Power and Propaganda Scotland 1306–1488

Power and Propaganda The New History of Scotland Series Editor: Jenny Wormald

Original titles in the New History of Scotland series were published in the 1980s and re-issued in the 1990s. This popular and enduring series is now being updated with the following published and forthcoming titles:

Vol. 1 Warlords and Holy Men: Scotland ad 80–1000 by Gilbert Markus (new edition to replace original by Alfred Smyth)

Vol. 2 Kingship and Unity: Scotland 1000–1306 by G. W. S. Barrow (reissued edition)

Vol. 3 Power and Propaganda: Scotland 1306–1488 by Katie Stevenson (new edition to replace Independence and Nationhood by Alexander Grant)

Vol. 4 Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland 1470–1625 by Jenny Wormald (second revised and updated edition)

Vol. 5 Crown, Covenant and Union: Scotland 1625–1763 by Alexander Murdoch (new edition to replace Lordship to Patronage by Rosalind Mitchison)

Vol. 6 Enlightenment and Change: Scotland 1746–1832 by Bruce P. Lenman (second revised and updated edition of Integration and Enlightenment)

Vol. 7 Ourselves and Others: Scotland 1832–1914 by Graeme Morton (new edition to replace Industry and Ethos by Olive and Sydney Checkland)

Vol. 8 No Gods and Precious Few Heroes: Twentieth-Century Scotland by Christopher Harvie (second revised and updated edition) www.euppublishing.com/series/nhs Power and Propaganda Scotland 1306–1488

Katie Stevenson © Katie Stevenson, 2014

Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com

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The right of Katie Stevenson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Contents

List of Figures vi Acknowledgements vii

1. Introduction: Power, Propaganda and Perceptions of Scotland in the Late Middle Ages 1 2. Kingship, Power and the Making of a Myth 16 3. Crises of Confidence: Kings, Princes and Magnates 52 4. Governance, the Law and the Scottish Polity 88 5. The Church, Religion and Intellectual Life 117 6. Commerce and Community 153 7. Elite Culture, Iconography and Propaganda 182

Further Reading 215 Index 228 Figures

1.1 The Gough Map, c. 1360 4 2.1 The coronation chair of the kings of England at Westminster Abbey, shown here housing the Stone of Scone 23 2.2 Reproduction of the Tyninghame copy of the Declaration of Arbroath, 1320 27 4.1 Bull of Pope Benedict XIII confirming the foundation of the University of St Andrews, 28 August 1413 110 5.1 A 3D computer-modelled reconstruction of St Andrews Cathedral in 1318 123 5.2 A fourteenth-century pilgrim’s badge from St Andrews excavated at a site in Perth High Street in 1977 137 7.1 The medieval maces of the University of St Andrews 207 Acknowledgements

First, I wish to thank Jenny Wormald, the editor of the New History of Scotland series, for inviting me to write this book. It is a truly salutary experience to be invited to consider the history of late medieval Scotland in its entirety and to think about how to communicate its complexities to a diverse audience. I have found this to be an intellectually enriching process and one that has had a profound effect on my view of the past. In St Andrews I have accrued many debts and there is no question that the support and encouragement of many of my colleagues has enabled me to complete this book. In particular, Roger Mason should be singled out and thanked profusely not only for helping to shape some of the arguments presented herein, but also for his friendship. The colleagues with whom I work most closely, Alex Woolf and Michael Brown, make my day-to-day working life a pleasure. They have both been instru- mental in the writing of this book, from inception to comple- tion. Michael had the additional, but I hope not onerous, task of being my official mentor in a formal departmental scheme. He discharged his duties admirably, and he will no doubt be pleased to be relieved of having to ask me if I ‘need any mentoring’. Further thanks are offered to Sarah Peverley at Liverpool, who gave me access to Hardyng material at very short notice, Rebecca Kerry in the School of English at St Andrews, who kept me right on the Roman de Fergus, and my colleague Christine McGladdery, whose neatly arranged books (unlike my own!) I gratefully used as an extension of the St Andrews University Library in the final phases of writing. Many other colleagues, students and friends have helped to shape this book. I would also like to thank the staff at the National Library of Scotland viii power and propaganda in Edinburgh and all at Edinburgh University Press for their patience. Final revisions of this book were made whilst I was a Visiting Fellow with the Research School of Humanities and the Arts, Australian National University, Canberra. On a personal level I wish to express my thanks to my parents, James and Jennifer Stevenson. They probably thought that the time had come when I would no longer be so reliant upon their help, but for eighteen months I have used their dining room as my auxiliary study, while they have looked after my children for increasingly longer periods of time. Without them, nothing I do in my professional life would be possible. My husband’s parents, Brian and Gillian Pentland, have likewise offered much appreciated support with long hours of childcare and by ferrying my family around while I worked. Catriona Elder and Rupert Lezemore said nothing when I rudely disappeared to write instead of spending time with them during their visits to our home. My cat Mycroft, on the other hand, was delighted that I sat in one place for hours on end and produced a lot of waste paper that he could chew. Finally, I thank my husband, Gordon Pentland. Cliché it may be, but without his support, both intellectual and domestic, writing this book would not have been possible. The motivation for both of us is our two little boys, Archie and Alex. Although I suspect that at this point in their lives they won’t care in the slightest about late medieval Scottish history (although there are knights, pirates and swords herein, so I might be mistaken), I hope that in years to come they will appreciate the legacy that the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries have left in modern Scotland and that they, and their generation, will seek to con- tinue to understand the past in new and insightful ways. 1

Introduction: Power, Propaganda and Perceptions of Scotland in the Late Middle Ages

On the front cover of this book is a reproduction of a map. Although the image here is faded by a computer program to conform to the house style of the series in which this book appears, the original map is a brilliantly vivid imaginative rep- resentation of Scotland. The map appears in the first version of the Englishman John Hardyng’s Chronicle, now held in the British Library at MS Lansdowne 204, and was probably a presentation copy given to Henry VI of England (1422–61, 1470–1) in 1457. When I use this image in teaching my undergraduate classes, a common reaction of students is to exclaim that it looks like a map from a fairy tale. Indeed, the Disney Sleeping Beauty castle is such a familiar image to us that whitewashed turrets immediately evoke an impression of fantasy. Such reactions to the map are not entirely fatuous, for this small kingdom on the outer fringes of Europe – or, at this time, really the edge of the known world – was an established setting for medieval Arthurian fantasy literature. Both the c. 1200 Roman de Fergus (and its later and more celebrated Dutch recasting the Roman van Ferguut) and Froissart’s fourteenth-century romance Méliador take place in an imagined Scotland and were directed at audiences who could envisage no place more distant or exotic than the Highlands. Yet both texts were topographically and geographically well informed by the authors’ own visits to the kingdom during their lifetimes. Although the fifteenth-century Aragonese writer Juan de Flores never visited Scotland, by his lifetime (c. 1455–c. 1525) the kingdom had firmly established 2 power and propaganda credentials as a ‘far away place’ and was used as the principal backdrop to his 1495 romance Grisel y Mirabella. John Hardyng’s map of Scotland is, of course, much more than a cartographic fantasy, designed only as a kind of medieval dust jacket with which to decorate the presentation copy of his Chronicle. Maps always embody claims to power and this one was part of a subversive campaign to equip Henry VI with suf- ficient intelligence to prove England’s sovereignty over Scotland. It was nothing short of propaganda. Hardyng had been a spy in Scotland for Henry V of England (1413–22), spending three and a half years in the kingdom. He had first-hand knowledge of its geography, which he used to supply military intelligence. The map, along with an invasion plan and a series of forged documents, was essential to his overarching goal of pushing the English king into a campaign to conquer the northern kingdom. Hardyng’s map is thus an intriguing insight into not only the excessive zealousness of a propagandist for English claims to Scotland, but also into the potential power of the map. The first version of the map in MS Lansdowne 204 was presented on two folios and is designed to showcase Scotland as an attractive parcel of land that was desirable and worthy to be conquered. Scotland here is a land of bounty. Beautiful, rich colours are used; the buildings are large, the towns have high walls, and the churches have grand steeples. These are the principal treasures of the kingdom of the Scots, which are enclosed in a neat square surrounded entirely by sea with only one point of access at Roxburgh. It was an overt message that Scotland was ripe for the taking. When Henry VI was deposed in 1461, Hardyng had already commenced work on a second version of his Chronicle that would prove to appeal greatly to Yorkist tastes. Three of the twelve surviving versions of this revision include an elaborate map of Scotland, British Library Harley 661, Arch. Selden B10 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and MS Eng. 1054 in Houghton Library, Harvard University. These maps are not as richly illuminated as the first version, and are quite different in style. The Harvard manuscript has been particularly Introduction 3 badly damaged by a scissor-happy vandal of a bygone age, who wanted to extract some of the more detailed drawings of the grand palaces and cathedrals of Scotland for their personal scrapbook project. These three map versions do, however, build upon the 1457 version, extending it from two sides to three. The first side shows the Lowlands, with over seventy place names and beautiful, prosperous-looking towns, ecclesiastical centres and castles. The rest of the map shows the Highlands and is accompanied not by images but by prose notes detail- ing the best agricultural areas, the points at which to refresh an army and the locations of notable castles and abbeys. Most remarkably, the northern edges of Scotland are shown to be on the borders of Hell. A large castle – the palace of Pluto, home of the king of Hell – is surrounded by four of the five rivers of the classical underworld, the Stix, the Acheron, the Phlegethon and the Cocytus. The juxtaposition of the castle of Pluto and the northerly location of Hell allowed Hardyng to maintain his claim that Scotland was profitable, for Pluto was often conflated with the god of prosperity. But it also suggests that Scotland’s remotest corners were the places furthest from the grace of God and thus in desperate need of salvation, presumably by the hands of an English king. That the Highlands were where the devil resided also had currency throughout Europe, and the French chronicler Jean Juvenal des Ursins suggested precisely this in his early fifteenth-century Histoire de Charles VI Roy de France. Indeed, it was certainly evident that some perceived this small kingdom to be at the remotest fringes of the world. In October 1474 Galeazzo Maria Sforza, duke of Milan, remarked during negotiations for a marriage alliance with James III of Scotland (1460–88) that ‘if we had only one daughter, which is not the case, we should not want to marry her so far off as Scotland would be’. Medieval maps of Scotland were fanciful projections rather than attempts at realistic representations, but, even still, Hardyng’s maps sit in stark contrast to earlier maps of Scotland. Matthew Paris’s famous map of Britain from c. 1250, now in the British Library, shows a dwarfed Scotland, with the only route to the Figure 1.1 The Gough Map, c. 1360. Bodleian Library, MS Gough Gen. Top. 16. Introduction 5 north via Stirling Bridge. England dominates the map both in its comparative size and in the level of detail lavished on its features. A similar narrow causeway links Scotland and England in a c. 1320 portolan map of the world by the Genoese cartographer Pietro Vesconte, whereas the mappa mundi of c. 1300 in Hereford Cathedral shows Scotland as a separate island altogether. The Gough map of c. 1360 presents a completely different picture of Scotland again, but like Paris’s map remains Anglocentric in its outlook. The level of detail south of the border is far superior to that appearing in the northern areas and the sheer size of England in comparison to Scotland betrays its provenance. The Scotland of the Gough map is sparsely pop- ulated with barely any notable landmarks: it is mostly lowland and east-coast towns that feature and there is virtually nothing north of the Moray Firth. The towns, castles and cathedrals that are recorded match the itinerary of Edward I of England’s (1272–1307) travels to Scotland (indeed, Edward did not go further than the Moray Firth) and it has been suggested that a non-extant earlier version of this map was prepared to assist the English king with his intervention, conquest and governance of the kingdom of the Scots. The Gough map, MS Gough Gen. Top. 16 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, has been the subject of a recent Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project with an online resource that includes a searchable digital version of the map, a wonderful enhancement to our knowledge given the fragility of the original and the difficulty in reading its faded inks in traditional reproduction methods. Accompanying Edward I on his progress in Scotland in 1296 was an observer who provides one of the earliest surviving accounts of a visit to the kingdom, the Voyage of Kynge Edwarde. However, the anonymous writer offers only a scanty impression of the kingdom at the close of the thirteenth century, for the account is little more than a list of the king’s itinerary. Perth, Montrose and St Andrews are marked out as ‘good’ towns, Kincardine a ‘faiour manour’, Aberdeen a ‘faire castell and a good towne upon the see’, and Elgin a ‘good Castell and a good towne’. Little else in the way of judgement is passed, 6 power and propaganda nor are there more perceptive observations. Edward’s time in Scotland did, of course, have significance beyond the contents of the Voyage of Kynge Edwarde, for by the journey’s conclusion Scotland had been ‘conquerid and serchid [. . .] in xxj wekys’. Edward had deprived the kingdom of the Scots of a king and had brought Scotland under English sovereign authority. It is from the mid-fourteenth century that more complex and sensitive impressions of Scotland have survived. The famous Hainault chronicler of the Hundred Years War, Jean Froissart, visited the court of David II of Scotland (1329–71) in 1365. He spent six months in Scotland, which had a profound influ- ence on his view of the kingdom. Scattered throughout his Chronicles and his poetry are vivid accounts of his visits to both the Lowlands and the Highlands and insights into Scotland in the 1360s. Fifteen weeks were spent with King David II on a progress through the kingdom, during which Froissart remarked that David spoke ‘moult biau françois’, perhaps something to be expected given David’s years exiled in France in the 1330s. Froissart spent a welcome three days at rest at Stirling Castle, the preferred centre of royal power for much of the late middle ages, and this was reinforced by David II through his explanation of the significance of the castle. According to Froissart, the Scottish king told him that Stirling was also called Snowdon, because in the past it was where King Arthur’s knights had gathered for their round tables, providing the groundwork for an alterna- tive Scottish Arthurian tradition which countered the claims to English sovereignty over Scotland inherent in English versions of the legends. Froissart further perpetuated this myth by making Stirling the venue for the staging of splendid tournaments in his Arthurian romance Méliador, where the central action was structured around a five-year quest for the hand of the king of Scotland’s daughter. Froissart was also entertained in Scotland by the earls of Fife, Mar, March and Sutherland on their estates, and he expressed great satisfaction with their hospitality. Two weeks of his visit were spent as a guest of Sir William Douglas at Dalkeith Castle, where he learned of the family history of the renowned Black Douglases. This ensured that when he came to Introduction 7 write his account of the battle of Otterburn in 1388, the central protagonist James, second earl of Douglas, was portrayed in an unquestionably chivalric light. The words put into Douglas’s mouth by Froissart as he died on the battlefield conform to the style and manner of Douglas family propaganda, which empha- sised chivalry, loyalty and military service. As he died, the earl of Douglas uttered his last words: ‘God be praised, not many of my ancestors have died in their beds.’ Froissart’s impression of the Scots he encountered in passing was deeply unflattering. While the aristocracy, who subscribed to the common European ethos of chivalry that Froissart so admired, were left largely unscathed, the common Scots were a different matter altogether. Froissart admired their military ability, remarking that they were ‘bold, hardy, and much inured to war’, but he found them utterly offensive as people. Presumably as the result of an incident where Froissart’s nation- ality bore some relevance, the chronicler described the Scots as ‘rude and worthless’ racists who particularly hated the French: ‘hated them in their hearts, and abused them with their tongues as much as they could’. Indeed, this same abusive trait was remarked upon in the mid-fifteenth century when the future Pope Pius II stated that ‘nothing pleases the Scots more than abuse of the English’. Froissart’s longest diatribe against the Scots is a virtually verbatim account of Jean le Bel’s Les Vrayes Chroniques. Le Bel’s view was formed by his experiences on Edward III’s campaign in Scotland in 1327. Leaving Le Bel’s original passage mostly untouched, Froissart argued that

in Scotland you will never find a man of worth: they are like savages, who wish not to be acquainted with anyone, and are too envious of the good fortune of others, and suspicious of losing anything themselves, for their country is very poor.

In these passages of Froissart, it is really Le Bel’s voice we hear. Le Bel’s description of how the Scots army survived on simple oatcakes, for example, was passed on by Froissart and has helped to ensure this biscuit’s position amongst the top tier of Scottish cultural icons: 8 power and propaganda

Under the flaps of his saddle, each man carries a broad plate of metal; behind the saddle, a little bag of oatmeal: when they have eaten too much of the sodden flesh, and their stomach appears weak and empty, they place this plate over the fire, mix with water their oatmeal, and when the plate is heated, they put a little of the paste upon it, and make a thin cake, like a cracknel or biscuit, which they eat to warm their stomachs: it is therefore no wonder that they perform a longer day’s march than other soldiers.

Le Bel’s impressions of the Scots were echoed by others involved in the wars with Scotland. One veteran of the first War of Independence, Sir Geoffrey Luttrell, commissioned a richly illuminated psalter, which is now one of the most renowned manuscripts that survives from the late middle ages; it is held in the British Library at Add. MS 42130. In the Luttrell Psalter there are images of Scots attacking unarmed innocents from behind, hitting elderly widows over the head and hacking babies to pieces with their swords. The faces of some are darkened with woad, a bright blue dye. This is a depiction that shares remarkable similarities to contemporary images of the Saracens, including those within the Psalter itself. It also chimes with ideas about this particular blue colour and its role in Scottish warfare: one of the Scots on folio 169r has a parti- coloured face, recalling stories circulating about woad-painted armies of Britons described by Roman historians, or more contemporary stories of the blue-painted face of Sir William Wallace. The image of the ‘wild Scottes’ was pervasive in this period; for example, the eleven surviving poems of the English poet Laurence Minot attest to the widespread stereotyping and anti-Scottish propaganda that was circulating in the 1330s and 1340s. The victory at Bannockburn was undermined by Minot’s accusations that the Scots had killed innocents to win: Skottes out of Berwik and of Abirdene, at the Bannok burn war ye to kene! Thare slogh ye many sakles, als it was sene ‘Wild’ and ‘Highlander’ seem to have been inseparable concepts: even Hardyng’s second maps contained labels of the regions of Introduction 9 the Highlands marked as the ‘Wilde Scottys’ of Mar, Garioch, Atholl, Moray and Ross. Froissart’s Chronicle also reveals much about the Lowlands, where he spent a considerable amount of his time. He remarked that Edinburgh was ‘the capital of Scotland, where the king chiefly resides when he is in that part of the country’. Although Edinburgh’s status as a capital did not genuinely emerge until the mid-fifteenth century, it was the dominant centre for trade by the time of Froissart’s visit. Froissart’s awarding of capital status to Edinburgh is explained also by his drawing of a flat- tering comparison with Paris, for Edinburgh ‘is the residence of the king, and is the Paris of Scotland’. Nevertheless, he remarked that it ‘is not such a town as Tourney or Valenciennes [Froissart’s place of birth]; for there are not in the whole town four hundred houses’. When Froissart reported an influx to Edinburgh in 1385 of between 500 and 1,000 French soldiers, led by Admiral Jean de Vienne, to launch a joint attack with the Scots on the north of England, he revealed that the lords and their men lodged themselves as well as they could in Edinburgh, and those who could not lodge there were quartered in the different villages thereabout [. . .] Several of the French lords were therefore obliged to take up their lodgings in the neighbouring villages, and at Dunfermline, Kelso, Dunbar, Dalkeith, and in other villages. In the recounting of the Scots’ general displeasure at the arrival of the French he revealed something of the construction of many of the houses. Putting words into the mouths of the Scots, Froissart wrote: ‘If the English do burn our houses, what con- sequence is it to us? We can rebuild them cheap enough, for we only require three days to do so, provided we have five or six poles and boughs to cover them.’ In return Froissart pointed out that when the French lords and knights

who had been used to handsome hotels, ornamented apartments, and castles with good soft beds to repose on, saw themselves in such poverty they began to laugh, and to say to the admiral, ‘What could 10 power and propaganda

have brought us hither? We have never known till now what was meant by poverty and hard living.’

Of course, all of this was coloured by Froissart’s narrative agenda and his audience, but the popularity of the chronicle ensured that these observations remained a perception of the Scots and life in Scotland for centuries to come. During James I of Scotland’s reign (1424–37) Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, a Sienese secretary (and later Pope Pius II, 1458– 64), visited the royal court to engage in diplomatic business. After a succession of storms which deprived him of all hope of reaching the coast of Scotland, when he did land at Dunbar he immediately undertook a pilgrimage to the nearest shrine of the Virgin Mary at Whitekirk, a ten-mile walk. This journey, under- taken barefoot in a Scottish winter, left him with lifelong pain in his legs and feet. Piccolomini’s sense of Scotland was influenced by these experiences: ‘Here I once lived in the season of winter, when the sun illuminates the earth little more than three hours.’ The Scotland of Piccolomini was ‘wild, bare and never visited by the sun’. Of the king who entertained him we learn that he was ‘robust of person, and oppressed by his excessive corpulence’, although the latter comment does not tally with the accounts of James I from the 1440s by the contemporary Scottish chronicler Walter Bower, the abbot of Inchcolm Abbey. Like Froissart, Piccolomini reported on the poverty he saw: ‘I saw the poor, who almost in a state of nakedness begged at the church doors, depart with joy in their faces on receiving stones [coal] as alms’ and he remarked that the people ate mostly flesh and fish, bread being eaten ‘only as a dainty’. ‘The men’, Piccolomini reported, ‘are small in stature, bold and forward in temper; the women, fair in complexion, comely and pleasing, but not distinguished for their chastity, giving their kisses more readily than Italian women their hands’. That he fathered a child during his visit (who to his deep distress did not survive infancy) may shed some light on these remarks. He recorded the cold climate, the production of few crops, the scanty supply of wood, and the use of peat for fuel. ‘The towns have no walls, and the houses Introduction 11 are for the most part constructed out of lime. The roofs of the houses in the country are made of turf, and the doors of the humbler dwellings are made of the hide of oxen.’ The Italian noted that there were ‘two distinct countries in Scotland – the one cultivated, the other covered with forests and possessing no tilled land. The Scots who live in the wooded region speak a language of their own [Gaelic], and sometimes use the bark of trees for food.’ The now familiar ‘division’ between Highlands and Lowlands was also perceived by contemporary Scottish observers. In the way that some English writers had referred to their neighbours in the north as ‘wild’ in the context of the Wars of Independence, it is perhaps unsurprising then to find ‘wild’ used in the domestic context by a Scot referring to the ‘other’ within the same kingdom, the Gaelic-speaker. John of Fordun, a Scottish chronicler and chaplain at St Machar’s Cathedral in Aberdeen, writing in the 1380s, reported that ‘the manners and customs of the Scots vary with the diversity of their speech’. He went on: The people of the coast are of domestic and civilized habits, trust, patient and urbane, decent in their attire, affable, and peaceful, devout in Divine worship, yet always prone to resist a wrong at the hand of their enemies. The highlanders and people of the islands, on the other hand, are a savage and untamed nation, rude and independent, given to rapine, ease-loving, of a docile and warm disposi- tion, comely in person, but unsightly in dress, hostile to the English people and language, and, owing to diversity of speech, even to their own nation, and exceedingly cruel. They are, however, faithful and obedient to their king and country, and easily made to submit to law, if properly governed. Fordun’s Chronicle was amongst the first conscious attempts to create a narrative history of the Scots, and he included much descriptive detail of the landscape, flora and fauna of the kingdom, as well as the types of farming suitable to the different grounds. These ideas were replicated in Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon of the 1440s, which reproduced Fordun’s Chronicle with considerable expansions, before continuing the history into the years of Stewart kingship. 12 power and propaganda

Of course, all of these contemporary impressions from visi- tors and maps are just that – impressions, usually of one indi- vidual based on a single visit or deployed for a specific purpose. The real picture of Scotland in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was far more complex than the fairly stark pronounce- ments above would imply. The aim of this book is to render that picture with some attention to the nuanced shading, as well as to the bold blocks of colour. This book self-consciously moves away from some of the themes that have dominated late medieval Scottish historical studies over the past decades. In particular, the critical question of Scotland’s relations with her larger southern neighbour, England, one of the shaping influences on all modern Scottish historiography, receives less play than many readers will expect in a book which takes in Robert Bruce and the Wars of Independence within its chronological scope. The period 1306–1488 is a crucial one in what used to be called Scotland’s ‘national development’. At its start Scotland was in a desperate fight to maintain independent sovereign authority in the face of English claims to overlordship. At its end Scotland was a kingdom making preparations to enter marriage negotiations with that same ‘auld enemy’, negotiations that would ulti- mately lead towards the union of the crowns through James VI of Scotland (1567–1625). Indeed, it was during the late middle ages that the borders of Scotland reached their modern extent and the kingdom took the shape that we know today. While borders are measurable and diplomatic relations leave documentary evidence, historians have also spilt a lot of ink on the more vexed question of the emergence of Scottish national identity during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It is easy to understand why reading national identity into this period of Scottish history is so compelling for the historian. The Declaration of Arbroath of 1320 – with its justly famous pledge that ‘as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule’ – has been shaped and used across the centuries to appeal to patri- ots, nationalists, separatists and liberal constitutionalists. Its significance has been seen to lie in two principal areas. First, it Introduction 13 has been claimed as a precociously early statement of contrac- tual kingship and thus deployed as the foundational text of an unbroken tradition of democratic Scottish populism (however spurious and confected this may be). Second, its rhetorical content has been taken as a pristine statement of Scotland’s national history and identity. Needless to say, both of these uses entail considerable liberties with the actual historical context of the document itself. Indeed, the nineteenth-century French philosopher and one of the first theorists of nations and nation- alism, Ernest Renan, observed that ‘historical error is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation’. The passage from the Declaration quoted above was bor- rowed from the story of the Maccabees. This was a story which likewise inspired John Barbour’s rendering of the events of Bannockburn, when he gives to Robert I the words:

we for our lyvis, and for our childer and our wyvis, And for the fredome of our land, Ar strenyheit in battale for to stand.

And so, in common with other medieval European kingdoms, Scottish elites did borrow from diverse sources, many of them biblical, to furnish identities upon which later modern national identities and nationalisms would build (ethnies in the termi- nology of the sociologist Anthony D. Smith). How widely and deeply such ideas percolated is a question near impossible to answer. Beyond reports, such as that from Froissart, of instinc- tive hostility to ‘the other’, the evidence on which we might build a properly nuanced inquiry simply does not exist. For that reason, while this book does offer a historically contextualised examination of some of the evidence used to support the idea of a nascent national identity, it is not a theme around which this analysis is structured. The comparative downplaying of Anglo-Scottish relations and Scottish identity may seem perverse to readers keen to reflect on the momentous changes that are possible with the Independence Referendum in 2014. Readers seeking greater illumination on these vexed issues than can be 14 power and propaganda found in the chapters that follow are directed to the further reading list offered at the back of this volume. But enough on what this book is not substantially about. My principal interest here is in power and authority. Such a focus will be obvious from the first three chapters. These deal in turn with some well-trodden themes of political history: the nature of the power enjoyed by kings, how it was maintained and how it was deployed; the interpersonal relations and struggles between kings and the elites within their kingdoms; and, finally, the structures of governance through which power operated and was felt down to a local level. Late medieval Scotland is fertile ground for an examination of all of these themes. Within this period two new dynasties – the Bruces and the Stewarts – were faced with the challenge of establishing their own legitimacy and authority. They often had to do so against and in conjunc- tion with powerful families such as the Albany Stewarts, the MacDonalds and the Black Douglases. In doing so, and in facing challenges common to other European kingdoms, they oversaw the development of structures of governance (hence the increas- ing popularity of discussion of the ‘medieval state’) to provide justice and extract revenue. Power and its exercise has long attracted the attention of scholars, but as historians’ interests have shifted from studying power as the imposition of will to something which also values social and cultural dimensions, so too has there been a broad- ening of the range of sources that are used. Indeed, my own interdisciplinary background in archaeology, art history and literature betrays my tendency to seek a more expansive evidence base to understand the ways in which power was articulated. Both throughout the first three chapters and within subse- quent chapters, which deal with religion and the church, with economy and demography, and with elite culture, this expanded and more diffuse definition of power is very much to the fore. So, for example, Chapter 7 examines how power and authority were embodied in the visual languages of iconography and royal propaganda. Chapter 6, which examines Scotland’s experiences as the four horsemen of the apocalypse – pestilence, war, famine Introduction 15 and death – ran amok across this period, pays attention to what this meant in terms of the agency and opportunities available to different groups in society. There is no question that considering the events and surviving evidence of Scotland in the period 1306–1488 through the explicitly political categories of power, authority and propaganda is not a conventional way of approaching medieval Scottish history. However, these themes are discussed widely and one aim as I started writing this book was to seek my ques- tions not from within the existing national history of Scotland, but more generally from recent work on late medieval Europe. I hope that this book will thus contribute new themes to the outward-looking confidence that has marked so much of the work of Scottish historians over the last decades.