medieval estates satire for Skelton’s
critique of the lords as uneducated and spendthrift.39
More significant, however, is the tendency of public writing to sidestep
the nobility as a distinct class and to emphasise the coupling of king and
commune, or community, as the basis of the polity.40 ‘Kam ther a Kyng’,
36 ‘Public poetry’ is the useful coinage of Anne Middleton, ‘The idea of public poetry
in the reign of Richard II’, Speculum 53 (1978), 94‒114.
37 Magnyfycence, line 18 (‘Yf noblenesse were aquayntyd with sober dyreccyon’). Cf Why
Come?, line 769. For Skelton as heir to Chaucer and his contemporaries, see Garlande,
line 387ff.
38 Something of this is noted by Walker, Skelton, 139ff. For more on ‘evil councillors’ in
later medieval political discourse, see John Watts, ‘The pressure of the public on later
medieval politics’, in Linda Clark and Christine Carpenter (eds), The Fifteenth Century 4:
Political Culture in Late Medieval Britain (Woodbridge, 2004), 159‒80, at pp. 169, 174
and passim.
39 Walker, ‘Skelton, Wolsey and the nobility’, 115‒17, and see Wynnere and Wastoure, ed.
Stephanie Trigg, EETS, 297 (Oxford, 1990), for a good example of a stereotypical
critique of high-spending aristocrats.
40 For extensive treatment of this theme, see David Rollison, A Commonwealth of the
People (Cambridge, 2010), chs 3‒5, and also John Watts, ‘The Commons in medieval
England’, available at http://lamop.univ-paris1.fr/IMG/pdf/Watts.pdf (last accessed
30 September 2013).
wrote Langland, in a famous depiction of the fourteenth-century parliament:

‘Knyghthod hym ladde; / Might of the communes made hym to regne’;
‘clerkes’ are there too, but, despite the parliamentary setting, the lords are
subsumed into the second estate.41 Similarly, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
contains estates archetypes – knight, parson and ploughman – but, in repre-
senting English society, it mainly depicts the middling ranks, while Gower’s
‘bok for Englandes sake’, Confessio Amantis, defines the estates of the realm
as clergy and laity, lumping the latter together as ‘the comune’.42 As a martial
class, then, the lords were typically allotted a particular social function, but
it is plain that they shared it with the rest of the aristocracy – the knights and
esquires – and most literary and pastoral figurations of the later medieval
realm promoted a community, dominated by the respectable inhabitants of
towns and villages, and protected by knights and priests under the govern-
ment of the king. These images were strongly reinforced by the rhetorics and
institutions of the royal state, which – with one or two exceptions, such as
the recognition of the peerage in parliament – tended to present the realm as
a collectivity of liberi homines (free men), rather than a series of territorial
lordships, networks and hierarchies. It is true that the estates of the realm
could be ordered vertically, and there are certainly grounds for seeing in the
later middle ages a growing preoccupation with social stratification and a
growing conviction that preserving hierarchy was the route to social order,
but against this would have to be set mounting concern about aristocratic
violence and about the threat posed by ‘overmighty subjects’. In all, the
tradition of English public writing offered scant legitimacy to lords except
as the defenders of the commune; Skelton’s location in this tradition helped
to structure his treatment of the nobility and to incline it in a negative and
minimising direction.
In these ways, then, we might feel that Skelton’s sources, Roman and
English, gave him a distorting lens through which to view the realm and the
position of the nobility within it. But that would be the wrong conclusion to
draw. For one thing, these same boxes of terms and concepts were available
to all the learned men of Skelton’s day, and most of them extracted and
combined their contents in ways that paralleled Skelton’s own: his style may
have been distinctive, but his ideas and vocabularies were widely shared. For
another, these same learned men were living in, and helping to make, a
changed political world, in which the activity and authority of the king and
his educated councillors was bulking larger, and the inherited power of the
nobility was being disrupted and curtailed. The lords retreated from the
41 The Vision of Piers Plowman: a Complete Edition of the B-Text, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt
(London, 1978), Prologue, lines 112‒13, and see lines 114, 116.
42 For this approach to Chaucer, see Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, MA,
1989), esp. ch. 1; G. C. Macaulay (ed.), The English Works of John Gower, 2 vols, EETS,
extra series 81‒2 (London, 1900‒1), I, lines 24 and 499.
postures they had adopted in the troubles of the later middle ages; they were
less able to influence patterns of appointment and justice in their countries;
they were more likely to be royal creations, personally (and often literally)
indebted to the king, than the inheritors of large estates and established
connections; they took their places in a realm that was more completely and
insistently driven from the royal centre than it had been, and where the centre
itself was larger and more complex.43 In this altered world, distinctive new
languages combined with older ones and with a whole series of social and
political shifts to create a political atmosphere that the likes of Skelton sought
to depict and capture. It is the atmosphere of Renaissance England, and, given
its biases – towards education and eloquence, courtliness and urbanity, minis-
terial power and royal sovereignty – a laureate poet, who saw himself as orator
regius, might be just the guide we need. On the inside in some respects and
the outside in others, sometimes abreast of and sometimes behind the latest
trends in learning and writing, striving for a public voice whose forms and
warrants were changing and fading, Skelton’s poetry reflects the cross-
currents of a cultural and political revolution.
How much Renaissance England had in common with Jenny’s Renaissance

Scotland I leave for others to judge. In most of his writing, Skelton seems to
have had little appreciation of the glories of Scottish culture in the age of
Lindsay and Dunbar. But a curious and rather scrappy piece that has been
attributed to him does show some glimmer of recognition of northern
learning and might be a good place to close.44 Written for an unknown
Scottish lady – and evidently a learned one, with connections at Oxford – it
plays on a somewhat obscure tradition that Guinevere, wife to King Arthur,
came not from Gwent, Cornwall or Brittany, but rather from western
Scotland, where she claimed descent from Albanactus, second son of Brutus,
the founder of Britain.45
43 Argument and evidence supporting the views in this paragraph will appear in the book
I am currently writing for the New Oxford History of England series, covering 1461‒
1547. Among existing accounts of the nobility in this period that take a similar line,
see Steven J. Gunn, Early Tudor Government, 1485‒1558 (Basingstoke, 1995), esp. 42‒8;
Christine Carpenter, Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society,
1401‒1499 (Cambridge, 1992), chs 16‒17.
44 The text, which has never before been printed, appears in the common-place book of
the London mercer, John Colyns (BL, Harley MS 2252, fos 666v.–67r.). For the
possible attribution to Skelton, see Adolf Falschlehrer, ‘Some minor lyrics of John
Skelton from British manuscripts’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 32 (1967), 237.
45 Alexander Salmond, Fresh Light on British Myths (Scone, 2007), 14.
O Guinevere Queen, from parts Borell,46

That depely dronke of Elycons47 well
And Clios frende was many a yeer,
From Albaynes brown and tanny hills drear
Came ye to courte at Tamise-syde
Oure Oxford scholars for to guide
And eek to ryde
For their edificacyon
And goodly reformacyon
(Withoute cavillacyon
In full jubilacyon)
In materys Brityshe
But also skyttyshe,
As Derneleyes dealings with the Quayne
And Jamys dremes of Newe Britayne,
Of Roussaue, Marlowe, Macaulay,
Aristotill, Gibbon, Tacité,
Skelton Laureate and Surrey gay,
Markes and Marvell, Tockevyle ay
Yowr techinges filled up all the day!
The nunnes at Aedes Hildae gave ye rest,
But kirtels and wimpels were not your gest:
From gynate hoarth48 ye rode abowte
With glas of Haygh and fag ne’er out
To heal in homes; with wordes ful wise
The Lady Brigden to surprise;
At Ingrames nose,
Ye bent your bowes,
Or, archer retired,
Your gunn ye fired:
And al for correccion,
Or insurreccion,
In gret ereccyon
And newe complexyon
Of our trivium
And quadrivium:
Yeres two and thre
Of our degre
In Historye.49
46 Boreal, northern.
47 Helicon is a mountain in Boetia, Greece, the mythic location of the fountains of the
Muses Aganippe and Hippocrene.
48 ‘Gynate’ appears to be a coinage of Skelton’s, making this phrase mean ‘female hearth’.
‘Hoarth’ is an unusual spelling of ‘hearth’, however, and may indicate some play on
words that is now impossible to untangle.
49 Possibly a reference to discussions of syllabus reform in late fifteenth-century Oxford,
All were masyd

And none more crasyd
Than wysdomes snake –
That worme old spake
And said it was the grettest of your gestae
(What thogh ye wrote those bookes, the best I
Ever read?),50
But then ye shed
Your Oxon head
And hither led
Your way to Ed-
In-borugh-town,
And left your gown
And old renown;
Wherfore all England’s scholers cry in vain,
O Gwynveer, Jennifer, Jennye, Jane,
Will ye noo come back agayne?
Al this wots Skelton Laureate to be true,
Vates Britonum.
now unknown. For changes at Cambridge in the late 1480s, see Damian R. Leader,
History of the University of Cambridge, vol. i: The University to 1546 (Cambridge,
1988), 242‒3.
50 This seems to suggest that a figure represented by this ‘worme old’ regarded the
impact that the subject of the poem had on Oxford’s curriculum as more important
than the writings that Skelton praises. Since these debates over the curriculum are
undocumented, I am at a loss to explain this reference.
chapter 6
Rethinking the Justice of the Feud in

Sixteenth-Century Scotland
A. MARK GODFREY 1
The functioning of courts in dispensing civil and criminal justice can tell
only part of the story of any dispute, and may often play no part at all. When
invoked, however, court process is typically (if not always) a response to a
dispute. The history of the administration of justice must therefore take into
account the wider history of dispute resolution and settlement. This is not
least because in a society such as that of late medieval Scotland a wide variety
of methods of conducting a dispute tended to be used alongside each other.
Thus the relationships between the various resolution or settlement mecha-
nisms and the various ways a dispute was progressed – for example, resort to
feud, formal litigation, criminal prosecution, arbitration, mediation, negoti-
ation – have to be an essential focus of enquiry before the role played by any
one method can be adequately understood. The work of Jenny Wormald has
been exceptional in offering profoundly insightful and innovative ways of
understanding disputes in late medieval Scotland, especially the relationship
between what she has termed private and public justice.2
A pioneering aspect of Wormald’s overall thesis was to link the decline of the
bloodfeud with the development of the Court of Session as a supreme civil
court in Edinburgh. This admitted into the analysis a concern with the ways
in which institutions of governance tried not only to control crime and disorder
but also to provide for adjudication between disputing parties themselves.
11 I am very grateful to Hector MacQueen for comments on an earlier draft. This chapter
was written during six months on sabbatical leave in 2012 as a visiting research fellow
in the LOEWE Research Centre for Judicial and Extra-judicial Conflict Resolution,
and visiting professor in the Faculty of Law at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Univer-
sität, Frankfurt am Main.
12 Though ‘public’ and ‘private’ are at one level problematic terms in the medieval period:
Susan Reynolds, ‘The historiography of the medieval state’, in Michael Bentley (ed.),
Companion to Historiography (London, 1997), 117‒38, at pp. 124‒5.
RETHINKING THE JUSTICE OF THE FEUD 137
In this context the development of a central court in Scotland continues to

raise significant but under-explored questions about the effect the strength-
ening of ‘public justice’ had on the well-established modes of ‘private justice’,
as well as on the role of violence and on the underlying structures of social
authority in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.3 The question derives
further interest from Scotland’s place in the parallel and more general
European pattern of the ‘suppression of the noble feud by central govern-
ments in the sixteenth century’.4
In Scotland, bloodfeud survived in a way which was not unique but which
has been regarded as particularly well attested until the seventeenth century.
It was a natural feature of a highly localised society deeply structured around
lordship and kinship. All of this has led historians to characterise sixteenth-
century Scotland as a ‘feuding society’. More detailed studies have shown
just how widespread feuding was at this time: it was possibly even the primary
way of approaching many disputes. Despite this, however, there is still a risk
of oversimplification, which may come from seeing all aspects of the reso-
lution of disputes through the lens of the particular mechanism of feud, even
for a society in which feud was common. This same ‘feuding society’ was,
after all, rooted in landed property that had been structured for centuries
around jurisdiction and legal rights as expressed in the medieval common
law. Indeed, the medieval common law had developed above all as a response
to demands for ‘public’ or at least royal justice and the protection of landed
interests through the provision of legal remedies.
As early as the beginning of the sixteenth century, this ‘feuding society’
had also become highly responsive to the availability of the Session as a new
central tribunal in which to seek justice. Indeed, by the sixteenth century, if
not well before, it can also be regarded very much as a ‘litigating society’.5
Moreover, the increased demands for effective justice that stimulated the
creation of a new central court in the first place seem to have come from the
local level rather than simply reflecting some royal design for stronger central
governance.6 In short, these developments in the administration of justice
13 A. M. Godfrey, Civil Justice in Renaissance Scotland: The Origins of a Central Court

(Leiden, 2009), 401.
14 Howard Kaminsky, ‘The noble feud in the later middle ages’, Past and Present 177
(November 2002), 55‒83, at p. 83. See also R. R. Davies, ‘The survival of the bloodfeud
in medieval Wales’, History 54 (1969), 338‒57, at p. 338; Hillay Zmora, State and
Nobility in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1997), 8, 129; Stuart Carroll, Blood
and Violence in Early Modern France (Oxford, 2006), 7; Stuart Carroll, ‘The peace in
the feud in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France’, Past and Present 178 (February
2003), 74‒115, at pp. 78, 81; Alexander Grant, ‘Murder Will Out: Kingship, Kinship
and Killing in Medieval Scotland’, ch. 9 below in this volume.
15 Godfrey, Civil Justice, 403.
raise questions about social change, which the characterisation ‘feuding

society’ can risk obscuring rather than illuminating. Above all, how do we
explain the apparent rise and even popularity of a system of centralised public
justice in a society still fundamentally structured around the twin institutions
of lordship and kindred, if it is true that peace, stability and order were
primarily understood in terms of private justice, local settlement, and what
Wormald refers to as the ‘justice of the feud’?
Wormald’s contribution remains the most brilliant, wide-ranging and
fundamental analysis of this question, most powerfully presented in 1980 in
her ground-breaking article ‘Bloodfeud, kindred and government in early
modern Scotland’.7 A series of further important studies by Wormald was
complemented in 1986 by Keith Brown’s Bloodfeud in Scotland, which built
on and refined, but only partially challenged her thesis.8 The overall analysis
presented by Wormald, embracing the whole political structure of late
medieval Scottish society, and building on her study of personal bonds of
maintenance, manrent and friendship, has since come to provide an essential
part of the framework of analysis for late medieval Scottish history.9 Further
research that tested or developed aspects of her argument followed in several
unpublished doctoral theses,10 and gradually a series of published studies has
engaged more directly with themes drawn from her analysis of feud in
and Present 87 (May 1980), 54‒97. See also Jenny Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community:
Scotland, 1470‒1625 (London, 1981); Jenny Wormald, Lords and Men in Scotland:
Bonds of Manrent, 1442‒1603 (Edinburgh, 1985); Jenny Wormald, ‘An early modern
postscript: the Sandlaw dispute, 1546’, in Wendy Davies and Paul Fouracre (eds), The
Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1986), 191‒205. A slightly
neglected paper that preceded publication of Wormald’s work but is still of great value
in relation to the role of the court system in disputes is Stephen J. Davies, ‘The courts
and the Scottish legal system, 1600‒1747: the case of Stirlingshire’, in V. A. C. Gatrell,
Bruce Lenman and Geoffrey Parker (eds), Crime and the Law: The Social History of
Crime in Western Europe since 1500 (London, 1980), 120‒54.
Early Modern Society (Edinburgh, 1986).
19 See, for example, Roger A. Mason, ‘Renaissance and Reformation: the sixteenth
century’, in Jenny Wormald (ed.), Scotland: A History (Oxford, 2005), 107‒42, at
p. 142; Alison Cathcart, Kinship and Clientage: Highland Clanship, 1451‒1609 (Leiden,
2006), 94.
10 Stephen J. Davies, ‘Law and Order in Stirlingshire 1637‒1747’, unpublished PhD
thesis (University of St Andrews, 1984); Stephen I. Boardman, ‘Politics and the Feud
in Late Mediaeval Scotland’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of St Andrews,
1990); Michael Wasser, ‘Violence and the Central Criminal Courts in Scotland,
1603‒1638’, unpublished PhD thesis (Columbia University, 1995). Davies’ thesis has
been almost entirely overlooked by scholars. Boardman has subsequently touched on
the implications of his thesis for the Wormald analysis of bonding in his ‘The
Campbells and charter lordship in medieval Argyll’, in Steve Boardman and Alasdair
particular.11 It therefore seems timely to review this analysis as a basis for

future evaluation of the growing body of more recent work. It is hoped that
this chapter will provide a useful starting point.
II
Wormald’s approach in modelling the workings of the Scottish feud drew

upon the social anthropologist Max Gluckman’s influential analysis of the
‘peace in the feud’. Gluckman himself had proposed of his work that ‘it would
be profitable to apply these analyses to those periods of European history
when the feud was still apparently the main instrument for redress of injury’.12
Gluckman’s general approach provides the fundamental underpinning for
Wormald’s analysis of feud in late medieval Scotland, just as it did to a lesser
degree for R. R. Davies’ analysis of medieval Wales. In the Scottish context,
however, this underpinning has not been universally accepted. A more sceptical
note was sounded by Keith Brown, who stated that Gluckman’s ‘sanitised
bloodfeud sits uncomfortably amidst our perceptions of the past’, given the
very different nature of historic European societies from those studied by
Gluckman.13 Indeed, Brown has since gone further in stating that ‘while the
extent to which a high level of private violence was the norm in a feuding
society remains debatable, it does appear that anthropological studies of feud
have unduly influenced historical analysis of more hierarchic and martial soci-
eties by emphasizing the peace in the feud’.14
Ross (eds), The Exercise of Power in Medieval Scotland, c.1200‒1500 (Dublin, 2003),
95‒117, at pp. 112‒13.
11 Brown, Bloodfeud; Julian Goodare, State and Society in Early Modern Scotland (Oxford,
1999); Julian Goodare, The Government of Scotland, 1560‒1625 (Oxford, 2004);
Godfrey, Civil Justice; Anna Groundwater, The Scottish Middle March, 1573‒1625:
Power, Kinship, Allegiance (Woodbridge, 2010); Keith M. Brown, Noble Power in
Scotland from the Reformation to the Revolution (Edinburgh, 2011); Jackson W.
Armstrong, ‘The justice ayre in the Border sheriffdoms, 1493‒1498’, SHR 92 (2013),
1–37; Jackson W. Armstrong, ‘The “fyre of ire kyndild” in the fifteenth-century
Scottish marches’, in Susanna A. Throop and Paul R. Hyams (eds), Vengeance in the
Middle Ages: Emotion, Religion and Feud (Farnham, 2010), 51‒84; Jackson W.
Armstrong, ‘Violence and peacemaking in the English marches towards Scotland,
c.1425‒1440’, in Linda Clark (ed.), The Fifteenth Century VI: Identity and Insurgency
in the Late Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2006), 53‒71.
12 Max Gluckman, ‘The peace in the feud’, Past and Present 8 (November 1955), 1‒14,
at p. 2. However, the ‘influence’ of Gluckman on Wallace-Hadrill’s ‘The Bloodfeud
of the Franks’, the most famous early example of such reception, has recently been
doubted: Ian Wood, ‘“The Bloodfeud of the Franks”: a historiographical legend’,
Early Medieval Europe 14 (2006), 489‒504.
13 Brown, Bloodfeud, 2.
14 Brown, Noble Power, 27 (emphasis added).
This apparently represents an important difference of theoretical

approach between Wormald and Brown, the two leading scholars of the
Scottish bloodfeud. However, whilst a theory of feud may be criticised for
failing to acknowledge adequately the role (and extent) of violence in disputes
where other historical factors predispose a given society towards such a degree
of violence, this does not seem a sufficient reason to discard the theory. This
is because (as I will go on to discuss) the concept of the ‘peace in the feud’
does not imply a particular minimum level of violence, but simply seeks to
explain how even the latent threat of violence can exert pressure to find a
settlement, as well as how actual violence does the same by drawing the wider
kindred into the conflict in ways that may be adverse to the interests of its
individual members. The application to history of the theory of the ‘peace in
the feud’ does not try to explain the precise level of violence in a feuding
society, or minimise its role, but rather to explain how violence can be the
fundamental driver of settlement processes. As R. R. Davies put it, the theory
helps explain why ‘settlement is more common than warfare’, despite the
apparent prevalence of violence in a society.15
On different grounds, other historians have also distanced themselves
from applying the Gluckman analysis historically to European societies. The
deeper criticism here is not so much to do with explanations of levels of
violence that feuding societies experience, and whether these seem consistent
with a ‘peace in the feud’, but rather with the theory proceeding on unwar-
ranted ‘functionalist’ assumptions. Such assumptions would posit a static
model of cohesive social order, which is seen as threatened by the violence
that would be unleashed without the restraining institution of feud. The feud
is thereby assumed to underpin social stability, order and cohesion. By
contrast, violence and disputes are on this view seen as disruptive of order,
dysfunctional and socially undesirable. Against this, the criticism would be
that, in historical societies for which these broader assumptions about the
conditions for the maintenance of social order do not hold, and where conflict
may play a dynamic rather than restorative role, the ‘peace in the feud’ might
not reflect social reality, and an analysis based upon it is therefore likely to be
flawed.16 Arguably medieval European societies fall into this category.
15 Davies, ‘Survival of the bloodfeud’, 341. Paul R. Hyams has also made use of the
‘peace in the feud’ in his ‘Feud and the state in late Anglo-Saxon England’, Journal of
British Studies 40 (2001), 1‒43. In his Rancor and Reconciliation in Medieval England
(Ithaca, NY, 2003), however, Hyams does not draw on Gluckman in any fundamental
way, commenting that ‘I use Gluckman’s work here more as a license to speculate than
as any kind of authoritative model’: see p. 14, note 31.
16 For an excellent critical overview and discussion see David Cohen, Law, Violence, and
Community in Classical Athens (Cambridge, 1995), ch. 1, esp. at pp. 11‒12. A more
uncritical but perhaps representative citation of Gluckman’s analysis can be found in
Julius Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe, 1500‒1800 (Cambridge, 2001), 82.
Considering these criticisms in relation to a specific field of historical study,

Stephen White has observed of Northern France in the later eleventh and
earlier twelfth centuries that ‘feuds may have been more common and more
difficult to stop than the theory would suggest’. White characterises the
theory as implying that ‘where feuding is an established practice, there is a
“peace in the feud”, because various social mechanisms ensure that few feuds
will break out and that those that arise will normally be quickly settled’.17
White goes on to provide a meticulous discussion of the factual circumstances
evident from his sources. These raise questions about the limitations of the
‘peace in the feud’ analysis and how violent feud might still prevail regardless
of such social mechanisms.18 How does the ‘peace in the feud’ establish itself,
for example, in societies in which ‘feuds were intimately associated with
dynamic political processes’ and could be ‘linked both to larger political
conflicts and to smaller but more continuous struggles between peasants and
lords’?19 Even White, however, does not repudiate the Gluckman analysis as
such, but adapts it as an interpretative model, though one that should still be
shaped in its application by close reference to the historical sources.20
Conversely, therefore, where the historical sources seem to support the
assumptions in question, it can be argued persuasively (following Wormald)
that the ‘peace in the feud’ may explain much.21 We must remember that
Gluckman’s theory simply raises the question of the role of complex kinship
ties in disputes in the abstract, and, as Paul Hyams has noted, ‘[e]xactly what
men and women made of these cross-pulls in any particular situation is, of
course, a matter for investigation’.22 For Scotland, Wormald’s work consti-
tutes just such an investigation. The validity of the Gluckman model of feud
is not tested in every detail in relation to the historical sources but Wormald
shows how it is strikingly consistent with them.
Arguably the role of the kin is the most crucial aspect. A distinctive feature
of settlements involving the kin in earlier medieval society had been that
customary tariffs reflecting status existed to indicate the level of emendation
or compensation that was considered due.23 Importantly, this compensation
17 Stephen D. White, ‘Feuding and peace-making in the Touraine around the year 1100’,
Traditio 42 (1986), 195‒263, at pp. 259, 258.
18 See the conclusion in White, ‘Feuding and peace-making’, 259‒63.
19 White, ‘Feuding and peace-making’, 259.
20 White, ‘Feuding and peace-making’, 258.
21 For an example of the historical evidence being found not to readily support the exis-
tence of even a concept of feud, see John G. H. Hudson, ‘Feud, vengeance and
violence in England from the tenth to the twelfth centuries’, in Belle S. Tuten and
Tracey Billado (eds), Feud, Violence and Practice: Essays in Medieval Studies in Honor
of Stephen D. White (Farnham, 2010), 29‒53, at p. 48.
22 Hyams, Rancor and Reconciliation, 16.
23 Wormald, ‘Bloodfeud’, 59, referring to tenth- and eleventh-century Scotland and
tariffs in the Leges inter Brettos et Scottos. For a recent comparative discussion of
was owed not only to the injured party but also to the kin-group as a whole
and to the lord of that kindred in his own right too. Even if by the sixteenth
century it is unlikely that any strict tariff system still operated, nevertheless
the rights of the kin-group to compensation were still maintained.24 It is this
evidence of the direct interest of the kin-group in securing compensation that
provides a particular basis for arguing that there was a ‘peace’ in the Scottish
feud in terms of the Gluckman model. On this basis the Scottish feud can be
seen not so much as evidence of a society prone to violence and disorder but
rather, as Wormald argues, as ‘a force for peace’ within such a society.25
In the Scottish context, therefore, lordship and kinship do seem to provide
the social structures that acted to promote peace through their engagement
with feuds. The evidence of bonding, and the involvement of the wider kin
in settlement – formally recognised in the compensatory process involving
assythment, letters of slains, and the requirements for the purchase of remis-
sions – may suggest that violence was indeed considered to be dysfunctional
and preferably avoided. Consequently, despite Brown’s criticism, Wormald’s
adoption of the model of the ‘peace in the feud’ to help explain the Scottish
feud still seems highly persuasive, even if there remains scope for argument
about how successful settlement processes were in terminating or discouraging
the violence of the feud.
III
Wormald has applied this analysis brilliantly to late medieval and early
modern Scotland. What are her claims in relation to the Scottish evidence?
Perhaps three main claims can be isolated for discussion. First, following the
anthropologists, and the earlier work of R. R. Davies on reinterpreting the
bloodfeud in medieval Wales, Wormald argues that feud in Scotland was
neither a symptom of lawlessness and unceasing violence, nor simply a means
to achieve peace, but was a custom-bound method of achieving justice. It was
governed by a pattern of norms that are termed by Wormald ‘the justice of
the feud’ (a highly suggestive phrase seemingly coined by her), whose norms
rested on a different set of principles from those informing the justice of the
courts. In her study of bonds of manrent, maintenance and friendship,
Wormald refers to ‘the early modern attitude that peace was a desirable thing
but that it would be achieved very often through violence’.26 The justice of
aspects of pre-Norman compensation payments in Scotland see Patrick Wormald,

‘Anglo-Saxon law and Scots law’, SHR 88 (2009), 192‒206.
24 Wormald, ‘Bloodfeud’, 66‒7, 89. Cathcart also adopts this interpretation in Kinship
and Clientage, 94, note 112.
25 Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community, 36.
the feud is seen as ‘private’ justice, typified by ‘personal arbitration and

settlement by kin and lord outside the courts,’ and operative within a private
order represented by the kindred.27 Public justice, in contrast, is that of the
courts, administered to uphold a public order overseen by the crown, and by
government generally.
Secondly, responding to the question how such private methods of dispute
resolution related to public order, Wormald’s contention is that, despite
deriving in her view from different principles and mechanisms, public and
private justice were far from incompatible and far from being in conflict. Her
argument entails therefore that the apparent shift in the sixteenth century
from private to public justice (with the decline of the feud and the devel-
opment of the Court of Session) does not need to reflect any simple
suppression of one mode of justice in favour of another, but instead is likely
to reflect a complex interaction between the two that endured over time, the
precise pattern of which was based ultimately on what was found to be most
effective by the parties themselves.28
The third claim by Wormald relates to how it was that public justice came
to supplant feud as a mode of achieving justice. She argues that because
public and private justice did not directly conflict, the eclipse of the feud in
this shift from private to public justice was accomplished not through the
disappearance or elimination of the ‘justice of the feud’, but through its
acceptance and assimilation by the courts. With the success of the Court of
Session in the sixteenth century, it is argued, lawyers were more prevalent
and influential in late sixteenth-century Scottish society than ever before. In
Wormald’s view, the culture of private settlement outside legal procedure,
which she associates with the feud, came to meet increasing resistance from
lawyers, but the lawyers’ approach was to absorb the justice of the feud into
legal procedures and thus take it over.29
IV
Before Wormald’s claims can be analysed, the nature of disputes in early

modern Scotland requires some further elucidation. First, a feud could
provide a means to resolve a great many different types of dispute, not all of
which could alternatively have been resolved through legal process. Clearly
many disputes could be essentially political and concerned more with power,
authority and influence rather than a desire simply to assert solidly legal
claims. The localism of Scottish sixteenth-century society intensified this,
Keith Brown observing that ‘there was enough fluidity within local power
27 Wormald, ‘Bloodfeud’, 57, note 13; p. 55.

29 Wormald, ‘Bloodfeud’, 86‒90.
structures to ensure a constant round of manoeuvring and aggression to

weaken a rival’s lordship and strengthen one’s own’.30 And even the exercise
of a jurisdiction could be a political and contested act in a society with a far
from uniform, and highly complex structure of royal, baronial, ecclesiastical
and burgh jurisdiction, which was often subject to many exemptions or
supplemented by special commissions.31 Brown in particular has stressed the
dynamic nature of disputes, and the presence of non-justiciable and intangible
factors, commenting:
while a case could appear to be about a killing, the context in which the killing
took place may have been a quarrel over land or jurisdiction. Very often the
underlying cause was forgotten about as honour and vengeance maintained a
conflict which was simply about feuding itself.32
Second, we must ask how parties in dispute perceived the interconnections
between their various underlying interests. Historians have emphasised ways
in which the basic approach to dispute resolution in general – and feud in
particular – was shifting by around the end of the sixteenth century. But it
may also be plausible to suggest that it was the very nature of a dispute and
how its constituent elements were perceived to inter-relate that were about
to change. A dispute that had become the subject of a feud might have often
involved different strands that were seen to be knotted together, but could
have been unravelled and pursued independently when it was to the advantage
of the parties. If, by around 1600, political conflict was beginning to be
resolved with less resort to violence then matters of purely legal dispute could
have been more readily isolated for judicial determination. This would have
had enduring implications for how contemporaries perceived the effectiveness
of the different means of resolving a dispute. The causes of disputes that
might have led previously to feud would have become easier to differentiate
and to disaggregate, so that issues that were indeed justiciable could be
addressed more easily through the courts. If so, feud would have become
increasingly redundant.
It is difficult to make an assessment of this hypothesis, since the final three
decades of the sixteenth century experienced political instability and faction-
alism to an unusual degree – something that has been understood to explain
some of the prevalence of feuding at that period.33 The consequences of the
Reformation may also have undermined older ways in which the authority of
the church could be mobilised for peace. Hector MacQueen has pointed to
‘the apparent decline of girths into disuse after 1560’, noting that ‘the
Reformation uprooted the source of authority for their officers and did not

33 Brown, Bloodfeud, 5‒6, 21‒22.
replace it’.34 But a change in how disputes were being framed would help to
explain, at least in part, why recourse to the courts came to seem more
effective than a feud by the seventeenth century, at least in relation to many
types of dispute. If the typical component parts of disputes were increasingly
amenable to the effectiveness of a diversity of methods of resolution, then a
feud could have come to be seen as too inflexible and uniform a response.
The kind of all-inclusive settlement that a feud tended to require might have
come to seem lacking in stability, at least when there were legally defined
interests at stake that could be addressed – and therefore challenged – in other
ways. In terms of procuring an effective and satisfactory resolution, it may
have come to seem more to the advantage of parties to isolate justiciable
matters for formal redress in the courts. And even if legal redress were not
sought, the strength of claims that were justiciable would count in the context
of any compromise leading to an informal settlement. Such a view can only
be a hypothesis without further research on the nature of disputes, and on
how they were structured and resolved. But it certainly does not seem incon-
sistent with Wormald’s general thesis about the decline of feud. At the same
time, it raises an underlying question about what lay behind changing percep-
tions of effectiveness, and how these might have related to even deeper changes
in the fabric of Scottish society, as well as to the effects of the late sixteenth-
century governmental campaign against the violence of the feud, epitomised
by the act of 1598 ‘anent removeing and extinguischeing of deidlie feidis’.
Turning to Wormald’s central claims, her thesis about feud concerning not
lawlessness but the achievement of justice should first be acknowledged as a
brilliant interpretation of the Scottish evidence and one that has with good
reason become the orthodox view. We have seen that at a theoretical level
subsequent work has broadly followed Wormald’s interpretation. The main
qualifications relate to the role of violence and of honour in feud. Keith
Brown has argued convincingly that Wormald has significantly underplayed
the levels of violence that feuding society in sixteenth-century Scotland had
to endure, and that aspirations towards peace were often militated against by
the desire to protect honour. But beyond this difference in emphasis, Brown
seems to accept the basic validity of Wormald’s conception of ‘the justice of
the feud’. We have seen how he is sceptical about but does not explicitly reject
the theory of the ‘peace in the feud’, which provides one important founda-
tion for Wormald’s approach. Significantly, perhaps, he does not base the
34 Hector L. MacQueen, ‘Girth: society and the law of sanctuary in Scotland’, in John
W. Cairns and O. F. Robinson (eds), Critical Studies in Ancient Law, Comparative Law
and Legal History (Oxford, 2001), 333‒52, at p. 351.
analytical structure of his enquiry around testing the ‘justice of the feud’
model, and therefore this conception is not itself subjected to particular
critical analysis. Indeed, the expression is only relied on towards the very end
of his book.35 Brown’s analysis is, nevertheless, implicitly premised upon the
validity of the concept of ‘the justice of the feud’. This is apparent from refer-
ences during the course of the book to aspects of dispute resolution that are
distinctive in relation to feud, such as that ‘every feud-settlement offered
something to both sides’; the containment of violence occurring through ‘the
refusal by both sides to discard all restraint’, so as to establish limits ‘which
were largely acceptable to both sides’; the ‘justice of the feud’ is also referred
to explicitly, as well as ‘the justice of the kindreds’, ‘the principles of private
justice’, and ‘the bloodfeud’s own principles’.36
Although Brown thus relies on a conception of ‘the justice of the feud’,
and by extension the underlying Gluckman-inspired concept of the ‘peace
in the feud’, one important difference between his analysis and that of
Wormald is worth noting, namely that he has a more critical and dynamic
conception of the peace achieved through the feud than Wormald. He
comments, for example, on ‘limitations in the effectiveness of private justice
which were partly responsible for a change in how feuds were handled
towards the end of the century’.37 He notes the fragile nature of peace in
sixteenth-century Scotland, and points out that it could not be regarded as
durable when achieved, commenting that ‘while local society could at times
find the human resources to punctuate feud with peace, it would not find a
way of guaranteeing that peace’.38 Kinship structures, lordship and a culture
of settlement were therefore incapable of maintaining continuous and stable
peace: indeed, that was the very reason for feud, as a way of guiding and
imposing a pattern upon disruptive behaviour. Brown observes that the shift
that went with the decline of feuding had to involve peace becoming ‘more
highly valued than honour or power’, although he argues that ‘it had to be
institutionalized by a coercive authority’, noting the crown’s ‘growing ability
to ensure that settlements were made and kept’.39
The peace achieved through the feud was thus not necessarily permanent
or stable, and it must be recognised that changes in patterns of dispute
resolution would also have reflected changing attitudes to what peace could
or should mean. However, in other respects Brown still accepts Wormald’s
basic argument that the bloodfeud had its own principles and that these were
35 The first reference in terms seems to be Brown, Bloodfeud, 244, the end of the final
chapter being at p. 274.
36 Brown, Bloodfeud, 53; 97; 244, 246, 260, see also pp. 266, 272 for the ‘justice of the
feud’ or of the ‘bloodfeud’.
eventually absorbed by the law, though he does not attribute the decline of
the feud simply to this development.40 So the most substantial departure in
Brown’s analysis remains one of emphasis, relating to the levels of violence
involved in feud in sixteenth-century Scotland, and to some extent to the role
of violence itself as being central to how men behaved. He has observed that
‘local politics were very much the politics of conflict and confrontation …
and the tool of that conflict in this society was violence, actual or threatened’.41
As Brown argues, ‘feuding was … an essentially violent means of resolving
disputes’, commenting that ‘indiscriminate vengeance was common to a large
number of Scottish feuds’, and that ‘interpersonal violence was the main
business of feuding’.42 In itself this represents a very significant difference
in emphasis from Wormald’s interpretation (the basis for which was subse-
quently accepted and taken account of by Wormald)43 and has been supported
by subsequent research.44 However, it also does not seem to require or
propose a theoretical alternative to the ‘justice of the feud’.
VI
In terms of reassessing Wormald’s central claims, however, it is the relation-

ship between feud and justice that still requires further probing, in particular
the concept of ‘the justice of the feud’. Overall, we have seen that Wormald
stresses that the purpose of the feud was settlement and its objective compen-
sation – she refers to ‘the principle of compensation to those wronged which
lay at the heart of the justice of the feud’. Moreover, she argues that ‘peace
after the feud depended on acceptance of a settlement by both sides’.45
Nevertheless, Wormald’s concept of ‘the justice of the feud’ is a complex one,
which does not simply embody one principle or idea. Rather, it embraces (and
perhaps collapses together) several distinct ideas, and it cannot adequately be
subject to critique unless the component ideas are recognised and disting-
uished. These might be:
1. Kin involvement: in a feud redress is due not just to the victim but also to
the kin-group.
2. Composite definition of disputes: the immediate dispute can connect with other
disputes between the same parties, as well as encompassing the wider relations and
conflicts of respective lords and kin-groups, many if not all of which may need to
be addressed in any settlement, including non-material factors like honour.

42 Brown, Bloodfeud, 33, 27, 30‒1.
43 Wormald, Lords and Men, p. vi.
44 Wasser, ‘Violence and the Central Criminal Courts’, 21, 37, 66.
45 Wormald, ‘Bloodfeud’, 66, 73.
3. Compensation rather than vengeance or punishment is a sufficient form of

redress for harm.
4. Settlement takes a composite form: compensation and other aspects of
settlement of the underlying or wider dispute are typically assessed together
as a whole.
5. Settlement is made with a view to effecting a lasting if not permanent reso-
lution that satisfies both sides.
6. On both sides some compromise is customary.
With regard to these features, it may be suggested that the concept of ‘the
justice of the feud’ functions very well to identify a structural feature of late
medieval Scottish society, since all these features existed and were inter-
connected. However, it is perhaps less helpful when it comes to explaining
change over time in patterns of dispute resolution during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. This can be explored through a number of more
detailed points.
First, it is not clear that feud settlement can be seen as simply compen-
satory. Against this view, for example, J. H. Baker has observed more generally
that ‘the purpose of emendation payments was overtly retributive, yet it was
also compensatory’.46 This is consistent with Robert Black’s view that
compensation was not always an entitlement following injury, in line with his
argument that in Scotland ‘no payment was due where the culprit suffered
capital punishment’, meaning that no compensation was due once this form
of retribution had been inflicted by the crown.47 At the very least, we need to
be cautious in making such assumptions until tested by further research.
A second point is that settlements were by definition consensual, but that
even within the sphere of private justice there could be different forms of
settlement involving different procedures, not all of which involved assent of
the parties to the precise terms. Indeed, assent to the precise terms occurred
only when parties literally negotiated a compromise for themselves or when
they were party to the negotiation of a compromise by others acting in their
interest but which they adopted or ratified. However, many settlements
involved parties simply agreeing to abide by the decision of chosen persons,
or perhaps to accept the further verdict of arbiters or a nominated group of
informal judges. There could still be scope in such cases for acceptance of
the outcome to depend not directly on the consent of the parties – which was
merely given in advance to the procedure, at the point when the submission
was made – but more on respect for the authority of individuals or of the
46 J. H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History (4th edn, London, 2002), 501.
47 Robert Black, ‘A historical survey of delictual liability in Scotland for personal injuries
and death, part I’, Comparative and International Law Journal of South Africa 8 (1975),
46‒70, at p. 55.
kinship groups and associated lordship to whose representatives the dispute

would be submitted, as arbiters or otherwise. In addition, when arbitration
was involved, the parties were legally bound to accept the decision of the
arbiters as a result of their original voluntary submission to arbitration, which
had the force of a contract – arbiters were not meant to ‘negotiate the issues
between the parties’, as Brown suggests, but rather to decide them.48
The need for acceptance of a settlement is indeed in obvious contrast to
the outcome of legal process, which is aimed at vindication of rights not
compromise. Legal process results in a decree, enforcement of which is ulti-
mately coercive and dependent upon legal rather than social sanctions, and
in which the enforcement of one party’s rights is necessarily at the expense
of the other party.49 Indeed, Wormald acknowledges something of this when
observing that ‘settlement after murder could be more easily achieved, because
it was to the advantage of both parties, than resolution of land dispute, which
involved gain to one and loss to the other’.50 It should also not be forgotten
that legal action carried with it the risk of losing, a risk that could be
exchanged for the certainty involved in a negotiated settlement, or where the
risks attached to weak claims could be pooled with stronger claims in a
submission to arbitration.51 But even when settlements were made and volun-
tarily accepted, parties could and did change their minds and on occasion
dishonour them, as they could too with decrees of courts or decrees arbitral.
So it was not the case that there was a distinct ‘justice of the feud’ that
necessarily engendered more stable outcomes because of being based on the
voluntary acceptance of the parties.
A third point about Wormald’s conception of the justice of the feud is
that, if both feud and court actions are seen as directed towards achieving
results that were ‘just’, then what was considered just could hardly have been
divorced from the evaluation and protection of legal rights. In a society with
a common law and a centuries-old system of land tenure, no calculus of the
interests at stake in a dispute could be made without regard to the legal claims
and rights of the parties, and the strength of those claims. And it seems
probable that the development of a central civil court from the later fifteenth
century onwards would over time have intensified the weight to be attached
to legal rights, since the more effective judicial process of the Court of
Session, the increase in resort to central litigation during the sixteenth
century, and the reliability of central record-keeping would have offered ever
greater opportunities to contest claims that were not legally sound (though
to test this hypothesis further research is needed).52 Thus the apparently

49 Wormald, ‘Bloodfeud’, 66; Godfrey, Civil Justice, 384, 406.
52 Godfrey, Civil Justice, 436, 448‒9.
categorical distinction between the ‘justice of the feud’ and that of the courts
risks failing to acknowledge an unavoidable connection between them in
practice and a deeper common basis for both. It also seems unlikely that many
feuds would have been carried out without some accompanying legal process
by the sixteenth century, at least if they involved possession of land, or that
a world of pure feuding existed where parties trusted to the old methods of
the justice of the feud but ignored the king’s justice in the courts. The
contrast between two types of ‘justice’ is at least from this perspective
somewhat too stark. What is really being contrasted is a resolution based on
settlement (and compromise) with one based on the vindication of legal
rights. But awareness of structures of legal rights and the strength of legal
claims must have always informed settlements, with or without accompanying
court action. Conversely, a decision to litigate did not foreclose the option of
a negotiated settlement either, and may often have helped create the pressure
to advance one.53
Here the maintenance of a firm distinction between the justice of the
courts and of feud is also problematic with regard to the prevalence of private
arbitration, since arbitration was in itself a formal process governed by legal
norms whose deployment could reflect many potential advantages it had over
other methods of addressing the resolution of a dispute, including litigation.54
Arbitration could be speedier, and could encompass a range of disputed
matters in one resolution, while the parties could choose the panel of arbiters.
Thus, parties did not necessarily opt for arbitration simply because its out-
come would be geared to the goal of restoring harmony between them rather
than achieving a strictly legal determination.55 Indeed, in determining the
outcome arbiters could not have avoided having some regard to the legal
strength of any legal claims involved. Where landed interests were at stake,
parties in dispute would still have had to rely on presenting the arbiters with
the legal documents necessary to support the claim. The medieval common law
had long since established that security of tenure was best attested by the clear
evidence of charters and other legal documents, and this imperative would not
be affected by the choice of forum in which a dispute was being addressed.
Moreover, arbitration very often interacted subsequently with public justice,
since it resulted in a decree from the arbiters that could be enforced through
court action.56 There was therefore advantage in the terms of the resolution
being consistent with legal understanding of the rights of the parties.
53 A point also made by Boardman, ‘Politics and the Feud’, 82: ‘the threat of imminent
judgement exerted pressure on the contesting parties to bring about a settlement by
the way of “luf ”.’ Also see Davies, ‘Law and Order in Stirlingshire’, 399‒400, for a
similar point in respect of criminal prosecutions.
54 See Godfrey, Civil Justice, ch. 8.
55 Godfrey, Civil Justice, 378‒90.
A fourth point is that the compensatory nature of settlements achieved

after feud is a less distinctive feature of the ‘justice of the feud’ than it might
appear. The compensatory basis of feud settlement is implicitly presented in
Wormald’s analysis as especially noteworthy because of the contrast with the
infliction of retribution and punishment that might otherwise be the more
natural primary response to violence in a system of administration of justice.
And yet this contrast only exists to the extent that compensatory principles
were foreign to the legal system and, at the same time, that retribution and
punishment did in fact play a significant role in the administration of justice
in sixteenth-century Scotland. However, this is questionable, precisely
because the functioning of both civil and criminal law in this period was
primarily directed towards the achievement of compensation, and punish-
ment was probably not a typical outcome even to a criminal prosecution.
Crimes could be and often were pardoned and remissions granted by the
crown when the victim had been compensated. Since criminal prosecution
was usually a private matter, that process depended primarily on the initiative
of the victim or their kin, whose agreement to the offer of compensation was
required before a pardon could be considered.57 When remissions were
granted, it was therefore not a question of the legal system turning a blind
eye to the ‘justice of the feud’, whose principles were otherwise foreign to it,
but rather it was simply the way in which the legal system’s own principles
of compensation for wrongs were effected at this time.58
Subsequently, especially from the seventeenth century onwards, the proce-
dures for achieving compensation were vastly elaborated by the Court of
Session within the system of civil justice, instead of being approached
through the procedures of criminal justice. The older link to gaining a
remission from a criminal prosecution, and the associated quantification of
compensation, were left to private settlement processes.59 However, we should
not categorise a compensatory approach to dispute resolution as intrinsically
and exclusively derived from a ‘justice of the feud’ as opposed to public justice
just because this differentiation and development had not yet occurred in the
57 I. D. Willock, The Origins and Development of the Jury in Scotland (Stair Society, 1966),
153‒4. The complex relationship between granting of royal mercy, remissions and
protection of the rights of injured parties to compensation through assythment is
hinted at in statutes regulating remissions such as RPS 1592/4/89. For further
discussion see Goodare, The Government of Scotland, 125.
58 See Hector MacQueen and W. David H. Sellar, ‘Negligence’, in Kenneth Reid and
Reinhard Zimmermann (eds), A History of Private Law in Scotland, II: Obligations
(Oxford, 2000), 517‒47, at p. 520; C. H. W. Gane, ‘The effect of a pardon in Scots
law’, Juridical Review 25 (1980), 18‒46, at pp. 18‒23.
59 For an overview see A. M. Godfrey, ‘The courts of Scotland’, in Mark A. Mulhern
(ed.), The Law: Scottish Life and Society: A Compendium of Scottish Ethnology, vol. 13
(Edinburgh, 2012), 131‒54, at p. 141.
sixteenth century. Wormald notes how the Stewart kings mostly understood
that ‘compromise and compensation might be a better answer to crime than
a penal code’.60 However, the comparison should not be between compen-
sating injury after feud and prosecuting crime, but between judicial and extra-
judicial methods of conflict resolution, both of which recognised the
compensatory principle quite separately from the issue of any criminal
liability and questions of punishment.
A complication in Scotland is that the administration of justice did not
yet observe a clear distinction between the criminal and civil functions of
court remedies. However, the principle of compensation for wrongful injury,
inchoate though it may have been, was already one of the main underlying
principles of Scots law, though the development of distinctive civil remedies
to provide compensation as conceived by a delictual law of ‘wrang’ occurred
only gradually from the late medieval period onwards. Alan Harding has
pointed in this regard to a ‘late medieval experience of the improvisation of
remedies’ in relation to delictual forms of liability in Scotland, arguing that:
although Scots law may never have recognized distinct torts in the English
style, complaints of wrongs in the later Middle Ages were answered by the
development of distinct remedies, which fulfilled the essential function of
bringing delict within the purview of the Scottish courts.61
This also overlapped with developments in the definitions of crimes, with
the beginnings of a shift ‘from the world of the bloodfeud towards a public
criminal law’, argued by David Sellar to be evident as early as the later four-
teenth century.62
VII
Nevertheless, although the distinctiveness of the ‘justice of the feud’ may in

many ways seem less apparent upon close examination, this does not detract
from the larger point Wormald is making in her general claim that compen-
sation was seen as a sufficient response to harm, however violent, and that the
norms of a society which accepted ‘the justice of the feud’ did not in addition
require vengeance or punishment of otherwise criminal conduct if all
concerned parties had received their compensation.63 Wronged parties and
their kin were interested ultimately in redress, and this meant extracting

61 Alan Harding, ‘Rights, wrongs and remedies in late medieval English and Scots law’,
in Hector L. MacQueen (ed.), Miscellany IV (Stair Society, 2002), 1‒8, at p. 4.
62 W. D. H. Sellar, ‘Forethocht felony, malice aforethought and the classification of
homicide’, in W. M. Gordon and T. D. Fergus (eds), Legal History in the Making
(London, 1991), 43‒59, at p. 50.
compensation, whilst the wider settlement could address all other aspects,
including questions of honour. Merely inflicting vengeance or seeing punish-
ment imposed through the procedures of criminal justice would not directly
provide compensation. The ‘justice of the feud’ sanctioned retribution to be
enacted privately if compensation – through assythment – was not forth-
coming, and ultimately unassythed crimes against the person might also be
punished by the crown. However, this picture is still unbalanced if we do not
acknowledge that parties in dispute did not have to rely solely on informal
extra-judicial mechanisms of resolving disputes in order to achieve compen-
sation, but throughout the later middle ages could turn to litigation to pursue
compensation as well.
Even in sixteenth-century Scotland the compensatory principle was recog-
nised across all judicial and extra-judicial methods of conflict resolution, and
was not itself distinctive to the ‘justice of the feud’. To state that throughout
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ‘the justice for which the kin had origi-
nally been wholly responsible was still available’ though it was now also ‘part
of the justice offered by crown and courts’ therefore risks overlooking the
existence of the compensatory principle within the legal system, as embodied
in the gradual development of civil remedies alongside criminal sanctions to
which reference has already been made (though concerning which much more
research needs to be done). In other words, the situation in which assythment
itself could become a court remedy in the seventeenth century, providing
compensation for personal injury, was only possible because the legal system
already accepted the principle of compensation for harm – it did not need to
borrow it or take it over from the ‘justice of the feud’.64
Finally, there is also a danger of overlooking the case for regarding liti-
gation and feud as simply two means of securing the same end, namely an
outcome embodying what would be perceived by those with an interest as
just.65 Whilst it was only with a court decree that the measure of justice would
be the legal right, nevertheless, as already argued, informal settlements and
arbitrations would also have to take account of the background of legal rights.
Here, Keith Brown’s analysis is instructive, since, apart from acknowledging
the role of violence more directly, it also seems to see the striving for justice
as a common strand across different ways of resolving disputes, commenting
that ‘vengeance was self-help justice, however subjective it may have been,
and while the violence could become a self-perpetuating cycle of apparent
meaninglessness, justice, or the lack of it, remained its root cause’.66
64 See Black, ‘Historical survey of delictual liability’. For more on private and public
justice in this period see Anna Groundwater, ‘“We Bund and Obleiss Us Never More
to Querrell”: Bonds, Private Obligations and Public Justice in the Reign of James VI’,
Wormald has presented a brilliant analysis of enduring value as an expla-

nation of the role that feud played in Scotland. However, once attention turns
away from the feud to other mechanisms of dispute resolution, and an inte-
grated picture begins to be drawn, the emphasis on a ‘feuding society’ and
the ‘justice of the feud’ requires some qualification. Just because feud was
such a distinctive feature of sixteenth-century Scotland does not make it the
governing concept for all analysis of disputes, even if by the end of the
sixteenth century many non-violent disputes could also be commonly
regarded as feuds.67 The most serious problem with the concept of the ‘justice
of the feud’, however, is that it associates certain principles with feud that
were actually much wider. These principles are ones we might associate
generally with corrective justice, and would have concerned the transacting
of any settlement, for the achievement of which feud was only one means.
Feud was indeed simply a means – ritualised violence, supported by the kin
– by which parties could create pressure to be offered redress and to reach a
settlement. Without settlement they and their kin would continue to suffer
from disorder, albeit disorder that was legitimated by the culture of the
‘justice of the feud’.
67 See Wormald, ‘An early modern postscript’, 191: ‘It was indeed a feuding society, in
the sense that the word “feid”, as defined in an act of parliament of 1598, covered
everything from the full-scale and classic feud which involved vengeance killing to
civil dispute from which violence was entirely absent’.
chapter 7
Bonding, Religious Allegiance and

Covenanting
JANE E. A. DAWSON
In her seminal book Lords and Men, Jenny Wormald achieved the important
double that great historians accomplish. She both dealt superbly with a
particular body of evidence and also revealed an entire world and guided the
reader into it and around it. By opening up this new territory of lords, men
and their bonds Jenny has given those who follow in her footsteps a chance
to explore, to find exciting paths to travel and to discover new ways of exam-
ining familiar landmarks. Although the second achievement has probably
overshadowed the first one, her classification and explanation of the actual
bonds has received the accolade of being silently absorbed into the standard
accounts and becoming part of the ‘givens’ for understanding Scotland
during the late medieval and early modern period. These days the categories
of bonds of maintenance, manrent, friendship and political and religious
bonds can be found in historical discussions from school essay to specialist
article. This exploration will start with Jenny’s list of ‘religious bonds’ and
chart how conventional bonds grew into a new type of bonding expressing a
profound sense of religious allegiance and identity and flowing into the
covenanting tradition.1
As Jenny demonstrated, a bond of maintenance reflected the perspective of

the ‘lord’, usually a noble overlord or feudal superior. It detailed how the lord
viewed his relationship with his ‘man’ and in particular what he would be
doing to ‘maintain’ his ‘servitor’.2 The Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue
(DOST) defines ‘maintenance’ as:
1985), appendix C: ‘Political and Religious Bonds’. The religious bonds are calendared
at pp. 410‒12.
12 Wormald, Lords and Men, chs 2 and 4.
backing, support, protection, granted by, or due from, one person to another,
his dependants, possessions etc. … As by a lord to his man, one ally to another
… Also band, letter(is) of maintenance, a formal contract of such backing or
protection.3
Bonds of maintenance were typically made up of four discrete sections. First,

the preamble explained that it was the ‘bounden duty’ of the lord to help his
man. Second came the promise to apply power and strength and ‘very lyves’
in support of the particular people who were named or identified. Third, the
actual maintenance clause contained the promise to ‘mantene, nuryss and
defende’. Finally, as befitted a legal document, came the subscription by the
parties to the bond, along with witnesses, date and place.4
On 3 December 1557 a bond of maintenance was drawn up offering to
defend a small group of men from potential threats to them, including a
summons to court or ‘day of law’. So far, so routine. What was more unusual
was that the bond was issued conjointly in the name of five different titled
lords. Rather than their own dependants, protection was extended to an
unusual group of recipients: those who preached and those who heard
sermons. What was startlingly different from a usual bond was the overtly
religious language and purpose. Though wrapped in ideologically charged
terminology, the four elements constituting an ordinary bond of maintenance
were plainly present:
[Preamble] ‘We persaving how Sathan in his membris the Antechrystis of oure
tyme, crewellie dois raige seiking to downebring and to destroye the Ewangell
of Christ and his Congregatioune: awght, according to oure bounden dewtye,
to stryve in oure Masteres Cawss, even vnto deth: Being certane of the victorye
in him: The quhilk our dewtie being weill consyderit: [Promise] We do promiss
before the Maiestie of God and his Congregatioune that we (be his grace) sall
with all diligence continewallie applie oure haill power, substance, and oure
very lyves, to mantene, sett forwarde, and establische the maist blessed Worde
of God, and his Congregatioune. And sall lawboure at oure possibilitie, to haif
faithfull Ministeres purelie and trewlie to minister Christes Evangell and
Sacramentes to his Peopill: [Maintenance Clause] We sall mentene thame,
nwryss thame, and defende thame, the haill Congregatioune of Christ, and
everye member therof, at our haill poweris and waring of our lyves againis
Sathan and all wicked power that dois intend tyrannye or troubill againis the
forsaid Congregatioune: Onto the quhilk holie Worde and Congregatioune we
do joyne ws: and also dois forsaik and renunce the Congregatioune of Sathan,
with all the superstitioune, abhominatioune, and idolatrie therof. And
mareattour sall declare oure selwes manifestlie innemyes tharto. [Subscription]
Be this oure faithfull promiss before God, testefyit to his Congregatioune, be
oure Subscritptiounes at thir presentes. At Edinburgh, the (blank) day of
13 DOST, s.v. ‘mantenance’ (italics in original).

14 This is adapted from the discussion in Wormald, Lords and Men, ch. 4.
BONDING, RELIGIOUS ALLEGIANCE AND COVENANTING 157
December, the zere of God ane thowsande fyve hundreth fiftie sevin zeres:
God callit to Wytnes.
Archibald Argyll
Glencairn
Mortoun
A Lord of Lorn
Jhone Erskyne5
A misconception about this bond’s signatories has been prevalent since the
sixteenth century. As was appropriate for a powerful bond of maintenance,
all five men who signed were earls and lords. The first to sign was Archibald,
fourth earl of Argyll, one of the most powerful peers in the realm and the
group’s senior figure in authority and age. He was followed by Alexander
Cunningham, fifth earl of Glencairn, a long-standing and fervent supporter
of the Protestant cause. James Douglas, fourth earl of Morton, was the third
man to sign, and was followed by Archibald Campbell, Lord Lorne, son and
heir to the earl of Argyll. Finally, John Erskine signed; this was the sixth Lord
Erskine who was later earl of Mar and Regent of Scotland. It was assumed
until recently that the final signature belonged to John Erskine of Dun, the
laird who later became a minister in the Reformed Kirk and Superintendent
of Angus and the Mearns. In the original manuscript of his History John Knox
assumed that Erskine of Dun signed. Since Knox had not been in Scotland
in 1557 and had no first-hand experience of the bond, the confusion probably
arose because the bond seems to have been circulated and Erskine of Dun
probably signed it at this later stage. Knox recorded in his History that Erskine
of Dun and the lairds of the Mearns had made a similar declaration in 1556
binding themselves together to support the Protestant cause. No text for this
bond has survived, and it is not clear whether a written document was created.6
Following Knox, the editor of The Works of John Knox, David Laing,
declared,
There is no reason to doubt (having Knox’s authority for the fact) that the last
name was that of John Erskine of Dun, and not John Lord Erskine. Knox it
will be observed, to these five names adds, Et cetera, and expressly states, that
this Bond ‘was subscryved by the foir-writin and many others’.7
This view has been repeated by later commentators. However, Laing also
printed a facsimile of the signatures to the bond from the original document
that had been exhibited by the Reverend James Young at the 1860 Tercentenary
of the Reformation.8 When compared with his other signatures, the Erskine
15 Knox, Works, vi, 674‒6.

16 Wormald, Lords and Men, 412; Knox, Works, i, 250‒1; Frank D. Bardgett, Scotland
Reformed: The Reformation in Angus and the Mearns (Edinburgh, 1989), 52.
17 Knox, Works, i, 273; vi, 674‒6 (Laing’s italics).
18 The original of the First Band is at NLS, Charter 902.
signature on the First Band matched those of Lord Erskine.9 The recognition
that the final signature was penned by another peer, rather than a laird or
minister-in-waiting, underscores and greatly strengthens its significance as a
noble bond of maintenance. Each member of that first group was drawn from
the highest social and political rank in the realm and ensured that the bond
represented a step change in support for the Protestant movement.
Most Scots viewing the bond in 1557 would assume that this was what
nobles did: lords protected their men. They would also have understood that
some senior members of the Scottish nobility were willing to give public
support for Protestant preachers and preaching, and protect those who
attended the ‘heretical’ sermons and other services. As with all bonds of main-
tenance, the implication was that, when necessary, protection would be armed;
‘our haill poweris and waring [i.e. spending] of our lyves’ were promised for
the fight. In addition, the ‘enemies’ were identified as Satan and the ‘members
of Antichrist’. Although they were not named, this targeted those who might
be conducting a campaign against heresy and ‘dois intend tyrannye or troubill
againis the forsaid Congregatioune’. By association, this included the entire
ecclesiastical hierarchy in Scotland and anyone prepared to support them.
The traditional bond formula allowed the peers to declare publicly that they
were ‘manifestlie innemyes’ to that entire ‘congregatioune of Sathan’.
II
The document signalled a shift, socially and tactically, in the profile of the
scattered groups of Protestants in Scotland. The five peers were promising
to maintain, nourish and defend the ‘haill Congregatioune of Christ’, the
adherents of what remained a heretical movement. With that protection in
place, from being an underground network the Protestants were able to
emerge into the public gaze. They could now operate openly as a pressure
group with a specific programme for religious reform, to ‘establische the
maist blessed Worde of God, and his Congregatioune’. The use of the
language of lordship declared that noble power and even military force might
be employed to implement this religious programme. There was a new will-
ingness to make an open and direct challenge to the Catholic hierarchy and
defend an alternative form of worship.
Though the format of the document and the basic provisions followed the
standard maintenance contract, something new had emerged from this adap-
tation of traditional formulas. One obvious omission was the lack of an equiv-
alent bond of manrent, the normal mirror image of a bond of maintenance.10
In a departure from conventional practice, no reciprocal action on their part
19 NLS, MS 73, fos 20‒1, 29, 32‒7.

10 Wormald, Lords and Men, ch. 4.
was required from the ministers and ‘congregation’ to be protected. This was
not simply an unwillingness to enter into contracts concerning matters of
worship or with preachers.11 In addition to describing the central purpose of
the bond in religious terminology such as holy word, congregation of Christ,
Antichrist, superstition and idolatry, the First Band contained a specific
declaration of religious allegiance and alliance. Two routine components
within a bond were altered: the presence of witnesses and the oath on a sacred
object such as the Gospels. Since Protestants denied that sanctity could
adhere to physical objects, they abandoned the practice of placing their hands
on sacred objects whilst taking an oath. Instead the five nobles gave their
‘faithfull promiss’ openly to avow their Protestantism, ‘onto the quhilk holie
Worde and Congregatioune we do joyne ws’. Though no one signed the bond
on their behalf, the Congregation would be able to bear legal witness or
‘testefy’ to the bond.
The real witnesses at the promise-taking were God and Christ. In one
sense the five nobles gave to Christ their manrent and allegiance, vowing ‘to
stryve in oure Masteres Cawss, even vnto deth’. With its overt declaration of
allegiance to God, these innovations created the first religious bond in
Scotland, and its significance was encapsulated by Jenny:
For the first time this commonplace of Scottish society was turned to religious
use: subsumed into the Calvinist idea of the religious covenant, it produced a
short and succinct clarion call for the advancement of the new faith, which set a
pattern out of which there would emerge, 80 years later, the National Covenant.12
The 1557 document later achieved iconic status within Covenanter thinking
and historiography. However, in the middle of the sixteenth century Scots
employed the word ‘cunnand’, rather than ‘covenant’, when describing such a
bond with God, best exemplified in baptism. In 1552 Archbishop Hamilton’s
Catechism had explained, ‘For quhat uthir thing is Baptyme, bot ane faithful
cunnand and sickir band of amitie maid be God to man and be man to God?’13
The description of the 1557 bond as the ‘first covenant’ was initially made
by James Carmichael at the time of the King’s Confession of 1581. David
11 As that champion bond-maker Colin Campbell of Glenorchy demonstrated four years

later, there were no qualms about making a contract with Mr William Ramsay, minister
at Inchaiden that specified that he should preach and provide Protestant worship:
NRS, contract between Campbell and Ramsay, 28 May 1561, GD112⁄1⁄114. The 181
bonds of manrent made by the Campbells of Glenorchy, listed under ‘Breadalbane’
in Wormald, Lords and Men, appendix A, pp. 205‒49, form the largest group of bonds
that have survived. ‘Grey Colin’ had his bonds entered into a special ‘buke of bandis’,
GD112/24/2.
12 Jenny Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland, 1470‒1625 (London, 1981),
111.
13 The Catechism of John Hamilton, 1552, ed. T. G. Law (Oxford, 1884), 185; DOST, s.v.
‘cunnand’.
Calderwood later helped create a genealogy of covenants and this flowed into
the full-blown Covenanting tradition that became a significant element within
Scottish history and identity.14 The inevitable emphasis upon the 1557 bond’s
religious language and its role as founding father of the Covenants has
obscured its format as a noble bond of maintenance.
III
The second religious bond was signed at the start of the Wars of the Congre-
gation in May 1559. It built upon the main theme of the defence of ministers
and the Protestant cause. Such protection had become necessary after Knox’s
11 May sermon and the subsequent iconoclastic riot in Perth, the flashpoint
that started the Wars of the Congregation. Support had been mobilised from
other parts of the kingdom, including the well-organised and committed
Ayrshire network.15 On 31 May the earl of Glencairn, Lords Boyd and
Ochiltree and the master of Loudoun16 signed a bond on behalf of the
Protestant supporters from the West. The goal was more specific than the
1557 First Band; the lords promised ‘thair haill poweris to distroy, and away
put, all thingis that dois dishonour to his name, so that God may be trewlie
and puirelie wirschipped’. Given that the summoning of Protestant ministers
to a ‘day of law’ at Stirling on 10 May had provoked the chain of events, the
bond carefully specified that protection was given against the use of legal
process, whether on an explicitly religious charge or not.
An additional dimension was introduced of an alliance entered into via a
bond of friendship.17 In the past the format of bonds of friendship between
social equals had slipped into political bonds with a specific political objective;
it was a small step to use the same format for a religious programme.18 The
31 May bond employed the familiar terminology of a bond of friendship, ‘to
keap ane constant amitie, unitie, and fellowshcipe togidder’ in order to do ‘all
thingis required of god in his Scripture, that may be to his glorie’. The classic
‘all for one and one for all’ clause found in such bonds was included: ‘in case
that any truble beis intended againis the saidis Congregationis, or ony part,
or member thairof, the haill Congregatioun shall concur, assist, and conveane
14 Edward J. Cowan, ‘The making of the National Covenant’, in John Morrill (ed.), The
Scottish National Covenant in its British Context (Edinburgh, 1990), 68‒89, at p. 70;
J. Lumsden, The Covenants of Scotland (Paisley, 1914).
15 Margaret H. B. Sanderson, Ayrshire and the Reformation: People and Change, 1490‒1600
(East Linton, 1997) ch. 7.
16 Sir Matthew Campbell of Loudoun, who succeeded his father Sir Hugh in 1561. He
signed as Campbell of Teringland or Terrinzean in Kyle.
17 This category of bond is listed in Wormald, Lords and Men, appendix B.
18 Wormald, Lords and Men, appendix C, where political and religious bonds are listed
as a single category.
togidder, to the defence of the samin Congregatioun, or persone trubled’.19

The Western lords made this bond in Perth with the fifth earl of Argyll and
Lord James Stewart, Commendator Prior of St Andrews.20 Though initially
supporting the Queen Regent, those two nobles had been persuaded to
change sides.21 In the 31 May bond, and another signed with some Perthshire
lords the following day, Argyll and Lord James made a public commitment
to join their co-religionists.22 Their switch of allegiance made the two nobles
the effective leaders of the self-styled ‘Lords of the Congregation’.
As the name indicated, these ‘Lords’ expressed their aims in the ways they
knew best, within the format of bonds and the language of lordship. At
Stirling on 1 August a brief bond was subscribed that focused upon one
particular theme of the bond of amity, the need to hold together. Those who
signed declared that they would not be separated by:
the craft and slycht of our adversaries, tending all maner of wayis to
circumvene us, and be prevy meanis intendis to assailzie everyie ane of us
particularie be fair hectis and promisses, thairthrow to separat ane of us frome
ane uthir, to oure utter rewyne and destructioun.
The Regent’s attempt to negotiate individually on the tried and tested ‘divide
and rule’ formula was to be countered by sharing the content of all
communications and making joint decisions about responses to Mary of
Guise.23
IV
During the war, the Lords of the Congregation utilised bonds to draw
together a ‘party of revolution’ to fight the Queen Regent.24 The religious
bond was expanded into a general and public bond. Though initially made
in Edinburgh, the 13 July 1559 bond survives only in a copy that circulated
within St Andrews. It was signed by men conscious of being members of the
19 Knox, Works, i, 344‒5; Wormald, Lords and Men, 411.

20 Argyll, who had succeeded his father in 1558, had signed the First Band as Lord
Lorne. His friend, Lord James, was the illegitimate son of James V, later earl of Moray
and Regent of Scotland.
21 For a fuller discussion see Jane E. A. Dawson, The Politics of Religion in the Age of
Mary, Queen of Scots: The Earl of Argyll and the Struggle for Britain and Ireland
(Cambridge, 2002), ch. 3.
22 1 June bond with Lord Ruthven, the earl of Menteith and William Murray of
Tullibardine, discussed in Dawson, Politics of Religion, 92.
23 The names of those making the bond have not survived: Knox, Works, i, 381‒2;
Wormald, Lords and Men, 411.
24 Gordon Donaldson’s phrase in his All the Queen’s Men: Power and Politics in Mary
Stewart’s Scotland (London, 1983), ch. 3.
‘Congregatioun’ and, crucially, drawn from a variety of social ranks.25 This

general bond took the format one further stage by extending a noble alliance
to include everyone who supported the common religious purpose and were
willing to fight for the cause. To sign was to promise to ‘sett up the trew reli-
gioune of Christe’, and ‘with our haill power and diligence to walk fordwart
in the waiis of the Lord, laboring to destroy and put downe all idolatrie,
abhominationess, supersitioness and quhatsumever thing dois exalte the self
against the majestie of our God’.
Unlike the 31 May document, where representative lords signed on behalf
of the Western contingent, the July bond had ordinary St Andrews craftsmen,
such as the saddler, John Biccarton, adding their names.26 In St Andrews 331
men signed the bond, though no female Protestants since it had a military
element. The language of maintenance had been pushed to the background,
with the emphasis shifting to making a commitment to ‘june ourselfis togiddir
as memberis of ane body’ and to ‘bind and obliss ourselfis, in the praesence
of our God, of his Sone Jesus Christe, calling for the Haly Spirite to strenth
us to performe the same’. The Trinitarian formula and the devotional
language brought the bond closer to the parallel development of accepting a
confession of faith and making a recantation of former beliefs.27 Such general
bonds circulating in areas where the Congregation had control became a
testimony of religious allegiance. Being bound into ‘one body’ with its strong
associations with sacramental unity turned adherence to a general bond into
a badge of Protestant identity.
The combination of a religious purpose with a national cause added the
final ingredient to the bond or covenant, and one that came to haunt the
covenanting tradition. The ‘last bond’ of the Congregation signed by most
of the Scottish political nation on 27 April 1560 at Leith reflected the
changing agenda of the party of revolution. The religious purpose was now
defined more precisely as procuring ‘by all meanis possibill, that the treuth
of Goddes word may haif free passage within this Realme, with due admin-
stratioun of the sacramentis, and all thingis depending upoun the said word’.
The Congregation had added a patriotic appeal to broaden its support base
and make the diplomatic and military alliance with rebels more palatable to
Queen Elizabeth of England. Alongside the reformation of religion was
placed the freeing of the kingdom from French domination as a parallel goal:
25 Register of the Minister, Elders and Deacons of St Andrews, 1559‒1600, 2 vols, ed.
D. H. Fleming (SHS, 1889‒90), i, pp. vii–viii, 6‒7 (text), 8‒10 (list of 331 names).
26 Biccarton later fell out with the St Andrews Kirk Session and was excommunicated,
though ‘he had assistit the congregacion wyth his body armit in defence againis the
inimeis impugnoris of the trewth’: Register of St Andrews, i, 195.
27 The recantations of some of the priests in St Andrews were entered in the
Kirk Session Register immediately after the 13 July Band: Register of St Andrews, i,
10‒18.
‘[we] concur and joyne togidder, taking anefald plane pairt for expulsioun of
the said strangeris, oppressouris of oure libertie, furth of this Realme’.28
The apparently timeless language taken from the bonds that deliberately
concentrated upon general aims of unity and amity, defence and maintenance
had given the Lords of the Congregation a remarkably helpful set of formats
and phrases from which to construct the general religious bond. The adap-
tation of the language of lordship also furnished a patina of comforting and
familiar tradition to cover their religious and political revolt. By 1560 the
ingredients of the religious bond or covenant had been assembled: a religious
purpose to uphold preaching the ‘Evangel’ and ‘true’ worship; protection
and maintenance for preachers and all members of the ‘congregation’ from
their enemies; a single alliance or party held together by the ‘all for one and one
for all’ clauses; membership of the alliance open to all willing to support the
cause, irrespective of rank; a declaration of religious allegiance and confession
of faith with God as witness; a link between national and religious causes.
Although it was a necessary strategy in 1559‒60, running two purposes
in parallel weakened rather than strengthened a religious bond. An internal
tension undermining its coherence and unity was created by having two
separate goals. The ‘last’ bond’s cumbersome text was weighed down with
extraneous matter such as how internal disputes should be resolved. As with
many coalitions, the attempt to attract as wide a constituency as possible, and
satisfy its differing needs, diluted the solidarity of a common identity with
its binding obligations. The same tension and potential for conflict between
two different purposes was present most dramatically in the 1638 National
Covenant.
The situation in the closing stages of the Wars of the Congregation also
directly affected private bonds. The patriotic language of freeing the kingdom
was attached to the religious purpose of establishing true religion in a bond
of friendship signed in May 1560. The head of the Hamilton lineage, the duke
of Châtelherault, and his heir, the earl of Arran, made the political bond with
the earl of Morton as part of a wider deal to settle their dispute over claims
to the earldom of Morton. They were faced with a dilemma when it came to
the place in a noble bond to insert the normal ‘exception’ clause covering
allegiance to the crown.29 Without mentioning the monarch or the Queen
Regent’s authority they produced the interesting formula, ‘sa fer as we may
be the lawis of this realme and with ane frie and saif conscience’.30 This
28 Wormald, Lords and Men, 411; Knox, Works, ii, 61‒4. The phrase ‘anefald plaine pairt’
was regularly used in bonds: DOST, s.v. ‘anefald’.
29 The exception clause, ‘his allegeance to our soverane lord the kingis maiestie allanerlie
being excepted’, from the example bond of maintenance by William, lord Herries to
Robert Macbrair of Almigill, 16 June 1589: Wormald, Lords and Men, 414.
30 Wormald, Lords and Men, 405; NRA(S) 2177, papers of the Douglas-Hamilton family,
Dukes of Hamilton and Brandon, no. 479 (MS copy of the 31 May 1560 bond between
adjustment within one small clause of the bond highlighted how a major step
could be taken of dividing allegiance owed to the kingdom from that given to
the monarch.31
The achievement by the Lords of the Congregation of their twin goals of

religious reformation and political independence in the summer of 1560
added the gloss of success to religious bonding. The public adoption of the
Confession of Faith in the Scottish Parliament on 17 August can be regarded
as the culmination of the religious bonds of the Wars of the Congregation.
Emotional declarations accompanied the ‘promise’ or acceptance of the
Confession containing clear echoes of the language of bonding. As the English
ambassador recorded:
Dyvers with protestation of their Consciens and Faythe, desyred rather
presentlye to end their lyves than ever to thinke contrarie unto that that allowed
ther. Maynie also offereit to shede their blude in defence of the same …
concludinge all in one that that was the Faythe wherin thei ought to lyve and
die.32
The Scots Confession reinforced the confessional element within religous
bonding, but did not replace or supersede it. Bonds retained their ability to
sustain a religious identity and kept their potential to elevate that allegiance
above the loyalty owed to the crown.
The general bond signed at Ayr in 1562 demonstrated the rebellious
element that such bonds continued to possess. As in the First Band, it was
the ‘preaching of the Evangell’, and the ministers who preached who were
given protection by the ninety-one signatories drawn from the south-west of
Scotland.33 In traditional phrases from a bond of friendship, it bound all into
an alliance ensuring that ‘everie ane of us shall assist otheris’, and that their
maintenance should extend to ‘the hoill body of the Protestantis within this
Realme’, and not only those within their own region. The national reach of
Morton, Châtelherault and Arran). Cf. HMC, Eleventh Report, Appendix, Part VI
(London, 1887) (Duke of Hamilton), p. 38, no. 77⁄28.
31 The many aspects of ‘kingship’ and ‘commonweal’ are discussed in J. H. Burns, The
True Law of Kingship: Concepts of Monarchy in Early-Modern Scotland (Oxford, 1996)
and Roger A. Mason, Kingship and the Commonweal: Political Thought in Renaissance
and Reformation Scotland (East Linton, 1998).
32 Thomas Randolph’s report to William Cecil, 19 August 1560, cited in Knox, Works,
vi, 116‒17.
33 Seventy-eight names in Knox, Works, ii, 348‒50; 91 names on copy in Sir William
Fraser, Memorials of the Montgomeries, Earls of Eglinton, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1859), ii,
192‒3; Wormald, Lords and Men, 411, 156; Sanderson, Ayrshire, 44, 121, 124.
the maintenance offered in the bond therefore incorporated an entire party

identified solely by their religious allegiance. Protection was extended to all
Scottish Protestants: ‘whosoever shall hurt, molest, or truble ony of our body,
shalbe reaputed ennemye to the hoill’. This bond elaborated upon the theme
of a solemn oath before God, with the powerful assertion of making the
‘promesse in the presence of God, and in the presence of his Sone our Lord
Jesus Christ’. In a final flourish, the bond was justified in the contexts of
salvation and Kirk membership, ‘as we desyre to be accepted and favored of
the Lord Jesus, and reaccompted worthy of credyte and honestie in the
presence of the godlie’. In this bond, honour and worthiness were to be
judged by religious, rather than noble, faithfulness, with the emphasis firmly
placed upon Christ as king and lord. These were the kinds of concepts that
would characterise the covenants in the following century. Though created
in the context of a traditional rivalry between different Ayrshire affinities, the
assumptions within this bond potentially challenged the noble concept of
honour within Scottish society.34
Instead of employing the usual clause about dispute settlement by a higher
authority or legal process, the 1562 bond cited the Kirk’s new courts, ‘except
that the offendar wilbe content to submit him self to the judgement of the
Kirk, now establisshed amangis us’. While the language retained its familiar
ring, the implications were new. It included the new institution of the
Reformed Kirk and its congregations and drew into its compass the entire
body of Protestants in Scotland. Even more significant was the underscoring
of a different concept of kinship, the spiritual kindred of the ‘godlie’, those
joined in a common covenant with God created and sustained by the sacra-
ments of the Reformed Kirk and upheld by the Kirk’s discipline and
judgement. Scottish Reformed ecclesiology brought the language of leagues
and covenants to the fore, and Article 21 of the Scots Confession of Faith had
emphasised the sacraments ‘mak ane visible difference betwixt his people and
they that wes without his league’. In particular, sacramental theology and
practice helped underline the similarities between being a member of the
Kirk and religious bonding. The Book of Common Order explained that
attending a baptism was designed to ensure every member of the congre-
gation was ‘putt in minde of the league and covenant made betwixt God and
us that he wilbe our God, and we his people’.35 Knox had summarised the
significance of the Lord’s Supper in terms redolent of bonding, as ‘the decla-
ration of our covenant, that be Chryst Jesus we be nurissit, mentenit, and
continewit in the league with God our Father’.36
The 1562 bond had been composed shortly before the disputation held at
34 Cf. Keith M. Brown, ‘Honour, honours and nobility in Scotland between the Refor-
mation and the National Covenant’, SHR 91 (2012), 42‒75.
35 Knox, Works, iv, 189.
36 Knox, Works, iii, 125.
Maybole between John Knox and Quentin Kennedy, abbot of Crossraguel,

and Knox had forewarned that ‘troubles’ might come. The abbot was backed
by his powerful Kennedy kin led by the earl of Cassillis, and the Ayr bond
was a public declaration of extensive support for Knox, not least from oppo-
nents of the Kennedys. Surprisingly, this particular confrontation was not
subsumed into these long-standing regional rivalries, and the bond’s confes-
sional language emphasised that it was a new-style declaration of Protestant
allegiance.
The disputation between Kennedy and Knox did not escalate into armed
confrontation, though the contemporary situation in France demonstrated
what might have happened. Following the massacre in 1562 of the Protestant
congregation at Vassy by the duke of Guise, the Protestant nobles led by the
prince of Condé had extended their protection to other congregations and
co-religionists within France. Since the defence of Protestants was expanded
to include the seizure of Rouen by Protestant forces, the situation rapidly
degenerated into full-scale war. As this example demonstrated, one man’s
defence of religion was another man’s rebellion. The bond of 1562 avoided
government censure because there was no fighting in Ayrshire. In the
following year its existence and terms probably played a part in the queen’s
indignant reaction when Knox wrote to his Protestant friends in the West
and elsewhere.37 His letter speaking of the dangers facing the Kirk was inter-
preted as a deliberate attempt to mobilise the support promised in that earlier
bond. It was possible to construe that letter as an open summons to the
queen’s lieges, and possibly treasonable, though after investigation Knox was
absolved by the Privy Council in December 1563.38
By tracing phrases and concepts from noble bonds of maintenance and
friendship that were taken into religious bonds, one direction of flow between
the two spheres has been demonstrated. Religious language, ideas and ritual
had flowed the opposite way from the beginning of bonding within medieval
Scottish society. The church had always been the other arena in which kinship
and its many obligations could be deliberately created. Its sacramental system,
especially in baptism and marriage, produced new ‘affinities’ among the key
participants, with ties that bound for life. They had a direct effect upon the
language and ritual of the bonds, and in one instance had produced a new
type, a bond of gossipry, based on the baptismal links of godparenthood.39
The complex interaction between civil and religious practice was more than
a two-directional interchange. It resembled a series of rebounds, with words,
37 Knox, Works, ii, 395‒7.

38 Knox, Works, ii, 398‒411.
39 Jane E. A. Dawson, ‘“There is nothing like a good gossip”: baptism, kinship and
alliance in early modern Scotland’, in Christian J. Kay and Margaret A. Mackay (eds),
Perspectives on the Older Scottish Tongue: A Celebration of DOST (Edinburgh, 2005),
38‒47.
phrases and ritual ricocheting back and forth producing an intermingling.

Where there was a core of shared concepts, such as the importance of faith-
fulness, the undertaking of obligations, the creation of amity and a common
purpose, this was relatively straightforward. However, sharing languages
could create problems where the two sets of values were at odds. In the long
run, the religious bond and the noble bond produced radically different
answers to the questions, ‘who is my ally?’ and ‘where does my allegiance lie?’
As the 1562 bond indicated, the establishment of the Reformed Kirk as a
national institution added another strand to the tangle of competing alle-
giances. It brought the language of bonding closer to a confession of faith
and the rituals of repentance being used within the kirk’s disciplinary system.
A common sight and sound for early modern Scots was of penitents perfor-
ming and expressing their repentance in the parish church as a result of the
routine discipline of the kirk sessions.40 Of greater significance for general
bonding was the public repentance ritual of the General Fast, with its
emphasis upon the covenant between God and his people and the obligations
this entailed.41 Most of the instances when a general bond was circulated,
including the National Covenant, were accompanied by a Fast; its language
formed a backdrop to bonding. The General Fast drew upon the two different
views of the ‘godly’, and the ‘Kirk’, using both the concept of a Protestant
nation with a fully Reformed Kirk and the ‘remnant’ of the faithful who
besought God on behalf of the sinful realm. These ideas and the tensions
they created fed into the covenant mix of the seventeenth century.
VI
In 1581 many of these strands were brought together when the King’s or
Negative Confession was turned into a national religious bond. The ‘Secund
Confession of Faith’, as Calderwood labelled it, self-consciously looked back
to the 1560 Scots Confession.42 It celebrated the patriotic belief that:
the true Christiane fayth and religion pleasing God…is receaved, beleved and
defended by manie and sindrie notable kyrkis and realmes, but cheifly by the
kyrk of Scotland … as more perticulerly is expressed in the confession of our
40 Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven, CT,
2002), ch. 3; Jane E. A. Dawson, ‘Discipline and the making of Protestant Scotland’,
in Duncan B. Forrester and Doug Gay (eds), Worship and Liturgy in Context: Studies
and Case Studies in Theology and Practice (London, 2009), 123‒36.
41 The Order of the General Fast, Knox, Works, vi, 391‒422. There is a fuller discussion
of the Fast in W. Ian P. Hazlett, ‘Playing God’s card: Knox and fasting, 1565‒66’, in
Roger A. Mason (ed.), John Knox and the British Reformations (Aldershot, 1998), 176‒98.
42 Calderwood, History, iii, 502‒5; William C. Dickinson and Gordon Donaldson (eds),
A Source Book of Scottish History, vol. iii: 1567‒1707 (2nd edn, Edinburgh, 1961), 32‒5.
fayth stablished and publictly confirmed by sindrie actis of perlamentis, and

now of a long tyme had bene openly professed by the kingis Majestie and whole
body of this realme both in brught and land.
It was followed by a long and specific list of ‘all kynd of papistrie’ that ‘we
detest’ – a list that earned the confession its ‘negative’ nickname with contem-
porary Roman Catholics.43 Eventually the signatories asserted that ‘we joyne
our selves willingly in doctrine, fayth, religion, discipline, and use of the holie
sacramentis, as lyvlie memberis of the same in Christ our head’. Then came
the promise, ‘swearing by the great name of the Lord our God that we shall
continue in the obedience of the doctrine and discipline of this kyrk and shal
defend the same according to our vocation and power all the dayes of our
lyves’. Although it had first been signed by the king, his household and court,
it was extended by royal command on 2 March to the whole of the realm. In
a significant combination of the techniques of general bonding with an oblig-
atory Confession, it was to be enforced by both royal and ecclesiastical
authority, accompanied by civil and religious sanctions. The document was
to be signed or accepted ‘under the panes conteyned in the law, and danger
both of body and saule in the day of Godis fearfull judgement’.
The Confession faced a novel problem over its ‘enemies’. While the Pope
and Roman Catholic rulers abroad were easily identifiable, those at home
remained hidden. The fear was that these dangerous hypocrites conformed
outwardly to the Reformed Kirk, but were waiting ‘when tyme may serve, to
become open ennemeis and persecutoris’. Adopting the language of penit-
ence, the signatories declared that we:
protest and call the searcher of all heartis for witnes, that our myndis and
heartis do fullely aggree with this our confession, promise, othe, and
subscription … [and] are perswaded onely in our conscience throught the
knawledge and love of Godis true religion prented in oure heartis by the holie
sprit, as we shall answer to him in the day when the secretis of all heartis shalbe
disclosed.
There was a reversion to the language of bonding and a strong echo of the
king’s coronation oath in 1567, when the second promise was made in the
Confession.
The 1567 General Assembly had made a strong association between the
coronation oath and a religious bond. It had summarised its understanding
of the royal oath to be made by kings at:
ther first entres, befor they be crownit and inaugurat, sall make ther faithfull
league and promise to the true kirk of God, that they sall maintaine and
defend, and be all lawfull meanes sett fordward, the true religioun of Jesus
Chryst presentlie confessit and establishit within this realme … as they crave
43 DOST, s.v. ‘negative’.

obedience of there subiects, so the band and contract to be mutuall and reci-
proque in all tymes comeing betuixt the prince and God, and also betuixt the
prince and faithfull peiple according to the word of God.
As a way of associating the kingdom with the king’s coronation bond, a
General Fast had been held and a general bond to root out idolatry and
establish true religion was circulated by the Assembly.44
Within the King’s Confession of 1581, allegiance to God and true religion
were carefully aligned in the second promise with the allegiance owed to the
monarch.
We shall defend his [the king’s] persone and authoritie with our geyr, bodyes,
and lyves in the defence of Christis evangell, libertie of our countrey, minis-
tration of justice and punishment of iniquitie, agaynst all enemies within this
realme or without.
In its final passage, the document reverted to the language of salvation and
divine judgement, paralleling the defence of the king with that given by God
to each Christian:
as we desyre our God to be a strong and mercyfull defender of us in the day
of our death and cuming of our Lord Jesus Christ, to whome with the Father
and the Holie Sprit be all honour and glorie eternally.
This confession was an official document circulated and enforced by the
authority of the crown and the Kirk. The masterstroke of placing the promise
to defend true religion and the Kirk alongside the promise to uphold the
king’s person and authority appeared to have tamed the rebellious element
within religious bonding.
VII
Having remained dormant for most of the century following the Reformation,
the full rebellious potential of religious bonding erupted spectacularly in 1638
when the National Covenant was signed in Greyfriars churchyard, Edin-
burgh.45 Ironically, it was the crucial double promise from the King’s
Confession of allegiance to the king and to true religion that made the
44 BUK, i, 108‒10; Calderwood, History, ii, 324. For a full discussion of the 1567 corona-
tion and its combination of traditional elements with revolutionary ones, see Michael
Lynch, ‘Scotland’s first Protestant coronation: revolutionaries, sovereignty and the
culture of nostalgia’, in L. A. J. R. Houwen (ed.), Literature and Religion in Late
Medieval and Early Modern Scotland: Essays in Honour of Alasdair A. MacDonald
(Leuven, 2012), 177‒207.
45 For the text of the National Covenant, as quoted below, see Dickinson and Donaldson
(eds), Source Book, iii, 95‒104. It was also incorporated into an act of parliament in
1640: RPS, 1640/6/36.
National Covenant possible. The entire Confession was incorporated word

for word at the start of the Covenant, and it was emphasised that the
Confession had been signed by ‘all ranks’ and ‘all sorts of persons’. In the
style of general bonds, after the first signing in Edinburgh, the Covenant was
circulated throughout the kingdom to gather as many signatures as possible.
In a phrase that deliberately recalled the tradition of general religious bonding
and the Confessions, the Covenant described itself as ‘a general band for the
maintenance of the true religion and the king’s person’, and mentioned ‘the
laudable example of our Worthy and Religious Progenitors’. Following a long
recital of parliamentary acts carefully selected to justify the protests about
religious innovations, specific reference was also made to the king’s coronation
oath. This was both the general fact ‘that all Kings and Princes at their Coro-
nation and reception of their Princely Authority shall make their faithfull
promise by their solemne oath in the presence of the Eternal God … to
maintain the true Religion of Christ Jesus’, and the specific reference to
Charles I’s coronation oath made in 1633. For good measure, the earlier Scots
Confession and the practice of catechising were reintroduced within the text
to reinforce confessional and ecclesiastial continuity.
Near the beginning of the Covenant there was a bold profession:
[we] do hereby professe, and before God, his Angels, and the World solemnly
declare, That, with our whole hearts we agree & resolve, all the dayes of our
life, constantly to adhere unto, and to defend the foresaid true Religion.
However, the full promise was included much later:
We promise, and sweare by the Great Name of the Lord our God, to continue
in the Profession and Obedience of the Foresaid Religion: That we shall defend
the same … according to our vocation, and to the uttermost of that power that
God hath put in our hands, all the dayes of our life.
As in the King’s Confession, a second promise was added: ‘we promise and
sweare, that we shall, to the uttermost of our power, with our meanes and
lives, stand to the defence of our dread Soveraigne.’ The language concerning
the defence of the king’s person had the impeccable pedigree of the King’s
Confession, but also could be understood to convey, in a suitably non-specific
phrase, the traditional medieval demand to separate the king from his evil
counsellors. This was what the Covenanters wanted to happen in order to
effect the change of royal policy that they desired.
The language of bonding came to the fore when reference was made to
the creation of the alliance of the signatories, especially in the ‘all for one and
one for all’ clause:
whatsoever shall be done to the least of us for that cause, shal be taken as done
to us all in general, and to every one of us in particular. And that we shall
neither directly nor indirectly suffer ourselves to be divided … from this
blessed & loyall Conjunction.
At the end was appended the devotional language of personal promise or

covenant concerning a moral ‘life & conversation, as beseemeth Christians,
who have renewed their Covenant with God’, when those signing promised
‘to be good examples to others of all Godlinesse, Sobernesse and Righteous-
nesse’.
VIII
The National Covenant contained a wide range of ideas culled from many
different sources; these disparate parts did not fit together into a single,
coherent whole. Whilst it did contain many of the phrases and concepts
developed in the religious bonds of the Reformation period concerning the
protection and defence of preaching, of the ministers and of the congregation,
it was not really cast in their mould. The King’s Confession of 1581 had acted
as a filter as well as a transmitter for that tradition of bonding. From the 1590s,
with the introduction of federal theology into Scotland, there had been a
major expansion of discussion about covenants that had dropped many new
ideas and expressions into the pot in which the Covenant was brewed.46 The
excessively prolix National Covenant borrowed forms and devices from many
different sources, with the language of bonds making only a minor contri-
bution. By 1638 the practice of bonding was dying out; rather than forming
part of everyday life, its language and forms were fading to a memory. The
short and coherent format of the bonds of maintenance had been carried into
religious bonding during the Reformation period. Once bonds ceased to be
familiar, they no longer served as models for the expression of allegiance.
Running to c.4,300 words, the National Covenant was not an easy text to
grasp at first or even subsequent hearings or readings. Thanks to the pre-
existing tradition of religious bonding, its adoption could be transformed
into a symbolic and emotive ritual.47 In his diary, Archibald Johnston of
Wariston, one of the Covenant’s authors, recorded the reception of the
Covenant at Currie parish church on 18 March 1638. During this national
fast day the minister read the Covenant aloud, as he had the previous Sunday,
and then explained parts of the text by reference to the Old Testament
covenants. All was quiet and orderly until the time came for making the
promise. The emotion overflowed at the point when the congregation stood
and raised their arms to swear in the presence of God:
Bot immediatly thairafter at his lifting up of his hand and his desyring the
congregation to stand up and lift up thair hand and suare unto the aeternal
God, and at thair standing up and lifting up thair hands, in the tuinkling of
46 David G. Mullan, Scottish Puritanism, 1590‒1638 (Oxford, 2000), ch. 6.

47 Margaret Steele, ‘The “politick Christian”: the theological background to the National
Covenant’, in Morrill (ed.), Scottish National Covenant, 31‒67, at p. 37.
ane eye thair fell sutch ane extraordinarie influence of God’s Sprit upon the
whol congregation, melting thair frozen hearts, waltering thair dry cheeks,
chainging thair verry countenances, as it was a wonder to seie so visible,
sensible, momentaneal a chainge upon al, man and woman, lasse and ladde,
pastor and people.48
This description furnishes a salutary reminder to historians that the docu-
ment is not everything, though it remains important. The performance and
the action often conveyed more to early modern Scots than the words and
the legal document they accompanied. As Jenny has demonstrated in her
discussions of the world of lordship, the visual language of ritual and gesture
was as powerful as the written language of the bonds.49 This is yet another of
those trails inviting exploration that Jenny has blazed for us.
48 Diary of Archibald Johnston of Wariston, 1632‒1639, ed. George M. Paul (SHS, 1911),
327‒8.
and Present 87 (May 1980), 54‒97; Wormald, Lords and Men.
chapter 8
‘We Bund and Obleiss Us Never More to

Querrell’: Bonds, Private Obligations and
Public Justice in the Reign of James VI1
ANNA GROUNDWATER
In 1599, at the tower of Branxholme near Hawick, two members of the noto-
riously rumbustious Elliot kindred subscribed a bond agreeing to uphold an
arbitration made by Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch in a dispute between them.
Robert Elliot of Redheugh for himself and on behalf of his kin, friends and
dependants, and Martin Elliot, son of the late Sym Elliot, for himself, his
uncles and the rest of his surname and servants, promised that,
Forsamekle as we the saidis robert and martene haveing submittit all actionis
and debaitis betuixt us In the hands of the right honorable the said Sir Walter
… [who] efter gude avyse and deliberatioun hes finalie agreit us thairanent
and ordanit that the memorie thairof be bureit in tym cuming
they ‘bund and obleiss us never more to querrell’.2 Elliot of Redheugh was a
tenant of Buccleuch’s in his lordship of Liddesdale, an unruly region abutting
the Anglo-Scottish frontier. In the same year, several other tenants also
subscribed bonds to Buccleuch swearing to be answerable to him for ‘any
complaint from england or upoun the kingis maiestie his hienes counsall or
his justices preissing or chalenge upoun any complaint from the subiectis of
Scotland’, because Buccleuch ‘be vertew of the generale band hes fund
cautioun and bund and oblist him’ for the actions of ‘the haill inhabitantis of
the boundis of liddisdaill’.3 The increasing likelihood of James VI’s succession
to the English crown had increased the pressure the king was putting on his
officials to crack down on internal and cross-border crime in the Borders.4
11 This chapter grew from a paper given to the Scottish Legal History Group in 2011,
and I owe Professor Mark Godfrey huge thanks for inviting me to present it. His book
has been invaluable in helping me formulate my ideas: A. M. Godfrey, Civil Justice in
Renaissance Scotland: The Origins of a Central Court (Leiden, 2009).
12 NRS, Buccleuch Muniments, GD224/906/68/4.
13 NRS, GD224/906/5/1‒7.
14 Susan Doran, ‘Loving and affectionate cousins? The relationship between Elizabeth I
and James VI of Scotland, 1586‒1603’, in Susan Doran and Glenn Richardson (eds),
The making of bonds was one of the principal means by which he achieved
this.
This was not just the case in the Borders. The king was keen to suppress
crime, particularly violent crime, throughout his kingdom, and bonding was
to play a central part in his efforts. Whilst James’ reign was notable for the
welter of legislation attempting to regulate every aspect of life, most notable
of all perhaps were his concerted attempts to suppress the ancient activity of
the bloodfeud. Legislation in 1598 and 1600 outlawed the pursuit of violent
private justice, calling participants to bring their disputes to public arbi-
tration, increasingly in the central courts in Edinburgh.5 The main mech-
anism used to stay the spiral of violence, whilst the lengthy processes of
litigation, or arbitration and compensation proceeded, was the use of bonding,
through private and public assurances, in acts of caution, and finding of
monetary surety. Once arbitration had been made, participants were usually
compelled to subscribe a bond promising to uphold the decision and its
requirements. Laws can be registered, but in a period with relatively few
public prosecutions, and an over-stretched King’s Guard, bonding was
central to the way in which laws were enforced.6
From the 1580s, the number of publicly registered acts of caution
increased exponentially, peaking in the period 1600 to 1610. At the same time,
however, bonds made privately, as between Buccleuch and his tenants, played
an equally important role in securing compliance with crown policies. There
were various types of bonding, and complex motivations, including the obli-
gations of kinship, allegiance, and lordship, which encouraged co-operation
with the law. At a time of the crown’s unprecedented intolerance of violent
crime, and during the intensification of government that Scotland experi-
enced under James, it is suggested that whilst there was an increasing
emphasis on the use of formal public procedures to resolve disputes, early
modern government was to continue to use traditional methods, such as
bonding, to stay violence during any arbitration, and to implement the newly
registered laws. Though bonds of manrent and maintenance disappeared by
Tudor England and its Neighbours (Houndmills, 2005), 203‒33; Anna Groundwater,
The Scottish Middle March, 1573‒1625: Power, Kinship, Allegiance (Woodbridge, 2010),
esp. ch. 7.
15 RPS, 1598/6/2, 1600/11/44.
16 Godfrey, Civil Justice; Jenny Wormald, ‘Bloodfeud, kindred and government in early
modern Scotland’, Past and Present 87 (May 1980), 54‒97; Michael Wasser, ‘Violence
and the Central Criminal Courts in Scotland, 1603‒1638’, unpublished PhD thesis
(Columbia University, 1995).
BONDS, PRIVATE OBLIGATIONS AND PUBLIC JUSTICE 175
the early 1600s, formal public justice continued to utilise the informal mech-
anisms of ‘private justice’, and structures of authority were still formed by
traditional lordship and a kin-based society.7 The very bonding of society
itself facilitated the objectives of a newly intrusive crown. This blurred any
division between the concept and practice of public and private justice; and
such fluidity should continue to shape our understanding of the implemen-
tation of the law throughout James’ reign.
As Jenny Wormald and Keith Brown have shown, bonds came in different
guises, and bonding was used by both public and private forms of justice to
instil good order within Scottish society.8 Wormald’s identification of the
bonds of manrent, whereby a lesser man would subscribe an agreement to
abide by the wishes of his social superior, in return usually for some promise
of maintenance, showed how they gave the traditional obligations of lordship
or kinship a degree of written formality. But further than this, her encapsu-
lation of the informal, but codified rules governing the arbitration and
compensation of feuds showed how these could be imposed privately through
the subscription of private assurances and letters of slains.9 Both she and,
more recently, Mark Godfrey have shown how the settlement of disputes
formed part of a remarkably flexible legal system that allowed for the interplay
of what have been described as formal and informal, public and private
judicial processes. In particular, Godfrey’s emphasis on the role of the Court
of Session in arbitration as well as litigation, concludes that dispute resolution
using arbitration ‘cannot be exclusively categorised as either based on state
“public justice”, or informal “private justice”’. It often ‘encompassed both
types of approach’.10 As Wormald surmised, there was no incompatibility
between using the private processes of the settlement of the bloodfeud, and
the evolving public judicial system, with its new ranks of eager lawyers.11
1985).
Early Modern Society (Edinburgh, 1986); Jenny Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community:
Scotland, 1470‒1625 (London, 1981); Wormald, Lords and Men; Wormald, ‘Bloodfeud’.
19 Wormald, ‘Bloodfeud’, 62, 70. A letter of slains was issued by the victim’s family, usually
as a result of an agreed compensation or settlement, stating that they no longer held the
murderer or his family further accountable for his actions: DOST, s.v. ‘letter of slanis’.
10 Godfrey, Civil Justice, esp. ch. 8, quotation at pp. 355‒6. Cf. John Finlay, Men of Law
in Pre-Reformation Scotland (East Linton, 2000); Kenneth G. C. Reid and Reinhard
Zimmermann (eds), A History of Private Law in Scotland, vol. ii: Obligations (Oxford,
2000); Robert L. C. Hunter, The Law of Arbitration in Scotland (2nd edn, Edinburgh,
2002), esp. ch. 2, ‘The history of dispute settlement law in Scotland’; W. D. H. Sellar,
‘Assistance in conflict resolution in Scotland’, Recueils de la Société Jean Bodin pour
l’histoire comparative des institutions 64 (1997), 267‒75. See also A. Mark Godfrey,
‘Rethinking the Justice of the Feud in Sixteenth-Century Scotland’, Chapter 6 above
in this volume.
11 Wormald, ‘Bloodfeud’, 56‒7, 72‒3, 77‒8, 80‒1, 82‒3, 87‒90.
Wormald’s and Godfrey’s blurring of the distinction between public and

private forms of justice is invaluable in understanding how the crown was
able to utilise devices more usually seen in the private settlement of dispute,
such as arbitration and bonding, in the resolution of disputes through the
public courts. Mechanisms of private justice were helping to shape the way
in which public justice was conducted. Indeed Wormald has shown how, from
the earliest surviving records, the crown had been largely acquiescent in the
private method of justice provided by the arbitration and compensation of
feuds; and that this remained the case for most of the sixteenth century, until
the 1590s.12 Additionally, the pressure of the crown’s own agenda meant that
it was dependent on whatever judicial processes were available to achieve
compliance; the way in which this was being done in Liddesdale forms the
focus of this chapter. In Liddesdale the crown was utilising not just the law,
or legal processes, but the making of personal bonds between its officer there,
Buccleuch, and the valley’s inhabitants. More than this, it will be shown how
the crown was dependent on the very bonding of society, the socio-political
structures of authority and networks of obligation that could get people to
co-operate.13 In trying to evaluate how government was able to use bonds to
enforce the law, the way in which they worked at a local level will be
considered, exploring the personal relationships, and associated obligations
that underpinned them. And taking it back to a national level, it will be shown
how bonding at this personal level characterised the development of judicial
processes, and the part it played in the intensification of government in early
modern Scotland.
II
The Elliots being targeted in the bond that began this chapter lived at
Redheugh, at the foot of Liddesdale, close to the Anglo-Scottish border, and
near to the Hermitage castle around which various Elliots and the equally
notorious Armstrongs lived. The Elliot surname was repeatedly identified by
the Scottish government, English officials, and in common parlance as one
of the most disordered Borders kindreds, and it was often the unhappy
recipient of the crown’s special attention. The English complained that the
Elliots were the ‘theves of Scotlande’, ‘that comonlie truble’ the English
12 Wormald, ‘Bloodfeud’, 63‒6, 78‒85, 96.

13 Anna Groundwater, ‘Obligations of kinship and alliance within governance in the
Scottish Borders, 1528‒1625’, Canadian Journal of History 48 (2013), 1‒27. For
consideration of these themes in an English context see Michael J. Braddick and John
Walter (eds), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subor-
dination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2001); Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve
Hindle (eds), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (London, 1996).
Middle March, reminding officials that it was lawful to ‘execute them

forthewith’ if they were caught with ‘red or blodie handes’.14 Robin Elliot of
Redheugh was repeatedly accused of cross-border theft, a typical raid in 1589
by him and five other Elliots taking sixty cattle, two horses and moveable
goods of £100, setting alight five houses.15 Liddesdale itself was infamous
for its thieving inhabitants. Government most particularly referred to the
‘notorious thieves as were born in Liddesdale, Eskdale, Ewesdale, Annandale
and the lands sometimes called debatable’.16 Their exploits denigrated and
demonised in contemporary literature, the men of Liddesdale were:
… ye commoun thevis
Sa peirtlie stelis, now and revis
That nae can keip, hors nolt nor scheip
Nor yit dar sleip, for thair mischevis …
Thai have neir hand hirreit haill
Ettrik forrest and Lawderdaill
Now ar thai gane, in lowthiane
And sparis nane, that thai will waill.17
What stimulated the making of Elliot of Redheugh’s bond to Buccleuch in
1599 was a combination of James’ recent resolution to put an end to cross-
border crime, in anticipation of his English inheritance, and his newly
persistent determination to suppress violence throughout Scotland. Kindred
leaders and landlords from all regions were increasingly made to undertake
responsibility for the actions of their kinsmen, or tenants, under a general
band imposed by the crown at various times.18 The general band registered
in 1590 included the oath that the ‘erlis, lordis, barronis, landit men … sub-
scrivit with oure handis, to be bundin and obleist … in all tyme coming, [to]
keip and caus to be kepit gude rule within our landis, [and] lordschippis’.19
More particularly, and especially at times of diplomatic sensitivity, this band
was applied to named lairds in the Borders to quell internal and cross-border
crime in the Border-specific bands of 1569, 1576, 1599 and 1602.20
This was prosecuted most dramatically in the ferocious act ‘For the
quieting and keeping in obedience of the disordered subjects, inhabitants of
the borders, highlands and isles’ in 1587. All landlords and bailies named in
the act were ‘charged to find sufficient caution and surety’, that ‘if any of
14 CBP, i, 103.
15 CBP, i, 351.
16 RPS, 1587/7/70.
17 Sir Richard Maitland, ‘Aganis the theivis of Liddesdaill’, The Maitland Folio Manu-
script, ed. W. A. Craigie (STS, 1919), 301‒3.
18 Julian Goodare, State and Society in Early Modern Scotland (Oxford, 1999), 258‒60.
19 RPC, iv, 787‒9.
20 RPC, ii, 117, 370‒3, 548‒9, 549‒52; vi, 45‒6, 435‒6, 825‒9.
their men, tenants, servants and indwellers upon their lands … commit any
masterful reiving, theft or reset of theft, depredations open and avowed, fire-
raising upon deadly feuds protected and maintained by their masters’, they
had to present them for trial, upon monetary pains for failure to do so ‘accor-
ding to the laws and general bond’.21 The named landlords included Francis
Stewart, earl of Bothwell and lord of Liddesdale, Archibald Douglas, earl of
Angus, who was lieutenant in the Borders, and the laird of Buccleuch. These
nobles and lairds were having to bind themselves to the crown for their
followers’ behaviour, under the general bond, and its border-specific applica-
tions. In 1602, the general band was signed at Jedburgh by over 120 borderers,
including Buccleuch’s associates the Scotts of Harden, Haining, Tushielaw
and Goldielands, and the Elliots of Redheugh and the Stobs. They swore
responsibility for ‘ourselffis and all sic personis quhatsumevir as duellis
upoun oure landis’, promising that if in the fulfilment of the band ‘we or ony
of us be querrellit be ony clan, brensche, or surname to quhome the thevis
pertenis, we bind and oblissis us … to concur and assist with uther aganis
[those] … that querrellis, as gif it wer oure proper cause’.22
The government’s understanding of the efficacy of these measures was
based in its belief that these ‘captains of the clans’ (as it referred in 1587 to
kindred leaders in both Highlands and Borders) were those ‘on whom their
tenants depend and obey’. Buccleuch was held responsible principally for his
Scott kinsmen in Selkirkshire; but from 1594, following the forfeiture of the
flighty Bothwell, Buccleuch was granted the lordship of Liddesdale, and
landed with the office of keeper of Liddesdale. He had thus acquired the
onerous responsibility for accounting for his miscreant tenants, dominated
by the surnames of Elliot and Armstrong, in both his private and public
capacities. His lordship came with the usual regality powers to hold a court
there. But Buccleuch’s authority over his tenants was enhanced by the judicial
powers associated with the keepership, which gave him exclusive rights
(excepting the king) to try the inhabitants of Liddesdale, and excluded the
Middle March warden from any jurisdiction over them.23 So Buccleuch held
here a mixture of official and private jurisdiction, of his keepership and of
his regality rights. His power, however, though formalised by crown grants
of land and office, was underpinned by the nature of his personal authority,
and this in itself depended on the social structure within the lordship, and
the interpersonal obligations that bound it. The crown was aware of the
21 RPS, 1587/7/70. The new bracketing of disorder in the Highlands and Borders in this
act is noted by Julian Goodare and Michael Lynch, ‘The Scottish state and its border-
lands, 1567‒1625’, in Julian Goodare and Michael Lynch (eds), The Reign of James VI
(East Linton, 2000), 186‒207, at p. 204.
22 RPC, vi, 827‒8.
23 Sir William Fraser, The Scotts of Buccleuch, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1878), ii, no. 211; RPC,
v, 178.
necessity of this personal authority for its officials’ effectiveness, and was
concerned in 1597 that those sheriffs who did not have sufficient ‘power and
authoritie’ would not be able ‘with strang hand’ to carry out their duties.24
The wording of the Elliots’ agreement suggests a number of social
processes at work, from the traditional obligations of kinship and lordship,
to the recognition the Elliots gave to Buccleuch’s authority. First, Robert and
Martin Elliot, by agreeing to the bond on behalf of others of their name,
showed themselves to be operating within the context of a kinship-based
society, acknowledging that what one member of the surname did or promised
could affect other members of that surname. This suggests the way in which
kinship shaped the divisions within the dispute.25 Second, by taking respon-
sibility for the fulfilment of the bond by others of their name, these Elliots
were demonstrating a structure within that kindred over which they exercised
some authority. Implicit in this was the kindred’s recognition of their obli-
gation to obey the leader of their branch – an informal obligation at least, if
not a guarantee that they would! Robert (Robin) Elliot had been described in
1583 by the English official Thomas Musgrave as ‘cheife of the Ellotes’ of
Liddesdale. ‘All theise Ellotes and manie more of them are at Robin Ellotes
comaundment and dwell betwixt the Armytage in Lyddisdall and Whethough
towre’; he listed thirty-four of them individually.26 Redheugh himself had a
superior within the Elliot surname, the more powerful Gavin Elliot of the
Stobs. Stobs in 1587 had become liable to enter Redheugh before the Privy
Council to ‘underly sic ordour as salbe inputt to him for ye weill and quietnes’
of the Borders, under the pain of £2,000 surety.27
But why had both sides of the Elliots chosen to submit their dispute to
Buccleuch, a member of a different surname, and then to swear a bond before
him? Buccleuch’s official accountability for Liddesdale will have (perhaps)
motivated him to settle the dispute, and to encourage the Elliots to come to
him for arbitration. But the fact that the Elliots were prepared to accept his
judgement implicitly recognised that Buccleuch was the most apposite person
to arbitrate. His status conferred an authority on any decision that would
make it more acceptable to both sides than any personal resolution between
the combatants. This in turn would make the resolution difficult to challenge,
and thus the bond more effective.28 Their promise never more to quarrel
suggested that they recognised that Buccleuch had the authority, and the
means in the longer term, to enforce his judgment and the terms of the bond.
By bringing the dispute to Buccleuch, the Elliots were recognising his ability
24 RPS, 1597/11/55. Date accessed: 7 May 2013. Cf. Julian Goodare, The Government
of Scotland, 1560‒1625 (Oxford, 2004), 170.
26 CBP, i, 121.
27 NRS, PC10/3/iv/16.
28 Godfrey, Civil Justice, 379, 388‒9, 406; Wormald, ‘Bloodfeud’, 73, 75.
to make, and then enforce, his arbitration; but more than this, the bond acknowl-
edged the relationship between the Elliots and their landlord, legitimised and
formalised by Buccleuch’s private and public jurisdictions, but underpinned by
interpersonal obligations rooted in the traditions of ‘good lordship’.
III
The origins of Buccleuch’s authority lay in a combination of traditional

lordship and private and public judicial powers. He wore a variety of hats. At
the most basic level, Buccleuch held the regality in which the Elliots lived in
Liddesdale, and could exercise the economic power of a feudal superior or a
landlord over his tenants. But more than this, he was able to draw on the
obligations associated with lordship, the service given by his tenants to their
lord, in return for his maintenance and protection.29 These were not written
undertakings, but they were understood. When government asked him to
guarantee his tenants’ good behaviour it did so because it assumed that he
had that power over them, through the obligated nature of the relationship
between him and his tenants. That the Elliots had come to Buccleuch for his
arbitration implicitly recognised these obligations.
There was a popular understanding of these obligations too. When
Buccleuch rode to the rescue of Kinmont Willie (William Armstrong of
Kinmont) at Carlisle in 1596, he was fulfilling the role of Kinmont’s lord,
protecting his dependant, though of a different surname. In his train rode a
mixture of names mostly from amongst his Liddesdale tenants, and Scott
kinsmen, including the Armstrongs of Whithaugh and Mangerton, and the
Scotts of Harden and Goldielands.30 As the ballad of ‘Kinmont Willie’ goes,
He has call’d him forty Marchmen bauld,
Were kinsmen to the bauld Buccleuch;
With spur on heel, and splent on spauld,
And gleuves of green, and feathers blue.
There were five and five before them a’,
Wi’ hunting horns and bugles bright;
And five and five came wi’ Buccleuch,
Like warden’s men, array’d for fight.31
29 For this see Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community, 29‒30; Michael Brown, The Black
Douglases: War and Lordship in Late Medieval Scotland, 1300‒1455 (East Linton, 1998),
160‒1, 178‒80; Steve Boardman and Alasdair Ross, ‘Introduction’, in Steve Boardman
and Alasdair Ross (eds), The Exercise of Power in Scotland, 1250‒1500 (Dublin, 2003),
1‒22.
30 CBP, ii, 252.
31 Sir Walter Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 4 vols, ed. T. F. Henderson
(Edinburgh, 1902), ii, 58‒67; quotation at p. 61.
Buccleuch’s strength was also based on his leadership of the large Scott
surname, a position that brought him the co-operation of hundreds of men
in the Borders, giving him the necessary ‘strang hand’ to enforce any decision.
It was said by the English West March warden Lord Scrope in 1596 that he
could summon as many as 3,000 men to his side, though such reports were
not representative of the usual size of his retinue. His raid on Carlisle Castle
was accomplished with only around eighty riders.32 Buccleuch’s potential
forces compared in size with the 2,000 that Lord Maxwell, as warden in the
West March, had at his side in 1593, when he fell in the battle against the 500
men (including some Scotts) that his foe Sir James Johnstone had mustered
at Dryfe Sands.33 These forces also gave him the authority to act as ‘oversman’
in any dispute within his kindred and its allies and to enforce any bond
resulting.34
Buccleuch’s informal power was enhanced and legitimised, as we have
seen, by his officially recognised jurisdictions and office. Indeed, the granting
of both the regality and keepership of Liddesdale reflected official recognition
of Buccleuch’s existing power in the region. That power gave him the ability
to fulfil these official roles, and the crown consciously drew on that power to
assist it in implementing its policies. In 1622, Buccleuch’s son, also Walter,
first earl of Buccleuch, was made one of a new triumvirate of commissioners
for the Middle Shires, being one of those ‘speciall persones of pouer and
freindschip’, of ‘credit, and meanis to prosequute and follow his Majesteis
service’ in the region, that the Privy Council thought would be effective.35
Buccleuch’s private jurisdiction over those who lived there gave him the
right to hold courts there. In another bond by some different Elliots, they
promised Buccleuch that they would ‘submittis oure selffis to the said laird
of balcleuchis awin court thair to abyde tryale’ suggesting that this was some-
thing he did.36 His mother, the redoubtable Margaret Douglas, who had
married Bothwell following the death of the previous Buccleuch, stood in for
her son occasionally. The power deriving from this private jurisdiction was
augmented by the public office of keeper, which gave him roughly the equiv-
alent of the judicial powers of the warden of the Middle March, in which
Liddesdale nominally lay. Thus the bond concluded, Buccleuch ‘doth protest
that quhasoevir sall violat this decreit and ordinance ... sall debait the present
keipar’.37 Buccleuch had the reputation and powers of a man of ‘credit’.38
This mixture of private and public authority, of the roles of landlord,
32 CBP, ii, no. 336; CSP Scot., xii, 245.

33 RPC, v, note 113.
34 NRS, Scott of Harden papers, GD157/162.
35 RPC, xii, 675‒6.
36 NRS, GD224/906/5/6.
37 NRS, GD224/906/68/4.
38 RPC, xii, 676.
kindred leader, lord and keeper, meant that it was more likely that the bond
subscribed by the Elliots would be upheld, and helps to explain why they had
agreed to Buccleuch’s arbitration. His authority, so effective here in getting
the Elliots to sign this bond, was also potent when dealing with his own
kindred, and indeed in resolving his own disputes. For instance, in 1585 at
Hawick, a bond of maintenance and service was subscribed by Buccleuch and
Robert Scott of Allanhaugh, on the resolution of their feud over the slaughter
of David, son of Adam Scott of Allanhaugh. Allanhaugh promised on behalf
of his kin and friends ‘never to fynd falt’ with Buccleuch over the slaughter
of David Scott, ‘bot sall serve, manteine, and defend my said cheif according
to the band subscrivit be me ... as ane gentilman aucht to do to thair chief’. In
return, Buccleuch on behalf of his kin and friends promised to ‘fortifie,
manteine, and defend’ Allanhaugh and his dependants.39 The Scott kindred
felt obliged to obey any decision made by their ‘cheif ’ in the settlement of
their disputes.
In a similar arbitration by Buccleuch’s great-grandfather (also Walter) in
1528, John Scott of Borthwick and his brother recognised the decision of that
Buccleuch as their ‘ovirman’ in the settlement of their dispute. The ‘arbiteris
and amicable compositoris’ chosen by each brother were all of the Scott
surname, and all promised to abide by Buccleuch’s terms.40 Buccleuch was
thus able to use these personal obligations in his exercise of private justice as
kindred leader, and in the case of the Allanhaughs, as their landlord too. Also
operating here, and in the Elliots’ bond, was some form of consensus between
the superior and the subordinate, the governor and the governed.41 The inter-
dependence between the superior and the subordinate compelled an
agreement, and encouraged the maintenance of that agreement. Buccleuch’s
‘strang hand’ would not have existed without the co-operation of his kindred,
and their recognition of his authority; but equally they needed his favour in
their landholding, and it would have been an uncomfortable ride to run foul
of the kindred.
IV
This is not the whole story, however. The Elliots’ promise never more to
quarrel was not merely the result of the Elliots deciding to kiss and make up,
but also because they were being forced to give up their feud by Buccleuch,
39 Fraser, Buccleuch, ii, no. 202. Emphasis added.

40 NRS, Scott of Harden papers, GD157/162.
41 John Walter, ‘Public transcripts, popular agency, and the politics of subsistence in
early modern England’, in Braddick and Walter (eds), Negotiating Power in Early
Modern Society, 123‒48, at pp. 123, 128, 135, 147; Michael J. Braddick and John
Walter, ‘Introduction: grids of power: order, hierarchy and subordination in early
modern society’, ibid., 1‒42, at pp. 7‒8, 16‒17, 42.
as a result of crown pressure on him. For Buccleuch, in insisting on the bond,

he was acting both as their landlord, and as keeper in Liddesdale. As landlord,
thanks to the repeated general bands he and his forebears had had to
subscribe, he was himself bound to the crown to take responsibility for the
behaviour of his tenants; he was specifically required to do by the act anent
the Highlands and the Borders of 1587. Additionally, the crown’s expectations
of him as keeper resounded in those words of the bond, which grimly
declared that any transgressors would ‘becum his perpetuall enimie and sall
debait the present keipar’. By 1599, Buccleuch, himself no stranger to the
odd bit of cross-border raiding, was threatening to hang any in his jurisdiction
who misbehaved, displaying his determination by burning down the house
of one of Redheugh’s neighbours, an Armstrong at Whithaugh, for the
murder of an Englishman.42 Crown recognition of the success of Buccleuch’s
endeavours came with his ennoblement in 1606, and an indemnity remitting
his actions in the pacification of the Borders when fugitives ‘immediately on
their apprehension, were necessarily hanged, and punished with death by pit
and gallows off-hand on the very spot at which they were apprehended’.43
In addition, on 19 July 1599, Elliot of Redheugh himself was asked by the
Privy Council ‘to find caution’ that he and those he was ‘obliged to answer
for shall observe the King’s peace’.44 The same day Buccleuch appeared before
the council to accept responsibility for a number of errant Scotts. In 1600
Redheugh along with other surname leaders was summoned to appear to
consult concerning the Borders at Falkland, and in 1602, he was obliged to
subscribe a general band for the Borders for himself and his men. In
November 1602, he was declared answerable by the Privy Council for Will
Elliot of Fiddletoun, whose liberty he had secured from Sir James Johnstone,
the West March warden; later that month, when Sir James Sandilands
pursued Redheugh for the value of two horses allegedly stolen from him by
Fiddletoun, the council ordered Redheugh to pay Sandilands’ unlikely claim
of £1,000.45 Subscribing a bond to Buccleuch was possibly a way for him to
insert a barrier between him and the crown, though it emphasised the powers
of a formidable overseer in Liddesdale.
The Elliots’ bond, of course, implied the existence of an ongoing dispute,
now lost in the bogs of Liddesdale. It may or may not have reached the levels
of a violent feud, though the phrase ‘never more to querrell’ suggests that it
had. The phrase ‘actionis and debaittis betwixt us’ probably referred to
quarrels that had already taken place, but it also referred to a process of
working out that dispute, perhaps the beginnings of an attempt to come to a
resolution. It is not entirely clear from the bond itself whether or not
42 CBP, ii, nos 605, 610, 645.

43 Fraser, Buccleuch, i, 235; RMS, vi, no. 2165.
44 RPC, vi, 823.
45 RPC, vi, 137, 476, 490, 825‒9.
Buccleuch’s arbitration had actually happened; the wording can be read either
way, but plausibly it is suggestive of a decision that was to come, the bond’s
function being to prevent violence until it had done so. It certainly does not
contain any mention of what the resolution was, or what form any compensa-
tion took, if that was part of the settlement. This was not a letter of slains, no
agreement on reparation; this bond was instead made to inhibit the continu-
ation of violence, to enforce any settlement that had been or was to be agreed.
An assurance in 1607 at the settlement of a feud between the Jardines and
the Geddes, for which Buccleuch, alongside Charles Geddes of Rauchan and
Sir Alexander Jardine of Applegarth swore responsibility for the future
amicable relations between the two kindreds, made it clear that a settlement
had taken place. Applegarth ‘remittit dischargit renderit and frielie fra oure
hairtis [had] forgevin’ the murder of three of his kinsmen, promising that his
kin would take no further ‘actioun of displeasure’ against the Geddes kindred;
further, that they had ‘ressavit and admittit [their former enemies] in siclyk
amitie luif and freindschip’.46 No other terms of the settlement were
included, nor mention of whether any material compensation had been made;
the purpose was to stop future violence, even if amity, love and friendship
might be harder to instil.
The understanding of the effectiveness of Buccleuch’s powers of lordship
underwrote these agreements. Similarly, it is evident that kinship, or at least
the ‘ideal of kinship’ to use Wormald’s words, continued to frame both the
disputes and their resolution.47 The continuities in the processes that helped
to impose justice are clear; and they are evident too in the stipulation in the
Jardine-Geddes agreement that any transgression would be made ‘Under the
pane of loss of honor and credit perjurie and defamatioun for ever’.48 The
maintenance of honour, of the importance of reputation in legitimising and
making effective a leader’s authority, continued to be understood.49 The
preservation of reputation was to remain crucial even as the private powers
of a lord translated into the public powers of a crown-appointed office.50 What
46 NRS, GD224/906/3.
48 NRS, GD224/906/3.
49 Keith M. Brown, ‘Honour, honours and nobility in Scotland between the Reformation
and the National Covenant’, SHR 91 (2012), 43‒75, at pp. 49‒52, 54, 72‒5; Godfrey,
Civil Justice, 386; Mervyn E. James, ‘English politics and the concept of honour, 1485‒
1642’, Past and Present, suppl. 3 (1978).
50 As Mike Braddick observes of early modern English office-holders, ‘their credibility
depended on the reception of their performance’: Michael J. Braddick, ‘Introduction:
the politics of gesture’, Past and Present, 203, suppl. 4 (2009), 9‒35, at pp. 18, 24‒6;
Michael J. Braddick, ‘Administrative performance: the representation of authority in
early modern England’, in Braddick and Walter (eds), Negotiating Power in Early
Modern Society, 166‒87, at pp. 171‒2, 175, 186‒7; Michael J. Braddick, State
Formation in Early Modern England, c.1550‒1700 (Cambridge, 2000), 71‒2, 189‒90;
was new however was their further agreement, that ‘for the mair securetie’
of this private assurance, ‘we ar content and consentis that the presentis be
actit and registrat in the buikis of counsall’.51
The making of both the Elliot and the Jardine-Geddes bonds inherently
recognised the wish, perhaps under compulsion, to seek a resolution, and the
procedure by which to do so. This procedure lay outside the formal procee-
dings of a judicial court; though Buccleuch held formally recognised legal
authority over his tenants, the Elliots’ bond was made to him personally and
not to the crown. Simultaneously there was an understanding that he could
prosecute them for any offence in his formal capacity as keeper. In choosing
Buccleuch to arbitrate their dispute, the Elliots were recognising that his
mixture of private and public authority made him the most appropriate person
to bring their dispute to, and the person with enough authority to enforce its
settlement. Separate bonds to Buccleuch by Elliots and Forsters of the same
year also recognised that mixture, stating that they were made because
Buccleuch had himself subscribed a personal bond to the crown for their
good behaviour, and because he held the judicial powers of his ‘awin court
thair’ to pursue any complaint against them. Buccleuch’s public office was
equally acknowledged in the Elliot of Redheugh bond, in that anyone trans-
gressing the agreement would be pursued by him or ‘sic as sall occupy his
place’; this public office would enforce the settlement. But any Elliot who
violated his decree would become Buccleuch’s own personal ‘perpetuall enimie’.
This was particularly important by the late 1580s, when increasing attempts
by James to intervene in feuds culminated in the act against feuds of 1598.
This formed a crucial part of the intensification of government (to borrow
Mike Braddick’s phrase) in Scotland throughout the sixteenth century, which
saw the development of the central law courts in Edinburgh, a broadening
stratum of those holding public office, and a crown that was increasingly
prone to prosecute.52 Julian Goodare estimates that the numbers of those
involved in public office expanded by 400 per cent in the period 1560 to 1625.53
Thus, from the later 1580s, the frequency with which bonding was used by
government, at all levels, was unprecedented. Whereas a dependant had made
a bond to his lord for his actions, either within a bond of manrent, or in the
Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle, ‘Introduction’, in Griffiths, Fox and
Hindle (eds), Experience of Authority, 1‒9.
51 NRS, GD224/906/3.
52 Braddick, State Formation, 337. Cf. Wasser, ‘Violence and the Central Criminal
Courts’.
53 Goodare, The Government of Scotland, 216‒19.
agreements for good behaviour exemplified by the Elliots’ bond, the bond
was now being increasingly made to the crown. These new bonds took the
form of acts of caution, sworn assurances by individuals to fulfil certain stip-
ulations, such as not harming the other named party in a dispute; and to
strengthen the effectiveness of these bonds, the principal was required to find
cautioners, those providing surety, with monetary penalties imposed in the
case of any transgression of the bond’s terms. The traditional obligations of
lordship and kinship continued to underlie the structure of the bond in the
cautioner’s signing of the assurance alongside the principal, thus widening
the responsibility for the enforcement of the principal’s good behaviour.
The subscription of acts of caution peaked between 1604 and 1610 when
nearly 2,000 acts of caution were registered by the Privy Council, as indi-
viduals bound themselves, and their allies, to uphold agreements or ordi-
nances, with monetary penalties attached for their failure. Given that each of
these bonds involved several parties, either as protagonists, or sureties, this
represented many thousands of people being formally obliged by the crown
to uphold certain conditions of behaviour. The caution, for instance, that
Gavin Elliot of the Stobs had found for producing Elliot of Redheugh before
the council in 1587, involved William Home of Lesudden, Nicol Cairncorce
of Colmeslie, and Walter Cairncorce of Lingill as his sureties, men outside
his own surname but possibly related, who lived nearby. Under the threat of
a £2,000 penalty, they became ‘actit and oblist conjunctlie and severalie as
cautionaris’ to the crown for Stobs. Stobs in turn took on responsibility for
the actions of Redheugh.54 Increasing numbers of people were being involved
in official judicial processes. Where previously disputes had rumbled on
usually under the radar of crown interest, with arbitration and the enforce-
ment of settlements usually a local affair, the disputes and their perpetrators
were now being registered centrally, publicly, formally, leaving a lasting record
that government could draw on to inform itself, or to take any further punitive
action. The subscription of centrally registered acts of caution allowed the
crown to harness the traditional obligations of private bonding, to secure the
co-operation and good behaviour of increasing numbers in a web of inter-
related obligations that ultimately tied those involved more directly into
formalised judicial processes.55 At the same time, the activities of increasingly
well-established kirk sessions regulated an individual’s behaviour in areas
outside the remits of the central judicial courts, at a localised level, tying him
or her into further obligations, under the threat of punitive action.56
This widening pool of registered accountability was not overpopulated by
errant Borderers. Under 20 per cent of bonds registered between 1603 and 1610
related to the Borders, with around half of these originating in the former
54 NRS, PC10/3/iv/16.
56 See, for example, Perth Kirk Session Book, 1577‒1590, ed. Margo Todd (SHS, 2012).
West March, largely accounted for by the persistent Maxwell–Johnstone feud.

Though this figure was higher proportionately than other Scottish regions,
it was almost certainly affected by the greater proximity of the Borders to
Edinburgh, and the relative ease with which the Privy Council could insist
on the subscription of bonds there.57 Arguably, too, the greater proportion
of cautions undertaken by Borderers from the 1590s also represented an
intensified crown determination in the Borders occasioned by political and
diplomatic circumstances, over and above a more general policy of increased
intolerance of violence. The percentage of the total numbers of registered
cautions that were signed by Borderers roughly equated to the enumeration
Keith Brown has made for the regional distribution of bloodfeud. His conclu-
sions on the geographically widespread nature of feuding are echoed by the
signings of acts of caution.58 Scotland, not just the Borders, could be a violent
place, and James’ efforts to suppress violent crime encompassed the whole
kingdom. Increasingly these general bands and acts of caution were to tie
more individuals throughout Scotland in a formalised, publicly registered
and personal obligation to the crown.
Whilst these assurances showed a variety of objectives, from preventing
hunting in the Cheviots to a laird’s obligation to arm himself sufficiently, they
related predominantly to feud. It is here that we see one of the principal moti-
vations behind these bonds, and that was to stay the spiral of violence so often
associated with a feud. Some of the bonds related to the enforcement of arbi-
trations already made, but many were made in order to stop ongoing violence
during the time it took to bring disputes before a court for adjudication. In
October 1601, an act of caution was registered by the Privy Council in which
one unfortunate Alexander Guthrie of Kincaldrum stood surety for William
Rhind of Kerse, and his son John, to the tune of 5000 merks; he promised
that they would subscribe ‘such form of submission as shall be presented to
them anent the feud’ between them and the Ogilvies of Craig. The Rhinds
of Kerse were also involved in the feud between the Lindsays of Wodheid,
and the appropriately named Querrelhill, and Sir Walter Lindsay of Balgay;
this was itself part of a bigger feud between James, master of Ogilvy, and his
associates, and Alexander Lindsay, Lord Spynie, and his following, which had
come to combat in early 1600. In April 1602, Lindsay of Wodheid stood surety
for Kerse and his sons John and Gilbert not to harm Balgay, whilst Wodheid
himself had to find surety with Querrelhill in the same matter. Again in June
1603, Rhind found caution for his appearance before the Privy Council to
subscribe his submission to the council’s arbitration of the ‘deadly feud’ with
the Ogilvies.59 The crown was attempting to constrain any further violence
between large groups of people by involving them all in a web of mutual
57 Groundwater, Scottish Middle March, 138‒9, 152‒3.

58 Brown, Bloodfeud, 6‒7, 277.
59 RPC, vi, 639‒40, 704, 722‒3, 791‒2; Brown, Bloodfeud, 21.
assurances, taking responsibility for each other’s behaviour until arbitration

could be made, and a settlement arrived at.
One of the attractions of such bonding to government and, potentially, to
participants, was the speed with which it could be accomplished. Mark
Godfrey suggests that since arbitration speeded up the process of resolution,
it was often preferred to protracted litigation by those pursuing cases before
the lords of session. Bonding too could provide a quick fix to interrupt further
violence. Whilst Godfrey places his emphasis on the ‘very short timescale’
associated with arbitration as the stimulant for its use, the very human fear
of current, retributive violence may have been an equally pressing deter-
minant. Wormald saw the speedier private methods of justice as crucial in
defusing ongoing tension.60 That concern would have been behind some of
those using arbitration rather than litigation. It was certainly where the crown
was choosing to intervene, particularly in terms of what it wanted from those
‘banging it out’ in deadly feuds, or threatening the stability of the Anglo-
Scottish border.
The efficacy, however, of such bonds in helping to resolve a dispute was
not inevitable. Some acts of caution seemed almost to presuppose no
settlement actually taking place, merely being repeated on a yearly basis when
the term of the previous assurance ran out. Thus in December 1602, the
Privy Council, concerned that the existing assurances having almost expired
between the Ogilvies and the Lindsays (which included the Rhinds of
Kerse), ‘but the quarrel between them still standing’, ordered all to ‘re-
subscribe and deliver … such forms of mutual assurance as shall be presented
to them by the Clerk of Council, to endure till 1st January 1604’.61 Other
bonds appeared inappropriate to deal with the situation as it was on the
ground: the daily reality of living in proximity to one with whom you were at
feud. In 1599, for instance, Patrick Hamilton of Samelstoun complained
against an assurance that he had been ordered to make against harming
George Douglas of Longniddry, who he claimed was ‘in the daily habit of
carrying hagbuts and pistolets’. What was more, the sums being mentioned
as security were way beyond the means of the man that was also bound with
Hamilton.62 Similarly in 1595, James Hoppringle of Whitbank had protested
against an accusation by John Home of Cowdenknowes ‘that I have molestit
trublit and oppressit him in the possessioun of his landis’; Cowdenknowes
had purchased letters ‘quhairwith he hes causit charge me to find cautioun
and sourtie actit in the buikis of secreit counsall ffor ye indemnitie … under
the pane of tua thowsand pundis … Albeit it be of veritie that I nevir molestit
trublit nor oppressit ye said John’, and especially since Cowdenknowes knew
60 Godfrey, Civil Justice, 385, 387; quotation at p. 378. Wormald, ‘Bloodfeud’, 73.
61 RPC, vi, 492.
62 RPC, vi, 852.
that Whitbank could not find surety for such an ‘extraordinarie’ sum of
money.63
In January 1604 the Privy Council reiterated the king’s ‘maist ernest and
ardent zaill and desyer to have removit’ the barbarous ‘wicked custome’ of
the ‘deidlie feidis’, and questioned whether the measures presently adopted
for suppressing them were sufficient. The problem with assurances, the king
had complained, was that when they expired the parties involved appeared
to think that they were then at liberty to resume their dispute. It was ordered
therefore that all protagonists should be summoned before the Privy Council,
who would command them ‘to keip thameselffis frome taking revenge at thair
awin handis’; they were ‘to be bund to the peax and sourtie-taking that thay
sall persew these upoun quhome thay compleine be law and no utherwayis’
ever.64 Such a stipulation ‘bound’ combatants to the law itself for their
behaviour; they were obligated to underlie formal judicial proceedings, either
before the council or the Court of Session. There was, it was ordered, to be
no more private settlement of dispute; arbitration and settlement were to be
exclusively the functions of the king’s formal apparatus of justice.
VI
Despite this, the signing of acts of caution, the making of these personal
assurances, continued. Because they were centrally registered, the breaking
of them now brought not just the ire of the opposing party, but the punitive
actions of the crown. The crown clearly thought that such bonds, and the
obligations that they utilised, were of continued use. In this mixture of public
and private forms of justice, of so-called formal and informal procedures,
judicial and extra-judicial, it is worth asking whether there is any merit in
continuing to try to look at Scotland’s legal processes within such a demar-
cated structure. It may be suggested, instead, that judicial processes were
ongoing throughout Scottish society, that the socio-economic relationships
within it were in themselves self-regulating (though not always effective), and
that these obligations, this bonding, were part of the structure, the sinews, of
society itself.
Robert Elliot of Redheugh appeared to keep his nose clean for a while,
being one of the surname leaders called to advise the council in 1606 on the
Borders. But by the following year the council was calling for him to be
warded in Cupar, Fife.65 And the relationship between the Buccleuchs and
the Elliots of Redheugh did not end happily. What had once been close had
soured by 1624. It is unclear what had gone wrong, though Redheugh had
63 NRS, PC10/3/v/15.
64 RPC, vi, 594‒6.
65 RPC, vii, 271.
perhaps been aggrieved by the crackdown that the successive Buccleuchs had
imposed in Liddesdale following the Union of the Crowns. Buccleuch’s son,
also Walter, now blessed with an earldom and the office of triumvir commis-
sioner of the Middle Shires, was the target of Redheugh’s murderous
conspiracy. An irate James, infuriated by the challenge to his officer’s
authority, called for ‘examplarie punishement’ to be meted out for these ‘vile
attemptis’, plotted against Buccleuch given ‘the qualitie of the personne …
being a nobleman, a counsellour, our commissionar in the boundis … and
the said Robin his supeririour and landislord’. Buccleuch however, being
‘moved with pitie and commiseratioun of his [Redheugh’s] estait’ interceded
for him, perhaps recalling the older obligations between them.66
In the 1620s, in the fulfilment of this public office, Buccleuch used the
members of his kindred and his Liddesdale tenants as his officially nominated
deputies, but also the privately derived power he had through his leadership
of the wider kindred, in both cases utilising the ties of traditional obligations
between them, of kinship and lordship.67 Older methods of justice by this
noble Buccleuch were suggested too, in 1629, by an Englishman venturing
into the hilly Borders dales, who noted of the river between Langholm and
Selkirk that this was where ‘my lord Buckpleugh did wapp the outlaws into
the dubb’.68 Private methods of justice were to continue into an increasingly
formalised legal world.
66 RPC, xiii, 475‒6, 486‒7, 572‒3, 614, 651‒2.

67 RPC, xii, 695; xiii, 18‒19.
68 Christopher Lowther and others, ‘Our Journal into Scotland AD 1629, 5th of
November, from Lowther’, in HMC, Lonsdale, xiii report, app. 7 (London, 1893), 76.
part 11
Kings and Lords

chapter 9
Murder Will Out: Kingship, Kinship and

Killing in Medieval Scotland
ALEXANDER GRANT
This chapter reflects on Jenny Wormald’s ground-breaking article, ‘Bloodfeud,

Kindred and Government in Early Modern Scotland’ (1980),1 which bril-
liantly analysed fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Scotland’s kin-based mech-
anisms for pacifying feuding, in relation to the public legal system. Essentially,
the crown would grant a remission to the perpetrator of illegal violence,
including killing, on condition that assythment (compensation) was given to
the victim or his kin. It is not only one of the most important articles written
on Scottish history, but also – through its wider significance – probably the
most widely cited; and over thirty years later it reads as powerfully as ever.
Since 1980, work on feuding has multiplied exponentially. Whereas
Wormald had to cite only a few dozen studies, nowadays well over a thousand
could be mentioned; and her comment, ‘greater awareness that feud is a
complex business has not resolved all problems of interpretation’, now seems
a masterly understatement. What, indeed, makes a ‘feud’? Long-term fighting
across generations, or also short-term retaliation? Only kin-groups, or also
other groupings? Only killing, or also non-mortal injury and/or property
damage? Are ‘bloodfeud’ and ‘vendetta’ different from ‘feud’, or subsumed
within it? Jeppe Büchert Netterstrøm’s introduction to a wide-ranging
volume examines such issues, giving twenty-six pages on ‘definitions and
concepts’ before considering how to construct ‘a comprehensive history of
European feuding’.2 A ‘more flexible’ and ‘broader’ definition is preferable,
11 Past and Present 87 (May 1980), 54‒97.

12 Jeppe Büchert Netterstrøm, ‘Introduction: the study of feud in medieval and early
modern history’, in Jeppe Büchert Netterstrøm and Bjørn Poulsen (eds), Feud in
Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Aarhus, 2007), 9‒67. Also Susanna A. Throop,
‘Introduction: the study of vengeance in the Middle Ages’, Paul R. Hyams, ‘Was there
really such a thing as feud in the high Middle Ages?’, and Hyams, ‘Neither unnatural
nor wholly negative: the future of medieval vengeance’, all in Throop and Hyams
(eds), Vengeance in the Middle Ages (Farnham, 2010), 1‒4, 151‒76, 203‒20; and Guy
Halsall, ‘Violence and society in the early medieval West: an introductory survey’, in
Guy Halsall (ed.), Violence and Society in the Medieval West (Woodbridge, 1998), 1‒45.
he argues, so that ‘long-standing bloodfeuds between Icelandic peasants

might then be placed on the same continuum as bloodfeuds between Scottish
or Friulian aristocrats as well as the feuds between Franconian noblemen that
were not primarily bloodfeuds’. Meanwhile:
Edward Muir has tried to place Renaissance Friuli on a spectrum of European
feuding societies. At the one end … ‘might be medieval England, where royal
justice stamped out blood feuds earlier than in any other kingdom, and at the
other modern Albania, where governments have hardly touched the endemic
tribal feuds in the mountains … Friuli in the Renaissance came closer to the
Albanian than the English end of the spectrum’. It is [Netterstrøm’s] opinion
… that an effort to place the feuding societies of medieval and early modern
Europe on this sort of spectrum may provide a constructive starting point for
further comparison.3
That ‘England–Albania spectrum’ is Jenny Wormald’s concept:4 so ‘Blood-
feud, Kindred and Government’ now provides a blueprint for taking the
subject forward.
Presumably this would employ the flexible and broad Scottish concept of
feud, as defined by the estates in 1598: ‘all feuds are one of these three natures,
namely: that there is either no slaughter upon neither side, or slaughter upon
one side only, or else slaughter upon both sides’.5 Thus Scottish ‘feud’ was
not necessarily deadly; it included unfriendliness or enmity – as when the
duke of Rothesay’s council of 1399 promised ‘loyal counsel … not having eye
for feud nor friendship’.6 As for length, Keith Brown’s analysis of 365 feuds
between 1573 and 1625 shows that 75 per cent were shorter than five years,7
and Steve Boardman’s study of late medieval feuding indicates much the
same.8 Also, though compensation for death went to the victim’s kindred,
feuding usually involved ‘friends and part-takers’ too.9
Wormald’s article, however, is essentially about the pacification of feud –
13 Netterstrøm, ‘Study of feud’, 66‒7; Edward Muir, Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta and
Factions in Friuli during the Renaissance (Baltimore, MD, 1993), 275.
14 Wormald, ‘Bloodfeud’, 56‒7 (acknowledged by Muir and Netterstrøm).
15 RPS, 1598/6/2 (‘nather’ in the original; rendered as ‘either’ in the RPS translation,
which I have amended).
16 Ibid., 1399/1/3. Rothesay was lieutenant for his father Robert III. This is the earliest
recorded use of the term in Scotland: DOST, s.v. ‘fede’.
Early Modern Society (Edinburgh, 1986), 277‒9. Twenty-one per cent lasted 2‒5 years,
17 per cent 5‒20 years, and only 8 per cent more than 20 years. Almost half the 253
feuds for which details survive were not mortal (27 per cent no bloodshed, 22 per cent
just bodily assault).
18 Stephen I. Boardman, ‘Politics and the Feud in Late Mediaeval Scotland’ (St Andrews
University PhD thesis, 1990), available at http://hdl.handle.net/10023/504 (last
accessed 30 November 2013).
19 Wormald, ‘Bloodfeud’, 68–71. For individual feuds, Brown, Bloodfeud, chapters 4, 6;
KINGSHIP, KINSHIP AND KILLING IN MEDIEVAL SCOTLAND 195
for which she drew upon social anthropology, especially Max Gluckman’s
1955 essay ‘Peace in the Feud’.10 Gluckman argued that fear of feuding
powerfully inhibited its unlimited escalation, because as a feud expanded
many of the participants came to realise the wider threat, especially to their
own interests. Consequently, feuds eventually generated a strong desire for
pacification, pressurising the protagonists into ceasing hostilities and agreeing
settlements: ‘peace in the feud’. Though not unchallenged,11 this makes broad
sense. And recently the behaviourist Christopher Boehm has proposed a
similar argument, highlighting two opposing human instincts: to retaliate –
for both affection and honour – when a loved one is hurt or killed; but to
compromise and pacify if the wider group’s interests are threatened.12
However, the consequent ambivalences and dilemmas became increasingly
problematic as human groupings became bigger and more complex, making
feud pacification far from straightforward: feuds could ‘involve a long series
of lethal exchanges’.13 Boehm’s feud seems less peaceful than Gluckman’s.
Another, less functionalist, aspect should be added: the ‘holy’. In a study
of German justice, the legal/cultural historian Wolfgang Schild argues that
pre-Christian Germanic peoples had ‘a demonic–magic conception of the
world’, in which a kin’s (mythical) ancestor was a ‘demonically holy’ figure
who bequeathed his holiness to his collective kindred. Consequently, when a
kin member was killed, the ‘rage that led to vengeance’ had three reasons:
that the kin’s ‘holy power’ was weakened, which only revenge could rectify;
that tolerating the initial killing meant the kin was cowardly, which also stim-
ulated revenge; and that if no vengeance were taken, the dead kinsman might
return as a ghost to take it himself, and also to punish negligent relatives (as
in Hamlet).14 Since the sense of ancestral ‘holiness’ is another long-estab-
lished instinct, this adds a significant extra dimension to Boehm’s arguments.
However, Boehm’s quasi-Weberian statements that collective pacification
operated only when ‘strong authority at the political centre’ was absent, and
Boardman, ‘Politics and the Feud’, chapters 4, 6‒8; Jackson W. Armstrong, ‘The “fyre
of ire kyndild” in the fifteenth-century Scottish Marches’, in Throop and Hyams
(eds), Vengeance in the Middle Ages, 51‒84.
10 Max Gluckman, ‘The peace in the feud’, Past and Present 8 (November 1955), 1‒14;
also in his Custom and Conflict in Africa (Oxford, 1955).
11 Brown refers to ‘Gluckman’s … sanitised bloodfeud’ (Bloodfeud, 2), while Netterstrøm
suggests he ‘perhaps understat[ed] the violent elements in feuding’ (‘Study of feud’, 9);
and see their references to post-Gluckman anthropologists.
12 Christopher Boehm, ‘The natural history of blood revenge’, in Netterstrøm and
Poulsen (eds), Feud in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, 189‒203.
13 Ibid., 200.
14 Wolfgang Schild, ‘Penal law as a phenomenon of the history of ideas’, in Christoph
Hinckeldey (ed.), Criminal Justice through the Ages (Rothenburg, 1981), 30‒45, at
pp. 39‒42.
that kingdoms, as they emerge, ‘develop sufficient coercive power … that

feuds can be coercively suppressed by the leader, rather than merely being
arbitrated’,15 might raise eyebrows. Yet, as Rees Davies remarked, ‘feud as
an organised and recognized institution is largely a phenomenon of the
stateless society’.16 Collective pacification mechanisms are far older than
central coercive ones, and form the background against which the latter
developed – as in medieval and early modern Europe, when, as Wormald said
about Scotland, ‘the question of interaction between public and private [feud-
based] justice is at its most problematic’.17 Her analysis naturally highlighted
‘the justice of the feud’18 in relation to the traditional concept of ‘the justice
of the state’. But in human history feud justice is age-old, whereas state justice
is relatively new. Accordingly, since the ‘new’ is commonly a bigger factor
in change than the ‘old’, my reflections are angled towards the justice of
the state.
In the first half, these reflections are on the wider context – beginning in
modern Saudi Arabia. Its legal system applies Islamic shari‘a law, whereby,
with deliberate homicide, the victim’s head of kin can either impose the death
penalty on the perpetrator, or remit it and accept diyya (blood money).19 Thus
the justice of the feud still operates – which impinged on Western conscious-
ness in 1997 after an Australian nurse, Yvonne Gilford, was murdered there.20
Two British colleagues were accused, and confessed in prison; one was
sentenced to death, the other to 500 lashes. Westerners’ reactions were mixed.
Some (favouring the death penalty) accepted Saudi justice; but many vehe-
mently condemned the judgement because the confessions appeared forced.
That point was technically irrelevant under the Saudi system, however – and
the only way to prevent the execution was for Gilford’s brother to accept
15 Boehm, ‘Natural history of blood revenge’, 202‒3.

16 R. R. Davies, ‘The survival of the bloodfeud in medieval Wales’, History 54 (1969),
338‒57, at p. 341.
18 Ibid., 56ff. (used 27 times in all); a preferable formulation to Gluckman’s ‘peace in
the feud’.
19 Rudolph Peters, Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law (Cambridge, 2005), 38‒53,
142‒90.
20 Robert J. Meadows, What Price for Blood? (San Francisco, CA, 2000); C. R. Pennell,
‘Law as a cultural symbol: the Gilford murder case and the presentation of Saudi
justice’, International Journal of Human Rights 10 (2006), 121‒42; Hossein Esmaeili
and Jeremy Gans, ‘Islamic law across cultural borders: the involvement of Western
nationals in Saudi murder trials’, Denver Journal of International Law and Policy 28
(1999‒2000). The Times Digital Archive also provides a useful account (search for
‘Gilford’+‘Parry’+‘McLaughlan’ between December 1996 and June 1999).
diyya. He initially refused,21 but was persuaded to agree, and $1.2 million
(c.£750,000) blood money was paid, allegedly by British defence contractors.
The execution and the lashes were cancelled, and the defendants were
released in 1998.
The case highlights that fundamental instinct for revenge. Gilford’s mother
said ‘murder the nurses if they murdered my daughter’,22 and her brother’s
wife wished ‘the killers should go through what my sister-in-law went
through’.23 This attitude is unsurprising: the second quotation is from a
newspaper article examining how, across the West, ‘the appeal of retribution
is increasing, not in the style of the vendetta … but along the more limited
Biblical lines of an eye for an eye’.24 Thus, in a sense, the state has replaced
the kin-group as the agency of retributive punishment (often too lenient for
victims’ families). However, in Saudi Arabia the prosecutor is the victim’s
head of kin, not a state official. Also, though judges determine whether the
accusation is valid, if it is, the accuser determines the accused’s fate: diyya or
death. That kindred role is typical of feud justice, but the state is not
excluded: it is there in an enabling capacity, and has one executive function,
for if diyya is refused, a public executioner carries out the death sentence.25
So the state under shari‘a law could be seen as employing and maintaining
the justice of the feud; there is no conflict between ‘state’ and ‘feud’ justice.
Now, shari‘a law derives from the Qur’an (seventh century) and Hadiths
(‘traditions’; ninth century), as interpreted by scholars over subsequent
centuries, and the continuities are strong in Saudi Arabia.26 Diyya originates
in one passage in the Qur’an enjoining compassion instead of eye-for-eye
retaliation, and another in the Hadiths indicating that a man’s blood money
should be 100 camels.27 That is still the Saudi Arabian benchmark – and in
2011 diyya for deliberate homicide was raised from 110,000 ryals to 400,000
(c.£70,000) because of inflation in camel prices.28 Saudi blood money,
21 Though he opposed the death penalty, if the defendant were guilty he wanted her
punished, preferably by a long prison sentence – which was not possible under shari‘a
law.
22 Pennell, ‘Law as a cultural symbol’, 135, citing Daily Mail, 23 August 1997.
23 Jack O’Sullivan, ‘Wanted: but dead or alive?’, Independent, 4 June 1997 (www.
independent.co.uk/news/1254029.html; last accessed 1 June 2013).
24 Ibid.: highlighting the USA’s ‘Federal Victims and Witness Protection Act’, 1982, by
which increasingly frequent ‘victim impact statements’, generally demanding a retal-
iatory death penalty, are presented to the court after an accused is found guilty (note
that in the UK such statements do not influence sentencing).
25 Peters, Crime and Punishment, 30‒2, 36‒7; in the Gilford case this received great press
attention.
26 Ibid., 6‒68, 148‒53.
27 Qur’an, 5.45; Hadith Sahi-al-Bukhai, 9.83.36. For early diyya, Lahcen Daaït, ‘Le prix
du sang (diya) au premier siècle de l’Islam’, Hypothèses (2006/1), 329‒42.
28 Arab News, 10 February 2010 and 6 September 2011, available at www.arabnews.com/
therefore, represents more than a millennium of continuity – back to the era

of Anglo-Saxon wergeld and Gaelic cró.29 The standard view is that diyya
was introduced to limit feuding: ‘with the advent of Islam, this institution of
revenge was drastically modified’.30 That probably exaggerates, because the
concept is pre-Islamic;31 but shari‘a law did institutionalise it,32 producing a
process that can be regarded as having been brought about by the earthly
rulers (Muhammad and subsequent caliphs) of a theocratic state, who by
incorporating ‘peace in the feud’ within Islam also harnessed the sense of the
‘holy’. Thus we can see the justice of the state impacting on that of the feud
during the early Middle Ages, in a way that operated throughout the Islamic
world, and still does in Saudi Arabia – which, in terms of Wormald’s
spectrum, is surely right in the middle.
We now shift to Europe, initially the Balkans. Albania is on the spectrum’s
edge: the horrific feuding that still occurs there ‘is not about order and
stability [but] about honour’, and there is ‘no government impact’.33 That
also applied to neighbouring Montenegro and Kosovo until the twentieth
century. However, feuding was mostly limited to their mutual mountainous
borderlands, which from the fifteenth century harboured opponents of
Ottoman conquest who in ‘state’ terms were outlaws.34 These operated their
own feud justice, following a law-code (Kanun) attributed to the anti-Ottoman
leader Lekë Dukagjini (1410‒81), which ‘became a major symbol of Albanian
identity’ and still operates nowadays.35 Though it included blood money, this
node/336788 and www.arabnews.com/node/390060; last accessed 1 June 2013. This

is for killing a Muslim male; for a female Muslim, or a Christian of either gender, it
is only half.
29 With payments in livestock, the animals bred and thus provided lasting income. As a
Saudi economist stressed, diyya in camels was a long-term investment for the
deceased’s dependants; but 400,000 ryals would be spent before a victim’s children
reached maturity: Arab News, 25 September 2011, available at www.arabnews.com/
node/392359 (last accessed 1 June 2013).
30 Peters, Crime and Punishment, 40.
31 Daaït, ‘Le prix du sang’, 331‒2.
32 See ibid., 332.
33 Wormald, ‘Bloodfeud’, 56‒7. From the later 1960s, tough action by the Communist
regime greatly reduced bloodfeud, but it has re-emerged significantly since 1991:
Mentor Mustafa and Antonia Young, ‘Feud narratives: contemporary deployments of
kanun in Shala Valley, northern Albania’, Anthropological Notebooks 14 (2008), 87‒197,
at pp. 88‒90; Tanya Mangalakova, The Kanun in present-day Albania, Kosovo, and
Montenegro (Sofia, 2004, available at http://pdc.ceu.hu/archive/00003864/01/
The_Kanun.pdf, last accessed 30 November 2013), 3. For Albanian bloodfeud in
general, Margaret Hasluck, The Unwritten Law in Albania (Cambridge, 1954), 219‒60.
34 Mustafa and Young, ‘Feud narratives’, 87‒9; Christopher Boehm, Blood Revenge: The
Enactment and Management of Conflict in Montenegro and other Tribal Societies (2nd
edn, Philadelphia, PA, 1986), 41‒5.
35 Mangalakova, Kanun in Albania, 2‒3.
was commonly rejected as dishonourable, and the provisions for Mosaic life-
for-life vengeance were preferred and exalted – presumably reflecting
hostility to Islam, though aspects of the ‘holy’ also come to mind.
Consequently, the factors that for Gluckman and Boehm militate against the
likelihood of extensive, enduring feuding did not operate effectively. In the
stateless Albanian, Montenegrin and Kosovan highlands, there was (and in
Albania still is) little ‘peace in the feud’.
The Balkans were hardly typical, however. What of the heart of Europe,
the once Germanic/Frankish territories? Germanic feuding and blood-
money were famously described by Tacitus,36 and analysed almost as famously
by J. M. Wallace-Hadrill in his ‘Bloodfeud of the Franks’, which applied
Gluckman’s concept to history for the first time.37 Moreover, in 789 Charle-
magne prohibited all killings including those of vengeance – ‘the earliest piece
of legislation against feud’38 – and added in 802 that if killing did happen,
compensation must be offered and accepted immediately; royal officers main-
tained both laws.39 In the Carolingian Empire as in the Islamic, the state was
becoming involved in feud justice.
After the Carolingian Empire collapsed, the parallel was not sustained,
especially in what became the German empire. Here, roughly speaking, there
were three basic trends: at the top, central authority faded as imperial
dynasties came and went; at the middle, regional duchies and counties
achieved semi-independence, but often fragmented through accidents of
inheritance; and at the lower, an expanding knightly class became increasingly
prominent.40 South and south-west Germany finished up as a ‘geopolitically
highly fragmented area, with … puny territorial states [and a] kaleidoscopic
jumble of ill-defined, intermingled and competing jurisdictions’;41 and it was
36 ‘It is an obligation to take over the father’s or kinsman’s feuds (inimicitias) and friend-
ships (amicitias). But feuds do not go on with no reconciliation. In fact, even homicide
can be atoned for with a fixed number of cattle or sheep. The whole family receives
this compensation. This is an advantage for the community, since feuds are dangerous
where freedom exists’. Tacitus, Germania, c. 21: from Tacitus, Agricola and Germany,
ed. and trans. Anthony R. Birley (Oxford, 1999), 48.
37 First published in Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 41 (1959), 459‒87; reprinted
in J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Long-Haired Kings (London, 1962).
38 J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic Kingship in England and on the Continent
(Oxford, 1971), 107‒8.
39 Admonitio Generalis, 789, c. 67; Capitulary (at Aachen), 802, c. 32. English versions
in P. D. King (trans.), Charlemagne: Translated Sources (Lambrigg, 1987), 216, 240‒1.
40 What follows derives from F. R. H. du Boulay, Germany in the Later Middle Ages
(London, 1983), chs 2‒4; John Watts, The Making of Polities: Europe, 1300‒1500
(Cambridge, 2009), 59‒66, 188‒91, 301‒7, 352‒5; Benjamin Arnold, Princes and Terri-
tories in Medieval Germany (Cambridge, 1991); and Tom Scott, ‘Germany and the
Empire’, in The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. vii, c.1415–c.1500 (Cambridge,
1998), 337‒66.
41 Hillay Zmora, The Feud in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 2011), 49.
not much better elsewhere. General law-codes existed, especially the Sach-
senspiegel (from the thirteenth century),42 but little direct overall authority.
The emperors did get lords to make regional peace agreements (Landfrieden),
which generally broke down; and princely hostility thwarted Frederick III’s
empire-wide Landfried of 1465.43 In practice, the intermingled jurisdictions
made legal dispute settling virtually impossible: ‘each party to a dispute
always claimed to have justice on its side, whereas no single supreme insti-
tution existed which bindingly defined the law’.44 That puts Germany fairly
close to Albania on Wormald’s spectrum – and of course it stimulated feuding.
German feud research, however, has taken a Sonderweg.45 Since 1939, Otto
Brunner’s Land und Herrschaft has been fundamental;46 but it was little
known elsewhere until the English translation, ‘Land’ and Lordship, appeared
in 1992,47 possibly because of its difficult German,48 but also possibly because
Brunner, an enthusiastic National Socialist,49 said it studied the ‘political
concepts of the Third Reich’.50 However, as Benjamin Arnold commented,
‘it would be hard to detect that his scholarly exposition … [has] been tainted
by false notions about the historical driving forces of Volk and Führung’.51
We may never know; but Brunner’s arguments set the agenda for the
German-speaking world, and are crucial here.
42 The Saxon Mirror: A Sachsenspiegel of the Fourteenth Century, trans. Maria Dobozy
(Philadelphia, PA, 1999).
43 Du Boulay, Germany, 76‒3; Scott, ‘Germany and the Empire’, 358‒9; Watts, Making
of Polities, 62, 101‒2, 190, 303, 354; and F. R. H. du Boulay, ‘Law enforcement in
medieval Germany’, History 63 (1978), 345‒55.
44 Zmora, Feud, 40.
45 Netterstrøm, ‘Study of feud’, 20‒8 (on ‘The Sonderweg of German feud research’).
46 Land und Herrschaft: Grundfragen der territorialen Verfassungsgeschichte Südostdeutsch-
lands im Mittelalter (Vienna, 1939).
47 ‘Land’ and Lordship: Structures of Government in Medieval Austria, trans. Howard
Kaminsky and James Van Horn Melton (Philadelphia, PA, 1992); this work was a
translation of the fourth, heavily revised, edition (Vienna, 1959), in which Österreichs
replaced Südostdeutschlands in the title.
48 Ibid., p. xiii.
49 Peter N. Miller, ‘Nazis and Neo-Stoics: Otto Brunner and Gerhard Oestreich before
and after the Second World War’, Past and Present 176 (August 2002), 144‒86, at
p. 157: in 1943 ‘the officer to whom Brunner reported’ was SS-Obergruppenführer
Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Reich’s Security Service.
50 Brunner, Land und Herrschaft (1st edn), 512; cited by Miller, 155.
51 Benjamin Arnold, ‘Structures of medieval government and the thought-world of Otto
Brunner (1898‒1982)’, Reading Medieval Studies 20 (1994), 3‒12, at p. 9. But Miller,
‘Nazis and Neo-Stoics’, stresses that the removal of Nazi concepts from the 1959
edition obscures the argument (p. 154); that in 1939 Brunner declared, ‘Not the state,
nor culture, are for us today the object of history, but rather Volk and Reich’ (p. 155);
and that ‘Fernand Braudel was right to be suspicious of Brunner’s motives’ (p. 158;
Land und Herrschaft has never been translated into French).
Brunner rejected state-oriented history, employing a bottom-up approach

to show what was really going on. He focused on Austria’s districts and
provinces, to which he applied the term Land. This was not just territorial:
Land was a legal idea … nearer to ‘district’ in one of its original senses as a
juridical dimension in which, in the medieval milieu, all rights, authority, and
law added up to a shared endeavour partly to do with administering the law
courts, partly to do with the defence of the land, and partly allowing for self-
defence within the land.52
It is the territory of Landfrieden, and not unlike the English county community.
Brunner derived it from the Germanic past, when ‘Civitas, tribe and Land
were associations of arms-bearing men … able to fight for their rights’.53
Such fighting could be done either in a court, or if (as was often the case)
that was unsatisfactory, through force of arms – in other words feud, which
‘was as integral to medieval political life as war is to the modern state’.54
But Brunner’s feud was purely ‘knightly’, and excluded bloodfeud:
The Middle Ages distinguished … between blood vengeance, that is, mortal
enmity, and the knightly feud with its ‘challenge’. The former could be
employed by anyone … On the other hand the knightly feud was reserved to
the nobility and seigneurial proprietors of similar status … The knightly feud
could be employed to settle any conflict, so that even the most trivial legal
dispute could serve as an excuse for declaring a feud.55
This ‘knightly feud’ did not involve vengeance, and was legitimate if formally
declared – as confirmed by Charles IV’s ‘Golden Bull’ of 1356, which
prohibited attacks ‘under the pretext of a feud, with arson, robbery or plunder,
unless the feud has been announced publicly … three days in advance’.56 The
legitimation, however, did not apply to killing, and while ‘the killing of one’s
opponent’ and ‘honest homicide’ are recorded ‘often enough’,
in knightly feuds the killing of one’s opponents was something rather to be
avoided. For one thing, it was not exempt from the vengeance of the victim’s
friends and relatives – that is, from blood vengeance and blood feud. And for
another, even though it was legally recognised as long as ‘enmity’ existed
between the parties, it nevertheless went against the purpose of the feud, which
was to rectify an injustice, not to destroy the other party.57
52 Arnold, ‘Structures of medieval government’, 4‒5. Because Brunner used Land in a

technical sense, inverted commas are used in citations of the English title.
53 Brunner, ‘Land’ and Lordship, 17.
54 Ibid., 90.
55 Ibid., 16.
56 Quoted in Zmora, Feud, 34, in the context of Baron Georg von Puchheim’s 1453 letter
to Emperor Frederick III telling him, ‘I want to be enemy of Your Grace’s land and
people, and wherever I encounter your servitors and subjects, I will cause them damage’.
Killing in ‘knightly feud’ broke the rules, and the killer’s peers would turn
against him – making it counter-productive. But otherwise feuding had a very
wide scope. ‘Injustice’ was any slight to knightly (and hence aristocratic)
honour; and any member of the knightly class could declare feud against any
other, even a territorial prince or the emperor.58
The commonest quarrels, however, were among those in frequent contact,
and the typical feud occurred within a Land. The aim was to make an
opponent redress the ‘injustice’ by damaging his lordly and economic status
through attacks on his dependent peasantry. Thus the peasants were ‘most
affected by feuds … the loss of harvest, cattle, clothing, and household
furnishings was bad enough, while the burning down of whole villages caused
losses that were irreparable’59 – and peasants were often killed. But that was
how the world worked: ‘feud [was] an evil, but one as unavoidable as crop
failures and famine’.60 The affected peasantry had either to suffer or to
abandon their lords – the purpose of the exercise – and fatalities were simply
collateral damage.
‘Land’ and Lordship ‘has become a veritable battleground’,61 and conse-
quently ‘German historiography exceeds by far any other national historio-
graphy as to the quantity of feud studies produced’62 – all broadly within
Brunner’s conceptual framework, as Hillay Zmora’s recent overview
demonstrates.63 Zmora himself develops the analysis significantly. One
instance is his concept of ‘inimical intimacy’:64 Brunner located feuding
within the Land, but for Zmora it is even more local. Feuds mostly derive
from neighbourly friction – and those who fail to counter a neighbour’s
hostility are despised by others. Hence Zmora stresses proximity more than
honour. Also, most importantly, he brings in a higher political level, high-
lighting rivalries and conflicts among the German princes – who used,
manipulated and stimulated knightly hostilities to gain advantages against
their own princely rivals. This gives a top-down dimension to German
feuding after all, and leads Zmora to connect it with ‘state-building’, albeit
at the princely rather than the imperial level.65
Zmora’s insights are fascinating, with European, not just German, rele-
vance; yet his work is still within Brunner’s ‘knightly feud’ parameters. That
58 As in note 56, above.

59 Brunner, ‘Land’ and Lordship, 88‒9.
60 Ibid., 91, quoting a tenth-century text.
61 Zmora, Feud, 9.
62 Netterstrøm, ‘Study of feud’, 22.
63 Zmora, Feud, 1‒28.
64 Ibid., 50 ff., 77 ff.
65 Ibid., chs 5‒6, based largely on Franconia, his own research area, rather than Brunner’s
Austria; also Hillay Zmora, State and Nobility in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge,
1997).
is a general point: as Netterstrøm chides, the ‘self-sufficiency of feud studies

probably explains why German feud research has neither significantly
obtained the foreign anthropological and historical literature on feud nor
compared the German feud system to the feuding societies of, say, Icelandic
peasants or Scottish aristocrats’.66 Comparisons with Scotland are certainly
instructive. Two immediate thoughts are that Scottish feuding often had ‘no
slaughter upon neither side’;67 but that German knightly quarrels could
involve killing, and even (as Brunner admitted) bloodfeud:
Killing for revenge … was something quite different … The murderer was
peaceless vis-à-vis the friends and relatives of his victim, and could therefore
be killed out of hand unless an atonement intervened … Even among the
nobility and others who had the right to feud, and whose feuds were mostly
of the ordinary sort, the blood feud was not unknown.68
Thus it is not that late medieval German elites did not have bloodfeuds; it is
that these appear (because of Brunner’s approach) not to have received in-
depth study. Yet the Sachsenspiegel law-code that was followed for centuries
treated wergeld, a major concomitant of bloodfeud, as current;69 and actual
wergeld payments by killers are recorded in seventeenth-century Holstein.70
Surely, therefore, compensation for both ‘honest homicide’ in knightly feuds
and killings in bloodfeud was required – which suggests German parallels
with all types of Scottish feuding.
As for the anthropological issue, ‘peace in the feud’ existed in early medieval
Germany, upheld by central power; but when central power diminished, we
might expect feuding to have intensified. However, if most significant quarrels
occurred within coherent group structures (Brunner’s Land, Zmora’s neigh-
bourhood), then, in the absence of effective external authority, group pres-
sures to avoid or settle feuding would no doubt have increased, as would
individual and collective fears of its disastrous effect. The collective group
response would presumably have been to create a means of settling elite
disputes honourably but with the least possible violence – as Brunner
implicitly argued.71 That is surely what the knightly feud was about: letting
landowning neighbours quarrel dramatically and satisfactorily, without
66 Netterstrøm, ‘Study of feud’, 22‒3.

67 Above, p. 194. Two examples are the Angus–Dalkeith feud in 1399 and the Hepburn–
Home one in the mid-1440s: Michael Brown, The Black Douglases: War and Lordship
in Late Medieval Scotland, 1300‒1455 (East Linton, 1998), 88‒91, 94; Armstrong,
‘Fyre of ire kyndild’, 64‒72.
69 Dobozy (trans.), Saxon Mirror, 20‒4, and ad indicem.
70 Bertha S. Phillpotts, Kindred and Clan in the Middle Ages and After (Cambridge, 1913),
125‒46, esp. pp. 138‒9. Holstein is the only part of the Empire included in Phillpotts’
book.
threatening each other’s death. So, while honour could be ostentatiously

upheld, the factors that made feud so fearsome were removed. I suggest,
therefore, that in later medieval Germany the ‘bloodfeud of the Franks’ was
‘sanitised’ or emasculated,72 allowing elites to indulge in frequent non-mortal,
honourable and legitimate conflicts – in which ordinary people suffered most.
Meanwhile, what was going on in the western remnant of the Frankish
Empire, namely France? Much the same, according to Howard Kaminsky.73
A translator of Land und Herrschaft, he also dismisses state-focused history
as anachronistic, focuses on Land-like ‘modules of lordship’, emphasises ‘the
noble feud’, and argues that it was fundamental: ‘just as one cannot imagine
the modern state tolerating a right to feud, so we cannot imagine the medieval
state without it’.74 Yet while in principle noble/knightly feud (in French
terminology ‘guerre privée’, or private warfare) might have been the same in
France and Germany,75 royal power was not. It grew significantly in thir-
teenth- and early fourteenth-century France, and though there were huge
political crises later, the basis of French crown authority survived and royal
power was reconstructed. But, as Graeme Small stresses, ‘the picture … is
necessarily more complex than the roller-coaster, single-track story of the
monarchy’s “progress”’. We should think instead of a ‘plurality of powers …
and consider the interactions between them: kings and princes, of course, but
also nobles, churchmen, municipal authorities and peasant communities’.76
Much of the royal–noble interaction involves the noble feud, which
‘continued in France throughout [and beyond] the later Middle Ages’;77 and
here I consider the crown, or state, response.
72 ‘Yet despite the apparent rule of force, a feature of the German Fehde was the frequent
weakness of those who pursued it’: Du Boulay, ‘Law enforcement in medieval
Germany’, 346.
73 Howard Kaminsky, ‘The noble feud in the later Middle Ages’, Past and Present 177
(November 2002), 55‒83.
74 Ibid., 57‒8.
75 Except that accounts of French private war show that there was no bar to killing; and
see Justine Firnhaber-Baker’s explanation of why she prefers ‘war’ to ‘feud’: ‘Jura in
Medio: the settlement of seigneurial disputes in later medieval Languedoc’, French
History 26 (2012), 441‒59, at pp. 445‒6.
76 Graeme Small, Late Medieval France (Basingstoke, 2009), 3; from Lewis’ phrase, ‘the
pluralistic nature of power distribution’: P. S. Lewis, ‘Reflections on the role of royal
clientèles in the construction of the French monarchy’, in N. Bulst et al. (eds), L’état
ou le roi (Paris, 1996), 51‒68, at p. 55. The ‘plurality of powers’ is a recurrent theme
in Small’s discussion of the political aspects of late medieval French history. See also
David Potter (ed.), France in the Later Middle Ages, 1200‒1500 (Oxford, 2003), and
the chapters on France in The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. vi, c.1300–c.1415
(Cambridge, 2000), and vol. vii, c.1415–c.1500 (Cambridge, 1998).
77 Kaminsky, ‘Noble feud’, 66. See, e.g., Robin Harris, Valois Guyenne (Woodbridge,
1994), 137‒42; Stuart Carroll, ‘The peace in the feud in sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century France’, Past and Present 178 (February 2003), 74‒115; and Stuart Carroll,
From Louis IX (1214‒70) to Charles V (1364‒80), some thirty ordinances

prohibiting private warfare were issued, to little general effect;78 in southern
France ‘local wars were just as common … as in the feud-friendly Empire’.79
Yet the ordinances did at least assert royal antipathy to private warfare. Also,
both Richard Kaeuper and Justine Firnhaber-Baker show that while they did
not prevent that from breaking out, once it happened individuals could be
prosecuted for breaching them.80 But the ‘plurality of powers’ also applied:
noble claims to a right to private warfare had considerable effect,81 and so
such prosecutions succeeded only in areas under direct royal jurisdiction.82
However, from Philip IV’s reign (1285‒1314) other strategies were employed.
First, ‘interaction between royal and noble powers’ was utilised: ‘royal officials
allowed and indeed themselves engaged in a range of extra- and quasi-judicial
negotiations with warmakers’, especially by acting as high-status honest
brokers to persuade warring parties to compromise and make peace.83 Second,
a direct means of responding to feuding anywhere, irrespective of jurisdic-
tions, was developed: that of bringing one of the parties into the king’s special
peace.84 To attack someone within that peace was tantamount to attacking the
king himself – always illegal no matter where the offender lived. This nullified
the plurality of powers, since everyone in the kingdom was the king’s subject.
Providing ‘safeguards’ for threatened individuals, therefore, helped combat
private warfare. It was not infallible: a safeguard might be obtained by the
aggressor, or by both sides, or could be ignored – though that was risky.85
Blood and Violence in Early Modern France (Oxford, 2006), which has valuable material
on the fifteenth century in the introduction and first chapter.
78 Most prohibited it during times of international war, but at least one per reign banned
it altogether: Justine Firnhaber-Baker, ‘Seigneurial war and royal power in later
medieval southern France’, Past and Present 208 (August 2010), 37‒76, at pp. 51‒3;
and, more generally, Raymond Cazelles, ‘La réglementation royale de la guerre privée
de Saint Louis à Charles V et la précarité des ordonnances’, Revue historique de droit
français et étranger, 4th series, 38 (1960), 530‒48.
79 Firnhaber-Baker, ‘Seigneurial war’, 46; also Firnhaber-Baker, ‘Jura in Medio’, 444‒7.
80 Richard W. Kaeuper, War, Justice and Public Order: England and France in the Later
Middle Ages (Oxford, 1988), 239‒60; Firnhaber-Baker, ‘Seigneurial war’, 51‒7 (superseding
Cazelles’ and Kaminsky’s interpretation); Firnhaber-Baker, ‘Jura in Medio’, 447‒9.
81 Firnhaber-Baker, ‘Seigneurial war’, 55.
82 Ibid., 63‒7.
83 Firnhaber-Baker, ‘Jura in Medio’, 450‒5 (quotation from p. 451).
84 Firnhaber-Baker, ‘Seigneurial war’, 69‒74; also Kaeuper, War, Justice and Public Order,
235‒60.
85 As illustrated by the execution of the early fourteenth-century Gascon lord Jourdain
de l’Isle. See the very different accounts in Kaminsky, ‘Noble feud’, 69, and Kaeuper,
War, Justice and Public Order, 226; plus Joseph Kicklighter’s fascinating full-scale
study, ‘The nobility of English Gascony: the case of Jourdain de l’Isle’, Journal of
Medieval History 13 (1987), 327‒42.
Safeguards were simply based on the king’s age-old right to protect his
friends;86 but through that traditional power, French crown authority
extended into the world of the feud.
Third, that also happened via letters of remission granting royal pardons,
which survive from 1304 on. Though these were criticised both then and now
‘for allowing thieves and murderers to escape with impunity’,87 Claude
Gauvard’s magisterial analysis of 7,500 of the remissions that the royal
chancery issued throughout the kingdom between 1364 and 1515 paints a
very different picture.88 They went to all social classes, though nobles are
over-represented proportionally. Fifty-seven per cent involved homicides, of
which the vast majority (85 per cent) were acts of vengeance – but only about
a third were triggered by previous killing, while two-thirds avenged oral or
physical insults.89 Thus, while ‘l’honneur blessé’ (wounded honour) was a
crucial motive, life-for-life killing was not prevalent. Gauvard attributes this
to the letters of remission,90 arguing that a predominant sense of honour
fostered wide tolerance of violent responses to insults, but that after the initial
hot-blooded action the priority was to prevent further killing: hence the
remissions.91 And being acts of royal grace and mercy outside and above
formal legal processes,92 they, like safeguards, were available to anyone irre-
spective of jurisdictional technicalities.
But what of the dead victim’s kin, who would want their own revenge?
Because remission letters narrate the offender’s story, Gauvard’s analysis is
almost entirely from that standpoint. However, one brief passage shifts the
focus:
Whatever the process adopted for restoring the peace, an accord was always
necessary in order for the king to be able to legitimately grant his remission.
The clause that limited royal grace, the only one that might be formulated,
provided that ‘satisfaction is to be made to the party if not [already] made’. It
86 Firnhaber-Baker, ‘Seigneurial war’, 70‒1.

87 Firnhaber-Baker, ‘Jura in Medio’, 457.
88 Claude Gauvard, ‘De grâce especial’: Crime, état et société en France à la fin du Moyen
Âge (1991; 2nd (single-volume) edn, Paris, 2010), esp. 703‒806, 896‒952. For a brief
version of the most striking part of her argument, see Claude Gauvard, ‘Grâce et
exécution capitale’, Bibliothéque de l’École des chartes, 153 (1995), 275‒90. The 7,500
remissions consist of all 3,752 issued between 1380 and 1424, plus a full sample of
the rest.
89 Gauvard, ‘De grâce especial’, 242 (Table 8), 756 (Table 41; my extrapolation), and in
general chapter 16 (‘L’honneur blessé’).
90 Ibid., within chapters 17 (‘La Vengeance’), 18(2) (‘Meutres et homicides’), and 20
(‘Pardonner et punir’); esp. 778‒9, 797‒9, 940‒4.
91 Best summed up in Gauvard, ‘Grâce et exécution capitale’, 218: ‘the royal chancery
had every facility to grant the remission – a remission which stops vengeance and
precipitates accord between the parties’.
92 Ibid., 277‒80, and Gauvard, ‘De grâce especial’, 907‒20 (‘Justice et miséricord’).
is present in 90% of the letters: it is therefore a clause that could not be got
round.93
The procedure for bestowing royal grace is also important.94 A killer seeking
remission had to obtain chancery authorisation, get his letter properly
written, submit it for royal approval, pay a fee – and then present it to the
relevant local court, where its accuracy would be investigated, ideally before
his victim’s kin, who could challenge it and demand damages. Only then, if
all went well, would the letter be formally ratified. The court hearing was
vital, but it judged not the killer himself but the narrative in his letter and,
especially, the satisfaction of his victim’s kin – to assure the king that his
exercise of royal grace was deserved. This is the most significant way whereby
the late medieval French crown came, by extra-judicial means, to exert state
authority over the feud settlement process – though actual feuding still
continued during the early modern era.
Thus, while France and Germany had common roots, the late medieval
contrast is striking. Admittedly, this might be due partly to different
approaches: if a German study included peasant quarrels and killings, or if a
French one dealt only with the knightly classes, it might be less so.95 Never-
theless, the role of the crown was crucial: the French kings found ways of
bypassing jurisdictional problems; the German emperors did not; nor, yet,
did the princes (who did not possess ‘royal grace’). As for Wormald’s
spectrum, France can be placed well within the English side – while the rele-
vance of French procedures, especially letters of remission, for any
commentary on her ‘Bloodfeud’ is patently obvious.
We now cross to England, where, to quote Wormald,
before the Norman Conquest public authority had already taken over at least
part of the responsibilities of the kin, and where within two centuries after it
the bloodfeud itself had been replaced by a concept of crime enshrined in a
uniquely comprehensive system of royal justice.96
Her summing-up is still valid, though nuanced by recent work. In particular,
Paul Hyams’ Rancor and Reconciliation softens the distinction between earlier
kin-based and later crown-based justice.97 Hyams shows that once the latter
93 Gauvard, ‘De grâce especial’, 778: ‘satisfaccion soit faicte a partie si faite n’est’.
94 Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-
Century France (Cambridge, 1988), 8‒14; also Carroll, ‘Peace in the feud’, 106‒8, and
Carroll, Blood and Violence, 214‒21.
95 Since over 90 per cent of Gauvard’s letters related to non-nobles, the conclusions
from these will obscure any noble-specific points. That said, Carroll’s analysis in Blood
and Violence, which focuses much more on nobles, does not contradict Gauvard’s.
97 Paul L. Hyams, Rancor and Reconciliation in Medieval England (Ithaca, NY, 2003);
also T. B. Lambert, ‘Theft, homicide and crime in late Anglo-Saxon law’, Past and
became predominant (in the thirteenth century), state agency provided an

effective and safe way of gaining revenge on an opponent – by getting him
condemned either to death, or more commonly to outlawry for fleeing trial
(so anyone could kill him). Many of Hyams’ ‘case narratives’ illustrate how
English royal justice became an instrument of feud: if you seek revenge and
can manipulate the judicial system (or have it manipulated), this becomes a
powerful weapon.98
The more complex the system, the more it could be manipulated – as in
fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, where numerous conflicts among
the landed classes led Kaminsky to apply his concept of ‘noble feud’ there as
well as to France. Despite errors, he has a point:99 English noble and gentry
feuding seems to have become more frequent, particularly in the fifteenth
century.100 Gerald Harriss provides the best explanation.101 Most feuding
originated in land disputes, which became common because England’s
increasingly complex land laws not only stimulated claims and counter-claims
but also made victory in court nearly impossible to achieve.102 Instead,
Present 214 (February 2012), 3‒43; John G. H. Hudson, ‘Feud, vengeance and
violence in England from the tenth to the twelfth centuries’, in Belle S. Tuten and
Tracey L. Billado (eds), Feud, Violence and Practice: Essays in Medieval Studies in
Honor of Stephen D. White (Farnham, 2010), 29‒54; Richard L. Keyser, ‘“Agreement
supersedes law, and love judgment”: legal flexibility and amicable settlement in
Anglo-Norman England’, Law and History Review 30 (2012), 37‒88; Daniel
Klerman, ‘Settlement and the decline of private prosecution in thirteenth-century
England, Law and History Review 19 (2001), 1‒65.
198 Hyams, Rancor and Reconciliation, 242‒308; and see Brown, Bloodfeud, 44: ‘in a
feuding society … the law was simply seen as a weapon with a cutting edge of its
own for pursuing violence’.
199 Kaminsky, ‘Noble feud’, 74‒9; though the English disputes, like the French, do not
fit all the Brunner/Kaminsky criteria. He is badly mistaken over the Gloucester–
Hereford dispute of 1290, which they claimed was legitimate in the Welsh Marches;
see Michael Prestwich, Edward I (London, 1988), 348‒50. Also, his statement that
‘Edward III still “condoned” the nobles’ “right of defiance” in principle’ (citing M.
H. Keen, The Laws of War in the Late Middle Ages (1965), 232) is wrong: Edward
was referring to Aquitaine, not England.
100 Henry VI’s reign is the apogee. R. L. Storey, The End of the House of Lancaster
(2nd edn, Stroud, 1999), and Ralph A. Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI
(2nd edn, Stroud, 2004), chs 7, 20, highlight the local violence. See also J. G. Bellamy,
Criminal Law and Society in Late Medieval and Tudor England (Gloucester, 1984)
54‒89, for what he called ‘gentlemen’s wars’ (pp. 64, 70, 84).
101 Gerald Harriss, Shaping the Nation: England, 1360‒1461 (Oxford, 2005), 197‒202,
from which the rest of this paragraph derives. The best account of the criminal
justice system is Edward Powell, Kingship, Law, and Society: Criminal Justice in the
Reign of Henry V (Oxford, 1989), 23‒114; see also Kaeuper, War, Justice and Public
Order, 151‒60, 174‒83, 260‒7, and Bellamy, Criminal Law, 54‒89.
102 Thus, ‘it might even be argued that royal power contributed to disorder and the
disputants used simpler actions of trespass and breach of the peace, hoping
to pressurise opponents into out-of-court settlements. And both sides
generally obtained support from their lords; so great men were sucked into
gentry disputes. Ideally, compromises would be arranged, with reparations
where necessary.103 Unfortunately, such arbitrated settlements were not
absolutely binding, and were often broken. And though appeals could be
made to the chancellor, parliament or king, if one party appealed successfully,
the other generally objected. Consequently, ‘where litigation, lordship, private
treaty, or public authority failed, it was likely that one of the parties would
resort to force’.104 As elsewhere, that meant the honourable use of arms in
defence of family interests – feuding – which was unlikely to be punished
heavily. Inter-family feuds often escalated into local power struggles, pulling
in rival magnates – which could exacerbate the situation, necessitating crown
intervention. However, if one side in a conflict was well placed at the royal
court or had powerful friends there, crown intervention might not be neutral.
The interaction of local and national politics, therefore, could be destabilising:
for several historians, indeed, local feuding was a major causal factor in the
mid fifteenth-century ‘Wars of the Roses’.105
This is not unlike Brunner’s, Kaminsky’s, and especially Zmora’s worlds
– though England’s ‘state problem’ appears to be too much institutionalised
crown authority, not too little. The best solution was direct royal action – very
direct, believed the author of a story about Henry V (1413‒22) in the Brut
chronicle. A Lancashire and a Yorkshire knight were feuding, and some of
their followers were killed. Henry summoned them, and asked on what
authority they had made his lieges kill each other. They begged for mercy,
whereupon Henry said he had some oysters to eat, and unless they had made
peace before he finished, they would be hanged!106 They did, of course. The
story – presumably written later, when feuding was rife – portrayed Henry
as the great upholder of justice. Yet the letter of the law was not followed:
despite the killings, he pardoned the offenders – but terrified them into not
offending again. Edward Powell has illustrated the reality of such flexibility.
Under Henry IV (1399‒1413) the midlands had suffered from serious
authority of the crown was a public nuisance’: M. T. Clanchy, ‘Law, government and
society in medieval England’, History 59 (1974), 73‒8, at p. 78.
103 Commonly in ‘lovedays’: Michael Clanchy, ‘Law and love in the Middle Ages’, in John
Bossy (ed.), Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West (Cambridge,
1983), 47‒68, refined by Keyser, ‘Agreement supersedes law’, 40‒4. For arbitration,
Edward Powell, ‘Arbitration and the law in England in the late middle ages’, TRHS,
5th series, 33 (1983), 49‒67, and Edward Powell, ‘Settlement of disputes by arbitration
in fifteenth-century England’, Law and History Review 2 (1984), 21‒43.
104 Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 200.
105 See note 100, above.
106 The Brut, 2 vols, ed. F. W. D. Brie (EETS, 1906‒8), ii, 595; Powell, Kingship, Law,
and Society, 230‒1.
disorder and feuding; so in 1414 Henry V sent King’s Bench judges there on
‘superior eyre’. Some 2,200 persons were indicted for violence, and about
800 stood trial (the rest would have been outlawed). But few were found
guilty; most either paid a fine in advance or bought a pardon, and Henry soon
pardoned everyone who had been indicted. That looks like serious weakness
in one of medieval England’s toughest kings – yet, as Powell asks, what else
could be done? Those indicted included most of the county elites; had they
been imprisoned or executed, local government would have collapsed.107 On
the other hand, ‘the most serious offenders were made to take out recogni-
sances for large sums to keep the peace; for the rest a fine or pardon was suffi-
cient to buy off the king’s suit and gain readmission to his peace’.108 Those
readmitted to the king’s peace would have known that reoffending would not
be tolerated – surely the Brut’s main message.
Henry V’s strong personal kingship evaporated under Henry VI (1422‒61),
and though Edward IV (1461‒83) was tougher, his real heir in this respect
was Henry VII (1485‒1509). Had the oysters story been written about him,
the knights would have been put under recognisance, promising in writing
to pay a large sum of money if they offended again. All fifteenth-century kings
used recognisances to a certain extent, but Henry VII made them ‘the linchpin
of his entire ruling system’;109 hundreds were exacted from men engaging in
violent disputes, generally after appearing before Henry himself or his
council. This bypassed the formal, clogged-up, law-courts – but in practice
was the best way of dealing with troublesome gentry and lords.110
Thus the response to feuding by the two most successful fifteenth-century
English kings paralleled French rather than German practice. Also, the
numerous pardons recorded in the patent rolls of fourteenth- and fifteenth-
century England suggest that royal grace was exercised as frequently as in
France;111 while English letters of pardon had to be ‘proved’ in court, when
‘any appellant wishing to bring a suit against the recipient of the pardon’ was
entitled to object.112 However, as the word ‘appellant’ indicates, a simple
107 Ibid., 166‒94.

108 Ibid., 194.
109 Sean Cunningham, Henry VII (Abingdon, 2007), 216.
110 Ibid., 209‒33; Sean Cunningham, ‘Loyalty and the usurper: recognizances, the
council and allegiance under Henry VII’, Historical Research 82 (2009), 459‒81; Sean
Cunningham, ‘Henry VII, Sir Thomas Butler and the Stanley family’, in Tim
Thornton (ed.), Social Attitudes and Political Structures in the Fifteenth Century
(Stroud, 2000), 220‒41; and Sean Cunningham, ‘The Establishment of the Tudor
Regime: Henry VII, Rebellion, and the Financial Control of the Aristocracy,
1485‒1509’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Lancaster, 1995).
111 Pardons appear on virtually every page of the 45 volumes of the Calendars of Patent
Rolls covering the years 1307‒1509.
112 Helen Lacey, The Royal Pardon: Access to Mercy in Fourteenth-Century England
(Woodbridge, 2009), 20.
objection was not enough; it had to be made through a legal ‘appeal of felony’
– a formal private prosecution – which could win damages, but might be both
costly and unsuccessful.113 This was obviously much less satisfactory for
injured parties than the French system, in which remissions were almost
always conditional upon their satisfaction. The reason was, of course, the
great development of twelfth- and especially thirteenth-century English royal
justice114 – as a result of which, F. W. Maitland remarked many years ago, ‘the
law of wer [wergeld], being no longer applicable if there was felony, perished
for lack of sustenance, and the parentes occisi [kinsmen of the slain] were
reduced to getting what they could by threats of an appeal’.115
Wergeld, indeed, had become ‘anathema to English common law’ – as Rees
Davies commented in regard to Edward I’s abolition of the Welsh version,
galanas, after conquering the principality of Wales in 1284.116 But it must be
added that outside the principality, in the Welsh Marches, galanas appears to
have survived into the fifteenth century. Moreover, across the Irish Sea the
similar éraic operated within Gaelic lordships well beyond the Middle Ages,117
while blood money is found in Anglo-Irish lordships as well.118 Ireland leads
us back to Scotland, where the eleventh-century ‘Laws of the Brets and the
Scots’ (so-called) detailed the equivalent, cró119 – which, as Wormald showed,
survived loosely as late medieval and early modern ‘assythment’.120
113 For good accounts of the fourteenth-century English system, see ibid., 1‒81, and
Anthony Musson, Public Order and Law Enforcement: The Local Administration of
Criminal Justice, 1294‒1350 (Woodbridge, 1996).
114 Above, pp. 207‒8.
115 Sir Frederick Pollock and Frederic William Maitland, The History of English Law
before the time of Edward I, 2 vols (1895; 2nd edn, reissued, Cambridge, 1968), ii, 483.
116 Davies, ‘Survival of bloodfeud’, 339.
117 The best study is Neil McLeod, ‘The blood-feud in medieval Ireland’, in Pamela
O’Neill (ed.), Between Intrusions: Britain and Ireland between the Romans and the
Normans (Sydney, 2004), 114‒33, which starts in the 1450s and uses Gluckman’s ‘Peace
in the feud’. See also Katherine Simms, From Kings to Warlords: The Changing Political
Structure of Gaelic Ireland in the Later Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 1987), 89‒91;
K. W. Nicholls, Gaelic and Gaelicized Ireland in the Middle Ages (2nd edn, Dublin,
2003), 59‒64; and Fergus Kelly, A Guide to Early Irish Law (Dublin, 1988), 125‒34.
118 Peter Crooks, ‘Factions, feuds and noble power in the lordship of Ireland, c.1356‒
1496’, Irish Historical Studies 35 (2007), 425‒54, esp. p. 453; Nicholls, Gaelic and
Gaelicized Ireland, 60‒4.
119 Alice Taylor, ‘Leges Scocie and the lawcodes of David I, William the Lion and
Alexander III’, SHR 88 (2009), 207‒88, at pp. 237‒43, and (for text and translation)
278‒9, 286‒8; Patrick Wormald, ‘Anglo-Saxon law and Scots law’, SHR 88 (2009),
192‒206.
120 Wormald, ‘Bloodfeud’, 62‒4. It was still paid in the eighteenth century, and was not
formally abolished until 1996: W. David H. Sellar, ‘Forethocht felony, malice afore-
thought and the classification of homicide’, in W. M. Gordon and T. D. Fergus (eds),
Legal History in the Making (London, 1991), 43‒59, at p. 47.
And with respect to Scotland, whereas when ‘Bloodfeud’ was published

it seemed exceptional, it now appears to be entirely normal. What are the
general implications? Though Max Weber’s concept of the modern state’s
‘monopoly of legitimate force’ is conspicuously absent,121 the underlying
concept – that the state’s purpose is to uphold law and order – applies usefully
to the medieval era. But what law was upheld? It involved not only enactments
(‘statute law’), but also traditional rules that tolerated the commonest forms
of killing (in hot-blooded quarrel and self-defence) and required compen-
sation for the victim’s kin. And how was ‘order’ maintained? The main need
was to prevent prolonged feuding, which was more achievable through
pacification than punishment, since the latter could stimulate more feud.
Pardons and blood money were therefore crucial for medieval law-and-order
mechanisms. Admittedly these varied – the ‘state’ is less visible in Germany,
while in England, where it is most visible, the compensation requirement
disappeared. As for Scotland, its system resembles France’s – and both seem
good examples of the late medieval approach to maintaining law and order,
which evokes not Weber’s monopoly of force but Michel Foucault’s
contention that sovereignty’s fundamental attribute was the right ‘to take life
or let live’.122 The life-giving pardon can be called the ultimate act of state.
II
The rest of my reflections are specifically Scottish, and focus on royal remis-
sions. Technically, these relate to crime rather than feuding, which, as the
1598 act anent feud shows, was not crime per se.123 But what was medieval
crime? For Scotland, Alice Taylor answers significantly, ‘we cannot continue
identifying crime by the presence of royal or … state punishment. Crime
should instead be understood to denote offences that an authority put right,
through the force of its own law-making’.124 Saudi Arabia, where the state
plays a largely enabling role, comes to mind.125 But from the later twelfth
121 Weber: Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Spiers (Cambridge, 1994),
310‒11.
122 Michel Foucault, ‘Society must be defended’: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975‒76,
trans. David Macey (London, 2003), 240‒1. See also Gauvard, ‘Grâce et exécution
capitale’, 290: ‘The judicial power of the king thus has a double nature: it is simul-
taneously a power of life and a power of death’.
123 RPS, 1598/6/2: they were intended to pacify feuds through compulsory royal arbi-
tration, and also enable those against whom ‘deadly crimes’ had been committed in
the course of the feuds to make formal accusations.
124 Alice Taylor, ‘Crime without punishment: medieval Scottish law in comparative
perspective’, in David Bates (ed.), Anglo-Norman Studies, XXXV: Proceedings of the
Battle Conference 2012 (Woodbridge, 2013), 287‒304; quotation from p. 304; I am
most grateful to Dr Taylor for sending me a pre-publication copy.
125 Above, p. 197.
century the Scottish crown claimed more. A charter of William I asserted

that major offences – ‘murder, premeditated assault, rape, arson and plunder’
– belonged ‘to my regality’ and should be prosecuted by his ‘crowner’ before
his justices; while his laws forbade lords from holding courts without noti-
fying the sheriffs, and reserved ‘four pleas ... pertaining to his crown: namely
rape, plunder, arson and murder’.126 Furthermore, the thirteenth-century
‘legislation of Alexander II reveals a royal monopoly over crime’ – which has
obvious implications for the granting of remissions.127
Such a monopoly was never absolute, however, because (as in France) the
rights of the victim of crime or his kin remained fundamental. Consequently,
Scottish remissions, like French (and as in shari‘a law), were always condi-
tional on the offender giving assythment. That is clear from the first known
text of a remission for killing, in an early fourteenth-century formulary:
[the king] remits our rancour against T de C for the death of X, provided that
he makes peace with the relatives and friends of X so that we hear no further
complaint; takes him under our peace; and forbids anyone to hurt him on
account of the death of X under pain of forfeiture, or to kill him under pain
of death.128
An actual early fifteenth-century remission is similar but fuller:
Remission by Robert, Duke of Albany, Governor of Scotland, to Thomas Boyd
of Kilmarnock, Robert Muir of Rowallan, etc., for the slaughter of Maurice
Neilson of Dalrymple, Robert Black and Donald Young at Dalmellington, for
burning their houses, for ravaging the goods and chattels of Alexander
Cunningham at Badlane, and the lands of Drumcross, and for all other depre-
dations. Provided that Thomas etc. make such peace and concord with the kin
and friends of the late Maurice etc., and give such compensation for all
damages, that henceforth no complaint shall be heard about this matter. Also,
Thomas etc. are taken firmly into the Governor’s peace: they are not to be
attacked, under threat of royal forfeiture. 24 October 1409.129
Unfortunately Scottish remissions, unlike French, did not rehearse offenders’
stories; but their principle was the same. So was the procedure, which (at
least from the later fifteenth century) involved obtaining a royal letter that was
either effective immediately, or was examined in court (usually under challenge),
126 RRS, ii, no. 80; Taylor ‘Leges Scocie’, 211, 282‒3 (LS, c. 7).
127 Quotation from Taylor, ‘Crime without punishment’, 304; and for the implications,
Cynthia J. Neville, ‘Royal mercy in later medieval Scotland’, Florilegium (forth-
coming). I am most grateful to Professor Neville for sending me a final draft of this
article, which introduces her current research project on the subject.
128 Scottish Formularies, ed. A. A. M. Duncan (Stair Society, 2011), E44, giving the text
of either A39 or A40 (p. 21), which are early fourteenth-century; Duncan’s summary,
slightly amended.
129 NRS, Boyd of Kilmarnock Papers, GD8/1; my summary.
and if acceptable was then put into operation; but both processes depended
on the opposing party issuing a ‘letter of slains’ certifying due satisfaction.130
In Scotland as in France, however, remissions were strongly criticised, as in
the later-fifteenth-century poem on kingship known as ‘The Harp’:
But of one thing all good men marvel more
When great council, with thine own consent
Has ordained strict justice no man to spare
Within short time thou changes thine intent
Sending a contrair letter incontinent
Charging of that matter may be naught
Then all the world murmurs thou art bought
…
And when thou gives a plain remission
In case requiring rigour of justice
But [i.e. without] goodly cause, thou offends to the crown
And forfeits both to God and thine office.131
Historians have mostly echoed such criticism, but detailed analysis gives a
more complex picture.
The first reference to remissions is in the Assise Willelmi Regis: if a thief
was lawfully executed and his kin killed his accuser, ‘the king shall have his
full right from the killers’ – ‘without any concord or remission unless by the
advice and consent of [the victim’s] kin’; and if the king granted remission
without the knowledge of the victim’s kin, they ‘may take vengeance on those
who killed their kinsman’. But only the first part (to the dash) is William I;
the rest is a late thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century amendment.132 That
shows the emergence of remissions, and highlights the necessity for consent
by the victim’s kin and the legitimacy of vengeance killing – though perhaps
only in this special case.
Formal parliamentary records begin with Robert I’s legislation of 1318,
which has three relevant chapters. Because of past ‘disagreements and
grievances … between the nobles’, c. 22 forbade ‘that henceforth any person
cause damage, burden or harm to another’, and anyone doing so shall have
130 This derives mostly from Jackson W. Armstrong, ‘The justice ayre in the Border
sheriffdoms, 1493‒1498’, SHR 92 (2013), 1‒37, at pp. 30‒3; and for slains, see
Wormald, ‘Bloodfeud’, 62‒3, 66.
131 Liber Pluscardensis, 2 vols, ed. F. J. H. Skene (Edinburgh, 1877‒80), i, 399‒400. This
chronicle was written in the early 1460s, but survives only in copies from 1478 ×
1496 and (apparently) 1489. The poem – the last item in the chronicle – is in only
the 1489 version (ibid., i, pp. x–xii), and so may well be an addition to the text proper.
Therefore it is more likely to be aimed at James III (whom the criticism fits exactly,
see below, p. 217) than James II, as is usually said, e.g. by Roland Tanner, The Late
Medieval Scottish Parliament: Politics and the Three Estates, 1424‒1488 (East Linton,
2001), 162.
132 Taylor, ‘Leges Scocie’, 232‒4.
‘broken the peace of the lord king’,133 which looks like a (highly optimistic)
ban on feuding. Also, c. 5 enacted that when anyone was convicted ‘of
homicide, rapine, theft or other offences … common justice be done without
redemption’, and c. 11 that ‘no-one [shall] take a redemption from a thief ’–
but neither provision applied to the king or to lords possessing ‘liberties in
such matters’.134 So lords of regality could grant remissions; but who else
had been doing so, wrongfully? Perhaps earls – which would have important
implications – but we cannot say. However, crown authority over remissions
was now asserted.
Next, after David II came back from captivity in 1357, his ‘full council’
declared ‘that nobody in future shall move war against his neighbours’ (again
anti-feud), and that the king would review past remissions by his lieu-
tenant.135 However, royal impartiality became an issue: in 1366 ‘the three
communities’ insisted that justice should be done without favour, that judicial
letters should not be revoked (as later in ‘The Harp’), and that ‘remissions
… should be null and void’ unless compensation was accepted within a
year.136 And in 1370, David had to prohibit remissions for homicides found
by inquest to be by ‘murder or malice aforethought’, unless the general
council gave approval; though he could still grant them for unpremeditated
killing.137 Theoretically, that was a significant change. For William I, ‘murder
and premeditated assault’ pertained ‘to my regality’, and so, by Robert I’s
logic, the crown could grant remissions for them; but parliament was now
attempting to restrict that regality.
After Robert II succeeded David, the 1372 parliament developed the new
rules, allegedly because of recent killings. Since justice ‘was not as fast as
expedient’, in future a killer should be imprisoned while an immediate assize
determined whether the homicide was ‘by forethought felony or murder, or
from the heat of anger, namely chaudemella’. If the former, ‘justice is imme-
diately to be done’; if the latter, ‘he will have the legitimate and due delays
and defences’.138 Those who committed murder or forethought killing were
133 RPS, 1318/22.

134 RPS, 1318/5, 11. Note Scottish Formularies, E49 (pp. 74‒5): a brieve by which the
king ‘following his statute issued dealing with such a case, remits his rancour’ for a
killing found by inquest to be in self-defence. This, pace Duncan, can be associated
with the 1318 legislation, c. 5.
135 RPS, 1357/11/12‒13.
136 Ibid., 1366/7/6, 13, my paraphrase of some problematic wording, which may have
been mistranscribed: ‘remissions should be null and void, nec satifiat parti infra
annum a data earundem, nisi forte manifeste steterit per illos quorum interest’.
137 Ibid., 1370/2/36: per murthyr vel per precogitatam maliciam. See also 1370/2/12, and
Scottish Formularies, E14 (pp. 55‒6): a ‘brieve to the sheriff to hold an inquest into
whether the bearer killed someone in a rage and not by murder or forethought
felony’; this probably dates from the early 1370s, and certainly from before 1424.
138 RPS, 1372/3/6, and 7‒12; Sellar, ‘Forethocht felony’, 48‒9.
now to be executed at once! The new rules were draconian – but exceptional,
because they were to apply for just three years. And 1384 saw further law-
and-order legislation. Unfortunately the homicide measures (again for three
years) are lost; but the concept of forethought malice (precogitata malicia) was
extended to mutilation, wounding and beating.139 The next recorded legis-
lation was under Robert III: the 1397 ‘statute of Stirling’ addressing ‘great
and horrible destructions … and slaughters’. No one was to ‘use destructions,
slaughter, reif nor burning … under the pain of forfeiture of life and goods’,
and for three years offenders identified by inquest had to give securities to
appear at the next justice ayre; those who could not would be executed, and
those who fled would be put ‘to the horn [outlawed] without remission’.140
The following year, ‘to repress transgressors more sternly’, all offenders were
given just forty days ‘to stand to law’, or be outlawed;141 while in 1399, a further
amendment put victims’ complaints to royal officers on the same footing as
formal inquests, and the statute was extended for three more years.142
The later fourteenth-century acts demonstrate serious concern about law
and order, echoing English and French measures.143 Also, they demonstrate
consistent, thoughtful efforts by the political elite to make the system more
effective, including (ideally) limiting remissions to unpremeditated offences.
That, however (as noted above), restricted royal power and grace, and so had
to be convincingly justified: hence the preambles highlighting awful
lawlessness, which (as with modern equivalents) can be regarded as political
propaganda depicting a collapse of law and order that had to be rectified.144
The most famous instance of such propaganda is, of course, Bower’s story
of James I being told on his return to Scotland in 1424 about the ‘thieving,
dishonest conduct and plundering’ in Scotland, and replying, ‘If God spares
me I shall see to it that the key guards the castle and the thorn bushes the
cow’.145 His first enactment in 1424 was ‘that firm and secure peace be …
139 RPS, 1384/11/1, 6‒17. A whole folio is clearly missing between the preamble to c. 6,
and the middle of what is called c. 7: see notes to c. 6 and c. 7. The time limit is stated
in c. 17, while c. 9 deals with mutilation and wounding by forethought, for which
the process should proceed ‘as is ordained above concerning homicide’. Much of
Robert II’s and Robert III’s parliamentary records are missing, and what survives is
mostly in problematic copies: ibid., 1384/1/1, note.
140 Ibid., 1397/1‒2.
141 Ibid., 1398/9.
142 Ibid., 1399/1/14.
143 For these, see Sellar, ‘Forethocht felony’, 46‒6, 51‒2.
144 For an in-depth analysis of political propaganda relating to crime that is relevant
here, see Claude Gauvard, ‘Fear of crime in late medieval France’, in Barbara A.
Hanawalt and David Wallace (eds), Medieval Crime and Social Control (Minneapolis,
MN, 1999), 1‒48: a translation of ‘De grâce especial’, chapter 5.
145 Chron. Bower (Watt), viii, 323. This theme is excellently explored in Michael Brown,
‘James I’, in Michael Brown and Roland Tanner (eds), Scottish Kingship, 1306‒1542:
held among all and sundry lieges and subjects of our sovereign lord the king.
And that no man … move or make war against another, under all pain that
may follow by the course of common law’.146 That is nothing new, and in
practice his only important innovation was to make his predecessors’ three-
year provisions permanent. But the lives of those guilty of forethought
homicide were to be ‘at the king’s will’, so remissions were not forbidden:
James had cancelled the 1370s’ restriction on royal grace.147 His other acts simply
modified the 1370‒99 measures,148 and minor amendments are all that can
be found under his successors.149 But in 1473 parliament exhorted James III
‘to close his hands for remissions and respites’;150 in 1477, because ‘the
greatest reason’ for the frequency of slaughter ‘is the easy granting of the
king’s grace in pardons’, forgiveness ‘for any kind of slaughter’ was suspended
for the next three years;151 and there were three similar acts in 1484, 1485 and
1487.152 This is worse than the pressure on David II, and surely reflects a
specific problem with James III (as probably reflected in ‘The Harp’) – which
he may have justified in terms of royal power to ‘let live’ through acts of mercy.153
In contrast, under James IV – who has the best law-and-order reputation
of any late medieval Scottish king – the legislation has no mention of (and
hence concern about) remissions until 1504, when, because of ‘great slaughter
… and the reasons for it in the assurance and belief of getting swift remis-
sions’, he agreed to prohibit them ‘for slaughter committed as premeditated
felony’ until it was decided otherwise.154 This parliament, however, was held
Essays in Honour of Norman Macdougall (Edinburgh, 2008), 155‒78, at pp. 157‒64,

and p. 175 for how James’ harsh administration of government, especially justice,
backfired fatally in 1437.
146 RPS, 1424/2a.
147 Ibid., 1426/10.
148 Compare RPS, 1424/5 with 1397/1; 1425/3/15 with 1397/2; 1426/10 with 1372/3/6,
1398/9 and 1399/1/4; 1432/3/2 with 1372/3/6; and 1432/3/6‒7 with 1398/10.
149 Ibid., 1469/25; 1471/5/3; 1484/2/33; 1485/5/10; 1487/10/8‒9; 1488/1/22.
150 Ibid., 1473/7/10. A respite was a conditional remission, limited to a number of years.
151 Ibid., 1478/6/80: discussed (and redated) in Tanner, Late Medieval Scottish
Parliament, 214‒15, along with a 1477 privy seal letter to the sheriff of Edinburgh
ordering public proclamation that there would be no ‘respite or remission for
slaughter committed of forethought felony’ – a narrower definition than in the statute.
152 RPS, 1484/2/34; 1485/5/10; 1487/10/5.
153 Tanner, Late Medieval Scottish Parliament, 215, 251, 254‒6; Norman Macdougall,
James III (2nd edn, Edinburgh, 2009), 141‒2, and p. 274 for the story of how James,
accompanied by the papal legate and Bishop Elphinstone, pardoned a condemned
aristocratic murderer with the words ‘let mercy prevail’ – to Elphinstone’s approval.
This apocryphal story may have been aimed against parliament’s disapproval of
James’ remissions. For more on the story, see Alasdair A. MacDonald, ‘James III:
Kingship and Contested Reputation’, Chapter 11 below in this volume.
154 RPS, 1504/3/108; also, more briefly, 1504/3/25.
in response to specific defiance from parts of the Highlands and the West,
and both the preamble and the act (with its ban on mercy for deliberate
killing) can be seen as political statements. That said, the act – which echoes
criticisms of his father – has been seen as complaining about James using
remissions to raise money.155 These were certainly lucrative: for instance in
1495 Hugh Rose of Kilravock and William Munro of Foulis (plus accom-
plices) paid £233 6s. 8d. and £80 respectively for remissions for killing Walter
Gawane.156 But so long as the crown ensured that remissions did bring
assythment and pacification (which James III probably did not do), then to
view them chiefly from a fiscal standpoint is distorting. As with early medieval
wergeld (or cró) and modern fines, the exaction of money was primarily
punitive; royal remissions for serious crimes were not cheap, while the
victim’s kin had to be compensated, too.
More significantly, the act banned only remissions for homicide by fore-
thought. The preamble suggests such killings were widespread, but is that
correct? For James IV, the Privy Seal Register survives, and so all registered
remissions can be studied – though here only a brief analysis is possible. In
all, 581 remissions and temporary respites were registered. The breakdown
of the most serious offence mentioned in each of them is: 249 remissions or
respites for homicide; ninety-seven for forethought felony; 114 for defying
the crown (mostly by rebelling, helping rebels and outlaws, refusing to serve
in the army, and abusing sheriffs); fifty-four for reif or robbery (mostly of
livestock); forty for arson, plunder and other ‘oppression’ (damage to
property); five for rape; fourteen for theft; and eight for ‘theft-wise’ damaging
the goods of the victim when lying with his wife (which must have meant
stealing or damaging the husband’s sexual rights over his wife, thus making
adultery criminal and entitling the husband to assythment). All the offences
except theft and adultery usually involved violence and could be associated
with feud, but here my focus is on homicide and forethought felony.157
It should be noted, however, that ‘forethought felony’ per se did not auto-
matically indicate killing: its general usage shows it was a wider concept,
applicable to any premeditated violence. That is demonstrated by the
remission granted to Andrew, Thomas and John Hunter in September 1498,
155 E.g. by Norman Macdougall, James IV (Edinburgh, 1989), 164; Nicholson, Scotland,
570.
156 TA, i, 210. Two years later Rose received a remission for himself and eleven others,
for the cruel killing of Gawane and three others in the chanonry at Fortrose: RSS,
i, no. 166. It is unclear whether this was linked to the 1495 payment, or whether
there was a new transaction because of the other three mortalities.
157 Found within RSS, i, pp. 1‒386, counting only the most serious offences recorded
in each remission or respite (note that a single offence could generate several remis-
sions, if several individuals were involved). Because of this methodology, my figures
differ from those given in Nicholson, Scotland, 569, Macdougall, James IV, 164, and
‘for the slaughter of the late (umquhile) Thomas Blackford, and for the fore-
thought felony done upon the said Thomas, his wife, bairns and servants’:158
clearly Thomas, his wife, children and servants had suffered a premeditated
attack, but only Thomas had been killed, perhaps by accident. More generally,
when a person is said to have been killed, they are invariably described as
‘late’, which is never found in forethought remissions unless a killing is also
recorded; and whereas with remissions for homicide all other offences are
normally included as well, with remissions for forethought offences that are
not said to involve a killing, homicide is always specifically excluded.159
As for the 249 instances of actual homicide, remarkably few killings are
said to be forethought: only nine before the 1504 act, one in 1507 and two in
1510‒11.160 There were fifteen remissions for ‘cruel homicide’, presumably
horrific or excessive wounding;161 and twenty-eight for homicide ‘by suddenty’
or the like, in most cases no doubt due to outbursts of rage162 – as with John
Thowles’ remission for killing Alexander Meill ‘suddenly with a blow from a
staff, namely a golf club’.163 However, the form of homicide is not categorised
in the other 194 instances. Some, like the killing of a child ‘by the cast of a
stone at a dog’,164 would have been accidental. But a broader explanation can
be suggested. Since the 1370s there had been formal inquests into whether
X killed Y ‘by forethought felony or not’.165 Any homicides not clearly caused
by accident or rage should have been investigated, and those that inquests
found not to be by forethought were probably recorded simply as homicide,166
with no qualification (no doubt including many cases of self-defence, which
Leslie J. Macfarlane, William Elphinstone and the Kingdom of Scotland, 1431‒1514

(Aberdeen, 1985), 411‒12, 436 (in which, incidentally, reif and theft seem to have
been merged). A full-scale analysis of the material is planned by Cynthia Neville;
see above, note 127.
158 RSS, i, no. 251.
159 Nicholson, Macdougall and Macfarlane do not mention this important point with
respect to their remission analyses. But, more significantly, Armstrong, ‘Justice ayre’,
26‒9, counts all mentions of forethought felony as homicide, which, unfortunately,
seriously distorts that part of his analysis and argument. For the 1384 legislation,
RPS, 1384/11/9, and above, p. 216.
160 RRS, i, nos 16, 106, 109, 163, 251, 307, 412, 690, 825, 1410, 1991, 2193. The 1504
act was probably cancelled in the 1509 parliament, most of the legislation of which
is lost: Macdougall, James IV, 190‒1.
161 RRS, i, nos 117, 127, 166, 412, 584, 676, 718‒20, 918, 1410, 1572, 1980, 2204, 2259.
162 Ibid., nos 66, 288, 325, 421, 489, 522, 610, 679, 680, 696, 764, 803, 840, 929, 1123,
1181, 1296, 1547, 1581, 1595, 1617, 1697, 1726, 1746, 1802, 1992, 2004, 2194
(including a few deaths caused by ‘negligence’).
163 ‘… pro interfectione quondam Alexandri Meill ex subito per ictum baculi, viz golf
club, commissa’: ibid., no. 1547.
164 Ibid., no. 85.
165 Above, p. 215.
166 I.e. the ‘simple homicide’ of Regiam Majestatem: below, p. 222.
the remissions never mention). In addition, the well-known propensity of

medieval juries to favour the defendant would also help to explain why fore-
thought verdicts were so scarce.167
Furthermore, it was probably easy and safe to commit non-forethought
homicide deliberately. Consider late medieval Scotland’s two most notorious
killings. When James II summoned the eighth earl of Douglas to Stirling in
February 1452, did he seriously expect him to break the Douglas–Crawford–
Ross bond? According to the ‘Auchinleck Chronicle’, when Douglas said
(probably vehemently and certainly insultingly) ‘he might not nor would not’,
James called him ‘false traitor’ and ‘leapt suddenly to him with a knife’. James
must have expected that outcome – but technically it was excusable homicide
‘by suddenty’, though Douglas’ brother understandably called it foul
slaughter.168 Similarly, when in February 1306 Robert Bruce set out for his
fateful meeting with John Comyn in the Greyfriars church, Dumfries, did
he seriously believe that they would reach an amicable agreement? I think
not, and suggest that he anticipated and quite probably engineered a hot-
blooded quarrel in which Comyn could be killed without overt premedi-
tation.169 Irrespective of whether that is correct in these cases, the main point
is that by creating a situation in which a hot-blooded quarrel was inevitable,
an enemy could be killed without committing forethought felony.
Also, when rival lords’ followings encountered each other, tensions could
easily escalate into lethal violence, as Romeo and Juliet illustrates, and as at
Monzievaird in 1489, when a long-running quarrel flared up and led to
Drummonds setting the local church on fire with twenty Murrays inside. On
the other hand, following this atrocity powerful state action was taken, not so
much by the young James IV as by his council.170 This illustrates the same
collective desire to maintain order as in the parliamentary legislation: the
collective-versus-individual pressures promoting ‘peace in the feud’ were
operating within ‘the justice of the state’. And eleven years later, ‘for heart-
liness … amongst them’, the Drummond and Murray lords received royal
letters ‘remitting to their kin and friends … all actions and crimes of the
167 Also, in 18 instances remissions were granted to men who had been ‘put to the horn’
or had fled to England, in which case formal inquests were presumably unnecessary:
RSS, i, nos 37, 69, 86, 90, 104, 108, 110, 113, 117, 375, 665, 696, 1301, 1331, 1361,
1414, 1578, 1597.
168 Christine McGladdery, James II (Edinburgh, 1990), 165; now best discussed in
Christine McGladdery, ‘James II (1437‒1460)’, in Brown and Tanner (eds), Scottish
Kingship, 179‒208, at pp. 191‒5. However, pace McGladdery, James II, 66‒70, this
was not murder in the contemporary sense; see below, after pp. 222‒4. For the
aftermath of the killing, see Michael Brown, ‘The Lanark Bond’, Chapter 10 below
in this volume.
169 Alexander Grant, ‘The death of John Comyn: what was going on?’, SHR 86 (2007),
176‒224.
170 Macdougall, James IV, 83‒4; Boardman, ‘Politics and the Feud’, 288‒300.
burning of the kirk of Monzievaird and slaughter of the king’s lieges’.171

Pacification of feud was always the ideal, and from the crown’s standpoint
the remission system was as important for achieving it as the formal ‘justice
of the state’.
That said, aristocratic feuding is not very visible in the privy seal register.
Only twenty-four remissions or respites for homicide went to certain or
probable members of the landed classes. Cuthbert Cunningham, earl of
Glencairn is the greatest, but his remissions in 1508 for non-lethal fore-
thought violence and in 1511 for killing Andrew McFarlane in Bute are not
obviously connected to his long-running feud with the earl of Eglinton.172
Other leading figures who had homicide remissions or respites included
William Gordon, son of the earl of Huntly; Archibald Ogilvie, son of Lord
Airlie; David Home of Wedderburn; Hugh Rose of Kilravock; Patrick
Dunbar, son of the lord of Kilconquhar; William, son of Matthew Wallace
of Craigie; and Andrew Blackadder of that ilk, who killed two men and
wounded three ‘near the king’s palace while the king was in residence’.173 But
the list is short, and most of the other twenty-four are only minor lairds.
Twenty-four is just under a tenth of the total: higher, surely, than the
landed classes’ share of the population, but roughly the same proportion as
Gauvard found in France.174 Also, hardly anyone received remissions for more
than one killing, and there is only one instance (discussed below) of a killer
being killed himself.175 The James IV remissions and respites, in other words,
give virtually no evidence of the chains of tit-for-tat homicide that are usually
associated with feuds. That may simply be a function of the way the docu-
ments were written; had they included the killers’ narratives, the conclusion
might be different. But the absence of tit-for-tat killing is also a feature
(though not quite so extreme) of the French remissions. As said already,
Gauvard attributed that to a crown policy of accepting that it could not
prevent fatal quarrels from breaking out in all ranks of society – but that it
could, through giving letters of remission to the killers so long as the victims’
families were compensated, significantly reduce the likelihood of long-term
171 RSS, i, no. 843.

172 Ibid., nos 360, 2323. Also in 1511, he obtained remissions for homicide by some of
his men, and for his son who had sheltered outlaws: ibid., nos 2212, 2225, 2324. For
the feud, Macdougall, James IV, 93‒6, 101, 152‒4, 187‒8; Boardman, ‘Politics and
the Feud’, 171‒7, 261‒88.
173 RSS, i, nos 72 (Ogilvie), 166 (Rose), 227 (Dunbar), 412 (Blackadder), 428 (Gordon),
654 (Home), 949 (Wallace). In addition to obvious figures like these I have counted
anyone who was described as ‘of ’ a territory. The other references are ibid., nos 35,
39, 83, 223, 351, 371, 427, 461, 625, 721, 775, 1561, 1578, 1644, 1969, 2183.
174 She gives 6 per cent overall, but also shows that the proportion of homicides
committed by nobles and esquires was much higher than for other crimes: Gauvard,
‘De grâce especial’, 74, 528‒36.
175 Below, note 178.
feud, such as is found in Albania.176 The evidence of the Scottish remissions

in James IV’s privy seal register, although a much smaller sample, indicates
exactly the same conclusion – which puts Scotland beside France on
Wormald’s spectrum. Killing in quarrels was part of human nature, and late
medieval Scotland’s state machinery could not prevent it; but in normal
circumstances the state could stifle most potential feuds, and limit the
duration of those that did break out. It did so, essentially, through the use of
remissions – which could be described as harnessing the justice of the feud
to serve the justice of the state.
III
However, there is a final point. Nowadays, under Scots law, all the forethought
killings and many of the others would be murder.177 One of James IV’s remis-
sions and respites for forethought killing is actually for murder: ‘A respite to
Patrick McCulloch, for … the murder and slaughter of the late Archibald
McCulloch of Ardwell, committed … upon forethought felony, under silence
of night’.178 The ‘silence of night’ makes it different, in accordance with the
definitions in late medieval Scotland’s main legal text, Regiam Majestatem:
‘There are two kinds of homicide. The first is murder, which is homicide
secretly perpetrated without the knowledge of anyone except the assailant
and his accomplices … The second kind of homicide is called simple
homicide’.179 Thus secrecy is the issue – which includes killing at night.
That is not just Scottish: ‘as is well known, the word “murder” is cognate
with Germanic “mord” and Scandinavian “morð” signifying a secret
killing’.180 Regiam Majestatem was copying the twelfth-century English text,
176 Above, pp. 198, 206.

177 ‘The classic definition of murder [is] “any wilful act causing the destruction of life,
whether intended to kill or displaying such wicked recklessness as to imply a dispo-
sition depraved enough to be [intended]”’: Sellar, ‘Forethocht felony’, 44, quoting
John Hay Macdonald, A Practical Treatise on the Criminal Law of Scotland (5th edn,
Edinburgh, 1948), 89.
178 RSS, i, no. 163, dated 17 November 1497: one of the few instances of killing within
a single kin. But Patrick did not survive for long: by 2 June 1498 he had been killed,
for which his killers got respite and eventually a full remission: ibid., nos 227, 1561.
This is the only mention in the register of the killer himself being killed.
179 Regiam Majestatem and Quoniam Attachiamenta, ed. and trans. T. M. Cooper (Stair
Society, 1947), 253‒4.
180 Sellar, ‘Forethocht felony’, 47; see also Taylor, ‘Crime without punishment’, esp. 295.
But ‘secret killing’ is too narrow a definition: in Anglo-Saxon England ‘it referred
… to particularly dishonourable killings, perhaps involving secrecy in some form or
even an attempt to hide the victim’s body’ (Lambert, ‘Theft, homicide and crime’);
and OED, s.v. ‘murder’: ‘In old English the word could be applied to any homicide
‘Glanvill’,181 while Philippe de Beaumanoir’s later thirteenth-century Coutumes

state that ‘murder is when anyone kills anyone else or has them killed by
premeditation between sunset and sunrise, or under truce or assurance’. All
three contrast murder and homicide; but with Regiam and ‘Glanvill’ the
distinction is obviously between secret and open killing; while for Beaumanoir
homicide is simply killing in hot blood (chaude mellee), which blurs the
issue.182 But by Beaumanoir’s time, ‘premeditated malice’ and ‘wrath’ were
being distinguished in England, too, and in the fourteenth century
premeditation eventually came into a statute of 1390 forbidding pardons ‘for
murder [and] homicide occasioned by … malice aforethought’.183 Similarly
but earlier, a French ordinance of 1356 banned royal remissions for ‘murders
and mutilations made by premeditation and evil will’.184 These straddle the
Scottish acts of 1370 and 1372, which also restricted remissions, and made a
distinction between murder and forethought felony on the one hand and
(echoing Beaumanoir) chaudmella or hot-blooded killing on the other.185 Legal
minds in all three countries were working in the same direction.
In fifteenth-century France and England, however, the term ‘murder’
became more general, encompassing premeditated killing just as nowadays.186
Scottish fifteenth-century legislation shows a similar blurring, but in the
opposite direction: from James I on, the acts mention only ‘forethought
felony’ and ‘sudden chaudmella’, dropping murder. That might support
Sellar’s argument about murder being incorporated within forethought felony
in the 1370s – and it could be regarded as a sub-category of the latter in
Patrick McCulloch’s respite. On the other hand, as we have seen, forethought
felony involved more than killing, while murder, because it was committed
at night, was still distinct from slaughter. Moreover, the Border ayres studied
that was strongly reprobated … more strictly, however, it denoted secret murder’. It
is best, therefore, to regard it as an outrageous, essentially unpardonable crime – of
which secret killing was the typical example.
181 Tractatus de legibus et consuetudinibus regni Anglie qui Glanvill vocatur, ed. G. D. G.
Hall (London, 1965), 174‒6 (xiv, c. 3).
182 Philippe de Beaumanoir, Coutumes de Beauvaisis, 2 vols, ed. Amédée Salmon (Paris,
1899‒1900), i, nos 825, 828.
183 F. W. Maitland, ‘The early history of malice aforethought’, in his Collected Papers,
3 vols, ed. H. A. L. Fisher (Cambridge, 1911), i, 304‒28, at pp. 307‒9 for a case in
1270; T. A. Green, ‘The jury and the English law of homicide’, Michigan Law Review
74 (1975‒6), 413‒72, at pp. 457‒72; ‘Richard II: 1390, January’, ed. Chris Given-
Wilson, in The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, 16 vols, eds Chris Given-
Wilson et al. (Woodbridge, 2005), vii, 127‒90, at p. 155 (c. 36).
184 Ordonnances des Roys de France de la Troisième Race, vol. III (Paris, 1732), 128‒9.
185 Above, pp. 215‒16. I read the 1370 and 1372 acts differently from Sellar, ‘Forethocht
felony’, 47.
186 Gauvard, ‘De grâce especial’, 798‒806; Green, ‘Jury and law of homicide’, 469‒72.
by Armstrong had a case of ‘forethought felony by means of murder’ and

another of ‘murder [and] killing’ – ‘both suggestive of secret killing, one with
premeditation, the other without’.187 Thus I would argue that in Scotland
the concept of murder retained its special restricted meaning at least until
the end of the fifteenth century – and perhaps beyond, given the definition
in Skene’s De Verborum Significatione of 1597:
MURTHURUM, whereof of some is called private, that is manslaughter,
whereof the author is unknown, whereof the inquisition belongs to the
crowner; as where a person is found slain, or drowned, in any place or water.
Other is public committed by forethought felony. And murder is committed
by forethought felony and not by suddenty.188
Skene was following Regiam Majestatem, but glossing it for his own time; and
while murder comes under forethought felony, it is still non-public, with
unknown perpetrators – in other words, secret.
In a sense, that concept of murder survives today, in crime fiction: there
would be no detective novels if all killings were public! Not knowing ‘who-
dunnit’, was, of course, crucial in the worst of Scotland’s political killings, that
of Henry Stewart Lord Darnley, the king-consort – which was certainly
murder.189 And in ordinary life there were no doubt many occasions when a
body was found, and the questions had to be asked: had the deceased been
killed, was the killing deliberate, and who was responsible? But in the past, if
there was a suspect, one popular solution was the process of ‘cruentation’: he
was brought before the corpse, which, it was believed, would bleed or speak
out if touched by its murderer. An echo of this is found in the case of Sir James
Standsfield, who was found dead, apparently drowned, in winter 1687‒8;
because his son would not let the body be viewed, he became suspect, and was
eventually tried for murder.190 Earlier, the practice had been common in both
Britain and France:191 so, whatever the legal terminology, ‘secret’ killing was
different and special. The most famous illustration of that is in Chaucer’s
‘Nun’s Priest’s Tale’: two friends stayed in a tavern, and one dreamed that the
other was being murdered; next morning, when told his friend had left, he
remembered the dream and found the body: ‘murder will out’.192
187 Armstrong, ‘Justice ayre’, 27.

188 Sir John Skene, De Verborum Significatione (Edinburgh, 1597), s.v.
189 For events following this murder see Julian Goodare, ‘The Ainslie Bond’, Chapter 14
below in this volume.
190 R. A. Houston, The Coroners of Northern Britain, c. 1300‒1700 (Basingstoke, 2014),
23.
191 Malcolm Gaskill, ‘Reporting murder: fiction in the archives in early modern
England’, Social History 23 (1998), 1‒30; Gauvard, ‘De grâce especial’, 179‒89.
192 Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry
D. Benson (3rd edn, Oxford, 1988), 253‒61, at pp. 255‒6 (lines 2984‒3063).
In addition to obvious shock, two factors surely made secret killing so awful.
First, whereas open revenge killing would be presented and understood in
terms of honourable reaction to insult or the like, a secret killer was a dishon-
ourable coward. And, even worse, his victim’s kin would find it hard to
achieve closure through either compensation or revenge – and they might
even attack the wrong person in trying. Consequently, the secret killer was
deliberately rejecting his society’s pacification mechanisms. Thus when,
according to Bower, Roger Kirkpatrick was killed by his guest Sir James
Lindsay after ‘the wine had been pleasurably drained’, and Lindsay then fled
on horseback but did not cover more than three miles, we might blame alcohol
and think that peace could still be made. Instead, Bower relates, David II
immediately held an assize, which put Lindsay to death – as much, it seems,
for running away (under cover of night) as for the actual deed, which though
presumably hot-blooded was turned into murder.193
Now, as David II’s role in this case indicates, if secret killing negated
feud justice, then the justice of the state had to step in. Moreover, that does
not apply just to secret killing: for instance, if the head of a kin was killed by
members of his kindred, that could hardly be dealt with through the justice
of the feud. Thus when, in 1289, Duncan, earl of Fife was ambushed and
killed in broad daylight at the instigation of a leading member of the Fife
kindred, Sir Hugh Abernethy, it was the royal justiciar Sir Andrew Murray
who pursued and caught Abernethy and one of the actual killers.194 And Fife
provides an even more significant illustration of the point, the ‘Law of Clan
MacDuff ’:195 if one of the Fife kindred committed a killing anywhere in the
kingdom and then fled to ‘the cross of Clan Macduff ’ (near Newburgh, in
193 Chron. Wyntoun (Laing), ii, 500‒1; Chron. Bower (Watt), vii, 309. Also, Bower tells
us that Lindsay and Kirkpatrick were both sons of men who helped Robert Bruce
kill John Comyn, and that the sons were being punished for the sins of the fathers
(p. 311).
194 The killer, Sir Walter Percy (a minor Fife landowner), was summarily executed,
while Hugh Abernethy was imprisoned for the rest of his life. The other actual killer,
Patrick Abernethy (possibly Hugh’s eldest son), escaped to France and died in exile.
Chron. Bower (Watt), vi, 33, 207‒8; Michael Brown, ‘Aristocratic politics and the
crisis of Scottish kingship, 1286‒96’, SHR 90 (2011), 1‒26, at pp. 5‒9.
195 On this, see Skene, De Verborum Significatione, s.v. clan-makduf; Chron. Wyntoun
(Laing), ii, 140‒1; A. D. M. Forte, “‘A strange archaic provision of mercy”: the
procedural rules for the duellum under the Law of Clann Duib’, Edinburgh Law
Review 14 (2010), 418‒50, at pp. 421‒4; Alexander Grant, ‘Franchises north of the
Border: baronies and regalities in medieval Scotland’, in Michael Prestwich (ed.),
Liberties and Identities in the Medieval British Isles (Woodbridge, 2008), 115‒99, at
pp. 181‒2; John Bannerman, ‘MacDuff of Fife’, in Alexander Grant and Keith J.
Stringer (eds), Medieval Scotland: Crown, Lordship and Community: Essays presented
to G. W. S. Barrow (Edinburgh, 1993), 20‒38.
north-west Fife), the earl would protect him from revenge and set the
assythment. That this was a special privilege is shown by the fact that the new
law-and-order legislation of 1384 included Robert, earl of Fife’s consent, ‘as
head of the law of Clan MacDuff ’, to its temporary suspension.196 But such
a privilege could have been granted only by a king; and, given its archaic
nature, there seems little reason to doubt Wyntoun’s connection of it with
the earls of Fife’s other privilege of enthroning new kings, which surely dates
from the eleventh century. Consequently, the ‘Law of Clan MacDuff ’ reflects
the modification of the traditional justice of the feud by means of what could
be regarded as an act of state by one of the Celtic kings of Alba.
However, these points should not be seen as suggesting that the king’s (or
state’s) justice was taking over from that of the kin. In the medieval world’s
main model for government, the Old Testament, the Jewish people were all
descended from Abraham, whose lineage went through King David to Jesus
Christ. David and his successors were thus heads of the Jewish kindred – as
were Cerdic and his descendants for the Saxons, and so on. For Alba and
Scotland, Dauvit Broun and others have shown, ‘the Pictish antecedents of
Scottish kingship are … proclaimed in the eleventh-century text Lebor
Bretnach’, which includes the legend of Cruithne (Pict) and his seven sons
who took ‘the north of the island of Britain’. Each son in turn succeeded
Cruithne – and their names correspond to seven provinces, each theoretically
inhabited by the descendants of one of the sons. The story was probably
created in the eighth century, and survived into the twelfth and beyond.197
Its message, of course, was that all the people of all the provinces of Alba
descended from Cruithne – so that Cruithne’s successor as king was head of
the kin of the whole of Alba and later Scotland. Therefore, if the justice of
the state was the justice of the king, that made it the justice of the overall
head of the entire Scottish kindred. And from that conceptual standpoint,
the king’s justice could not be distinguished from the kin’s justice. My final
reflection on Wormald’s bloodfeud and the interaction between the justice
of the feud and the justice of the state, therefore, is that there is no dichotomy
between them: they are interlinked aspects of the same whole.198
196 RPS, 1384/11/12, and above, pp. 215‒16.

197 Dauvit Broun, Scottish Independence and the Idea of Britain: From the Picts to
Alexander III (Edinburgh, 2007), 55‒7, 76‒80.
198 My warmest thanks to Dauvit Broun, Stuart Carroll, Rab Houston, Alison Grant,
Hector MacQueen, Cynthia Neville, Alex Metcalfe, David Sellar and Alice Taylor
for their invaluable help and advice; to Steve Boardman and Julian Goodare for their
patience as well; and of course more generally to Jenny Wormald, for all her support,
encouragement and constructive chivvying over more than 40 years – and for
forgiving my question in our very first conversation: ‘what were bonds of manrent,
and why do they matter’?
chapter 10
The Lanark Bond
MICHAEL BROWN
Through her seminal study of bonding, Lords and Men in Scotland, Jenny
Wormald placed the character and use of private agreements at the heart of
the study of Scottish politics and society in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries. She demonstrated that the ‘rise of the personal bond’ was the key
to understanding lordship, service and society. The development of these
written contracts reflected the absence of a ‘strong, central system’ in
Scotland.1 She rightly re-interpreted the reliance on private arrangements –
traditionally regarded by historians and lawyers as a mark of weakness and
backwardness – as the mark of a polity capable of effective self-regulation.
While Steve Boardman has argued via a number of fifteenth-century case
studies that the formation of bonds was often a direct result of violent feuding
between parties rather than primarily an expression of less fraught relation-
ships, Wormald’s conclusions about the importance of such contractual
agreements as a key component of Scottish political and social interaction
have been accepted.2
Less central to Wormald’s argument was the way in which the use of
similar, essentially private agreements characterised the exercise of govern-
ment and political power at the highest levels in fifteenth-century Scotland.
One of the most unusual entries in the lists of bonds that she assembled in
the appendices to Lords and Men was the first of her ‘royal bonds’. This was
dated 16 January 1453 at Lanark and contained a promise by James, ninth
and last earl of Douglas to deliver his manrent and service to King James II.3
Only one other bond was listed by Wormald as being given to an adult king
(also to James II by the minor borders landowner, James Tweedie of
Drumelzier, in 1455). However, rather than a virtually unique example of the
use of such bonds by an adult ruler, this ‘Lanark bond’ needs to be under-
stood in the context of approaches to royal government which, in certain
conditions, could employ the methods and language of private agreements.
1985), 39‒41.
12 Stephen I. Boardman, ‘Politics and the Feud in Late Medieval Scotland’, unpublished
PhD thesis (University of St Andrews, 1990).
13 Wormald, Lords and Men, 359 (Royal bonds, nos 1‒2).
Just a few months earlier, in late August 1452, there had been ‘ane appoyn-
tement’ between the same two figures, the king and the earl of Douglas, issued
from Douglas Castle in Lanarkshire. These two agreements have been recog-
nised as laying out terms to resolve the conflict that had begun with the king’s
killing of the earl’s elder brother, William, earl of Douglas, in February 1452.
However, limited attention has been paid to the precise terms of these agree-
ments and how they were expected to operate. The tendency has been instead
to regard them as a brief hiatus in tensions that had developed between the
king and the Douglas earls, which ended with the defeat and expulsion of
Earl James in a renewed conflict during 1455.4 This has left unanswered ques-
tions about the Lanark bond and its predecessor the ‘appoyntement’
concerning the relationship between them, the intentions behind them and
their impact on the political life of the kingdom in the two years between
January 1453 and the outbreak of the final period of fighting. More broadly,
the use of written agreements to produce a negotiated settlement between
the king and an aristocratic subject raises issues about the nature of royal
authority in Scotland and the political character of the realm and polity in a
period often seen as witnessing the growth of the physical and ideological
resources of the crown.
Although it has been referred to in all accounts of the period, the Lanark
bond itself has been misunderstood as a text. It was printed in the eighteenth
century in connection with the Sutherland peerage case, but the terms of the
bond have frequently been misquoted.5 The earliest texts of both the Lanark
bond and the ‘appoyntement’ are found in the notebooks and genealogical
collections compiled by Sir Lewis Stewart of Kirkhill in the early seventeenth
century and now held in the National Library of Scotland.6 Stewart was a
noted advocate and antiquarian who received his knighthood from Charles I
for investigating the claims of William Graham, earl of Menteith to the
14 For accounts of these events see Christine McGladdery, James II (Edinburgh, 1990),
62‒83; Annie I. Dunlop, The Life and Times of James Kennedy Bishop of St Andrews
(Edinburgh, 1950), 133‒45; Ranald Nicholson, Scotland: The Later Middle Ages
(Edinburgh, 1974), 358‒71; Michael Brown, The Black Douglases: War and Lordship
in Late Medieval Scotland, 1300‒1455 (East Linton, 1998), 291‒305.
15 The Additional Case of Elisabeth claiming the Title and Dignity of Countess of Sutherland,
1771 (London, 1830), appendix x, 29. In particular, the bond has been said to include
permission for James Douglas to marry his brother’s widow (and cousin), Margaret
Douglas, lady of Galloway. This misunderstanding arose from a misreading of Sir
William Fraser’s description in Fraser, Douglas Book, i, 483‒4.
16 NLS, Adv. MSS 34.3.11, 34.3.12, 22.1.14. The ‘appoyntement’ was printed in
P. F. Tytler, A History of Scotland, 9 vols (Edinburgh, 1828‒43), ii, 386‒7.
THE LANARK BOND 229
earldom of Strathearn in 1632.7 His collections contain a wide range of mate-

rials that seem to have been transcribed accurately, while there is nothing to
suggest that Stewart was a forger of ‘lost’ documents.8 Though the Lanark
bond was misdated and misidentified in its title as a ‘Bond be James Earle of
Douglas to Rob. 3 1402’, amended in another hand in NLS Advocates’ Manu-
script 22.1.14 to ‘James ii’ and ‘1452’, the texts can be confidently regarded
as representing the terms of the original agreements from 1452 to 1453. The
text of the Lanark Bond is printed as an Appendix below.
It is fitting that Stewart copied both the August 1452 ‘appoyntement’ and
the subsequent Lanark bond, as the two texts can only be understood in
conjunction. Both take the form of letters written in the name of James, earl
of Douglas, whose terms represent those agreed by the earl with the king. As
has been mentioned above, they followed a period of major conflict that had
lasted much of the previous year. This had begun with the rebellion of John,
earl of Ross and lord of the Isles in late 1451, and also involved fighting
between the earls of Huntly and Crawford in the north-east.9 The refusal of
William, earl of Douglas to sever his family’s obligations to Ross and
Crawford and aid the young James II against these magnates was identified
in a contemporary chronicle as sparking the king’s personal assault on Earl
William in Stirling Castle in February 1452. The killing of the earl led to a
period of open civil war, which lasted until August. The Douglas family and
their supporters burned Stirling and renounced their fealty to the king in
March, and in June negotiated with the English government about entering
the allegiance of King Henry VI of England. James was forced to secure
parliamentary exoneration for the earl’s death in June, before mustering an
army, which he led on a full campaign through the earl of Douglas’ southern
Scottish lands in July.10 These events threatened the stability of much of the
kingdom and were the most serious political crisis for forty years.
17 J. M. Sanderson, ‘Two Stewarts of the sixteenth century: Mr William Stewart, poet,

and William Stewart, elder, depute-clerk of Edinburgh’, The Stewarts 17:1 (1984),
25‒46, at p. 38. Lewis Stewart also purchased the Coupar Angus MS of Scotichronicon
(NLS, Adv. MS 35.1.7); for details of this manuscript see Chron. Bower (Watt), ix,
193‒5.
18 Also included in the notebooks are charters by Robert I and David II to James and
William, lord of Douglas, the statute of Cambuskenneth, the tailzies of 1315 and 1318
and the indenture of 1483 between James III and Alexander, duke of Albany, whose
texts correspond to other versions.
19 Alexander Grant, ‘The revolt of the Lord of the Isles and the death of the earl of
Douglas’, SHR 57 (1978), 169‒74.
10 Brown, Black Douglases, 293‒9. The best, indeed only contemporary, Scottish
narrative of these events is the ‘Auchinleck Chronicle’; see McGladdery, James II,
appendix 2.
II
The timing and terms of the ‘appoyntement’ were designed to provide some
kind of resolution following these months of confrontation. The clauses of
the document contain direct responses to the grievances of Earl James. Most
obviously the earl agreed:
to remit and forgive … all maner of rancour of heart, malic, fede, malgre and
invy … to all them that had arte or parte of the slauchter or deid of whylum
William Earle of Douglas … and shall take thay personnes in heartlines and
friendship at the ordinance and advice of our said soverayne lord.
In similar vein, Douglas forgave the king for all damages done to his lands
during the preceding months (up until 22 July). To further satisfy the king,
Douglas agreed to revoke all leagues and bands ‘contrare to our said soverayne
lord’, and to allow his tenants and those renting lands from him to hold their
lands undisturbed for the next twenty months. The earl bound himself to
defend the borders and keep all truces as warden. However, it is significant
that the first item in the ‘appoyntement’ was a promise that Douglas would
not ‘persew … by law or any other maner of way, any entrie in the lands of
the earledome of Wigtone’, followed by a similar statement concerning ‘the
lordschipe of Stewartoun’, until the agreement of the queen was secured.11
The Lanark bond began with the same issue. Now, however, James, earl
of Douglas held letters promising ‘to gif me lawful entrie and possession unto
the erldome of Wigtoun and landis of Stewartoun’ before Easter. In return,
as soon as he received the lands, Douglas swore on the gospels that at the next
general council, either in person or by procurators, he would present letters
‘under my seal and subscription of my body bind to my said soveragne lord
my manrent and my service in the best and most sure forme … for all the
dayes of my lyf ’. This involved promises to reveal any harm planned against
the king, once more to renounce any bonds ‘contrair’ his ‘sov lord’ and ‘that
I sall be with him at all my power and tak part with him formaly againe al his
enemies and rebellis beand within his realme at all tymes’. Amplifying the
‘appoyntement’, Douglas also agreed to observe the king’s relations with
England, ‘in tyme of peace keipe all trewis within his boundes belaingand me
And in tyme of war defend thame as esseurily’. Finally, the earl promised ‘to
assist to my soveragne lord with all my poure in ye re-syneing of his heritage,
rentis or possessions disponit or annalied fra the croune’, saving those granted
by James II to the late Earl William.12
The exact meaning of the two documents and the relationship between
them are clearly not straightforward matters. However in their character and
terms they can be related to a range of other similar documents produced in
11 Tytler, History of Scotland, ii, 386‒7.

12 NLS, Adv. MS 22.1.14, fo. 163v.
THE LANARK BOND 231
Scotland during the fifteenth century. There is plentiful evidence of the way
in which private agreements could be employed to resolve periods of armed
conflict. The term ‘appoyntement’ may have had a specific meaning as a
document designed to reconcile opponents. An earlier ‘appoyntement’, made
in 1439 between Alexander Forbes and Robert Erskine, sought ‘to reform al
wnkindnes wrangkis and iniuriis’ between them.13 Though not overtly linked
to such a settlement, the bond of manrent made by James Forbes (Alexander’s
son) and the lord of Gordon in 1444 also followed a period of dispute between
their families. Like the Lanark bond, Forbes’ action was linked to the receipt
of a grant of land from Gordon, another common element of such arrange-
ments.14 The direct relationship between the settling of feuds or disputes and
the making of bonds becomes increasingly evident in the number of examples
during the later fifteenth century. Steve Boardman identified numerous cases
of this, for example the 1476 bond between the thane of Cawdor and Hugh
Rose of Kilravock following ‘slauchteris, debattis, injuris ande contraverssis,
that haf beyne betwixt thame’, in which Rose was adopted as son to the
thane.15 Perhaps the earliest extant example of this kind of arrangement
involved two figures whose standing and resources made them comparable
to James II and Earl James in 1452‒3. In 1409 the earl’s great-uncle,
Archibald, fourth earl of Douglas and the king’s great-uncle, Robert, duke
of Albany produced an indenture that was designed to settle disputes between
them and their men following a period of tension between the two magnates;
the settlement was followed by a series of land transactions and the marriage
of Albany’s son to Douglas’ daughter.16
As Wormald argued, the 1409 bond revolved around efforts for the ‘main-
tenance of order’ through ‘private arbitration’ as an adjunct to the judicial
system.17 However, its function was coloured by the identity of the partici-
pants. Albany and Douglas may have been two of the greatest private lords in
Scotland, but they also represented the authority of the crown in much of
the realm. Albany was governor of Scotland. Douglas was justiciar south of
Forth and warden of the Marches with England. The two men were respon-
sible for holding courts and enforcing justice, but relied on a personal contract
between them to shape their relations and activities. This indenture must be
regarded as having a direct influence on the government of the Scottish
13 AB Ill., iv, 189.

14 AB Ill., iv, 340‒1, 395‒6.
15 Boardman, ‘Politics and the Feud’, 72‒5.
16 Sir William Fraser (ed.), The Red Book of Menteith, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1880), ii, 277‒80;
Stephen I. Boardman, The Early Stewart Kings: Robert II and Robert III, 1371‒1406
(East Linton, 1996), 306‒12; Brown, The Black Douglases, 111; Karen Hunt, ‘The
Governorship of the First Duke of Albany’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of
Edinburgh, 1999), 23‒70.
17 Wormald, Lords and Men, 39‒41.
realm. In this respect it was not an isolated example. Between the Albany–
Douglas bond in 1409 and the agreements between James II and Earl James
in 1452‒3 there were a number of individual contracts through which royal
governments regulated their relations with their subjects. Some of these
framed the powers and responsibilities of royal officials. In 1420 Alexander,
earl of Mar entered an indenture with Murdoch, duke of Albany, Robert’s
son and successor as governor of Scotland. This linked Mar’s position as
lieutenant of northern Scotland to his becoming ‘man of speciale feale and
retinue til the foresaid duke of Albany’. In return Duke Murdoch gave Mar
‘his lettres baunde and seille’, promising ‘maintinance helpe and suppleie’.
The language and instruments of bonding were clearly being applied to the
delegation of royal justice, and of the power to collect revenues, by the
governor to a lieutenant.18
It is possible that a similar arrangement was sought in the late 1430s. The
appointment of Alexander, lord of the Isles and earl of Ross as justiciar in
1438 followed a meeting on Bute between him and the lieutenant for the
young James II, Archibald, fifth earl of Douglas. It would be plausible to think
that the Bute discussions were concluded with a bond similar to that between
Albany and Mar linking office-holding with a personal promise of ‘feale and
retinue’ by Alexander to the lieutenant.19 This would certainly fit in with the
use of written agreements in a number of contexts by the minority regimes
ruling for James II between 1437 and 1449. Such agreements could relate to
disputes over custody of the king. In 1439 another ‘appoyntement’ was made.
This one involved James’ mother, Queen Joan Beaufort, and Alexander
Livingston of Callendar, keeper of Stirling Castle, and a group of his friends
and family. The queen agreed to the terms almost certainly to secure her
release from Livingston’s custody.20 She was forced to accept that her captors’
action was made from ‘good zeal’ and ‘loyalty’, and not intended as ‘harm or
slander’ to her person. The queen also remitted any ‘grief or displeasure’
against Livingston and his friends on her behalf and that of ‘her men and
retinue’. The key to the agreement was, however, Queen Joan’s surrender of
her son, the young James II, into Livingston’s custody along with the 4,000-
mark annuity she received for the king’s upkeep. Such terms indicate clear
similarities between this agreement and the later ‘appoyntement’ of 1452,
which also centred on the forgiveness of past deeds as part of a political
settlement.
The limited authority of subsequent conciliar regimes prompted the
making of written agreements with individual lords on at least two other
18 Fraser, Menteith, ii, 261‒2; Wormald, Lords and Men, 46; Michael Brown, ‘Regional
lordship in north-east Scotland: the Badenoch Stewarts, ii, Alexander Stewart Earl
of Mar’, Northern Scotland 16 (1996), 31‒53.
19 ER, v, 84, 86, 116.
20 RPS, 1439/9/1; McGladdery, James II, 18‒19; Brown, Black Douglases, 257‒8.
THE LANARK BOND 233
occasions. In August 1440 an enlarged royal council of thirty-one named indi-

viduals made an ‘amicable composicioun’ with Robert Erskine. This secured
the surrender of Dumbarton Castle by Erskine by conceding his right to
Kildrummy Castle and the earldom of Mar until James II came of age, indi-
cating the limited ability of James II’s government to dispose of royal property
without entering into private negotiations with individuals.21 In 1445, as part
of the resolution of a period of sporadic political conflict, the Livingstons, as
royal councillors and keepers of the king’s person, again employed written
bonds to secure their goals. On 6 July 1445 an indenture was made at Edin-
burgh between Walter Ogilvy of Beaufort, and Alexander Livingston of
Callendar and his son, James. It dealt with Ogilvy’s delivery of an heiress for
marriage to James’ son and, in return, a promise that Ogilvy would have his
rights and lands recognised by the king.22 The Livingstons’ promise of
patronage rested on their position as the custodians and councillors of the
young king. The next day they were included in a second bond with Ogilvy.
This time they were named as part of James II’s daily council, and it was this
body that concluded the agreement. Ogilvy bound himself to ‘the furtherance
and defence of the king in all his actions’, and ‘neither to consent nor to
counsel the undoing’ of the king’s councillors.23 These terms were similar to
the oaths of loyalty reportedly sworn by those at the parliament, which had
been sitting in Edinburgh in early July. These two bonds suggest that Ogilvy
was one of those making peace with the council at the parliament. The
personal arrangements in the first bond were cemented by obligations of
political support stated in the second. However, both took the form of bonds,
and reflect the council’s seeking service and adherence through individual
agreements with former opponents.24
It is even possible that the infamous bond between the Livingstons’ ally,
William, earl of Douglas, and the earls of Ross and Crawford fitted into this
pattern of private arrangements being utilised in connection with the exercise
of royal government. There is evidence that the bond resolved disputes that
centred on the lands of the earl of Crawford and the Douglas earls of Moray
and Ormond around the Moray Firth. An agreement seems to have allowed
the Douglases and Crawford custody of lands previously occupied by
Alexander, earl of Ross and his associates during the late 1440s. However the
settlement also seems to have involved the Livingstons and the royal council.
21 RPS, 1440/8/5; Michael Brown, ‘Public authority and factional conflict: crown,
parliament and polity, 1424‒1455’, in Keith M. Brown and Roland J. Tanner (eds),
The History of the Scottish Parliament, vol. i: Parliament and Politics in Scotland, 1235‒
1560 (Edinburgh, 2004), 123‒44.
22 NRS, GD45/27/106.
23 NRS, RH6/311; Alan R. Borthwick, ‘The King, Council and Councillors in Scotland,
c.1430‒1460’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Edinburgh, 1989), 56‒120.
24 RPS, 1445/3‒7.
In the aftermath of the putative bond, Ross’ son and heir married the
daughter of James Livingston. This secured the northern magnate access to
the king and council. In return, royal keepers were allowed entry into the
castles of Urquhart and Inverness, which Ross had occupied for most of the
minority.25 If these things were connected, it provides a further indication of
the way in which royal authority had come to be linked to the negotiation of
relationships and the resolution of disputes through the medium of written,
personal bonds.
III
For minority regimes of limited resources there was an obvious value to the
direct and indirect use of such agreements to secure adherence and exercise
authority. However, in the context of royal government, it is hard not to regard
the employment of bonds as running counter to the statements made by adult
kings with regard to their position as sovereign ruler of their realm. Such state-
ments can be found regularly within the legislation issued by James I. Most
directly in 1425 a statute was issued proclaiming that the king forbade that:
any leagues or bonds be made between them [the king’s lieges], either to confer
against the king or against any of his lieges in a partial manner. And if any
[league or bond] has been made at an earlier time, that they not be kept nor
held in time to come.26
This act was accompanied by similar legislation about the size and behaviour
of aristocratic retinues, the keeping of ‘firm and secure peace … among all
the subjects of the lord king’, the standards of justice by royal officials, the
penalties for rebellion ‘against the king’s person’, and for those who ‘disobey
to enforce the king against notorious rebels’ when asked by the king or his
ministers.27 Taken together, these statutes stressed the person, authority and
role of the king as superior to those of his subjects and protected by laws
passed by king and estates.
In January 1450, James II’s first parliament after his marriage and the
arrest of his erstwhile keepers, the Livingstons, re-enacted and amplified
several of his father’s statutes. In particular, the obligation placed on all the
king’s lieges to act against rebels was stated fully, and the first full definition
of treason was provided in Scottish legislation. The statute defined the crime
(unhelpfully) as ‘treason against the king’, but more specifically as rising in
25 For this interpretation of the bond between Douglas, Crawford and Ross see Michael
Brown, ‘The great rupture: lordship and politics in north-east Scotland (1435‒1452)’,
Northern Scotland, new ser. 5 (2014), 1‒25.
26 RPS, 1425/3/6.
27 RPS, 1424/2a, 1424/3, 1424/4; Michael Brown, ‘“Vile times”: Bower’s last book and
the minority of James II’, SHR 79 (2000), 165‒88.
THE LANARK BOND 235
war, laying hands on the king (regardless of age), helping or counselling those
convicted of treason, stuffing (garrisoning) one’s own or traitors’ houses
against the king or assailing the king’s residence.28 The last charge was a clear
reference to the events of February 1437 and the killing of James I at the Perth
Blackfriars. Laying hands on the king was a charge that may have recalled
the treatment of James I in the general council of October 1436. However it
produced a definition of treason that could be levelled against the Livingston
family, whose seizure of the young James II from his mother in 1439 became
both a cause and basis of the condemnation of the family at the January 1450
parliament.29 As well as the Livingstons, treason charges under the formula
of a ‘crime committed against his majesty and rebellion’ had been levied
against members of the defeated faction in 1445.30 The development of a
defined charge of treason was driven by political events and crises but (like
these crises) also involved the enhancement of the legal standing and
authority of the crown, which made opposition to the king liable to capital
punishment and the deprivation of lands.
However, in the context of the crisis of 1452‒3 such laws and legalistic
definitions do not seem to have provided the basis for the political judgement
of king and estates. There was much in the actions of the Douglas earls that
could have been presented as treason. In February 1452 Earl William clearly
refused to provide the support against the king’s rebels specified in the
statutes of 1424 and 1450. William’s ‘shameless obstinance’ in this regard was
cited, along with ‘the bonds and conspiracies … with certain great magnates
of the realm in oppression and offence of the most serene royal majesty and
the public rebellions frequently perpetrated by him (and) his brothers’, to
justify his death at the king’s hands in the parliament of July 1452.31 Earl
James’ actions following his brother’s killing also invited a treason charge.
The public renunciation of his allegiance and denunciation of the king and
council, the burning of Stirling and his communication with the English king
concerning his homage were all treasonable acts. However the king does not
seem to have brought such charges against the earl. According to the contem-
porary Auchinleck Chronicle, the earl of Crawford was forfeited in the June
1452 parliament.32 The creation of James Crichton as earl of Moray at the
same time indicates some form of challenge to the title of Douglas’ brother,
Archibald, earl of Moray. There is, though, no indication of judicial action
against James Douglas during the spring or summer of 1452.
The dealings between the king and the earl in late August as expressed in
28 RPS, 1450/1/24.
29 Roland Tanner, The Late Medieval Scottish Parliament: Politics and the Three Estates,
1424‒1488 (East Linton, 2001), 122‒4.
30 RPS, 1445/7‒8.
31 RPS, 1452/6/1.
32 McGladdery, James II, appendix 2, 166.
the ‘appoyntement’ drew on the practices of bonding used by James II’s coun-
cillors during the previous fifteen years and on long-standing approaches to
dispute resolution within and between realms.33 The promise to forgive any
anger and abandon causes arising from the killing of Earl William or other
matters can be compared with the queen’s ‘appoyntement’ with the
Livingstons in 1439. Like the bonds between the Livingstons and the council
and Ogilvy of Beaufort from 1445, the 1452 agreement included matters of
public obligation, concerning the making of leagues and bonds against the
king in 1452, as elements of private negotiation. In common with many
private agreements, it was also made evident that an issue of property and
patronage was at the core of the negotiation. Most significantly, however, like
the examples mentioned above, the 1452 ‘appoyntement’ clearly derived from
the negotiations between a king and a subject as political rivals.
IV
The ‘appoyntement’ thus corresponded to the use of bonds by the king’s

counsellors during the preceding decade. It also fitted into a wider political
settlement. The earliest indication of this was the grant of royal letters of
remission to Archibald and Duncan Dundas on 16 August 1452.34 The
Dundas family was closely linked to the Livingstons and had been forfeited
following the capture of their tower by the king and the Douglases in
February 1450. Their restoration was also linked to the upturn in the
Livingstons’ fortunes. The day after parliament assembled at Edinburgh on
26 August the king rescinded the sentences of forfeiture that had been passed
on Alexander and James Livingston and their kin and allies, including the
Dundas family. James II stated that his action came ‘in consideration of the
solicitude and laudable service to us in time of our tender age’ and from his
‘benevolence’.35 However, the act went beyond the king’s relations with his
former keepers. It had been the Livingstons’ fall that had precipitated the
rebellion of John, earl of Ross and lord of the Isles in 1451. According to the
Auchinleck chronicle, James Livingston had fled to his son-in-law ‘for supple
and succour’, and Ross ‘tuke plane part agayne the king for him’.36 In October
1451 Livingston appeared at Duffus near Elgin along with Archibald
Douglas, earl of Moray as procurators for the resignation of lands to John of
33 See for example Gerd Althoff, ‘Satisfaction: peculiarities of the amicable settlement
of conflicts in the Middle Ages’, in Bernhard Jussen (ed.), Ordering Medieval Society:
Perspectives on Intellectual and Practical Modes of Shaping Social Relations, trans.
Pamela Selwyn (Philadelphia, PA, 2001), 270‒84; J. E. M. Benham, Peacemaking in
the Middle Ages: Principles and Practice (Manchester, 2011).
34 NLS, Adv. MS B1315.
35 NLS, Adv. MS B1316; RPS, 1452/2‒6.
THE LANARK BOND 237
the Isles, earl of Ross.37 This indicates direct contact between the rebel earl
of Ross, his fugitive father-in-law and the Black Douglases in the months
before Earl William’s killing. It may also illustrate the role of James
Livingston as a point of contact between these magnates.
Livingston’s rehabilitation by James II and the restoration of his lands on
26 August can be linked to the character of the king’s relations with these
earls. If Auchinleck is to be believed, James II’s action removed the reason
for the earl of Ross to continue in rebellion, and this may have been the king’s
primary motivation in reversing his judgements against his former keepers.
The timing of the royal pardon links the restoration of Livingston to the
‘appoyntment’ with James, earl of Douglas. In the coming months James
Livingston would appear on safe conducts from the English government,
which were issued to James, lord Hamilton.38 It is even possible that around
this time Alexander, earl of Crawford reached an agreement with the king,
which may have involved the reversal of any sentences passed against him in
June.39 If so, then like the bond that had aroused James’ ire in February, the
resolution of the conflict was based on personal connections and obligations
of family, on negotiated private agreements expressed in written bonds rather
than on the public authority of the crown and the weight of parliamentary
statute. The motivation, like the settlement between the duke of Albany and
the earl of Douglas in 1409, was a pragmatic desire to avoid a sustained period
of disruption that might involve the intervention of the English crown. The
settlement therefore renewed the political fabric of the kingdom via
compromise and negotiation.
How did the Lanark bond, the letters issued by James earl of Douglas four
and a half months later on 16 January 1453, relate to this settlement?
Historians have generally been uncertain about the motives behind this
second arrangement. Most have regarded it as a fresh concession to Douglas
by James II, which indicated the king’s ‘impotence’ and ‘insecurity’. Dunlop
linked it to the English safe-conduct issued to Douglas’ ally, James, lord
Hamilton, and James Livingston in early January, and almost all accounts
(including my own) erroneously link the bond to the marriage of Earl James
37 NRA(S), 3094/7‒8.
38 Rymer, Foedera, xi, 319, 327. Hamilton was associated in the terms of the ‘appoyn-
tement’ alongside his close political ally, Douglas.
39 In December Crawford’s father-in-law David Dunbar of Cockburn granted lands to
Bishop Kennedy’s recently founded college of St Salvator in St Andrews University,
for the souls of King James and Alexander, earl of Crawford. Dunlop may have been
correct in linking this gift to Crawford’s rehabilitation: St Andrews University Library,
UYSS 110 MI; Dunlop, Bishop Kennedy, 143‒5.
to his brother’s widow, Margaret.40 Margaret Douglas was the earls’ cousin,
and lady of Galloway in her own right. A dispensation was issued for the
marriage between Margaret and James Douglas on 27 February and the king
may have consented to the match.41 However such consent was not contained
in the Lanark bond. For James Douglas, as for his brother, the marriage was
vital to the continued lordship of the successors of Archibald the Grim (who
had acquired Galloway for the Douglases in the 1360s and 1370s) over south-
west Scotland. Custody of Margaret was maintained after the death of Earl
William. In June 1452 as ‘consort of the late William earl of Douglas’ she was
included in the safe conduct issued to her former mother-in-law, Countess
Beatrice.42 However by 1 November, James, earl of Douglas was at Threave
Castle using the title lord of Galloway.43 His presence at the head place of the
lordship, styled as its lord, is clear evidence that he had already married
Margaret prior to the receipt of a dispensation.
Rather than seeing the Lanark bond as arising from renewed tensions
between the king and the earl for which there is no direct evidence, an under-
standing of its purpose should derive from the terms included in the text.
Most obviously, like the ‘appoyntement’, the first issue dealt with in these
letters was that of land, specifically the earldom of Wigtown and the lordship
of Stewarton in Ayrshire. The place accorded to these lands in the two docu-
ments must be taken as evidence of their central importance in relations
between the earl and the king. Moreover, it is possible to trace this significance
back to the late 1440s. In January 1449 James II issued a transumpt (legal
transcript) of seven charters. These included the grant of the earldom of
Wigtown by David II to Thomas Fleming and Robert II’s confirmations of
Fleming’s resignation of the earldom to Archibald Douglas in 1372, as well
as David’s grant of the lordship of Galloway (east of the Cree) to Archibald
three years earlier. The other charters were royal confirmations of the rights
of the Murray family to Hawick, Sprouston and half the lordship of Stew-
arton. These fourteenth-century charters were being registered as legal proof
of the rights of Earl William Douglas as heir to these lands. The need for this
proof indicated insecurity about their title, which was borne out during the
next two years.44
When, in late 1450, James II exploited Earl William’s absence from
Scotland to send adherents into Douglas’ lands and, reportedly, attack his
40 Dunlop, Bishop Kennedy, 142‒3, 145; McGladdery, James II, 82‒3; Norman Macdougall,
James III: A Political Study (Edinburgh, 1982), 7; Brown, Black Douglases, 299.
41 Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland: Papal
Letters, vol. x (1447‒1455), ed. J. A. Twemlow (London, 1915), 130‒1.
42 Rymer, Foedera, xi, 310.
43 HMC, 11th Report, Appendix VI, Hamilton, no. 14.
44 For the background to these charters and anxieties about the Douglases’ rights see
Brown, Black Douglases, 60‒1, 63, 65‒8, 120, 171‒2.
THE LANARK BOND 239
castles and kill or extract oaths from his tenants, Wigtown and Stewarton
were taken into the king’s hands. In May 1451 James II appointed Andrew
Agnew, ‘his familiar’, as hereditary sheriff of Wigtown.45 The following month
the king made ‘an accordance’ with Douglas that involved the earl submitting
himself to ‘the kingis grace’, and James II receiving him and restoring all his
lands ‘outane the erldome of wigtoun … and stewartoun’.46 In early July the
king confirmed Douglas in all his principal estates with the obvious exception
of Wigtown and Stewarton, and to emphasise his control over these lordships
he made a grant of lands in Stewarton to Alexander Home.47
However, in October, with the earl of Ross close to revolt, James ‘with the
full deliberation of the three estates in open parliament’, issued charters that
recognised William’s possession of Wigtown and Stewarton in terms which
ignored any interruption in his tenure.48 To reinforce this, in January 1452,
Douglas granted lands in Wigtown to Robert Vaus. However, after the killing
of Earl William, the pendulum swung again.49 In June and July, as King James
launched political and military attacks on the Douglases, he once again
granted land and office in Wigtown and Stewarton. Most significantly it is
clear that, at this point, James II used the earldom and lordship to endow his
queen with her dower lands.50
It was against this background that both the ‘appoyntement’ and Lanark
bond dealt with Wigtown and Stewarton. Rather than the Lanark bond
marking a royal climbdown over these lands, it was the fulfilment of the earlier
arrangement. In August, Douglas agreed not to pursue the lands until the
special favour and licence of Queen Marie had been obtained. The terms of
the Lanark bond imply that this had occurred and that Douglas anticipated
the king’s letters giving him ‘lawful entrie and possession’ in the two lord-
ships. Douglas’ grant of lands in the earldom of Wigtown in October 1453
provides evidence that he had indeed obtained possession from the king.51
The central importance accorded to the earldom of Wigtown and the
lordship of Stewarton in efforts to resolve the conflict between the king and
the earl in 1452‒3 confirms the evidence that tenure of these fiefs was a key
issue of dispute between the crown and the Black Douglases. In 1450 and
1452 King James had used forceful means to assert his rights as direct holder
of Wigtown and Stewarton, disposing of land and office within them. This
position was established not by a sentence of forfeiture on the earls but by
45 RMS, ii, no. 447.

47 RMS, ii, nos 463, 466‒72, 474‒82, 485.
48 RMS, ii, nos 503‒4.
49 Wigtownshire Charters, ed. R. C. Reid (SHS, 1960), no. 136.
50 NRS, GD25/1/53; Wigtownshire Charters, no. 139.
51 Wigtownshire Charters, no. 141. In March 1453 Douglas also granted lands in the
earldom of Carrick to his secretary Mark Haliburton: NRS, GD25/1/55.
exploiting a flaw in their titles to these lands. In July 1451 Earl William
Douglas must have accepted the king’s right as part of his ‘accordance’ with
the king. However, this was a short-lived concession. Over the period from
1449 to 1453 the earls also asserted and sought to preserve their rights in
these lands by appealing to earlier royal charters that recognised the acqui-
sition of the estates, and by securing fresh charters and letters from James II
confirming rights of entry and possession in Wigtown and Stewarton. For
the Douglas earls therefore the crown remained the source of legal title, but
the efforts of James II to seize the lands or deny title and sasine to the earls
was a breach of their rights that could be legitimately resisted.
VI
This ability or need to separate the authority of the crown as the legitimate
basis of law and landholding from the actions of a king as a potential threat
to good order and legality in his realm was, of course, a fundamental problem
of late medieval politics in both theory and practice across Christian Europe.52
The problem may have had a particular resonance in mid-fifteenth-century
Scotland. James II and his father had both been keen to present themselves
as the source of peace, justice and protection for all their subjects against the
plundering of robbers, the impositions of lords and the corruption of royal
officials. However to many of their magnates they must have appeared as
powerful territorial rivals, capable of invoking their sovereign status to secure
possession of lands and revenues from their nobility. As a perception this may
have had its roots in the governorship of Robert, duke of Albany, whose use
of concepts of public authority in pursuit of private claims has been stressed
recently. Even instinctive royalists like Walter Bower could demonstrate
disquiet with royal acquisitiveness.53
There may thus be a sense in which an acquisitive approach to monarchy
undermined its authority whilst it developed its resources. From the last
months of James I’s reign onwards, a series of royal legal judgements had
been challenged, subverted or ignored. Robert Erskine’s custody of the
earldom of Mar between 1438 and 1448, Alexander of the Isles’ recognition
as earl of Ross in 1436 and Isabella, duchess of Albany’s appearance as
countess of Lennox after 1437 all represented either formal or tacit reversals
of sentences of forfeiture or acts of enforced resignation. The sentence of
forfeiture passed on Duncan, earl of Lennox in 1425 was quietly expunged
52 Jean Dunbabin, ‘Government’, in J. H. Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval

Political Thought (Cambridge, 1988), 477‒519; Antony Black, Political Thought in
Europe, 1250‒1450 (Cambridge, 1992), 148‒52; Antony Black, Monarchy and
Community: Political Ideas in the Later Conciliar Controversy (Cambridge, 1970).
53 Chron. Bower (Watt), viii, 219, 257.
THE LANARK BOND 241
and it was an extended council of thirty-one that allowed Erskine temporary

custody of half of Mar. The ‘full and mature deliberation’ of the estates that
was said to have preceded James II’s charter of Wigtown and Stewarton to
Earl William in October 1451 may reflect a similar sense that the king had
overstepped his rights and that peace would be best served by the restoration
of lands and titles to the Douglases.54
Similar pressures may well have underpinned the peacemaking of 1452‒3.
The terms of the ‘appoyntement’ from Douglas and the Lanark bond, as well
as the locations from which they were issued, suggest a process of ongoing
negotiation between two sides, with the earl in upper Clydesdale and the king
in Edinburgh and Stirling. The restoration of the Dundas and Livingston
families may even indicate the roles of members of these kindreds in negoti-
ations. This negotiated character runs through the bond, producing a
document in which the king’s authority was filtered through the language
and expectations of good lordship and loyal service. Thus the promise to take
the king’s part against enemies and rebels, implicitly referring to Earl
William’s actions in 1451‒2, expressed the public duty of subjects, as stated
in statute and oath of fealty, as a private accord. This was comparable to
Ogilvy of Beaufort’s bond of 1445 with the council, but now made with an
adult king.
A similar construction can be placed on the final, and perhaps crucial,
clause. In this, Douglas undertook to ‘assist my soveragne lord … in ye re-
syneing of his heritage, rentis or possessions disponit or annalied fra the
croune’. The meaning of this clause clearly envisaged the recovery of lands
given away by the crown.55 It can be connected to a statute of 1445 forbidding
alienations of royal lands from the death of James I in 1437, and to the plan
for a formal act of revocation by James II on his twenty-fifth birthday in
1455.56 However, given the readiness of kings to challenge rights of property
since 1424, this clause cannot be confined to set occasions or statutes. What
is striking is the stated exclusion of any gifts or ‘sickernes’ (sureties) made to
the Douglas earls by King James from royal action to reclaim them. As terri-
torial rights had been central in the causes and settlement of the recent
disputes between these parties, this clause was aimed at securing the future
relationship between them.
54 RMS, ii, nos 503‒4.

55 Though suggestive of the king’s resignation, ‘re-syneing’ is employed here to mean
‘to give back (a possession), restore … bring back’: Middle English Dictionary, ed.
R. E. Lewis (Ann Arbor, MI, 1984), xi, 525.
56 RPS, 1445/2; NRS, RH6/342, GD25/1/65; Tanner, Late Medieval Scottish Parlia-
ment, 151, 154.
VII
Douglas’ promise to assist the king in the recovery of lands would exercise a
crucial influence on the development of their relationship after the Lanark
bond. Armed with foreknowledge of the final conflict between the king and
the Douglas earls from January 1455, historians have seen the bond as a
temporary and insincere arrangement between implacable opponents who
used the next two years to prepare for a renewal of open hostility. However,
there are indications in 1453 and 1454 that the settlement between the king
and the earl was effective. Douglas’ leading role in the negotiation of a renewed
truce with England in May 1453 was a sign of the benefits of co-operation,
while the king’s appointment of James Livingston as his chamberlain and
Douglas’ uncle, William, earl of Orkney as chancellor in April 1454 suggest
he was placing trust in men with proven connections to Earl James.57
What seems to have undermined the peace in the bond were issues relating
to the annexation of lands by King James. In 1454, following the death of his
chancellor, William, lord Crichton, James’ attention turned to William’s
cousin, George, earl of Caithness. George was forced to resign ‘his conquest
landis’, those he had acquired during his own lifetime, to the king in May.58
These included Blackness Castle, which was then briefly held against the
king by George Crichton’s son. The Douglas earl was no friend to the
Crichtons, and the redistribution of the offices held by William, his son
James, and George benefited Orkney, Livingston and Archibald Dundas,
perhaps in a royal attempt to secure Douglas support.59 However the earl’s
attitude to the treatment of George by the king is uncertain. In conjunction
with the account of Crichton’s resignation, the Auchinleck Chronicle
reported a meeting between Douglas and John earl of Ross and lord of the
Isles in Knapdale (on the western seaboard), which was widely known and
poorly thought of.60 Moreover in the treason charges brought against the earl
of Douglas and his family in June 1455 a list of violent actions in Lothian was
included. Amongst these was the earl’s offering of ‘help and support’ to
Robert Douglas in seeking the lands of Strathbrock (Broxburn) ‘to the disin-
heritance of the king’. Strathbrock had been held by George Crichton, and
the earl’s action was a challenge to the king’s efforts to secure these lands.61
More serious were physical attacks against Dalkeith and against Kincavil
and Bondington near Linlithgow.62 These actions probably occurred in early
57 Borthwick, ‘Council’, 488, 491; NRS, B59/28/5.

58 McGladdery, James II, 84‒5, appendix 2, 167; Dunlop, Bishop Kennedy, 150; NRS,
GD32/20/2.
59 ER, vi, 90, 98, 100.
61 RPS, 1455/6/6.
62 RPS, 1455/6/6.
THE LANARK BOND 243
1455 but were prompted by the earl’s disquiet about the king’s handling of
the lands of the lords of Dalkeith. In a long-running dispute, the Black
Douglases had supported the claims of Henry Douglas of Borg (who was
married to Margaret, sister of the eighth and ninth earls) against his elder,
but incapable, brother, James. By early 1452 a compromise had left the two
brothers in joint custody of Dalkeith.63 However the crown had already
annexed the lands of Kincavil and Bondington, which had been held by the
lords of Dalkeith since the fourteenth century.64 Then, probably after Henry’s
death, the king upheld the claims of his elder brother’s family. After the fall
of the earl of Douglas, the king would engineer the transfer of the inheritance
to the son of the elder brother. Henry’s widow, the earl of Douglas’ sister,
was forfeited and in exile by 1457.65 In the 1460s the new lord of Dalkeith
came to terms with Henry’s son, granting him lands in return for a promise
not to claim Dalkeith. He also sought help to recover Kincavil from the
crown.66 James’ handling of the Dalkeith inheritance in the early 1450s, which
may have followed on from his treatment of George Crichton, had significant
repercussions. The most immediate of these was the hostility of Earl James
and his family.
This hostility may have been predictable but it also broke the terms of the
agreements between the king and the earl in 1452‒3. In early 1455 James II
was able to count on a body of support that was wide but, more importantly,
fixed in its adherence to the king’s goal of engineering the permanent fall of
the Black Douglases.67 This collective resolve through a relatively lengthy
conflict was not inevitable and differed from the apparent pressure on the
king for an accord in 1452. One explanation for this may be that in 1455
Douglas could not present himself as seeking to avenge the killing of his
brother or to protect his patrimony from royal annexation. Both these issues
had been resolved in the settlement of 1452‒3. Instead, the earl’s violent
response to royal efforts to settle a long-standing and divisive family dispute,
and to resume lands that were claimed to have been alienated from the crown,
made it easy for the king to present Douglas as the breaker of both the peace
and the sworn terms of his bond with him.
63 NRS, RH6/307; RMS, ii, no. 515.

64 Registrum Honoris de Morton, 2 vols, eds Thomas Thomson, Alexander Macdonald
and Cosmo Innes (Bannatyne Club, 1853), ii, 154, 157; ER, v, 456‒7, 544, 647.
65 ER, vi, 196, 347.
66 Morton Reg., ii, no. 222; NRS, GD150/142; RMS, ii, no. 1138.
67 For accounts of the events of 1455 see Brown, Black Douglases, 299‒308; McGladdery,
James II, 84‒6.
VIII
The Lanark bond cannot be regarded as an exceptional document. Since 1437

(and before 1424) royal governments had repeatedly regulated their relation-
ships via essentially private arrangements. Both the bond and the ‘appoyn-
tement’ represented the need to reinforce the language of royal authority with
that of lordship and manrent. That issues of landholding were central to both
documents also attests to the importance of such issues in dispute resolution
between nobles. It might be suggested that the crown’s use of its judicial,
ideological and material powers to secure tenure of a number of provincial
lordships and earldoms since 1424 had made the use of such powers much
more significant in political life – but also more problematic. The first sixteen
years of James II’s reign witnessed the king and his councillors having to
negotiate with subjects over the exercise of royal authority. The Lanark bond
was one more example of this and, though the fall of the Douglases in 1455
was a clear demonstration of the powers of the crown, Scottish royal
government and their subjects would continue to see the value of private or
personal agreements in the running of the realm.68
68 In the 1460s, for example, the Boyds used bonds to maintain their hold on James III’s
council, while the king himself brokered a peace with his brother, Alexander, duke of
Albany, via an indenture in 1483: NRS, GD25/1/96; APS, xii, 31‒3; Norman
Macdougall, James III (2nd edn, Edinburgh, 2009), 69‒70.
THE LANARK BOND 245
Appendix: Text of the Lanark Bond from a

Seventeenth-Century Transcript
I James erle of dowglas obleiss me be yese my letteres written withe 1

my hand and be ye faith of my bodie yat for alsmeikell as my sov lord 2
hes promittit to me be his lettres written withe his hand to gif me 3
lawful entrie and possession unto the erldome of Wigtoun 4
and landis of Stewartoun with the pertinences betwixt this and 5
pasche in ye next generale connsale as his said lettaris mair 6
fullelie propertis I bind me to my said sov lord be ye faith of 7
my body as is forsaid the halie evangell touchand yat I sall als soone 8
as thir thing forsaid conteinit in my said sov lordes lettres not fullfilled 9
to me that I sall incontinent in ye said nixt generalle counsall be my 10
sleff or my procuratoris having full and plaine power thereto of me under 11
my seall and subscript of my body bind to my said sov lord my 12
manrent and my service in ye best and maist sure forme that can 13
be sein to my said sov lord bot incontinent for all the dayes of my 14
lyf before and againe all thame that to fore do ma. And 15
that I sall neuer wytt in privie na in a pert be na maner of way harme 16
dew or evill to my sov lordes persone bot I sall latt … yt and keipe 17
him therfra and warne him therof incontinent. And that I sall 18
gif over all liges and bandis maid betwixt me and any persone 19
lefaule of quhat estaitt or natione that ever they be for evir 20
mair gif ony be made that ar contrair to my sov lord, na I sall nevir 21
mak nane in tyme to come the qlk sall be contrair to his hienes 22
or his realme be na maner of way, and that I sall be with 23
him at all my power and tak part with him formaly 24
againe al his enemies and rebellis beand within his realme 25
at all tymes and in tyme of peace keipe all trewis within 26
his boundes belaingand me And in tyme of war defend 27
thame as esseurly And that I sall assist to my sov lord withe all 28
my poure in ye re-syneing of his heritage rentis or possessions 29
disponit or analied fra the croune in all places saiffing the giftis 30
and sickernes given be him to my brother whome god assolzie and 31
me in ony tyme bygand and at all thir conditiones befour written sall 32
be lellelie and trewlie kepit but fraud or gyle I have given 33
bodilie with oath the evangell touchand And to the mair witnessing 34
I have sett my seall At Lanark ye 16 of January in ye 3ear 35
of our Lord I m iiii c lii 3669
69 NLS, Adv. MS 22.1.14 (163 verso).

chapter 11
James III: Kingship and Contested

Reputation
ALASDAIR A. MACDONALD
There is a long-standing consensus among Scottish historians regarding the

poor, not to say utterly bad, reputation of James III.1 To some extent this is
understandable, since James had the ironic misfortune to be the father of a
son whose reign is generally (and rightly) upheld as marking the Golden Age
of late medieval Scotland: the question is, however, whether the glory of the
son has not darkened the reputation of the father?2 The present contribution
does not seek to restore the balance by impugning the reputation of James IV
– albeit that the latter’s personal morality was far from irreproachable, his
piety was of a suspiciously ostentatious sort, and his command of military
strategy led to the total disaster of Flodden; rather, it will suggest that there
are in the life of James III aspects that have not been fully understood, but
deserve to be taken into consideration if a more just appreciation of this much
censured monarch is to be attained.
In several respects the behaviour of James III differed strikingly from that of
his son. Perhaps most obviously, he preferred to stay in Edinburgh as much
as possible, rather than travel restlessly round his kingdom. James III, of
61 This was well analysed in Norman A. T. Macdougall, ‘The sources: a reappraisal of

the legend’, in Jennifer M. Brown (ed.), Scottish Society in the Fifteenth Century
(London, 1977), 10‒32. Macdougall’s subsequent, and fuller studies are: James III:
A Political Study (Edinburgh 1982), revised as James III (Edinburgh, 2009); for the
sake of brevity, these two versions will be identified below under their respective dates
of publication. Contrasting with Macdougall’s careful weighing of the evidence, see
the brutally brief conclusion of Roland Tanner, ‘James III was a bad king, no more,
no less’, in his ‘James III (1460‒1488)’, in Michael Brown and Roland Tanner (eds),
Scottish Kingship, 1306‒1542: Essays in Honour of Norman Macdougall (Edinburgh,
2008), 209‒31, at p. 228.
62 Indicative is the fact that a standard reference work allocates a separate entry to James IV
but not to his father: Michael Lynch (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Scottish History
(2nd edn, Oxford, 2004).
JAMES III: KINGSHIP AND CONTESTED REPUTATION 247
course, had no need to make highly visible pilgrimages to the tombs of

northern and southern saints (in casu SS Duthac and Ninian) to atone for his
part (real or imputed) in the heinous crimes of regicide and parricide;3 nor
had he any need to wear a heavy chain round his waist. While such penitential
mortifications contribute to the modern fascination with James IV, the very
absence of such exercises on the part of James III should perhaps be
construed as a sign of merit. Inevitably the king, by staying in his capital,
could not expect to reap the political rewards of exposure to the crowd. In
modern idiom, he seems to have been little inclined to ‘press the flesh’, and
he has been accused of parsimony: there are known for him none of the
charmingly spontaneous donations of his son, who lavished money on
minstrels, menials and mistresses.4 However, that James III might have been
building up a fund with which to finance some great, but ultimately unre-
alised, enterprise (for example in relation to Gueldres) is a possibility for
which no historian seems to make allowance.5
Another area in which James III has been found deficient is in the
upholding of justice. This would normally be demonstrated by the king
presiding at justice ayres held in the provinces of his realm; such duties,
however, seem to have had little appeal for this largely non-peripatetic
sovereign. James, moreover, has been blamed for extracting bribes in lieu of
carrying out sentence of justice properly or consistently, and by extension he
has been accused of an inability to regulate his own mind and behaviour. One
of the earliest criticisms levelled at him concerns his favourites: yet, while
such a pattern of politics is an inherent danger in any court-centred system
of government, James’ particular fault would seem to have been his
predilection for men with artistic gifts, such as the architect Thomas (or
Robert) Cochrane. Furthermore, James has been blamed for interfering in
important decisions and then abruptly changing his mind: Robert Lindesay
of Pitscottie (himself not the most reliable memorialist) called it ‘that wicked
variatioun / Off James the third’.6 As a result, so it might be thought, people
63 Instead James III and Margaret of Denmark made a pilgrimage to Whithorn in 1473 for
the happier purpose of celebrating the birth of their first child: Macdougall (2009), 90.
64 The treasurer’s accounts for the reign of James IV are full of the records of such
payments: for a representative specimen, see R. L. Mackie, King James IV of Scotland
(Edinburgh, 1958), 125. For the reign of James III, unfortunately, the treasurer’s
accounts do not survive.
65 A parallel can be given from the English poet Stephen Hawes, in his ‘A Joyfull Medi-
tacyon’ (1509), a work that celebrates the coronation of Henry VIII. Commenting
(lines 71‒98) on the reputed avarice of the previous king, Hawes suggests that the true
reason for the latter’s accumulation of a great hoard may have been in order to finance
a great project, such as a crusade against the Turks: Stephen Hawes: The Minor Poems,
ed. Florence W. Gluck and Alice B. Morgan (EETS, 1974), 87‒8.
66 Robert Lindesay of Pitscottie, The Historie and Chronicles of Scotland, 3 vols, ed. Æ.
J. G. Mackay (STS, 1898‒1911), i, 211; Macdougall (2009), 150‒4. Great play is made
never really knew where they were with this king, who is accused of not
running a sufficiently tight ship. Such allegations are familiar, nay hoary: they
appear in the accounts of early modern historians, but they continue to play
at the present time. Reiteration, however, does not convert allegation into truth,
nor, in the assessment of kingly character, are the themes of government and
administration everything: there is a clear need to consider all the factors that
may contribute to showing how ‘it really was’ in relation to James III.7
II
An approach to at least a partial recuperation of the king’s reputation may be

made via a scrutiny of a particular and well-known story, of which the true
nature and rhetorical function have not entirely been recognised, and which
as a result can serve as a test case for the present argument. Hector Boece, in
his history of the bishops of Aberdeen, recounts an incident involving James
III, bishop William Elphinstone of Aberdeen, and the legate of the Pope,
bishop Giacomo Pasarella of Imola.8 This illustrious threesome, it is said,
were on their way to Restalrig, when they encountered an unnamed Scottish
nobleman, who, having been condemned for murder, was about to be put to
death. The king, on asking the papal legate what should happen with the man,
received the advice, ‘Let justice be done’ (fiat justitia). James then turned to
Elphinstone, and observed that the Scottish bishop’s face betrayed disap-
proval of the words of his Italian colleague. Boece puts the following words
into the mouth of the king: ‘Is this the compassion of Italian churchmen?
You [i.e. Elphinstone] used to give me very different advice’. The king then,
with the words ‘Let mercy prevail’, gave order that the man’s life was to be
spared. For R. L. Mackie, this little incident provided an excellent illustration
of James’ weakness and vacillation.9 This view was rejected, however, by
Norman Macdougall, in his political study of 1982: for him, rather, Boece
was an unreliable narrator by virtue of his here ‘omitting the vital factor of
payment for royal forgiveness’, and in this way the significance of the event
with the favourites in Mackie’s ‘Prelude’ to the following reign: King James IV, 15‒21.
Pitscottie’s stanzas on James III, as Mackay notes, are taken from Lyndsay’s ‘The
Testament of the Papyngo’, but for the significant adjective ‘wicked’ for which the
historian is uniquely responsible: cf. Janet Hadley Williams, ‘Verse in Pitscottie’s
Historie and Cronicles of Scotland, NLS, MS Acc. 9769, Personal Papers, 84/1/1’,
in Kevin J. McGinley and Nicola Royan (eds), The Apparelling of Truth: Literature
and Literary Culture in the Reign of James VI: A Festschrift for Roderick J. Lyall
(Newcastle upon Tyne, 2010), 134‒47, at p. 142.
67 ‘Wie es eigentlich gewesen’, in Leopold von Ranke’s celebrated formulation.
68 Hector Boece, Murthlacensium et Aberdonensium episcoporum vitae, ed. and trans. James
Moir (New Spalding Club, 1894), 201‒2.
69 Mackie, King James IV, 32.
was moved from the psychological and moral to the judicial and adminis-
trative domains.10 Macdougall also expatiated on James’ sins in this latter
area, and supported his view by alleging that the practice was typical of
Scottish kings.
However, if Mackie’s interpretation was problematic, that of Macdougall
(in 1982) was also unsatisfactory, and it does not figure in the revised version
of his study. In Boece’s account there is no mention of money whatsoever,
and an invocation of that issue – however relevant it may be to other moments
in James’ career – would be gratuitous in the interpretation of this particular
incident. As it happens, Macdougall’s 1982 examples of the venality of Scottish
kings in taking payment for pardons relate rather to James II and James IV,
and so the third James comes to be smeared with the malversations of his
predecessor and his successor. It is true that another favourite of James III,
John Ramsay, was accused of ‘the oppression of … prelates, barons, burgesses
and lieges by the common selling and buying of justice’, but this allegation,
as Macdougall notes, was made only after the overthrow of the king in 1488,
and may well reflect the need of the new regime to justify rebellion after the
event: the phenomenon of Siegerjustiz (victor’s justice) is nothing new.11
Anyway, even if Ramsay were in fact guilty as alleged, that would in itself
carry no necessary implications for James.
These are all political considerations and, as Macdougall demonstrates,
they are details in a larger picture. However, it will here be argued that they
require to be complemented by an investigation of factors pertaining to
cultural history and literary genre. The latter are particularly important in
the case of Hector Boece’s cameo narrative, since the Restalrig story is less a
recording of fact and more an exemplary tale. As such, it scarcely matters that
the homicidal nobleman is left unnamed: in fact, even if such a person were
never actually to have existed, the rhetorical functioning of the story – of
which the primary purpose is to praise Elphinstone – would not be vitiated.
In a secondary and indirect way the story presents James III as an eirenic
ruler (whether or not he actually deserved to be so seen), in his insistence on
the value of mercy over against strict justice.12 In late medieval literature
Justice and Mercy were regularly conceptualised as two of the four daughters
of God, abstract terms that lent themselves to application in the domain of
government: the good king would be imitating God himself, were he to
succeed in reconciling such antinomies.13
10 Macdougall (1982), 202; cf. Macdougall (2009), 250‒2.

11 Macdougall (1982), 202‒3. In Macdougall (2009), 297‒304, there is an excellent
discussion of the way in which sixteenth-century chroniclers commented on the reign
of James III.
12 This general concern is prominent in William of Touris’ Contemplacioun of Synnaris
(c.1497): Devotional Pieces, ed. J. A. W. Bennett (STS, 1955), 72‒4 (lines 121‒76).
13 The other two daughters were Truth and Peace. This very common medieval motif
It is quite possible, and even likely, that Boece’s story should be decon-
structed along such lines. Yet the story contains further significance, since
the brief phrase, fiat justitia, which is put into the mouth of the distinguished
ecclesiastic and canonist Pasarella, lends itself to more than one interpre-
tation. As the Latin is reflected in Older Scots usage, to ‘justify’ someone
could mean: to put him on trial, to judge him, to execute justice upon him,
or to put him to death.14 It is not evident which sense of this multivalent term
would be best applicable in Boece’s account. Furthermore, should the Latin
phrase be understood as the first half of the familiar Senecan maxim fiat
justitia ruat caelum (‘may justice be done, though the heavens should fall’),
this would suggest uncompromising rigour on the part of Pasarella, and ipso
facto contrast with Elphinstone’s more clement instincts.15 Yet the phrase fiat
justitia, on its own, could also mean ‘let the case be submitted to due process
of trial’; in this interpretation, Pasarella would emerge as a stickler for formal
legal procedure. However, once again there is a potential catch, since
Pasarella’s words may admit the possibility that justice can be served by the
king’s exercise of the royal prerogative of granting mercy: the latter option
would itself belong within accepted and proper (albeit exceptional) legal
procedure. If this were indeed the intended implication, the Italian would
inevitably appear as less implacable, though his legalist and formalist spots
would not have changed.
While the opposition of justice and mercy remains fundamental to all
these various interpretations, the subtext of the story is clearly a recommen-
dation that the king should follow correct legal procedure – wherein the
exercise of mercy is not precluded. In his resolution of the dilemma in this
particular case, the king does manage to reconcile the principles of justice
and mercy, and all three men emerge with credit – Pasarella for his rectitude,
Elphinstone for his compassion, and James for his executive decision. It may
was elaborated from an origin in Psalm 84:11 (Vulgate), and, for example, it plays an
important role in Piers Plowman: William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman
[B text], ed. A. V. C. Schmidt (2nd edn, London, 1995), 311‒16 (xviii, 110‒228). A
Scottish example occurs in John Ireland’s Meroure of Wysdome, which was originally
written for James III: Johannes de Irlandia, The Meroure of Wysdome, 3 vols, eds
Charles Macpherson, F. Quinn and Craig McDonald (STS, 1926‒90), i, 106‒17 (II, ix).
See Sally Mapstone, ‘A mirror for a divine prince: John Ireland and the four daughters
of God’, in J. Derrick McClure and Michael R. G. Spiller (eds), Bryght Lanternis:
Essays on the Language and Literature of Medieval and Renaissance Scotland (Aberdeen,
1989), 308‒23.
14 DOST, s.v. ‘justify’.
15 Leslie Macfarlane reads the story differently. According to him, Elphinstone would
have seized upon the difference between involuntary slaughter (homicide) and murder,
on which basis the unidentified nobleman would not deserve to incur the death penalty:
Leslie J. Macfarlane, William Elphinstone and the Kingdom of Scotland, 1431‒1514:
The Struggle for Order (Aberdeen, 1985), 114.
also be noted that in combining justice and mercy James was following the
advice given to kings by St Bridget of Sweden, advice taken into Walter
Bower’s Scotichronicon, and which James may therefore be presumed to have
known.16 In any event, the Scottish king, who is shown as heeding the counsels
of his attendant bishops, is a figure very different from that of the modern
received consensus, which has tended to see him as little more than the
whirligig of his favourites. It must, of course, be stressed that one is concerned
here with rhetoric rather than with historical reality: in Goethe’s terms,
Boece’s exemplary story belongs more to Dichtung (artistic creation) than to
Wahrheit (unadorned fact), and to apply the story without due reservation in
a political study of royal maladministration is to tilt at the wrong windmill.
III
Boece’s location of the story in connection with Restalrig is a highly signif-

icant aspect of the story. Perhaps because Restalrig is today one of the visually
less pleasant suburbs of Edinburgh, it tends to be neglected by both citizen
and tourist. In the late fifteenth century it was a separate village, situated less
than a mile to the east of the palace of Holyrood, and was the site of one of
the graveyards serving the capital. Restalrig contained a truly remarkable
ecclesiastical building: this was the capella regis, begun by James in 1477, who
ten years later was granted papal permission to found it as a collegiate church
beside the parish church of Restalrig.17 Sadly, all that now remains of this
royal chapel, which was initially separate from the parish church (now known
as St Margaret’s), is merely the undercroft of what was originally a two-storey
construction.18 This undercroft is itself partly below ground level, and is thus
inherently susceptible to flooding, something that has led to the old misun-
derstanding – long ripe for eradication – of the building as a ‘balm well’.19
The chapel’s upper storey was devastated in 1560 at the behest of the very
16 Chron. Bower (Watt), v, 308‒15 (Bk. x, cc. 7‒8). See Sally Mapstone, ‘Bower on king-
ship’, in Chron. Bower (Watt), ix, 321‒38.
17 A. A. MacDonald, ‘The chapel of Restalrig: royal folly or venerable shrine?’, in L. A.
J. R. Houwen, A. A. MacDonald and S. L. Mapstone (eds), A Palace in the Wild:
Essays on Vernacular Culture and Humanism in Late-Medieval and Renaissance Scotland
(Leuven, 2000), 27‒59. For the record, this paper should not be thought to suggest
that Restalrig chapel is ‘serious evidence for James III as a “renaissance prince”’
(Tanner, ‘James III’, 224). Its only use of the word ‘Renaissance’ (p. 28) is in relation
to James V, and, though Restalrig chapel has many points of interest as a cultural
monument, affiliation with the Renaissance is not one of them.
18 The most recent discussion of Restalrig is Richard Fawcett, The Architecture of the
Scottish Medieval Church (New Haven, CT, 2011), 282‒5.
19 It is likely that at Restalrig there was a well from which blessed water would have been
distributed: this was presumably the hexagonal stone well-house (‘St Margaret’s Well’)
which, in 1859, to make way for the railway, was moved from its original site in the
first General Assembly of the Protestant church, which branded it ‘a

monument of idolatry, [to] be razed and utterly cast down and destroyed’.20
As a consequence, the proper recognition of the significance of this chapel is
now not easy.
In its pristine condition, it must have been a most impressive building,
and the records attest the expense of its construction.21 Moreover, the very
vehemence of the Assembly’s order implies an uncommon degree of
animosity on the part of the Kirk, and suggests that at the time of the Refor-
mation the chapel must have been perceived as a monument of the most
egregiously papistical sort, irredeemably incompatible with the new religious
fashion. King James III, however, must have been proud of his creation, since
it was evidently fit to be shown off to a legate of the Pope. Restalrig chapel is
said to have been a place where liturgical practice of the highest standard took
place, and Macdougall has made the convincing suggestion that James may
have intended it as a (the?) chapel royal: this institution had hitherto been
located at the church of St Mary on the Rock, St Andrews, and later, under
James IV, it would be given a new and permanent location within Stirling
Castle (1501).22 In terms of royal building projects, Restalrig may be compared
with another edifice, situated not far away: this was Trinity College, founded
by Mary of Gueldres in 1460, as a mausoleum-chapel for her husband,
James II. Regrettably each building would suffer great damage: Restalrig at
the hands of the Reformers, Trinity College beneath the juggernaut of the
Victorian railway.
Yet even in its present, degraded state Restalrig remains a monument of
great interest. The chapel was erected over the shrine of St Triduana – now
an unfamiliar saint, but one who was the subject of an important and devel-
oping cult in the century before 1560. It should be noted that for Edinburgh
and its environs Triduana was in fact the only local saint, male or female; this
fact, together with the evident presence of her complete skeleton, were
powerful attractions not to be matched even by the relics of St Giles, in the
burgh’s collegiate church, and of St Andrew, in the diocesan cathedral.
Venerable on account of her chaste virtue, her heroic piety, her antiquity, and
graveyard below Restalrig chapel to its present location in Holyrood Park: MacDonald,
‘Chapel of Restalrig’, 36. In the neighbourhood of Edinburgh, however, there was an
actual balm-well at Liberton, from which blessed oil was said to flow: David
McRoberts, ‘Scottish pilgrims to the Holy Land’, IR 20 (1969), 99‒100.
20 BUK, i, 5. See also David McRoberts, ‘Material destruction caused by the Scottish
Reformation’, in David McRoberts (ed.), Essays on the Scottish Reformation, 1513‒1625
(Glasgow, 1962), 415‒62, at p. 420.
21 To finance it, James diverted the considerable income from the priory of the Bene-
dictine abbey of Coldingham: Macdougall (2009), 250‒2.
22 Ibid., 250. On the chapel royal at Stirling see Charles Rogers, History of the Chapel
Royal of Scotland (Grampian Club, 1882).
her ability to intercede in heaven on the part of those who prayed at her
shrine, Triduana was a very real link between the physical and the meta-
physical realms, between the contemporary circumstances of Scotland and
the perpetual felicity of heaven.23 For most people today such notions are
perhaps likely to count for little or nothing: in the late fifteenth century,
however, the case was very different, and the late medieval founding of
Triduana altars in several prominent churches (for example in Edinburgh,
St Andrews, Dundee, Brechin and Aberdeen) indicates a distribution of relics
from the shrine at Restalrig, in a deliberate campaign to extend the cult.24
Though Boece does not emphasise the point, the visit of James III and
the two bishops indubitably belongs within this hagiographical context. In
his formative years, James was presumably influenced by his mother, Mary
of Gueldres, who through her marriage (1449) to James II brought to
Scotland the habits of piety and devotion characteristic of the trend-setting
Burgundian court of her great-uncle, Philip the Good. To Mary, the scarcity
of local (and especially female) saints in her new environment – St Margaret,
at Dunfermline, is the exception that proves the rule – can only have seemed
disturbing, and a sense of such deficiency may explain the manifest, and
presumably compensatory, upsurge of interest in St Triduana beginning in
mid fifteenth-century Scotland. The personal piety of James III has scarcely
been the subject of study (unlike that of his son), but it is at the very least
possible that, with the erection of the chapel of Restalrig, James III was
following the example set by Mary of Gueldres. The proximity of Triduana’s
principal cult-site to the royal residence was, moreover, a happy coincidence,
and if Restalrig were indeed intended as the site of the chapel royal, its
location would have been most convenient for this sedentary monarch.
The architecture of the chapel of Restalrig is in its own right remarkable.25
In its ground plan – a regular hexagon – it is extremely unusual: in the British
Isles there is no other freestanding specimen, and non-freestanding spec-
imens are also virtually unknown.26 An attempt has been made to attribute
the inspiration for this design innovation to the visit made by Anselm Adorne
(another favourite of James III) to the monastery of Mount Phileremos on
23 For Triduana and her legend see MacDonald, ‘Chapel of Restalrig’, 34‒5, 58‒9; also
Alan Macquarrie (ed.), Legends of Scottish Saints (Dublin, 2012), 240‒3, 420‒1.
24 Helen Brown, ‘Saint Triduana of Restalrig? Locating a saint and her cult in late
medieval Lothian and beyond’, in Debra Higgs (ed.), Images of Medieval Sanctity:
Essays in Honour of Gary Dickson (Leiden, 2007), 45‒70, at p. 62.
25 Iain MacIvor, ‘The King’s Chapel at Restalrig and St Triduan’s Isle: a hexagonal two-
storied chapel of the fifteenth century’, PSAS 96 (1962‒3), 247‒63; Richard Fawcett,
Scottish Architecture from the Accession of the Stewarts to the Reformation (Edinburgh,
1994), 146‒9; MacDonald, ‘Chapel of Restalrig’.
26 The highly decorated hexagonal north porch of St Mary’s Redcliffe, Bristol, is
attached to the main structure.
Rhodes in 1470‒1, in the course of his return from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem;

this theory, however, is unconvincing.27 However, a most satisfactory medieval
parallel can be adduced: this is the chapel of St Quirinus, beside the monastic
and pilgrimage church of SS Eucherius and Matthias, outside Trier. As with
Restalrig, the Trier chapel, likewise located in a burial ground, is built over
an undercroft containing the tomb-shrine of a local Christian heroine – in
casu the third-century Albana, a saint more ancient but little less obscure than
Triduana. A comparison may be made between Figures 11.1 and 11.2.
The hexagonal design of these chapels – a feature also seen in many
medieval pulpits, and in innumerable medieval reliquaries – is not accidental,
but is informed by Basilean and Augustinian number theory, wherein six was
a signifier of the penultimate age of the world.28 This sixth age began with
the birth of Christ (the Word), and would end at the Second Coming; in other
words, it is the age containing the historical life of Christ, and, after his
Ascension, the preaching of the Word. The chapels at Trier and at Restalrig
are not the only examples of hexagon symbolism as realised in architecture.
The chapel of St Erhard (1230) in the monastery-fortress of Grosscomburg
(by Schwäbisch Hall, in Baden-Württemberg) is one excellent specimen, and
commemorated the seventh-century ‘Scotish’ (i.e. Irish) bishop of Regensburg.
Another is the St Matthias chapel at Kobern-Gondorf (on the Moselle, near
Koblenz), built to house the saint’s skull, which had been brought back from
Damietta (Egypt) by Heinrich II von Isenburg-Kobern, on his return (1221)
from the Fifth Crusade; in the fifteenth century the skull was transferred to
Trier. Inspiration from the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem is evident in both
monuments; at Grosscomburg this contrasts effectively with the prominent
New Jerusalem symbolism of the famous wheel-chandelier hanging over the
high altar in the main, monastic church.29
Thus it cannot be doubted that the exceptional architectural form of the
chapel of Restalrig was connected with this symbolism. Furthermore, in its
two-storeyed construction, it linked saintly virtue from the remote past (St
Triduana) with the devotions of the present time. Whether the Trier chapel
may have been the actual inspiration for Restalrig, however, is an idea that
cannot be advanced with certainty, since independent conception, or parallel
derivation from the typological model, cannot be excluded; but it is not
impossible, especially given the importance of pilgrimage to the tomb of St
27 Miles Glendinning, Ranald MacInnes and Aonghus MacKechnie, A History of Scottish

Architecture (Edinburgh, 1996), 10. At the time of Adorne’s visit, the two hexagonal
chapels at Mount Phileremos were not yet in existence; furthermore, once built, they
were not freestanding, were not regular hexagons, and were not two-storeyed:
MacDonald, ‘Chapel of Restalrig’, 43.
28 Vincent F. Hopper, Medieval Number Symbolism (New York, 1969); Heinz Meyer and
Rudolf Suntrup, Lexikon der Mittelalterlichen Zahlenbedeutungen (Munich, 1987), 442‒79.
29 Rainer Jooß, Kloster Komburg im Mittelalter (Sigmaringen, 2nd edn, 1987). I am much
obliged to Professor Richard Fawcett for drawing these German chapels to my attention.
Matthias (the only one of the Twelve Apostles to be buried north of the Alps),
and the fact that Trier could easily be visited by Scottish clergymen on their
way to and from Rome.30
IV
A detail curiously unmentioned in Hector Boece’s narrative is that Pasarella,

the papal legate, was in Scotland to honour James III with the Golden Rose
from Innocent VIII.31 This award was a signal commendation, and testifies
to the recognition of the king’s piety and service to the Church. As was
normal, the Golden Rose would have been blessed in Rome by the Pope on
Laetare Sunday (the fourth Sunday in Lent), to be presented to its destined
recipient at or around Easter. The royal excursion to Restalrig may thus be
presumed to have taken place sometime close to the latter feast in 1486. As
already noted, a mere one year later James would found Restalrig as a colle-
giate church.32 Whereas the festive and ceremonial Edinburgh presentation
of the Golden Rose would probably have taken place in some appropriately
spacious ecclesiastical surrounding33 – for which the most ready candidate
would have been the Abbey church of Holyrood – this leaves the question of
what can have been the special objective of the royal procession to Restalrig,
especially since the latter was a building of modest proportions (only some
twenty-five feet in internal diameter) and could at best have accommodated
only a small and almost private company, and for these reasons seems most
unlikely to have been the location of the Golden Rose ceremony. In other
words, what could have been the purpose of the Restalrig chapel – beyond
providing a fitting shrine for St Triduana?
Although lack of documentation means that certainty is not possible in
this matter, an answer grounded in contemporary devotional attitudes and
practices may be tentatively proposed. A general context would have been
that of Passion devotion, the role of which in late medieval culture can
scarcely be overemphasised.34 The Passion was central in the liturgy of the
30 McRoberts, ‘Scottish pilgrims’, 84. On pilgrimage to Trier see also Wolfgang Seibrich,
‘Die Trierer Heiltumsfahrt im Spätmittelalter’, Archiv für mittelrheinische Kirchenge-
schichte 47 (1995), 45‒125. Seibrich notes that pilgrimage to Trier was especially
popular in the Low Countries, and was often part of a longer pilgrimage via Aachen
and Cologne to Rome (p. 116).
31 Charles Burns, ‘Papal gifts to Scottish monarchs: the golden rose and the blessed
sword’, IR 20 (1969), 150‒94; Macdougall (2009), 295.
32 Nevertheless, Restalrig only acquired the anticipated prebends under James IV, in
1512: Ian B. Cowan and David E. Easson, Medieval Religious Houses: Scotland (2nd
edn, London, 1976), 224‒5.
33 Burns, ‘Papal gifts’, 159.
34 A. A. MacDonald, ‘Passion devotion in late-medieval Scotland’, in A. A. MacDonald,
Figure 11.1
The chapel of St Quirinus, Trier, consecrated 1287. In the foreground
is the stair leading down to the St Albana crypt. The roof of the chapel is
from the 17th century. (Photo: John Flood)
Figure 11.2
The chapel of Restalrig: conjectural drawing by Richard Fawcett.
Reproduced, with permission, from L. A. J. R. Houwen, A. A. MacDonald and
S. L. Mapstone (eds), A Palace in the Wild: Essays on Vernacular Culture
and Humanism in Late-Medieval and Renaissance Scotland (Leuven, 2000), 54.
mass; Good Friday and Easter gave focus to the entire Church Year; the theme
was continued in liturgical feasts both ancient (the Invention of the Cross,
the Exaltation of the Cross) and modern (the Crown of Thorns, the Five
Wounds, the Vera Icon); the scene of the Passion was omnipresent in paintings
and sculpture, in music and drama, and it underlay most of the texts in Books
of Hours, which catered for personal devotions. The Church of the Holy
Sepulchre in Jerusalem inspired numerous European imitations – one of the
most remarkable being the Jerusalem Church in Bruges, constructed by Peter
Adorne, father of Anselm, in which a huge Calvary dominates the altar and
the replica Tomb. The tower of Adorne’s church, which would have been a
familiar sight to any inhabitant of Bruges and any Scottish visitor, is topped
by a replica of the hexagonal canopy, which then stood over the Edicule in
Jerusalem. It seems very likely that the chapel of Restalrig, with its highly
peculiar architectural form, was conceived as a place specifically for Passion
devotion on the part of the king. A typological similarity has been discerned
with the hexagonal shape of many medieval reliquaries, as in the tabernacle
portrayed in the Book of Hours of James IV and Margaret Tudor (c.1503), a
manuscript produced in either Bruges or Ghent.35 It is thus not only possible,
but rather a thing to be expected, that the upper storey of Restalrig chapel
would have contained artistic features connected with the Passion (for
example some very prominent crucifix, an altar with a Crucifixion scene
painted on its reredos, or some replica of the Holy Sepulchre). The contem-
porary international cult of chivalry, and the Bruges-centred devotion to the
Holy Blood, were other factors linking Europe and Jerusalem within the
context of Passion devotion.36
H. N. B. Ridderbos and R. M. Schlusemann (eds), The Broken Body: Passion Devotion

in Late-Medieval Culture (Groningen, 1988), 109‒31.
35 MacDonald, ‘Chapel of Restalrig’, 32‒4. For the idea that a centrally constructed
polygonal chapel may resemble a monstrance, see also, in relation to a number of such
buildings in north Germany (in particular the two-storeyed chapel of St Anne and St
Gertrude beside the cathedral of Havelberg, in Brandenburg): Dieter Hoffmann-
Axthelm, ‘Das Wunderblut von Beelitz’, in Felix Escher and Hartmut Kühne (eds),
Die Wilsnackfahrt: Ein Wallfahrts- und Kommunikationszentrum Nord- und Mitteleu-
ropas im Spätmittelalter (Frankfurt am Main, 2006), 199‒233, at p. 220.
36 A. A. MacDonald, ‘Chivalry as a catalyst of cultural change in late-medieval Scotland’,
in Rudolf Suntrup and J. R. Veenstra (eds), Tradition and Innovation in an Era of
Change/Tradition und Innovation im Übergang zur Frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt am Main,
2001), 151‒74; Alasdair A. MacDonald, ‘Princely culture in Scotland under James III
and James IV’, in M. Gosman, A. MacDonald and A. Vanderjagt (eds), Princes and
Princely Culture, 1450‒1650, 2 vols (Leiden, 2003‒5), i, 147‒72. Although the idea of
the founding by James III of an Order (either of the Unicorn or of St Andrew) has
been shown to be improbable (Katie Stevenson, ‘The Unicorn, St Andrew and the
Thistle: was there an order of chivalry in late medieval Scotland?’, SHR 83 (2004),
3‒22), the evidence for contemporary Scottish interest in chivalry remains strong.
The chapel of Restalrig belongs primarily within the architectural genre

of the mortuary chapel (German: Grabkapelle). This was typically a private
chapel for the use of a particular family, and normally situated within or
beside a burial ground. Such chapels were frequently two-storeyed edifices:
a lower storey to contain (optimally) the sarcophagus or relic-shrine of some
saint, or of members of the respective founding family, with a chapel above
to cater for votive masses for the dead.37 In size, style, architecture and deco-
ration such chapels reflected the social and financial status of the founder,
and, as capella regis, Restalrig would naturally have demonstrated that of
James III.38 However, if it is indeed a mortuary chapel, for whom would
Restalrig have been particularly intended?
It is not impossible that James intended it for himself – hence, perhaps,
one possible sense of the term capella regis. But if James III planned that
Restalrig would be his own final resting-place on earth, his purpose was to
be thwarted, since, defeated at the battle of Sauchieburn (1488), he was buried
beside Margaret of Denmark in Cambuskenneth Abbey. Another possibility
is that James may have intended it for his queen. Margaret, who died at
Stirling in July 1486, had perhaps only provisionally been buried at
Cambuskenneth. Provisional interment would have applied a fortiori to James,
who could not have foreseen his death so far away from his home base. In
either scenario, it seems likely that Restalrig would have been conceived as a
parallel to Trinity College (also close to Holyrood), which was the mausoleum
of James II and (later) Mary of Gueldres. The parallel would explain the
expense of the construction of Restalrig chapel, just as the site of the grave
of St Triduana would have dictated its location.
Nor should liturgical and musical aspects be overlooked. Votive masses
were commonly continued for long periods, even in perpetuity, and for such
commemorations, specially financed clergy were required; such an intention
would satisfactorily explain the erection of a collegiate church. This arrangement
accords well with Macdougall’s chapel royal hypothesis, and both purposes
The Chapel (now Basilica) of the Holy Blood in Bruges was another two-storeyed
edifice, with below, the Romanesque and plain chapel of St Basil, and above, the splen-
didly Gothic chapel housing the relic of the Holy Blood.
37 That such a functional relationship would have applied in the case of Restalrig has
not hitherto been recognised: cf. George Hay, ‘The architecture of Scottish collegiate
churches’, in G. W. S. Barrow (ed.), The Scottish Tradition: Essays in Honour of Ronald
Gordon Cant (Edinburgh, 1974), 56‒70.
38 A modern (1884) Scottish specimen, but which in its impressiveness corresponds to
all these aspects, is that of the Fraser of Hospitalfield family, in the Western Cemetery,
Arbroath. It may be noted that, after the Reformation, the undercroft of Restalrig,
now deprived of the relics of St Triduana, gained a new function as the burial place of
the prominent local family of Logan of Restalrig: J. N. Logan Home, History of the
Logan Family (Edinburgh, 1934), 25‒8.
may well be relevant in James’ foundation.39 Significantly, there is no trace

of any specifically monastic building (e.g. cloister, refectory, or chapter-house)
at Restalrig, but none such would have been necessary: the celebrants in the
king’s chapel would have been neither eremitical nor coenobitic, but seculars
attached to the college that was institutionally linked with the neighbouring
church.40 It is not surprising, therefore, that at a somewhat later date the
parish church was extended westward to occlude the original entrance to the
hexagonal chapel, thereby incorporating into a single building (if awkwardly)
the two principal components of the Restalrig complex.41 This would natu-
rally account for the subsequent frequent designation of Restalrig chapel as
an ‘aisle’, though it was never an aisle in the normal sense: the floor of the
upper chapel was some eight feet above that of the church, and access from
church to chapel, after both were conjoined, was only possible via a narrow
flight of steps, with a right-angle turn making processions difficult.42 There
could never have been any natural or easy connection – whether visual or
aural – between the ceremonies taking place in the church and those in the
chapel: though Restalrig chapel might have been called an aisle, it would
remain more like an oratory, a place for exclusive and private royal devotions.
It was suggested above that Mary of Gueldres might have brought a strain
of Burgundian devotional practice with her to Scotland. The same cannot
automatically be presumed of Margaret of Denmark, but that is not to rule
out the possibility that, once at the Scottish court, she may have displayed a
comparable pattern of behaviour. Margaret is recorded as having been a
notably pious lady, and after her death James III supplicated for her canoni-
sation.43 Shortly into the new reign (1490) an Italian vita was written by
Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, and seven years later a Latin version was
composed by the humanist Jacopo Foresti da Bergamo.44 Not since Turgot’s
vita of St Margaret (early twelfth century) had a Scottish queen been so
honoured. In assessments of James III and his queen allowance should be
made for the operation of personal piety, while always conceding the
inevitable mixture of motives that characterised royal behaviour: one modern
historian has observed that ‘James had been as devout as Margaret throughout
39 Masses for the souls of James and Margaret were indeed to be said in Restalrig chapel
in perpetuity: ibid., 28‒35.
40 As has been noted, it was only in 1512 that prebends were actually appointed: see note
32, above.
41 At Beelitz and other German churches similar incorporations of originally separate
chapels occurred: Hoffmann-Axthelm, ‘ Das Wunderblut’, 208‒20.
42 See the gound plan diagrams in MacIvor, ‘The King’s Chapel’, opposite pp. 258, 260
and 262.
43 Rosalind K. Marshall, Scottish Queens, 1034‒1714 (East Linton, 2003), 82.
44 S. B. Chandler, ‘An Italian Life of Margaret, Queen of James III’, SHR 32 (1953),
52‒7; Joanne Sabadino de li Arienti, Gynevera de le Clare Donne, eds Corrado Ricci
and A. Bacchi della Lega (Bologna, 1968), 312‒20.
his life’.45 John Ireland wrote for the king a treatise (unfortunately now lost)
de auxilio speciali – a theological concept particularly associated with Gregory
of Rimini (d.1358), which holds that, in addition to dispositional grace, God’s
‘special help’ is necessary in making possible an individual’s virtuous act of
volition.46 James, the dedicatee of this book by his own confessor, should
perhaps be credited with having read it, and he may even have been influ-
enced by it. Hector Boece noted that James could not pass any image of either
Christ or the Virgin without bursting into tears.47 On the other hand, any
display of such emotionally charged, Burgundian-style heightened piety,
however much that may have been characteristic of contemporary royal
devotion, was quite likely to have struck many of James’ less impressionable
and susceptible nobles as abnormal, excessive and possibly rebarbative, and
the grievance could only have been all the greater, the more it were perceived
as leading the king to divert considerable sums of money to such a project as
Restalrig chapel. Behaviour of this sort could all too easily be misrepresented
as emotional instability coupled with avarice.
Macdougall has given a résumé of James’ complicated negotiations in the

matter of the duchy of Gueldres, to which the Scottish king had a theoreti-
cally good claim: unfortunately, the acquisitive Realpolitik of Charles the Bold
was to prove the stronger force, and the duchy passed into Burgundian
control in 1473.48 The great attraction that Gueldres must have had for James
is insufficiently appreciated today. As a territory, it was probably richer than
Scotland; from the latter, however, it would have been easily reachable, since
it bounded on the Zuiderzee.49 Gueldres, with inclusion of the county of
Zutphen, and in its four ‘quarters’, was considerably larger than the modern
Dutch province of Gelderland, and its total area was about the size of central
Scotland. Gueldres, moreover, extended into what is now Germany, wherein
45 Marshall, Scottish Queens, 83. Macdougall (‘The sources’, 23) had noted that Adam
Abell, writing in 1533, was impressed by James’ devotion. On royal piety see
MacDonald, ‘Princely culture’, 160‒4.
46 R. J. Lyall, ‘The lost literature of medieval Scotland’, in McClure and Spiller (eds),
Bryght Lanternis, 33‒47, at p. 38. On Gregory and auxilium speciale see Alexander
Broadie, The Tradition of Scottish Philosophy (Edinburgh, 1990), 70‒3.
47 Boece, Murthlacensium Vitae, ed. Moir, 52.
48 Macdougall (2009), 115‒21. See also Gerard Nijsten, In the Shadow of Burgundy: the
Court of Guelders in the Late Middle Ages, trans. Tanis Guest (Cambridge, 2004).
49 For a recent map, see G. G. Hellinga, Hertogen van Gelre (Zutphen, 2012), 22. On the
importance of Gueldres see David Ditchburn, ‘The place of Gueldres in Scottish
foreign policy, c.1449–c.1542’, in Grant G. Simpson (ed.), Scotland and the Low Coun-
tries, 1124‒1994 (East Linton, 1996), 59‒75.
it possessed several exclaves. Such an alluring prize would not be undervalued

by any Scottish king, and it is not surprising that the dream of gaining
Gueldres lived on in the mind of James IV. Importantly, Gueldres was a
dukedom under the Holy Roman Empire (as was the larger part of the
Burgundian state itself), and it may be that this fact had some influence upon
the ‘imperialist’ thinking of James III,50 and that the fame of Burgundy
inspired some of what Jenny Wormald has called ‘James’ exalted ideas of
kingship’.51 Since the marriage (1477) of Maximilian I to Mary of Burgundy,
the only child of Charles the Bold, most of Burgundy had fallen under
Habsburg control, and it is at least thinkable that the unsuccessful embassy
to Worms led by Elphinstone in 1495, which tried to negotiate a marriage
between the young James IV and Maximilian’s daughter Margaret,52 is to be
placed in the envisioned context of a Scotland–Gueldres–Burgundy nexus.
The reigns of James II, III and IV are those of the ‘Burgundian moment’
within the history of Scotland, and, despite the peripety of 1488, there is a very
real cultural continuity between the decades before and after Sauchieburn.
Just as the death of Charles the Bold did not mean the end of the cultural
eminence of Burgundy, which continued as part of the ever larger territorial
areas ruled by Maximilian I and Charles V, so the death of James III had little
effect on the culture of late medieval Scotland, though most of the credit for
the latter has usually been assigned to James IV.53 Robert Henryson, whose
poems doubtless have a bearing on conditions under James III, lived on into
the 1490s.54 John Ireland’s Meroure of Wysdome was actually composed for
James III, though it was smartly rededicated to the new sovereign.55 The
important poetry anthology assembled for Henry, third lord Sinclair, collected
the courtly verse that had been esteemed in fifteenth-century Scotland and
50 Roger A. Mason, ‘This realm of Scotland is an empire? Imperial ideas and iconog-
raphy in early renaissance Scotland’, in Barbara E. Crawford (ed.), Church, Chronicle
and Learning in Medieval and Early Renaissance Scotland (Edinburgh, 1999), 73‒91;
Tanner, ‘James III’.
51 Jenny Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland, 1470‒1625 (London, 1981), 19.
52 Norman Macdougall, James IV (Edinburgh, 1989), 119. Only in 1543 was Gueldres
fully integrated with the provinces of the Spanish-Habsburg Netherlands.
53 The continuity is stressed in MacDonald, ‘Princely culture’, passim. Needless to say,
this is in no way to diminish the genuine cultural achievement under James IV, the
appreciation whereof requires no depreciation of the previous reign. Roderick Lyall
has given a succinct, and very positive, account of Scottish culture under James III:
‘The court as a cultural centre’, in Jenny Wormald (ed.), Scotland Revisited (London,
1991), 36‒48, at p. 42.
54 The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. Denton Fox (Oxford, 1981). Henryson died some-
time before 1505.
55 J. H. Burns, ‘John Ireland: theology and public affairs in the late fifteenth century’,
IR 41 (1990), 21‒42; J. H. Burns, The True Law of Kingship: Concepts of Monarchy in
Early-Modern Scotland (Oxford, 1996), 20‒39.
so preserved it for later readers.56 Likewise, the career of the Observant Fran-
ciscan William of Touris lay in both reigns, though his poetic magnum opus,
the Contemplacioun of Synnaris (c.1497), was written for the penitential Easter
retreats of James IV.57 In relation to James and Margaret, the works of
Sabadino, Foresti and Touris may perhaps be seen, if in different ways, as
manifestations of a wider impulse of the 1490s, tending towards the discul-
pation of James IV. In architecture, music, art and in the production of manu-
scripts there was likewise no caesura at 1488, and in all these areas the late
medieval and generally Burgundian-style cultural patterns continued: the
latter could be transmitted to Scotland either directly from the Low Coun-
tries, or through France or the Empire, since Burgundy was closely linked
with both.58
VI
As far as culture is concerned, the idea of a new start under James IV seems
to be a myth created by early modern historians and maintained at the present
day. While there is no need to go into denial about the genuine inadequacies
and mistakes of James III, a consideration of the role of kingly piety may
supply as good an explanation of the contemporary aversion to James III as
can come from the invocation, faute de mieux, of mere ‘personality politics’.59
Though the career of James III in the sphere of government may seem in
many respects a study in failure, he did not alienate every noble and he
retained the loyalty of important intellectuals and counsellors, such as John
Ireland and William Elphinstone; as Macfarlane has observed, the contem-
porary literary works ‘do not blame the king himself ’.60 For Gordon
Donaldson, James was ‘the royal enigma’, and Macdougall has well said that
56 The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and ‘The Kingis Quair’: a facsimile of Bodleian Library,
Oxford, MS Arch. Selden. B. 24, eds Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards, with an
appendix by B. C. Barker-Benfield (Cambridge, 1997).
57 Alasdair A. MacDonald, ‘Catholic devotion into Protestant lyric: the case of the
Contemplacioun of Synnaris’, IR 35 (1984), 58‒87.
58 Cultural influences on Scotland from the Low Countries in the fifteenth century are
largely synonymous with influences from Burgundy. See Alexander Stevenson,
‘Medieval Scottish associations with Bruges’, in Terry Brotherstone and David
Ditchburn (eds), Freedom and Authority: Scotland, c.1050–c.1650. Historical and
Historiographical Essays presented to Grant G. Simpson (East Linton, 2000), 93‒107;
David Ditchburn, Scotland and Europe: The Medieval Kingdom and its Contacts with
Christendom, c.1215‒1545: vol. i: Religion, Culture and Commerce (East Linton, 2001),
especially ch. 3, ‘The cultural bonds’, pp. 93‒137. In the older scholarly literature,
however, this connection was insufficiently recognised.
59 Tanner, ‘James III’, 226.
60 Macfarlane, William Elphinstone, 187.
‘it is at least possible that James III was not so much the victim of unworthy
familiars as of missing evidence’.61 The reductionist view, that James was ‘a
bad king, no more, no less’, may be fair enough if only politics and finances
are taken into account, but the evidence from culture, religion and literature
also requires to be considered, even though the resulting picture, though
fuller, may remain enigmatic.
61 Gordon Donaldson, Scottish Kings (2nd edn, London, 1977), 96; Macdougall (2009),
247.
chapter 12
Beyond the Declaration of Arbroath:

Kingship, Counsel and Consent in Late
Medieval and Early Modern Scotland
ROGER A. MASON
The Declaration of Arbroath of 1320 is a remarkable document. By any

standards, it is a uniquely succinct and effective expression of medieval regnal
solidarity under a monarch who reigns only on condition that he maintains
the kingdom’s freedom from foreign over-lordship.1 Addressed to Pope
John XXII by ‘the barons, freeholders and the whole community of the realm
of Scotland’, it begins with an account of the Scottish people’s ancient origins,
their early conversion to Christianity, and the cruelty of Edward I towards a
kingdom made vulnerable by the crisis of a disputed kingship. It then goes
on to say that the Scots have been set free by ‘our most valiant prince, king,
and lord’, Robert Bruce, who ‘like another Maccabeus or Joshua’ has
delivered Scotland out of the hands of its enemies and whose rule is
sanctioned by divine providence, rightful succession, and ‘the due consent
and assent of us all’. Yet, it proceeds, while King Robert’s rule may be triply
legitimate – sealed by God, hereditary right and the consent of the people –
it is assuredly not unconditional. On the contrary, in an oft-quoted passage,
it states that:
… if he [Robert] should give up what he has begun, seeking to make us or our
kingdom subject to the king of England or the English, we would strive at once
to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own right and ours, and
we would make some other man who was able to defend us our king. For as
long as a hundred of us remain alive, we will never on any conditions be
subjected to the lordship of the English. For we fight not for glory nor riches
nor honours, but for freedom alone, which no good man gives up except with
his life.
61 For the translation used here, see A. A. M. Duncan, The Nation of Scots and the Decla-
ration of Arbroath (Historical Association, London, 1970); see also James Fergusson,
The Declaration of Arbroath 1320 (Edinburgh, n.d.); and for a recent reappraisal,
Geoffrey Barrow (ed.), The Declaration of Arbroath: History, Significance, Setting
(Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2003).
Even leaving aside the final Sallustian flourish, it is not surprising that the
blend of patriotism and political radicalism that these lines encapsulate has
become a focus of consuming pride to many modern Scots. Nor is it
surprising that the Declaration is often taken to be an expression of a distinc-
tively Scottish attitude to government – at once independent of foreign inter-
ference and accountable to the people – that has allegedly defined Scottish
political culture from that day to this. After all, such a self-congratulatory
story speaks eloquently – if hardly accurately – of the Scots’ contribution to
the creation of modern liberal democracy.
This whiggish view is presumably not one to which Jenny Wormald would
subscribe. We are all hugely indebted to her pioneering assault on the old
‘thud and blunder’ view of late medieval Scotland, and its replacement by a
much more nuanced understanding of the relationship between crown,
magnates and community that is characterised as much by co-operation and
consent as by confrontation and dissent. Yet, paradoxically, the revisionism
that took its cue from Wormald’s iconoclasm has made the continuing
influence of the Declaration’s principles of contractual monarchy all the more
plausible. Certainly, though probably irrespective of academic revisionism,
the Declaration has come to be seen as Scotland’s Magna Carta, the ur-text
of a tradition of Scottish political thought and practice that in turn defines
Scotland’s unique constitutional – and cultural – identity. Just as Scottish
civil society is said to be less hierarchical and deferential, more caring and
communitarian, more egalitarian and populist than everywhere in general,
but England in particular, so the new Scottish Parliament is said to be the
‘people’s parliament’, founded, not on the reactionary (English) doctrine of
parliamentary sovereignty, but on the progressive (Scottish) principle of
popular sovereignty. And in support of these views there has developed a
reassuringly flattering story of how such democratic principles – like the well-
worn trope of the democratic intellect – are rooted in Scotland’s history, if
not in the Scottish psyche itself. In 2006 the then presiding officer of the
Scottish Parliament, George Reid, wrote in celebration of George Buchanan’s
five hundredth birthday that, in his famous political treatise De Iure Regni
apud Scotos Dialogus (1579), Buchanan:
had gathered together the essence of a Scottish constitutional tradition and
passed it on to those who followed. The theory of contractual sovereignty,
where the public good of the community comes first, runs all the way from
the Declaration of Arbroath through the National Covenant, the Solemn
League [and Covenant], the thinking of Enlightenment philosophers like
Dugald Stewart, the writing of Robert Burns, the Disruption, the early
socialist and nationalist agitators, to the Constitutional Convention and its
Claim of Right signed by MPs and representatives of civic Scotland in 1988:
‘We acknowledge the sovereign right of the Scottish people to determine the
form of government best suited to their needs.’ Almost 500 years after the birth
of Buchanan, on the opening day of the new Scottish Parliament,
KINGSHIP, COUNSEL AND CONSENT 267
parliamentarians and people burst spontaneously into the singing of A Man’s

a Man – not just the universal hymn of humanity, but a reaffirmation of the
sovereignty of the people. I think George Buchanan, himself a member of the
old Scots Parliament, would have been fine pleased.2
Perhaps. In any event, Reid is tapping into a set of beliefs, and an associated
narrative, that requires a serious suspension of historical disbelief to be
remotely credible. All cultures and communities like to think they are
different and exceptional, and Scotland is no exception in thinking itself
exceptional – or in promoting a self-congratulatory pseudo-history to prove
it. Indeed the narrative of Scottish constitutional exceptionalism has gone
global. In 1998 the United States Senate passed Resolution 155, establishing
6 April, the date of the signing of the Declaration of Arbroath, as Tartan (now
Scotland) Day, and stating confidently, not to say casually, the entirely erro-
neous view that ‘the American Declaration of Independence was modelled
on that inspirational document’.3 And it is not just the resolution’s proposer,
the former Republican Senator for Mississippi, Trent Lott, who would like
to believe that America’s Founding Fathers drew inspiration from the Scottish
tradition of populist political thought. Ted Cowan would clearly like to believe
it too, though he is too good a historian not ultimately to admit that there is
precious little evidence that the Declaration of Arbroath exerted any direct
influence over early modern Scots, let alone colonial Americans.4
And there’s the rub. For those who would like to see the Declaration of
Arbroath as the fountainhead of Scottish political radicalism, the founding
document of Scottish constitutionalism, animating Scottish political culture
from that day to this, it is seriously problematic that for over 350 years after
its composition virtually no one actually referred to it. It is true that a copy
was transmitted to posterity via Walter Bower’s mid-fifteenth-century
Scotichronicon, but there is no evidence of it ever being invoked or acted upon
in disputes between late medieval barons and their over-mighty Stewart
monarchs; no mention of it in the historical writings of John Mair and Hector
Boece; no evidence of radical Protestant reformers like John Knox being at
all familiar with it; no evidence that Buchanan had ever set eyes on it or that
his most famous pupil James VI (and I) saw it as a threat to his divine right to
rule; no evidence that Covenanters like Samuel Rutherford and Alexander
62 George Buchanan, A Dialogue on the Law of Kingship among the Scots [De Iure Regni
apud Scotos Dialogus], ed. and trans. Roger A. Mason and Martin S. Smith (Saltire
Society, Edinburgh, 2006), pp. ii–iii; a quite contrary view is expressed in the editor’s
introduction (ibid., 20). On Buchanan as a parliamentarian, see below, note 38.
63 For the full text of the resolution, and a critique of the historical understanding that
lay behind it, see Euan Hague, ‘National Tartan Day: rewriting history in the United
States’, Scottish Affairs 38 (2002), 94‒124.
64 Edward J. Cowan, ‘For Freedom Alone’: The Declaration of Arbroath, 1320 (East Linton,
2003).
Henderson had ever heard of it; and no evidence that the seventeenth-century
lawyers Thomas Craig and Viscount Stair even knew of its existence. In fact,
far from being influential, the Declaration of Arbroath was to all intents and
purposes invisible until, ironically, it was published in the original Latin in
1680 by that out-and-out royalist, Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh,
‘bluidy Mackenzie’, the scourge of Restoration religious dissenters, whose
aim in doing so was to lend weight to the mythical antiquity of Scottish
kingship and emphatically not to support its historically elective nature.5
In short, narratives of Scottish constitutional exceptionalism based on the
enduring influence of the Declaration of Arbroath have little or no evidence
to support them. However, this is not to deny that there were traditions of
political discourse of broadly constitutionalist bent that informed political
practice in late medieval and early modern Scotland. Indeed, in what follows
it will be argued that there were at least three of them, and that in different
ways and to different extents, these modes of discourse spoke to issues of
kingship, counsel and consent in terms that might well define the Scottish
monarchy as founded on a contract that rendered the crown accountable to
the people (or at least their representatives). By sketching out the basic
parameters of these traditions, it is hoped that a more historically sensitive
understanding of the ways in which the relationship between the crown and
the community was conceived in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries will
emerge. In order to achieve this, however, two important caveats need to be
introduced. It must be borne in mind, first, that traditions of political radi-
calism were met and matched by countervailing traditions of conservative
thinking – royalist ideologies that preferred to vest sovereignty in the person
of the prince rather than the collective unwisdom of the people; and second,
that these were not peculiarly Scottish traditions but modes of thought of
European currency that might be given a Scottish inflexion but were by no
means unique to Scotland.
The first of these traditions was ecclesiastical conciliarism, the movement

associated with the fifteenth-century councils of Constance (1414‒18) and
Basle (1431‒49) that challenged the absolutist pretensions of the papal
monarchy by arguing that the pope must be subject to a council representative
65 Fergusson, Declaration of Arbroath, 37‒41; Clare Jackson, Restoration Scotland, 1660‒

1690: Royalist Politics, Religion and Ideas (Woodbridge, 2003), 64‒5. The first English
translation was published appropriately enough in 1689; see Caroline Erskine, ‘George
Buchanan, English Whigs and royalists, and the canon of political theory’, in Caroline
Erskine and Roger A. Mason (eds), George Buchanan: Political Thought in Early
Modern Britain and Europe (Farnham, 2012), 229‒45.
of the church as a whole.6 This proved remarkably fertile ground for the
development of secular theories of popular sovereignty and the accountability
of kings to their subjects throughout Europe. Moreover, in the figure of the
prolific scholastic logician, philosopher and theologian, John Mair (1467‒
1550), conciliarism had a Scottish representative of genuinely international
stature. Mair studied and taught at the Sorbonne for twenty-five years before
returning to Scotland in 1518 to teach first at Glasgow University and subse-
quently at St Andrews. A towering figure in the world of late scholastic
learning, Mair is seen by historians of political thought such as Quentin
Skinner as a crucial transitional figure who was instrumental in making the
medieval heritage of libertarian ideas available to the early modern world –
and the fact that Mair certainly taught George Buchanan and probably taught
John Knox lends weight to this view.7 But this is not the place to retrace what
Francis Oakley long ago called the road from Constance to 1688.8 It is more
important in this context to try and locate Mair in broader traditions of late
medieval philosophy in order to explore the extent to which his conciliar
politics were more widely disseminated in Scotland. In particular it is worth
asking whether his brand of radical scholasticism was routinely taught at the
three new universities founded in fifteenth-century Scotland: St Andrews
(1413), Glasgow (1451) and King’s College, Aberdeen (1495).9
This is a particularly tricky enterprise, firstly, because the extant sources
relating to what was taught in the Scottish universities are extremely thin,
and secondly, because it requires an understanding of the complexities of late
medieval academic philosophy that only a genuine specialist can claim to
possess. Still, with the latter proviso particularly in mind, it is worth at least
broaching these issues in the light of one of the few recent interventions on
the subject of the Declaration of Arbroath that actually has something new
to say. This is a brief piece by the historian of philosophy, Alexander Broadie,
in which he argues that the authors of the Declaration may well have been
influenced by the writings of John Duns Scotus (1266‒1308), the celebrated
Franciscan theologian, who may have been Scottish, but spent his adult life
at the universities of Oxford and Paris, before moving to Cologne in 1307
66 The literature is immense, but for a useful starting point, see J. H. Burns (ed.), The
Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c.350–c.1450 (Cambridge, 1988), esp.
chs 17‒18.
67 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (2 vols, Cambridge,
1978), esp. vol. 2, 42‒7, 117‒23, 342‒5.
68 Francis Oakley, ‘On the road from Constance to 1688: the political thought of John
Major and George Buchanan’, Journal of British Studies 1 (1962), 1‒31.
69 What follows is greatly indebted to Isla Woodman, ‘Education and Episcopacy: The
Universities of Scotland in the Fifteenth Century’, unpublished PhD thesis
(University of St Andrews, 2010), and to many conversations with Dr Woodman about
her research.
where he died the following year.10 Scotus was thus a near contemporary of
the Scottish clerics who composed the Declaration, and Broadie points to
some striking parallels between Scotus’ highly original ideas on free will,
authority and consent and the conditional nature of Robert Bruce’s kingship
as set out in the Declaration. Broadie does not claim to have presented
conclusive evidence of Scotus’ influence on the Declaration as such, but even
if it proves impossible to make such a categorical connection, Broadie’s work
on late medieval Scottish philosophy more generally has demonstrated how
thinkers like John Mair were acutely conscious of the debt they owed to
Scotus.11 And this in turn prompts one to ask how prevalent Scotist thinking
was in the fifteenth-century Scottish universities and what, if any, implica-
tions this might have had for the reception and dissemination of theories of
limited, contractual monarchy based on the need for ‘popular’ consent?
Scotus is generally considered a transitional figure between what became
known as the via antiqua of Thomas Aquinas (1226‒1274) and Albert the
Great (1190‒1280) and the via moderna, the new approach to theology and
philosophy pioneered by the English Franciscan William of Occam (c.1285‒
1349). The conflict of ‘moderns’ and ‘ancients’ is often characterised as one
between ‘nominalists’ and ‘realists’ respectively. Defining it solely in terms
of the issue of universals does not always work – Scotus was in this respect a
realist – but there did develop in late medieval Europe a broad range of radical
scholastic thinking, owing much to Scotus as well as Occam, and often
described as nominalist, which questioned the prevailing Thomist–Albertist
view of the rationality of God’s creation and the ordered, hierarchical and,
in political terms, conservative understanding of the world to which this gave
rise. Instead, Scotists and Occamists argued that God was inscrutable, unpre-
dictable and inaccessible to reason. As a result they privileged faith over
reason, circumscribing man’s ability to subject God’s creation to rational
analysis, dichotomising man’s intellect and his will, and creating an altogether
edgier and more contingent world than the comfortably ordered cosmos of
the Thomists and Albertists. While the latter tended to see political authority
as a necessary part of God’s creation and were as a result sympathetic to the
pretensions of papal – and royal – monarchy, adherents of the via moderna
were more likely to stress the importance of human volition in political society
and to sympathise with both ecclesiastical conciliarism and the doctrines of
popular sovereignty and the consent of the community, which were developed
to underpin challenges to royal as well as papal absolutism.12
10 Alexander Broadie, ‘John Duns Scotus and the idea of independence’, in Edward J.
Cowan (ed.), The Wallace Book (Edinburgh, 2007), 77‒85; see also his A History of
Scottish Philosophy (Edinburgh, 2009), 25‒31.
11 See in particular Alexander Broadie, The Shadow of Scotus: Philosophy and Faith in
Pre-Reformation Scotland (Edinburgh, 1995).
12 For the sources of this bald summary, see the wide range of essays in Norman
John Mair was by no means alone among Scottish academics in acknowl-

edging a debt to Scotus or in associating himself with the via moderna.
Laurence of Lindores, for example, who dominated St Andrews University
from its foundation in 1413 until his death in 1437, was an aggressive propo-
nent of one of Occam’s most influential followers, the Parisian master Jean
Buridan, while John Ireland, theologian of St Andrews and Paris, who even-
tually became James III’s confessor, was an equally combative nominalist.
Although Lindores’ political views are unknown, Ireland was certainly familiar
with conciliarist ideas, while Mair positively endorsed them.13 However, we
do not really know what these academics actually taught the impressionable
teenagers whom they guided through the philosophy curriculum. Aristotle,
to be sure, but in glossing Aristotle’s Politics – or commentators on Aristotle’s
Politics – how did they interpret for their young charges the relative merits
of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy? How did their understanding of
issues of free will and consent shape their attitudes to political authority?
Unfortunately, the available sources are largely silent on these precise
issues, though they do reveal that academic in-fighting between nominalists
and realists dominated the Scottish universities as they did their counterparts
elsewhere.14 Lindores’ grip on St Andrews, for example, led to a formal ban
on Albertist teaching in 1418 (in favour of Buridan), which was only lifted
when Lindores himself died, while Ireland probably left St Andrews after
falling out with its then realist authorities and was certainly involved in having
the ban on nominalist teaching, which was imposed at Paris in 1474, lifted in
1481.15 In fact, although proponents of the via moderna have attracted more
attention from historians, fifteenth-century Scotland shared in a widespread
European reaction against the radical scepticism of the nominalists, and a
deliberate revival of the thinkers of the via antiqua, especially Albert the
Great. As a result it was actually a form of Albertist realism that came to
prevail in the newly founded Scottish universities. At St Andrews, following
the death of Lindores in 1437, there was a concerted effort to re-establish
Kretzman et al. (eds), The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy

(Cambridge, 1982), and Robert Pasnau (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval
Philosophy, 2 vols (Cambridge, 2009), esp. vol. ii, part VII.
13 On Ireland and Mair, see Broadie, History of Scottish Philosophy, chs 3‒4, and J. H.
Burns, The True Law of Kingship: Concepts of Monarchy in Early-Modern Scotland
(Oxford, 1996), ch. 1.
14 For the wider European context, see H. De Ridder-Symoens (ed.), A History of the
University in Europe, vol. i: Universities in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1992), esp.
328‒33 and 438‒41.
15 The most comprehensive study remains John Durkan, ‘The Scottish Universities in
the Middle Ages, 1413‒1560’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Edinburgh,
1959), but see also his William Turnbull Bishop of Glasgow, 1447‒1454 (Glasgow, 1951)
and, with James Kirk, The University of Glasgow, 1451‒1577 (Glasgow, 1977), esp. ch. 4.
Albertism, and the same agenda probably informed the foundation of both
St Salvator’s College by Bishop James Kennedy in 1450 and Glasgow
University by Kennedy’s close friend, Bishop William Turnbull, in 1451.16
It is tempting to see this as, on the one hand, imposing a more conservative
scholastic curriculum in both arts and theology, and, on the other, nurturing
a clerical class trained in law and fit for service in the royal bureaucracy. This
would certainly lend weight to the suggestion that, in the 1460s and 1470s,
there emerged an academic–clerical nexus of royal councillors that set about
countering the potentially subversive politics of the conciliar movement with
assertions of the crown’s ‘imperial’ sovereignty – a sovereignty that was
symbolised in stone when in the early sixteenth century that former Glasgow
student, distinguished lawyer and loyal servant of James IV, Bishop William
Elphinstone, topped the steeple of the chapel of his new university foun-
dation, King’s College, Aberdeen, with a closed imperial crown.17
This has taken us quite some way from John Duns Scotus and the Decla-
ration of Arbroath. But it is an intellectual context that needs to be opened
up, and explored in much more detail, if we are to identify the ways in which
traditions of political radicalism developed in the late middle ages and were
made available to the early modern world. The late J. H. Burns wrote exten-
sively and with enormous erudition on Scottish conciliarism and its contri-
bution to the literature on resistance with which Scotland became so closely
associated in the sixteenth century.18 Yet, as he would undoubtedly have
acknowledged, conciliarism itself needs a wider intellectual context that
encompasses the political philosophy of the via moderna more generally. At
the same time, exploration of the Scotist and Occamist traditions needs to
go beyond the study of individual texts and their authors to an examination
of what was actually taught in the fifteenth-century universities. This in turn
will surely entail recognition of the fact that the via moderna did not go
unchallenged in Scotland, that there were rival and often more powerful
Thomist and especially Albertist camps, and that radical political views on
popular sovereignty, consent and accountability could be matched by highly
sophisticated arguments in support of the absolute and irresistible nature of
monarchical authority.
16 Woodman, ‘Education and Episcopacy’, 53‒63.

17 Ibid., 64‒75; Roland Tanner, ‘James III (1460‒1488)’, in Michael Brown and Roland
Tanner (eds), Scottish Kingship, 1306‒1542: Essays in Honour of Norman Macdougall
(Edinburgh, 2008), 209‒31.
18 In addition to his True Law of Kingship, see especially ‘The conciliarist tradition in
Scotland’, SHR 42 (1963), 89‒104; J. H. Burns, Scottish Churchmen and the Council of
Basle (Glasgow, 1962). One of his last contributions to the field that touches on some
of the themes explored here is ‘Political ideas and parliament’, in Keith M. Brown
and Alan R. MacDonald (eds), The History of the Scottish Parliament, vol. iii:
Parliament in Context, 1235‒1707 (Edinburgh, 2010), 216‒43.
II
In the later middle ages, arguments in defence of papal absolutism were

conducted largely in theological terms or with reference to canon law.
Temporal rulers, however, might turn instead to Roman law and the growing
tendency to exploit the civilists’ doctrine that ‘the king is emperor in his own
kingdom’ (rex in regno suo imperator est).19 Formulated by fourteenth-century
jurists intent on defending the liberties of the Italian city-states against the
encroachments of the Holy Roman Emperor, it was quickly seized upon by
French civil lawyers anxious to assert the autonomy of the French monarchy
in the face of papal claims to temporal as well as spiritual jurisdiction within
the kingdom. From there, imperial ideas were transmitted to Scotland as well
as England and, for the Stewart monarchy, provided firm ideological foun-
dations for the belief – all the more pertinent in the light of the English
crown’s age-old claim to feudal superiority over their kingdom – that they
recognised no superior jurisdiction.
If empire implied autonomy, however, the assertion of jurisdictional self-
sufficiency might also imply something all but indistinguishable from absolute
authority: not only did the crown’s imperial status mean that it denied the
superiority of any external jurisdiction, but it also implied that it recognised
no rival jurisdictions – lay or clerical – within its own territories. Thus when
Henry VIII claimed in 1533 not only that the realm of England was an empire,
but that he possessed ‘plenary, whole, and entire power, pre-eminence,
authority, prerogative and jurisdiction’ over it, he was laying claim to an absolute
sovereignty that was tempered only, if ironically, by being stated in the preamble
to a parliamentary statute.20 The consequent tensions between crown and
parliament, and the history of the peculiarly English doctrine of the sovereignty
of the crown-in-parliament, need not concern us here. Rather what needs to
be emphasised is the fact that contemporary Stewart monarchs were equally
attracted to imperial ideas and, while they did not arrogate to themselves the
full caesaropapal powers that Henry needed to arrange his own divorce, they
were clearly well aware of the domestic as well as the diplomatic advantages of
projecting an image of themselves as emperors in their own kingdom.21
19 For the juristic background, see Burns (ed.), Cambridge History of Medieval Political
Thought, ch. 15 (2); on the development of the idea in Scotland, on which what follows
draws heavily, see Roger A. Mason, ‘This realm of Scotland is an empire? Imperial
ideas and iconography in early Renaissance Scotland’, in Barbara Crawford (ed.),
Church, Chronicle and Learning in Medieval and Early Renaissance Scotland (Edinburgh,
1999), 73‒91.
20 On imperial ideas in England, see in particular J. A. Guy, ‘Thomas Cromwell and the
intellectual origins of the Henrician Reformation’, in Alistair Fox and J. A. Guy,
Reassessing the Henrician Age: Humanism, Politics and Reform, 1500‒1550 (Oxford,
1986), 151‒78.
21 This was particularly, though not exclusively, the case with James V: see Andrea
Admittedly, still more than for Henry VIII, for Stewart kings such as
James III (1460‒88), James IV (1488‒1513) and James V (1513‒42), absolute
power was an aspiration rather than a reality. Nevertheless, it was an aspi-
ration that generated an imperial ideology that needs to be taken into account
when considering the increasing importance of a second source of radical
politics from which sixteenth-century Scots could draw inspiration and
example: classical republicanism. Just as with late medieval philosophy we
need to consider the vitality of the via antiqua as a counterweight to the
influence of the via moderna, so with regard to Renaissance culture we need
to be aware of the attractions of imperial as well as republican Rome.22 For
Renaissance monarchs, a variety of imperial role models were available –
Augustus the Peace-maker, Justinian the Law-giver or Constantine the
Christian warrior; while for those who were sceptical of the imperial ambi-
tions of their monarchs, the more lurid examples of Nero, Caligula and
Domitian sprang more readily to mind. As far as Scotland is concerned, this
counter-point is perhaps best illustrated by the response of James VI to the
republican politics of his erstwhile tutor, George Buchanan, and James’ devel-
opment of a theory of imperial kingship that underscored the ‘free’ and
‘absolute’ authority of the Scottish crown. In doing so, he was deliberately
invoking the imperial self-image of the Stewart dynasty that long predated
the confessional and constitutional revolutions associated with the personal
rule of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, in the 1560s. Buchanan too, in justi-
fying the deposition of Mary on the grounds of her egregious tyranny, could
draw not only on the conciliar ideas of his former teacher, John Mair – though
the extent to which he did so is debatable – but also on the classical spin
imparted to the Scottish past by Hector Boece (c.1465–1536) whose Scotorum
Historia (1527) was a prime source for Buchanan’s own Rerum Scoticarum
Historia (1582).
A friend of Erasmus, deeply committed to the humanist pursuit of
eloquence, Boece wrote his chronicle at least in part as a riposte to the
scholastic approach to the British past pioneered by Mair in his Historia
Majoris Britanniae, tam Angliae quam Scotiae (1521). While Mair set out at
some length arguments for the elective nature of monarchy and the rights of
the people to restrain an errant ruler, he not only did so with great caution,
but avowedly eschewed ‘elegant and highly-coloured language’ in favour of
the syllogistic reasoning of which he was such a distinguished practitioner.23
Thomas, ‘Crown imperial: coronation ritual and regalia in the reign of James V’, in
Julian Goodare and Alasdair A. MacDonald (eds), Sixteenth-Century Scotland: Essays
in Honour of Michael Lynch (Leiden, 2008), 43‒67.
22 For background, see J. H. Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History of Political Thought,
1450‒1700 (Cambridge, 1991), Part I; Charles G. Nauert, Jr, Humanism and the Culture
of Renaissance Europe (Cambridge, 1995).
23 For what follows on Mair and Boece, see Roger A. Mason, Kingship and the
That he was also deeply sceptical of some of the sustaining myths of Scottish
identity, while also putting a case for dynastic union between the Tudor and
Stewart realms, did little to popularise his work in either Scotland or England.
Boece, in contrast, heavily influenced by Livy, composed a history that was
deliberately designed to entertain as well as edify its readers, that took over
and grossly elaborated existing accounts of the Scottish kingdom’s antique
origins and precocious development, and that presented a series of vivid
portraits of early (and fictitious) Scottish kings whose tyrannical behaviour
was met with concerted resistance by a virtuous aristocracy. It is by no means
clear that Boece intended these examples of tyrannicide as constitutional
precedents as opposed simply to moral examplars. What is clear, however, is
that his chronicle combined pride in Scotland’s ancient and essentially martial
heritage with a profound sense of responsibility to the public good. Such a
commitment to res publica was undoubtedly shared by Mair, and it is possible
to argue that in some respects, not least in his apparent desire to create a
soldier–citizenry of lesser landowners, Mair shows evidence of indebtedness
to contemporary strains of civic humanism far in advance of Boece.
Nonetheless, it was Boece, through his enthusiastic and rhetorically effective
blending of chivalric and civic idealism, who spoke more cogently to contem-
porary Scots.
Indeed, his chronicle was almost immediately translated into the
vernacular by John Bellenden (the translator also of the early books of Livy)
and published in Edinburgh in the 1530s with a dedication to King James V.
A noticeable feature of this translation is the frequency with which the term
‘commonweal’ is used, either on its own or in such compound phrases as ‘the
commonweal and liberty of the realm’. The ‘commonweal’ was a recent
addition to the Scottish political vocabulary, rarely used before 1520, but
rapidly supplanting clumsier constructions such as the ‘common profit of
the realm’ or ‘the welfare and public good of the realm’.24 Probably borrowed
from England, and proving particularly appealing to Ciceronian humanists
looking for an equivalent of the Latin res publica, it was more than capable of
bearing the weight of civic and patriotic connotations with which Bellenden
invested it. Moreover, in Bellenden’s usage, the ‘commonweal’ could mean,
not just the welfare of the community, but the actual community whose
welfare was at stake.
However, while clearly intended to imply responsibility for the people, the
idea of the ‘commonweal’ did not necessarily mean accountability to the
people. The classical republican vocabulary of civic activism was by no means
incompatible with monarchy and, particularly in northern Europe, was given
Commonweal: Political Thought in Renaissance and Reformation Scotland (East Linton,

1998), chs 2‒3.
24 Ibid., 97‒8.
a courtly spin that made service to the commonweal indistinguishable

from service to the king. In Scotland, for example, the term occurs with
some frequency in the poetry of the courtier Sir David Lindsay in the 1530s,
and subsequently, in his Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, first performed in 1552,
came to be personified in the figure of John the Commonweal.25 For many
modern commentators, when at a climactic moment of Lindsay’s drama John
is warmly welcomed into the body of the three estates, this is evidence of
Lindsay’s respect for the Scots’ ‘democratic’ traditions of political thought.
However, leaving aside the fact that Lindsay was a courtier – indeed the
guardian of aristocratic status and privilege as Lyon King at Arms – it will
be clear to anyone familiar with sixteenth-century political discourse that the
scene represents the three estates symbolically renouncing the pursuit of
‘singular profit’ and embracing instead a public-spirited commitment to the
common good.26
That said, however, there is no doubt that in Lindsay’s writings there is
evidence of unease when confronted with a situation where the inadequate
exercise of kingship actually jeopardises the commonweal of the realm. This
unease is never articulated in constitutional terms and no attempt is made to
suggest that sovereignty lies with parliament (let alone the people), or that
subjects may legitimately resist tyrannical rulers. Yet, within a few years of
Lindsay’s death in 1555, it was on the grounds that they were defending the
commonweal and liberty of the realm against French tyranny that in 1559‒60
the Lords of the Congregation justified rebellion against duly constituted
authority and brought about a Protestant revolution in Scotland.27 By 1564,
indeed, it was possible for the Protestant minister John Craig to inform the
General Assembly of the new Protestant Kirk that ‘every kingdom is, or at
least should be, a commonwealth, albeit that every commonwealth be not a
kingdom’. George Buchanan could hardly have put it better himself, and in
fact Craig went on to say, in terms more usually associated with Buchanan,
‘that princes are not only bound to keep laws and promises to their subjects,
but also that in case they fail they justly may be deposed; for the band betwixt
the prince and the people is reciprocal’.28 A former Dominican, Craig claimed
to have heard these ideas expounded at the University of Bologna in 1554.
In Scotland in the 1560s, though such ideas were clearly being discussed,
they were hardly commonplace. Indeed, in 1567‒8, those who sought to over-
25 The best study is Carol Edington, Court and Culture in Renaissance Scotland: Sir David
Lindsay of the Mount (Amherst, MA, 1994).
26 David Lindsay, Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, ed. Roderick Lyall (Edinburgh, 1989),
esp. lines 3800‒3816.
27 Roger A. Mason, ‘Covenant and commonweal: the language of politics in Reformation
Scotland’, in Norman Macdougall (ed.), Church, Politics and Society: Scotland, 1408‒
1929 (Edinburgh, 1983), 97‒126.
28 John Knox, On Rebellion, ed. Roger A. Mason (Cambridge, 1994), 206‒8.
throw Mary Stewart did so in the most conservative terms they could
imagine, maintaining legitimate hereditary succession by insisting that Mary
had abdicated voluntarily in favour of her son and heir James VI.29
Nonetheless, the revolutionary events of that decade, culminating in Mary’s
enforced abdication, did lead Buchanan to explore in more detail the impli-
cations of Craig’s remarks.
Thus in his De Iure Regni Buchanan fused his deep commitment to
Ciceronian ideals of active citizenship with an essentially Aristotelian under-
standing of natural law to present a reasoned case for the sovereignty of the
people and the accountability of kings (and queens) to laws enacted by the
people.30 While it is true that there is some ambiguity in Buchanan’s defi-
nition of the people, it is hard to deny either that the De Iure presents the
most thoroughly populist theory of resistance written in the sixteenth century,
or that the tract culminates in a ringing endorsement of the right of any and
every public-spirited citizen to kill a tyrant. That is, he advocated single-
handed tyrannicide – political assassination – in a manner that has long seemed
both puzzling and unnecessary, but that Martin Dzelzainis has now shown
to be a direct lift from Cicero himself.31 Be that as it may, in the present
context, what is particularly noteworthy about Buchanan’s political theory is
that there is nothing particularly Scottish about it. For all that he was osten-
sibly talking about kingship ‘apud Scotos’, his theoretical ideas on citizenship,
consent, resistance and tyrannicide owed little or nothing to specifically
Scottish sources but developed rather out of his direct engagement with the
classical authors, both Greek and Latin, in whose works he was so thoroughly
steeped. It is only when one turns to his history of Scotland, Rerum
Scoticarum Historia (1582), published in the year of his death, and heavily
indebted to the chronicle of Hector Boece, that one can begin to locate
Buchanan within a distinctively Scottish constitutionalist tradition.
III
The idea of an ancient Scottish constitution is one to which Buchanan alludes

in the De Iure Regni, but it is marginal to the theoretical ideas expounded
29 A point reinforced by the new king’s coronation: see Michael Lynch, ‘Scotland’s first
Protestant coronation: revolutionaries, sovereignty and the culture of nostalgia’, in
Luuk Houwen (ed.), Literature and Religion in Late Medieval and Early Modern
Scotland; Essays in Honour of Alasdair A. MacDonald (Leuven, 2012), 177‒207.
30 For a full analysis, see the introduction to George Buchanan, A Dialogue on the Law
of Kingship among the Scots, a critical edition and translation of George Buchanan’s ‘De Iure
Regni apud Scotos Dialogus’, eds Martin S. Smith and Roger A. Mason (Aldershot, 2004).
31 Martin Dzelzainis, ‘The Ciceronian theory of tyrannicide from Buchanan to Milton’,
in Erskine and Mason (eds), Buchanan, 173‒87.
there, and is only really set out in detail in his Historia. It is in this context
that one might reasonably expect him to invoke the Declaration of Arbroath
as exemplifying the constitutional principles that he claims to have been char-
acteristic of Scottish political culture since remote antiquity. That he did not
do so presumably means that he was unaware of it. Yet such ignorance did
not prevent him from re-interpreting the long sweep of Scotland’s history,
including the several fictitious centuries it owed to Boece’s enthusiastic inven-
tiveness, in such a way as to lend massive historical legitimacy to the depo-
sition of Mary Queen of Scots – an act (in Buchanan’s telling) of undoubted
legality that took place according to principles of popular sovereignty and
elective monarchy that had been adhered to by the Scots since the foundation
of the monarchy by Fergus I in 330 BCE. In fact, in the Historia, Buchanan
retreated from the vision of popular participatory politics set out in the De
Iure Regni and, perhaps understandably in a work focused on the past,
presented a more socially conservative view of a civic-minded nobility holding
rulers to account. Another way of looking at the Historia, however, and the
last of three strands of political thought with which this chapter is concerned,
is to see Buchanan as combining the Scots’ traditional belief in the antiquity
and continuity of their monarchy – essential to legitimising the kingdom’s
independent status – with a decidedly pointed gloss on just as traditional a
belief in the nobility’s role as the monarch’s natural born counsellors.
In other words, a characteristic feature of late medieval Scottish political
culture, as of other contemporary kingdoms and principalities, was a form of
aristocratic conciliarism in which the ‘nobility’ – however defined – were
understood to possess a political birthright that entailed both a duty to
counsel the king and a responsibility to ensure the welfare – the commonweal
– of the realm as a whole.32 Moreover, in times of crisis, when the king’s
actions jeopardised the common good, the right to counsel the king might be
supplemented by calls forcibly to resist and restrain him. In Scotland,
responses to the perceived ‘tyranny’ of James I, James II and James III were
sometimes articulated in constitutionalist terms.33 Nevertheless, it is striking
that in fifteenth-century Scotland the right to counsel was very rarely
reformulated in this way, while the more aggressively predatory kingship of
32 We are here entering territory that is very much Jenny Wormald’s own. My under-
standing of Scottish political culture has been profoundly influenced by her seminal
writings, not least one of her earliest forays in the field (as Jennifer M. Brown): ‘The
exercise of power’, in Jennifer M. Brown (ed.), Scottish Society in the Fifteenth Century
(London, 1977), 33‒65.
33 Michael Brown, ‘“I have thus slain a tyrant”: The Dethe of the King of Scotis and the
right to resist in early fifteenth century Scotland’, IR 47 (1996), 24‒44. More generally,
see Roland Tanner, The Late Medieval Scottish Parliament: Politics and the Three Estates
1424‒1488 (East Linton, 2001), and Keith M. Brown and Roland J. Tanner (eds), The
History of the Scottish Parliament, vol. i: Parliament and Politics in Scotland, 1235‒1560
(Edinburgh, 2004).
James IV and James V never appears to have elicited a more aggressively

‘populist’ response. The secret may be that, on the one hand, many Scots
actually appreciated the smack of firm government (provided that government
did not tax them);34 while on the other hand, however imperial and imperious
they liked to appear, both James IV and James V were successful monarchs
precisely because they recognised the need for counsel and ‘consent’. Parlia-
ment – the three estates – was undoubtedly acknowledged to be the insti-
tution in which the community was most fully represented and where the
king and community together made the law. Nonetheless, it was still possible
for James IV to reign for extended periods and with considerable effect
without summoning parliament at all. Instead, he made far greater use of less
formal general councils (meetings of the nobility that could be called at rela-
tively short notice) or enlarged royal councils – consultative bodies that were
more or less representative of competing factional interests in the kingdom.35
There were, in short, a number of more or less formal mechanisms
through which counsel could be offered to the king and, if in Scotland these
were less well differentiated in their functions, and less bound by precedent,
this is understandable in a kingdom where power was historically devolved
to regional magnates, where the crown’s authority was relatively circum-
scribed (though by no means insignificant), and where a legal profession
existed only embryonically and largely as an extension of the royal bureau-
cracy.36 Certainly, in the course of the sixteenth century, Scottish government
became more intensive, central authority more intrusive, taxation more
regular, the royal bureaucracy more specialised in the functions of its various
departments, and a self-regulated and self-aware lay legal profession began
to emerge. Yet this was less a ‘revolution in government’ than a series of
haphazard responses to changing circumstances.37 As for Buchanan, Privy
Councillor as well as parliamentarian that he may have been, so thin and
imprecise are his descriptions of Scottish constitutional mechanisms, that
counsel appears much more important than the councils through which it is
34 For this kind of approach, see Leslie Macfarlane, William Elphinstone and the Kingdom
of Scotland, 1431‒1514: The Struggle for Order (Aberdeen, 1985); on the growing
stature of the Stewart dynasty, founded on hereditary right, see Roger A. Mason,
‘Renaissance monarchy? Stewart kingship (1469‒1542)’, in Brown and Tanner (eds),
Scottish Kingship, 255‒78.
35 Norman Macdougall, ‘The estates in eclipse? Politics and parliaments in the reign of
James IV’, in Brown and Tanner (eds), The Scottish Parliament, vol. i, 145‒59. James V
was similarly less reliant on parliament: see Brown and Tanner, ‘Introduction:
parliament and politics in Scotland, 1235‒1560’, ibid., 22‒5.
36 For two important recent studies of law and the legal profession, see John Finlay, Men
of Law in Pre-Reformation Scotland (East Linton, 2000), and A. M. Godfrey, Civil
Justice in Renaissance Scotland: The Origins of a Central Court (Leiden, 2009).
37 See Julian Goodare, The Government of Scotland 1560‒1625 (Oxford, 2004), esp. ch. 12,
which addresses the Eltonian question: ‘A Stewart Revolution in Government?’
offered and sought.38 This may simply be a recognition on Buchanan’s part

of how deeply-rooted baronial conciliarism was in Scottish political culture,
not just in terms of how kings maintained peace and justice throughout the
kingdom, but equally in terms of how the aristocracy – lowland magnates as
well as highland chiefs – maintained peace and justice in their regions by
holding councils of their leading kin and clients. Informal, and leaving no
written records, such meetings were nonetheless critical to the effective
exercise of aristocratic power in the localities, and hint at the extent to which
the apparently all-powerful authority of the heads of the great Scottish
kindreds was circumscribed by the need to ensure the loyalty and support of
their extended family and friends. As Wormald has herself put it: ‘References
to people seeking the counsel of their kin and men are numerous, so much so
that one gets the impression that no-one ever did anything without mulling
it over first’.39 Seen in this light, Buchanan’s ancient constitutionalism may
be no more than an idealisation of a highly traditional form of baronial concil-
iarism – as applicable to the crown as to the aristocracy – in which the quasi-
contractual basis of their authority – the tacit recognition of the need for
consensus and consent – is restated in explicitly contractual terms.
Quite clearly, this is not only a key area where political theory intersects
with political practice, but is also one that needs a good deal of detailed
research to flesh out both the actual workings of baronial conciliarism at local
as well national level, and the extent to which it was informed by or developed
in response to wider intellectual discussions of sovereignty and consent. On
the face of it, it may seem more likely that influence and example flowed in
the other direction, and that theorists rationalised existing practice. In recent
Tudor historiography it has become commonplace to follow Patrick
Collinson’s lead and talk of an Elizabethan ‘monarchical republic’, an expe-
dient hybrid that, because of immediate and urgent issues of gender and the
succession, combined commitment to monarchy with republican concepts of
civic responsibility, consent and elective monarchy.40 Thus far Collinson’s
idea has not been applied to Scotland, where arguably the issues raised by
Mary Queen of Scots’ gender and the succession were every bit as pressing
38 As keeper of the privy seal (1570‒8), Buchanan was an ex officio member of the Privy
Council and could have attended parliaments. However, if he was present at any
meeting of the three estates, the extant parliamentary records do not note the occasion,
while his involvement with the Privy Council was minimal. His political activities are
discussed in Buchanan, A Dialogue on the Law of Kingship, eds Mason and Smith
(2004), pp. xxxii–xlv.
1985), 95‒6.
40 Patrick Collinson, ‘The monarchical republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, in John Guy
(ed.), The Tudor Monarchy (London, 1997), 110‒34; John F. McDiarmid (ed.), The
Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson
(Aldershot, 2008).
as those confronting Elizabeth’s councillors, and where in Buchanan’s De

Iure Regni we find what is arguably the most complete and thorough-going
defence of monarchical republicanism to emerge from the sixteenth century.
How much traction such ideas had among the political elite is much harder
to gauge. It is true that, by the time James VI began ruling his kingdom in
person, a humanist education was the norm for the lay elite in Scotland, as it
was in England, and some familiarity with classical republican literature such
as Cicero’s De Officiis could probably be taken for granted.41 Nonetheless, it
would be unwise to assume that royal courtiers and councillors were alto-
gether comfortable as citizens rather than subjects. After all, these were
intensely conservative, hierarchical societies in which honour, privilege and
deference were prized rather than despised and where republican politics
were seen as a grave threat to the status quo. It was only in extremis that ideas
of elective monarchy would be invoked or that the nobility would seriously
consider their rights as active citizens to trump their duties as loyal subjects.
Not surprisingly, therefore, if Buchanan was at the heart of a British
‘republican moment’, it proved momentary indeed. James VI and I emphat-
ically preferred subjects to citizens and, with the issues of gender and
succession settled in both Scotland and England in 1603, it was possible to
reassert the crown’s imperial sovereignty jurisdictionally, while glorying in it
territorially. James also of course responded formally to what he saw as the
threat to Stewart kingship posed by his former tutor’s political ideas and
developed his own theory of the divine right of kings to counter them. Thus
in the Trew Lawe of Free Monarchies (1598) he explicitly denied the historicity
of Buchanan’s ancient Scottish constitution, insisting that Fergus I ruled by
conquest rather than consent and that parliament was simply the king’s ‘head
courte’ that existed (and legislated) at royal command.42 That said, however,
although for James recognition of and obedience to his ultimate sovereignty
were imperatives, his absolutism was tempered by awareness of the practical
limits of royal authority. Like the more successful of his Stewart predecessors,
at least during his personal rule in Scotland, James VI was clearly intent on
including his ‘born counsellors’ in the processes of government, while recog-
nising the importance of consultation through whatever conciliar channels
seemed appropriate to the occasion. Alan MacDonald has recently compiled
the astonishing statistic that between 1585 and 1603 the king summoned a
convention of the three estates on average every three months – a remarkable
level of consultation with which his tutor might well have been fine pleased.43
41 See Keith M. Brown, Noble Society in Scotland: Wealth, Family and Culture from
Reformation to Revolution (Edinburgh, 2000), 196‒201.
42 James VI and I, Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Somerville (Cambridge, 1994), 62‒84.
43 Alan R. MacDonald, ‘Consultation and consent under James VI’, Historical Journal
54 (2011), 287‒306.
IV
This story does not of course end with James VI’s removal to London in 1603.
On the contrary, just as over the ensuing decades the union of the crowns led
to acute constitutional strains both within and between the Stewarts’ multiple
monarchy, so it created crises of counsel and consent that came close to
destroying it altogether. Space precludes further consideration of how these
themes worked themselves out in the seventeenth century. Likewise, it is not
possible to explore the additional modes of thought, not least the intense
Biblicism that became characteristic of post-Reformation Scotland, and that
helped shape Scottish responses to absentee monarchy and a kingless
kingdom. Nevertheless, what should be clear enough already is that, if late
medieval Scotland did not after all incubate modern democracy, if the Decla-
ration of Arbroath is notable only for its absence, the political culture of late
medieval and early modern Scotland is no less rich and interesting for that.
chapter 13
Royal Gifts and Gift-Exchange in

Sixteenth-Century Anglo-Scottish Politics
FELICITY HEAL
In the eleventh chapter of the first book of Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes

considers men’s social behaviour and its relationship to power. One of the
most important issues is that of giving and receiving benefits. When men
receive greater benefits from an equal than they can readily requite it
‘disposeth to counterfeit love’, but breeds actual hatred because benefits oblige,
and obligation ‘is thraldom’. On the other hand, if requital can be made, then
there is a positive affirmation of affection, and the acceptance of mutual aid
and benefit.1 Earlier Hobbes links this explicitly to the process of gifting:
to give great gifts to a man, is to honour him; because it is buying of protection
and acknowledging of power. To give little gifts is to dishonour; because it is
but alms, and signifies an opinion of the need for small helps.2
Gratitude, the response that must be generated by freely proffered gifts,
would be his fourth law of nature, one of the key means of endeavouring peace
within a commonwealth.3
Hobbes was relating gift exchange to the need to move a group of men
from a state of nature into a civil society. This may appear to have little to do
with relations between realms, specifically here between Scotland and England
in the preceding century. But Hobbes’ understanding of honour, and his
insistence on the centrality of gifts and gratitude in endeavouring peace, offer
a valuable starting point for the investigation of inter-state relations in the
sixteenth century. Elements of a state of nature, with naked competition and
the absence of constraining political structures, exacerbated by the collapse
of religious consensus, certainly existed in early modern Europe. However,
the development of diplomatic structures, and an increase in regular contact
between rulers, provided a countervailing influence which, while it certainly
did not always promote peace, offered the opportunity to evaluate the
41 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth, ed.
Michael Oakeshott (Oxford, 1960), 65.
42 Ibid., 58.
43 Ibid., 99.
intentions of their peers. Hobbes offers a powerful reminder that the pursuit
of peace, whether within or between states, might be a matter of ruthless self-
interest, but that it had to be articulated in symbolic form to persuade men
to action. And there were few forms of behaviour that so effectively combined
the symbol and substantive interest so effectively as gift exchange.4
Gift giving between rulers was a crucial part of proper royal performance,
acknowledging status and signalling bonds. However, its description is usually
subordinated to other matters in the rapidly growing body of diplomatic
reports in this period. Home governments were understandably most actively
concerned about the military and political intentions of their neighbours and
rivals, the risks of war and the possibilities for alliance. Resident ambassadors
fed these concerns with their constant flow of information about the internal,
often factional, politics of the court to which they were assigned. In the case
of England and Scotland the deep hostility between the nations, the lengthy
periods of royal minority in Scotland, and the issue of succession to the
English throne all added fraught dimensions to diplomatic exchange. Tudor
attitudes to Scotland and its rulers ran the gamut from indifference to expan-
sionist ambition; from overt aggression to grudging accord. The Stewarts
responded in kind, though indifference was hardly a viable option given such
proximity to a larger power. In following the narrative tales generated by these
political concerns it is easy to neglect those performative aspects of exchange
that were of great significance to early modern monarchs: the gestures that
articulated honour and were an external test of authority.
Proper behaviour of this kind was particularly important for Scotland’s
rulers. Their pursuit of what Jenny Wormald has described as a ‘pushy and
self-assertive role’ on the European political stage depended upon political
skills underscored by symbolic gestures.5 Royal marriages, renaissance buildings
and a rich court life all contributed to the enhancement of their image.6 To give,
and indeed to receive, properly, were also crucial attributes for Scots rulers.
There were the long-established forms of largesse that must be given to subjects.
44 Much of the most useful literature on the gift in sixteenth-century culture is brought
together in Natalie Z. Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Oxford, 2000).
45 See particularly Jenny Wormald’s comments in the introductory section of Court, Kirk
and Community: Scotland, 1470‒1625 (London, 1981), 4‒6.
46 Lorna G. Barrow, ‘“The kynge sent to the Qwene by a Gentylman, a grett tame Hart”:
Marriage, gift-exchange and politics; Margaret Tudor and James IV, 1502‒13’,
Parergon 21 (2004), 65‒84; Janet H. Williams (ed.), Stewart Style, 1513‒1542: Essays
on the Court of James V (East Linton, 1996); Andrea Thomas, Princelie Majestie: The
Court of James V of Scotland, 1528‒1542 (Edinburgh, 2005); Julian Goodare and
Michael Lynch (eds), The Reign of James VI (East Linton, 2000).
ROYAL GIFTS AND GIFT-EXCHANGE IN ANGLO-SCOTTISH POLITICS 285
When James VI came to pen his advice to his heir it was on these that he
focused, urging in Ciceronian terms that Henry ‘use true Liberalitie in
rewarding the good, and bestowing frankly for your honour and weale’.7 But
there were also the exchanges with other rulers, with whom there was a claimed
equality. In the case of Anglo-Scottish giving the disparity of resources and the
old enmities were always likely to generate problems. English monarchs were
usually disposed to pursue honour and status in their relations with the Valois
and Habsburgs rather than with the Stewarts, so there was a likely asymmetry
in cross-border exchanges. Yet the undeniable strategic importance of Scotland
ensured that in times of peace there was a northwards flow of promises, gestures
and threats, a dialogue conducted in gifts as well as words.
The honourable behaviour of monarchs was judged as much by giving
proper rewards to messengers and ambassadors as by direct exchange. This
almost automatic assumption about offering thanks for service rendered
acquired new significance as diplomatic exchange increased. It also became
more sensitive politically. Ambassadors who resided longer in their host coun-
tries than in the past had to avoid excessive entanglement in local politics,
and at the same time came to expect reward from the monarch to whom they
were accredited commensurate with their own ruler’s significance. In the case
of Anglo-Scottish diplomacy missions were still episodic in the first part of
the sixteenth century, neither distance nor political interest requiring long-
term residence. James IV’s negotiation of the 1502 Treaty of Perpetual Peace
with England, and his ensuing marriage with Margaret Tudor, provide the
first instance of significant ambassadorial exchange.8 It was consistent with
James’ perception of honour that he should then treat emissaries well. Those
who came north for the wedding were given silver vessels and French crowns;
even the task of carrying late instalments of the dowry benefited William
Cope of Henry VII’s chamber with a great gilt standing cup.9 Henry VII made
similar gestures to James’ diplomats who negotiated the Treaty; Edward Hall
relates that they left London ‘not without great rewardes’.10 Even when nego-
tiations were fraught, largesse had to be displayed: Nicholas West and Lord
Dacre of the North, who left Scotland in 1512 after unsuccessful attempts to
prevent the resumption of the ‘auld alliance’, were rewarded with silver
flagons, a splendid cup with gold decoration and six great silver pieces.11 This
47 James VI and I, Basilikon doron. Or His Maiesties Instructions to his Dearest Sonne,
Henrie the Prince (London, 1603), 98.
48 Norman Macdougall, James IV (Edinburgh, 1989), 155, 248‒51, 256.
49 TA, ii, 373‒4, 386; Rymer, Foedera, xiii, 119. I owe this latter reference to the kindness
of Dr Steven Gunn.
10 Edward Hall, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke
(London, 1550), Henry VII, fo. 54r. The ambassadors sent a specific letter of thanks
for their reception to Henry VII: Rymer, Foedera, xiii, 54.
11 TA, iv, 348, 533.
was not, of course, a peculiar privileging of Henry VII’s agents; a few years
earlier James had rewarded the papal ambassador who brought him the sword
and cap blessed by Julius II with a shower of French crowns, a great gilt cup
and two flagons in cases.12
Occasional largesse of this kind was costly, though James, like other Scottish
rulers, expected that great subjects would pay their share when necessary. So
the gifts to West and Dacre came in part from the earl of Moray, and those
for the papal ambassador from the bishop of Ross and James Merchiston.13 At
the other end of the century James VI was still rewarding favoured embassies
with rich chains lifted from his subjects: in 1586 the Danish ambassador was
given a great gold chain, ‘which’, says Sir James Melville, ‘he had got from
Sir James Balfour’.14
II
By the time of James V’s majority, and especially from the 1530s, it became
necessary to handle Anglo-Scottish affairs through the dispatch of more
regular embassies. This gradually produced an expectation, almost in the end
a tariff, of proper reward at the end of a mission. The ‘tariff ’ addressed both
the status of the prince who had sent it and the nature of the mission.
Melville, discussing this late in the century, drew a distinction between official
messengers and those with full ambassadorial credentials. Messengers
announcing the birth of Prince Henry did not command reward, but had
ambassadors been sent express they would have had a claim to the ubiquitous
gold chain that monarchs routinely gave.15 But difference was also marked
by the success or otherwise of the embassy. The Scots gave Sir Peter Mewtas
a gold chain that cost £400 Scots in 1561, at a time when English support
was vital to the Lords of the Congregation. Sir Henry Killigrew, key ambas-
sadorial support of the King’s Party during the siege of Edinburgh Castle in
the early 1570s, was given a rich range of silver plate valued at £320, and a
gold ring valued at £360.16 On the other hand in 1534 after peace negotiations
the English ambassador Archdeacon Thomas Magnus was only given £200,
and the only reward noted for Ralph Sadler’s rather ineffectual missions is
an early gift of sixty crowns when he brought messages in 1538.17
The Scots who conducted business at the Tudor court were treated in an
equally variable manner. A gold chain was certainly given on occasion:
12 Ibid., iii, 380.

13 Ibid., iv, 348, 533.
14 The Memoirs of Sir James Melvil of Halhill (Edinburgh, 1735), 332‒3.
15 Memoirs of Melvil, 405.
16 CSP Scot., i, 163; TA, xi, p. xxi; xii, 350. All pound values refer to Scottish currency
unless otherwise specified.
17 TA, vi, 232.
Melville describes how one was placed on his neck by Sir William Cecil after
his 1564 mission.18 Special friends might merit special rewards: the 328
ounces of plate given to William Maitland of Lethington in 1564 was only
slightly less than the parallel gift to the French ambassador, whose status was
inherently higher.19 On the other hand, when official petitioners came thick
and fast, as they did in the 1570s and 1580s, usually seeking financial aid,
there seems to have been less generosity. In 1585 David Lindsay and George
Young, sent by James VI to plead for money, were given only fairly modest
gilt bowls, that for Lindsay weighing only seventy-one ounces.20 And in 1578
an embassy seeking aid for James VI was, Thomas Wilson reported to Sir
Francis Walsingham, so far from getting its objective that it was sent away
without any reward.21 Such offensive behaviour mattered deeply to ambas-
sadors, who always had a struggle to make their missions financially viable,
and who were endlessly watchful about the rewards given to other represen-
tatives.22 But the Scots seem to have been particularly sensitive to the threat
of dishonour in dealing with England.23 Even the rumour of such behaviour
raised anxieties, and when a powerful noble such as the earl of Moray was
treated without generosity it was interpreted as a public slight. When he
visited Elizabeth in 1562 it was observed that, for all the welcome he was
offered, ‘he had no present … onles it were a licence to cary into Scotlande
of geldings’.24
III
Ambassadors represented their monarchs, and had to be treated with honour.

But when kings themselves exchanged gifts there had to be an even greater

19 TNA, C47/Bundle 3/38.
20 BL, Egerton MS 3052.
21 CSP For., xiii, no. 141. This was not unique to the English: in the 1520s Patrick
Wemyss served as ambassador from Scotland to France and had to be rewarded by
James V since he ‘got no reward thair’: TA, v, 330.
22 See, for example, Thomas Randolph’s breathless reporting of the largesse to the
Swedish embassy to Scotland at its departure in 1562, ‘ii Eayer basins and eavers, ii
broode cuppes and two standing peeces of silver’, plus chains for the entourage: CSP
Scot., i, no. 1111.
23 It was observed that John Colville had not been rewarded in 1589. However, he
thanked Burghley for some specific favour that suggests a present: HMC, Calendar
of the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Salisbury, 24 vols, eds S. R. Scargill-Bird et al.
(London, 1883‒1976), iii, no. 929; William Murdin (ed.), A Collection of State Papers
Relating to Affairs in the Reign of Elizabeth, 1571‒1596 (London, 1759), 638.
24 BL, Add. MS 35831, fo. 32, though Moray himself used ambiguous language about
the horses, thanking Dudley for his remembrance in providing ‘of her hienes
hacquenciis’: BL, Add. MS 35125, fo. 10.
sensitivity to issues of parity and reputation. William Asheby, one of

Elizabeth’s ambassadors to Scotland, caught this nicely when he told
Burghley in 1589 that food gifts from the English Marches for James VI’s
wedding feast should come as offerings from neighbours, not ‘in the manner
of a prince’s present, which, consisting of complementes of that nature, it
might seme nether honourable for her majestie to offer, nor for this King to
receave’.25 The most obvious circumstances for the gift were grand cere-
monies: marriages, christenings and formal treaties. Under James IV this
meant the prime expression of Anglo-Scottish relations: his marriage to
Margaret Tudor. Margaret, like any bride, can be construed as herself the
supreme gift to her husband, and in this alliance she was both a spouse and
a symbol of the ‘Perpetual Peace’ between the two realms.26 Her dowry also
gave significant fiscal freedom to her spouse, increasing his flexibility in
pursuit of foreign policy and domestic control.27 The more symbolic gifts
from Henry VII reminded James that this was an alliance of lineage and blood:
a painter called Mynours was sent from London with portraits of Henry VII,
Elizabeth of York, Prince Henry and Margaret herself. He may well have
returned with a painting of James, now existing only in a seventeenth-century
copy.28 James’ reciprocal gifts to his bride were jewels, and the pageants to
celebrate her coming as the harbinger of peace. The latter included a hart,
representing the idea that Margaret gave the heart that would tame him to
fidelity.29 But James’ heart was neither faithful nor particularly committed to
the Perpetual Peace, and, as he had been in the 1490s, so in the years before
Flodden, he was for the ‘auld alliance’ and a wider European role. On the
road to Flodden it was these other allies who sought to woo him with gifts.
In 1511 Anne of Brittany more directly used her gift of 14,000 French crowns
and her own ring to persuade him to alliance against the English.30
The impression given by James IV’s treasurers’ accounts is that giving to
other monarchs was normally reserved for grand moments of alliance. When
his son came of age in 1528 things were different. Public celebration of grand
prestations still occurred, most notably at the time of the two French
marriages, which were the vigorous affirmation of the continuity of the ‘auld
alliance’ and the culmination of a remarkable diplomatic effort. The gift first
of the French king’s daughter Madeleine and then of Mary of Guise, brought
James V the remarkable dowries of £168,750.31 Since the King actually
25 CSP Scot., x, no. 239.

26 Barrow, ‘Marriage, gift-exchange and politics’, 70.
27 Macdougall, James IV, 155.
28 TA, ii, 82‒3; Thomas, Princelie Majestie, 83.
29 Barrow, ‘Marriage, gift-exchange and politics’, 76‒8.
30 Ibid., 83.
31 Jamie Cameron, James V: The Personal Rule, 1528‒1542 (East Linton, 1998), 261; cf.
Margaret’s dowry, worth approximately £35,000. The English Ambassador to France
married Madeleine in person on 1 January 1537 in Paris his reciprocity could

take the form of lavish gifts proffered publicly at the New Year and at his
departure – great cups of gold to Francis I and his Queen, and a lesser one to
the Grand Master of France, gold swords and scabbards for the Dauphin and
the King of Navarre, and gold jewellery set with precious stones for the royal
family. Francis, with his much greater wealth, was able to return in kind,
giving a short sword plastered with diamonds, emeralds and rubies, and, for
good measure, guns and armour.32 The gold and jewellery may also have been
a defence of a kind against the obligations of alliance: James displayed his
gratitude through giving, and presumably in so doing sought to retain his
freedom of political action. An even more explicitly political offering of these
years was the papal donation of the sword and cap, given to James while he
was in France in 1537. The Venetian ambassador in Rome observed that it
was a result of the Scottish king’s offer to ‘march against the King of
England’. The papacy asked no ceremonial counter-gift: the return was to
support the Church.33
The papal donation was only one form of honorific gift laden with political
intent. In 1532 James was the beneficiary of an Imperial desire for alliance
and was invested with the chivalric Order of the Golden Fleece. This was
done with full public display in St Andrews Cathedral, offering the King the
opportunity to affirm the importance of Scotland and its ruler.34 The logic
for Henry VIII was to use the Order of the Garter as a counter-weight offering
in 1535 when he was seeking better Anglo-Scottish relations.35 James was
eager enough to receive the status gift, and indeed was so keen to complete a
hat trick of the key chivalric orders that he made the acquisition of the French
Order of St Michael a condition in his marriage negotiations.36 At least two
uses were made of the chivalric gifts. Most obviously they were to demon-
strate James’ equality with his fellow monarchs. The badges of the Orders
were carved in stone at Linlithgow; the King had collars made for them and
urged Lord Erskine, who received the Garter, to ensure that the Scottish stall
at Windsor was next to the French one ‘amangis kingis’.37 He may even have
sought to delay his installation until he could present Henry with his own
commented that he did not think the King of Scots had ever seen so much money
gathered together: L&P Henry VIII, xii, 1305.
32 TA, vii, 7, 14, 31.
33 Charles Burns, ‘Papal gifts to the Scottish monarchs: the Golden Rose and the Blessed
Sword’, IR 20 (1969), 150‒94.
34 Patrick C. Hotle, Thorns and Thistles: Diplomacy between Henry VIII and James V,
1528‒1542 (London, 1996), 86; L&P Henry VIII, viii, 429.
35 James V Letters, 285.
37 Raphael Holinshed, The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (London, 1587
edn), vol. 5, 319; James V Letters, 297.
Order.38 Reception of the Orders could also be manipulated to signal varia-

tions in royal favour: the Imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys, whose
interest lay in denigrating English diplomatic overtures to the Scots, reported
that the Garter had not been greeted with the full public ceremonial that had
attended the reception of the Golden Fleece.39 And when James expended
100 crowns for a chain for the St Michael in 1538, he spent only 20 on the
chain for ‘ane uther ordour’, unfortunately not specifying which it was.40
James was a renaissance prince in his taste for grandeur and display, but
also in his desire to emulate his fellow rulers. This involved comparison and
dialogue sustained by regular embassies and in part by the flow of gifts less
dramatic than those already discussed. The form of giving and receiving most
dear to his heart was equipment for the hunt. The treasurers’ accounts for
the 1530s are replete with payments made to servants travelling to France or
England with hawks, or receiving horses sent in return. A couple of examples
must suffice: in 1534 Edward Stewart, falconer, was given his expenses to
travel to London with three hawks for Henry VIII.41 In the previous decade
Robert Gib was given a reward for riding the great horse that came from the
King of France.42 Good horses were always in short supply in Scotland, while
hawks could readily be captured, so James usually hoped to prompt the
generosity of his fellow monarchs by offering birds. At the end of 1541, for
example, he sent his ambassador in France thirteen falcons: twelve were duly
presented to Francis who, placed under gift obligation, reciprocated with
‘eight fair gyr falcons’.43 Presents were sometimes accompanied by letters of
lavish compliment: in 1535 James sent Henry hawks from Orkney and
Shetland, talking of the ‘confederation and mutuall ligue’ between them and
insisting that anything else found in Scotland was at his uncle’s disposal.44
By the late 1530s James predictably favoured the French crown over the
English in these gift dialogues, but his cautious policy of avoiding conflict
meant that he maintained his English contacts until very close to the final
crisis of the reign. When those hawks were sent to France in 1541 he also
made sure some went to England: Henry was sent ten, and considerable care
was lavished on their accoutrements.45
James no doubt understood that it was more blessed, or at least more
liberating, to give than to receive. But his desire for good horses was over-
38 There is uncertainty about whether James had established a chivalric Order; see Katie
Stevenson, ‘The Unicorn, St Andrew and the Thistle: was there an order of chivalry
in late medieval Scotland?’ SHR 83 (2004), 3‒22.
39 L&P Henry VIII, viii, 429.
40 TA, vii, 39.
41 Ibid., vi, 211.
42 Ibid., v, 311.
43 L&P Henry VIII, xvi, 1288.
45 TA, viii, 24, 30.
whelming, and at times placed him under considerable obligation to the English
King. In 1539 his servants identified a particular gelding owned by Lord
Wharton, and sought it for James. Wharton demurred and asked Henry’s
approval; Henry agreed and promised other geldings.46 Ralph Sadler was then
sent north on a difficult mission to secure the pro-English influence at the
Scottish court, with the apparently ideal gift of six horses and geldings. His
report on his, and their, reception reveals both the rituals of gift exchange, and
the problems associated with this apparently simple part of the embassy. At
Sadler’s first interview with the King the horses had not yet arrived, so the
ambassador had simply to carry the assurances of his master’s goodwill. Then
they arrived, but needed time to rest and to be groomed and ‘trimmed’, while
James expressed impatience to see them. When they were ready James insisted
on formality ‘because the lords should see your majesty did not forget him’. So
on a Sunday after the sermon James stood with his court at a window, looking
down on the horses being put through their paces by the English groom
Christopher Erington. Sadler provided a running commentary on their qual-
ities, evoking the royal response ‘I like them the better, because they be of mine
uncle’s own brood’. But all was not well, and Sadler’s heart must have sunk
when James observed that the barbary would have been more valuable had it
been bigger. The King then recovered the moment by glowing praise of Henry’s
friendship, alleging that he would find anything to pleasure his uncle ‘if I can
get it betwixt this and the farthest part of Turkey’. And finally, turning to his
court, he praised the horses, constraining his followers to do the same.47
Sadler was confident that much of this exaggerated enthusiasm for the
gift was designed to impress on the Scottish court the value James placed on
the friendship of the English King. James’ reaction provided a check on those
elements among the elite, who were energetically promoting French interests.
Their reception revealed both the possibilities and limitations of gift dialogue.
Horses were thoroughly acceptable as the opening gambit of a diplomatic
initiative: they obliged the King to speak fair and to display gratitude. The
generous token indicated understanding of royal needs, and yet another affir-
mation of equality with the English King, while being definable only as a
personal gift between two loving cousins. But endeavouring peace also needed
successful negotiation, and Sadler’s mission was not a success, partly through
English misjudgement, partly because James was still in the afterglow of his
marriage alliance. At one point in the negotiations he remarked to Sadler that
if he did not have enough to live on ‘my good father the king of France …
will not see me wont anthing’.48 The great gift easily eclipsed the small, and
diplomacy painstakingly built upon personal affinities slowly unravelled.

47 A. Clifford (ed.), The State Papers and Letters of Sir Ralph Sadler, knight-banneret,
2 vols (Edinburgh, 1809), i, 21, 39‒41.
48 L&P Henry VIII, xii: II, 1313.
IV
The kingly gift dialogue of James V, Henry VIII and Francis I was not fully
replicated in the second half of the sixteenth century. There were, however,
a few moments when the Scottish crown could expect grand prestations from
the English. Most important were the christening gifts for Prince James in
1566 and to his oldest son in 1594. In each case Elizabeth was godmother and
sent one of the nobility to personate her – the earl of Bedford for James’ chris-
tening and the earl of Sussex (after some delay) for Henry’s. In 1566 the
Queen offered an extraordinary golden christening font; in 1594 what
Melville described as ‘a great shew’ – a cupboard of silver gilt with some cups
of ‘massy gold’. In both cases an objective was to outshine other gifts.49 The
Venetian ambassador in London reported in 1566 that the font, valued at
5,000 crowns, was considered more remarkable than the jewellery sent by
Charles IX, or the fan offered by the duke of Savoy.50 The gifts articulated in
public the identity between monarchs, expressing the proximity of the
Scottish princes to the English succession.
Christenings, and the marriage of James VI and Anne of Denmark, were
the only occasions for such dramatic largesse. But gifts remained a key part
of Anglo-Scottish political dialogue even when given and received only within
the routines of courtly exchange. For example, Mary Queen of Scots sought
in the period following her return from France to woo Elizabeth, with alliance
and a personal meeting as her objectives. Early in 1562 Mary began her
campaign by sending Thomas Randolph, the English ambassador, a cup of
gold, using the offering to reinforce her desire for perpetual amity with
Elizabeth. Mary also requested a picture of her ‘fair sister’ – a standard move
in actual royal wooing in this period.51 A few days later Mary was assuring
Randolph of the importance of the picture but ‘yt wyll not contente my
harte untyll I have bothe seen her and spoken with her’.52 By the summer of
1562 the gestures acquired more urgency: Maitland had returned from
his English mission with Elizabeth’s portrait, and in July Randolph was told
that Mary had a ring with diamonds in a heart shape upon it, to be sent to
England as a counter-gift, along with some verses to express her meaning.
Meanwhile, he was assured, Mary was keeping her sister’s letter to her in her
bosom, a place for the secret gift that must nevertheless be displayed to gain
true worth. They also exchanged poetry in a display of learned one-

50 Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Relating to English Affairs, Existing in the
Archives and Collections of Venice, 38 vols, eds R. Brown et al. (London, 1864‒1940),
vii, 386‒7; Rayne Allinson, ‘Queen Elizabeth and the “nomination” of the young
prince of Scotland’, Notes and Queries 53 (2006), 425‒7, at p. 425.
51 CSP Scot., i, no. 1077.
52 Ibid., i, no. 1083.
upmanship.53 The diamond ring was dispatched with verses by Buchanan,

and both were received with some publicity at the English court. John Jewel,
bishop of Salisbury, heard about the magnificent diamond and acquired a
copy of Buchanan’s verses. Jewel remarked darkly to Josiah Simler, his Swiss
correspondent, that he would see from the text the truth of the saying ‘he
who knows not how to dissemble, knows not how to govern’.54 In another
letter he told Heinrich Bullinger that this was all a ploy to divert ‘attention
… from the noise of war’, and lull Elizabeth into a false sense of security.55
During the following year relations between the two queens cooled rapidly.
But Mary retained some hopes of her dear sister and chose to signal these
through the mode of her acceptance of a gift from Elizabeth. In December
1563 Randolph proffered her a jewelled ring, probably as a new year present,
rehearsing the conventional sentiment that it conveyed the mind of the sender
rather than the value of the offering. Mary chose to make her reception of
the ring a moment of high drama, insisting on all those present in her
chamber commending the gift, and claiming that it was one of the two jewels
‘I have that muste die with me’, the other being her ring from her former
husband Francis II.56 Two could play this courtly game: when Melville went
to the English court in 1564, Elizabeth produced Mary’s picture that she had
received earlier and kissed it with ostentatious affection. She also dangled ‘a
fair ruby, as great as a Tennis-ball’ before the ambassador, but only to say that
if Mary would follow her counsel, she would in time get all that she had. Then
Elizabeth promised a diamond as token for his mistress, though Melville’s
account suggests that he did not actually receive it.57 Elizabeth might appear
to be staging a set of appropriate gestures to her Scottish rival. But Mary
seems to have retained more faith in gifts. After her flight to England she
regularly worked gifts of needlework for those with influence, including the
queen. In 1574 she made an offering of a skirt of crimson satin, which the
French ambassador reported was a very agreeable gift that, he believed, had
much softened Elizabeth towards her.58 Elizabeth was indeed susceptible to
pretty gifts of jewels and clothing, though surely she never regarded them as
occasions to change her political calculations.59
While Mary’s attachment to the persuasive power of gifts represents
miscalculation, then the attitude of the Elizabethan regime to the young
53 Ibid., i, no. 1116.

54 Hastings Robinson (ed.), The Zurich Letters, 1558‒1579, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1842), i,
120.
55 Ibid., i, 115.
56 CSP Scot., ii, no. 41.
58 Margaret H. Swain, The Needlework of Mary Queen of Scots (New York, 1973), 82‒3.
59 Jenny Wormald, Mary Queen of Scots: A Study in Failure (London, 1988), stresses
Mary’s misjudgements in her reading of Elizabeth.
James VI shows that miscalculation was not the unique prerogative of the
Scots. Henry VIII had appeared to treat James V as an equal sovereign, at least
in performative acknowledgement of his claims. It was not always so for
James’ grandson. The Scottish Reformation, the loss of the French alliance,
the Marian crisis and the royal minority led the English regime to regard
Scotland as a far less pressing threat to security than its Continental adver-
saries. In these years, as indeed earlier, gifts from England often meant
payments to various kinds of the assured Scots who would promote alliance
and interest. ‘In all ages’, said a report of 1584, ‘when the kings of England
could not be assured of the favour of the kings of Scotland, they entertained
some of the nobility of Scotland to be their friends’.60 When attention was
focused on friends and alliances, a monarch in his minority was easily under-
valued. In 1578 Randolph was sent north to intervene in Scottish affairs, and
to distribute ‘her Majesty’s liberality’ among the ‘best affected’. Some courtly
gesture was needed to the twelve-year-old prince, and Walsingham told the
ambassador that the ostensible purpose of his visit was to be the giving of a
present. But this was to be neither ostentatious nor costly: a present ‘meate
for his yeares’, something like a dagger or rapier that could readily be bought
in London. Jewellery was not allowed, because such a present would have to
be costly and finely made ‘(whereunto her Matie I feare wyll not be browght)’.61
If such a miserly attitude to proper kingly gestures was thought acceptable
in James’ minority, it was clearly unwise once he came to power. There was
momentary anxiety when, in 1582, the duke of Guise sent James a gift of
horses, which the English ambassador to France feared might conceal
gunpowder. Perhaps, but surely the key here is that France was recognising
James’ majority by proper gifting, and it is important that the king immedi-
ately replied in kind sending the customary hawks.62 It was only in 1585 that
the English regime caught up, and even then Melville suggests that they did
so in a cynical spirit. When in that year the queen sent Edward Wotton as her
ambassador, Melville suggests that his main duty was to accompany the king
in hawking and hunting, distracting him with ‘friendly and merry Discourses’
from the business of state.63 Wotton himself certainly related his mission to
the importance of gifting; he was thrown into panic on his way north because
60 CSP Scot., vii, no. 84. On the assured Scots, see Keith M. Brown, ‘The price of friend-
ship: the “well affected” and English economic clientage in Scotland before 1603’, in
Roger A. Mason (ed.), Scotland and England, 1286‒1815 (Edinburgh, 1987), 139‒62.
61 BL, Harl. MS 6992, fo. 45. In 1573 the French ambassador in London had requested
Burghley’s permission to send Monsieur Verac to Scotland on the excuse that the
French King wished to send a little gilt suit of armour to his nephew. Verac was
arrested and prevented from leaving England, blaming Regent Morton for his
troubles: CSP For., x, nos 869, 912.
62 CSP For., xvi, no. 150; xviii, no. 225.
63 Memoirs of Melvil, 317. Melville’s comments should be treated with caution because
of his hostility to Wotton from earlier encounters in France.
James anticipated a gift of hounds he claimed Elizabeth had promised. If the

dogs did not arrive promptly and in good order ‘the want of them might bred
contempt, which the adverse partie would work upon’.64 Fortunately for
Wotton, horses were already on their way to the Scottish court and all was
sufficiently well for James to pen a fulsome letter of gratitude to Elizabeth.65
However, the tone of an English note working out what should be sent indi-
cates that the Scottish king was being amused with baubles, rather than
treated with full honour. The note is headed: ‘memoir of certain small
pleasures for the king of Scotland’, and lists horses, bow staves and buck-
hounds. Would gifts to France or Spain have been so noted?66
By the time that James’ buckhounds had been run into the royal leash he
had already shown his determination to be an independent ruler – first by
his favour to Esmé Stewart and the French, and subsequently by his cautious
approaches to the Spanish.67 Elizabeth responded with her distinctive corre-
spondence, containing warnings, anger and persuasion, but in the end with
the key promise of money. The formal arrangements for regular subventions
were concluded in the aftermath of the Anglo-Scottish Treaty of 1586, and
remained essentially the same until the union of the crowns. Payments rarely
rose above £4,000 sterling per annum, though Elizabeth’s first plan was to
offer £5,000: even so they constituted about a sixth of James’ annual income.68
Since Julian Goodare has covered the issue in detail there is no need here to
retrace the convoluted story of the giving, manipulating and sometimes with-
holding of payments. But the language and gestures of exchange are examined
here in the light of the need for both sovereigns to appear independent and
honourable in their dealings with one another.
The prevailing orthodoxy about the relationship between James and
Elizabeth seems to be that the Scottish monarch played a very canny game
with his dear cousin. As early as 1581 the Queen had been driven in exasper-
ation to call him an ‘urchin’, and there were many moments when her anger
flared against what she saw as his duplicity.69 James needed money: the queen,
or her government, had the even greater need of him as guarantee of the
Protestant succession. There was in practice little that Elizabeth could do to
influence the specifics of Scottish government, even for example to ensure
64 TNA, SP52/37, fos 46, 48.

65 John Bruce (ed.), The Letters of Queen Elizabeth and King James VI of Scotland
(Camden Society, o.s. 46, 1849), 14.
66 TNA, SP52/37, fo. 110.
67 On Spanish intrigue see Concepcion Sáenz-Cambra, ‘James VI’s Ius Suum Conservare
– his Intrigues with Spain, 1580‒1603’, International Review of Scottish Studies 30
(2005), 86‒107.
68 Julian Goodare, ‘James VI’s English subsidy’, in Goodare and Lynch (eds), Reign of
James VI, 110‒25.
69 Quoted in Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI and I: two kings or one?’, History 68 (1983),
187‒209, at p. 190.
that James married according to her will. Wotton’s embassy, so successful

socially, was rebuffed both on the issues of marriage and closer alliance. So
the correspondence evolved in a pattern that all too often meant that the
English queen resorted to schoolmarmish bullying that was deftly side-
stepped, or occasionally completely ignored, by the recipient. As Susan
Doran observes in the case of the crisis of the Catholic earls, ‘James usually
promised much but delivered little’.70 The case is convincing, but it overlooks
the difficulties caused by the inherent asymmetry between the two monarchs
in the 1580s and 1590s. The language used to discuss the payments made for
the King’s support makes that asymmetry visible. There is a crucial linguistic
distinction: James and his ministers always referred to the subsidy as an
‘annuity’, an assured payment that had been agreed and was enduring.
Elizabeth and her regime used the language of ‘gratuity’, offerings given of
grace and dependent on good performance.71 Neither side normally talked
about gifts per se, though each payment had to be authorised by the Queen in
person, and represented thanks for good done as well as seeking assurance
for the future.
The contrasting attitudes of the two regimes were revealed most fully in
1589, when James’ imminent marriage was the cause of anxiety. On 16 August
William Asheby wrote to Walsingham from Edinburgh about the royal
marriage, pointing out that James’ households were unprepared for the arrival
of a queen, ‘yet he thinks with his honour he cannot go back’, and expects
Anne’s arrival imminently.72 Walsingham, in a letter that must have crossed
with this, gave a dusty answer that the King could expect little, given
England’s military costs.73 A few weeks later the outline of an agreement was
patched up by English officials, and a full range of gilt plate, purchased in
London, valued at £2,000 sterling, was despatched to Edinburgh.74 But the
status of the silver was unclear: was it in lieu of much of James’ gratuity? Was
it a loan or a gift? While James was on the high seas pursuing his bride,
Burghley spent frustrating months disentangling these issues, and trying to
avoid himself becoming liable for the cost of the plate, for the purchase of
which he had given his own surety.75 While Elizabeth was predictably
reluctant to part with more money than necessary, and seemed to assume that
70 Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community, 150‒1. For a development of similar ideas from
the English perspective see Susan Doran, ‘Loving and affectionate cousins? The rela-
tionship between Elizabeth I and James VI of Scotland, 1586‒1603’, in Susan Doran
and Glenn Richardson (eds), Tudor England and its Neighbours (Basingstoke, 2005),
203‒34, at p. 210.
71 Goodare, ‘English subsidy’, 113.
72 CSP Scot., x, no. 182.
73 Ibid., x, no. 187.
74 Ibid., x, no. 226.
75 Ibid., x, nos 241, 261.
the £2,000 would be repaid, she directed her anger at a king who did not offer
proper thanks for her gift.76 By what the diplomats were constrained to read
as oversight James, in the haste of departure for Denmark, only wrote to
thank the English ambassador, asking him to convey gratitude to the Queen.
In October Burghley told Asheby in no uncertain terms that Elizabeth
‘myslyketh that the kyng wold wryt to yow and not to hir self ’. Even in
November the matter was not fully resolved, because the Scottish council, in
writing to the queen, again forgot gratitude for the gift of plate, and had to
apologise through Asheby and Burghley. Only in December had everyone
performed as required, and Burghley gained his warrant for £3,000 from the
Exchequer.77
Elizabeth clearly believed that she had behaved with honourable generosity
in these transactions, giving a great gift to enhance James’ resources on the
eve of his marriage – and 1589 did see two payments of £3,000 each.78 In
return she expected both principals to behave in ways that maintained at least
the fiction of freedom of action. Proper giving and receiving was part of what
in 1596 she termed ‘the law of kingely love’, which assured (in the public
gaze) mutual obligation and contributed to princely security.79 ‘We princes’,
the queen reminded James, ‘are set on the highest stage, where all beholders
pass verdict on our works’.80 This he did not dispute, but the public procla-
mation of gratitude for him involved a different kind of reciprocity. At the
time of the negotiation of the Anglo-Scots treaty of 1586 he wanted an
assured pension, and above all the ‘instrument’ nominating him as heir to the
English throne. This was so that ‘the quole worlde… [should] understand
hou it pleacith you to honoure me’.81 Such public proclamation would have
legitimated the one-way transmission of resources for the protection of
England’s heir, and would have removed the sting from the concept of
dependence embodied in annuity. Instead, in a brutal manipulation of the
language of gifting, Elizabeth chided him for his desire for public affirmation:
‘must so great dout be made of fre good wyl, and gift be so mistrusted, that
our signe Emanuel [sic] must assure?’82
The English pension therefore developed a relationship that involved
76 BL, Harl. MS 6994, fo. 201; CSP Scot., x, no. 241.

77 CSP Scot., x, nos 256, 261, 272.
78 Goodare, ‘English subsidy’, 115.
79 Letters of Queen Elizabeth and King James VI. of Scotland (Camden Society, 1849),
115. For a valuable recent reading of the language of the letters see Rayne Allinson,
‘Conversations on kingship: the letters of Queen Elizabeth I and King James VI’, in
Liz Oakley-Brown and Louise J. Wilkinson (eds), The Rituals and Rhetoric of
Queenship: Medieval to Early Modern (Dublin, 2009), 131‒44.
80 CSP Scot., xi, no. 280.
81 Letters of Elizabeth and James, 33.
82 Ibid., 30.
subterfuge, as well as asymmetry. James became an ingenious petitioner,

bargaining with and cajoling the resistant queen. He even sought to play the
lover, in a letter and sonnet penned in 1586. Peter Herman’s analysis of the
sonnet suggests that the Petrachan form led James into dangerous political
territory since he urged the avoidance of conflict such as those that arose
‘betwixt the husband and his loving wife’.83 The persona of a lover who
seemed to claim equality with his lady was surely unsuitable for Elizabeth,
and seems to have been met with silence. But it may also be just a rather inept
example of one of James’ ways of compensating for his inability to give
material gifts. The queen already used the idea of words as gifts, and presented
her monitions to her cousin as offerings. This was a form of rhetoric that
James quickly learned, employing the words of a king as presents, which could
be intimate and private, or public and symbolic, as occasion demanded.84
For much of the time James sought to combine specific pleas to Elizabeth
for better subvention with actions designed either to demonstrate that he was
her independent equal, or even to frighten her council into buying his co-
operation. Both tactics had some success: the handling of the Catholic earls in
the early 1590s was largely controlled by James despite warnings from London,
and when he was particularly angry over the succession in 1597 a gesture of
audience towards Elizabeth’s Irish rebels meant that his ambassadors were able
to gain the return of the pension after a break of two years, and to secure the
arrears as well. But James’ needs made it impossible to maintain any consistent
image of equality, or to evade Elizabeth’s power over gifts. In 1590, sending one
messenger after another to try to gain his pension, he asked for certainty that
promises would be kept, since ‘it is best for us both that thaire be a reciproke
meiting in all our turnis’.85 The queen might humour her cousin when times
were good; when he wished to restock the deer park at Falkland, Burghley
allowed the English ambassador and royal gamekeepers in the north of England
to be run ragged in the attempt to provide them. When diplomatic relations
were poor, however, she had no hesitation in withholding the subsidy, or
signalling anger by a breach in the norms of monarchical exchange. Although
she agreed to be godmother to Princess Elizabeth in 1596, she sent no special
representative to the christening, leaving the ambassador Robert Bowes to stand
for her. Most unusually, she sent no gift for the naming (universally expected
of godparents in sixteenth-century society) and, while Robert Cecil and Bowes
83 Peter C. Herman, ‘Authorship and the royal “I”: King James VI/I and the politics of
monarchic verse’, Renaissance Quarterly 54 (2001), 1495‒1530.
84 Simon Wortham, ‘“Pairt of my taill is yet untolde”: James VI and I, the Phoenix, and
the royal gift’, in Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fautier (eds), Royal Subjects: Essays in the
Writings of James VI and I (Detroit, IL, 2002), 184‒93. On the use of words as gifts
see Jason Scott-Warren, Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift (Oxford, 2001),
177‒213.
85 TNA, SP52/45, fo. 61.
endeavoured to present this as a brief delay, it seems clear that Elizabeth was
not disposed to any generosity.86
In the end James, of course, held one ‘reciproke meiting’, as the only viable
Protestant heir to the queen, a fact that mattered greatly to the English Privy
Council. And so the great gift of the subsidy was, in Hobbesian terms, an
acknowledgement of the King of Scots’ power. Despite the poor relations
between the sovereigns that marked the later part of the 1590s, the manoeuvres
by the earl of Essex and then Robert Cecil to smooth the succession did some-
thing to assuage James’ sense of wounded honour and inferiority. Yet he
remained caught between taking money as ‘the acceptance of mutual aid and
benefit’, and the thraldom of receiving without direct reciprocation. This was
an issue that remained unresolved between him and Elizabeth.87 What
English payments did deliver to James was a domestic freedom, from which
he learned the value and significance of gifts. English commentators, from
the queen downwards, thought him prodigal rather than liberal: ‘he gives’,
said Thomas Fowler, ‘to every one that axes what they desyer, even to vayne
youths and prowd foles’.88 Though this was not quite true, James did expect
to follow his own precept in displaying largesse with liberality, an image very
different from that of his cousin, who required full service to be rendered
before reward was given. When the prize of the English throne was finally
attained, his freedom readily morphed into prodigality. At a court masque at
Christmas 1603 the Three Graces sang of generosity:
Desert, Reward and Gratitude,
The Graces of Society,
Do here with hand in hand conclude
The blessed chaine of amity.
For 1. I deserve, 2. I give, 3 I thank.89
This downward and outward flow of generosity from the monarch became
the hallmark of James’ early years in England.90 That freedom of spirit was
to have consequences that Hobbes deeply condemned.
86 CSP Scot., xii, nos 303, 330; Doran, ‘Loving and affectionate cousins’, 218‒20.
87 Small wonder that there was a rumour in 1591, possibly from France, that James had
argued with Elizabeth and returned Anne’s wedding gifts from her: CSP Dom., 1591‒
4, 14.
88 CSP Scot., ix, no. 558.
89 John Nichols, The Progresses, Processions and Magnificent Festivities of King James the
First, 4 vols (London, 1822‒8), i, 309.
90 James’ ‘spendthrift’ habits are set in the context of a discussion of his rule in Scotland
and England by Wormald, ‘James VI and I: two kings or one?’, 198‒9.
Royal gifting mattered in the sixteenth century. It marked alliances,

provided a form of dialogue with fellow monarchs, and upheld an image of
largesse and magnificence that was a necessary part of renaissance power.
Exchange between England and Scotland was made complex by neigh-
bourhood, enmity and the imbalance of material resources. But James IV and
James V managed to use the great offerings given to them as an affirmation
of power and honour, retaining freedom of choice in those to whom they gave
and from whom they received. The situation of James VI was very different.
For all his internal success in ruling Scotland, and his skill in manipulating
the threat of foreign alliance, he was neither free nor equal in his relations
with Elizabeth. This surely bred a Hobbesian disposal to ‘counterfeit love’ to
his cousin, and a resentment of ‘thraldom’. We know that the queen’s choice
in maintaining the dependent gift relationship, coupled to a refusal to assure
the succession, mattered little to the ultimate success of the union of the
crowns; James VI, however, had rational grounds to fear that her gifts were
full of false promise.
chapter 14
The Ainslie Bond
JULIAN GOODARE
This poor young princess, unexperienced in such devices, was circumvented

on all sides by persuasions, requests, and importunities; both by general
memorials signed by their hands and presented to her in full council, and by
private letters.1
Therefter by consent of the nobility the Queen married James Hepburne Earle
Bothuell.2
In April 1567, many Scottish nobles and bishops signed a bond agreeing to
support the earl of Bothwell’s proposed marriage to Queen Mary. This bond
is a notable event in the chain of events leading to Mary’s downfall, yet the
details are obscure. The date is uncertain: either 19 or 20 April. The venue is
uncertain: either ‘Ainslie’s tavern’ (either in Edinburgh or the neighbouring
burgh of the Canongate), or Bothwell’s lodgings at Holyrood. The signatories
are uncertain – a particularly important point. Some copies of the bond have
attached to them a document by Mary approving the transaction, others do
not. How should we interpret the Ainslie Bond?
The last few months of Mary’s reign have been debated for centuries, but
few if any scholars have paid adequate attention to the Ainslie bond. The
important events have been assumed to be Darnley’s murder (9 February)
and Mary’s marriage to Bothwell (15 May). It has been taken for granted that
the marriage was highly unpopular with ‘the nobles’, not least because
Bothwell had murdered Darnley, so that an anti-Bothwell uprising was
inevitable. Debate has largely concerned Mary’s role in Darnley’s murder.
Her detractors have argued that she was guilty along with Bothwell, while
her supporters have contended that she was innocent, but was dragged down
along with Bothwell once she agreed to marry him, either voluntarily or
81 Claude Nau, The History of Mary Stewart, from the Murder of Riccio until her Flight
into England, ed. Joseph Stevenson (Edinburgh, 1883), 37.
82 NLS, ‘The Kingdome of Scotland’ (contemporary history), Wodrow Folio 5, p. 222.
through coercion. Debate about the anti-Bothwell uprising has thus merely
concerned the extent to which it was, or became, also anti-Mary. The
inevitability of the uprising itself has not been questioned, since Bothwell’s
unpopularity is taken for granted.
But perhaps an anti-Bothwell uprising was not inevitable? The fact that
Bothwell gathered so much support in late April is certainly striking. Most
historians have simply stated that the Ainslie bond was made, and then moved
rapidly on without incorporating it in their analysis. It has seemed obvious
to them that the other nobles were always totally against Bothwell marrying
the queen, and so they have either given offhand explanations for the bond
or no explanation at all, before proceeding to resume the story on the assumed
basis of hostility to Bothwell. This chapter argues that the history of Mary’s
downfall should be written as if the Ainslie bond really was signed, and as if
those who signed it really meant what they said.
The work of Jenny Wormald is crucial for understanding this last point.
She has placed the Ainslie bond in its correct interpretative framework simply
by reminding us that it is a bond, and by showing us how bonds operated.
Bonds were part of a culture of honour. With bonds, men formed alliances
and made promises to serve their lords and protect their followers. Wormald’s
work focused on bonds of manrent, promises made by followers to lords, and
bonds of maintenance, reciprocal promises made by lords to followers. But
she extended her work to include bonds made between equals – bonds of
friendship, alliances for local causes – and also what she called ‘political’ bonds
– bonds in support of national causes. The Ainslie bond was one of these
political bonds. This is what Wormald said about political bonds:
There is no absolute dividing line between the ‘normal’ bonds of friendship,
maintenance and manrent and political bonds. They involved the same people
and their followers; and a man who made a bond of manrent promised to serve
his lord in all his affairs, and these would include his political affairs …
Moreover, political bonds invoked the same language and ideas as other bonds;
indeed, they used language which gave an even stronger impression of a deeply
felt adherence to the strength of the ties of friendship and, because they were
made for political purposes, they made a very conscious attempt to show that
those who entered into them were imbued with political responsibility and
desire to serve the state.3
This does not mean, of course, that men who signed bonds were never self-
interested or hypocritical. It means that they presented themselves as
honourable and trustworthy, in a world where open, honourable and trust-
worthy actions were valued. Honour resided in truthfulness, and in the
keeping of promises, both spoken and written.4 The Ainslie bond was not a
1985), 145.
THE AINSLIE BOND 303
hole-and-corner affair, done in secret or with built-in deniability. Those who

make public political commitments know that people will expect them to
adhere to those commitments – and their behaviour is affected by the fact
that they know that people will expect this.5 The bond itself spoke of the
‘honour and fidelitie’ of the signatories, and urged that they should be
counted ‘vnvorthie and faithles treatours’ if they breached their promise.
In what follows, therefore, it will be assumed that the signatories to the
Ainslie bond were self-interested, and that at least some of them may have
been hypocritical – but not necessarily more so than others who take political
actions; they were simply politicians, who are often self-interested and some-
times hypocritical. However, it will also be assumed that when they signed
the bond, the signatories pledged themselves to its programme honourably
and publicly, and that they expected to be believed.
II
It is first necessary to resolve the bond’s textual and archival problems. It has
never yet been established who actually signed it. The original bond, with
holograph signatures, is no longer extant, and the various extant copies do
not all agree. One relevant document is merely an eighteenth-century
summary of a manuscript that has since disappeared. All these versions can
be referred to, for convenience, as ‘copies’. A careful look at the variations
between them can be revealing.
There are seven relevant copies, in two distinct manuscript groups. In the
discussion that follows, I will number the groups 1 and 2, with individual
copies being numbered 1a, 1b, 2a, 2b and so on. The four copies of group 1 are
placed in rough chronological order, because 1b probably derives from 1a,
while 1c and 1d (which have less value) are probably copies of either 1a or 1b.
The three copies of group 2 cannot be placed so clearly in order, because they
cannot be shown to derive directly from each other, but 2a is the most complete.
Copy 1a is in the National Archives.6 This copy, like all those in group 1,
is dated 19 April. In addition to the bond itself, the text includes a warrant
by Mary endorsing the signatories’ actions, dated 14 May. The text was copied
in Scotland by John Reid, an associate of the earl of Morton. He gave his
document to an Englishman, evidently working for Sir William Cecil, and
84 Keith M. Brown, ‘Honour, honours and nobility in Scotland between the Reformation
and the National Covenant’, SHR 91 (2012), 42‒75, at pp. 49‒52.
85 Quentin Skinner, ‘Some problems in the analysis of political thought and action’,
Political Theory 2 (1974), 277‒303, at pp. 289‒301; cf. Quentin Skinner, ‘Moral prin-
ciples and social change’, in his Visions of Politics, vol. i: Regarding Method (Cambridge,
2002), 145‒57.
86 TNA, SP52/13, no. 33 (cf. CSP Scot., ii, 321‒2).
the Englishman added to it a list of the names of the nobles who had signed.
This is established by the English writer, who headed his list: ‘The names of
such of the nobilitie as subscribid this Band so far as John Read might
remember, of whome I had this copie, being his owne hand.’ Sir William
Drury described Reid in June 1567 as ‘Jhon Reade, a Skotysche man whoo
hathe not leaste credyte with therle Murton, nor leaste doynge in hys
cheaffest secrettes’.7
The list of signatures, however, was crucial, and this was written by the
second writer, based on Reid’s oral information. His identity is unknown, but
his orthography was clearly English: ‘Read’, ‘Aynsleyes supper’, ‘Murray’,
‘Argile’, ‘Seyton’, ‘Oglevy’. He had met Reid when Reid was somewhere away
from his best sources of information, so that Reid had had to ‘remember’ the
list of signatories. The phrase ‘Beinge termid in Scotland Aynsleyes supper’
probably indicates that they were in England at the time. The second writer
probably wrote his list in Reid’s presence – he made an error and corrected
it (the listing of Eglinton among the earls, crossed out and with a note at the
end about him having slipped away). Overall, Reid clearly knew the signa-
tories, though he made some perhaps revealing errors, as we shall see.
Copy 1b is in the Cotton collection in the British Library.8 This has been
the most widely quoted version of the bond, but it is probably copied from
1a, the National Archives copy. It is a neat copy by an experienced copyist in
English orthography, though one or two Scottish spellings survive (such as
‘bot’ in the penultimate sentence) to indicate that it was copied directly from
a Scottish copy such as 1a. Copy 1b is also dated 19 April, and also includes
Mary’s warrant.
Copies 1c and 1d can be considered together; they are both from the same
volume of the Sloane collection in the British Library, and are both English
copies from a somewhat later date, perhaps the seventeenth century.9 Copy
1d has a note attached saying that it is a copy of 1b, and 1c may also be a copy
of 1b. These two copies thus have less value than 1b.
We now turn to the three copies in the second group. Copy 2a is from the
Leven and Melville muniments in the National Records of Scotland.10 It may
well derive from the papers of Sir Robert Melville, an ambassador for Mary
in 1567. One indication that it is from a different manuscript tradition is that
1a and 2a have numerous textual differences, with 2a being more verbose –
867 words in the main text, as against 827 for 1a – and slightly more
grammatically accurate. There are also material differences between the two
87 TNA, Drury to Cecil, Berwick, 20 June 1567, SP59/13, fos 174r.–175r. (cf. CSP For.,
1566‒8, 256).
88 BL, Cotton MSS, Calig. C.1, fos 2r.–3v.
89 BL, Sloane MS 3199, fos 96r.–97r. (1c), fos 312r.–314v. (1d).
10 NRS, Copy (16th century) Bond of Friendship in favour of James, Earl Bothuill,
Leven & Melville Muniments, GD26/15/1.
groups. The two main copies in group 2 lack Mary’s warrant. All three date
the bond 20 April, not 19 April as in group 1. Their lists of signatories include
bishops, while group 1 do not. And even with the nobles, the two groups’
lists sometimes differ.
Copy 2b derives from the Scots College at Paris. The document itself was
destroyed in the French Revolution, but it was read in 1730 by Thomas Innes,
who sent a note of it to Robert Keith for inclusion in the latter’s history of
Mary’s reign. Innes knew the Cotton copy (1b) through its recent publication
by James Anderson. Thus he did not transcribe the main text, merely noting
that it was the same in substance as Anderson’s, but he did transcribe the
signatures, and he pointed out discrepancies in date and signatures.11 His list of
signatures was identical to that of 2a, of which neither Keith nor Innes was aware.
Copy 2c, the final copy, is a transcript by the presbyterian historian David
Calderwood.12 Calderwood gave fewer signatories overall – eighteen as against
twenty-four for 2a and 2b. Unlike 2a or 2b, he included Mary’s warrant.
Against one of the bishops’ signatures – ‘Sanct Andrewes’ – Calderwood
added a note: ‘(This subscription is counterfoote in the principall.)’ Did
Calderwood see the ‘principall’, with original signatures? Or was he simply
mistaken in believing that the document he was copying was the ‘principall’?
This is an insoluble but perhaps peripheral puzzle.
III
The bond was signed at the close of a parliament, which took place in Edin-
burgh between 14 and 19 April. This can help to solve the problem of the
conflicting dates in the various copies. The disparity probably arose through
a simple copying error; copy 1a says ‘xix’, 2a says ‘xx’, and either of these
figures could easily be mistaken for the other. There is, however, a further
piece of evidence: a letter from Sir William Kirkcaldy, dated ‘At Edingburgh
the xxth of Aprill’, and then with a postscript, in the same hand, longer than
the letter itself. The main text of the letter said that ‘The parliament dissolvet
this day’. The postscript added:
The same night the parliament was dissolvit Bothwell caulit the mast part of
the noblemen to supper for to desire of them their promys in writing and
consent for the Q. mariage, quilk he will obteyne, for sho has said that sho caris
not to lose France Ingland and her owne countrie for him, and sall go with
him to the warldis ende in ane white peticote or sho leve him.13
11 Near-contemporary copies of Innes’ transcript, with his covering letter to Keith, are
in NLS, Miscellania Scotica Curiosa, Adv. MS 22.2.18, pp. 144‒5, 153‒4.
12 Calderwood, History, ii, 352‒4.
13 TNA, Kirkcaldy to earl of Bedford, 20 April 1567, SP52/13, no. 35 (cf. CSP Scot., ii,
322‒3).
For present purposes the notorious ‘white peticote’ is not the most important
part of this letter.14 The question is: when did Kirkcaldy write it? His date
‘xxth’ was probably an error for the 19th, since it formed part of the main
text, which he clearly wrote on the same day as the dissolution of parliament.
The parliamentary record and other sources make clear that this was the 19th
(a Saturday). In Kirkcaldy’s postscript, his wording – ‘The same night the
parliament was dissolvit …’ – suggests that he was writing on the following
day, but is unambiguous that the ‘supper’ was on the evening of the
parliament’s final day. His statement that Bothwell ‘will obteyne’ the nobles’
promises indicates that he had not yet received information about the
outcome. If Bothwell wanted to maximise the signatures he gathered, it would
have made sense to circulate the bond for signature at the supper itself. It may
be concluded, therefore, that the bond was signed on the evening of the 19th.
The name ‘Ainslie’s Supper’ presumably relates in some way to the venue.
The fact that the event acquired a name indicates that contemporaries discussed
it publicly and saw it as significant. It derives from the English annotator of
1a, who said that the event was ‘commonly termid in Scotland Aynsleys
supper’. Previous scholars have assumed that ‘Ainslie’ was a tavern-keeper,
which may be correct, though there is no mention of a ‘tavern’ in the sources.
Several sources place the supper at Bothwell’s lodging, either in Edinburgh
or in Holyroodhouse; perhaps Ainslie was an outside caterer.15 Despite
Ainslie’s obscurity, the name ‘Ainslie bond’ is historiographically convenient.
IV
To determine who signed the bond, it is necessary to collate the surviving

copies.16 But there is one further source of information. Lists survive of those
attending the parliament, both at its opening – the members assembled on
the 16th – and at its close on the 19th.17 If there is doubt about whether a
given person signed the bond, it helps to check the parliamentary attendance
record. It would normally be expected that nobles or bishops who were in
14 My own view is that it is an unsubstantiated rumour. Kirkcaldy also reported, wrongly,

that the queen had had Bothwell’s acquittal ratified in parliament. The whole letter
seems distorted by hatred of Bothwell.
15 Sir James Melville places it ‘in a chamber within the palice’: Sir James Melville,
Memoirs of his Own Life, ed. Thomas Thomson (Bannatyne Club, 1827), 177. The ‘Book
of Articles’ says Bothwell’s lodging at Holyrood: Gordon Donaldson, The First Trial of
Mary, Queen of Scots (London, 1969), 179. Nau says the ‘Earl of Bothwell’s house, in
Edinburgh’, as does Bothwell himself: Nau, History, 36‒7; Les Affaires du Conte de
Boduel, ed. Henry Cockburn and Thomas Maitland (Bannatyne Club, 1829), 16.
16 Wormald uses more copies than most other scholars – those I have numbered 1b, 1d,
2a, 2b and 2c: Lords and Men, 406.
17 APS, ii, 546‒8 (RPS, 1567/4/5).
Edinburgh at the time of a parliament should attend it. Anyone who was
absent from the parliament is thus unlikely to have been in Edinburgh, and
this would make them unavailable to sign the bond.
Below are three tables showing which earls, lords and bishops are said to
have signed the bond, with separate columns for each copy. There is also a
column for attendance at the parliament (‘P’). In evaluating the tables, it
should be borne in mind that not all the copies bear equal weight; in group 1,
at least, 1a is more important than the others. The table for the bishops confines
itself to the copies in group 2; group 1 names no bishops, being explicitly (in
the words of 1a) ‘The names of such of the nobilitie as subscribid’.
In analysing the signatories, it is important not only to determine who
signed; we also want to know who did not sign. Or rather – since some people
were inactive or physically unavailable – we want to know who could have
signed, but refused to do so. The tables thus offer a snapshot of the political
community, or at least of relevant members of the noble and ecclesiastical
estates, since Bothwell seems to have made no attempt to obtain signatures
from representatives of burghs. We shall see that at least two non-noble
officers of state seem to have been involved.
Table 14.1 Earls and the Ainslie Bond in 1567.
Title P 1a 1b 1c 1d 1a 1b 1c Notes Conclusion

Argyll Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Signed
Arran18 – – – – – – – – Out of country Could not sign
Atholl – – – – – – – – Did not sign
Bothwell Y – – – – – – – Bond to him
Caithness Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Signed
Cassillis Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Signed
Crawford Y – – – – Y Y Y Signed
Eglinton Y – – – – – – – Slipped away Did not sign
Errol Y – – – – Y Y Y Signed
Glencairn – Y Y Y Y – – – Probably did not
sign
Huntly Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Signed
Lennox – – – – – – – – In west of Could not sign
Scotland
Mar – – – – – – – – Did not sign
Marischal Y – – – – – – – Did not sign
18 This is the second earl, duke of Châtelherault, rather than the insane third earl.

Moray – Y Y Y Y – – – Out of country Could not sign
Morton Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Signed
Rothes Y Y Y Y Y Y Y – Signed
Sutherland Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Signed
This table shows eighteen of Scotland’s twenty-two earls.19 Earls were expec-
ted to be politically active; Angus, Buchan, Menteith and Montrose, however,
were inactive in early 1567, and have thus been omitted from the table.
Of the eighteen active earls, therefore, we can establish that nine signed
the bond: Argyll, Caithness, Cassillis, Crawford, Errol, Huntly, Morton,
Rothes and Sutherland. As for the remainder, two were out of the country
(Arran and Moray), one was in the west of Scotland (Lennox), three more
were absent from the parliament and thus probably unavailable (Atholl, Glen-
cairn and Mar), while one was Bothwell himself.20 That leaves only two earls
who were at the parliament and seem to have refused to sign: Eglinton (said
by 1a to have ‘slippid away’) and Marischal. We shall return to the question
of Glencairn and Moray, who were both named by group 1 as having signed.
In the meantime, however, the signatures of these nine earls stand as striking
testimony to the scale of the support that the political community gave to
Bothwell’s project.
The next table shows twenty-two of Scotland’s thirty-one lords. The
following have been omitted because they were neither at the parliament nor
mentioned by any copy of the bond: Cathcart, Drummond, Elphinstone,
Forbes, Lovat, Maxwell, Methven, Somerville and Yester. Some were politi-
cally active, but none can be said with confidence to have refused to sign.
It is harder to establish which lords signed, as there are more disparities
between groups 1 and 2. I have taken a lord to be a definite signatory if he
attended the parliament and was named by both groups, and a probable
signatory if he attended the parliament and was named by just one group. All
those named by group 2 in fact attended the parliament. However, there are
several lords named by group 1 who were absent from it. I have not treated
them as signatories.
19 For unreferenced statements about the peerage and episcopate, see the Scots Peerage,
the ODNB or the Handbook of British Chronology.
20 On 19 April, one of the acts of parliament mentioned that Moray and Châtelherault
(Arran) were absent from the realm: APS, ii, 551, c. 7 (RPS, 1567/4/11). Lennox was
in Stirling on 11 April: Robert Keith, History of the Affairs of Church and State in
Scotland, from the Beginning of the Reformation to the Year 1568, 3 vols, eds J. P. Lawson
and C. J. Lyon (Spottiswoode Society, 1844‒50), ii, 538‒9. He seems then to have
returned to his Glasgow base. On the 23rd he was on a ship at the Gairloch: Lennox
to Drury, 23 April 1567, CSP Scot., ii, 323‒4.
Table 14.2 Lords and the Ainslie Bond in 1567.

Borthwick Y – – – – – – – Did not sign
Boyd Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Signed
Carlyle – Y Y Y Y – – – Probably did not
sign
Fleming Y – – – – Y Y – Probably signed
Glamis Y – – – – Y Y Y Probably signed
Gray – Y – – – – – – Probably did not
sign
Herries Y Y Y Y Y Y Y – Signed
Home – Y Y Y Y – – – Probably did not
sign
Innermeath – Y Y Y Y – – – Probably did not
sign
Lindsay Y – – – – – – – Did not sign
Livingstone Y – – – – – – – Did not sign
Ochiltree Y – – – – – – – At parl. 16th Did not sign
only
Ogilvy Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Signed
Oliphant – Y Y Y Y – – – Probably did not
sign
Ross Y Y Y Y Y – – – Probably signed
Ruthven Y – – – – Y Y – Probably signed
Saltoun Y – – – – – – – At parl. 16th Did not sign
only
Sanquhar Y – – – – – – – Did not sign
Sempill Y Y Y Y Y Y Y – Signed
Seton Y Y Y Y Y – – – At parl. 16th Probably signed
only
Sinclair – Y Y Y Y – – – Probably did not
sign
Torphichen Y – – – – – – – At parl. 16th Did not sign
only
This gives us four definite signatories – Boyd, Herries, Ogilvy and Sempill
– and five probable signatories – Fleming, Glamis, Ross, Ruthven and Seton.
In addition, 1a names the following six lords: Carlyle, Gray, Home, Inner-
meath, Oliphant and Sinclair. They probably did not sign, but the inclusion
of extra lords in 1a is a significant point to which we shall return. Finally,
there were seven lords at the parliament who seem to have failed or refused
to sign: Borthwick, Lindsay, Livingstone, Ochiltree, Saltoun, Sanquhar and
Torphichen. Four of these – the four last named – left before the end of the
parliament, but they could still have refused to sign. Lords faced less pressure
than earls to be politically active, so for Bothwell to obtain the signatures of
up to nine lords was quite an achievement.
Table 14.3 Bishops and the Ainslie Bond in 1567.
Title P 2a 2b 2c Notes Conclusion

Aberdeen Y Y Y Y Signed
Argyll – – – – Did not sign
Brechin Y Y Y Y Signed
Caithness – – – – Did not sign
Dunblane Y Y Y Y Signed
Dunkeld Y – – – Did not sign
Galloway Y Y Y Y Signed
Glasgow – – – – Out of country Could not sign
Isles Y Y Y Y Signed
Moray – – – – Did not sign
Orkney Y Y Y – Signed
Ross Y Y Y Y Signed
St Andrews Y Y Y Y Signed
Of the thirteen bishops, nine were at the parliament, and eight of these
signed the bond – the exception being Robert Crichton, bishop of Dunkeld.
The virtual unanimity of the bishops in support of Bothwell’s project is note-
worthy. It may also be relevant that the bishops’ nominal leader was John
Hamilton, archbishop of St Andrews, since the Hamilton family’s allegiance
was important.
The issue of the bond’s early gestation has been as neglected as that of its
meaning. Yet big political bonds tended to have antecedents, as when the
murder of Darnley was discussed months before at Craigmillar. Scholars
discussing the Ainslie bond often seem to have assumed that Bothwell invited
a group of earls, lords and bishops to supper, and then sprang the bond on
them without warning. Yet it is at least as likely, a priori, that he had been
discussing the plan with potential signatories beforehand, perhaps widely,
perhaps for some time. The contemporary evidence for a Mary–Bothwell
marriage project is not as extensive as is sometimes assumed (I discount the
Casket Letters, for instance), but surely the bond had antecedents of some kind?
The question of the bond’s gestation can be pursued further by asking
another question. Why did group 1 name Glencairn and Moray as signatories?
The fact that Moray was listed in error has been repeatedly pointed out since
the eighteenth century, but no conclusions have been drawn from this.
However, let us recall that the list in 1a derived from John Reid’s memory.
Omitting names from a remembered list is easy; Reid forgot Crawford and
Errol, for instance. Including extra names is more surprising; this is a harder
‘error’ to commit. Glencairn and Moray could be simple errors, but there is
probably more to it. Reid, let us recall, was politically active in Morton’s
circle. Whether or not his memory was accurate, the names he gave had to
seem plausible.
It can be suggested, therefore, that Reid constructed his list, not from a
photographic memory of the bond itself, but from a memory of those who
had been involved in the planning of the project. These were people who had
promised to sign, or had been expected by the planners – especially from
Morton’s point of view – to sign. Morton, himself a signatory, had worked
closely with Moray and Glencairn for years; he had usually agreed with them,
though not always. When he thought about joining this latest project, one of
his most important questions would have been whether these two Protestant
and Anglophile stalwarts were going to join him in it. If Morton knew that
Moray and Glencairn had refused to become involved, then Reid, remem-
bering discussions in Morton’s circle on that point, would not have found
their names plausible.21 The fact that Reid named them, therefore, indicates
that they agreed to support the project at the planning stage, even though
they did not in the end turn up at the tavern to add their signatures. And if
this is true of Moray and Glencairn, it may well be true of some or all of the
21 Moray left a few days before the bond, on either 7 or 9 April: Diurnal of Remarkable
Occurrents that have Passed within the Kingdom of Scotland, ed. Thomas Thomson
(Bannatyne Club, 1833), 107; Diary of 1566‒1568, in James Anderson (ed.), Collections
Relating to the History of Mary Queen of Scotland, 4 vols (Edinburgh, 1727‒8), ii, 274.
six lords in the same category: Carlyle, Gray, Home, Innermeath, Oliphant
and Sinclair. As we have seen, Reid listed them as signatories, although they
were not at the parliament.
VI
Scholars who have assumed that ‘the nobles’ were always hostile to Bothwell’s
marriage to Mary have produced various explanations for why they never-
theless signed the Ainslie bond. None of these explanations has become
standard, and indeed the standard approach to the bond has been to avoid
giving any explanation for it. However, four explanations have been offered
for why nobles hostile to Bothwell would nevertheless have signed the bond.
Either the signatories were craftily planning to use Bothwell to drag Mary
down, having foreknowledge of the next few months’ events; or they were
deceived by Bothwell’s telling them that Mary had consented; or they were
intimidated by Bothwell’s hagbutters; or they were drunk.
Thus, Antonia Fraser states that ‘the motives and loyalties of some of the
signatories must be considered to be highly suspect’, and that some signed
‘out of either cunning or weakness’.22 This implies some combination of fore-
knowledge and intimidation. Alison Weir, whose account of the bond is
perhaps the longest in recent times, concludes with a combination of drunk-
enness and intimidation, adding that Bothwell may also have used ‘bribery’
or ‘promises of patronage to come’.23 A. R. MacRobert, by contrast, dismisses
the idea that the signatories were ‘browbeaten or drunk’, and concludes that
Bothwell used ‘deception’, persuading the lords that Mary had consented.24
Mark Loughlin wrote that Bothwell secured the bond by ‘spurious means’,
which seems to imply deception.25
Some of these explanations originate with the later excuses of the emerging
king’s party. Once they began to distance themselves from Bothwell, they
had to produce plausible accounts of why they had signed. In early May, the
Stirling confederacy that was gathering against Bothwell put forward the
intimidation argument: ‘the most part of the nobility for feare of ther lives
did grant to sundry things both against their honours and consciences, who
sence have convenit them selves at Stirling’.26 At the York–Westminster
conference in 1568, the English commissioners reported being shown ‘a copie
of a Bande … to the which the most parte of the lordes and counsaill of
22 Antonia Fraser, Mary Queen of Scots (London, 1969), 376, 382.

23 Alison Weir, Mary Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley (London, 2003), 345.
24 A. R. MacRobert, Mary Queen of Scots and the Casket Letters (London, 2002), 55.
25 Mark Loughlin, ‘The Career of Maitland of Lethington, c.1526‒1573’, unpublished
PhD thesis (University of Edinburgh, 1991), 251.
26 TNA, Kirkcaldy to earl of Bedford, 8 May 1567, SP52/13, no. 43 (cf. CSP Scot., ii, 327).
Scotland have put to their handes, and as they say, more for feare, then anie
lykinge they had of the same’.27 The words ‘as they say’ indicate that the
English commissioners did not necessarily believe them, but what this
argument required at that point was plausibility rather than credibility. It is
certainly not credible today; one earl could not intimidate nine. As for the
idea that they were drunk, the only contemporary source is Buchanan’s
Historia of 1582.28 It is unlikely that major political figures would have signed
crucial documents in that state.
The king’s party avoided saying that Bothwell deceived the signatories by
falsely alleging Mary’s consent, because they were required to argue that
Bothwell and Mary were already in collusion. They eventually claimed that
Mary authorised the lords to sign. At York they produced ‘a warraunt …
bearinge date the 19th Aprill, signed with their Quenes hand, whereby she
gave them licence to agree to the same’.29 This warrant, produced alongside
the probably genuine warrant of 14 May, puzzled the English commissioners
and was evidently a forgery. If it was a forgery by Bothwell, this might have
justified the claims that Bothwell obtained the lords’ signatures by deception;
but there is no evidence for this, and the whole argument for deception seems
irretrievably speculative.
The idea of foreknowledge, by contrast, originates with pro-Mary argu-
ments, notably the account that Claude Nau later compiled from Mary’s own
recollections: ‘Some helped him [i.e. Bothwell] honestly, from friendship;
others from fear, being in dread of their lives; others dissembled, meaning
through him to carry out their own secret ends and private designs.’30 Again
this seems coloured by hindsight. There is an early suggestion of fore-
knowledge in Drury’s report of 6 May that Archbishop Hamilton was encour-
aging Mary and Bothwell in order to destroy them.31 But by then, Mary’s
abduction had altered the political landscape, and the anti-Bothwell confed-
eracy was already a powerful force. It seems unlikely that this could have been
foreseen on 19 April. Moreover, the whole idea of foreknowledge rests on the
assumption that the signatories were already hostile, not only to Bothwell,
but also to Mary – a questionable assumption, to put it mildly.
The weaknesses of these ideas may explain why most scholars have not
given any explanation at all for why the lords signed the bond.32 Maurice Lee
27 Duke of Norfolk, earl of Sussex and Sir Ralph Sadler to Elizabeth, York, 11 October
1568, CSP Scot., ii, 526.
28 W. A. Gatherer (ed.), The Tyrannous Reign of Mary Stewart: George Buchanan’s
Account (Edinburgh, 1958), 126.
29 CSP Scot., ii, 526.
30 Nau, History, 39.
31 TNA, Drury to Cecil, Berwick, 6 May 1567, SP59/13, fos 68r.–69r. (cf. CSP For.,
1566‒8, 223‒4).
32 A long list of examples could be produced here, but two recent works may suffice,
even calls the bond an ‘astonishing business’, but disposes of it in six words
with no analysis.33 Wormald memorably writes, ‘one can hardly imagine a
more dramatic night in a pub’.34 Gordon Donaldson recognised that there
was a problem with the bond, writing, ‘the bond urging the marriage of Mary
and Bothwell is not the least of the mysteries of the period.’35 The repeated
absence of an explanation for the bond may help to show why it is worth
paying detailed attention to it.
VII
How should we understand the likely political and religious motives of the
bond’s signatories? The following discussion draws particularly on Gordon
Donaldson’s detailed analysis of Scottish political factions in the period from
about 1559 to 1585.36 He showed that three tendencies influenced the
formation of factions. Religion was important; the available religious positions
fell on a spectrum from militant Protestantism of the John Knox variety to
militant Counter-Reformation Catholicism, with most political actors
somewhere in between. Attitudes to international relations were important;
some members of the political community were more pro-English, others
pro-French or at least anti-English. Finally, attitudes to royal authority were
important; some took a high view of the powers of the crown, others were
more attracted to constitutional checks and the monarch’s responsibility to
her or his advisers.37 These three tendencies tended to combine in standard
patterns: Knox himself was a militant Protestant, pro-English and
both containing valuable analysis of the politics of the period: Jane E. A. Dawson, The
Politics of Religion in the Age of Mary, Queen of Scots: The Earl of Argyll and the
Struggle for Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2002), 150; John Guy, My Heart is my
Own: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots (London, 2004), 326‒7.
33 Maurice Lee, Jr, James Stewart, Earl of Moray (New York, 1953), 194.
34 Jenny Wormald, Mary Queen of Scots: A Study in Failure (London, 1988), 163 (p. 167
in the revised edition, 2001).
35 Donaldson, First Trial, 179.
36 Gordon Donaldson, All the Queen’s Men: Power and Politics in Mary Stewart’s Scotland
(London, 1983). Other particularly relevant works are Frank D. Bardgett, Scotland
Reformed: The Reformation in Angus and the Mearns (Edinburgh, 1989); Ian B. Cowan,
‘The Marian civil war, 1567‒1573’, in Norman Macdougall (ed.), Scotland and War,
AD 79‒1918 (Edinburgh, 1991), 95‒112; Dawson, Politics of Religion; Elaine Finnie,
‘The house of Hamilton: patronage, politics and the church in the Reformation
period’, IR 36 (1985), 3‒28; Julian Goodare, ‘Queen Mary’s Catholic interlude’, in
Michael Lynch (ed.), Mary Stewart: Queen in Three Kingdoms (Oxford, 1988), 154‒
70. For unreferenced statements about allegiance, see these works.
37 For more on kingship and counsel in this period see Roger A. Mason, ‘Beyond the
Declaration of Arbroath: Kingship, Counsel and Consent in Late Medieval and Early
Modern Scotland’, Chapter 12 above in this volume.
constitutionally minded, for instance. Lord Seton, Catholic, pro-French and

monarchical, exemplified the opposite pole of this pattern. However, there
was a good deal of individuality. Bothwell himself, a committed Protestant
but anti-English, did not fit the standard pattern. Lord Sempill was a Catholic
but often pro-English, as his allegiance was influenced by hostility to his
neighbours the Hamiltons.
Donaldson built his analysis upon various lists of the political alignments
of the period. Some of these lists were contemporary, like the Hamilton bond
of 8 May 1568, which many of Mary’s supporters signed and which thus
provided a snapshot of the ‘queen’s party’.38 Donaldson himself assembled
other lists from evidence of individuals’ behaviour. But however they were
created, most of his lists were lists of factions: people acting together in a
sustained way in support of a common cause that pursued one or more of the
three types of aim – religion, foreign policy and powers of the crown.
Some of the political alignments of the period could be said to fit the
standard patterns, while others crossed more boundaries. There were two
ways in which boundaries could be crossed. One might be called the band-
wagon effect, in which a particular movement was so successful that people
joined it because it was difficult to avoid doing so. The Lords of the Congre-
gation in 1559‒60 were basically Protestant, pro-English and constitutionally
minded, but broadened out to include reluctant adherents like the Catholic
fourth earl of Huntly.
The other way in which an alignment could cross boundaries, particularly
relevant here, was when two distinct factions deliberately entered into a
compromise agreement. Although their long-term ideals differed, they felt
that they could work together in the short term. There was always pressure
for compromise because ‘faction’ itself was undesirable; the ideal, for all
political actors, was disinterested service of the crown. Members of factions
would sometimes act against the other faction, even violently, as with the
bloodfeuds that factional struggles resembled; but sometimes, as with feuds,
conflicting factions would also seek to bury their differences and to reach a
compromise.39 The Ainslie bond was an attempt to reach such a compromise.
One of the two main factions to be reconciled was that to which Bothwell
himself belonged.40 Bothwell was not a major magnate, but his close ally,
Huntly, was. Huntly could even be seen as the core of the faction. At any rate,
38 Wormald, Lords and Men, 407. In All the Queen’s Men, although his analysis relied on
lists of allegiance, Donaldson omitted any mention of the Ainslie bond.
39 The classic exposition of how feuds were reconciled is Jenny Wormald, ‘Bloodfeud,
kindred and government in early modern Scotland’, Past and Present 87 (May 1980),
54‒97.
40 To avoid convoluted expressions in what follows, the term ‘signatory’ will be extended
to those lords whom I have designated above as ‘probable’ signatories, and to Bothwell
himself.
Huntly signed the bond, as did his kinsman Sutherland. Errol had usually
avoided provocative commitments, but he was based in Huntly’s north-
eastern sphere of influence, and his signature to the bond may well have been
influenced by Huntly. This faction displayed anti-English tendencies;
certainly Bothwell and Huntly had anti-English records, though they were
both Protestants.
The core of the opposing faction comprised two overlapping groups: those
who had supported the Chase-about Raid in 1565, and those who had
supported the attempted coup around the Riccio murder in 1566. Both these
initiatives had been pro-English and had claimed to promote the Protestant
cause; they had also been constitutionally minded, claiming that it was the
queen’s duty to take the advice of her nobles. Both initiatives had brought
their members into conflict with the Bothwell–Huntly faction, and indeed
the latter faction had taken more definite shape in the aftermath of the Riccio
murder coup.
Three former Chase-about Raiders signed the bond: Argyll, Rothes and
Boyd. Indeed, if we add Glencairn and Moray, all the earls from the Chase-
about Raid were involved in the project (apart from the unavailable Arran).
Morton, who had swithered in 1565 and might have joined, was also affiliated
to this group; he was also the most prominent of the Riccio murderers. Argyll,
Glencairn and Morton had been three of the five signatories of the First Bond
of the Lords of the Congregation in 1557.41
The leaders of these two factions – the Bothwell-Huntly faction and the
Moray–Morton faction – were thus using the bond as a means to bury the
hatchet. Reconciliation was always the theoretically desired goal of factional
struggle. They drew in, as signatories, a diverse group of supporters, not all
of whom were primarily motivated by attachment to these factions as such.
The earls of Caithness, Cassillis and Crawford could be considered as part
of this diverse group of signatories, as could Lords Fleming, Glamis, Herries,
Ogilvy, Ross, Sempill and Seton. Most of these people had supported the
queen in 1565, when she mobilised a large part of the political nation against
the Chase-about Raiders; but the fact that they had been part of a large group
underlines their lack of factional commitment.
The bond’s cross-party nature could be expected to cause difficulties for
some people who did have a factional commitment. Not everyone wanted to
bury the hatchet, or at least, not in this way. Some committed Protestants
apparently refused to sign, notably Marischal and Torphichen. Ochiltree, a
former Chase-about Raider, apparently refused. Among those noted as Catho-
lics, Atholl and Borthwick apparently refused, while Caithness, Cassillis,
Crawford, Sempill and Seton signed. Lindsay, who apparently refused to
41 For more on this bond see Jane E. A. Dawson, ‘Bonding, Religious Allegiance and
Covenanting’, Chapter 7 above in this volume.
sign, was a local rival of Rothes, who signed; although both Protestants, they
had also been on opposite sides in 1565. The bishops who signed were mostly
Catholics but included both the Protestants present (the bishops of Galloway
and Orkney); the only bishop who refused to sign was Robert Crichton,
bishop of Dunkeld, a committed Catholic. Finally, people could take more
than one view on whether the project was in Mary’s interest. Fleming,
Livingstone and Seton, brothers of three of the ‘Queen’s Maries’, were all
close to Mary personally; Fleming and Seton signed, while Livingstone
apparently refused.
The factions to be reconciled by the Bothwell–Mary marriage project
included two of the country’s main magnate families among their leaders:
the Gordons, headed by Huntly, and the Douglases, headed by Morton. The
project could be seen from this point of view as a continuation of a previous
project with cross-factional support: the murder of Darnley, in which
Bothwell (Huntly’s ally) and Morton had co-operated. Three of Scotland’s
four main magnate families thus lined up in support of the Ainslie bond: the
Campbells, the Douglases and the Gordons.
What of the fourth family, the Hamiltons? With Arran in exile, the only
actual Hamilton who was in a position to sign was Archbishop Hamilton; he
did sign, but this does not necessarily indicate a settled policy by the family.
The Hamiltons, like their traditional enemies the Lennox Stewarts, were in
disarray. Still, to the extent that the project was a continuation of the Darnley
murder project, it was anti-Lennox and so likely to be attractive to the
Hamiltons. Most Hamiltons had been Chase-about Raiders, and they would
probably have welcomed the opportunity to join the project to the extent that
it was linked with a reconciliation of factions.
VIII
The project to reconcile the factions, however, was scuppered almost as soon
as it began – and, it seems, even before the bond itself was actually put to use.
Having obtained the bond, Bothwell had now to propose marriage to the
queen. He had evidently omitted to procure her consent in advance – and
indeed, if he had had her consent in advance, the bond would scarcely have
been necessary. The project seems to have been intended to present itself to
Mary, if not quite as a fait accompli, at least as a complete and worked-out
proposition, which she could consider in the knowledge that her leading
nobles had already agreed to it. This could be compared with the working
out of the so-called Craigmillar conference of December 1566, where the
queen was consulted only at the end of the discussions.42 The Ainslie bond
was evidently intended to persuade Mary, who might otherwise have been
42 Anderson (ed.), Collections, iv, II, 189‒90.

reluctant, that marrying Bothwell would be a good idea that would command
wide support. This is in fact what the bond itself said, though it took over
eight hundred words to do so. However, if anyone in the tavern asked, ‘What
if the queen refuses?’, the answer seems to have been, ‘Don’t worry, she
won’t’. There was no back-up plan.
To ascertain how Bothwell sought to implement the project, we turn to
Mary’s instructions to William Chisholm, bishop of Dunblane, who was sent
in late May to explain the marriage to the French. According to this
document, Bothwell secretly obtained the consent of ‘the nobillmen’ to the
marriage, ‘geving thame to understand that we wer content thairwith’.
Whereupon ‘he began afar of to discovir his intentioun to us, and to assay gif
he mycht be humill sute purches oure gude will. Bot, finding oure answer na
thing corespondent to his desyre …’43 This accords with other things we
know about the Ainslie bond, with the addition that Mary thought that
Bothwell had told the signatories that she had agreed to it. But Mary made
clear that she had in fact rejected Bothwell’s ‘humill sute’. This unexpected
refusal placed the whole project in peril.
One might have expected Bothwell to propose to the queen in person, but
the phrase ‘afar of ’ is curious. It becomes clearer when compared with Nau’s
account:
All these lords and the chief of the counsel of the nobility, having held a
meeting in the Earl of Bothwell’s house, in Edinburgh, sent Lethington, the
Justice Clerk, and a third, to the queen as their delegates.44
So Bothwell, with uncharacteristic bashfulness, sent a delegation to press his
suit. William Maitland of Lethington, the secretary, and John Bellenden of
Auchnoull, the justice clerk, are credible members of it; they could well have
been at the parliament. Nau placed the delegation before the parliament, but
his chronological confusion does not invalidate his entire story; this is the
kind of detail that would be hard to invent. He went on to corroborate
Chisholm’s instructions by specifying that Mary had refused the proposal.
This proposal seems to have been made on the 20th or perhaps the 21st.
Mary, like Bothwell, had been in Edinburgh for the parliament; her presence
in Edinburgh is attested every day up to and including the 21st.45 On the
43 RPC, xiv, 275‒6.

44 Nau, History, 36‒7.
45 See the daily itinerary by David Hay Fleming, Mary Queen of Scots from her Birth to
her Flight into England (2nd edn, London, 1898), 542. This has numerous documents
showing her in Edinburgh up to and including the 21st, and several showing her in
Stirling on the 22nd. There is also a stray document dated at Holyrood on the 22nd,
but Hay Fleming points out that ‘the royal clerks were not always immaculate in their
dates’ (p. 515). Hay Fleming is relied on in this period by Edward M. Furgol, ‘The
Scottish itinerary of Mary queen of Scots, 1542‒8 and 1561‒8’, PSAS 117 (1987),
219‒31.
20th, she and Bothwell were able to confer in person, being both in Edin-
burgh and both involved in quelling a soldiers’ mutiny, apparently in Edin-
burgh Castle; the well-informed Drury, who tells us this, adds that she then
went to Stirling on the 21st.46 So Mary rejected Bothwell’s suit and rode
away, evidently leaving him wondering what to do next.
What he did, of course, was to abduct the queen on the 24th, on her return
journey from Stirling to Edinburgh, taking her instead to Dunbar. The details
of this event need not detain us, but there is one relevant point from
Chisholm’s instructions. Bothwell showed Mary the Ainslie bond for the first
time at Dunbar, and she was taken aback by it:
And, quhen he saw us lyke to reject all his sute and offeris, in the end he schew
us how far he was procedit with oure haill nobilitie and principallis of oure
estaittis, and quhat thai had promeist him undir thair hand writtis. Gif we had
caus than to be astoneist we remit us to the jugement of the King, the Quene,
oure Uncle, and utheris oure friendis.47
The Ainslie bond was indeed an ‘astonishing business’, even to Mary herself.
This story fits with Maitland’s delegation making the initial proposal;
presumably Bothwell would have kept the bond himself rather than
entrusting it to them. By the time he produced it, it was too late; Bothwell’s
allies, as is well known, deserted him after the abduction. What now needs to
be recognised is that if Mary had consented voluntarily to the marriage,
without the abduction, they might have remained his allies.
46 TNA, Drury to Cecil, Berwick, 24 April 1567, SP59/13, fo. 41r.–v. (cf. CSP For.,
1566‒8, 213).
47 RPC, xiv, 276‒7.
chapter 15
‘Scotland will be the Ending of all Empires’:

Mr Thomas Murray
and King James VI and I
JAMIE REID-BAXTER
That the remarkable monarch so long referred to by non-Scottish scholars

as James I is today generally described as James VI and I is in no small measure
the achievement of Jenny Wormald.1 Now that James is no longer seen as
springing into existence out of a provincially irrelevant Scottish limbo in
1603, his early writings have received intensive study, effectively demolishing
the traditional view of him as a lifelong Rex pacificus: the king himself wrote
in 1619 that ‘I know not by what fortune, the dicton of PACIFICUS was added
to my title, at my comming in England; that of the Lion, expressing true
fortitude, having been my dicton before’.2 It is now clear that for some years,
James took his leonine dicton seriously; with the publication of Ane Fruitfull
Meditatioun contening ane plane and facill expositioun of ye 7.8.9 and 10 verses of
the 20 Chap. of the Reuelatioun in forme of ane sermone (1588), Ane meditatioun
vpon the xxv, xxvi, xxvii, xxviii, and xxix verses of the XV chapt. of the first buke
of the Chronicles of the Kingis (1589) and Lepanto (1591), he had consciously
positioned himself, the future monarch of Britannia, as the militant champion
of all Europe’s Protestants and the arch-enemy of the Papacy.3 An engraving
81 I wish to record my gratitude to James Johnson, Dr Peter Auger, Dr Sebastiaan

Verweij, Dr Astrid Stilma and Dr Amy Juhala for invaluable logistical help in obtaining
copies of material, and to Professor Dana Sutton for checking my Latin translations.
82 Meditation vpon the Lords prayer, written by the Kings Maiestie, for the benefit of all his
subiects, especially of such as follow the court (London, 1619), 93. On pp. 82‒3, James
had already stated, ‘What the Lion is, my dicton tells you, Est nobilis ira leonis, &c’
(emphasis in original).
83 See particularly Astrid Stilma, A King Translated: The Writings of King James VI &
I and their Interpretation in the Low Countries, 1593‒1603 (Farnham, 2012); Astrid
Stilma, ‘“As warriouris in ane camp”: the image of King James VI as a Protestant
crusader’, in Kevin J. McGinley and Nicola Royan (eds), The Apparelling of Truth:
Literature and Literary Culture in the Reign of James VI (Newcastle, 2010), 241‒51;
A. H. Williamson, ‘Radical menace, reforming hope: Scotland and English religious
politics, 1586‒1596’, Renaissance and Reformation (forthcoming).
‘SCOTLAND WILL BE THE ENDING OF ALL EMPIRES’ 321
Figure 15.1
An unfamiliar image of the ‘Rex pacificus’: James VI as Protestant warrior,
from John Johnston’s Vera descriptio avgvstissimae stevvartorum familiae
(printed at Amsterdam for Andro Hart, 1602).
(The National Library of Scotland, shelfmark L.C.1221)
that perfectly captures James in this role is reproduced as Figure 15.1; the
armour-clad king originally appeared in three works by John Johnston
(c.1570‒1611) published just before James mounted the English throne,
namely Inscriptiones historicae regum Scotorum (1602), The Trewe description,
of the nobill race of the Stewards, and the latter’s Latin edition, Vera Descriptio
(1602 and 1603).4
The present chapter seeks to add a footnote to recent work exploring James’
own ‘armoured’ and ‘British’ thinking of the later 1580s, when writing and
publishing his two Meditatiouns and the Lepanto, and the fact that in 1603,
many of his contemporaries viewed the first king of Britain as a Protestant
crusader. A hitherto overlooked Scottish link between the Scottish king of
1587 and the British monarch of 1603 is the poetry of Thomas Murray (1564‒
1623), who addressed direct appeals to James as champion of universal
Protestantism both in Lamentationum Ieremiae Paraphrasis Poetica, a manu-
script volume of 1587‒88, and in his printed volume of 1604, Naupactiados,
sive Lepantiados Iacobi Magni, Britanniarum, Franciae, & Hiberniae Regis,
fidei verè Christianae vindicis, & assertoris verè Christianissimi Metaphrasis
poetica (‘A Poetic Paraphrase of the Naupactos or Lepanto of James the Great,
King of Britain, France and Ireland, truly the Defender of the Christian faith,
and its most Christian professor’), hereinafter Naupactiados.5 In both of these
books, as we shall see, Murray indicated that a British crusader clad in shining
armour was exactly what he wanted James to be, just as John Johnston did
with his choice of engraved portrait.6
Both Murray and Johnston were friends of the ferociously anti-Roman
presbyterian spokesman Andrew Melville, another of whose friends was John
Malcolm (d.1634), author of widely read prefatory epigrams to King James’
theological publications of 1588 and 1589.7 In 1588, Malcolm first presented
84 See the discussion in Roderick J. Lyall, ‘The marketing of James VI and I: Scotland,
England and the Continental book trade’, Quaerendo 32 (2002), 204‒17, at 205, fn. 3.
85 Naupactos is the Greek name of Lepanto. ‘Naupactiados’ is of course grammatically
a genitive.
86 Much of Johnston’s extensive work was published in mainland Europe, and has never
been reprinted; but see Musa Latina Aberdonensis, 3 vols, eds W. Duguid and W. K.
Leask (New Spalding Club, 1892‒1910), iii, 104‒60. In a late, unpublished poem to
King James, Johnston crowned his plea for the persecuted ministers of the Kirk with
the king’s motto, ‘nobilis leonis ira est …’: Edinburgh University Library, Special
Collections, Melvini Epistolae, fo. 331v.
87 On Malcolm’s early career, see Steven J. Reid, Humanism and Calvinism: Andrew
Melville and the Universities of Scotland, 1560‒1625 (Farnham, 2011), 139ff; for his
opposition to episcopalianism, see Hew Scott (ed.), Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae: The
James as the divinely appointed conqueror of the Spanish and French

Catholic hostis atrox (grim foe), and then as the long-prophesied protagonist
of the downfall of the papacy, who would cast down the ramparts of Rome.
In 1589, Malcolm’s James is the successor to King David, and – Domini
deuictis hostibus (once he has defeated God’s enemies) – dances before the
ark.8 Both in time and tone, Malcolm’s 1588 epigrams stand very close to
Murray’s statements in the Lamentationum … Paraphrasis, foreshadowing
Andrew Melville’s ΣTHΦANIΣKION [sic for ΣTEΦANIΣKION], ad
Scotiae Regem (1590) and Principis Scoti-Britannorum natali (1594), poetic
visions of the ‘Britannic’ James and his dynasty leading a Protestant crusade
and overthrowing the walls of the papal Babylon.We do not know how early
Murray made Andrew Melville’s acquaintance, but he would be cited as a
most trusted friend by the imprisoned Melville in 1610.9
Thomas Murray was the third son of Patrick Murray of Woodend (near
Crieff in Perthshire), second son of Anthony Murray of Dollerie, a cadet of
the Murrays of Tullibardine. Thomas’ career before 1603 is (as yet) a mystery:
there is no extant record of where he studied, nor whether he ever graduated,
despite the fact he was addressed as ‘Mr’.10 One of his poems says he took
part in a public disputation on sovereign monarchical power, graced by the
presence of the king, at Edinburgh in 1599.11 In 1603, he is recorded as being
paid £333 6s. 8d. by command of the king for attending James in England.12
In 1604 Murray published Naupactiados, his Latin verse paraphrase of the
king’s Lepanto, and thereafter went on to enjoy a long, successful and little-
studied career at the heart of the royal family, as first tutor and then secretary
to Prince Charles.13
Succession of Ministers in the Church of Scotland from the Reformation, 5 vols (2nd edn,
Edinburgh, 1915), iv, 230, which ignores his epigrams, as does Jane Rickard,
Authorship and Authority: The Writings of James VI and I (Manchester, 2007).
88 The 1603 London edition of the Fruitfull Meditatioun included rhyming paraphrases
of both epigrams; see Stilma, A King Translated, 209‒10, where she fails to realise that
the two paraphrases are simply translations of Malcolm’s two 1588 epigrams.
(Malcolm’s epigram for the meditation on Chronicles was left untranslated in the
1603 London edition of that work.)
89 Thomas McCrie, Life of Andrew Melville, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1824), ii, 269, 528.
10 Joshua Sylvester, listing the ‘Grave Guides and Guards of Hopefull Charles’, calls
him ‘Master Thomas Murray’: The Parliament of Vertues Royall (London, 1614), sig.
A2. In 1615, Sir Andrew Murray and Archbishop Spottiswoode do likewise: Original
Letters Relating to the Ecclesiastical Affairs of Scotland, 1603‒1625, 2 vols, ed. David
Laing (Bannatyne Club, 1851), ii, 404, 418, 417, 421.
11 ‘Ad Regem cum publicas Authoris De Regum in Reges Jure, Juris eiusque dictione exerci-
tationes Edinburgi ANNO 1599 habitas suae Majestatis presentia aliquoties illustrasset
Eukharistikon’, in Naupactiados, 36.
12 NRS, comptroller’s accounts, 1602‒3, E24/24.
13 See the ODNB entry by Malcolm Smuts.
In 1993 Jenny Wormald’s former student Keith Brown wrote:

To describe James VI and I’s court or Charles I’s court simply as the English
court is quite wrong, and historians who have done so and who discuss it in
these terms are making a grave error. This was a British imperial court in
which Scottish and Irish elites constituted a sizeable minority, and their impact
ought to be recognised at least as much as the second-rate English poets and
royal servants who receive so much recognition from historians. But this is a
historiographical tradition with a long past. … the Scottish presence did
decline after the first few years of union. But the Scots did not disappear, and
to imagine that their presence at court made no difference to politics, policy
or the public culture of early seventeenth-century Britain is a grave error.14
Thomas Murray was one of those Scots who did not disappear.15 Already
described as tutor to Prince Charles in 1605 when awarded a grant of 220
marks per annum for life, he was highly respected: on 12 February 1611, Isaac
Wake wrote to Sir Dudley Carleton that ‘Murray … who is about the Prince,
is much courted. But his honesty makes him well esteemed’.16 Murray’s rela-
tionship with his young charge must have been rather different from the
ageing and irascible George Buchanan’s tutorship of James VI. Charles was
not his father’s intellectual equal, and unlike James, he had a ‘whipping boy’,
namely Murray’s young nephew William (son of the minister of Dysart). He
would be created first earl of Dysart in 1643.
Thomas’ own British career would never falter, despite an attempt in 1615
by George Gledstanes, archbishop of St Andrews, to get him removed from
the Prince’s service because of his presbyterianism; he was defended by none
less than Archbishop Spottiswoode of Glasgow, who would shortly succeed
the terminally ill Gledstanes at St Andrews:
There is a course to shift Mr Thomas from the Prince, and that his Maiestie
suld mislyk him as ane il affected to the estate of the Kirk. … in my opinion,
thai neyther lufe Kirk nor Countrey that wold wisch the remove of so wyse
and learned and religious a person.17
In the spring of 1617, Murray became Charles’ secretary, and in August it
became known that the king had promised him the prized provostship of Eton
College when it next fell vacant.18 In August 1621, however, it must have
seemed that Murray’s long years of royal favour were over. He failed to warn
14 Keith M. Brown, ‘The Scottish aristocracy, anglicization and the court, 1603‒1638’,
Historical Journal 36 (1993), 543‒76, at p. 575.
15 Unlike his friend and fellow-poet Sir David Murray of Gorthy, for whom, as ‘the most
trusty servant of the late Prince, and almost the only one neglected’, Thomas Murray
interceded when writing to Isaac Lake on 1 April 1617: CSP Dom., x (1619‒23), 456.
16 CSP Dom., viii (1603‒1610), 226; ix (1611‒18), 170.
17 Original Letters Relating to the Ecclesiastical Affairs of Scotland, ii, 417. For glimpses
of Gledstanes’ strategy, see ibid., 404, 405‒6, 413‒16.
18 CSP Dom., viii (1603‒1610), 444, letter of 13 March; 484, letter of 31 August.
the king that George Hakewill, Prince Charles’ puritan chaplain since
December 1612, was going to present the prince with a tract attacking the
proposed Spanish match.19 Murray did advise Hakewill not to present the
book, saying that it was ‘both dangerous and fruitless to to attempt to alter
resolutions of state by discourses’. Hakewill went ahead regardless. The
prince took the tract straight to his father, who immediately had Hakewill
imprisoned, while Murray was placed under house arrest.20 He was replaced
as Charles’ secretary in October.21
Yet in February 1622, on the death of the incumbent provost of Eton, Sir
Henry Savile, King James insisted, against considerable clerical opposition
and to the surprise of the other contenders, that the post was Murray’s as
promised.22 A botched operation for the stone, however, meant his tenure was
short. Murray died on 19 April 1623. His friend Sir Robert Ayton made
strenuous and successful efforts to ensure that Murray’s widow and children
were provided for, and the dead man was honoured with a veritable flood of
elegies in Latin and the vernacular, collected – without authors’ names – in
Harleian Manuscript 3910. One elegist notes with sadness that there seem to
be no Scottish tributes to a truly admirable man:
But since for this no gust nor sighe I see
Coms from the North, noe verse, no Elegye,
Reast pleased Murray w[ith] these teares & verse
Thy few freinds here doe scatter on thy hearse
Whose greife thire Northen Prophets credit saues
For English men now weepe oer Scotchmens graues.23
The depth of respectful affection voiced here is very different from the tone
adopted by that pillar of the Victorian London establishment Sir Lionel Cust,
historian of Eton. He dismisses Murray as ‘a Scotchman … [who] seems to
have had no particular qualifications to succeed a man like Sir Henry Savile
… [and who]… was an alien moreover, had no university degree, and was no
priest’, and continues:
[He] retained the post into which he had been thrust for one year, and would
have left no mark on the history of Eton College had not a fine and sumptuous
Jacobean monument been erected to his memory in the Chapel … the King
was disposed to give it [i.e. the provostship] to Sir Robert Ayton, a Scotchman
19 Peter E. McCullough, Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and

Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge, 1998), 202‒5.
20 CSP Dom., x (1619‒23), 284, letter of 25 August 1621.
21 See the sonnet ‘Vpon Mr Thomas Murrays fall’ in The English and Latin Poems of Sir
Robert Ayton, ed. C. B. Gullans (STS, 1963), 193.
22 CSP Dom., x (1619‒23), 339 (letter of 26 January 1622); 349‒50 (three letters of 23
February).
23 BL, Harley MS 3910, fo. 141. The elegies for Murray occupy fos 123‒147v. Ayton’s
Epitaphium for his friend is lost (Poems, 332).
like Murray … [whose] application was addressed to James I in verse, which

may have been the origin of that sage monarch’s approbation, apart from his
notorious penchant for Scotchmen. Murray’s widow also appears to have inti-
mated her willingness to remain in the lodge as Lady Ayton.24
It is no secret that Cust’s Jacobean counterparts, too, suffered from Scoto-
phobia.25 Yet the warmth of the elegies is positively striking:
O Eaton thou my nurse I waile thy state
A widowe arte thou too unfortunate
Such a good guide for skill of gentelnesse
Thou never more art likely to possesse
Yett must I feare thou dost not feele this crosse,
Nor yet hast learn’d the value of thys losse.
But it is well men misse him here no more,
Nor doate on him for what he was before.
In this forgetfulnesse, the greateste reste
Betydes him in his Monumental cheste.
Rest happy Murray then yet thou didst here;
For hadst thou liv’d a Life so good elswhere,
Such mad devotion some blind men would haue
They’d dig thy bones from out thy quiet graue
And in thy Sainted Reliques put such trust
Theyd were them with ther kisses into dust,
Or on thy Marble they so Long would pray
Till there hard knees had fyld ye stone away.
And for thy monument had Lefte no roome
But their owne harte w[hich] then should be thy Toomb.
II
This chapter is not concerned with Murray’s professional career after 1605,
the bare bones whereof can be assembled from the relevant pages of the
Calendar of State Papers: Domestic, but with Murray’s surviving poetry (all
in Latin). Less than half of it was included in the Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum
of 1637, namely the translation of the king’s Lepanto and a single short poem
about Murray’s ‘verissima amicitia’ (‘truest of true friendships’) with the
Perthshire-born humanist Alexander Dicson, the friend of Giordano Bruno.26
24 Lionel Cust, History of Eton College (London, 1899), 40‒1.

25 See e.g. Richard Harrison to Dudley Carleton, 28 May 1617, concerning Sir Henry
Saville, provost of Eton. Harrison ‘hopes he may live to see an end of the Scotchmen
who are waiting for his (i.e. Saville’s) fall’ – CSP Dom., ix (1611‒1618), 470, a reference
to Murray, Sir Peter Young and Adam Newton (ibid., 231, letter of 22 April 1614).
26 Delitiae, ii, 180‒200. For this anthology, see ‘Bridging the Continental divide: neo-
Latin and its cultural role in Jacobean Scotland, as seen in the Delitiae Poetarum
Scotorum (1637)’ (www.dps.gla.ac.uk; last accessed 30 September 2013).
In fact, the 1604 volume from which both these were taken contains
considerably more poetry. The Lepanto translation is prefaced by three
liminary poems, and followed by a rather heterogeneous collection of sixteen
short schediasmata (extemporisations), whereof the ascertainable dates of
composition range from 1599 to 1604.27 The death in February 1604 of
Catherine de Bourbon, the devoutly Calvinist sister of Henri IV, inspired
Murray to write twenty-four impassioned lines praising her constancy as a
Protestant, as well as the following forceful epitaph:
Cui genus, ingenium, pietas, prudentia, virtus
Summa fuêre, sub hoc marmore Nympha jacet.
Non jacet haec, fallor: vitam hanc erecta per omnem
Quae stetit, in caelo est viva, jacere nequit.
Haec stat, & ô vos! vos! Papanâ in faece jacentes
Excitat, exemplo stare jubetque suo. [p. 45]
(A lady whose race, spirits, piety, prudence and virtue
Were of the highest, is laid low beneath this stone.
No, I am wrong, she is not laid low; she, who all her life
Stood upright, does not lie here dead, she lives in heaven.
She is standing – and by her example, O all you who lie dead
In the excrement of popery, she urges and commands you to stand.)
Amongst the preceding ‘extemporisations’ is a striking Ad Regem, Prognos-
tikon:
Quae fuit a toto divisa Britannia Mundo,
Divisa & a populis quae fuit ante suis,
Te Duce, cum toto nunc una Britannia Mundo
Fiet, erit populis semper & una suis.
Tu quoque jam regnis pacem dabis omnibus, aut tu
Rex subiges armis omnia regna tuis.
Nempe hoc Imperii Fatum est, fortunaque summi.
Fertur in aestivi tramite Solstitii
Surgit ab Eoa, Occiduam devergit ad Arctum,
Caepit in Assyria, desinet in Scotia.
Quae fuit Imperii Romani Scottia finis,
Omnibus Imperiis Scottia finis erit.
Scilicet est Soli, & magno quae Scottia Mundo
Finis, erit Summis finis & Imperiis. [pp. 38‒9]
(To the King, a Prophecy

Britain, that was divided from all the world, and used to be divided up by her own
peoples, is now, under your reign, become one in the eyes of the whole world, and
27 As Charles’ tutor and secretary, Murray surely continued to write verse, cf. the
complete list of the Latin poems of Sir Robert Ayton, secretary to Queen Anna: Poems,
330‒2.
will be one for her peoples always. You will now give peace also to all kingdoms, or
you will, O King, conquer all kingdoms by force of arms. Assuredly the fate and
fortune of supreme empire is this: It is said that it rose from the East in the climes
of the summer solstice, and sinks down towards the Western North; it began in
Assyria, it ceases in Scotland. Scotland was the end of the Roman Empire, Scotland
will be the ending of all Empires. Undoubtedly Scotland, which is the end of the
Sun’s journey and of the great world, will also be the ending of its greatest Empires.)
This is followed by a similar poem to Prince Henry:
Ad Henricum Iacobi Magni Filium Britanniarum, & Hiberniae Principem
Aliud
Magne Puer, magnis prognate Heroibus; Heros
Major & O! atavis ipse future tuis.
O decus eximium sceptri! O spes fida Parentis!
O Mundi! O Patriae gloria summa tuae!
Tu coelo quidquid magnum est; tu quidquid in isto
Orbe fuit magnum, jam Puer unus habes:
Magnus in augusto nam splendet Iuppiter ore,
Mars, Venus, in facie Phaebus et ipse tua.
Ipse tua nobis describitur indole Cyrus,
Cum Puer Astyagem visere gaudet avum;
Ingenio Magnusque tuo, presente Philippo,
Cum domat indomitum pulverulentus equum.
Numinibus si vis ulla est caelestibus; olim
Si Cyro, & Magno gloria magna fuit,
Crede, tuis sub te veniet permagna Britannis
Gloria, quaesito fortiter Imperio;
Gloria non Graecis domitis, Persisve, Syrisve;
Gloria Romano sed pereunte Lupo.
Nec mirum hoc; Fati effatum est immobile summi,
Scottia Romanum finiet Imperium.
Inde fit, ut Scotici sit tandem, Henrice, Leonis
Splendida, Romanus, praeda futura, Lupus. [p. 39]
(Another to Henry, Prince of Britain and Ireland, son of James the Great
Great lad, descendant of great Heroes; and O, a future Hero yourself greater than
your forebears. O excellent glory of royalty! O faithful hope of your father! O
supreme glory of your native land! Whatever is great in heaven, whatever was great
on this earth, you, Lad, alone possess it: Great Jupiter himself shines in your
majestic features, your countenance is that of Mars, Venus, Apollo himself. It is
Cyrus whom your native disposition calls to our mind, when he rejoiced as a boy to
visit his grandsire Astyages; your spirit recalls Alexander the Great, when, covered
with dust, he broke the unbroken horse in Philip’s presence. If the celestial powers
have any strength; if once the glory of Cyrus and Alexander was great, then believe
me, under your sway exceeding great will the glory of your Britons be, by their
intrepidly acquired empire: a glory won not by conquering Greeks or Persians or
Syrians, but the glory achieved by the death of the Roman Wolf. Nor is this to be
wondered at. The decree of supreme destiny is unshakeable: Scotland shall be the
end of the Roman Empire. Thus it is, Henry, that the splendid future prey of the
Scottish Lion shall be the Roman Wolf.)
This is the Protestant, anti-imperial language of Andrew Melville, John
Napier of Merchiston and John Malcolm.28 Entirely different in tone and
substance are the three epigrams that Murray prefaced to the translation of
James’ Lepanto. Here Murray speaks not of prophecy and policy, but of
poetry and its power. He lauds James to the skies both as British king and as
poet, and while excusing his own pitiful attempt to put the king’s words in
Roman dress, he observes that the moon – while it is no more the sun than a
horse is a lion, or a hawk an eagle – has its own appointed role to play. Murray
also employs the topos of the interdependency of great heroes and those who
sing their deeds and thus create their fama: in two epigrams he echoes Henrie
Lok’s preliminary sonnet to King James’ Poeticall Exercises (and hence, to the
Lepanto), saying that had Homer never sung of Achilles, Alexander the Great
would never have visited and wept at the Homeric hero’s tomb.29 A similar
point had been made by Spenser’s friend Gabriel Harvey:
And now, whiles I consider what a Trompet of Honour Homer hath bene to
sturre vp many woorthy Princes, I cannot forget the worthy Prince that is a
Homer to himselfe … Lepanto, first the glory of Christendome against the
Turke, and now the garland of a soueraine crowne.30
Murray’s second epigram reads:
Ad Heroas Christianos hoc Poemate indigetatos
Relliquias flammae, Trojanaque rudera, Magnus
Lustrat Achilleum dum Macedo tumulum.
Si fortunatum magnâ proclamat Achillem
Voce, canas numeris hunc quod, Homere, tuis.
O fortunatos! Quibus una est gloria, summi
Vatis & ore cani, Regis & ore coli. [p. 6]
(To the Christian Heroes invoked in this Poem
If the great Macedonian, when visiting the ashes and ruins of Troy and the Tomb
of Achilles, cried out with a great voice that Achilles was fortunate, because you, O
Homer, sang of him in your verse, then, O fortunate men! yours is the unique glory
to be sung by a supreme bard, and honoured by the mouth of a king.)
28 See, inter alia, Stilma, ‘As warriouris in ane camp’, 243‒4; A. H. Williamson and Paul
McGinnis on Andrew Melville (and David Hume), in their edition of George
Buchanan: The Political Poetry (SHS, 1995), 31‒7, 276‒81; and Dana Sutton’s intro-
duction to David Hume’s Daphn-Amaryllis of 1603‒5 (www.philological.bham.ac.uk/
hume4/; last accessed 30 September 2013).
29 James Craigie (ed.), The Poems of James VI of Scotland, 2 vols (STS, 1955‒8), i, 105.
30 Pierces Supererogation (London, 1593), 53. My thanks to Astrid Stilma for this refe-
rence.
This is followed by Murray’s Latin version of James VI’s famous clarificatory

prose preface to Lepanto, designed to counter claims that the poem’s subject
implied pro-Spanish or pro-Catholic sentiments. Murray’s version has an
invaluable marginal note stating that James wrote the poem in summer 1585,
duly highlighted by James Craigie in his 1955 edition of Lepanto.31 More
recently, Daniel Fischlin has shown just how well the poem embodies James’
strategies for affirming his own position and status in the summer of 1585.32
Murray’s is not the only translation of the poem; the Dutch version of
1593 has now been thoroughly explored by Astrid Stilma.33 But far the best
known is La Lepanthe, by James VI’s favourite modern poet, the great
Huguenot Guillaume Salluste, Sieur du Bartas (1544‒1590), who visited
Scotland at the king’s invitation from May to September 1587. It is over-
whelmingly probable that this was when Du Bartas encountered the king’s
as yet unpublished Lepanto, and offered to make a French version.34 The king
would print the resultant Lepanthe alongside the original in 1591 in His
Maiesteis Poeticall Recreations.35 James Craigie examined the versions by Du
Bartas and Murray in some detail, and provides textual proof that Murray’s
was not the Latin version supposedly made by the king and supposedly used
as a crib, as claimed as late as 1611 by Simon Goulart.36 In fact, Du Bartas
had learned English in order to read Sidney’s Arcadia, and despite the
difference between English and Scots, Du Bartas had ample opportunity to
go over the text of Lepanto with the French-speaking king himself.37
Unlike Van der Myl’s Dutch translation, Murray’s version, like that of Du
Bartas, is very much a paraphrase, both expanding and condensing the king’s
agreeably colloquial text and recasting it in a highflown register. The presence
of the prose preface confirms that Murray did not work from the king’s
manuscript version, which lacks the print’s lines 12‒14, ‘O onely God, I pray
thee thrise,/ Thrise one in persons three,/ Alike Eternall, like of might,
Although distinct yee be’, for which Murray duly has ‘Une Deus, tu trine
31 Poems, ed. Craigie, i, p. xlviii.

32 Daniel Fischlin, ‘The politics and poetics of James VI’s Lepanto’, in Sally Mapstone
(ed.), Older Scots Literature (Edinburgh, 2005), 540‒59.
33 Stilma, A King Translated, 84‒125.
34 Craigie, in Poems, i, p. lxviii, note 54, shows that the Lepanto is not mentioned in Du
Bartas’ contract of 24 July 1585, pace both Rickard, Authorship and Authority, 61, and
her source for this claim.
35 Poems, ed. Craigie, i, 284‒9.
36 Poems, ed. Craigie, i, 284. Stilma, A King Translated, quotes the Dutch translator
Abraham van der Myl’s 1593 claim that Du Bartas ‘did not know Scots’, and had
recourse to help from someone else, resulting in a version much less literal than Van
der Myl’s own (p. 69). On pp. 107‒8, she reveals Van der Myl’s extensive debts to Du
Bartas.
37 Peter Auger, ‘Du Bartas’ visit to England and Scotland in 1587’, Notes & Queries 59
(2012), 505‒8, note 15.
Deus, ter hypostasis una, / Tres simul aeterni, tres omnipotente coaequi/
Numine; personis, mirum! O Deus une, ter unis’. Likewise, Murray’s ‘Plan-
itiemque dolat latomus rude marmor in aequam’ translates not the manu-
script’s ‘The goldsmith makis his tuichstainne fitt for any golde he gettis’,
but its replacement, ‘The mason clinckes on Marble Stones / which hardlie
drest he gets’ (lines 439‒40). Murray’s version of the king’s preface ends with
the date ‘Prid.Cal.Maias. 1588’, i.e. 30 April, and Craigie insists that this
proves that Murray’s translation itself was made in 1588.38 What the printing
of this date in 1604 does unquestionably prove is that in 1604, someone
wanted to underscore the strongly anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish contents
of the preface: the date makes it plain that Lepanto had never been a
preemptive conciliatory gesture of respect for the Spaniards on the eve of
their intended invasion of England, as seems to have been suspected at the
time (hence the king’s writing of an explanatory preface), and has been
suggested in a recent book.39
Rod Lyall has suggested that around 1603, the spate of editions and trans-
lations of James VI’s works was ‘part of a deliberate campaign to promote
James’s policies’, both in his new realm of England and in mainland Europe,
and he shows that Murray’s publisher John Norton had the Naupactiados
volume on sale at the Frankfurt Book Fair.40 But had Murray’s own intention
been to promote James VI and I, it seems unlikely that he would have
appended all sixteen of his heterogeneous schediasmata, though the two repro-
duced above would certainly appeal to an international Protestant readership.
As might the 1604 New Year’s poem for James VI and I, ender of internecine
strife and restorer of the rule of Astraea, goddess of Justice, in which Murray
inter alia optimistically proclaims:
Et tolles prisci nomina dissidii.
Non Scottus, non Anglus erit; sed uterque Britannus,
Aut prisco Albînus nomine dictus erit. [p. 38, lines 9‒12]
(And you shall do away with the names of ancient discord. No more Scots, no more
Englishmen, but both shall be called Britons, or by their ancient name of Albans.)
Of international interest would likewise be In redivivum Musarum sub Jacobo
Rege decus (‘On the revival of the glory of the Muses under King James’), the
brief In rarissimum Elizabethae Anglae regnum (‘On the exceptional rule of
English Elizabeth’), and, above all, Murray’s tribute to the steadfastness unto
death of the Protestant Catherine de Bourbon.
38 See Poems, ed. Craigie, i, pp. xlvi–vii, and the August 1589 Stationers Register entry
cited and discussed there.
39 King James VI & I, Selected Writings, eds Neil Rhodes, Jennifer Richards and Joseph
Marshall (Aldershot, 2003), 9.
40 Lyall, ‘Marketing of James VI and I’, 207 and 211.
III
Murray’s own lifelong commitment to a puritanical Scottish Calvinism and

to King James’ vision of ‘Britain’ is illustrated by the way in which the sche-
diasmata of 1604 addressed to James and to Henry – as those who would put
an end to the Roman Empire of the Pope – relate directly to Murray’s
virtually unknown, beautifully calligraphed manuscript work Lamentationum
Ieremiae Paraphrasis Poetica, which dates from 1587‒88, as we shall see.41
This expansive paraphrase of Lamentations comes carefully framed by
preliminary and postliminary verses.
The manuscript’s opening epigram (see Figure 15.2) comments ‘Parva
Britannaeo liceat dare dona Monarchae’ (‘it is permissible to offer little gifts
to a Britannic monarch’), and the following long ‘Elegia’ is addressed ‘Ad
Iacobum eius nominis Sextum Christianissimum & Serenissimum Scotorum
Regem’ (‘To James Sixth of that name, Most Christian and Most Serene King
of Scots’): the style ‘Christianissimum … Scotorum Regem’ recalls the
phraseology found in the title of James’ 1588 and 1589 meditations, namely,
‘Set doun be the maist christiane King and synceir professour, and cheif
defender of the treuth, IAMES the 6 King of Scottis’, epithets we have
already seen Murray employ in 1604 in the title of Naupactiados.42 Murray’s
Elegia opens by addressing James as:
Scote Britannaeae sidus Boreale coronae
Pene sub Arctoo qui regis arva polo
(O Scot, O North Star of the Britannic Crown, you who rule the lands that lie
almost under the Arctic sky)
This North Star wears a Caledonian diadem and wields the sceptre of Fergus,
yet Murray, writing in the latter half of 1587 or the first half of 1588, will go
on to speak of the Britannigenum genus (Britain-born race) and the Britan-
naeas… terras (Britannic lands). He makes no reference to James’ being
married or being about to marry, or to the Spanish Armada, but he does refer
to the Armada-supporting Pope Sixtus V (r. April 1585–August 1590):
Siccine Barbaricos rabies Papana furores
Sistaque flammiferas concitat ira faces?
(Does Papal madness thus stir up barbaric fury,
And Sixtus’ anger brandish blazing torches?)43
41 NLS, Adv. MS 19.3.23.

42 Stilma, A King Translated, 209‒10, briefly discusses various verbal portrayals of James
as the Pope’s nemesis. But see note 8 above.
43 Sista, here meaningless as a past participle, is in fact an adjective derived from
Sixtus/Sistus. My thanks to Professor Dana F. Sutton and Dr Henry Howard, who
independently suggested this interpretation.
Figure 15.2
Thomas Murray, Lamentationum Ieremiae Paraphrasis Poetica,
prefatory epigram to James VI.
(The National Library of Scotland, Adv. MS 19.3.23, fo. 2r.)
And he addresses these words to James VI:

Phosphore, Christicolis miseranda clade, subactis,
Surgit ab ingenio spes rediviva tuo.
Te duce, Romani pellent iuga dura Tyranni,
Cultaque pro vero Numina ficta DEO.
En tibi mirificos tribuit Germanus honores!
Ecce tuam supplex Belga requirit opem!
Te colit Helvetus, Batavus veneratur, adorat
Cimber, amat Suaevus, Burbonidumque domus.
Quique Britannaeas habitat pius incola terras,
Quaeque colit verum, te colit ora, Deum.
Te timet Hispani rabies animosa Philippi,
Et Capitolini pompa superba Iovis.
Te timet Ausoniis Italus truculentus in oris,
Gallaque foedifragos turba sequuta duces.
Turbaque Lethifero Papae temulenta veneno
Saepe cucullatis contemerata dolis. [fo. 5r.–5v., lines 53‒68]
(O Morning Star, from your natural disposition there arises fresh hope for the
Christian faithful crushed by pitiful slaughter; led by you, they will cast off the
harsh yoke of the Roman Tyrant, and the worship of false gods instead of the true
GOD. See what singular honours the Germans pay you, behold how the suppliant
Netherlander calls for your aid! The Swiss honour you, the Dutch revere you, the
Danes esteem you, the Swabians love you, as does the House of Bourbon. All men
of faith dwelling in the Britannic lands, and all those regions that honour the true
God honour you. The rage of undaunted Spanish Philip fears you, as does the proud
pomp of the Pope on the Capitoline Hill, and the grim Italian in the Ausonian
lands, and the French rabble that follows the treaty-breaking Dukes, and the rabble
drunk on the fatal poison of the Pope and repeatedly defiled by his hooded deceits.)
The mention of the Danes would suggest a date after July 1587, when
abortive negotiations were held for a match between James and Princess Eliz-
abeth of Denmark; in February 1588, on the death of Frederick II, Elizabeth’s
sister Anna was first suggested to James as a bride.44 Murray’s reference to
the Bourbons is equally suggestive in terms of dating. It calls to mind not
only Henri IV’s long military struggle against the followers of the Dukes of
Guise and the Ligueurs, assisted as they were by Philip II of Spain, and
backed by Pope Sixtus, but also Henri’s sister Catherine (1559‒1604): she
had been considered as a consort for James VI in the 1580s, and informal
negotiations on the proposed match took place during Du Bartas’ Scottish
visit from May to September 1587.45
In fact, Du Bartas may well have met Thomas Murray, and given him
firsthand accounts of the suffering of the Huguenots at the hands of the
44 David Stevenson, Scotland’s Last Royal Wedding: The Marriage of James VI and Anne
of Denmark (Edinburgh, 1997), 8‒11, 14.
45 See inter alia Auger, ‘Du Bartas’ visit’.
Catholic Ligueurs and their Spanish allies, which inspired Murray to para-
phrase Lamentations. Murray could also have heard earlier descriptions of
the horrific persecution of French Protestants from Patrick Adamson, who
had been forced to go into hiding during the orgy of slaughter unleashed by
the St Bartholemew’s Eve Massacre in Paris. Adamson had taken spiritual
refuge in composing a Bibilical paraphrase, on which Murray wrote a fine
epigram: ‘In Iobum, a Patricio Adamsono, Sancti-Andreae Archiepiscopo, in
medio belli civilis, quo Gallia anno 1572 conflagravit, Poetica Metaphrasi illu-
stratum’ (‘On Job, glorified in a poetic paraphrase by Patick Adamson, Arch-
bishop of St Andrews, in the midst of the civil war which set France ablaze
in 1572’), which begins:
Gallia civili cum debacchata furore
Facta est heu: populi carnificina sui,
Moestus Adamsonus, flammaque & caede piorum
Continuata videns funera funeribus,
Iam dubius vitae, solum sibi legit Iobum
Aerumnis comitem, consiliumque suis.
Hinc & Adamsono cessit bene, cessit Iobo
Res bene; pro meritis munus uterque tulit.
Debet Adamsonus vitae solamen Iobo,
Quodque pius raptas fert patienter opes.46
(When France, alas! overwhelmed by raging, internecine madness, became the

butcher of her own people, Adamson, griefstruck by the endless piling of death on
death as the righteous were burned and slaughtered, and in doubt of his own life,
chose Job as his sole companion and counseller in his tribulations. Hence things ended
well for Adamson, as they ended well for Job; each received the reward he deserved.
Adamson owes his life’s consolation to Job, and the fact that faithful man patiently
bore the loss of his worldly wealth.)
Adamson’s Job, circulating in manuscript, could have inspired Murray to
select Lamentations as a way of highlighting the current situation of mainland
Europe’s suffering Protestants, endlessly trampled under the bloodstained
feet of the Papacy’s Spanish and other butchers.47 Verse paraphrases of
Lamentations (and of the comparably concise Song of Songs) in both Latin
and the vernacular would enjoy a considerable vogue in Renaissance Britain:
46 Printed in Thomas Wilson (ed.), Reuerendissimi in Christo Patris, Patricii Adamsoni,

Sancti-Andreae in Scotia archiepisopi dignissimi ac doctissimi, Poëmata sacra, cum alijs
opusculis. Studio ac industria Tho. Voluseni I.C. expolita & recognita (London, 1619),
sig. C. The date of composition is unknown. Wilson’s 1619 publication was designed
to rehabilitate Adamson, but the presbyterian Murray is most unlikely to have been
an admirer of the erstwhile archbishop’s ecclesiology.
47 The general assembly of August 1574 appointed George Buchanan, Peter Young,
Andrew Melville and James Lawson to peruse Adamson’s work, and authorise it if
found ‘agreeable to the truth of God’s word’: BUK, i, 310.
Murray’s seems to be one of the earliest, but part of Lamentations is versified

in Jud(e) Smith, A misticall deuise of the spirituall and godly loue betwene Christ
the spouse, and the church or congregation (London, 1575), while an anonymous
Lamentations of Ieremie in meeter, with apt notes to sing them withal was printed
at London in 1587. Murray may have known Les lamentations et saincts regretz
du prophete Jeremie, avec paraphrase et exposition appropriée à ce temps en toutes
sortes lamentable (Speyer, 1584), by the Calvinist Daniel Toussain (Tossanus),
later translated by Thomas Stocker as The lamentations and holy mourninges
of the prophet Ieremiah with a lamentable paraphrase and exhortation, meete
euery way to be applyed vnto these our dayes (London, c.1587).
In his prefatory elegy addressing James VI, Murray writes:
Accipe lugubri squalentia veste Latina
Carmina, veridici flebile vatis opus.
Hic labor, hic macies, Elegi, tormenta, dolores,
Quaeque notant laceras, signa canuntur, opes.
Ira, furor, gemitus,clamor, metus, ensis, et arcus,
Bella, fames, lachrymae, fata, querela, minae.
Et quaecunque diu passa est Solymaea propago,
Dum Babylonaeas capta videret aquas. [fo. 3r.–3v., lines 7‒14]
(Accept these lamenting Latin songs dressed in mourning weeds, the weeping words
of the truth-speaking prophet. Here are hardships, starving bodies, funeral chants,
anguish, pain; here are battles that are joined, and forces shattered; here are anger,
rage, groans, shouts, fear, the sword and the bow, war, famine, tears, deaths, accu-
sations, threats – all that the children of Jerusalem long suffered, until as captives
they beheld the waters of Babylon.)
Murray then observes that although Lamentations was handed down on the
lips of the children of Israel (Hoc opus Isacidum quamvis volitare per ora ceperit)
and spoke of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, the poem also
refers to the present day:
Ista tamen variis titubantia saecla ruinis
Aspicit, auspiciis laeta futura tuis.
Iam fera barbaries laxis grassatur habenis
Et rabies Itali perniciosa lupi.
Divaque legitimo spoliantur numina cultu,
Structaque fictitios accipit ara Deos.
Foeda superstitio vasto dominatur in orbe,
Pistaque sacrilega crusta rotunda manu.
Undique terribili sonitu Papana vagantur
Arma, piis gelidos incutiuntque metus:
Heu pia Christicolum misere captiva trahuntur
Colla, vel implicitae post sua terga manus!
Heu fora caede madent nimia, perfusaque membris
Arva cruentatis sanguinolenta rubent!
Non mulier, primove puer sub limine vitae,
Non fugit armatas cana senecta manus.

Cuncta furens hostis ferro populatur, et igni,
Effugio tutas nec sinit esse vias.
Vincit et Assyries dira feritate colonos,
Vincit et immanes impietate feras.
Siccine Barbaricos rabies Papana furors
Sistaque flammiferas concitat ira faces? [fos 3v.–4v., lines 19‒40]
(It however, looks to this present generation, reeling from various calamities, yet
with a happy future under your leadership. For now, savage barbarism and the
madness of the baleful Italian wolf have free rein to rage; the Godhead is despoiled
of His lawful worship, and altars raised to welcome false gods. Filthy superstition,
and a pastry disc baked by sacrilegious hands, lord it over the wide world. Every-
where the terrible sound of the roaming Papal armies strikes icy fear in the hearts
of the faithful: Christ’s pious followers are carried off as wretched captives, alas for
sorrow, their hands bound behind their backs. Alas for sorrow, the marketplaces
overflow with the slain, and the fields, strewn with bleeding limbs, are red with
blood. Neither women, nor newborn babes, nor white-haired age can escape these
armoured hands; the raging foe lays all things waste with sword and fire, and there
are no roads safe for flight. This surpasses even the Assyrian invader in hideous
savagery, surpasses even those monstrous beasts in impiety. Does Papal madness
thus stir up barbaric fury, and Sixtus’ anger brandish blazing torches?)
And Murray moves on to tell James:
Ergo age, contensis apta tua robora nervis ...
Cerne famem, gemitus, et singultantia verba,
Bella, necem, lachrymas, verbera dura, metus.
Aspice, quae misero patiuntur in orbe fideles
Isaciduum querulis non leviora malis. [fos 5v.–6r., lines 69, 71‒4]
(Therefore take action, bend your sinews to readying your choice troops … take to
heart this hunger, these groans, these sobbing words, these wars, massacres, tears,
harsh blows and fears. Consider what things the faithful suffer in this unhappy world,
no whit less hard than the ills bewailed by the Hebrews.)
Then comes the direct equation of the Church of Rome with the Whore of
Babylon spoken of in Revelation, and a vision of James as leader of the hosts
of the faithful:
Et Babylonaeis languentia colla cathenis,
Multaque perpessos eripe damna pios.
Opprime Barbaricum, victa Babylone, Tyrannum,
Captaque fac durum colla subire iugum,
Non Asiae fuerit Babylon repetenda sub oris,
Turris in Assyrio, quae fuit alta, solo.
Sed Babylon Scoticis multo coniunctior oris,
Horrida Romulei Roma caverna lupi.
Hic tibi victrices cingent pia tempora lauri
Cum cadet auspiciis Roma superba tuis.
Nec Capitolini poterunt Capitolia Divi,

Nec Capitolinos haec rapuisse Deos.
Omnia Papanis resonabunt icta ruinis,
Crux, domus, aulaeum, templa, theatra, forum. [fo. 6r.–v., lines 81‒90]
(And free from their Babylonian chains the true believers who have suffered so many
afflictions. And having overcome Babylon, attack the Barbarous Tyrant, and put
a harsh yoke on his captive neck: not the Babylon that lies in the Asian lands, the
lofty Tower that stood on Assyrian soil, but the Babylon that lies much closer to
Scotland’s shores – Rome, the ghastly cave of the Romulean wolf. Here the victo-
rious laurels will crown your pious brow, when proud Rome shall fall to you. The
Capitoline gods will not be able to snatch away [to safety] the temples of the Capitol,
nor the Capitol able to snatch away the Capitoline gods. Caught up in the Papist
downfall, all these things will crash to the ground: cross, house, embroidered
hangings, temples, theatres, forum.)
The final passage speaks of James as the chosen one who will bring about the
long-delayed reign of true piety.
Quosque profanatus post plurima saecula mundus
Finxerat, una omnes destruet hora Deos.
Passaque funereos pietas veneranda labores
Incipiet placida sceptra tenere manu.
Et feret acceptam tibi, REX IACOBE, salutem,
Qui potes afflictae vim tribuisse Deae.
Sic pueri, serique canent tua gesta nepotes
Gramina dum campus, dum feret astra polus. [fo. 6v., lines 91‒8]
(Those gods, whom a world unhallowed for several ages had invented, shall all be
destroyed in a single hour, and venerable piety, having endured deadly hardship,
shall begin to hold the sceptre in her peaceful hand, and will bring you, KING
JAMES, welcome greeting, since you have been able to place your strength at the
service of piety, that afflicted goddess. Thus the children of this age and the grand-
children of ages to come shall sing your achievements, for as long as the fields grow
green, and the sky is filled with stars.)
Murray’s ensuing verse rendering of Lamentations is a literary version, not
an absolutely literal rendition. He frequently expands on his text, as here:
The Lord hath trodden underfoot all my valiant men in the middes of mee: he
hath called an assembly against me to destroy my yong men: the Lord hath troden
the winepresse upon the virgine the daughter of Iudah. (Geneva Bible, 1:15)
Robora belligerae prostravit leta iuventae,
Me, dolor! infandam conspiciente necem.
Quin, et, ut adversa iuvenilia pectora clade
Obruat, hostiles ecce coegit opes.
Et veluti tumidas conculcat vinitor uvas,
Cum nuova nudato sub pede vina fluunt:
Sic pede virgineos dominus calcavit honores,
Et decus, et formam, nata Sione, tuam. [fo. 12r., lines 103‒10]
(He has laid low the glad flower of my warlike young men, while I, O the pain of
it! looked upon the unspeakable slaughter. And so that he might destroy their
youthful hearts, he has brought together hostile forces. As the vintner treads the ripe
grapes when new wine flows beneath his naked foot, thus has the Lord trampled
underfoot your honourable virgins, your glory and your comeliness, o daughter of
Zion.)
However, Murray’s embroidering does not actually depart from the text, nor
extrapolate so as to invent direct allusions to the situation of Europe’s perse-
cuted Protestants. Certainly, there is a reference to Christ, in Chapter 4:20,
which in the Geneva Bible reads: ‘The breath of our nostrels, the anointed
of the Lord, was taken in their nets, of whom we said, Vnder his shadow we
shalbe preserued aliue among the heathen’. ‘Christus’, of course, means
‘anointed’, and Murray makes an untranslatable play on this:
Qui nostrae spes una fuit, columenque salutis
Christus homo, Christi vera figura DEI
Sustinet aeratas pedibus gestare cathenas.
Captus, et hostili retia tensa manu.
Ille salutifera mediis in gentibus umbra
Debuit incolumes qui tenuisse suos. [fo. 29r., lines 597‒602]
(He who was our only hope, and the pillar of our salvation, the Anointed Man, the
true figure of Christ God, endures the weight of brazen chains on his feet. Captured
in the net stretched out by the hands of our foes is he who should have been as a
healing shadow to keep his own unharmed.)
Murray here is simply building on the Geneva Bible’s marginal note m, ‘Our
king Iosiah, in whom stood our hope of Gods fauour, & on whom depended
our state and life, was slaine, whom he calleth Anointed, because he was a
figure of Christ’. Murray doubtless fully intended James VI to realise that he
too was a ‘christus homo’, an anointed mortal, but one who – being not slain
but alive – was capable of affording God’s chosen the protection of his healing
shadow. Murray seems to have worked from both the Geneva Bible and the
Latin version beloved of Protestants, produced by the Jewish convert
Emmanuel Tremellius (1510‒80), published between 1575 and 1579.
Unusually, Tremellius ends Lamentations with an interrogative: ‘Nam an
omnino sperneres nos, effervesceres contra nos admodum?’ – ‘For wouldst
Thou reject us utterly, wouldst Thou burn with limitless rage against us?’
Murray too ends questioningly:
Siccine bacchanti semper torrebimur igni?
Et facient nullos ira, furorque modos?
(Shall we forever be scorched by raging flames?
And will your anger and fury have no end?)
The manuscript then closes with a consoling postliminary poem, a beautiful
paraphrase of the First Psalm, ‘Blessed is the man, who walks not in the
counsel of the ungodly’. The reason for choosing this psalm is plain enough.
It speaks of the reward that awaits the righteous who do not betray the true
faith. Warning the righteous utterly to eschew the company of the godless
who mock God, the psalm describes the blessedness of those whose delight
is in the Law of the Lord and the keeping of His commandments. As one of
the righteous, surely James VI will defend the true believers crushed under
the cloven hooves of Philip II and Sixtus V. The enemies of God will be blown
away like dust and chaff before the wind, but the righteous, including James,
will have no cause for fear at the Last Judgement, which Murray vividly
summons up in his paraphrase of the words ‘Therefore the wicked shall not
stand in the judgement’ from verse five of the psalm:
Ergo citaturis vastum clangoribus orbem
Cum tuba rauca fremet, nitidoque sub aethere iudex
Iura repurgato dicet caelestia mundo,
Tum scelerata cohors radiantia lumina vultus
Iudicis in solio timeat spectare superbo. [fo. 33r., lines 25‒9]
(Therefore when the clangorous summons of the harsh trumpet shall shake the devas-
tated globe, and the judge shall pronounce heavenly sentence on a world that has
passed away, then let the wicked multitude fear to look on the shining face of the
judge on his splendid throne.)
Murray thus completes his presentation of Lamentations by reminding the
reader of the cosmic context of all human life, as set out in the Book of Reve-
lation, which he had evoked with his references to Babylon in the opening
Elegia to King James.
IV
Thomas Murray was clearly at one with his better-known contemporaries

John Malcolm, Andrew Melville and David Hume – and James VI himself,
at least for a time – in believing that God’s true purpose in bringing about
the union of Scotland and England in the person of James VI was to seal that
union in a Protestant crusade. Had Prince Henry lived, that crusade might
have taken place. Whether Murray ever envisaged Charles as a crusader is
unknown, but in fact, Charles’ career as king would exemplify the sad truth
that no amount of tutoring can guarantee a desired outcome, something histo-
rians have long pondered in the case of James VI and George Buchanan.
Thomas Murray may not have been Buchanan redivivus, but, like so many of
his fellow-countrymen at the British imperial court, he merits more investi-
gation than he has hitherto received.
Publications of Jenny Wormald
Books
The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2012) (co-editor with T. M. Devine).
The Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Short Oxford
History of the British Isles, 2008) (editor).
Scotland: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) (editor). Pub-
lished in Czech translation as Jenny Wormaldova (ed.), Dĕjiny
Skotska (Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové Noviny, 2007).
Scotland Revisited (London: Collins & Brown, History Today Book, 1991)
(editor).
Mary Queen of Scots: A Study in Failure (London: George Philip, 1988).
Published in German translation as Maria Stuart (Frankfurt: Verlag
Ploetz, 1993); revised as Mary, Queen of Scots: Politics, Passion and a
Kingdom Lost (London: Tauris Parke, 2001).
Lords and Men in Scotland: Bonds of Manrent, 1442‒1603 (Edinburgh: John
Donald, 1985).
Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland, 1470‒1625 (London: Edward Arnold,
1981). Reprinted Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991.
Scottish Society in the Fifteenth Century (London: Edward Arnold, 1977)
(editor).
Articles and book chapters

‘Introduction: the study of modern Scottish history’, in T. M. Devine and
Jenny Wormald (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1‒15. (Co-authored with T. M.
Devine.)
‘Reformed and godly Scotland?’, in T. M. Devine and Jenny Wormald (eds),
The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012), 204‒19.
‘The “British” crown, the earls and the plantation of Ulster’, in Eamonn Ó
Ciardha and Micheál Ó Siochrú (eds), The Plantation of Ulster: Ideology
and Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 18‒32.
‘Reformations, unions and civil wars, 1485‒1660’, in Jonathan Clark (ed.),

A World by Itself: A History of the British Isles (London: Heinemann,
2010), 223‒332.
‘“A union of hearts and minds?” The making of the union between Scotland
and England, 1603’, in Jon Arrieta and John H. Elliott (eds), Forms of
Union: The British and Spanish Monarchies in the Seventeenth and Eigh-
teenth Centuries (Donostia: Eusto Ikaskunta, 2010), 109‒24.
‘Conclusion’, in Jenny Wormald (ed.), The Seventeenth Century (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, Short Oxford History of the British Isles, 2008),
223‒48.
‘The headaches of monarchy: kingship and the kirk in the early seventeenth
Century’, in Julian Goodare and Alasdair A. MacDonald (eds), Sixteenth-
Century Scotland: Essays in Honour of Michael Lynch (Leiden: Brill, 2008),
366‒93.
‘The happier marriage partner: the impact of the union of the crowns on
Scotland’, in Glenn Burgess, Rowland Wymer and Jason Lawrence (eds),
The Accession of James I: Historical and Cultural Consequences (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 69‒87.
‘The reign of James VI, 1573‒1625’, in Bob Harris and Alan R. MacDonald
(eds), Scotland: The Making and Unmaking of the Nation, c.1100‒1707,
vol. ii: Early Modern Scotland, c.1500‒1707 (Dundee: Dundee University
Press and Open University in Scotland, 2006), 18‒35.
‘“O brave new world”? The union of England and Scotland in 1603’, in T.
C. Smout (ed.), Anglo-Scottish Relations from 1603 to 1900 (Oxford:
Proceedings of the British Academy 127, 2005), 13‒35.
‘Confidence and perplexity: the seventeenth century’, in Jenny Wormald
(ed.), Scotland: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 143‒76.
‘James VI and I (1566‒1625)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), vol. 29, 628‒57.
‘National pride, decentralised nation: the political culture of fifteenth-century
Scotland’, in Linda Clark and Christine Carpenter (eds), The Fifteenth
Century, vol. iv: Political Culture in Late Medieval Britain (Woodbridge:
Boydell, 2004), 181‒94.
‘Politics and government of Scotland’, in Robert Tittler and Norman L. Jones
(eds), A Companion to Tudor England (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 151‒66.
‘Thorns in the flesh: English kings and unco-operative Scottish rulers, 1460‒
1549’, in George W. Bernard and Steven J. Gunn (eds), Authority and
Consent in Tudor England: Essays presented to C. S. L. Davies (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2002), 61‒78.
‘“Tis true I am a cradle king”: the view from the throne’, in Julian Goodare
and Michael Lynch (eds), The Reign of James VI (East Linton: Tuckwell,
2000), 241‒56.
‘The witches, the Devil and the king’, in Terry Brotherstone and David
PUBLICATIONS OF JENNY WORMALD 343
Ditchburn (eds), Freedom and Authority: Scotland, c.1050–c.1650:

Historical and Historiographical Essays Presented to Grant G. Simpson (East
Linton: Tuckwell, 2000), 165‒80.
‘Scotland, 1406‒1513’, in C. T. Allmand (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval
History, vol. 7: c.1415–c.1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), 514‒31.
‘Godly reformer, godless monarch: John Knox and Mary queen of Scots’, in
Roger A. Mason (ed.), John Knox and the British Reformations (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 1998), 220‒41.
‘Der Schottische König Jakob VI’, in Heinz Duchhardt (ed.), Der Herrscher
in der Doppelpflicht: Europäische Fürsten und ihre beiden Throne (Mainz:
Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte, Beiheft 43,
1997), 99‒121.
‘James VI, James I and the identity of Britain’, in Brendan Bradshaw and John
Morrill (eds), The British Problem, c.1534‒1707: State Formation in the
Atlantic Archipelago (London: Macmillan, 1996), 148‒71.
‘James VI of Scotland, I of England (19 June 1566‒27 March 1625)’, in David
A. Richardson (ed.), Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 172: Sixteenth-
Century British Nondramatic Writers, Fourth Series (Detroit, MI: Gale,
1996), 119‒35.
‘Ecclesiastical vitriol: the kirk, the puritans and the future king of England’,
in John Guy (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last
Decade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 171‒91.
‘The high road from Scotland: one king, two kingdoms’, in Alexander Grant
and K. J. Stringer (eds), Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British
History (London: Routledge, 1995), 123‒32.
‘The union of 1603’, in Roger A. Mason (ed.), Scots and Britons: Scottish
Political Thought and the Union of 1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), 17‒40.
‘Resistance and regicide in sixteenth-century Scotland: the execution of Mary
queen of Scots’, Majestas, 1 (1993), 67‒87.
‘The creation of Britain: multiple kingdoms or core and colonies?’, Transac-
tions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 2 (1992), 175‒94.
‘Szkocja: tradycja i rozwój’, in Antoni Mączak (ed.), Europa i świat w
początkach epoki nowożytnej, Cz. 2: Ideologie, kryzysy, konflikty (Warszawa:
Wiedza Powszechna, 1992), 339‒64.
‘James VI and I, Basilikon Doron and The Trew Law of Free Monarchies: the
Scottish context and the English translation’, in Linda L. Peck (ed.), The
Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), 36‒54.
‘L’état et l’aristocratie et l’idée de contrat en Écosse, XVe–XVIIe siècle’, in
Philippe Contamine (ed.), L’état et les aristocraties, XIIe–XVIIe siècle:
France, Angleterre, Écosse (Paris: Presses de l’École Normale Superieure,
1989), 213‒30.
‘Laisser-faire government and local patronage: Scotland, sixteenth to early

seventeenth century’, in Antoni Mączak (ed.), Klientelsysteme im Europa
der Frühen Neuzeit (München: Oldenbourg, 1988), 159‒75.
‘No bishop, no king: the Scottish Jacobean episcopate, 1600‒1625’, in Bernard
Vogler (ed.), Miscellanea Historiae Ecclesiasticae, 8 (Louvain: Bibliothèque
de la Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique 72, 1987), 259‒67.
‘Lords and lairds in fifteenth-century Scotland: nobles and gentry?’, in
Michael Jones and R. L. Storey (eds), The Gentry and Lesser Nobility in
Late Medieval Europe (Gloucester: Sutton, 1986), 181‒220.
‘Governo “laisser-faire” e padrinaggio locale: la Scozia fra il XVI e gli inizi
del XVII secolo’, in Antoni Mączak and Marzio Achille Romani (eds),
Padrini e clienti nell’Europa moderna (secoli XV–XIX) (Parma: Edizioni
Astrea, Cheiron 5, 1986), 47‒65.
‘An early modern postscript: the Sandlaw dispute, 1546’, in Wendy Davies
and Paul Fouracre (eds), The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval
Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 191‒205.
‘Gunpowder, treason and Scots’, Journal of British Studies 24 (1985), 141‒68.
‘James VI and I: two kings or one?’, History 68 (1983), 187‒209.
‘“Princes” and the regions in the Scottish Reformation’, in Norman
Macdougall (ed.), Church, Politics and Society: Scotland, 1408‒1929
(Edinburgh: John Donald, 1983), 65‒84.
‘Bloodfeud, kindred and government in early modern Scotland’, Past and
Present 87 (May 1980), 54‒97. Reprinted as ‘The blood feud in early
modern Scotland’, in John Bossy (ed.), Disputes and Settlements: Law and
Human Relations in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1983), 101‒44.
‘The exercise of power’, in Jennifer M. Brown (ed.), Scottish Society in the
Fifteenth Century (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), 33‒65.
‘Scottish politics, 1567‒1625’, in Alan G. R. Smith (ed.), The Reign of James
VI and I (London: Macmillan, 1973), 22‒39.
‘Taming the magnates?’, in Gordon Menzies (ed.), The Scottish Nation:
A History of the Scots from Independence to Union (London: BBC, 1972),
46‒59. Reprinted in K. J. Stringer (ed.), Essays on the Nobility of Medieval
Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1985), 270‒80, and in Gordon
Menzies (ed.), Who Are The Scots? and The Scottish Nation (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 147‒60.
Shorter works
‘Introduction’, in Jenny Wormald (ed.), The Seventeenth Century (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, Short Oxford History of the British Isles, 2008),
1‒10.
‘Royal Dunfermline to royal Whitehall: the stresses of moving house’, in
PUBLICATIONS OF JENNY WORMALD 345
Richard Fawcett (ed.), Royal Dunfermline (Edinburgh: Society of Anti-

quaries of Scotland, 2005), 199‒208.
‘Introduction’, in Jenny Wormald (ed.), Scotland: A History (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005), pp. xv–xxi.
‘James VI & I’, History Today 52:6 (June 2002), 27‒33.
Articles for Michael Lynch (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Scottish History
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001; 2nd edn, 2004).
‘The castle and palace of Stirling’, The Court Historian 5 (2000), 43‒8.
Articles for Jack A. Goldstone (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Political Revolutions
(Chicago, IL: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998).
Articles for Hans J. Hillerbrand (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Refor-
mation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Articles for Ronald H. Fritze and William B. Robison (eds), Historical
Dictionary of Stuart England, 1603‒1689 (New York: Greenwood, 1996).
Articles for Ronald H. Fritze (ed.), Historical Dictionary of Tudor England,
1485‒1603 (New York: Greenwood, 1991).
‘Introduction’, in Jenny Wormald (ed.), Scotland Revisited (London: Collins
& Brown, History Today Book, 1991), 7‒11.
Articles for A. F. Kinney et al. (eds), Tudor England: An Encyclopedia (New
York: Garland, 1991).
‘The first king of Britain’, in Lesley M. Smith (ed.), The Making of Britain:
The Age of Expansion (London: Macmillan, 1986), 35‒46.
‘Reformation and inflation: Scotland’, in Christopher Haigh (ed.), The
Cambridge Historical Encyclopedia of Great Britain and Ireland (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985), 164‒7.
‘The neighbour to the north’, in Simon Adams (ed.), Queen Elizabeth I: Most
Politick Princess (London: History Today, 1984), 33‒7.
‘The house of Stewart and its realm’, History Today, 34:9 (September 1984),
21‒7. Reprinted in Jenny Wormald (ed.), Scotland Revisited (London:
Collins & Brown, History Today Book, 1991), 12‒24.
Articles for David Daiches (ed.), The Companion to Scottish Culture (London:
Edward Arnold, 1981). Revised as David Daiches (ed.), The New
Companion to Scottish Culture (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1993).
Articles for Lexikon des Mittelalters (München: Artemis, 1977‒99).
‘Scotland before 1603’, in Malcolm Falkus and John Gillingham (eds),
Historical Atlas of Britain (London: Granada, 1981; 2nd edn, London:
Kingfisher, 1987), 90‒1.
‘James VI: new men for old?’, Scotia 2 (1978), 70‒6.
‘Introduction’, in Jennifer M. Brown (ed.), Scottish Society in the Fifteenth
Century (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), 1‒9.
Index
Aachen, 255n earls of see Douglas, Archibald; Douglas,

Abercorn, 109 George; Douglas, William; Stewart,
Aberdeen, 106, 108, 253 John; Stewart, Thomas; Umfraville
King’s College, 269, 272 Annandale, 177
Abernethy, Alexander, 42 Anne of Brittany, 288
Abernethy, Sir Hugh, 225 Anne of Denmark, queen of James VI and
Abernethy, Laurence, lord Abernethy in I, 292, 296, 299n, 327n
Rothiemay, 108, 119 Apollo, 328
Abernethy, lordship of, 42, 50‒1, 54 Aquinas, Thomas, 270, 272
Abernethy, Margaret, countess of Angus, arbitration, 174‒6, 179, 182, 184, 186, 188,
42, 43 (fig 2.1), 44 231
Abernethy, Mary, 42, 43 (fig 2.1) Arbroath, declaration of, 16, 96, 265‒8,
Abernethy, Patrick, 225n 282
Abernethy, William, lord Abernethy in architecture, 47n, 247, 263, 284; see also
Rothiemay, 110, 119 Restalrig, chapel of
absolutism, 272‒4, 281, 314‒15 Argyll, earls of see Campbell
Achilles, 329 Aristotle, 131, 271, 277
act anent feuding, 145, 154n, 174, 212 Armstrong family, 178, 183
Adamson, Patrick, archbishop of St Armstrong, William, of Kinmont
Andrews, 335 (‘Kinmont Willie’), 180
Adonis, 128 Armstrong of Mangerton family, 180
Adorne, Anselm, 253, 258 Armstrong of Whithaugh family, 180
Adorne, Peter, 258 Arran, earls of see Hamilton
Aeneas, 128 Arundel, earl of see FitzAlan, Richard
Agnew, Andrew, 239 Asheby, William, 288, 296‒7
Ainslie bond see political bonds Assize of Arms, 76
Alba, 226 assurances, 174‒5, 184, 188‒9
Albans, 331 Assyria, 337
Albania, 194, 198, 222 assythment, 142, 153, 211, 213
Albany Astraea, 331
duchess of see Isabella Astyages, 328
dukes of see Stewart Atholl
Albert the Great, 270, 271, 272 earls of see Stewart
Alexander II, king of Scotland, 213 regality of, 106
Alexander the Great, 328‒9 Auchinleck chronicle, 220, 235, 236‒7, 242
Angus Augustine, 131
countesses of see Abernethy, Margaret; Augustus, Roman emperor, 274
Sinclair, Margaret; Stewart, Margaret Austria, 201
earldom of, 40, 42, 50‒1, 54, 57 Avondale, 109
INDEX 347
earl of see Douglas, James bonds, bonding, 11‒12, 14, 15, 26‒9, 155,
Ayr, 108, 109, 110, 164 173‒4, 176, 179
Ayrshire, 165, 238 and covenanting tradition, 155‒60, 162,
Ayton, Sir Robert, 325, 327n 163, 165, 168‒70
see also caution, acts of; friendship,
Babylon, 336‒7, 340 bonds of; general bonds; mainte-
Badenoch, 96; see also Stewart, Alexander nance, bonds of; manrent, bonds of;
Baden-Württemberg, 254 political bonds; recognisances; reli-
Badlane, 213 gious bonds
Balkans, 198‒9 Book of Common Order, 165
ballads, 180 Borders, 27, 173‒4, 177‒8, 183, 186‒7,
Banaster, Adam, 77, 85 223‒4; see also Debatable Lands;
Banffshire, 99 Middle March; Middle Shires; West
Barbour, John, 39 March
Basle, council of, 268 Borthwick, William, 1st lord, 110, 119
bastard feudalism, 12, 66, 70, 75, 78, 79, Borthwick, William, 7th lord, 309‒10, 316
80, 81, 89, 91 Borthwick, Sir William, of Catcune, 49n,
debate over, 59‒64 50, 51, 54n
Beaton, James, archbishop of Glasgow, Bothwell, Adam, bishop of Orkney, 310,
310 317
Beauchamp, Thomas, earl of Warwick, 69, Bothwell, earls of see Hepburn, James;
84, 87 Stewart, Francis
Beaufort, lady Margaret, 122 Botiller, John, 79
Beaumanoir, Philippe de, 223 Bourbon dynasty, 334
Bedford Bourbon, Louis de, prince of Condé, 166
duke of see Lancaster, John of Bower, Walter, 39, 56‒7, 216, 225, 240,
earl of see Russell, Francis 251, 267
Begbie, manor house of, 49, 53, 57 Bowes, Robert, 298
Bellenden, John, 275 Boyd, Alexander, 110
Bellenden, John, of Auchnoull, 318 Boyd, Robert, 1st lord, 109‒10, 119
Berkeley family, 77, 81, 90 Boyd, Robert, 5th lord, 160, 309‒10, 316
Berkeley, Maurice, 79 Boyd, Thomas, of Kilmarnock, 213
Berwick, 98 Brandenburg, 258n
Berwickshire, 96 Branxholme, 173
Biccarton, John, 162 Brechin, 253
Black Death, 68, 92 Brets and Scots, laws of, 211
Black Prince see Edward Brotherton, Thomas, earl of Norfolk, 71, 82
Black, Robert, 213 Broxburn, 242
Blackadder, Andrew, of that Ilk, 221 Bruce, The, 39
Blackford, Thomas, 219 Bruges, 14, 258‒9
Blackness, castle of, 242 Bruno, Giordano, 326
Blind Hary, 39 Brut chronicle, 39, 209
bloodfeud see feud Brutus, 133
Boece, Hector, 39, 248‒51, 253, 255, 267, Bryan, Guy de, 86
274‒5, 277‒8 Buccleuch, earl of see Scott, Walter
Bohun, William de, earl of Northampton, Buchan
82‒3 earldom of, 102
Bologna, university of, 276 earls of see Douglas, Robert; Stewart,
Bondington, 242‒3 Alexander
Buchanan, George, 16, 266‒7, 269, 274, Carlyle, Michael, 4th lord, 309‒10, 312
277‒81, 293, 313, 324, 335n, 340 Carmichael, James, 159
Bullinger, Heinrich, 293 Carolingian Empire, 199, 203
Bunkle, lordship of, 42, 50‒1, 54 Carrick, earls of see Robert III; Stewart,
Burghley, lord see Cecil, Sir William David
Burgundy, 6 Carswell, John, bishop of the Isles, 310
and Scottish courtly culture, 14, 253, Casket Letters, 311
261‒3 Cassillis, earl of see Kennedy, Gilbert
Buridan, Jean, 271 Cathcart, Alan, 4th lord, 308
Burns, Robert, 266 Catherine de Bourbon, 326, 331, 334
Bute, 221, 232 Catholic earls, 298
Buttergask, Adam, 99, 118 Catiline, Catilines, 129, 130
Byres, 109 caution, acts of, 174, 183, 186, 187, 189
Cawdor, thane of see Calder, William
Cairncorce, Nicol, of Colmeslie, 186 Cecil, Robert, 298‒9
Cairncorce, Walter, of Lingill, 186 Cecil, Sir William, later lord Burghley,
Caithness, earls of see Crichton, George; 287, 288, 296‒7, 304
Sinclair, George Cerdic, 226
Calder, castle of, 53 Chalmer, William, 115
Calder, William, thane of Cawdor, 231 chapel royal, 252
Calderwood, David, 159‒60, 167, 305 Chapuys, Eustace, 290
Caligula, Roman emperor, 274 Charlemagne, 199
Cambridge, 125 Charles I, king of Great Britain, 9, 170,
university of, 122 228, 340
Cambridgeshire, 72 as prince, 323‒5
Cambuskenneth Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor, 201
abbey of, 259 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 262
statute of, 229n Charles V, king of France, 205
camels, 197 Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, 261‒2
Campbell family, 24, 317 Chase-about Raid, 316‒17
Campbell, Alexander, bishop of Brechin, Châtelherault, duke of see Hamilton, James
310 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 131, 132, 224
Campbell, Archibald, 4th earl of Argyll, Chester, 86
157, 159 Cheviots, 187
Campbell, Archibald, 5th earl of Argyll, Cheyne, Reginald, 97
161, 307‒8, 316 Chisholm, William, bishop of Dunblane,
as lord Lorne, 157, 159 310, 318‒19
Campbell, Colin, 1st earl of Argyll, 109‒ chivalry, 14, 17, 127, 131, 258, 275, 289‒90
10, 119 Cicero, 128, 129, 130, 131, 275, 277, 281,
Campbell, Colin, 3rd earl of Argyll, 94 285
Campbell, lord, title of, 39 civil law, 273
Campbell, Matthew, master of Loudoun, Clan MacDuff, law of, 225
160 Claydon, William de, 79
canon law, 46, 250, 273 Clinton, William de, earl of Huntingdon,
Canongate, 301 83
Canterbury Tales, 132 Clova, 55
Cantilupe, Nicholas, lord, 85 Clydesdale, 241
Carleton, Sir Dudley, 324 Cochrane, Thomas, 247
Carlisle, castle of, 180‒1 Cockburn, Alexander, 50
INDEX 349
Coldingham, priory of, 57 Cromwell, Thomas, 23

Colet, John, 125 Crowland chronicler, 129
Cologne, 255n cruentation, 224
university of, 269‒70 Cruithne, 226
Colville, John, 287n crusades, 247n, 254, 322, 323, 340
Commons, House of, 66, 69, 84, 90, 91 Cunningham, Alexander, 213
commonweal, 275‒6, 278 Cunningham, Alexander, 5th earl of Glen-
compensation, 13, 15, 17, 141‒2, 148, 151, cairn, 157, 159, 160, 307‒8, 311, 316
152, 153, 175‒6, 184; see also Cunningham, Cuthbert, 3rd earl of
assythment; cró; diyya; galanas; Glencairn, 221
wergeld Cupar, 100, 112, 189
Comyn, John, 220, 225n Currie, 171
Comyn, Sir Richard, 51 Cyrus, 328
conciliarism, 268‒9, 272, 274, 278, 280; see
also resistance theory Dacre, Thomas, 3rd lord Dacre of the
Condé, prince of see Bourbon, Louis de North, 285
Confessio Amantis, 132 Dalkeith, 242‒3
Confession of Faith, 162‒5, 167; see also castle of, 38
King’s Confession Dalmellington, 213
Congregation, Lords of, 156‒64, 276, 286, Dalrymple, James, 1st Viscount Stair, 268
315; see also religious bonds Damietta, 254
Constance, council of, 268‒9 Darnley, lord see Stewart, Henry
Constantine, Roman emperor, 274 David II, king of Scotland, 42, 97, 99, 100,
Cope, William, 285 101, 102, 115, 116, 215, 217, 225,
coronation oath, 168‒70 229n, 238
Coterel family, 81 David, king of the Jews, 226, 323
Counter-Reformation, 8, 314 Debatable Lands, 177
court of session, 136‒7, 143, 149, 151 Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum, 326
Courtenay, Hugh de, earl of Devon, 84 Delves, John, 86
covenants, covenanters, 159‒60, 162, 165, Denmark, 297, 334
167, 170, 267‒8; see also National Derby, earl of see Grosmont, Henry of
Covenant; Solemn League and Derbyshire, 85
Covenant Despenser family, 80‒1
Craig, John, 276‒7 Despenser, Hugh, the younger, 81
Craig, Thomas, 268 Devereux, Robert, earl of Essex, 299
Craigmillar, castle of, 311, 317 Devon, 84
Crawford, earls of see Lindsay earl of see Courtenay, Hugh de
Crécy, battle of, 87 Dicson, Alexander, 326
Crete, 102 diplomacy, 13‒14, 17, 162, 177, 187, 273,
Crichton, Edward, 7th lord Sanquhar, 283‒300, 314‒15
309‒10 of James III, 247, 261‒3
Crichton, George, earl of Caithness, 108, see also England
119, 242, 243 Dischington, William, 100, 102, 118
Crichton, James, earl of Moray, 235 Diss, 122
Crichton, Robert, bishop of Dunkeld, 310, diyya, 196‒8
317 Dominicans, 276
Crichton, William, lord, 242 Domitian, Roman emperor, 274
Crieff, 323 Douglas family, 24, 40, 101, 102, 105‒6,
cró, 198, 211, 218 116, 317
Douglas countess of Bothwell, 181

castle of, 228 Douglas, Margaret, lady of Galloway,
countesses of see Douglas, Margaret; countess of Douglas, 238
Sinclair, Beatrice Douglas, Robert, 242
earldom of, 48 Douglas, Robert, earl of Buchan, 308
Douglas, Andrew, 52 (fig 2.2) Douglas, William, 98
Douglas, Archibald ‘the Grim’, 3rd earl of Douglas, William (d.c.1274), 52 (fig 2.2)
Douglas, lord of Galloway, 48, 51, 52 Douglas, William (Dalkeith line), 52
(fig 2.2), 101, 118, 238 (fig 2.2)
Douglas, Archibald, 4th earl of, 102, 104, Douglas, William, 1st earl of Douglas and
119, 231 Mar, 43 (fig 2.1), 45‒9, 51, 52
Douglas, Archibald, 5th earl of, 106, 232 (fig 2.2), 54, 101, 115, 118
Douglas, Archibald, 5th earl of Angus, 111, Douglas, William, 2nd earl of Angus, 43
120 (fig 2.1), 57
Douglas, Archibald, 8th earl of Angus, 178, Douglas, William, 6th earl of, 107
308 Douglas, William, 8th earl of, 14‒15, 108,
Douglas, Archibald, earl of Moray, 233, 109, 220, 228, 229‒30, 235‒9, 241
235, 236 Douglas, William, lord of Douglas, 52
Douglas, Archibald, earl of Wigtown, 238 (fig 2.2)
Douglas, Archibald, lord of Douglas, 52 Drumcross, 213
(fig 2.2) Drummond family, 220
Douglas, Archibald, lord of Liddesdale, 52 Drummond, David, 2nd lord, 308
(fig 2.2) Drummond, John, lord, 112, 113, 114,
Douglas, Eleanor, 52 (fig 2.2) 116, 120
Douglas, Elizabeth, 43 (fig 2.1), 57 Drummond, lord, title of, 39
Douglas, George, 1st earl of Angus, 40, 43 Drummond, Malcolm, lord of Mar, 43
(fig 2.1), 46‒51, 52 (fig 2.2), 53‒7 (fig 2.1), 48, 50‒1, 52 (fig 2.2), 55‒6
Douglas, George, of Longniddry, 188 Drury, Sir William, 304, 313, 319
Douglas, Henry, of Borg, 243 Dryfe Sands, battle of, 181
Douglas, Hugh, earl of Ormond, 233 Du Bartas see Salluste, Guillaume, sieur du
Douglas, Isabella, countess of Mar, 43 Bartas
(fig 2.1), 48, 50‒1, 52 (fig 2.2), 55 Dudley, Edmund, 127
Douglas, James, ‘of Lothian’, 52 (fig 2.2) Dudley, John, 125
Douglas, James, 2nd earl of Douglas and Duffus, 236
Mar, 43 (fig 2.1), 46‒51, 52 (fig 2.2), Dukagjini, Lekë, 198
53‒5 Dumbarton, 107, 110
Douglas, James, 4th earl of Morton, 28, 157, castle of, 233
159, 163, 294n, 303‒4, 308, 311, 316, Dumfries, 101, 109, 110, 220
317 Dunbar, 319
Douglas, James, 9th earl of, 15, 220, Dunbar, George, earl of March, 101
227‒45 passim Dunbar, Patrick, 221
Douglas, James, earl of Avondale and 7th Dunbar, William, 133
earl of Douglas, 106‒7, 108, 119 Duncan, earl of Fife, 225
Douglas, James, lord of Douglas, 52 Duncan, earl of Lennox, 240
(fig 2.2), 96, 118 Dundas family, 241
Douglas, James, of Dalkeith, 38, 48, 51, 52 Dundas, Archibald, 236, 242
(fig 2.2), 54‒5 Dundas, Duncan, 236
Douglas, John, 52 (fig 2.2) Dundee, 100, 253
Douglas, Margaret, lady Buccleuch, Dunfermline, 253
INDEX 351
Duntreath, barony of, 111 political culture of, 10, 13, 41, 121‒35
Durham, cathedral of, 57 passim, 273
Dysart, earl of see Murray, William relationship with Scotland, 3, 14, 17,
104, 229, 230, 235, 237, 242, 275,
Edinburgh, 54, 241, 275, 323 283‒300 passim, 314‒15
and James III, 14, 246, 252‒3 see also bastard feudalism; Borders;
as seat of courts, 109, 136, 174 York–Westminster conference
bonds made at, 156, 161, 169, 170, 187, Enlightenment, 22
233, 301 Erasmus, 274
castle of, 101, 286, 319 Erington, Christopher, 291
general council at, 51 Errol, earl of see Hay, George
justice ayres at, 101, 110 Erskine, John, 5th lord, 289
Treaty of (1328), 96 Erskine, John, 6th lord, later 1st earl of
Edmonstone, William, of Duntreath, 110, Mar, 157‒8, 159, 307‒8
111, 119, 120 Erskine, John, of Dun, 157
Edward I, king of England, 73, 75, 77, 78, Erskine, Robert, justiciar, 100‒1, 116, 118
80, 81, 82, 83, 94, 95, 265 Erskine, Robert, 231, 233, 240‒1
Edward II, king of England, 62, 63, 73, 75, Erskine, Thomas, 2nd lord, 111, 120
76, 77, 78, 80, 91 Eskdale, 177
Edward III, king of England, 66, 69, 73‒4, Essex, earl of see Devereux, Robert
76, 81‒8, 90, 91, 92, 98 estates see general council; parliament
Edward IV, king of England, 210 Eton College, 324‒6
Edward, the Black Prince (Prince of Ettrick Forest, 177
Wales), 72, 84, 86, 87, 92 Ewesdale, 177
Eglinton, earls of see Montgomery
Eglinton, Hugh, 100, 118 Falkland, 98, 183, 298
Egypt, 254 ‘Fergus I’, king of Scotland, 278, 281, 332
Eilean Donan (Wester Ross), 97 feud, 11, 19, 25‒8, 136‒42, 154, 193‒226
Elgin, 97, 99, 236 passim
Elizabeth I, queen of England, 162, 280‒1, and public justice, 136‒8, 143, 145, 149‒
287‒8, 292‒300, 331 53, 173‒90 passim, 196, 207, 209
Elizabeth, princess of Denmark, 334 knightly feud, 201‒4
Elizabeth, princess of Scotland, 298 peace and justice in, 139‒43, 145‒54,
Elizabeth of York, queen of Henry VII, 288 195‒6, 198‒9, 203, 220
Elliot family, 173, 176‒7, 178, 181‒3, 185‒ settlement of, 13, 15, 136, 138, 140, 141,
6 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 150, 153, 154,
Elliot, Gilbert, of the Stobs, 178, 179, 186 174‒6, 182‒4, 193‒226 passim
Elliot, Martin, 173, 179‒80 suppression of, 136, 143, 145, 185‒90
Elliot, Robert, of Redheugh, 173, 177, 178, violence in, 27, 139‒42, 145, 147, 153‒4,
179‒80, 183, 185, 186, 189‒90 177, 184, 187‒8, 203, 220
Elliot, Sym, 173 see also act anent feuding; compensation
Elliot, Will, of Fiddletoun, 183 Fife, 98, 189, 225
Elphinstone, Robert, 3rd lord, 308 earls of see Duncan; Robert; Stewart,
Elphinstone, William, bishop of Aberdeen, Robert
217n, 248‒50, 262, 263, 272 First Bond of the Lords of the Congre-
Empson, Richard, 127 gation see religious bonds
England, 25, 98, 266 FitzAlan, Richard, earl of Arundel, 83, 86,
law of, 14, 28n, 173, 194, 207‒12, 216, 87
223 Fleming, John, 5th lord, 309‒10, 316, 317
Fleming, Thomas, earl of Wigtown, 238 Geneva Bible, 339

Flodden, battle of, 122, 128, 246, 288 Germany, 13, 195, 199‒204, 207, 212, 261,
Folville family, 81 334
Forbes, Alexander, 231 Ghent, 258
Forbes, James, 231 Gib, Robert, 290
Forbes, William, 7th lord, 308 gifts, 283‒300 passim
Foresti, Jacopo, da Bergamo, 260, 263 Glamis, lord see Lyon, John
Forrester, Adam, 114‒15 Glanvill, 223
Forster family, 185 Glasgow, university of, 269, 272
Fortescue, Sir John, 129 Gledstanes, George, archbishop of St
Fowler, Thomas, 299 Andrews, 324
France, 6, 82n, 162‒3, 166, 208, 263, 273, Glencairn, earls of see Cunningham
276, 292, 305, 318, 322, 323, 335 Glenelg, 96
feuding in, 13, 25, 27n, 141, 204‒7, Gloucestershire, 65, 77, 81
212‒14, 216, 221‒3, 224 God, 216, 249, 261, 265, 270, 334
relationship with Scotland, 14, 17, 105, and religious bonds, 159, 162, 163, 165,
110n, 287, 288‒9, 290‒1, 294 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172
Francis I, king of France, 289, 292 godparenthood, 166, 298
Francis II, king of France, 293 Golden Fleece, Order of, 289‒90
Franciscans, 263, 269, 270 Golden Rose, 255
Franconia, 194 Gordon family, 317
Frankfurt, 331 Gordon, Alexander, bishop of Galloway,
Frankish Empire see Carolingian Empire 310, 317
Fraser, Alexander, 6th lord Saltoun, Gordon, Alexander, lord of Gordon, 1st
309‒10 earl of Huntly, 229, 231
Fraser, Hugh, 5th lord Lovat, 308 Gordon, George, 2nd earl of Huntly, 112,
Frederick II, king of Denmark, 334 113, 114, 117, 120
Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor, 201n Gordon, George, 4th earl of Huntly, 315
friendship, bonds of, 160, 161, 163, 164, Gordon, George, 5th earl of Huntly, 307‒
166 8, 315‒16, 317
Friuli, 194 Gordon, John, 11th earl of Sutherland,
Froissart, Jean, 49 308, 316
Gordon, William, 221
galanas, 211 Gordon, William, bishop of Aberdeen, 310
Galloway, 97, 98, 238 gossipry, 166
justiciar of, 94 Goulart, Simon, 330
Garioch, 55 Gower, John, 131, 132
Garnesche, Sir Christopher, 126 Graces, 299
Garter, Order of, 289‒90 Graham, lord, title of, 39
Gaunt, John of, 1st duke of Lancaster, 69, Graham, William, 3rd earl of Montrose,
71 308
Gawane, Walter, 218 Graham, William, 5th earl of Menteith,
Geddes, Charles, of Rauchan, 184‒5 308
Gelderland see Gueldres, duchy of Graham, William, 7th earl of Menteith,
general assembly, 168‒9, 252, 335n 228‒9
general band see general bonds Gray, Andrew, 1st lord, 108, 109, 119
general bonds, 161‒2, 164, 165, 168, 170, Gray, Andrew, 2nd lord, 94, 113, 114, 120
173, 177‒8, 187 Gray, Patrick, 4th lord, 309‒10, 312
general council, 51, 53n, 215, 230, 235, 245 Great Britain, 21
INDEX 353
Greeks, ancient, 328 Henry III, king of England, 63

Gregory of Rimini, 261 Henry IV, king of England, 209
Greyfriars (Edinburgh), 169 Henry IV, king of France, 326, 334
Grosmont, Henry of, earl of Derby, 83 Henry V, king of England, 209, 210
duke of Lancaster, 85 Henry VI, king of England, 210, 229
Grosscomburg, 254 Henry VII, king of England, 127, 210,
Gueldres, duchy of, 247, 261‒2; see also 285‒6, 288
Mary of Gueldres Henry VIII, king of England, 7, 121, 127,
Guise family, 334 128, 130, 273‒4, 288, 289‒92, 294
duke of see Lorraine as Prince Henry, 122, 128
Guise, Mary of, queen regent, 161, 163 Henry, prince of Scotland, 285, 286, 292,
Gunpowder Plot, 29 328, 340
Guthrie, Alexander, of Kincaldrum, 187 Henryson, Robert, 262
Guthrie, master Alexander, 115 Hepburn, James, 4th earl of Bothwell, 15,
Guthrie, master David, of Kincaldrum, 301‒2, 305‒8, 310, 311‒19
110, 111, 112, 120 Hepburn, Patrick, bishop of Moray, 310
Herdmanston, castle of, 49, 53, 54, 57, 58
Habsburg dynasty, 262, 285 Hermitage, castle of, 179
Haddington, 46, 48, 49, 58 Herries, lord see Maxwell, John
Hadiths, 197 Highlands, 107, 177‒8, 183, 218, 280; see
Haket, William, of Belses, 115 also Isles, lords of
Hakewill, George, 325 Hobbes, Thomas, 283‒4, 299‒300
Haldane, John, of Gleneagles, 112, 120 Holstein, 203
Haliburton, John, of Dirleton, 50 Holy Land, the, 102
Hall, Edward, 285 Holy Roman Empire, 263, 273, 289; see
Hamilton family, 163, 310, 315, 317 also Carolingian Empire; Germany
Hamilton, Sir Alexander, 51 Holyrood, abbey of, 51, 255
Hamilton, James, 2nd earl of Arran, duke palace of, 251, 301
of Châtelherault, 163, 307‒8, 316 Home, Alexander, 239
Hamilton, James, 3rd earl of Arran, 163 Home, Alexander, 5th lord, 309‒10, 312
Hamilton, James, bishop of Argyll, 310 Home, David, of Wedderburn, 221
Hamilton, James, lord, 237 Home, John, of Cowdenknowes, 188‒9
Hamilton, John, archbishop of St Home, William, of Lessudden, 186
Andrews, 159, 310, 313 Homer, 329
Hamilton, Patrick, of Samuelstoun, 188 honour, 38‒9, 50n, 144‒7, 153, 165, 184,
Hamilton’s Catechism, 159 195, 198, 202‒4, 206, 209, 225, 281,
Harlaw, battle of, 104 283, 285, 287, 302‒3
‘Harp, The’ (poem), 214, 215, 217 Hoppringle, James, of Whitbank, 188‒9
Harvey, Gabriel, 329 horses, 53, 287, 290‒1, 295
Havelberg, 258n Howard, Henry, earl of Surrey, 121, 122,
Hawick, 173, 182, 238 128
hawks, 14, 290, 294 Howard, Thomas, earl of Surrey, 128
Hay, George, 7th earl of Errol, 307‒8, 311, humanism, 123, 260, 274, 275, 281, 326
316 Humbleton Hill, battle of, 56‒7, 104
Hay, William, 7th lord Yester, 308 Hume, David, of Godscroft, 340
Hay, Sir William, of Lochariot, 57 Hundred Years War, 65
Hector, 128 Hunter, Andrew, 218‒19
Heinrich II von Isenburg-Kobern, 254 Hunter, John, 218‒19
Henderson, Alexander, 267‒8 Hunter, Thomas, 218‒19
hunting dogs, 295 and bloodfeud, 11, 173‒4, 177, 185, 187,
Huntingdon, earl of see Clinton, William 190
de and Thomas Murray, 320‒40 passim
Huntly, earls of see Gordon English succession and union, 9‒10, 29,
30, 173, 281‒2, 286‒7, 288, 293‒300
Iceland, 194 passim, 331
Innermeath, lord see Stewart, John political ideas of, 16‒17, 274, 277, 281,
Inverness, 97, 106 285
castle of, 234 writings of, 320‒2
Inverurie, 45 Jardine of Applegarth, Sir Alexander,
Ipswich, 125 184‒5
Ireland, 21, 211, 298 Jedburgh, 110, 111, 113, 178
Ireland, John, 250n, 261, 262, 263, 271 Jeremiah see Lamentations
Isabella, duchess of Albany, countess of Jerusalem, 254, 336
Lennox, 240 Church of Holy Sepulchre, 258
Islam, 196‒9 Jesus Christ, 156, 159, 162, 165, 168, 169,
Isles, lords of see John, earl of Ross; 170, 226, 254, 261, 339; see also
MacDonald, Alexander Passion devotion
Italy, 121, 123, 248, 260, 273, 334, 337 Jewel, John, bishop of Salisbury, 293
Joan Beaufort, queen of James I, 232, 236
James I, king of Scotland, 8, 104, 105, 111, Job, 335
223, 234, 240‒1 John XXII, pope, 265
captivity and return, 104, 107, 116, John, earl of Ross, lord of the Isles, 229,
216‒17 236‒7, 242
opposition to, 16, 27, 106, 235, 278 Johnstone family, 187
James II, king of Scotland, 16, 108, 109, Johnstone, Archibald, of Wariston, 171
249, 253, 259, 278 Johnstone, Sir James, 181, 183
and earls of Douglas, 14‒15, 220, Joshua, 265
227‒45 passim Josiah, 339
minority of, 106, 116 Julius II, pope, 286
James III, king of Scotland, 5, 8, 14, 110, Julius Caesar, 129
112, 114, 115, 116, 229n, 246‒64 Jupiter, 328
passim, 274 justice ayres, 247
minority of, 109, 117, 244n justices of the peace (England), 63, 66‒9,
opposition to, 4, 16, 111, 214n, 217‒18, 84‒5, 88‒9
278 justiciars, 93‒120 passim, 231, 232
James IV, king of Scotland, 16, 94, 112, Justinian, Roman emperor, 274
114, 117, 217, 220, 221, 222, 274, 279
and Renaissance monarchy, 5, 8, 14 Kanun, 198
compared with James III, 246‒7, 249, Keith, Robert, 95, 97, 118
252, 258, 262‒3 Keith, William, 3rd Earl Marischal, 307‒8,
relations with England, 285‒6, 288, 300 316
James V, king of Scotland, 5, 8, 16, 27, 127, Kennedy, Gilbert, 4th earl of Cassillis, 166,
273n, 274, 275, 279, 287n 307‒8, 316
relations with England, 286, 289‒92, Kennedy, Gilbert, lord Kennedy, 109, 110,
294, 300 111, 119
relations with France, 14, 288‒91 Kennedy, Gilbert, of Bargany, 110, 119
James VI and I, king of Great Britain, 5, Kennedy, James, bishop of St Andrews,
9‒10, 19, 20, 21, 28, 29‒30, 267 272
INDEX 355
Kennedy, Quentin, abbot of Crossraguel, Lauder, Robert (younger), 98‒9, 105, 115,
166 118
Kildrummy, 55 Lauder, Robert, of the Bass, 50, 105, 119
castle of, 233 law see Brets and Scots, laws of; canon law;
Killigrew, Sir Henry, 286 civil law; Clan MacDuff, law of;
killing, 13, 144, 193‒226 passim; see also lawyers; pleas of the crown; Roman
feud law; shari‘a law; treason
Kimmerghame, 45 Lawson, James, 335n
Kincavil, 242‒3 Lawson, Richard, 116
King’s Bench, 63, 68‒9, 79‒81, 83, 88 lawyers, legal profession, 175, 279
King’s Confession (‘Negative Confession’), Leicester, 85
159, 167‒71 Leicestershire, 79
king’s guard, 174 Leith, 162
Kinmont Willie see Armstrong, William Lennox
kinship, 2, 11, 90, 165, 166, 174‒5, 179, countess of see Isabella; earls of see
184, 186, 190 Duncan; Stewart, Matthew
male lineages, 37‒40, 44 earl of see Stewart, Matthew
role of, in feud, 137‒8, 141‒3, 146, 147, earldom of, 111
149, 152‒4 Lepanto, battle of, 320‒31 passim
kirk sessions, 186 Leslie, Andrew, 42, 43 (fig 2.1), 44
Kirkcaldy, Sir William, of Grange, 305‒6 Leslie, Andrew, 5th earl of Rothes, 308,
Kirkpatrick, Roger, 225 316, 317
Kirriemuir, 51 Leslie, George, 1st earl of Rothes, 109
Knapdale, 242 Leslie, John, bishop of Ross, 310
Knox, John, 157, 160, 165, 166, 267, 269, 314 Leslie, Walter, lord of Ross, 43 (fig 2.1)
his History, 157 Liddale, Sir John, 51
Kobern-Gondorf, 254 Liddesdale, 173, 176‒7, 178, 179‒80, 183,
Koblenz, 254 190
Kosovo, 198 lordship of, 48, 51, 55‒6
Ligueurs, 334‒5
Lamentations, 332‒40 passim Lily, William, 125
Lanark, 227 Lincolnshire, 85
Lanarkshire, 228; see also political bonds Lindores, Laurence of, 271
Lancashire, 85 Lindsay, Alexander, 1st lord Spynie, 187
Lancaster, dukes of see Gaunt, John of; Lindsay, Alexander, 4th earl of Crawford,
Grosmont, Henry of 229, 233, 235, 237
Lancaster, Henry of, earl of Lancaster, 76, Lindsay, Alexander, lord of Glen Esk, 43
85 (fig 2.1), 47, 102, 103, 118
Lancaster, John of, duke of Bedford, 72 Lindsay, David, 42, 43 (fig 2.1), 44
Lancaster, Thomas of, earl of Lancaster, Lindsay, David, 5th earl of Crawford, 112,
62‒3, 71, 73, 74, 76, 77, 79, 80, 90 117, 120
Landfried, 200‒1 Lindsay, David, 10th earl of Crawford,
Langholm, 190 307‒8, 311, 316
Langland, William, 131, 132 Lindsay, David, emissary, 287
Latimer, William, 74 Lindsay, David, of Glen Esk, 1st earl of
Lauder, 111, 113 Crawford, 102‒3, 118
Lauder, Alan, 48, 50, 115 Lindsay, Sir David, of the Mount, 133, 276
Lauder, Robert (elder), 96, 98, 105, 115, Lindsay, James, lord of Crawford, 43
116, 118 (fig 2.1)
Lindsay, James, lord of Crawford (son of Lyle, Robert, 2nd lord, 112, 113, 114, 120
above), 102, 118 Lyon, John, 3rd lord Glamis, 112, 113,
Lindsay, Sir James, 225 114, 120
Lindsay, John, lord Lindsay of Byres, Lyon, John, 8th lord Glamis, 309‒10, 316
108‒9, 119
Lindsay, Patrick, 56 Maccabeus, 265
Lindsay, Patrick, 6th lord, 309‒10, 316‒17 MacDonald, Alexander, earl of Ross, lord
Lindsay, Robert, of Pitscottie, 107, 247 of the Isles, 94, 107, 108, 119, 232,
Lindsay, Sir Walter, of Balgay, 187 233‒4, 239, 240
Lindsay, William, of the Byres, 43 (fig 2.1), MacDuff see Clan MacDuff, law of
50 Mackenzie, Sir George, of Rosehaugh, 268
Lindsay of Querrelhill family, 187‒8 Madeleine of Valois, queen of James V,
Lindsay of Wodheid family, 187‒8 288‒9
Linlithgow, 242 Magdalen college, 125
palace of, 289 Magna Carta, 266
Liverpool, assizes at, 85 Magnus, Thomas, 286
Livingston family, 233, 234, 236, 241 maintenance, bonds of, 3, 15, 138, 142,
Livingston, Alexander, of Callendar, 232, 155‒6, 158, 160, 166, 171, 174, 182
233 Mair, John, 16, 267, 269‒71, 274‒5
Livingston, James, 233, 234, 236, 242 Maitland, John, of Thirlestane, 23
Livingstone, Alexander, of Callendar, Maitland, William, of Lethington, 287,
107‒8, 119 292, 318‒19
Livingstone, William, 6th lord, 309‒10, Malcolm, John, 322‒3, 340
317 manrent, bonds of, 3, 14, 15, 19, 138, 142,
Livy, 275 155, 158‒9, 174‒5, 185
Lochaber, 96 Mar
Logierait, 106 countesses of see Douglas, Isabella; Mar,
Lok, Henrie, 329 Margaret of; Stewart, Margaret of
London, 122, 125, 128, 282, 285, 288, 290, earldom of, 45‒6, 48, 50, 53, 55, 58, 233,
292, 294, 296, 336 240‒1
Lords of the Congregation see Congre- earls of see Douglas, William; Douglas,
gation, Lords of James; Erskine, John; Mar, Donald of;
lordship, 2, 5, 10, 11, 23‒5, 35, 49, 55, 129, Mar, Thomas of; Stewart, Alexander
137‒8, 142, 146, 149, 174‒5, 179‒80, Mar, Donald of, earl of Mar, 43 (fig 2.1)
184, 186, 190 Mar, Margaret of, countess of Mar, 43
exercise of, in England, 11‒12, 59, 60‒2, (fig 2.1), 45‒6, 48, 52 (fig 2.2)
91 Mar, Thomas of, earl of Mar, 43 (fig 2.1),
language of, 158, 161, 163, 241, 244 44‒6, 51, 53, 56
see also kinship Marcellus, 128
Lorraine, Francis of, duke of Guise, 166 March, earl of see Dunbar, George
Lorraine, Henry of, duke of Guise, 294 March, earl of (English) see Mortimer,
Lothian, 96, 177, 242 Roger
Louis IX, king of France, 205 Marches, 231, 288; see also Borders
Louvain, university of, 122 Margaret of Denmark, queen of James III,
Lovat, lord see Fraser, Hugh 247n, 259, 260, 263
Low Countries see Netherlands Margaret Tudor, queen of James IV, 258,
Lucy, Anthony de, 98 285, 288
Lydgate, John, 131 Marischal, Earl see Keith, William
Lyle, Robert, 1st lord, 110, 112, 120 Mars, 128, 328
INDEX 357
Marxism, 22, 26 Mortimer, Roger, earl of March, 82

Mary of Burgundy, 262 Morton
Mary of Gueldres, queen of James II, 239, earl of see Douglas, James
252, 253, 259, 260 earldom of, 163
Mary of Guise, queen of James V, 288 Moselle, river, 254
Mary, Queen of Scots, 5, 9, 24, 166, 274, Mowbray, John, duke of Norfolk, 62
280 Mowbray, Thomas, earl of Nottingham, 72
downfall, 15, 16, 277, 278, 301‒19 passim Muhammad, 198
relationship with England, 292‒3 Munro, William, of Foulis, 218
masques, 299 Murdack, Juliana, 79
Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, 262 Murray family, 220, 238
Maxwell family, 187 Murray, Andrew, guardian of Scotland, 98
Maxwell, John, 4th lord Herries, 309‒10, Murray, Sir Andrew, 225
316 Murray, Anthony, of Dollerie, 323
Maxwell, John, 8th lord, 181, 308 Murray, Patrick, of Woodend, 323
Maybole, 166 Murray, Mr Thomas, 320‒40 passim
McCulloch, Archibald, of Ardwell, 222 Murray, Thomas, 16
McCulloch, Patrick, 222, 223 Murray, William, 1st earl of Dysart, 324
McFarlane, Andrew, 221 Murray of Tullibardine family, 323
Mearns, lairds of, 157 Muschet, David, 95
Meill, Alexander, 219 Muschet, William, of Cargill, 96, 97, 118
Meldrum, William, sheriff of Aberdeen, Muses, 331
99, 100, 118 Musgrave, Thomas, 179
Melginch, 55 Mynours, painter, 288
Melville, Andrew, 322‒3, 335n, 340
Melville, Sir James, of Halhill, 286‒7, 292, Nairn, Robert, 115
293, 294 National Covenant, 163, 167, 169‒70, 171,
Melville, Sir Robert, 304 266
Menteith, earls of see Graham Nau, Claude, 313, 318
Methven, lord see Stewart, Henry Navarre, 289
Mewtas, Sir Peter, 286 Negative Confession see King’s Confession
Middle March, 178 Neilson, Maurice, of Dalrymple, 213
Middle Shires, commissioners for, 181, 190 Nero, Roman emperor, 274
Milton, John, 130 Netherlands, 263, 330, 334; see also
Moleyns, Sir John, 87 Burgundy
Montenegro, 198 Neville, Sir Ralph, 74
Montgomery, Hugh, 1st earl of Eglinton, Neville, Richard, earl of Warwick, ‘the
221 Kingmaker’, 127
Montgomery, Hugh, 3rd earl of Eglinton, ‘New Monarchy’, 6‒8
307‒8 Newbattle, abbey of, 99
Montrose, earl of see Graham, William Newburgh, 225
Monzievaird, 220‒1 nominalism and realism, 270‒2
Moray Norfolk
earls of see Crichton, James; Douglas, duke of see Mowbray, John
Archibald; Randolph, John; earl of see Brotherton, Thomas
Randolph, Thomas; Stewart, James North Berwick, barony of, 45, 48
regality of, 97 North Berwick, William of, 49
More, Thomas, 121, 129 Northampton, earl of see Bohun, William
Mortimer family, 80‒1 de
Northamptonshire, 79 powers of, 276, 279, 281

Northumberland, earl of see Percy, Henry see also general council
Norton, John, 331 Pasarella, Giacomo, of Imola, 248‒50, 255
Nottingham, earl of see Mowbray, Thomas Passion devotion, 14, 255‒8
Nottinghamshire, 72, 85 Paston letters, 62
number theory, 254 Pembroke, earl of see Valence, Aymer de
Percy, Henry, 4th earl of Northumberland,
Occam, William of, 270, 271, 272 127, 128
Ochiltree, lord see Stewart, Andrew Percy, Henry, lord, 74
Ogilvy of Craig family, 187‒8 Percy, Sir Walter, 225n
Ogilvy, Archibald, 221 Persians, ancient, 328
Ogilvy, James, 5th lord, 309‒10, 316 Perth, 111, 160, 161
Ogilvy, James, master of, 187 Blackfriars, 235
Ogilvy, Patrick, 105, 119 Perthshire, 99, 323, 326
Ogilvy, Walter, of Beaufort, 233, 236, 241 Phileremos, Mount, monastery of, 253‒4
Old Testament, 226 Philip II, king of Spain, 334
Oliphant, Laurence, 1st lord, 113, 114 Philip IV, king of France, 205
Oliphant, Laurence, 4th lord, 309‒10, 312 Philip, king of Macedon, 328
Ordo Justiciarie, 108 Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, 253
Orkney and Shetland, 290 pilgrimages, 247, 254
Orkney, earls of see Sinclair pleas of the crown, 96, 213
Ormond, earl of see Douglas, Hugh Plumpton, Robert, 72
Otterburn, battle of, 48, 49, 50 Pole, William de la, duke of Suffolk, 62
Oxford, 125 political bonds, 14‒15, 155, 160
university of, 122, 269 Ainslie bond, 14‒15, 301‒19 passim
oyer and terminer, commissions of, 77‒8, Albany–Douglas bond, 231‒2, 237
81‒3, 88‒9 Douglas–Crawford–Ross bond, 220,
233‒4
Pace, Richard, 125 Hamilton bond, 315
Painswick, 77 Lanark bond, 14, 227‒45 passim
papacy, 17, 168, 252, 268‒9, 320, 323, 332, political thought see absolutism;
335, 338; see also Golden Rose; sword commonweal; conciliarism;
and cap coronation oath; republicanism;
pardons, 210, 212, 249 resistance theory; sovereignty;
Paris, 289 tyranny
Scots college at, 305 Priam, 128
university of, 113, 115, 269, 271 privy council, 166, 179, 181, 183, 186‒9,
see also St Bartholomew, massacre of; 280n
Sorbonne privy seal, 218, 221‒2, 280n
parliament, 194, 215, 216‒18, 229, 233, Protestant movement, 156‒8, 160, 162,
234‒5 164‒5, 166
lords of, 39 psalms, 250n, 339‒40
of 1368, 100 Puchheim, Georg von, 201n
of 1451, 239
of 1452, 235, 236 Qur’an, 197
of 1487, 112
of April 1567, 305‒9, 318 Radcliffe, Robert, 5th earl of Sussex, 292
of 1640, 169n Ramsay, John, 249
of England, 78, 84, 273 Ramsay, John, lord Bothwell, 112, 120
INDEX 359
Randolph, John, earl of Moray, 99 as earl of Carrick, 102, 103

Randolph, Thomas, 287n, 292, 294 Robert, earl of Fife, 226
Randolph, Thomas, earl of Moray, 95‒8, Rome, 255
99, 118 ancient Rome, 274, 277, 327‒9
realism see nominalism and realism Roman law, 273
recognisances, 210 see also papacy
Reformation, 5, 157 Romeo and Juliet, 220
effect of, on Scotland, 6‒7, 12, 22, Rose, Hugh, of Kilravock, 218, 221, 231
144‒5, 160‒4, 169, 171, 252, 259n, Ross, earls of see John, earl of Ross;
282, 289 MacDonald, Alexander; Ross,
see also Counter-Reformation; William of
Protestant movement; religious bonds Ross, James, 4th lord, 309‒10, 316
regalities, 178, 180, 215 Ross, William of, 5th earl of Ross, 99, 100,
Regensburg, 254 118
Regiam Majestatem, 219n, 222‒3, 224 Rothes, earls of see Leslie
Reid, John, 303‒4, 311‒12 Rothesay, duke of see Stewart, David
religious bonds, 155‒72 passim Rouen, 166
First Bond of the Lords of the Congre- Roxburgh, 109
gation, 158‒60, 164, 316 Russell, Francis, 2nd earl of Bedford, 292
see also covenants; King’s Confession Rutherford, Samuel, 267
remissions, 206‒7, 211, 213‒15, 216, Ruthven, William, 5th lord, 309‒10
218‒22, 223; see also pardons
Renaissance, 14, 19, 21, 121, 251n, 274, Sabadino, Giovanni, degli Arienti, 260, 263
300, 335 Sachsenspiegel, 200, 203
in England, 13, 121, 122 Sadler, Ralph, 286, 291
‘Renaissance Monarchy’, 6‒8 St Albana, 254, 256
see also humanism St Andrews, 161‒2, 252, 253
republicanism, 128‒31, 274‒5, 280‒1 cathedral of, 289
resistance theory, 272, 277‒8, 314‒15; see St Salvator’s College, 272
also tyranny university of, 269, 271
respites see remissions St Anne and St Gertrude, chapel of, 258n
Restalrig, chapel of, 14, 248, 249, 251‒61 St Bartholomew, massacre of, 335
Restoration, 268 St Basil, chapel of, 259n
Revelation, 340 St Brigit of Sweden, 251
revocation, acts of, 241 St Duthac, 247
Rhind, John, 187‒8 St Erhard, chapel of, 254
Rhind, William, of Kerse, 187‒8 St Eucherius, 254
Rhodes, 254 St Margaret, 253, 260
Riccio, David, 316 St Matthias, 254‒5
Richard II, king of England, 69, 92 St Michael, Order of, 289‒90
Robert I, king of Scotland, 42, 214‒15, St Ninian, 247
220, 225n, 229n, 265, 270 St Quirinus, chapel of, 14, 254, 256
and justiciars, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 115, 116 St Triduana, 14, 252‒3, 259
see also Bruce, The Sallust, 129, 266
Robert II, king of Scotland, 40, 42, 46, 101, Salluste, Guillaume, sieur du Bartas, 330,
102, 103, 116, 215, 238 334
as Steward, 38‒9, 100, 101 Saltoun, lord see Fraser, Alexander
Robert III, king of Scotland, 40, 54, 104, Sandilands, James, 1st lord Torphichen,
106, 111, 116, 216 309‒10, 316
Sandilands, James (elder), 52 (fig 2.2) Simler, Josiah, 293

Sandilands, Sir James (younger), of Calder, Sinclair, Beatrice, countess of Douglas, 238
51, 52 (fig 2.2), 53, 54 Sinclair, George, 4th earl of Caithness,
Sandilands, Sir James, 183 307‒8, 316
Sanquhar, lord see Crichton, Edward Sinclair, Sir Henry, 39
Satan, 156, 158 Sinclair, Henry, 3rd lord, 262
Sauchieburn, battle of, 114, 259, 262 Sinclair, Henry, earl of Orkney, 57
Saudi Arabia, 13, 196‒8, 212 Sinclair, James, of Longformacus, 43 (fig
Savile, Sir Henry, 325 2.1), 44, 51, 57
Saxons, 225 Sinclair, John (junior), of Herdmanston,
Schwäbisch Hall, 254 43 (fig 2.1), 44‒5, 49, 51
Scipio, 128 Sinclair, John (senior), of Herdmanston,
Scone, 95 43 (fig 2.1), 44
parliament at, 100 Sinclair, lord, title of, 39
Scott family, 183 Sinclair, Margaret, countess of Angus, 41,
Scott, Adam, of Allanhaugh, 182 43 (fig 2.1), 44
Scott, David, 182 Sinclair, Walter, 43 (fig 2.1), 44, 49, 50, 51
Scott, John, of Borthwick, 182 Sinclair, William, 4th lord, 309‒10, 312
Scott, Robert, of Allanhaugh, 182 Sinclair, William, earl of Orkney, 108, 119,
Scott, Walter, of Buccleuch, 182 242
Scott, Walter, 1st earl of Buccleuch, 181, Sinclair, William, of Herdmanston, 43 (fig
190 2.1), 57
Scott, Sir Walter, of Buccleuch, 173, 174, Sixtus V, pope, 332, 334
176, 178, 179‒85, 189‒90 Skelton, John, 13, 121‒35 passim
Scott of Goldielands family, 178, 180 and Cardinal Wolsey, 122‒3, 125‒31
Scott of Haining family, 178 influence of Roman political models on,
Scott of Harden family, 178, 180 128‒33
Scott of Tushielaw family, 178 influence of medieval learning on,
Scotus, John Duns, 269‒70, 272 131‒3
Scrope, Sir Geoffrey, 82‒3 poems of: Collyn Clout, 126; Howe the
Scrope, Thomas, 10th lord, 181 Douty Duke, 128; Lawde and Prayse,
Selkirk, 190 127; Magnyfycence, 122, 126, 131;
Selkirkshire, 178 Phyllyp Sparowe, 122; Speke, Parott,
Sempill, Robert, 3rd lord, 309‒10, 315, 122, 126; The Bowge of Courte, 126;
316 The Garlande of Laurell, 122; Upon
Seneca, 250 the Dolorus Dethe, 125, 127; Why
session, court of, 136‒7, 143, 149, 151, 175, Come ye Nat to Courte, 125, 126
188, 189 views on nobility and king, 121‒7, 131‒3
Seton, George, 5th lord, 309‒10, 315, 316, Skene, Sir John, 224
317 slains, letters of, 142, 175, 184, 214
Shakespeare, William, 121 Smith, Jude, 336
Shareshull, Sir William, 83 Solemn League and Covenant, 266
shari‘a law, 196‒8, 213 Somerville, James, 5th lord, 308
sheriffs, 96, 179, 213, 218 Somerville, Thomas, 105, 119
in England, 62‒6, 68, 76, 78, 79‒80, 83‒ Song of Songs, 335
6, 88‒91 Sorbonne, 269
Shetland see Orkney and Shetland sovereignty, 272, 276, 280
Shropshire, 79 Spain, 295, 323, 330‒1
Sidney, Sir Philip, 121, 330 Spanish Armada, 331, 332
INDEX 361
Spanish match, 325 Mar, 12, 37, 40‒3 (fig 2.1), 44‒51, 52
Spenser, Edmund, 121, 329 (fig 2.2), 53‒8
Spottiswoode, John, archbishop of Stewart, Marjory, 102
Glasgow, 324 Stewart, Mary, 43 (fig 2.1), 55, 111
Sprouston, 238 Stewart, Matthew, 4th earl of Lennox,
Spynie, lord see Lindsay, Alexander 307‒8, 317
Staffordshire, 79 Stewart, Murdoch, duke of Albany, 103,
Stair, Viscount see Dalrymple, James 104, 118, 232
Standsfield, Sir James, 224 Stewart, Robert, bishop of Caithness, 310
Starkey, Thomas, 125, 129, 130 Stewart, Robert, earl of Fife and duke of
Steward, Robert the see Robert II Albany, 48‒9, 103, 104, 116, 118, 119,
Stewart family, 39, 40, 101, 116 213, 231, 240
of Angus-Bunkle, 58 Stewart, Thomas, earl of Angus, 41‒2, 43
Stewart monarchy, 5, 17, 19, 21‒2, 26‒7 (fig 2.1), 44, 47, 57
Stewart, Alexander, 38 Stewart, Walter, 38
Stewart, Alexander, duke of Albany, 111, Stewart, Walter, lord of Brechin, 103‒4,
120, 229n 118
Stewart, Alexander, earl of Buchan, ‘wolf earl of Atholl, Caithness and Strathearn,
of Badenoch’, 102, 103, 104, 115, 118 106, 115, 119
Stewart, Alexander, earl of Mar, 104, 106, Stewart, William, of Angus, 51, 57
119, 232 Stewarton, lordship of, 15, 230, 238‒41,
Stewart, Andrew, lord Avondale, 109, 111, 245
112, 116, 119, 120 Stirling, 104, 111, 160, 161, 220, 229, 235,
Stewart, Andrew, 2nd lord Ochiltree, 160, 241, 259, 319
309‒10, 316 castle of, 229, 232, 252
Stewart, David, duke of Rothesay, 194 confederacy of, 312
Stewart, David, earl of Carrick, 118 statute of, 216
Stewart, Edward, 290 Stocker, Thomas, 336
Stewart, Egidia, 102 Strathalva, 55
Stewart, Elizabeth, 44, 47, 51 Strathbrock, 242
Stewart, Esmé, 295 Strathearn, earldom of, 229
Stewart, Francis, 5th earl of Bothwell, 178, Suffolk
181 duke of see Pole, William de la
Stewart, Henry, lord Darnley, 224, 301, sheriff of, 82
311, 317 sheriff ’s clerk of, 80
Stewart, Henry, 2nd lord Methven, 308 Surrey, earls of see Howard, Henry;
Stewart, James, commendator of St Howard, Thomas; Warenne, John de
Andrews, earl of Moray, 161, 287, Sussex, earl of see Radcliffe, Robert
308, 311, 316 Sutherland, peerage case, 228
Stewart, John, duke of Albany, 127, 128 earl of see Gordon, John
Stewart, John, earl of Angus and lord of Swabia, 334
Bunkle, 42, 44 Switzerland, 293, 334
Stewart, John, 4th earl of Atholl, 307‒8, sword and cap (papal gifts), 286, 289
316 Syrians, ancient, 328
Stewart, John, 4th lord Innermeath,
309‒10, 312 Tacitus, 199
Stewart, John, of Crookston, 38‒9 tailzies, 38, 229n
Stewart, Sir Lewis, of Kirkhill, 228‒9 Talbot, Richard, 98
Stewart, Margaret, countess of Angus and Tantallon, castle of, 45, 47, 48‒50, 53
taxation, 3, 17, 28, 279 Walsingham, Sir Francis, 287, 294, 296
Thowles, John, 219 Warenne, John de, earl of Surrey, 73
Threave, castle of, 238 Wars of the Roses, 59, 131, 201
Torphichen, lord see Sandilands, James Warwick, earls of see Beauchamp, Thomas;
Touris, William of, 249n, 263 Neville, Richard
Toussain, Daniel, 336 Warwickshire, 65, 66, 79, 84
trailbaston, 63, 80 Weldon, Sir Anthony, 21
treason, 109, 166, 234‒5, 242 Welsh marches, 72, 211
Tremellius, Emmanuel, 339 Wemyss, Patrick, 287n
Trier, 14, 254‒5, 256 wergeld, 198, 211, 218
Trinity College, 252, 259 West March, 109, 183, 187
Troy, 329 West, Nicholas, 285
Turgot, 260 Westminster, 63, 122; see also York–West-
Turkey, 247n, 291, 329 minster conference
Turnbull, William, bishop of Glasgow, 272 Wharton, Thomas, 1st baron, 291
Tweedie, James, of Drumelzier, 227 Whithaugh, 179, 183
tyranny, 81, 126‒7, 129, 274‒8, 334, 338 Whittinton, Robert, 125
Wigtown, 97, 239
Umfraville family, 42 earldom of, 15, 230, 238‒41, 245
union of crowns see James VI and I earls of see Douglas, Archibald; Fleming,
Urquhart, castle of, 234 Thomas
Utopia, 121 William I, king of Scotland, 213, 214, 215
Wilson, Thomas, 287
Valence, Aymer de, earl of Pembroke, 62, Winchester, statute of, 68, 76
77, 79 Windsor, 289
Valois dynasty, 285 Wolsey, Thomas, cardinal, 122, 123, 125,
Van der Myl, Abraham, 330 126, 127, 128, 129‒30, 131
Vassy, 166 Worcestershire, 84
Vaus, Robert, 239 Worms, 262
Vaux, John de, 79 Wotton, Edward, 294‒6
Venus, 328 Wyatt, Thomas, 121, 122
Verac, Monsieur, 294n Wyntoun, Andrew of, 39, 97
Vergil, Polydore, 129
via antiqua and via moderna, 270‒2, 274 Yester, lord see Hay, William
Virgin Mary, 261 York–Westminster conference, 312‒13
Young, Donald, 213
Wake, Isaac, 324 Young, George, 287
Wales, 86, 139; see also Welsh marches Young, Peter, 335n
Wallace, The, 39
Wallace, Matthew, of Craigie, 221 Zuiderzee, 261
Wallace, William, 221 Zutphen, 261

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Kings, Lords and Men in Scotland and Britain, 1300‒1625

Dr Jenny Wormald. (Photo: Luke Wormald)

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

A CIP record for this book is available from the

ISBN 978 0 7486 9150 0 (hardback)

The right of the contributors to be identified as

List of Illustrations vii

Introduction: Kings, Lords and Jenny Wormald 1

1. The Stewart Realm: Changing the Landscape 19

Part I Lords and Men

Part II Kings and Lords

Publications of Jenny Wormald 341

Frontispiece: Dr Jenny Wormald ii

14.1 Earls and the Ainslie Bond in 1567 307

AB Ill. Joseph Robertson and George Grub (eds),

CSP Scot. Calendar of State Papers relating to Scotland and

RRS Regesta Regum Scottorum, 6 vols, eds G. W. S.

STEVE BOARDMAN is Reader in History, University of Edinburgh. His

KEITH M. BROWN is Professor of History, University of Manchester. His

MICHAEL BROWN is Reader in History, University of St Andrews. His

CHRISTINE CARPENTER is Professor of Medieval English History,

JANE E. A. DAWSON is John Laing Professor of Reformation History,

A. MARK GODFREY is Professor of Legal History, University of Glasgow.

JULIAN GOODARE is Reader in History, University of Edinburgh. His

ALEXANDER GRANT is Reader in History, University of Lancaster. He

ANNA GROUNDWATER is an historian of early modern Scotland and

FELICITY HEAL is Emeritus Fellow, Jesus College, Oxford. Her books

ALASDAIR A. MACDONALD is Professor Emeritus of English Language

books, including Sixteenth-Century Scotland: Essays in Honour of Michael

HECTOR MACQUEEN is a Scottish Law Commissioner and Professor of

ROGER A. MASON is Professor of Scottish History, University of St

JAMIE REID-BAXTER is a Research Associate in Scottish History at the

STEVE BOARDMAN and JULIAN GOODARE

Jenny Wormald’s contribution to the transformation of Scottish historical

A persistent feature of Jenny’s historical approach has been a cheerful disin-

usefulness and utility of thinking in terms of the constructed historical cate-

tively brought consideration of the story of the pre-modern kingdom into a

In Jenny’s summaries of her ideas she usually placed Scotland in a European

15 Anthony Goodman, The New Monarchy: England, 1471‒1534 (Historical Association

particularly in English historiography, assaulted on one front by medievalists

16 G. R. Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government (Cambridge, 1953); Goodman, New

One of Jenny’s earliest essays in reinterpretation, in 1973, concerned James

14 Jennifer M. Brown, ‘Scottish politics, 1567‒1625’, in Alan G. R. Smith (ed.), The

One of Jenny’s reasons for downplaying the Scottish significance of 1603

A number of the chapters below respond directly to Jenny’s ideas, either by

23 Hector MacQueen, ‘Tame Magnates? The Justiciars of Later Medieval Scotland’,

relationship to wider governmental structures that have so occupied Jenny.

27 Renaissance Quarterly 47 (1994), 955‒9.

30 Alasdair A. MacDonald, ‘James III: Kingship and Contested Reputation’, Chapter 11

32 Michael Brown, ‘The Lanark Bond’, Chapter 10 below in this volume.

‘Kings and lords’ needed ideologies as well as political mechanisms. Here

34 Roger A. Mason, ‘Beyond the Declaration of Arbroath: Kingship, Counsel and

The Stewart Realm: Changing the

Jenny Wormald has significantly enhanced our understanding of early

12 Jennifer M. Brown, ‘Scottish politics, 1567‒1625’, in Alan G. R. Smith (ed.), The

extending the themes of the fifteenth-century collection by offering an upbeat

bureaucracy and godliness allegedly reflected the interests of a rising middle

It might reasonably be argued that this body of work pulled sixteenth-century

This underlying analysis explains Jenny’s antipathy to Mary, most in evidence

21 Wormald, Lords and Men, 86.

25 Keith M. Brown, Bloodfeud in Scotland, 1573‒1625: Violence, Justice and Politics in an

of manrent’. Bonds were written from time to time as a way of keeping

28 Wormald, Lords and Men, 105.

or the Regent Morton! On the broader question of whether society –