INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF SCOTTISH STUDIES

ISSN 1923-5755 E-ISSN 1923-5763

EDITOR J. E. Fraser, University of Guelph

ASSISTANT EDITORS S. Devlin, University of Guelph C. Hartlen, University of Guelph

REVIEW EDITORS M. Hudec, University of Guelph H. Wilson, University of Guelph

EDITORIAL BOARD M. Brown, University of Aberdeen G. Carruthers, University of Glasgow L. Davis, Simon Fraser University E. L. Ewan, University of Guelph D. Fischlin, University of Guelph K. J. James, University of Guelph L. L. Mahood, University of Guelph A. McCarthy, University of Otago D. Nerbas, McGill University M. Penman, University of Stirling R. B. Sher, New Jersey Institute of Technology

The Editors assume no responsibility for statements of fact or opinion made by contributors. All contents are © copyrighted by the International Review of Scottish Studies and/or their author, 2017

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ARTICLES

The making and breaking of a comital family: Malcolm Fleming, First Earl of Wigtown, and Thomas Fleming, Second Earl of Wigtown Part 1—The making of an earl: Malcolm Fleming………………...1 By Richard D. Oram

The making and breaking of a comital family: Malcolm Fleming, First Earl of Wigtown, and Thomas Fleming, Second Earl of Wigtown Part 2—The breaking of an earldom: the decline of Earl Malcolm and failure of Earl Thomas……………………………………….36 By Richard D. Oram

The radical traditionalist: Naomi Mitchison, Aud the Deep-Minded and The Land the Ravens Found………………………………….59 By Cori L. Gabbard

British fictions after devolution: William Boyd’s culinary arts….86 By Dougal McNeill

REVIEWS

Philippe Laplace, ed., Environmental and Ecological Readings. Nature, Human and Post Human Dimensions in Scottish Literature & Arts (XVIII-XXI c.).………...………………….…………...…..99 By Mariah Hudec

Robert A. Dodgshon, No Stone Unturned: a History of Farming, Landscape and Environment in the Scottish Highlands and Islands…………….……………………………………..………102 By Ian Ralston

Jane Dawson, John Knox ……………………………………….105 By Daniel MacLeod

Scott McG Wilson, The Native Woodlands of Scotland: Ecology, Conservation and Management ………………………………...107 By Richard Oram

Ian A. Olson, Bludie Harlaw: Realities, Myths, Ballads………..110 By Shayna Devlin

Rebecca Lenihan, From Alba to Aotearoa: Profiling New Zealand’s Scots migrants 1840-1920…………………………...113 By Seán Brosnahan

Brian Bonnyman, The Third Duke of Buccleuch and Adam Smith: Estate Management and Improvement in Enlightenment Scotland…………………………………………………………116 By Craig Smith

Iain A. MacInnes, Scotland’s Second War of Independence 1332- 1357……………………………………………………………..119 By Michael Brown

The Frank Watson Book Prize in Scottish History……………...122

Richard Oram IRSS 42 (2017) 1

THE MAKING AND BREAKING OF A COMITAL FAMILY: MALCOLM FLEMING, FIRST EARL OF WIGTOWN, AND THOMAS FLEMING, SECOND EARL OF WIGTOWN

PART 1

THE MAKING OF AN EARL: MALCOLM FLEMING

Richard D. Oram*

Amongst the consequences of the invasions, civil and foreign wars, and political volatility which followed the death of King Robert I in 1329 was profound reshaping of the circle of military-political leaders upon whom Bruce power depended. Leaving aside extinction through genetic failure or battle casualty, the mid- fourteenth century is otherwise characterised by the brief efflorescence of families who rose from the ranks of the lower nobility into the upper echelons of the Scottish political community before fading back into obscurity. Through their failure to establish permanency within the inner circle of the magnate community, the careers of men who won temporary distinction have been largely ignored in narratives founded on sources like Gesta Annalia II, Barbour’s Brus or Andrew of Wyntoun’s Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland, which focussed on ‘winners’ like the Douglases and the Stewarts. That position changed significantly in the 1990s and early

* Richard Oram is a graduate of the University of St Andrews, where he gained his MA (Hons) Mediaeval History with Archaeology in 1983 and PhD in Mediaeval History in 1988. He joined the University of Stirling in 2002, where he is Professor of Medieval and Environmental History and, currently, Dean of Arts and Humanities. The first of his monographs, The Lordship of Galloway, was published in 2000; since then he has published extensively on medieval Scottish and North Atlantic environmental history, settlement and society, with a particular focus on lordship structures, resource exploitation and environmental change. 2 Making of an earl

2000s with a generation of revisionist historical research which opened new perspectives on the social and political structures of fourteenth-century Scotland.1 This work challenged traditional narratives to explore the dynamics of power as revealed in exchequer accounts, parliamentary records and charter texts and throw new light on the careers of men who occupied at best cameo roles in the chronicle accounts and whose families rose briefly to national significance in one generation to sink back into obscurity in the next.2 Amongst these mayfly-like figures who burst into prominence but who failed to establish a lasting legacy were the Fleming earls of Wigtown. The Flemings were a family who typified a new breed of lord; middle-ranking nobles who cannily positioned themselves to fill voids left by the magnate forfeitures and extinctions of the first Wars of Independence, but nevertheless creatures of the crown and utterly dependent on its patronage for their political, economic and social survival in the aristocratic top flight. The two parts of this present study (the second of which follows immediately after this one in the present volume) explore the careers of the two Fleming earls, Malcolm and Thomas, examining their personal and political relationships with the Bruce kings and exploring their interaction with the wider magnate community and with Robert Stewart in particular. Contemporary record evidence for even their immediate family relationships is fragmentary, and their limited surviving acts make it difficult to analyse the composition of their following or to make meaningful observations of their personal faith and devotional activity. Nevertheless, from what survives some broad observations on their network-building and religious behaviour will be offered. It is impossible to determine what links, if any, connected the various families designated as ‘Fleming’ who were established throughout Scotland by the thirteenth century. Their geographical spread—from Aberdeenshire to Dunbartonshire and Clydesdale— and their presence in both urban and rural contexts suggest that multiple individuals who were perceived to be of generally Flemish origin were involved rather than a single man whose descendants had spread rapidly round the kingdom. For the present discussion, one important Fleming kin-group descended from an immigrant

Richard Oram IRSS 42 (2017) 3 family of knightly rank introduced into Clydesdale by the kings of Scots in the mid twelfth century has been identified as the ancestors of the Wigtown line.3 From a core landholding around Biggar, this family’s influence by the 1200s extended across the sheriffdom of Lanark and into the inner estuary zone of the Clyde. Despite long- standing family traditions which identify one Robert Fleming as Malcolm’s father and founder of both the fourteenth-century Wigtown and Biggar Fleming lines,4 there is no surviving evidence for this relationship. A man of that name was listed in March 1290 amongst the barons who confirmed the Treaty of Salisbury with Edward I of England and who gave their consent to the marriage of the Maid of Norway to Edward of Caernarfon.5 Recent scholarship, however, has identified this Robert with the Aberdeenshire laird, Robert Fleming of Wardhouse in the Garioch, who was active from late in the third quarter of the thirteenth century. Given the absence of any territorial designation awarded to the treaty witness, it is unclear on what basis this firm identification has been made.6 Knowledge of this near-contemporary Robert Fleming may have been seized upon by nineteenth-century genealogists as a convenient provider of a connection between the family’s unequivocally pro-Bruce credentials under Malcolm Fleming and the Bruce coup of February 1306/7: Robert, on no historical grounds, was portrayed as a participant in the slaying of John Comyn at Dumfries.7 Similar association with the ‘patriotic party’ in the Wars of Independence figures prominently in several family histories constructed from the seventeenth century onwards, and was designed to give a spurious antiquity to the status of the family and its tradition of loyalty to the crown.8 There is likewise no surviving record of any grant to him of Cumbernauld, which Fleming family history claimed was the reward for his consistent pro-Bruce stance after 1306.9 All told, it appears that a Bruce- supporting ‘Robert Fleming’ is a fiction created to add depth to the Flemings’ recorded ties to the Bruce kings, manufacturing an association with the royal line that pre-dated the Bruce coup d’état. An intriguing possibility for an alternative origin of a Bruce/Fleming tie is Sir Nicholas Biggar, lord of the same, descendent of the mid-twelfth-century Flemish lord of Biggar and a major landholder in Clydesdale. Nicholas was likewise a witness to 4 Making of an earl the 1290 treaty but also possessed a political connection which could provide the basis for Malcolm’s later association with King Robert. On 19 April 1290, Nicholas entered into an agreement with Robert Bruce the Competitor concerning the lands in the Garioch pertaining to the heritage of the heirs of David, earl of Huntingdon.10 In return for pursuing an action against other claimants to those lands—John Balliol and John Hastings—and, on the successful conclusion of that action, making them over to Bruce, Nicholas would receive 20 merks-worth of land south of the Forth from Bruce, to be held for the twentieth part of the service of one knight, described by Geoffrey Barrow as ‘an almost nominal rent’.11 Little else is known of Nicholas and he appears to have died around 1292; there is no record of his submission to Edward I in 1296. Nicholas’s unnamed heirs are mentioned in a Lanarkshire property inquest in 1302/3, indicating the continued importance of this family locally.12 There remains, however, no explicit link between Nicholas and the Wigtown and Biggar Flemings. According to post-medieval family tradition, Malcolm Fleming, the future earl of Wigtown, was ‘Robert’s’ elder son; his younger son, Patrick, established the Biggar line which gained headship of the family in the later fourteenth century; modern scholarship has been unable to confirm either link.13 An early connection to the Bruces may be reflected in traditions recorded in the eighteenth century concerning Malcolm’s wife, Marjory, who was identified as a daughter of the pro-Bruce Sir Simon Fraser of Oliver Castle in Tweeddale.14 It was perhaps via that bond that Malcolm entered the upper echelons of noble society with the grant from Robert I of the substantial lordship of Kirkintilloch or Lenzie, which had been forfeited by John Comyn.15 The enrolled great seal charter recording this grant gives no indication of why Malcolm received this grant but his subsequent career indicates that he enjoyed a relationship with Robert I that was close and personal rather than simply political. Malcolm also emerges at this time as a Stewart associate, receiving a landholding from them in Kyle and in 1321 the gift of an annuity from Walter Stewart.16 The earliest datable evidence for Malcolm’s association with the Stewarts is a charter of 1316 to which Malcolm was a witness.17 The connection was maintained with Walter’s son, Robert, whose foster-father he

Richard Oram IRSS 42 (2017) 5 became, and with whose guardian, Sir James Stewart of Durisdeer, he was associated following Walter’s death in 1326.18 In the 1330s and 1340s, these bilateral connections placed him in the advantageous position of being both a member of the inner circle of royal councillors down to David II’s capture in 1346 and also an associate of Robert Stewart, David’s nearest male heir and lieutenant during his captivity. It was a position that probably served Malcolm well until c.1340, but as the already unhappy relationship between David II and Robert Stewart deteriorated after then, it perhaps contributed longer term to his political eclipse. The breaking of the positive relationship between the king and the Flemings, however, came after a long and fruitful career in royal service. Like several men of baronial rank who gained entry into the upper tiers of the aristocratic community, Malcolm’s rise was founded on service that probably dated from the immediate aftermath of the February 1306 coup for him to have benefited so significantly from the redistribution of property that followed Bannockburn. One of the imperatives driving King Robert’s policy in this regard was the need to reward men who had supported his cause, but it was equally important to bind these men into the regime construction embarked upon by the king and his close circle of supporters, to serve as agents of that new regime in the localities. Malcolm’s chief gain was the barony of Kirkintilloch or Lenzie, held by the Comyn family from c.1200 and one of the nodes of that family’s landholding and jurisdictional complex in the lower Clyde basin.19 As lord of Lenzie, Malcolm entered into new relationships of superiority over former Comyn tenants, amongst whom were the Carrick-based Kennedys who had held the office of steward for Kirkintilloch/Lenzie by c.1260.20 It has been argued that Fergus Kennedy had probably received land there as part of his fee for his office and in 1296 one Hugh Kennedy was entered in Ragman Roll as holder of lands in neighbouring Lanarkshire.21 Despite their traditional association with Carrick and the consequent assumption that that placed them naturally in the Bruce camp from 1306, these Kennedy ties with the Comyns of Badenoch makes the alignment of their loyalties more questionable. Hector MacQueen suggested that the main period of ambivalence was post-1329 on account of 6 Making of an earl the grant to Malcom Fleming in 1358 by King David II of lands in the barony of Lenzie that had been forfeited by John Kennedy,22 but there is no indication in Robert I’s charter to Malcolm of when the forfeiture had occurred or for what reason. The surviving document was issued in 1315 but Malcolm possibly received title soon after 1306 when Robert was asserting his authority in areas of strong pro-Balliol loyalties. The earlier date would place the grant to Malcolm in the context of the Kennedys’ delivery of Loch Doon Castle and Bruce’s brother-in-law into English hands.23 Although Robert granted a remission of his rancour by 1308 or 1309 to Gilbert of Carrick, the then head of the Kennedy kin, some properties of the wider kin-group had perhaps been given by Robert to others whose loyalty at that time mattered more than that of a 24 family whose faithfulness remained suspect. Malcolm’s regional standing expanded later in the 1320s through acquisition of Auchindonan in the Lennox.25 Implicit within this landed power-base for Fleming was the enhancement of the Bruce regime’s local leadership within the Dunbartonshire/ Lennox area. His regional role, however, was signalled as early as March 1315 when at Dumbarton he witnessed Robert’s confirmation of the sanctuary privileges of St Kessog’s church at Luss, accompanied by Walter the Steward, his kinsman John Menteith, James, lord of Douglas, Robert Keith and the important royal official and burgess of Dumbarton, Adam son of Alan.26 A similar regional grouping occurred in January 1327 at Perth when the Steward, John Menteith and Malcolm witnessed a royal charter giving Adam son of Alan land in Cardross to support a chaplainry in Dumbarton.27 Such fleeting appearances with the leading lords of the inner Clyde estuary zone hint at Malcolm’s inclusion in Robert I’s reconfigured post-1314 regional power structure, but his centrality to it emerges clearly only in the later 1320s. Although he is not so styled in the 1327 Perth charter, the meeting at which it was issued was perhaps when Malcolm was appointed sheriff of Dumbarton. He was in office certainly before February 1327 when he is first styled sheriff and keeper of Dumbarton Castle.28 Both positions had been held previously by Malcolm, earl of Lennox, a staunch Bruce loyalist. Under the terms of his 1321 grant of Lennox and the sheriffdom of Dumbarton to

Richard Oram IRSS 42 (2017) 7

Earl Malcolm, Robert had to pay 500 merks annually to compensate Lennox for his loss of office,29 a cost which underscores Fleming’s political capital at this time. Together with Kirkintilloch, and Kilmaronock at the south-eastern end of Loch Lomond attached to the keepership of Dumbarton,30 possession of the sheriffship and a castle regarded as a key stronghold of the kingdom made Malcolm one of the chief men in the territories around Glasgow and the inner Clyde estuary. As an immediate neighbour of the Stewarts’ lordship of Renfrew and already possessing strong bonds with the Stewarts, this also made him a man to be courted by that family. More frequent appearances as a charter-witness followed Malcolm’s ‘arrival’ amongst the regional political leadership. It was as a lord with both Clydesdale and Ayr interests that on 7 May 1327 he witnessed a property transaction concerning an annual rent in Lanarkshire and its use to endow a perpetual chaplainry at Ayr.31 More clearly arising from his office as sheriff was his presence as first witness to a charter, datable only to 1327x1333, granted by Malcolm II earl of Lennox confirming Malcolm of Luss in possession of his heritage.32 His embedding into the local power structures is clearest during the later 1340s and 1350s, by which time he had been elevated to the earldom of Wigtown; Malcolm regularly acted as the first named witness to acts of Earl Malcolm’s son, Earl Donald, concerning properties throughout the Lennox.33 As sheriff from the late 1320s and deploying the jurisdictional weight of that role, Malcolm embedded himself into the social and political leadership of the south-eastern districts of the Lennox. Malcolm’s second area of regional influence was Carrick and western Galloway. His direct interest there began with a grant in 1327/8 of property at Polton in Wigtownshire34 but his local presence stemmed from his management of the south-western lordships formerly held by Edward Bruce. From February 1327 until at least January 1330 Malcolm was bailie and steward of Carrick,35 an earldom whose strategic significance and political symbolism for the Bruce family broadcasts Malcolm’s standing within the regime. Carrick had been granted in 1313 to Edward Bruce to provide him with a comital title and the territorial lordship commensurate with his status as a royal sibling and, at that date, 8 Making of an earl sole male Bruce heir.36 It had been a secondary addition to Edward’s regional powerbase, his primary possession being Galloway whose conquest between 1310 and 1312 he had spearheaded.37 As a centre of Balliol and Comyn partisanship during the Scottish civil war after 1306, the substitution of the leadership those families held in Galloway by that of a member of the new royal family was essential. Undermined in 1315 by Edward’s diversion towards Ireland, the scheme failed upon his death in 1318. Although some Galloway lands were later granted to Edward’s bastard son, Alexander Bruce, Carrick reverted to King Robert, who later bestowed it on his infant son, David, as a means of supporting the child’s independent household.38 David was housed in Carrick’s caput at Turnberry, with Malcolm as his ‘foster-father’ overseeing the administration of the child-earl’s household and estates and care of the boy entrusted to Malcolm’s 39 wife, Marjory. Although his other duties as sheriff of Dumbarton probably kept him regularly away from Carrick, Malcolm made diligent efforts to consolidate his position there. He won the adherence of several key men in the earldom who had been prominent in Edward Bruce’s following, most notably Gilbert of Carrick, John of Knockdolian and his son, Nicholas, and Robert Wallace, who remained close associates until the end of Malcolm’s political career.40 Wallace’s connection with Malcolm possibly pre-dates the Carrick link, for he was constable of Dumbarton from perhaps as 41 early as 1325 and was undertaking building work there in 1329. The connection with Carrick furnished Malcolm with the reservoir of military manpower upon which his status as a leading figure in national politics through the 1330s and 1340s depended. Alongside this emergence as a regional magnate with a military following of significance, however, Malcolm’s political influence was being underscored through his appointment to a key office in the king’s inner administrative circle; from 20 February 1328 until shortly after Robert’s death in June 1329 Malcolm was steward of the royal household.42 His rise, however, was more than a reward for administrative aptitude. His guardianship of the king’s heir signals a bond which speaks of loyal and long-standing service that was recognised and valued. It goes too far to suggest personal

Richard Oram IRSS 42 (2017) 9 friendship, the relationship remained that of lord and servant, but Robert clearly identified in Malcolm a man on whom he could place the greatest trust. Of the gifts made to him in this final period of Robert’s reign that which provides the clearest indication of this position was the contribution towards the costs of Malcolm’s son’s marriage, of which he received a part-payment of £40 in 1329.43 We know neither the name of the groom44 nor the identity of the bride, but the expenditure on the wedding suggests that it was a

splendid event that reflected Malcolm’s standing in the king’s eyes. There is only circumstantial evidence for Malcolm’s activity between Robert’s death in June 1329 and July 1333, but his record of royal service makes it likely that he remained prominent in the council of the three successive guardians of the kingdom during that period. He continued to discharge his duties as sheriff, it being surely in this capacity that at Dumbarton he witnessed a charter of Malcolm, earl of Lennox,45 but there is no explicit record of his political activity in this period. There is likewise no evidence that he was present at Dupplin in August 1332 but he did join Archibald Douglas’s catastrophic attempt to relieve Berwick the following summer. He was reported to have been at Halidon Hill in the second division of the Scottish army that was nominally under the command of Robert Stewart.46 His presence in that division, which had a strongly Menteith, Clydesdale and Clyde estuary composition, reflected Malcolm’s regional status but it also highlights continuing associations with the Stewarts. One of the few members of the pro-Bruce Scottish leadership to avoid the carnage on 19 July 1333, Malcolm escaped to Dumbarton Castle, which he held thereafter for the Bruce cause.47 With him were David II and Queen Joan, who perhaps had been moved there from Turnberry as early as autumn 1332. They remained in his charge until May 1334, when he secured their safe passage to refuge in 48 France. Although a naturally strong fortress, Dumbarton was not unthreatened and the chevauchée led by Edward Balliol that penetrated Clydesdale, Renfrew and Ayrshire in September- December 1333 highlighted its exposure.49 On route, Balliol paused at the nominal heart of Stewart power, Renfrew, which he had already granted along with the Stewartry lands to David of 10 Making of an earl

Strathbogie, earl of Atholl.50 According to Andrew Wyntoun and Walter Bower, it was there that Balliol (but in this context more probably Atholl) received the keys of Rothesay and Dunoon, the principal Stewart strongholds in Bute and Cowal, which signalled the surrender of those areas into his hands, ‘for nane durst hym contrary’.51 Who made this symbolic delivery, however, is not recorded. Balliol appointed Sir Alan Lyle, a man with strong Stewart links as well as Lennox and Menteith connections,52 as his sheriff in Bute and Cowal and gave Thomas Wooler a lieutenancy over the Renfrew and Kyle parts of the Stewartry.53 Wyntoun adds that before the end of the year Atholl had passed through all of the Stewartry lands and taken homage and fealty from the principal 54 tenants. Traditional narratives of the late 1333-early 1334 period are problematical, not least in disentangling the reality of Robert Stewart’s actions from his semi-mythical role in the fight-back against Edward Balliol and his English ally that dominates fifteenth-century narratives.55 The over-running of the Stewart lordship and the part played by the young Steward in recovering his heritage is omitted from Gesta Annalia but appears in an extended form in both Wyntoun and Bower, who share a common lost source.56 According to both, while Balliol and Strathbogie were receiving the submissions of the Stewartry and its tenants, Robert was a passive onlooker from his refuge on Bute. There, he had frequent conversations with John Gilbertson and William Heriot, the former described by Wyntoun as a ‘good man’ and both by Bower as ‘faithful to the king of Scotland’ [David II]. Both chroniclers agree that they arranged Robert’s transport to Inverkip on the mainland and from there overland to a point on the Clyde opposite Dumbarton, across to which he was conveyed in a rowing boat.57 Heriot cannot be identified but Gilbertson is likely the man recorded as bailie of Bute in 1329,58 which would place him in a

position of local influence and trust within Stewart administration. As both Wyntoun and Bower agree that the keys of Rothesay had been delivered already to Balliol by some unknown hand, the question to be asked is had the young Steward attempted to treat with the new regime and sent the keys as a token of his submission? There is reason to believe that in 1335 when tensions

Richard Oram IRSS 42 (2017) 11 between John Randolph, earl of Moray, and Robert brought a breakdown in co-operation between them that Atholl negotiated a deal for Robert to enter Edward Balliol’s peace and retain his heritage.59 That manoeuvre displays remarkable self-preserving pragmatism—if not cynicism—on Robert’s part and it is not unthinkable that he attempted to follow a similar course eighteen months earlier in 1333. Certainly, in the shocked aftermath of Halidon Hill, he was not the only Bruce loyalist to do so. The repeated conversations with Gilbertson and Heriot perhaps intensified as it became clear that Atholl in the closing months of 1333 was intent on taking possession of all that Balliol had given him. Realisation by the teenage Steward that there was no place for him in a Balliol political settlement forced him into the only alternative; resistance in the name of David II with Malcolm

Fleming at Dumbarton. While those events had been unfolding, Malcolm had been performing manoeuvres of his own. As one of the few leading Bruce partisans remaining, Malcolm was negotiating with Edward III through the closing months of 1333. Edward had succeeded in installing Balliol on the Scottish throne and many Scots, including Bruce loyalists like Fleming, might have been prepared to accept that result provided a settlement could be reached that secured their personal positions and provided for David Bruce. Such pragmatism, however, was overturned by Balliol’s negotiations for payment for Edward’s military support of his cause; this concluded with the transfer in February 1334 of much of southern Scotland to the English king.60 On 20 November 1333, in the midst of these negotiations, Malcolm received two safe conducts to come to England with his retinue ‘on the king’s (Edward III’s) affairs’.61 No record survives of what business was to be discussed or if the meeting ever took place but given Balliol’s proposal to Edward III in February 1334 that he would marry the English king’s sister Joan, described only as ‘affianced’ rather than married to David II, and to make provision for David within his kingdom,62 both issues that directly affected Malcolm as guardian of the two children, it is possible that his negotiations had been seeking to salvage something from the wreckage for David Bruce. Failure to secure 12 Making of an earl acceptable terms presumably accelerated plans for the withdrawal

of David and Joan to France. Robert Stewart’s presence at Dumbarton provided Malcolm with a means to open up the route to safety for his young charges. The late winter of 1333-4, according to Wyntoun and Bower, was spent preparing to recover the Stewart castle at Dunoon, whose pro- Balliol garrison controlled the entry to the inner firth of the Clyde and Dumbarton.63 Probably in April 1334, with men and ships provided by Dugald Campbell of Lochawe, Robert re-took Dunoon. News of that success triggered a rising on Bute, where the Balliol sheriff, Lyle, was slain and John Gilbertson, who was by that date evidently in Balliol/Atholl service, was captured. Gilbertson, who was ‘captain of the castle of Bute’, was forced to surrender Rothesay to them and then performed homage to his former lord.64 By early May, the northern and western sides of the Firth had been cleared of Balliol-held strongholds and Robert was beginning to push into his ancestral heartland in Renfrew.65 It was around that time that a French vessel reached Dumbarton to convey David and Joan to safety. There is no precise date for the voyage: all mention of it is omitted from Gesta Annalia, Wyntoun and Bower, but the continental chronicler Jean Froissart indicates that the crossing was made probably in the third week of May with an arrival in 66 Normandy around 22 May. For the Bruce cause, the taking of the Balliol/English-held castles at the northern end of the outer Firth of Clyde not only secured the route by which David II could be carried to safety but also opened a channel through which French money and arms could be brought into Scotland and direct communication could be maintained with France and the papacy. Dumbarton, indeed, became the principal entry-point for supplies and personnel. It was there in 1334, for example, that John Randolph, earl of Moray, landed on his return from his embassy to King Philip VI of France.67 It is likely, too, that Dumbarton was the landing-place for Sir William Douglas and his company of French knights who arrived in Scotland in early summer 1339.68 The strength of the castle and its significance as the port-of-entry for men, money and equipment throughout this phase of the war probably accounts for its role as the main base for Robert the Steward’s military

Richard Oram IRSS 42 (2017) 13 operations down to 1341 and its continuing importance in an

identical manner for David II after his return from exile. There is no evidence that Malcolm accompanied David and Joan to France and he is not named amongst those who formed the king’s court-in-exile, but there is otherwise little firm evidence for his presence in Scotland in the next six years.69 From 1334, Robert used Dumbarton Castle as his base, presumably assuming control as David’s lieutenant and heir presumptive. A late tradition claims that he installed his own keeper in place of Malcolm.70 Certainly, accounts of John Randolph’s meeting there with Robert Stewart in summer 1334 make no reference to Fleming.71 Of course, Wyntoun and Bower’s source was concentrating on the two most important men in terms of status and the narrative of their encounter is focused on their likely joint lieutenancy for David II. We can also suspect, however, that reference to Malcolm has been expunged from both accounts that chose consistently to emphasise Robert Stewart’s unflagging leadership in the counter-offensive against the Anglo-Balliol position, probably because by the date of their composition his lineage was extinct. There are, however, residual ‘ghosts’ in the texts which hint at an originally wider discussion of the progress of the pro-Bruce Scots’ fight-back from Dumbarton. Wyntoun, for example, distinguished in his account of Robert’s recovery of the south-west mainland between the men in his force who were ‘his’, i.e. came from his ancestral lands, and those that he 72 found at Dumbarton. Robert Stewart’s domination of these chronicle narratives of the recovery of the western districts of the kingdom from Anglo- Balliol control excludes almost all reference to other agents in that process.73 It is important, however, to recognise that it was Fleming’s retention of Dumbarton in 1333 which prevented Balliol’s adherents from establishing complete control of the Stewart lands, despite Robert Stewart’s flirtation with defection to the Balliol cause. It was Malcolm, furthermore, who secured the western midlands of the kingdom as a base from which the Bruce party could regroup and threaten their opponents’ position in Clydesdale and Lothian. Indeed, it could be argued that it was his decision to remain loyal that prevented the terminal collapse of the Bruce kingship. Military leadership in the field was left to the 14 Making of an earl surviving members of the senior nobility of the Bruce regime, such as Andrew Murray, John Randolph and Robert Stewart, but it was the steadfast allegiance of a handful of men like Malcolm Fleming that ensured that there was a Bruce cause to fight for and the

fortresses to fight from. Malcolm only reappears in the historical record as a witness to an inspection of a charter made at Dumbarton on 8 May 1340 by a panel presided over by Robert Stewart as lieutenant for David II.74 If nothing else, this act locates Malcolm still at Dumbarton and forming part of a group of men working under Robert’s leadership. Consequently, it placed him in the advantageous position of being a bridging figure between the court- in-exile of David II at Château Gaillard and the king’s lieutenant in Scotland, the Steward. As emerged in the weeks immediately following David’s return to Scotland in May 1341, Malcolm was held in high regard by the teenage king and was in regular attendance on him. This closeness stemmed from the role as David’s foster-parents and guardians which the Flemings had discharged down to 1334, a role that was alluded to in subsequent royal gifts. It was surely political realities, however, rather than sentimental attachment that placed Malcolm amongst those who met David soon after his landing at Inverbervie and who formed a tight circle of councillors that traversed the country with David from June to September 1341.75 Reward for his past service followed swiftly with a heritable grant in free warren of his baronies of Lenzie, Kilmaronock and Dalzell in Clydesdale.76 It is unknown when Malcolm had acquired Dalzell, it not having been in his hands by 1329. Kilmaronock, however, was royal rather than Lennox property and it was noted in the Exchequer accounts for 1329 that it was in Malcolm’s possession for life for the keepership of Dumbarton;77 this 1341 grant now confirmed it as heritable property. Dalzell, which in the late 1360s lay within the lordship of Bothwell,78 had somehow been detached, probably after the death of Andrew Murray of Bothwell in 1338 when the Steward and his associates took possession during the minority of Andrew’s heir. For Malcolm, these properties reinforced his leadership within the district extending from the southern end of Loch Lomond east through Strathkelvin and south

Richard Oram IRSS 42 (2017) 15 into Clydesdale. It was upon this zone that he sustained his powerbase as a regional magnate. On 18 July 1341 Malcolm was with David at Stirling, where the castle was under siege. There, he witnessed the king’s grant of the earldom of Atholl, forfeited by the late David of Strathbogie, to William, lord of Douglas.79 The king had multiple aims with this award, seeking in the first place to bind Douglas, one of the most prominent and successful warlords of the previous seven years, firmly to him, and through him to gain access to Douglas’s formidable military retinue. As earl, moreover, Douglas could mobilise Atholl’s military resources and bind more firmly into Bruce control a territory where loyalty to the Strathbogies remained strong. Robert Stewart was invisible in these events and the grant to Douglas of Atholl, where the Steward had territorial ambitions, was a deliberate thwarting of those aspirations by the king. David’s careful involvement in the process of men like Fleming, who had close links with the Steward, was designed to separate them from Robert’s circle of associates. The teenage king was giving notice that he intended to resume control of royal patronage, long usurped by his nephew, and through that to build the network of loyal followers necessary to deliver the military resources that he required to restore the prestige of his kingship. From Stirling David headed west to Dumbarton, where he may have re-established Malcolm’s keepership of the castle. Certainly, it was as ‘our foster-father (alumnus) and keeper of our castle of Dumbarton’ that Malcolm was styled in royal letters patent probably issued at that time.80 It is unknown if he accompanied the king on his brief foray into Northumberland in late August, but he was with David in mid-September for his first full parliament at Scone, which Robert Stewart could not avoid attending.81 There, Malcolm was in David’s inner circle of councillors, acting as a witness to all bar one of the surviving charters issued at Scone.82 From there David moved to Lanark and on to Ayr and Carrick, where he was based from at least 9 to 11 November,83 and from where it may have been intended to strike into Balliol’s Galloway heartlands. It is probably no coincidence that it was at Ayr, where the strength of Malcolm’s local following was most in evidence, that David gave formal recognition to him of 16 Making of an earl his loyalty through the crisis years after 1333. The intentions behind the grant on 9 November 1341 of the lands of the sheriffdom of Wigtown, to be erected into an earldom entailed on Malcolm and his direct male heirs, and his creation as earl of Wigtown with rights of regality and special judicial powers, are unquestionable.84 This was a very personal grant, limited to Malcolm and direct heirs of his body, with the entail thus preventing potential future devolution onto collaterals like his Biggar kinsmen. Entails of this kind were still a novelty in Scottish inheritance practice and the use of this device in the award to Fleming is perhaps indicative of awareness already among David and his councillors of the precariousness of the future male descent of the family. Such an arrangement preserved the future integrity of the Fleming heritage in Galloway against the threat of its partition between Malcolm’s adult daughters and their husbands. David was not creating a new earldom to provide leadership and control in a still-fractious territory simply for it to fragment in the hands of men who lacked the status or landholding to maintain that domination. The first witness to the grant was Robert Stewart, who was not yet himself the holder of a comital title and who was surely left in no doubt that this elevation of his social inferior was a signal of David’s intention to continue to dismantle the power-base that the Steward had built over the previous seven years. David made it clear that the military leadership of a region where the Steward had displayed ambitions to extend his authority would be exercised by a man of his making, not the Steward’s. If Malcolm had any lingering ties to Robert, this act was intended by David to sever them and give the crown its loyal strongman in Galloway. There is no evidence that Malcolm accompanied David as he moved northwards again, ceasing to witness any royal charters between 11 November at Ayr and 16 February 1342. It is likely that he had spent some of this time in western Galloway seeking to convert his parchment patent into a reality. He had, however, rejoined the travelling court by 14 February for what proved to be a tense and ultimately humiliating gathering at Aberdeen. There, William Douglas and Robert Stewart joined forces to reverse various aspects of David’s land grants made since the previous June,85 exposing the fragility of the king’s grip on real power and

Richard Oram IRSS 42 (2017) 17 authority. This was most obvious in his lack of command of significant military resources and the still largely paper titles upon which was founded the status of the men whom he was seeking to build into the core of a personal following. Malcolm was one of David’s paper tigers whose position was more titular than real. Within his earldom, Malcolm’s demesne was intended to comprise of the burgh of Wigtown, his nominal caput or ‘principal manor-place’ as the charter styled it, and all royal lands throughout the sheriffdom, which consisted chiefly of the heritage of Alexander Bruce which had reverted to the crown after Halidon Hill. These lands are not listed in detail but, based on the named demesne properties in the earldom of Wigtown forfeited by the Douglases in 1455, they comprised a cluster of estates in the central Machars district of Wigtownshire with a scatter of outlying lands in the northern Moors area and in the Rhins.86 It was hardly a dominating landholding and, as with the Randolph earldom of Moray, it was not on a superior landed position that Malcolm’s power as earl depended but on a jurisdictional franchise, the delegated royal powers represented by the king’s grant of a free regality. But the jurisdiction would only be effective if Malcolm could impose his lordship over western Galloway and to do that he needed to establish military control. That seems to have been achieved in part through the warbands of the Carrick-based men in his following, but he still needed access to the network of regional kinship ties that had given substance to the authority the lords of Galloway in the pre-1300 era.87 Malcolm faced the entrenched power of that network in the MacDowell kindred, probable kenkynnol of the old lordly line of Galloway and leaders of the pro- Balliol cause in the region. The MacDowells were probably the most substantial land-holding family east and west of the River Cree, and their network included Galloway’s leading native kin- groups. Although the grant to Malcolm was, therefore, speculative in that much of his earldom still lay in the hands of Edward Balliol and his allies, David had armed him with the coercive authority of a legal jurisdiction as a means to turn his titular lordship into a reality. 18 Making of an earl

Regality authority had been used very effectively by Thomas Randolph in Moray after 1312 and its application in Wigtown was an astute move by the Bruce leadership, who at Ayr in November 1341 included John Randolph, earl of Moray.88 The successful assertion of power by the Randolphs across territory where they possessed neither an inherited regional kinship network nor a dominant land-holding provided encouragement to Malcolm to push harder to reassert Bruce authority in Galloway. Malcolm had to win his earldom for himself but his dependence on delegated royal authority to maintain control bound him inseparably to the king. From his already established position in Carrick and Ayr and reinforced with his overarching jurisdictional franchise, Malcolm was intended to be a reliable bastion of Bruce power in western Galloway. There is no evidence for an immediate effort by Malcolm to convert his title into a reality; it was not until 1344 that he was styled ‘earl’ in royal documents. After attending council at Aberdeen in February 1342, however, he perhaps joined a foray into eastern Galloway against Duncan MacDowell.89 By 18 June, he had rejoined David for a council-meeting at Restenneth and he was in his company intermittently thereafter as David moved between Dumbarton, Dunfermline and Lindores down to January 1343.90 There were opportunities during this period for a campaign to consolidate gains made in the spring. Perhaps significantly, in May 1342 Godfrey Ross, a former pro-Balliol sheriff of Ayr, and Gilbert and Patrick McCulloch, leaders of that powerful Wigtownshire kindred, received compensation from Edward III for the loss of their lands.91 The following year, Michael and Thomas McCulloch, who had also lost lands in Galloway, likewise received a daily cash allowance for their maintenance.92 It is slim pickings through which to perceive how Malcolm advanced his authority, but this displacement of pro-Balliol men locally points to progress in 1342/3. Further hints of activity in the Galwegian military theatre are provided by property deals involving Malcolm and other figures prominent in the pro-Bruce recovery. Amongst business at the Restenneth council was an exchange by Malcolm of land at Mochrum in Wigtownshire for Cardoness in eastern Galloway,93

Richard Oram IRSS 42 (2017) 19 probably due to Patrick Dunbar, earl of March’s rival claim to the former. Patrick’s successor held Mochrum in July 1365, but the lands had been held in the 1310s by Edward Bruce and down to 1333 by Alexander Bruce, earl of Carrick.94 The Dunbar interest may have dated from the early 1200s, when there was a close connection between the Dunbars and the Galloways,95 but they had clearly lost possession before 1314. Why either David, or perhaps Malcolm, felt the need to restore Patrick to his lost heritage at this juncture is unknown, given David’s conspicuous failure to reward Patrick’s support for his cause from 1335; it is possible that the earl’s support in military operations against Balliol’s Galloway powerbase was being bought. A further offensive may have been launched in June 1343, when Malcolm attended a major political gathering at Ayr.96 Malcolm, however, can only be placed there on 6 and 30 June and it is possible that it was then that he commenced the steady pressure on the MacDowells which culminated in Duncan MacDowell’s defection to David II in 1345.97 Evidence for Malcolm’s activity in Wigtownshire, however, is otherwise slender but it seems that while he sought to break the native kindreds he positively courted the region’s politically-influential monasteries. The loss of the cartularies of Glenluce, Soulseat and Whithorn has deprived us of the main record of religious benefaction on the part of Galloway’s rulers, but sufficient evidence remains to reveal Malcolm’s efforts to cultivate these institutions. Glenluce benefited substantially from his patronage, receiving from him what was effectively the erection of its barony jurisdiction into a regality and the gift of the ten merkland of Barns.98 These grants to Glenluce apart, however, the weight of Malcolm’s religious patronage was directed towards institutions outside Galloway. Further signs of favour can be seen in the good marriages secured for his daughters. Eva, who had probably attended court since David’s return from France, withdrew from court sometime in 1342, whereupon she received a gift of 40 shillings from the king. Her withdrawal perhaps related to her impending marriage to John Ramsay, with whom she received a royal grant of Tannadice in Angus.99 Marjory, his eldest daughter, possibly David II’s mistress in the early 1340s, married the Lothian knight William of Fa’side, 20 Making of an earl and received grants from David of crown properties near Clackmannan.100 His household servants, too, could expect advancement through association with this still-rising star. The clerk Robert of Dumbarton, who was probably Malcolm’s secretary and who can be seen involved in the administration of the sheriffdom and castle of Dumbarton, served in David II’s administration in the early 1340s as Clerk Register, and was further rewarded by Malcolm with a grant of land at Leadburn and Wester Hailes in Midlothian.101 Throughout this period of active royal favour and pursuit of his earldom, Malcolm was also consolidating his influence in Carrick and Ayr. In Ayr, he patronised the Dominican convent and before 1344 built a chapel there and endowed it with six merks annually from his own coffers.102 Two years later he replaced this cash payment with an annual rent of 100 shillings from properties near the burgh.103 His building of the chapel and endowment pro anima, for the souls of himself, parents, ancestors and successors, is suggestive of an intention to be buried there. The endowment given to the Dominicans was very substantial, for example equalling King Robert III’s provision in 1405 for the soul of his eldest son in the parish church of Dundee. The scale of the patronage, construction of the chapel, and its probable intended mortuary function underline the importance of Ayr and Carrick to Malcolm throughout his career. Further evidence of this importance to Malcolm can be seen in the continuing prominence in his following of men from Carrick and Kyle. Dumbarton and Lenzie, despite his earlier association with them, were of more secondary importance; the Lennox man, Finlay of Campsie, and the Dumbartonshire/ Renfrewshire knight Sir John Danielston, appear on the periphery of his retinue from the 1340s.104 His most trusted intimate was Sir Robert Wallace, his constable of Dumbarton from as early as 1328 and who remained in Malcolm’s service throughout his career.105 Wallace was the most regular witness to Malcolm’s acta and appears elsewhere as a supporting witness in his company.106 Robert’s kinsman, Sir Duncan Wallace, lord of Sundrum and Dalmellington in Kyle, was another associate.107 Duncan’s marriage to Eleanor Douglas, sister of William, 1st earl of Douglas,

Richard Oram IRSS 42 (2017) 21 and successively widow of Alexander Bruce, earl of Carrick, Sir John Sandilands and Sir James Towers of Dalry, brought him control of her terce lands in Galloway and Carrick amongst other properties.108 His links with the Flemings were emphasised in 1361 when he served as executor to the will of Countess Marjory, yet in 1373 he was a major beneficiary, in association with a group of former Fleming adherents, of some shadowy deals which enshrouded the dismemberment of the Fleming inheritance.109 Nicholas of Knockdolian, a southern Carrick knight, also featured prominently in Malcolm’s following, and maintained his association under Malcolm’s grandson Thomas.110 Together with his links to the Carrick family, kenkynnol of the old Carrick comital kindred, with the Kennedys of Dunure, the rising power in the earldom, and other lesser figures like Murdac son of Somerled,111 these men provided an enduring network of support for Malcolm in the southwest. Through their efforts, by June 1344 he could meaningfully use the title that had been granted two-and-a-half years earlier.112 The June 1344 Scone parliament where Malcolm commenced regular use of his title showed on the one hand his continued inclusion in David II’s close circle of adherents but on the other provided a hint of renewed links with Robert Stewart. In the retrial of Malise, earl of Strathearn, for treason on account of his pre-1339 communing with Edward Balliol and his English allies that formed the main business of that assembly, Malcolm was part of David’s ‘packing’ of the bench of jurors.113 Despite David’s careful exclusion of the Steward and his associates from the panel, Malise was acquitted of treason but found guilty of having surrendered Strathearn to Balliol and so merited forfeiture. As Michael Penman has argued, if a charge of treason for making a submission to Edward Balliol was to be secured against Malise then other leading figures including Robert Stewart, Duncan of Fife, Patrick of Dunbar, close associates of the king like William Ramsay of Colluthie, Thomas Bisset of Upsettlington, John Maxwell of Caerlaverock and John Logie of Strathgartney, and possibly even Malcolm Fleming, could be exposed to a similar accusation.114 Awareness of that threat perhaps persuaded Malcolm that renewal of his Stewart links might in the long term be 22 Making of an earl beneficial, and his inclusion with Robert and Patrick Dunbar as cautioners for the following of William Douglas of Liddesdale in the ending of the long-running feud between them and the followers of the late Alexander Ramsay of Dalhousie (which the king had helped to prolong) could signal that a rapprochement had been reached at Scone.115 Tensions between Malcolm and David might underlie events which unfolded in the aftermath of the parliament. Walter Bower, who took the core details of his story from the fourteenth- century narrative of ‘Fordoun’s’ anonymous source, relates how a man claiming to be the son of an unnamed Aberdeen burgess, who had been imprisoned in England for fourteen years, appeared that year.116 Once his ransom had been paid, the man produced what Bower describes as ‘many tokens and clear evidence’ to prove that he was actually Alexander Bruce, earl of Carrick, who was believed to have been killed in 1333. His claims are said to have won widespread popular belief and triggered unrest, which might point to grass-roots dissatisfaction with the ruling regime in areas from where Alexander Bruce and his father had drawn support. After meeting with David and unnamed magnates, the pretender fled to Carrick, claiming that he feared for his life at the hands of the men who controlled his heritage. Although no names are given, it would have been known widely that such men included Malcolm and several of his following, and Robert Stewart. David thereupon denounced him as an impostor and, once he was captured, handed him over to Fleming and Stewart, in whose presence he was hanged at Ayr in July 1344.117 Prima facie, this is a simple tale of attempted fraud and its consequences, but the coincidence of this pseudo-Alexander’s appearance with a parliament where David had given notice of a rigorous challenge to his nephew’s influence suggests deeper behind-the-scenes manoeuvres. Simply the suggestion that this pretender was in fact Alexander Bruce raised questions over the position of two leading figures, Malcolm from the perspective that the land from which he drew his military support and indeed his title had been Alexander’s heritage but Robert even more seriously from the perspective of a threat to his position as next in line for the throne from a man who, although born illegitimate, was the closest

Richard Oram IRSS 42 (2017) 23 male in terms of the 1315 tailzie which settled the succession. It is therefore possible that David had favoured this claimant before the widespread support for the pseudo-Alexander awakened him to the threat posed to his own position by a popular alternative Bruce heir. For Malcolm, it may have been a timely reminder of from whom his social elevation stemmed, to warn him of the risks of his flirtation with the Steward. Malcolm’s dependence on this south Ayrshire nexus, with its strong associations with Edward Bruce, provides the context for his anxiety to end this challenge. The loss of most of the enrolled royal charters from 1344 makes it impossible to trace the movement of the key players in these events and perhaps misleadingly heightens a sense of estrangement between David and Malcolm, but there also seems to have been a hiatus in the summer of 1344 in the flow of royal patronage towards the men who formed Fleming’s following. Whatever the background to this disturbing episode, Malcolm was again in David’s company and witnessing royal charters by early autumn 1344. He was probably present with the king, the Steward and Maurice Murray, newly-created earl of Strathearn, at Mouswald in Annandale on 10 September and, together with a rush of new charters and confirmations to men holding lands in eastern Galloway and Annandale, this foray points to a conscious effort to restore relations and give reassurance to men whose position had been threatened in the preceding months.118 Amongst these grants was a confirmation of Malcolm’s earldom.119 Further reassurance was perhaps provided by David’s visit to Dumbarton on 17 October, but there is no evidence to place Malcolm in David’s company again until April 1345.120 From Edinburgh David headed west to Dumbarton and thereafter spent most of the summer moving back and forward between the two centres accompanied by the Steward, John Randolph, Patrick Dunbar, Maurice Murray and Fleming.121 David was at Aberdeen on 4 November but it is not until 22 November at Elgin that Malcolm was certainly with him.122 The royal party, including Malcolm, returned to Dumbarton before 28 December and it is likely that David held his Christmas court there.123 Eighteen months on from the Scone parliament, Malcolm had been restored firmly to the inner circle of David’s council. 24 Making of an earl

The king’s assertion of his authority across 1344-5 had much to do with his quest for an heir of his own choosing but was also bound up in his desire to build a military following of his own. Down to early summer 1346 there are indications that this process was preparatory of a major military expedition into England led by the king under his own banner. Within Malcolm’s regional sphere of influence, the issuing of crown charters and confirmations evident in autumn 1344 resumed, probably to tie associates more firmly into his service, but more importantly to reinforce David’s personal authority over men who had recently renounced their allegiance to Edward Balliol. Foremost amongst such men were Dougal and Fergus McDowell, the first of whom received the lands of Senwick, Twynholm and Kelton, properties that had either pertained to Balliol’s heritage or had been held by families who still adhered to the Balliol cause, while the latter received the constabulary of Kirkcudbright and a three-merkland for his support.124 More general support was sought through a royal charter which confirmed the traditional laws and liberties of Galloway.125 These grants, however, were concentrated in eastern Galloway outside the range of Malcolm’s regality jurisdiction and within his earldom he was left to his own devices. Malcolm returned to the south-west early in May 1346 when he made a new grant to his chapel in the Dominican church at Ayr.126 By 5 May he had returned to Dumbarton where he joined the king, Robert Stewart, John Randolph, Patrick of Dunbar and the chancellor.127 It was probably around this time that royal charters were received by Nicholas of Knockdolian in respect of lands near Girvan and by Robert of Dumbarton, confirming Malcolm’s grant to him of land at Wester Hailes and Leadburn in Midlothian, rewarding two prominent members of Fleming’s following. From Dumbarton, he probably accompanied David to Perth for a meeting of council which lasted until the end of May128 and by 27 August he was again in Dumbarton with the king, the Steward, Moray, March and the chancellor. Although there is no indication that he followed them to Edinburgh, he joined that same group at Stirling for a last council-meeting before the expedition into England.129 Early 1346 was, in retrospect, the summit of Malcolm’s achievement. Years of loyal service, first as an administrative

Richard Oram IRSS 42 (2017) 25 officer and personal guardian of the child king and queen, then as defender of the military base from which the Bruce cause staged its comeback after 1333, had won him a place at the heart of David’s councils. Although overshadowed by the king’s ambitious nephew and the glamorous military reputations of John Randolph and William Douglas, Malcolm’s loyalty was the bedrock upon which the Bruce recovery was achieved. Recognition of his role in saving David II’s crown had come with the award of an earldom for himself and his heirs, propelling him into the topmost echelon of Scottish noble society and cementing his status as one of David’s intimate councillors. It also labelled him as David’s man and bound his fortunes to those of the king. The outcome of the English campaign, on which David pinned his own hopes of consolidating political dominance in Scotland, would shape not only David’s future but that of the men he had gathered around himself.

Continued in Part 2 below

NOTES

1 See, for example, S Boardman, The Early Stewart Kings: Robert II and Robert III (East Linton, 1996) and ibid, The Campbells (Edinburgh, 2006); M Brown, The Black Douglases (East Linton, 1998); and essays by Boardman, Brown, Macdonald, MacQueen and Ross in S Boardman and A Ross (eds), The Exercise of Power in Medieval Scotland (Dublin, 2003). 2 Compare, for example, discussion of the careers of Maurice Murray of Drumsargard, earl of Strathearn, or Thomas Stewart, earl of Angus, in M Penman, David II 1329-71 (East Linton, 2004) and R Nicholson, Scotland: the Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh, 1978). 3 L Toorians, ‘Twelfth-century Flemish Settlements in Scotland’, in G G Simpson (ed), Scotland and the Low Countries 1124-1994 (East Linton, 1996), 1-14 at 4, 5-10. 4 J B Paul (ed), The Scots Peerage, viii (Edinburgh, 1911), 520. 5 The Records of the Parliaments of Scotland to 1707, K.M. Brown et al eds (St Andrews, 2007-2015), 1290/3/1. Date accessed: 6 January 2015; ibid, 1290/3/2. Date accessed: 6 January 2015. 26 Making of an earl

6 People of Medieval Scotland http://db.poms.ac.uk/record/person/12826/# ; RPS 1290/3/1 and RPS 1290/3/2. Date accessed 24 February 2017. 7 Paul (ed), Scots Peerage, viii, 520. 8 See, for example, the ‘Genealogy of the Mackenzies’, composed in 1669, in Genealogical Collections Concerning Families in Scotland Made by Walter Macfarlane 1750-1751, ed J T Clark, i (Scottish History Society, 1900), 54-69 at 57-8. 9 Scots Peerage, viii, 520. 10 E L G Stones and G G Simpson (eds), Edward I and the Throne of Scotland 1290-1296: an Edition of the Record Sources for the Great Cause, vol ii (Oxford, 1978), 342-3. 11 G W S Barrow, Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland, 3rd edition (Edinburgh, 1988), 43-4. For discussion of the agreement in the context of the Great cause, see also A A M Duncan, The Kingship of the Scots: Succession and Independence (Edinburgh, 2002), 184-5; A Beam, The Balliol Dynasty 1210-1364 (Edinburgh, 2008), 97 and M Penman, Robert the Bruce King of the Scots (London, 2014), 35. Beam refers to Sir Nicholas as ‘Nicholas de Fleming of Biggar’, presumably referring to his probable descent from the twelfth-century Flemish settler, Baldwin, but this style occurs in no surviving contemporary record. For the lineage descending from Baldwin, see G F Black, The Surnames of Scotland (New York, 1946), 74 and more recently the sequence recoverable via the prosopographical detail in POMS. 12 POMS http://db.poms.ac.uk/record/person/11359/# 13 Scots Peerage, viii, 520, 524. 14 According to these accounts, Marjory was daughter of this implacable opponent of Edward I who was executed in September 1306: J T Clark (ed), Genealogical Collections Concerning Families in Scotland made by Walter Macfarlane, 1750-1751, vol ii (Scottish History Society, 1900), 316 (Fraser family); Barrow, Robert Bruce, 155-6. 15 Registrum Magni Sigilli Regum Scotorum, i, 1306-1424, ed J M Thomson (Edinburgh, 1882), no.80 [hereafter RMS, i]. 16 For the annuity, uplifted from the rents of Holyrood Abbey’s barony of Kerse in Stirlingshire, see Charter Chest of the Earldom of Wigtown, 1214-1681, ed F J Grant (Scottish Record Society, 1910), no.824. 17 Registrum Monasterii de Passelet (Maitland Club, 1832), 237 [hereafter Paisley Registrum]. The approval of this charter by diocesan Official was

Richard Oram IRSS 42 (2017) 27

dated 30 January 1318/9 Registrum Epsicopatus Glasguensis (Bannatyne Club, 1843), volume 1, no. 266 [hereafter Glasgow Registrum]. 18 See, for example, Cartularium Comitatus de Levenax (Maitland Club, 1833), 19 [hereafter Lennox Cartulary], where Sir James Stewart is the second witness after Malcolm to an act of Malcolm, earl of Lennox, issued at Dumbarton in early December 1330. 19 William Comyn, who became earl of Buchan by marriage c.1212, acquired Lenzie by grant of King William c.1200 for the service of one knight; Regesta Regum Scottorum, ii, The Acts of William I, ed G W S Barrow (Edinburgh, 1971), no. 557 [hereafter RRS, ii]. His lands included Kirkintilloch, property in which he was in dispute over with the bishop of Glasgow in 1201/2; RRS, ii, no. 430. William was being styled ‘lord of Lenzie and Kirkintilloch’ in royal charters by 1203; NRS GD45/13/246. A Young, Robert the Bruce’s Rivals: The Comyns, 1212-1314 (East Linton, 1997), 19-20. 20 Registrum Monasterii S Marie de Cambuskenneth, ed W Fraser (Grampian Club, 1872), xxxi-xxxii. The act, drawn up in John Comyn II of Badenoch’s ‘open court’ at Lenzie, was witnessed by ‘Fergus Kennedy, our steward’ and his brother, John Kennedy, amongst others. 21 H L MacQueen, ‘The Kin of Kennedy, “Kenkynnol” and the Common Law’, in A Grant and K J Stringer (eds), Medieval Scotland: Crown, Lordship and Community (Edinburgh, 1993), 274-296 at 283. Calendar of Documents Relating to Scotland, ii, 1272-1307, ed J Bain (Edinburgh, 1884), nos 812, 832 (p.203). Sir Hugh Kennedy was restored to his lands on 7 September 1296 by mandate of Edward I of England; Rotuli Scotiae in Turri Londinensi et in Domo Capitulari Westmonasteriensi Asservati, eds D Macpherson and others, i (London, 1814), 29b [hereafter Rotuli Scotiae]. 22 Regesta Regum Scottorum, vi, The Acts of David II, ed B Webster (Edinburgh, 1982), no. 160 [hereafter RRS, vi]. It was regranted to Malcolm Fleming of Biggar and his wife, Christian, on 6 April 1362, under an entail; RRS, vi, no. 270. MacQueen, ‘Kin of Kennedy’, 283. 23 Regesta Regum Scottorum, v, The Acts of Robert I, ed A A M Duncan (Edinburgh, 1988), 103 [hereafter RRS, v]. 24 RRS, v, no. 384. 25 RMS, i, no.81 26 RRS, v, no.55. 27 RRS, v, no.313. 28 Making of an earl

28 The Exchequer Rolls of Scotland, i, 1264-1359, eds J Stuart and G Burnett (Edinburgh, 1878), 257 [hereafter ER, i]. 29 RRS, v, 112. 30 ER, i, 257. 31 Glasgow Registrum, no. 276. Malcolm was again involved in a property transaction involving Simon Lockhart, this time concerning the monks of Newbattle, when his seal was used in an agreement between Lockhart and the abbey dated 1 April 1339; Registrum S Marie de Neubotle (Bannatyne Club, 1849), no. 214 [hereafter Newbattle Registrum]. 32 Lennox Cartulary, 23-4. The third witness to the charter is an otherwise unknown Hugh Fleming, knight. It is possible that this man is the enigmatic and unnamed son of Malcolm Fleming, for whose marriage in 1328/9 King Robert gave £40: ER, i, 216. Hugh, however, was also a common name in a family of Flemings active in the southern part of the Lennox in the mid-thirteenth century: POMS http://db.poms.ac.uk/record/person/4716/# 33 Lennox Cartulary, 33, 52, 55, 58, 62, 63, 92, 95. 34 RMS, i, app. ii, no. 325. 35 ER, i, 258-9; RRS, v, no.553. 36 RRS, v, 67 37 Edward was styled ‘lord of Galloway’ in a charter issued at Dundee on 12 April 1312: RRS, v, no.19. 38 Penman, David II, 35. 39 He is referred to as David’s ‘alumnus’ or foster-father in two royal charters of 1341 (RMS, i, app. i, no. 112; RRS, vi, no. 39 and in Walter Bower’s fifteenth-century account of the events of May 1334 which was founded on an otherwise anonymous later fourteenth-century source: Walter Bower, Scotichronicon, ed D E R Watt and others (Aberdeen, 1996), vii, 83. Wyntoun makes no mention of Fleming’s relationship with the boy David II. Marjory’s status as ‘nurse’ to the Bruce heir is only stated explicitly in a petition to the pope in 1343 (Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland: Petitions to the Pope, ed W H Bliss (London, 1896), 27). 40 See, for example, Charters of the Friars Preachers of Ayr (Ayr and Wigton Archaeological Association, 1881), nos 6, 15; Lennox Cartulary, 62, 63, 68, 93. The Knockdolians were probably members of the already extensive Kennedy kindred. 41 ER, i, 115, 250.

Richard Oram IRSS 42 (2017) 29

42 RRS, v, 112. For his accounts as steward of the king’s house, see ER, i, 248-260. 43 ER, i, 216. 44 See footnote 19 above. 45 Paisley Registrum, 205-206. 46 Chronicon Domini Walteri de Hemingburgh, ii (London, 1849), 308-9. For an expanded list of the leading men in the second battle, see The Anonimalle Chronicle 1307 to 1334, ed W R Childs and J Taylor (Cambridge, 1991), 165. 47 The Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland by Androw of Wyntoun, ed D Laing, ii (Edinburgh, 1872), 404: Wyntoun says that of the four castles and one peel holding out in the name of King David (the others being Kildrummy, Loch Doon, Loch Leven and Urquhart), Dwnbrettane wes the pryncypalle For thiddyrwart repayryd hale The folk that yharnyd till lyve freely: Schyr Malcolm Flemyng the worthy Off that castelle wes capytane. 48 Penman, David II, 49; Bower, Scotichronicon, vii, 83. 49 Chron. Hemingburgh, ii, 310. 50 Atholl was styled ‘Steward of Scotland’ by late August 1333. Nicholson, Edward III and the Scots, 148 note 6. 51 Wyntoun, Orygynale Cronykil, ii, 407. 52 His kinsmen appear in the 1360s with a Fleming connection related to the Lenzie/Lennox lands and a strong interest in western Menteith and Dumbarton involving a connection with Robert Erskine: see, for example, RRS, vi, no. 310, where John Lyle witnesses a confirmation of the sale of Cassillis in Carrick by the Montgomeries to John Kennedy; no. 327, where Lyle witnesses a property exchange involving Robert Erskine and Strathgartney; no. 335, where he witnessed an act of Thomas Fleming. 53 Bower, Scotichronicon, vii, 97. 54 Wyntoun, Orygynale Cronykil, ii, 412-3. 55 See, for example, S Boardman, The Early Stewart Kings: Robert II and Robert III 1371-1406 (East Linton, 1996), 4-5. 56 Boardman, Early Stewart Kings, 4 and note 13. Boardman notes that ‘Fordun’s annals display a consistent personal hostility towards the Steward’ and that they showed little interest in west and south-west Scotland. An original composition date before 1363 also places his 30 Making of an earl

writing in the context of hostility between David II and his nephew and represents a strongly court-centred narrative of events. 57 Wyntoun, Orygynale Cronykil, ii, 408; Bower, Scotichronicon, vii, 97. 58 ER, i, 184, 190, 196. 59 I A MacInnes, ‘“To be annexed forever to the English crown”: The English occupation of Southern Scotland, c.1334-1337’, in A King and D Simpkin (eds), England and Scotland at War, c.1296-c.1513 (Brill, 2012), 183-202 at 194 and sources cited in note 50; Penman, David II, 58-61. 60 The Records of the Parliaments of Scotland to 1707, eds K M Brown et al (St Andrews, 2007-2015), 1334/1. Date accessed: 24 February 2015. 61 Calendar of Documents Relating to Scotland, iii, 1307-1357, ed J Bain (London, 1887), nos 1099, 1100 [hereafter CDS, iii]. R Nicholson, Edward III and the Scots. The Formative Years of a Military Career 1327-1335 (Oxford, 1965), 150. 62 CDS, iii, no.1108. 63 For discussion, see S Boardman, The Campbells 1250-1513 (Edinburgh, 2006), 58-9. 64 Wyntoun, Orygynale Cronykil, ii, 414-5; Bower, Scotichronicon, vii, 103, 105. 65 Wyntoun, Orygynale Cronykil, ii, 416; Bower, Scotichronicon, vii, 105, 107. 66 Oeuvres de Froissart: Chroniques, ii, 1322-1339 (Brussels, 1867), 328 and following. See also Penman, David II, 52-3. 67 Wyntoun, Orygynale Cronykil, ii, 416; Bower, Scotichronicon, vii, 107. 68 Bower, Scotichronicon, vii, 141. 69 We can place him at Newbattle Abbey in Midlothian on 1 April 1339 when his seal and that of Thomas Charteris, the chancellor, were used to add greater weight to a settlement between Simon Lockhart and the monastery; Newbattle Registrum, no. 214. That joint action with Charteris suggests that he still held a role in the administration of the kingdom but there is no further evidence for the nature of that role. 70 Penman, David II, 78-9 and note 9. 71 Wyntoun, Orygynale Cronykil, ii, 416; Bower, Scotichronicon, vii, 107. 72 Wyntoun, Orygynale Cronykil, ii, 416: The yhynge Stwart off Scotland then In mekill hy gadderyde his men; And thame that lay at Dwnbertane, All halyly wyth thaim have their tane: Thai ware the floure off thare menyhé.

Richard Oram IRSS 42 (2017) 31

73 For discussion of this issue see S Boardman, ‘Chronicle propaganda in fourteenth-century Scotland: Robert the Steward, John of Fordun and the “Anonymous Chronicle”’, Scottish Historical Review, 76 (1997), 23-43. 74 RRS, vi, no.18. 75 RRS, vi, nos 25, 27, 30, 31, 33, 35, 483, where Malcolm is a witness to David’s charters issued during this period. 76 RRS, vi, no. 30. 77 RRS, v, no. 290, where Robert I granted the patronage of Kilmaronock to Cambuskenneth Abbey. This may have been a re-grant as letters patent to John, bishop of Glasgow, authorising him to appropriate the parish church to the abbey, were issued between October 1323 and November 1325, when he granted the church in proprios usus: RRS, v, no. 504; Registrum Monasterii S Marie de Cambuskenneth (Grampian Club, 1872), no. 146. There is no evidence to support the statement by Cynthia Neville that the patronage of Kilmaronock pertained to the earls of Lennox: C J Neville, Native Lordship in Medieval Scotland: The Earldoms of Strathearn and Lennox, c.1140-1365 (Dublin, 2005), 157 note 66 [where the name is given erroneously as ‘Kilmarnock’]. 78 Glasgow Registrum, no.308. 79 RRS, vi, no. 31. 80 RMS, i, app. i, no. 112; RRS, vi, 505. 81 Penman, David II, 80. 82 RRS, vi, nos 33-37. 83 RRS, vi, nos 39, 40. 84 RRS, vi, no.39. 85 For Malcolm at Aberdeen, see RRS, vi, nos 45, 47. For the business at Aberdeen and the collusion of Douglas and the Steward, see Penman, David II, 86-88. 86 See, ‘The forfeited estates of the Black Douglases’ in P.G.B.McNeill and H.L.MacQueen (eds), Atlas of Scottish History to 1707 (Edinburgh, 1996), 447. 87 The kin structures upon which the power of the lords of Galloway was based is discussed in R D Oram, ‘A family business? Colonisation and settlement in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Galloway’, Scottish Historical Review, lxxii (1993). 88 The exact date of Moray’s release from captivity in England has been much debated [see Penman, David II, 75 and note 92, where an early 1342 date is proposed], but this charter and a safe conduct issued on 22 32 Making of an earl

February 1341/2 for his passage through England to France and return [CDS, iv, no.1376] point strongly to a release-date in 1341. 89 R D Oram, ‘Dervorgilla, the Balliols and Buittle’, Transactions of the Dumfriesshire and Galloway Natural History and Antiquarian Society, lxxiii (1999), 165-181 at 179-80. 90 RRS, vi, nos 52, 53, 54, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64. 91 CDS, iii, nos 1390-1392. 92 CDS, iii, no. 1412. 93 RRS, vi, no. 52. The land he received, of which only the ‘…rnes’ at the end of the name is legible in the surviving text, was described as ‘pertaining to us by reason of forfeiture’. Cardoness had been held by a prominent, Balliol-supporting tenant family in the 1290s (see R D Oram, The Lordship of Galloway (Edinburgh, 2000), 230). It is mistakenly identified as the Rhins in Wigtownshire in Penman, David II, 95. 94 RRS, vi, no. 506. Edward Bruce granted an annual render of six stones of beeswax annually from Cruggleton and Mochrum to Whithorn Priory; RMS, i, app. i, no. 20. It was amongst properties granted to Edward’s bastard son, Alexander Bruce in c.1328-9 and which reverted to the crown on Alexander’s death in 1333; RMS, i, app. ii, no. 623. Patrick is named explicitly as having held possession in a charter of 25 July 1368, which confirmed the lands of Cumnock, Blantyre, Glenken and Mochrum in the hands of George Dunbar, earl of March: RMS, i, no. 291. 95 R D Oram, Alexander II, King of Scots, 1214-1249 (Edinburgh, 2012), 161-2. 96 RRS, vi, nos 71-4, where David and his council were in Ayr between 6 and 30 June. 97 RRS, vi, nos 71, 74; The Anonimalle Chronicle 1333 to 1381, ed. V.H.Galbraith (Manchester, 1927), s.a. 1345. 98 Wigtownshire Charters, ed R C Reid (Scottish History Society, 1960), no. 37, where both charters survive only within a general confirmation in the name of King James II, dated 31 May 1441. 99 ER, i, 509, 589. 100 Penman, David II, 83; APS, i, appendix, 168. In the 1342 Exchequer accounts, payment of £19 6s 8d to her ‘for the debt in which the king is beholden to her’ was recorded: ER, i, 506. She received a gift of woollen cloth worth £4 13s 4d in the same account: ER, i, 509. There is also reference to a payment of 20 shillings to one Henry of Kinghorn, by the king’s mandate, authorised by the seal of Lady Marjory Fleming, which

Richard Oram IRSS 42 (2017) 33

suggests a very close relationship between David and Malcolm’s daughter: ER, i, 511. 101 RMS, i, app. ii, no. 1067. For outline of Robert’s career, see RRS, vi, 11-12. He is discussed also in; A A M Duncan, 'The Regnal Year of David II', SHR, lxviii (1989), 105-19. 102 Ayr Friars Preachers Charters, no. 8. 103 Ayr Friars Preachers Charters, no. 6. This charter, granted by Malcolm as earl, is wrongly dated to 3 May 1336. His presence at Dumbarton on 5 and 6 May (see RRS, vi, nos 101, 102) strengthens the probability that the gift was made as he travelled north from Wigtown. 104 For Finlay of Campsie, see Lennox Cartulary, 58, 62, 92, 95. Both Finlay of Campsie and John Danielston witness Ayr Friars Preachers Charters, no. 15. Danielston was the principal witness to Malcom’s charter of lands in Lennox to Andrew Cunninghame, Lennox Cartulary, 67-8. 105 Lennox Cartulary, 62, 63, 68; Ayr Friars Preachers Charters, nos 6, 15; ER, i, 115, 250, 257. 106 See, for example, Ayr Friars Preachers Charters, nos 6, 15; Lennox Cartulary, 62, 63, 68. 107 RMS, i, no. 465. 108 RMS, i, nos 358, 464. 109 Registrum Honoris de Morton, ii, (Bannatyne Club, 1853), no. 79; RMS, i, no. 464. 110 Ayr Friars Preachers Charters, no. 15; RRS, vi, no. 128; Charters of the Abbey of Crossraguel, i (Edinburgh, 1886), no. 20 [hereafter Crossraguel Charters]. 111 For a discussion of these families, see H L MacQueen, ‘The Kin of Kennedy, ‘Kenkynnol’ and the Common Law’, in A Grant and K J Stringer (eds), Medieval Scotland: Crown, Lordship and Community (Edinburgh, 1993), 275-96. Gilbert of Carrick witnessed charters with Malcolm in the Lennox (Lennox Cartulary, 58, 92) where around 1342 and with subsequent confirmations into the 1350s he received a crown grant of Buchanan (RMS, i, app. ii, nos 876, 986, 1279). Early in 1342 he also received life-rent of the coronership between the rivers Ayr and Doon, i.e. within Kyle Regis, RMS, i, app. ii, no. 844. In the same period he was one of a group of Carrick men who received grants of land from the king in the Dee and Ken valleys in central Galloway. Gilbert’s acquisition of Balliol’s lordship of Kenmure, granted apparently in 1342 and confirmed in 1343, was the biggest single award made in that district, 34 Making of an earl

RMS, i, app. ii, nos 831, 894, 1100. He was clearly not simply dependent on his association with Malcolm Fleming for political and social advancement. Murdac witnesses Ayr Friars Preachers Charters, no. 15. For his Carrick lands in the 1360s, see RMS, i, no. 135; app. ii, no. 1378. 112 He is styled so for the first time in a surviving record in the rolls of the Scone parliament of June 1344 (see RPS, 1344/1-7). 113 Penman, David II, 107. 114 Penman, David II, 107-8. 115 RPS 1344/7; Penman, David II, 109. 116 Bower, Scotichronicon, vii, 157-9. 117 There is no evidence that places David, Malcolm and Robert in Ayr in July 1344, but it was on 6 July 1344 at Glasgow that Malcolm granted property outside the burgh to his chapel in the Dominican friary there, Ayr Friars Preachers Charters, no. 8. 118 RRS, vi, no. 81; RMS, i, app. ii, nos 894 (confirmation of Gilbert Carrick’s charter of Kenmure), 903 (grant to the Mar knight, Laurence Gillibrand, of Southwick), 910 (grant to John Crawford of the keepership of the lands and forest of Glenken), 912-4 (settlement of the headship of kin of three Galloway and Carrick kindreds), 915 (grant of the customs of the sheriffdom of Dumfries to John Randolph, earl of Moray), 928 (confirmation to Robert Wallace of his Ayrshire lands), 929 (grant to Malcolm Danielston of ‘Glencharry’ in Ayrshire), 930 (grant to Nicholas Stirling of Stockerton in Dumfriesshire), 937 (charter to Alan Stewart of Darnley of the lands of Corsewall, ‘Drochdreg’ and part of Glengyre in the northern part of the Rhins of Galloway). 119 RMS, i, app. ii, no. 927. 120 RRS, vi, no. 89. 121 RRS, vi, nos 93, 94, 95, 98; RMS, i, app. i, no. 120; ‘Miscellaneous Charters, 1315-1401, from transcripts in the collection of the late Sir William Fraser’, Miscellany of the Scottish History Society (Edinburgh, 1933), no. 9, dated at Dumbarton 10 July 1345. 122 RRS, vi, nos 98, 99; RMS, i, app. i, no. 121. 123 RRS, vi, 100. 124 RMS, i, app. ii, nos 1006, 1007. 125 RMS, i, app. ii, no. 1012; Oram, Lordship of Galloway, 145. 126 Ayr Friars Preachers Charters, no. 6. For dating, see above note 91. 127 RRS, vi, nos 101, 102. 128 RRS, vi, nos 103, 104. In addition to the core group of the Steward, earls of Moray, March, Strathearn and Wigtown, and the chancellor,

Richard Oram IRSS 42 (2017) 35

David Hay the Constable joined the witnesses to the latter charter, his presence not only being facilitated by the proximity of the gathering to his lands at Erroll but also necessary for the likely military nature of the main discussions. 129 RRS, vi, nos 106-108. The king gathered his host from Scotland north of the Forth at Perth, where William, earl of Ross, had his men murder Ranald mac Ruairidh at Elcho nunnery east of the burgh; Wyntoun, Orygynale Cronykil, ii, 472. From there he marched south, presumably gathering additional contingents on the way and perhaps rendezvousing with Malcolm at Stirling. 36 Breaking of an earldom

THE MAKING AND BREAKING OF A COMITAL FAMILY: MALCOLM FLEMING, FIRST EARL OF WIGTOWN, AND THOMAS FLEMING, SECOND EARL OF WIGTOWN

PART 2

THE BREAKING OF AN EARLDOM: THE DECLINE OF EARL MALCOLM AND FAILURE OF EARL THOMAS

Richard D. Oram*

David II’s 1346 expedition into England and the catastrophic end to the campaign at Neville’s Cross have been explored in depth in several studies. Likewise, the political consequences of the deaths or capture of so many of David’s closest councillors have been analysed for both the king and the government of his realm.1 What has not been explored in similar detail is the impact that the battle and its aftermath had on the political fortunes of a single noble family. With the king a prisoner and rivals like John Randolph and Maurice Murray dead, Robert Stewart and his associates regained their pre-1342 dominance, enhanced by Robert’s status as David’s sole heir and de facto lieutenant. For men who had been promoted by David to counterbalance his nephew’s political influence—and the followers of such men—the removal of the king and resurgence of Robert’s fortunes delivered a sharp lesson in realpolitik. Survival

* Richard Oram is a graduate of the University of St Andrews, where he gained his MA (Hons) Mediaeval History with Archaeology in 1983 and PhD in Mediaeval History in 1988. He joined the University of Stirling in 2002, where he is Professor of Medieval and Environmental History and, currently, Dean of Arts and Humanities. The first of his monographs, The Lordship of Galloway, was published in 2000; since then he has published extensively on medieval Scottish and North Atlantic environmental history, settlement and society, with a particular focus on lordship structures, resource exploitation and environmental change.

Richard Oram IRSS 42 (2017) 37 required accommodation with the new regime; failure to do so threatened political eclipse and social marginalisation. In this second part of the discussion of the rise and fall of the Fleming earldom of Wigtown the focus is on Earl Malcolm’s decline in the changed political environment of post-Neville’s-Cross Scotland and on the legacy bequeathed to his grandson and successor, Thomas. It presents a stark contrast to the preceding two decades of rising fortunes and exposes failures that were as much personal as political. Malcolm, then in at least his mid-fifties, had fought alongside David in the second division of the army and was captured with him.2 While David was immediately taken south for greater security, Malcolm was held in the custody of Robert Bertram, sheriff of Northumberland, for later transfer to London.3 A warrant on Exchequer was issued on 7 March 1347 for payment to John D’Arcy, constable of the Tower, of 20 shillings per diem as his expenses for bringing ‘David Bruce, Malcolm Fleming, and other Scottish prisoners’ from Roxburgh, Wark and Bamburgh to London.4 On 2 May, however, Bertram was indicted for contempt in allowing Fleming to escape.5 Claiming to be ill, possibly due to wounds received at Neville’s Cross, Malcolm had not accompanied the other Scottish prisoners but had remained in custody at Bothal. There, he had suborned one of his gaolers, Robert de la Vale, who then fled with him to Scotland, where Malcolm rewarded him with the lands of Dalzell and Kilsyth.6 Malcolm might have been expected to resume the prominence in government he had held previously but was instead striking by his invisibility. This absence may have been as much a consequence of the infirmity which had been his excuse for not being transported to the Tower as of his standing as one of the few survivors amongst David’s closest partisans.7 His personal links with Robert Stewart, who was again lieutenant, might have given him an important mediatory position, but, instead, he was conspicuously absent from what passed as Scotland’s government until 1350-1351; he then only attended the parliaments and councils of 1351, 1352 and 1354 summoned to discuss David’s ransoming.8 During this period, Malcolm’s position in Galloway collapsed and the lordship which he had built in the early 1340s 38 Breaking of an earldom disintegrated as the exiled native leadership returned with English support. Local figures who had submitted to David reverted to their former allegiance to Edward Balliol, who re-established a regional presence.9 Two of Malcolm’s associates, Alan Stewart of Darnley, who had estates in the Rhins, and John Kennedy of Dunure in Carrick, prevented the complete collapse of the pro-Bruce position in western Galloway and Carrick, but it was otherwise William, lord of Douglas, who led the offensive against Balliol’s supporters and secured their eventual surrender in 1355.10 This personal inactivity was paralleled by a shift into greater dependency on the Steward and his intrusion into key components of Malcolm’s lordship. As head of a large military following and an experienced politician, Malcolm should have been courted by the lieutenant, regardless of their past relationship, but was instead relegated to the political margins. One critical factor behind this situation was Malcolm’s lack of an adult heir to provide the Fleming family’s political-military adherents with a leader in the absence of Malcolm himself. If he was personally incapable of providing leadership to his following, even by the proxy of a son, and heading the defence of his own lands—and by extension those of his adherents—men would look elsewhere for leadership and protection. Malcolm’s decline is illustrated by the brusque tone adopted towards him by Robert, who in June 1348 wrote as lieutenant to an unnamed ‘sheriff of the castle of Dumbarton’ requiring him to cease levying a render of flour to feed the castle’s garrison from Paisley Abbey’s tenants in the Lennox.11 The letter mentioned a concordat on that subject previously made between ‘you’ (the sheriff) and ‘them’ (the monks of Paisley), which refers to the settlement agreed between Malcolm and the monks in November 1330, indicating that he was the unnamed sheriff in 1348. There are no courtesies in the letter, which is straightforwardly directive as an instruction from a superior lord to an official of inferior status. The tone could reflect the business-like manner of the chancellor, William Caldwell, a Stewart-linked cleric, and Robert’s assertion of authority as lieutenant in the aftermath of Neville’s Cross, but the lack of any courtesies or recognition of Malcolm’s wider titles seems deliberate.

Richard Oram IRSS 42 (2017) 39

It was only c.1350 that Malcolm resurfaced as a named participant in a surviving act. This was as a witness to a private charter of Robert Stewart to Sir Robert Erskine, one of the new stars in the wider circle of the Steward’s following and, from at least August 1348, chamberlain of Scotland.12 This re-emergence coincided with Robert’s temporary removal from office as lieutenant and replacement by a triumvirate of the earls of Ross and Mar, and the lord of Douglas;13 Robert needed to court allies where he could. Malcolm, however, aligned with the party that David II was constructing in absentia and it is in that context that Malcolm attended the 1351 Dundee parliament where terms for David’s release were debated.14 Those terms, which would have removed Robert Stewart from the succession and replaced him with a Plantagenet prince, were unacceptable to a majority in parliament, even Robert’s opponents. A reaction against David’s preparedness to secure his release on such terms resulted in Robert regaining the sole lieutenancy once the parliament ended; Malcolm had miscalled his alignment with David. Clearly still perceived (in English eyes at least) as a key Bruce partisan, Malcolm was amongst those whose sons or heirs were named in a safe conduct of 5 September 1351 as hostages for David when he was released on parole to return to Scotland with fresh ransom terms.15 Malcolm attended the Scone parliament at which that business was discussed but his only recorded input there was as witness to charters granted by David. These acts underscored the king’s failure and the Steward’s dominance; all were confirmations of grants by the Steward or his associate, Thomas Stewart, earl of Angus, to Sir Robert Erskine.16 Not only had the Steward retrieved the allegiance of Erskine as chamberlain from the king but he was also able to manipulate parliament’s suspicion of David, his plans, and by extension his few supporters to his benefit.17 From this point inroads into the remnants of Malcolm’s powerbase accelerated, and by 1353 Robert controlled 18 Dumbarton Castle. Malcolm’s hold on Dumbarton may have been weakening for some time. Regardless of whether or not it stemmed from the marriage of an otherwise unknown daughter to Sir John Danielston,19 it was to that staunch Stewart partisan that the castle 40 Breaking of an earldom was entrusted. Soon after his release in October 1357, David II confirmed a charter in Danielston’s favour from Malcolm, which granted him the island and castle of Inchcailloch in Loch Lomond, the advowson of the church of Inchcailloch, and the lands of Kilmaronock, the last of which had been granted to Malcolm as part of his fee for the keepership of Dumbarton and confirmed to him heritably in 1341.20 These grants to Danielston presumably involved the transfer of Dumbarton’s keepership; he held the castle by 1359 and was drawing revenue from the barony of Cadzow for its maintenance.21 Keepership of Dumbarton had not been explicitly a hereditary appointment—unless that was implicit in the hereditary grant of the lands attached to that position—but the castle had been the jewel amidst Malcolm’s sprawling complex of lordships and his principal, and effectively private, residence. It had been, moreover, the lynchpin in his network of power, dominating the northern end of the Clyde seaways and forming a bridging-point between his Clyde-basin estates and his south-western earldom. He had, presumably, intended that it pass with his hereditary lands to his heir; its loss must have been a bitter blow. After the March 1352 Scone parliament, with control of government concentrated in the hands of the Steward and his associates the earls of Angus and March, Malcolm withdrew to the political margins.22 It was as a loyal Bruce man that he attended a meeting of council at Inverkeithing on 1 April 1354, where along with his fellow loyalist William, earl of Sutherland, he witnessed three charters, the last of which represented part an effort by David to court William Douglas.23 Council concluded with agreement to reopen negotiations with Edward III and on 13 July terms were settled to be put before the Scottish parliament. If these were accepted, to cement the peace twelve Scottish hostages were to be delivered to England, headed by the sons and heirs of the earls of Sutherland and March and the heir of the earl of Wigtown.24 As with the previous proposals, however, the plan was rejected. Malcolm re-emerged into political life only in 1357. By then he may have been facing financial difficulties that stemmed from the loss of parts of his lordship from which he had drawn considerable income, most notably the sheriffdom and castle of Dumbarton. It was perhaps to address his money problems that in

Richard Oram IRSS 42 (2017) 41

April 1357 he granted his kinsman, Malcolm Fleming of Biggar, land at Auchmoir that had been wadset to him for £200,25 in what seems to have been the selling-on of a debt. This transaction was the first signal of growing financial dependence on the Biggar Flemings that would become absolute in the years ahead. Malcolm’s need may have been to gain the liquidity necessary to meet the costs of his grandson’s soon-to-be-enforced residence in England as a hostage for the fulfilment of David’s impending ransom settlement. That situation gained inevitability when Malcolm attended the assembly at Edinburgh on 26 September which authorised six Scottish commissioners to agree ransom terms and appended his seal to letters patent appointing the commissioners to conclude a firm treaty.26 Agreement having been reached, on 3 October his grandson Thomas was delivered to 27 Berwick as a hostage. This moment is the last certain point at which Malcolm can be seen alive and active, but there is reference to a now lost charter issued in December 1357 or January 1358 recording a grant to him from David of the five-merkland of Carnesmoel or Kirkinner in the Machars and the lands of Knock of Luce near Glenluce.28 This act followed a charter of confirmation to Glenluce Abbey of a five- merkland of the earldom of Wigtown and a five-merkland of Carnesmoel.29 The subject-matter of the two documents may be the same and perhaps represents post-facto confirmation of Malcolm’s rights in land which he had alienated to the abbey. That Malcolm’s last recorded act was a gift to one of the principal monasteries in his earldom perhaps signals awareness of his mortality and preparation for death. There is no evidence that he attended David’s first full council after his release, held at Scone around 6 30 November, but these charters may have been ratified there. Malcolm was possibly dead before 11 January 1358 when, in a transaction agreed at Dumbarton, the Steward secured a crown grant to Malcolm Fleming of Biggar of the lands in Lenzie that had been forfeited by John Kennedy.31 If he were still alive, it is unthinkable that Malcolm would not either have been personally involved in this award concerning property within his original lordship—not even his consent is noted—or that at the very least he would have witnessed the king’s charter. In his last days, Malcolm 42 Breaking of an earldom cannot but have feared for the future, for his lack of consequence in the political community and replacement as a social and military leader in both Galloway and Dumbarton by other men had reduced him, and by extension the Fleming earldom, to virtual irrelevance. Malcolm’s rise had been fuelled by his ability to attract ambitious men into his following, men who hoped to benefit from association with a lord in whose hands lay considerable patronage. Without access to such patronage, such men would soon turn elsewhere for lordship and advancement; indeed, some like the Wallaces had 32 already pursued opportunities through other routes. Under normal circumstances, the leadership of the Fleming kin, and of the earl’s personal following, would have devolved increasingly during his lifetime upon his heir, who would have been expected to form new bonds with the men upon whom Malcolm’s power had been built. The presence of the entail, moreover, would have placed the succession to the earldom beyond question and men would have had no doubt as to with whom their future should lie. But the heir, his grandson Thomas, was an untried young man who had made no independent impression on the political or military scene before October 1357, and for the next five years was a hostage for David II’s ransom; there would be no immediate revival of Fleming fortunes under a new, young earl. To add to the family’s woes, Countess Marjory did not long outlive Malcolm. Into 1358/9 she was still drawing her personal income from properties that had been granted to her in liferent.33 Described as ‘foster sister to the king’, she resigned into David’s hands some of her personal lands in Dumfriesshire, which the king granted before January 1361 to Malcolm Wallace.34 By that date she may already have been dead, for in 1361 her executors were acting to discharge her will.35 In the space of around two years, the elder generation of the Flemings had been removed and the heir was not

present in Scotland to take possession of his heritage. Malcolm’s son is historically obscure to the extent that not even his first name is known with certainty. He had been married around 1328/9 in a wedding to which Robert I made a substantial cash gift but the identity of the bride is unknown. There is no evidence for his activity after 1329 or, if he was the Hugh Fleming who witnessed a Lennox charter in the early years of David II’s

Richard Oram IRSS 42 (2017) 43 reign,36 after 1333 at the latest. If we set aside that latter identification, the latest possible date for his death moves forward nearly two decades to shortly before September 1351, when Thomas was first identified as heir to the earldom as a hostage during David II’s return on parole to Scotland.37 Given the silence of the sources on the question of Malcolm’s son, however, it is probable that his death occurred closer to 1329x1333 than later (perhaps at Dupplin or Halidon Hill, but that is simply conjecture). Even if he was born late in 1333 to take the Halidon Hill possibility, Thomas still would have been in his middle twenties by the time he succeeded his grandfather, an age by which he should have been actively gaining an independent identity as a young knight amongst the leadership of the Bruce party. The fact that he was apparently socially, politically and militarily inactive through the later 1340s and 1350s raises more questions than answers, but two main solutions present themselves. First, a straightforward reading of his invisibility in the record before 1351 would be that he was born at a much later date and was still underage in the late 1350s, but his naming in the list of hostages given as security for David’s return to captivity suggests that he was also more than an infant by that date. Second, he was around twenty when first identified as a hostage but had some form of disability which had prevented him from winning the place in Scottish elite society that his status as heir to an earldom should have given him. His later difficulties in exercising any kind of active personal leadership suggest that the latter might have been the case, but there is no

independent evidence to support that explanation or any other. Whatever his personal circumstance, Thomas became a hostage for David under the terms of the treaty of Berwick, being delivered on 3 October to Alan de Strother.38 How long he remained in captivity is unclear as he is not named in English records after November 1358 when he and a group of other hostages were moved north into the keeping of the sheriff of Northumberland,39 but David’s successful negotiation of a six- month deferral of the 1359 instalment of his ransom might have extended Thomas’s enforced absence. While David had recognised a debt of gratitude to Malcolm that stretched from the late 1320s that gratitude did not necessarily extend to the new earl, even 44 Breaking of an earldom although his regular visits to Dumbarton before 1346 and during his periods of parole in the early 1350s must have meant that Thomas was known to him. Under the entail’s terms, furthermore, David would have understood that the earldom of Wigtown would pass intact to Thomas. David may have regarded other components of Malcolm’s former possessions that were not covered by the 1341 grants in free barony or the tailzie relating to the earldom lands and title as available for re-grant to men he wished to cultivate. Robert Stewart likewise continued to erode the sphere of Fleming

influence. By the early 1360s, when David had begun to exercise his kingly authority more effectively, his efforts to stem the spread of Stewart influence into Carrick meant a further undermining of Thomas’s position. David’s insertion of William Cunningham of Kilmaurs as ‘lord’ of the earldom of Carrick sometime in 1358 was surely intended to provide an experienced replacement locally for Malcolm Fleming.40 Cunningham had appeared earlier on the fringes of Malcolm’s wider network of associates in south-western Scotland, and David may have intended that he assume leadership of the following that Malcolm had built in Carrick and so aid in restoring crown authority in the far south-west. Evidently, however, despite a re-grant by David in 1362,41 Cunningham failed to establish his lordship within Carrick through the hostility of the Kennedys, with whom David himself may have been in dispute, and by 1368 Cunningham had relinquished the earldom.42 By that date, any hope that Thomas had of moving into the role in Carrick

once filled by his grandfather had long gone. If Thomas was released with the first group of hostages in November 1358 there is no evidence of his activity in Scotland, where David was rebuilding a following through which to challenge Robert Stewart, Thomas Stewart, earl of Angus, and William Douglas.43 There are hints that the earldom of Wigtown may have been amongst lands resumed by the crown under the revocation of November 1357, for Wigtown was simply presented as a sheriffdom in the 1360 Chamberlain accounts despite the subsuming of that sheriffdom into the regality of the earldom in 1341.44 The extent to which Malcolm had regained control after the reversal of 1346, discussed above, is unknown but it is significant

Richard Oram IRSS 42 (2017) 45 that other men—Alan Stewart, John Kennedy and William Douglas—were named as active in that regard with no suggestion that the earl had himself been involved. Thomas, therefore, may have inherited a title but little by way of authority to give that title substance. Equally little evidence, however, exists for an attempt to exercise active leadership either as earl in Wigtown or as a magnate in the wider south-west. The earliest hint of a social leadership role for Thomas occurs in an undated charter of Marjory Montgomery confirming her sale of Cassillis in Carrick to John Kennedy, which the king confirmed in August 1363.45 Thomas did not actively witness the transaction but his seal as earl of Wigtown and that of his grandfather’s old associate Sir Duncan Wallace, who was by then sheriff of Ayr, were appended to add weight to Marjory’s right to sell. What is more significant in the timing of this (non-) appearance of Thomas as earl is that it occurred in the midst of David’s frenetic burst of activity in the aftermath of the suppression of the rebellion of the Steward, William Douglas, and Patrick Dunbar, earl of March, in early 1363; throughout that tumultuous period the one magnate of comital status who is conspicuously 46 absent from all records of events is Thomas Fleming. What can be read into this absence? There is no record that Thomas had returned as a hostage to England and the availability of his personal seal in the vicinity of Ayr before August 1363 seems to provide evidence against that being the case. While he might still have been a minor in 1357, the fact that he possessed a personal seal that carried legal weight as an authenticator of documents in the early 1360s is the clearest evidence for his being legally of age by that period. His possession of a personal seal suggests, moreover, that he was not in some way mentally incapacitated with the management of his affairs placed in the hands of his kinsmen. If he was then in possession of his mental faculties, why was he not providing his council to the king and participating actively in the political life of the kingdom? Here we seem to have the evidence that he was somehow physically incapable of the strenuous circuit of travel with the king as part of his court and council and of providing military leadership in the field as was expected of a man of his status. As an earl, Thomas appears to have lacked the ability to discharge those essential functions of comital power, the social 46 Breaking of an earldom and political leadership of the community of his earldom and the military leadership of his comitatus. The tailzie had made him earl but legal entitlement could not give him the capability to exercise that role. For the king, who needed strong and effective political and military leadership locally and as part of his personal

following, such an earl was of no conceivable use. It is probably in that context that the re-grant of the earldom to Thomas in January 1367 should be seen. David’s charter ‘gave’, ‘granted’, ‘restored’ and ‘confirmed’ Wigtown to Thomas as it had been held by his grandfather, but without the tailzie restricting succession to the direct male heirs of Earl Malcolm (the grant in feu and heritage was simply to Thomas and his heirs) and shorn of regality powers ‘which for certain reasons we wish to remain in suspension until such time as we are persuaded to instruct otherwise on this’.47 The use of the verb restituere (to restore or return) is very unusual and suggests that prior to January 1367 the earldom had in some way been in suspension and there is an implication that Thomas had not enjoyed even nominal possession. There is, however, no record of such a suspension and Thomas does appear to have been using—or at least was being accorded—the title earlier in the 1360s. The omission of the tailzie clause of the 1341 grant to Malcolm from the 1367 charter to Thomas is also problematical and could be over- interpreted, but failure to stipulate succession by legitimate male heirs of Thomas’s body perhaps signalled recognition that the likelihood of him fathering such heirs was at best remote and an opening of possible succession to heirs general might have sweetened the pill of losing the regality rights. No indication is given of what the ‘certain reasons’ were for withholding the regality jurisdiction but suggestions of conflict with leading local men offered by Thomas in the early 1370s might point to successful lobbying with David by men who offered dynamic and assertive local leadership. There was nothing unusual about such a withdrawal of jurisdiction, which was a feature of the Act of Revocation of September 1367,48 but the timing of this re-grant in advance of the revocation points to the addressing of a specific issue. Over and above the ‘ancient regalities’ which had existed in his father’s reign (such as the ecclesiastical liberties of Arbroath

Richard Oram IRSS 42 (2017) 47 and Dunfermline abbeys and the regalian powers of the Randolphs in Moray), David was prepared to grant specific exemptions where such powers were essential for the maintenance of good order. The suspension of the Wigtown regality adds further weight to a sense of Thomas as personally failing to deliver effective local

leadership. David can have held few illusions as to the likely consequence of the loss of regality powers in Wigtown, for Thomas possessed no greater landed base in the earldom than his grandfather had. What was worse, however, was his lack of the intimacy with the south Ayrshire nobility which had reinforced Malcolm’s authority in the 1340s. Thomas was earl in title but lacked capacity to enforce the social and political leadership that ought to have been attendant on that rank. The loss of regality immediately and fatally undermined his ability to exercise lordship in his earldom, and he soon faced considerable opposition from both native families, again headed by the MacDowells whose landholding David had restored. He was also challenged by the Kennedys, who were aligned with Robert Stewart and who were expanding their influence south from Carrick where they claimed the office of bailie, upon which Malcolm had founded his local influence.49 The Kennedys, moreover, had replaced as kenkynnol the Carricks, who had possibly died out in the male line in the late 1340s or 1350s, and with that status assumed the leadership of the other kindreds of the earldom.50 The Carrick power-base that had reinforced Malcolm’s authority was now aligned against his

grandson. Outside Wigtownshire, Thomas’s position also deteriorated. In Lenzie, where in 1357 his grandfather had sold or wadset to his kinsman Malcolm Fleming of Biggar the former Kennedy lands, alienation was made permanent in April 1362 when Fleming of Biggar and his wife received an extension of the king’s 1358 grant in feu and heritage into a full entail for those properties.51 Reversionary rights under a wadset were removed and a valuable portion of Lenzie was lost. The erosion of his landed position in Lenzie accelerated soon after February 1364 when Thomas made a grant in blenchferme of much of the eastern part of the barony lands to Sir Robert Erskine in thanks for his ‘service and 48 Breaking of an earldom help’.52 The economic consequences of the loss of the Wigtown regality jurisdiction may be reflected in his grant of a six-year tack of the rest of Lenzie to Erskine in June 1368.53 There is a strong indication in this succession of alienations and tacks that David II was easing his ‘fixer’ Erskine into a position of local power to replace the failing authority of the Wigtown Flemings. Erskine, however, aimed to consolidate his interests further west and Thomas’s nearer kin were equally keen to preserve the integrity of the Lenzie barony, which they were as increasingly likely to inherit as heirs general under the 1367 settlement. Erskine was thus able to arrange an exchange settled by charter in April 1369 with Patrick Fleming, younger son of Malcolm Fleming of Biggar, Thomas’s cousin, which saw him transfer his Lenzie properties to Patrick and Patrick transfer his lands of Dalnottar and Garscadden to Erskine.54 Behind these processes, the Biggar Flemings were seeking to retrieve their heritage from their kinsman’s finance-driven

alienations. Further difficulties were created for Thomas by Archibald Douglas, his new neighbour in eastern Galloway, who in September 1369 had received Galloway between the rivers Cree and Nith from the king.55 David’s grant made specific reference to Archibald’s strenuous personal efforts in securing the pacification and restoration of justice in the region, reflecting an aggressive imposition of lordship in a manner that contrasted sharply with Thomas’s failures. David’s death in February 1371 did not lift pressure from Thomas, for as king Robert Stewart continued to dismantle Fleming lordship in Wigtown. The crown-led process started in April 1372 when Robert granted the whole lordship of Wigtown, with the exception of the barony of Kirkinner, which Malcolm Fleming had acquired by a separate act, to his nephew, Sir James Lindsay.56 Robert’s charter narrated that Thomas had first resigned them to David II in an unrecorded court process at Glasgow, then again in person in Robert’s court at Perth on 19 April 1372. Lindsay was not granted the title of earl, but received the whole lordship with the full rights of barony and regality over it of which Thomas had been deprived; Robert understood the

requirements for strong lordship in this turbulent region.

Richard Oram IRSS 42 (2017) 49

Lindsay, however, was unable to effect possession. The reason was that in January 1372 Thomas had already sold the earldom lands for £500 to Archibald Douglas,57 a man whom the new king could ill afford to challenge. Archibald, whose power rested on a formidable military following backed by the substantial landed inheritance of his wife, Joanna Murray, could offer strong lordship where Thomas could not. Thomas’s decision to sell, made on the grounds of his great and urgent necessity and due to the ‘great and serious strife and utmost enmity’ between himself and the greater men of the earldom, recognised that Archibald had both the resources and the reputation to enforce his authority in ways that Thomas had not and could not. Robert was forced to accept the dubious legality of this transaction and confirmed Archibald in possession but withheld the title of earl,58 which later formed a cause célèbre in the conflict between James II and the Douglases. Kennedy ambitions in Wigtown, too, were checked by Douglas’s coup, but at the cost of decades of rivalry between the two families. In neither Robert’s plan for his nephew nor Thomas’s sale of the earldom to Archibald were the rights of Thomas’s heirs general

acknowledged. For Thomas, the cash sale of Wigtown—the only earldom disposed of in this way in medieval Scotland—was just part of a rapid spiral of decline. The money raised through the sale clearly failed to satisfy Thomas’s ‘great urgent necessity’ and further extended tacks or wadsets were granted on his other properties. On 10 August 1371, Thomas entered into a contract for service with William, son of Thomas Boyd of Kilmarnock, promising payment of twelve merks annually at Thomas’s residence at Fullwood until he provided William with land of equivalent value in the sheriffdoms of Dumbarton or Lanark. As security against default, Thomas pledged his lands of Govan ‘lying in my hands at the time of this contract’.59 In July 1372, just six months after the sale of Wigtown, Thomas was incapable of meeting his obligation to Boyd and entered into a new agreement whereby Thomas wadset the whole of Lenzie to him for £80, to be redeemed in one payment by the Feast of the Trinity 1373.60 At this point Thomas’s cousin, Malcolm Fleming of Biggar, stepped in and purchased the wadset of the Lenzie lands, for which he received royal ratification in 50 Breaking of an earldom

1374.61 As with his son Patrick’s acquisition of the portion of Lenzie granted to Robert Erskine in 1368, Malcolm’s intervention was a reaction to his nominal head-of-kin’s disposal of a major portion of his remaining properties with little prospect of their future recovery. Again, the Biggar Flemings were recovering an alienated part of their heritage. The final chapter in this tale of descent into social oblivion came on 20 September 1382 when Malcolm Fleming received charters confirming the grant to him of the barony of Lenzie, which Thomas had resigned to the crown.62 By this resignation, Thomas finally lost his position as head of the kin, for he was left in possession of only the small property at Fullwood north of Stewarton, his residence from the late 1360s.

There he sank into obscurity. That, however, was not the end to the entangled mess of wadsets, tacks, loans, exchanges and surrenders that accompanied Thomas’s fall. As with the peculiar behaviour surrounding his disposal of Wigtown, Thomas also entered separate contracts with other individuals which compromised the status of Lenzie and Fleming control within the barony. The parties involved were members of the Kennedy family, who were pursuing their inherited claims to lands within the barony. The first indication of an active interest in reacquiring their heritage is provided by an undated agreement between Thomas and Sir Gilbert Kennedy, son of John Kennedy of Dunure, which placed the toun of Kirkintilloch—the chief place of the barony of Lenzie—in the hands of the Kennedys. It is probable that this deal was intended to complete the Kennedys’ protracted efforts to recover what they had held in the thirteenth century from the Comyns (on which, see Part 1 above)63 and may have been agreed by Thomas in an effort to ease Kennedy pressure on his position in Wigtown. That the Kennedys could make good its possession, although perhaps not immediately, was confirmed by an entail of January 1384 whereby John settled the forty merklands of Kirkintilloch on Gilbert.64 The grant from Thomas,

however, was not the end of the saga. On 16 February 1374/5, just over two years after Malcom Fleming’s purchase of the wadset of Lenzie from William Boyd and only seven months after royal confirmation of his possession, Thomas granted Cumbernauld in wadset for 120 merks to John

Richard Oram IRSS 42 (2017) 51

Kennedy of Dunure.65 The act, settled at Ayr, was witnessed amongst others by Sir Nicholas of Knockdolian, the last of the circle of Carrick men who had been associated with Thomas’s grandfather, and Sir Gilbert Kennedy, John’s son and already possessor of Kirkintilloch. Cumbernauld was, at that date, already a possession of Malcolm Fleming of Biggar and had been the location of the drawing up of the formal contract between Malcolm and William Boyd that had seen the wadset of the barony lands transferred into the former’s hands. There is no further record of Kennedy possession of any interest in this property, which formed one of the chief centres of the Flemings of Biggar in the fifteenth century. It is possible that Thomas had redeemed the loan, but that would run against the trend in his behaviour evident in his other property deals. More likely, Kennedy had used this arrangement as leverage in his own efforts to secure concessions from Fleming over the lands of Kirkintilloch, the positive result of which can be

seen in the 1382 entail of those lands to his son, Gilbert. In all of this manoeuvring, Thomas appears as a powerless, hapless cipher. The wadset of Cumbernauld, however, as the final act in the long dissolution of the lordship constructed by Malcolm Fleming is representative of the forces that had torn it apart around Thomas. Perhaps long-broken in spirit and utterly uninterested in the fate of the heritage to which he had been heir, he was a passive onlooker as other men, politically skilled and militarily assertive,

fought over the choicest portions. In the space of sixty years, the senior branch of the Fleming family had risen to the level of the greatest nobility in the land only to fall back into utter obscurity. Malcolm had made his career in the service of the Bruces—both as a loyal agent and administrator in the localities and as a military leader—and had received the rewards accordingly; Thomas had been destroyed by his inability to serve in either capacity, falling prey to aggressively acquisitive men, including kin and close associates who had served his grandfather, and crushed under what seems to have been an increasing spiral of debt. He is the most important of the political failures of the reign of David II, a casualty in the king’s drive to create a new nobility which relied on him for its power and prestige, yet ironically a creature of that same process in the 52 Breaking of an earldom previous reign. Probably physically incapacitated (possibly from birth), abandoned by his grandfather’s political associates and in acute financial embarrassment, Thomas was never in a position to assert the power that should have stemmed from his status as an earl. By 1372 he was overwhelmed by the forces arrayed against him, unable to hold his own in the turbulent politics of the kingdom and the cut-throat manoeuvring amongst his own peer-group. Within ten years he had sunk without trace into the obscurity of the minor gentry; even the date of his death is unknown. Scotland under the early Stewart kings had no place or memory for losers.

The remarkable but not uniquely brief efflorescence and quick demise of the Fleming earldom of Wigtown opens a window onto important dimensions of noble culture and society on the margins of Scotland’s fourteenth-century magnate community. Essentially, the career of Malcolm is a narrative of the acquisition of the levers of power and their progressive loss as his personal authority and influence declined in his later years. It parallels, at a lower level in the social hierarchy, the career of John Stewart earl of Carrick (i.e. King Robert III), where an inability to maintain and provide dynamic personal leadership through injury led to an ebbing away of support and a loss of his control on government. For Thomas, any hope of recovery of his grandfather’s early levels of influence was lost through his failure to deliver personal leadership to the residue of the Fleming following. Their experience underscores the continuing centrality of active, personal lordship and the very visible discharge of that function as a key attribute of social leadership in mid-fourteenth-century Scotland. Leadership in this period still very much meant military leadership, and Malcolm spent much of the period down to 1346 in acquiring the landed resources and jurisdictional authority necessary to secure the following which delivered military strength. The Flemings’ acquisition of the means to that end, however, did not come through inherited power or similar traditional routes, such as marriage. In them, we see rather a family whose rise was founded on personal service to the crown and who capitalised on the need of a still-shallowly-rooted new regime to bolster its authority in regions of the kingdom where loyalty to the previous

Richard Oram IRSS 42 (2017) 53 regime ran strong. As a family of regional but not yet national prominence, the Flemings under Malcolm’s leadership seized an opportunity to fill a void in the political community of west-central Scotland that the forfeiture of the Comyns had created. Active military involvement in Robert Bruce’s campaign to secure his crown after 1306/7 cannot be proven but what is clear is that Robert used Malcolm’s administrative talents to bring stability to a strategic territory at the heart of the kingdom. From this springboard, Malcolm started a programme of aggressive territorial acquisition that catapulted him into a position of great influence within the apparatus of regional power. Malcolm’s rise through the 1320s was grounded in his accumulation of a series of senior administrative offices to which significant jurisdictional and fiscal powers attached. These offices—principally the sheriffship of Dumbarton and the stewardship of Carrick—reinforced his jurisdictional franchises within his personal landed possessions but, critically, whilst they brought income, influence and significant reserves of patronage they did not bring of themselves any direct increase in his ability to deliver that key indicator of extensive territorial lordship, the military following commensurate with magnate status. It was Malcolm’s energetic network-building and forging of bonds with local lords in the eastern Lennox and Carrick, much reinforced by his ability to deploy the fiscal resources of his various offices, that gave him access to the manpower necessary to secure his position as a regional magnate. The Fleming banner, with the growing body of knights and men-at-arms gathered around it, became a symbol of appreciable military strength with a solid, territorial base beneath it. Malcolm’s securing of comital status was both a straightforward recognition by David II of the importance of his erstwhile guardian’s role in saving his kingship but also of his capability to deliver the regional political and enhanced military leadership implicit in that rank. As with the offices acquired earlier, it was the jurisdictional powers attached to the earldom—in the case of the de novo creation of Wigtown enhanced with an award of regalian rights—that gave him the access to the power necessary to establish his authority within that territory. Again, however, it was his visible, assertive and directly personal role in converting a 54 Breaking of an earldom parchment title into a reality that was key in that transformation. Between 1342 and 1346, Malcolm was active in the field, leading his meinie and winning lordship over the earldom. In October 1346, his success in this process was visible in the military retinue which followed his banner to Neville’s Cross. The catastrophic outcome of that battle shattered his achievement. Military defeat and the collapse of the following that Malcolm had spent three decades constructing revealed the fragility of a power-base built largely on jurisdictional franchises and offices. Incapacity to exercise power led to wider disempowerment. For Malcolm, the loss of the armed retinue which gave a physical reality to his status and personal authority meant the loss of the means to assert his lordship and provide the apical leadership implicit in his position as earl. Without the means to exercise coercive power the right to discharge such power became meaningless. Whilst Malcolm sought to rebuild upon the foundation which remained in place, he lacked the resources to make his efforts effective and was essentially powerless as others with access to greater resources moved to fill the void that the collapse in Fleming power had created. In this quickening spiral of decline another process was being played out. It was the same issue of active, personal leadership that was critical in eroding confidence in the future of Fleming lordship. After 1346, Malcolm seems to have been incapable of providing that regular personal presence around which a following could coalesce; old age, illness and injury were taking their toll. In such circumstances, the next generation of a family should have come forward to gain recognition and provide confidence to its followers in the future continuity of leadership. Malcolm had no-one who could step into that role, for his heir Thomas was clearly incapable of exercising—or, indeed, of even inspiring faith in his ability to provide—effective leadership and strong lordship. The tailzie which controlled the succession to the earldom became a Sword of Damocles hanging over it: why invest faith in a lord who could neither reward that faith nor offer the prospect of improvement under a successor? As Malcolm’s personal ability to discharge his offices waned, sentimental attachment to a man who had provided good service in the past was

Richard Oram IRSS 42 (2017) 55 outweighed by the need to ensure the proper functioning of those roles. Loss of office further undermined the ability to attract men into his service and diminished the possibility of future recovery of regional influence. Together, loss of certainty in a future under Thomas, a man who lacked any capacity to lead, and loss of access to the levers of local power formerly delivered through the patronage reserves Malcolm had once enjoyed, led to the draining away of any residual support. The Fleming earldom had been built on one man’s personal dynamism; it fell when that driving leadership was withdrawn.

NOTES

1 See, for example, the collection of papers produced for the 650th anniversary of the battle: D Rollason and M Prestwich (eds), The Battle of Neville’s Cross 1346 (Donington, 1998). The principal political study is Penman, David II. 2 Wyntoun, Orygynale Cronykil, ii, 476; Bower, Scotichronicon, vii, 261; Anonimalle Chronicle, 26. 3 Rotuli Scotiae, i 680a. 4 CDS, iii, no. 1488. 5 Calendar of Patent Rolls, Edward III, viii, 1345-1348 (London, 1903), 314. 6 Rotuli Scotiae, i, 695b; Chron. Lanercost, 351; Anonimalle Chronicle, 28; Cal. Patent Rolls, vi, 459, 552; Calendar of the Fine Rolls, vi, Edward III 1347-1356 (London, 1927), 250; RMS, i, nos 108, 129. 7 The only other man of comital rank to survive alive and at liberty from that group created or advanced by David was his brother-in-law, William, earl of Sutherland. 8 RRS, vi, nos 115, 117, 119, 122, 128, 129, 130, 131. 9 Wyntoun, Orygynale Cronykil, ii, 477. On 6 March 1347, Gilbert McCulloch, Sir Patrick McCulloch and his son, also named Patrick, and two members of the Wigtownshire Marshall family received payments on account from the English Exchequer as they were ‘setting out for the north on the king’s business’; CDS, iii, no. 1490. On 12 March, Duncan, son of Duncan McDowell, who had only submitted to David II in 1345, was lodged in the Tower of London; CDS, iii, no. 1491. 10 Wyntoun, Orygynale Cronykil, ii, 487. 56 Breaking of an earldom

11 RRS, vi, no.112. 12 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Supplementary Report on the Manuscripts of the Earl of Mar and Kellie Preserved at Alloa House, Clackmannanshire, ed H Paton (London, 1930), 5 [hereafter HMC, Mar and Kellie [Supplementary]]; NRS GD124/1/147. Penman, David II, 142. 13 Penman, David II, 157. 14 RRS, vi, no. 115 (where the document is misdated to 1350). 15 Penman, David II, 169. This was the first occasion that Malcolm’s grandson, Thomas, appears in the records; Rotuli Scotiae, i, 744a. 16 RRS, vi, nos 117, 119, 122. 17 His plans rejected, David returned to captivity in England in late March. Wyntoun gives a sense of the resentment at David’s proposals that the Steward had been able to turn to his advantage: He made bot schort tyme here duelling, For he sped noucht at his lykyng, Agayne he passyd syne in Ingland, As he before had tane on hand. And than a lang qwhille he lay thare, Or spek was off his lowsyng mare. Wyntoun, Orygynale Cronykil, ii, 488. 18 RMS, i, app. i, no.152. 19 Scots Peerage, viii, 522. There is no independent witness for a third daughter, only two known daughters, Marjory and Eva, are recorded. 20 ER, i, 257; RMS, i, app. ii, no.1190; RRS, vi, no.30. 21 The rents of Cadzow had been assigned to Robert Wallace as part of his fee by 1342. Danielston was in post by 1 August 1358. ER, i, 508, 582. 22 RRS, vi, no. 128. He re-emerged in 1353/4 accompanied by Sir Nicholas of Knockdolian as a charter witness at Brechin. The dating of this charter [31 March a.r 24 (1354)] is suspect as Malcolm was apparently present the following day at Inverkeithing. 23 RRS, vi, nos 129-131. 24 CDS, iii, no. 1576. The majority of hostages were sons of Stewart adherents. 25 Wigtown Charter Chest, no. 4. 26 APS, i, 516; CDS, iii, no. 1651. 27 CDS, iii, Appendix, no. VIII. His name in this text is given as ‘Johan’ but in the letters inspecting the indenture of the treaty, dated 5 October 1357 (RRS, vi, no.148) and all subsequent references, he is correctly identified as Thomas.

Richard Oram IRSS 42 (2017) 57

28 RMS, i, app. ii, no. 1149. 29 RMS, i, app. ii, no. 1148. 30 RRS, vi, no .150. 31 Wigtown Charter Chest, no 5; RRS, vi, no. 160. 32 Duncan Wallace, for example, as fourth husband of Eleanor Douglas, countess of Carrick, not only gained access to the growing political network of her brother, William, but also entry into the circle of men around David II. He appears in the 1360s and 1370s in possession of various properties that had once been in the hands of Malcolm Fleming, including Dalzell (Glasgow Registrum, i, no. 308; NRS GD436/1/3 and GD436/1/4; NRS GD119/160). 33 ER, i, 548, 576, 589. 34 RMS, i, app. ii, no. 1351. 35 Registrum Honoris de Morton, ii, (Bannatyne Club, 1853), no. 79. 36 See Part 1 note 33. 37 ER, i, 103. 38 RRS, vi, no. 148; Rotuli Scotiae, i, 812a; CDS, iii, 434. 39 Rotuli Scotiae, i, 831b-832a, when his delivery from Alan Strother to Henry Strother in November 1358 was recorded. 40 Penman, David II, 207. 41 RMS, i, no. 113. 42 It was granted on 22 June 1368 to John Stewart, the eldest surviving son of Robert Stewart; RRS, vi, no. 400. 43 An undated charter issued by Thomas as earl of Wigtown to Sir Robert Erskine, granting him various lands in the barony of Lenzie, has been suggested as belonging to ‘c.1359’ but cannot be earlier than 20 February 1364 as its first witness is Adam of Lanark, bishop of Whithorn, who was consecrated that day; Wigtown Charter Chest, 7; NRS GD124/1/409. 44 ER, ii, 47. 45 Crossraguel Charters, i, no. 13; RRS, vi, no. 301. 46 For detailed analysis of the rebellion and its aftermath see Penman, David II, chapter 9. 47 RMS, i, no.250; RRS, vi, no. 368. The donative phrase is ‘Sciatis nos dedisse, concessisse et hac presenti carta nostra restituisse et confirmasse…’. The retention of the regality was ‘quam ex certa causa in suspenso remanere volumus quousque aliud super hoc duxerimus ordinare’. 48 RPS, 1367/9/2-7. Date accessed: 11 March 2015. 58 Breaking of an earldom

49 MacQueen, ‘Kin of Kennedy’, 278. For confirmation of the Kennedy family’s right to the office of bailie, which was amongst a raft of Carrick- related business settled by Robert Stewart after his accession to the throne in 1371, see RMS, i, no. 508. 50 MacQueen, ‘Kin of Kennedy’, 285. 51 RRS, vi, nos 160, 270. 52 HMC, Mar and Kellie [Supplementary], 7. See above note 43 for dating; RRS, vi, no. 335. 53 NRS GD124/1/414; HMC, Mar and Kellie [Supplementary], 9; RRS, vi, no. 399. 54 RMS, i, no. 491. It was agreed that if the ‘heirs of old’ of the barony recovered possession through the then current negotiations with England, Patrick would have reversionary rights to Dalnottar and Garscadden. Robert II confirmed the deal in August 1373, by which time the possible restoration of the heirs of the Comyns of Kirkintilloch had died with David II. 55 RMS, i, no. 329; RRS, vi, no. 451. 56 RMS, i, no. 414. 57 Wigtown Charter Chest, no. 7. The full text is embedded in RMS, i, no. 507. 58 RMS, i, no. 507. 59 RMS, i, no. 492. In his document, Thomas was styled ‘earl of Wigtown and lord of Fullwood’. 60 RMS, i, no. 477. 61 RMS, i, no. 477. The texts of both the wadset to William Boyd and Malcolm Fleming’s purchase of the debt are rehearsed in full in Robert II’s inspection. 62 RMS, i, no. 740. 63 For detailed discussion, see MacQueen, ‘The Kin of Kennedy’. 64 RMS, i, no. 466; RMS, ii, no. 874. The royal confirmation of Gilbert’s charter from Thomas is dated 13 May 1374. John’s settlement of Kirkintilloch on Gilbert survives only in a confirmation by James III in 1466. 65 NRS GD25/1/15; Crossraguel Charters, i, no. 20.

Cori Gabbard IRSS 42 (2017) 59

THE RADICAL TRADITIONALIST: NAOMI MITCHISON, AUD THE DEEP-MINDED AND THE LAND THE RAVENS FOUND

Cori L. Gabbard*

As one of the works that the Scottish writer Naomi Mitchison (1897–1999) wrote during the second of “two very distinct periods”—“1924-37” and “1952-57”—when she based her narratives upon medieval Scandinavian ones,1 The Land the Ravens Found (1955) reflects the accumulation of its writer’s knowledge concerning Norse culture, a subject that had piqued her interest since childhood when, according to her memoirs, she first read a few of the Icelandic sagas.2 In 1924, Jonathan Cape Limited published Mitchison’s When the Bough Breaks whose title story features a Norse protagonist. Five years later, Mitchison spent much of the spring of 1929 in Oslo’s museums for the purpose of examining Norse sea vessels;3 what she learned from these visits informed, among other works, the composition of The Swan’s Road,4 her historical account of the Vikings’ conquests throughout the world which the Naldrett Press published in 1954. As noted by Julian Meldon D’Arcy, whose chapter on Mitchison in his Scottish Skalds and Sagamen comprises the only other analysis (besides this current essay) of The Land the Ravens Found, Mitchison’s bibliography for The Swan’s Road is indicative of her extensive immersion in Norse history and literature in the decade following the Second World War when more-or-less annual visits to her friend Sonja Carstensen Meyer in Denmark resulted in

* Cori L. Gabbard earned her doctorate in English literature from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. A specialist in medieval and post-1900 British literature, she is currently revising her dissertation into a book manuscript and teaches works by Naomi Mitchison, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Maud Sulter, Irfan Merchant, Kokumo Rocks and Carol Ann Duffy (among others) at the New York City College of Technology. 60 Naomi Mitchison a re-acquaintance with—and a greater appreciation for—the Icelandic sagas.5 Mitchison consulted with scholars in the disciplines of history and archaeology; not surprisingly, her sources for The Swan’s Road include several works in these respective fields, such as the second, third and fourth volumes of the Cambridge Mediaeval History; Saxo Grammaticus’ Danish History (c.late twelfth/early thirteenth century); Fridtjof Nansen’s In Northern Mists: Arctic Exploration in Early Times (1911); T. D. Kendrick’s History of the Vikings (1930); Thomas Charles Lethbridge’s Herdsmen & Hermits: Celtic Seafarers in the Northern Seas (1950); James Ritchie’s The Influence of Man on Animal Life in Scotland (1920); Haakon Shetelig and Hjalmar Falk’s Scandinavian Archaeology (1937); and V. Gordon Childe’s Scotland Before the Scots: Being the Rhind Lectures for 1944 (1946).6 In addition, Mitchison acknowledged the debt she owed to Heimskringla saga (History of the Kings of Norway), Orkneyinga saga (The History of the Earls of Orkney), Brennu-Njáls saga (The Saga of Burnt Njal) and Færeyinga Saga (Saga of the Faroe Islanders).7 She apparently did not read these texts in their original Icelandic, as her praise for Sir George Webbe Dasent’s English translations of Orkneyinga saga and Brennu-Njáls saga implies,8 although she did visit Copenhagen’s Royal Library to look at the Norse manuscripts in its collection.9 The bibliography for The Swan’s Road also cites Gudbrand Vigfusson and F. York Powell’s Origines Islandicae: A Collection of the More Important Sagas and Other Native Writings Relating to the Settlement and History of Early Iceland (1905) as its source for a number of its chapters. One of the texts for which Vigfusson and Powell provide an edition and a corresponding translation is Landnámabók (The Book of Settlements), which is, ostensibly, a record of those who claimed land in Iceland during its Settlement Period (870-930).10 The sixth chapter of The Swan’s Road, which Mitchison entitled “The Land the Ravens Found,” alludes to and quotes from Origines Islandicae’s translation of Landnámabók extensively. Significantly, “The Land the Ravens Found” summarizes and quotes from Landnámabók’s account of the Icelandic settlement of a woman named Aud the Deep-Minded (Auðr in djúpúðga), as well as from Laxdæla saga’s version of the

Cori Gabbard IRSS 42 (2017) 61 same story as Vigfusson and Powell have translated it in Origines Islandicae.11 Mitchison’s postscript to The Land the Ravens Found, which states that “THE SKELETON of this story comes from the Landnamabok [sic]” and that its “translation, called Origines Icelandicae [sic], can be got out of [one’s] City or County Library,”12 identifies the narrative source of her own novel and explicitly positions her work as an expansion upon Landnámabók while implicitly situating it as an extension of The Swan’s Road, which is also informed by the knowledge she gained from her 1929 stay in Oslo.13 With the exception of the fact that the Norse text locates the matriarch first in Dublin and then in the Hebrides before placing her in Caithness while the novel initially situates her in the latter, The Land the Ravens Found more-or-less follows and expands upon the chronology of events that Aud’s settlement narrative comprises. More to the point, the post-1945 novel, like the medieval text, inscribes its protagonist with thematic consistency through its evocation of these incidents. Landnámabók identifies Aud as the only woman among Iceland’s “best-born settlers” (þesser land-náms-menn hafa gaofgaster vereð),14 a status that defines her in terms of masculinity even as the text’s overall description of her and her land-taking (landnám) represents a blurring of gender boundaries.15 Indeed, the etymological, legal, grammatical and narrative implications of Landnámabók’s description of Aud’s land-taking intensify its masculinization of her, not only by calling attention to the ways in which her settlement resembles those of her peers but also by identifying her with war, which, in terms of who participated in actual combat, was wholly a male domain within medieval Scandinavia. Insofar as any one episode comprised by Aud’s land-taking exemplifies the distinction between Landnámabók’s depiction of her and Mitchison’s depiction, this essay will comparatively examine the events that constitute her actual settlement in both texts in order to define the nature of her thematic import in Mitchison’s novel relative to what she embodies in Landnámabók. The implications of this comparison, as I shall demonstrate, complicate our understanding of Mitchison as a twentieth-century writer and, through her work, interrogate the binary opposition of 62 Naomi Mitchison the terms “medieval” and “modern” as we commonly perceive them in relation to one another, which is to say that we associate the former with backwardness and irrelevance while connecting the latter term with innovation and progression. Disagreement as to how we should categorize Mitchison in terms of genre notwithstanding,16 there is no question that her writing from the very first has served as a conduit for her political views and concerns about contemporary politics.17 The Land the Ravens Found is no exception to this paradigm. Relative to “her Norse fiction from the 1920s and 30s,” the 1955 novel “marks a new optimism in [her] view of the future of racial relations”: if “[i]n the pre-war short stories her Norse characters could not ultimately extend their loyalty beyond tribal or racial limits,” The Land the Ravens Found demonstrates that “differences in race, religion and language can be assimilated to form a new sense of identity, unity and pride.”18 More pertinently to the argument I shall put forth here, the book was the outcome of both the author’s personal convictions and her post-war activism. Affirming her long-held pacifism, Mitchison at some point after 1950 but before 1955 became “vice-chair” of the newly formed Authors’ World Peace Appeal (AWPA) which represented the concerns of numerous writers, the majority of whom were British, about “the threat of war posed by the tension between the United States and the Soviet Union.”19 That organization desired “to create an alternative children’s literature to the comics and books featuring war and violence which US troops had brought into Britain when they were stationed there during the [Second World] [W]ar.”20 Mitchison’s response to this ambition was twofold. First, she wrote “The Writer and the Child” which The New Statesman and Nation published in its February 12, 1955 issue.21 In this essay, Mitchison argues that “a certain amount of violence, both in life and literature, is necessary for the happiness of normal children, but that it can be a violence unrelated either to cruelty or war”,22 and that [w]hen writing for children we have no right to over- simplify moral issues … we must not leave out love; and we should not leave out hate … If we see the blow, we must also feel the pain and see the corpse, and know the result both on killed and killer … We

Cori Gabbard IRSS 42 (2017) 63

have a duty to present alternatives to war which will make peace just as exciting and dangerous and full of generous situations.23

Second, Mitchison produced The Land the Ravens Found.24 This work, which Collins released in the same year that The New Statesman and Nation published “The Writer and the Child,” certainly lives up to its author’s claims on behalf of her own treatment of conflict in her own narratives written for children: “What I have tried to do in my own books for children is to make violence and warfare real and to explain what is really happening to people: that is, to show the historical consequences of actions—or, in other words, the moral.”25 Given this context, it therefore is no surprise that in The Land the Ravens Found, Mitchison’s protagonist channels her pacifism. Yet the matriarch’s embodiment of peace in this work is inextricable from Mitchison’s overall presentation of her, a portrayal that somewhat contradicts the radical feminism that informed all aspects of Mitchison’s life, including her writing, and that was an integral aspect of her progressive politics. By the end of 1930, Mitchison was the mother of six children,26 the most recent of whom was born in the fourteenth year of what overall would be a happy marriage of fifty-four years27 that, five years earlier, had evolved into an open relationship, the author and her spouse having both taken lovers independently of each other. At the start of 1931, Mitchison was also the published author of two novels, a volume of poetry, several collections of short stories, a biography and an essay, “Comments on Birth Control” (1930), in which she asserts that marriage is no more than “domestic prostitution”28 when wives have no financial independence apart from their spouses and resign themselves to a lifetime of mediocre sex “in exchange for economic security,”29 claiming that within some contexts, extramarital affairs might enhance the respective relationships between the members of all involved parties.30 Indeed, Mitchison viewed such relationships as integral to that which she defines as the ideal for women like her:

64 Naomi Mitchison

Intelligent and truly feminist women want two things: they want to live as women, to have masses of children by the men they love and leisure to be tender and aware of both lovers and children; and they want to do their own work, whatever it might be … They insist—as I think they should—on having both worlds, not specializing like bees or machines31

As Mitchison’s life and comments make clear, it was as a feminist that she felt contempt for, and actively rebelled against, the conventionalities of a womanhood that was defined by and limited to the domestic sphere, particularly in the form of monogamous subservience to a spouse who supported her financially. It is my argument here that in constructing Aud as the embodiment of her anti-war sentiments in The Land the Ravens Found and thus mitigating Landnámabók’s association of her with war, Mitchison—by default given the actualities of medieval Iceland’s social structure—defines her protagonist in terms of traditional gender roles and boundaries such that she, in contrast to her medieval counterpart, is a comparatively de-radicalized figure.

I. Aud in the Hauksbók32 text of Landnámabók In its entirety, Landnámabók exists in two manuscripts, Sturla Þórðarson’s Sturlubók (1275x80) and Haukr Erlendsson’s Hauksbók (1306x08). Vigfusson and Powell based their edition and translation of Landnámabók upon Hauksbók. For this reason, my analysis of Landnámabók here, which will demonstrate how the text identifies Aud with masculinity and war from a narrative, etymological, grammatical and legal perspective, reflects my reading of Vigfusson and Powell’s edition and translation of Hauksbók despite the fact that Sturlubók is the source text for the standard, scholarly editions of Landnámabók: Jakob Benediktsson’s Icelandic edition (Landnámabók in Íslendingabók: Landnámabók, Íslenzk fornrit, Bd. 1, ed. Jakob Benediktsson [Reykjavík: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 1968], 31-397) and Hermann Pálsson’s and Paul Edwards’ English translation (eds. Haraldur Bessason and Robert J. Glendinning [Winnipeg: University of Manitoba, 1972]).

Cori Gabbard IRSS 42 (2017) 65

Landnámabók relates that Aud temporarily stays with one of her brothers, Helgi Biolan, before lodging with her other brother, Beorn, in Broad-frith, for the duration of her first winter in Iceland. Then “in the spring,” she “and her company [go] into Broad-frith to explore the land” (78):33

They took their day meal at a place north [so S, but MS. south] of Broad-frith, which is now called Day- meal-ness. Afterwards they went inland through the island channels, and landed at the ness, where also Aud lost her comb, and this ness she called Comb- ness. (78)34

Margaret Clunies Ross singles out these details in order to point out how they distinguish Aud’s landnám from those of the male settlers (landnámsmenn):

[n]o supernatural events are recorded in connection with her land-taking activities. Instead, the place- names that celebrate various of her acts as she moves about exploring the territory are mundane, domestic, or personal in their scope.35

Nevertheless, Clunies Ross’ own remarks inadvertently and indirectly point to the ways in which Aud’s journey from Broad- frith underscores similarities between her landnám and that of her acknowledged peers. Clunies Ross notes, as the passage above implies, that Day-meal-ness acquires its name from the fact that it is where Aud “and her companions [eat] their first breakfast while looking for land” 36 and that she gives Comb-ness its name because that is where she “[loses] her comb.”37 This phenomenon of naming places in commemoration of the settlers’ experiences in them is a feature not only of Aud’s landnám but also of the land-takings of three of her equals, one of whom is Scald-Grim. With respect to his settlement, the naming occurs, as it does with Aud’s, when its protagonist is surveying the landscape of his new country, still yet to come across the soil that he will stake as his own:

66 Naomi Mitchison

Scald-Grim came ashore at the place that is now called Cog-ness in the Mire or Fen. Afterwards he explored the land, and there was a great fen-land and broad shaws, far between fell and foreshore, and when they38 journeyed inward along the frith they came on a ness where they found wild swans, wherefore they called it Elfets-ness [Wild-swans’s-ness]. (38)39

Cetil-beorn the Old is another peer of Aud’s; his settlement, like hers and like Scald-Grim’s, also involves the phenomenon of naming topographical features; and it parallels Aud’s in other ways as well. Like Aud, Cetil-beorn lives with a relative (in his case, his wife’s father, Thord Beardie) when he initially comes to Iceland, and it is at the end of winter, when he is searching for suitable land to claim, that he encounters the two natural resources that he names. Notably, the name of the stream in which Cetil-Beorn loses his axe and that of the crag in which he subsequently forgets his trout allude to these losses just as “Comb-ness” alludes to the loss of Aud’s comb:

they40 came to a river, which they called the river Axe-water, because they lost their axe there. They took up their abode for a while under the mull of the hill, which they called Trout-mull, for there they left behind [forgetting them] the river-trout that they took out of the river. (228)41

Ingimund the Old is the third of Aud’s equals whose landnám encompasses the bestowal of a name upon a previously unnamed natural resource; he, too, does so before he has arrived at the site that he ultimately settles, and in the company of his followers, which in his case includes two friends, his wife’s brother and five serfs. And like Aud and Cetil-beorn, Ingimund is a guest for the duration of his initial cold season in Iceland. More importantly, the wood that Ingimund enters acquires its name from what he discovers there: he and his party “[come] into a frith, where they [find] two rams, and [call] it therefore Ram-frith” (127).42

Cori Gabbard IRSS 42 (2017) 67

That the land-taking narratives of the other women settlers (landnámskonur) do not feature any such episodes heightens Landnámabók’s identification of Aud with the other “best-born settlers,” although a few of the other women who have claimed land in Iceland are the namesakes of specific places: Arnbjorg, of Arnbjargar Brook; Thorunn, of Thorunnrholt; Thorbjorg Pole, of Stangarholt;43 and Ljot, of Ljotarstead. But the fact that Aud, too, is a namesake (of Audartoft) does not define her landnám in terms of gender because it is a commonplace in Landnámabók for settlers of both genders to be namesakes of geographical features, as are some of the “best-born settlers” including Ingolf, of Ingolfsfell; Bjorn the Gold-Bearer, of Gullberastead; Hastein (Ha-stan) Atlesson, of Hasteins Sound; and Auðr’s own brother, Bjorn (Beorn) the Easterner, of Bjarnarhaven. The seemingly innocuous circumstances that result in the naming of Comb-ness also tie Aud to war, and do so, as I shall argue shortly, in a way that contextualizes her landnám as conquest. Norse wives typically obscured their hair, which they “gathered up into a knot at the back of the head”44 under a veil. Norse combs, as we may deduce from Sturtevant’s examination of “hor-,”45 had, at the very least, the same basic purpose that they have in the twenty-first century. In light of these facts, I would argue that we may interpret Aud’s loss of her comb as an event that disassociates her not only from the civilizing norms that govern regulations of appearance, among other things, but also from those societal strictures that define normative gender roles. Combless, Aud’s hair is both free and wild, a condition that imbues it with the militaristic “symbolism of unkempt hair.”46 Saxon gladiators perceived the Suebi as their adversaries, and one particular year in the late sixth century, six chiliads of the former took an oath “not to cut hair or beard until they avenged themselves” on the latter.47 Significantly, these fighters had a Norse counterpart in King Harold Hárfagri (“Fair-hair”) whose moniker “was Harold Unkempt until he conquered all of Norway.”48 Given that Aud’s vulnerability as the mother of Scotland’s recently deposed king motivates her departure first to the Orkney Islands and then to Iceland, her hair ironically identifies her with the very monarch whose tyranny is the cause of so many future Icelanders’ departure from Norway in both 68 Naomi Mitchison

Landnámabók and the Íslendingasögur (“sagas of Icelanders”).49 That is, the woman’s combless tresses identify her with warriors who have yet to achieve their first military victories,50 and I would argue that the narrative adjacency of her literal landnám to the loss of her comb—the former immediately follows the latter—posits the settlement itself as a metaphorical conquest, an interpretation that Landnámabók’s own structural parallels and deployment of language support. With respect to the first, Scald-Grim, Cetil-beorn and Ingimund each claim land after naming the topographical features they respectively encounter, and Aud is no different. With respect to the second, it is worth noting that the Norse equivalent of “lost” that Landnámabók deploys is the third person, preterite singular of the infinitive tapa. The primary meaning of this word is, obviously, “to lose.”51 The secondary meaning of tapa, however, is “to destroy, kill.”52 Landnámabók’s depiction of the actual moment of Aud’s land-taking is superficially both anti-climatic and perfunctory in its adherence to formulae:

Aud took in settlement all the Dale-lands [here falls in the second blank in H; see Introduction], at the inward of the friths, from Day-meal-ness to Scram- leap-water. She dwelt at Hvam, on the Trout-water- oyce, at a place called Aud’s-tofts. (78-79)53

Yet the very mundanity of this depiction, which technically involves neither bloodshed nor conquest, is what paradoxically makes it interesting from an analytical perspective. The clause “[X] nam [Y]” (“[X] took possession of [Y]”) is the formulaic expression that Landnámabók (typically) uses to describe the actual moment of land-taking in an entry for a given settler. Auðr nam aoll Dala-laond í innan-verðom firðenom frá Daogorðar-ao til Skraumo-hlaups-ár obviously follows this paradigm. The landnám narratives of thirty-three of Aud’s male cohorts contain some version of this clause,54 which is to say that the settlement accounts of approximately eighty-seven percent55 of the male “best-born settlers” not only deploy this syntactical construction but do so consistently in Hauksbók, and thirty-one of these thirty-three

Cori Gabbard IRSS 42 (2017) 69 landnámsmenn are the single claimants of the land they take, the exceptions being Cetil Thidrandsson and his brother Grout-Atle who settle in Fleet-dale as joint claimants.56 By contrast, Hauksbók deploys the clause “[X] nam [Y]” in order to describe the landnám of only one other woman settler (landnámskona) besides Aud. That woman is As-gerd, and she is the only other woman whom the manuscript depicts unambiguously as a single claimant of previously unsettled land. In light of these statistics, Landnámabók’s use of the clause “[X] nam [Y]” to describe the moment of Aud’s actual settlement reinforces her place among the other “best-born settlers,” while the denotative meaning of nema identifies her with conflict and Norse masculinity. The equation of nema with “to take” is “limited, for taka (q. v.) is the general word, whereas nema remains in special usages,”57 one of which is “to take by force, seize upon.”58 Certainly, “[taking] by force” and “[seizing]” are actions that are intrinsic to war, and again, only men literally participated in battle during the Settlement Period. But if much of my analysis here has emphasized the ways in which Landnámabók distinguishes Aud from the other landnámskonur by showing how she, or the details of her settlement, resemble the most prominent landnámsmenn, or the particulars of their land-takings, Hauksbók’s depiction of Thor- gerd’s settlement calls attention to the way in which Aud does not perform as a woman insofar as her actual land-taking contrasts with the former’s, although the text initially creates a limited parallel between the two women. Both are widows who have borne male offspring when they arrive in Iceland, and the work begins its account of Thor-gerd’s settlement by introducing her husband, As- beorn, in the same way that it commences its narrative of Aud’s landnám by introducing her spouse Anlaf the White. But unlike Aud whose journey to Iceland is largely a reflection of her will and authority even if the death of her son Thor-stan the Red, and the potential harm she might now face in his absence, underlie her decision to abandon Scotland, Thor-gerd commences her voyage as the wife of a potential settler. She claims land when she sets foot in Iceland only because As-beorn dies before she gets to the island in the company of their two sons who obviously, unlike Thor-stan the Red, are alive.59 And that settlement, as Hauksbók explicitly states, 70 Naomi Mitchison conforms to the legal standards governing the acquisition of land by women:60

2. Now it was held law, that a woman should not take in settlement more land than a quhae or heifer of two years old could go round on a spring day from sunrise to sunset, a half-stalled neat, and well kept. Wherefore Thor-gerd led her heifer under Toft-fell a short way from Fold-River in the south, and into Kid-point, hard by Iockle’s-fell on the west.

3. Then Thor-gerd took in settlement land over all Ing-wolf’s-head-wharf, between Fold-river and Iockle-river, and dwelt at Sand-fell. (191)61

II. Aud in The Land the Ravens Found Methodologically, my analysis of The Land the Ravens Found is based to a lesser extent upon my knowledge of Old Norse, which, as I mentioned previously, Mitchison did not share, and to a greater extent upon both my own close reading of this novel and scholarly research published mostly after 1955. This fact does not, however, invalidate my conclusions in that most of what I specifically discuss with respect to the research I cite does not constitute knowledge that would have been non-existent before 1955 even if its sources did not come into print until long after the publication of The Land the Ravens Found. My citation of Patrick F. Wallace’s “The Archaeology of Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns” to substantiate that the Vikings viewed Ireland as a bullion reserve is a case in point. Wallace’s essay appears in A New History of Ireland I: Prehistoric and Early Ireland, which has a copyright date of 2008. But in the first chapter of The Swan’s Road, Mitchison refers to the plunder of Viking raids that took place in Ireland (and also in Scotland and England) between 700 and 899.62 Likewise, it is not difficult to imagine that Mitchison was familiar with the significance and details of certain traditions, values and ideas that have persisted in rural Scottish communities over centuries since the Vikings invaded them, knowledge to which scholarly criticism may or may not have referred before 1955 (the

Cori Gabbard IRSS 42 (2017) 71 sources I cite here may not be the first to discuss some of the details that I specifically analyze in this essay). Mitchison’s visits to Meyer after the Second World War also increased her consciousness of the extent to which Viking customs still persisted into twentieth-century Scotland, ones that she herself perpetuated through her experiences with farming and fishing.63 At Carradale in Kintyre, which became her permanent residence after the summer of 1939 owing to the start of the Second World War, Mitchison attempted to foster a sense of community in her Scottish village based upon her socialist principles,64 establishing friendships that transcended class boundaries.65 One of the ways in which she did so was to work on her own land alongside the working-class members of her community whom she had hired to perform such labour while another was to go fishing with those whose livelihood it was.66 In The Land the Ravens Found, Aud’s land claim also takes place during the first spring she spends in Iceland, the details of which initially expand upon, but do not subvert, Landnámabók’s first reference to Aud’s landnám, as follows:

The winter came to an end at last and the young grass began to show green in the low-lying land … Aud decided to go and take up her new lands. She and Coll and Anlaf had their own horses, but she had borrowed others from Beorn for some of the men … They started in the early dawn of a clear morning, riding off through Beorn’s lands and beyond … By mid-morning they were past any land which had been claimed, riding up a narrow marshy glen under birch and alder. (145-46)67

Yet Aud’s landnám as The Land the Ravens Found depicts it undercuts Landnámabók’s identification of her with her peers. First, the only settlement that The Land the Ravens Found depicts is Aud’s, thereby stripping it of the comparative framing that the other settlement narratives in Landnámabók provide. Second, the novel portrays its heroine as a figure whose authority is inconsistently unilateral. Although it is Aud herself who, in keeping 72 Naomi Mitchison with her stated intentions, determines the timing of her settlement, the fact that “the men [take] it in turns to go ahead and find the best way” (146) because of the dangers posed by dead, fallen trees, snowdrifts and the absence of any sort of path is indicative of the extent to which she cedes control of the situation to others, and it is worth emphasizing that Gudbrand Vigfusson and F. York Powell’s reference to Aud’s entourage68 in their translation of Hauksbók renders explicit what is implicit in Haukr Erlendsson’s manuscript: Aud is the only explicit, grammatical subject who ventures “into Broadfrith” according to Hauksbók, which by default posits her as an autonomous settler. As in Landnámabók, Aud in Mitchison’s novel resumes her expedition at the conclusion of her meal. Not surprisingly, The Land the Ravens Found continues to expand upon the medieval work’s portrayal of this episode, which unlike the passage below tersely describes the topographical features of the area that Aud explores, explicitly relating her actions and those of her entourage while barely hinting at her mindset:

After dinner they went on and now Aud kept her eyes open for the best place to build her Hall, somewhere flat and fairly sheltered. The inland plateau was flat enough but the winter winds would skin it like a knife. And she must have a hot spring somewhere near for a bath-house! (147)

The passage above corresponds to Aud’s movement “inland,” detailing the qualities of the land that she encounters from her perspective. On the surface, Aud’s specifications obviously reflect the pragmatic concerns that all settlers, whether men or women, would have considered between 870-930 when deciding where to claim land:69 in order to endure, her Hall should be in a location that will protect it from the effects of Iceland’s climatic elements, and it must be in proximity to a “hot spring.” But relative to Aud’s exploration of Iceland’s terrain as Landnámabók depicts it, her reasoning in the 1955 novel reinforces its identification of her with pacifism. Aud’s rejection of “[t]he inland plateau” as an appropriate site for her “Hall” because the “winter winds would skin it like a

Cori Gabbard IRSS 42 (2017) 73 knife” implies that it should be devoid of all connotations of violence, even those that are domestic in nature. Although killing animals for food was the duty of men,70 women had responsibility for “processing and converting the results of male work for short- term consumption and long-term preservation.”71 And in fact, Aud’s further stipulation that she “have a hot spring somewhere near for a bath-house” reinforces not only her distance from war but also her connection to specifically female roles within medieval Icelandic society. First, the “bath-house” was the one place where men disarmed themselves.72 But second, women did all of the laundry, a chore they routinely combined with taking a bath during their own trips to the “[h]ot springs.”73 Just as The Land the Ravens Found imparts psychological complexity to its depiction of Aud’s search for land, it also imbues that experience with causal connection. Landnámabók provides no particular reason as to how or why Aud “[loses] her comb”; the novel implies that its loss is owing to the fact that it is “difficult going especially when they [come] to places where there [are] great rocks scattered,” as follows:

It was a beautiful gold and ivory comb that held her hair together at the back; when they halted and got their breath after a scramble it was gone. Aud was really upset and sent back all the men to look for it, but try as they might it was nowhere to be seen. However by the time they had all hunted and finally given it up, she had decided there were more things to worry about than that; they must go on, but this headland where she was sitting waiting for them would be Combness. (147-148)

In both Landnámabók and The Land the Ravens Found, Aud sails from Caithness for Iceland (by way of the Orkney Islands) in the company of her grandchildren, among others, after Scotland’s conqueror—her son, Thorstan—dies in conflict. Thus although navigating Iceland’s terrain is problematic for Aud as well as for those accompanying her, her comparative lack of youth superficially explains her need to have those in her entourage search for her comb. Yet this necessity simultaneously emphasizes her comparative inability to manoeuver through Iceland relative to 74 Naomi Mitchison that of her men, and the importance of this difference lies in its affirmation of the division between the domains of war and civilian life that the opening paragraph of The Land the Ravens Found establishes. The beginning of The Land the Ravens Found describes “A WILD SEA [sic], even in the middle of summer, choppy waves running every way at once, clear sign to seamen of violent currents, treacherous and difficult” (11). Given that ships were the Vikings’ usual mode of transport, the sea is therefore a war zone. The novel’s deployment of the adjective “difficult” to describe both the sea and Aud’s search for land therefore links the latter event to war but then undermines that connection in relating her comparative lack of capacity to deal with Iceland’s terrain, thereby subverting the implications of Landnámabók’s employment of the verb nema in describing the matriarch’s land-taking. Indeed, the composition of Aud’s comb and the trajectory of her response to its loss affirm her anti-war mentality. Aud’s comb consists of “gold and ivory”—that is, it is made of ivory and decorated with gold. Before and during the Settlement Period, Vikings perceived Ireland, which unlike medieval Scandinavia produced combs made of ivory,74 as a (plunderable) source of both gold and silver.75 Given that both Landnámabók and The Land the Ravens Found contextualize Aud’s husband, Anlaf, as Dublin’s conqueror and ruler (although when the novel begins, he is long since dead), the matriarch’s possession of her comb makes her complicit not only in war but in territorial oppression. On a symbolic level, Aud’s response to the loss of her comb represents her relinquishment of what for lack of a better term I will call “imperial authority.” It is no coincidence, then, that The Land the Ravens Found concludes its version of this episode by reaffirming Aud’s aversion to conflict through her conformity to conventional gender roles. When Aud’s grandson, Anlaf Feilan, comments that the loss of her comb may be interpreted as “a sacrifice for the new land” (148), his grandmother “[tells] him to mind his own business” (148) while “twisting her hair which was very long still, for all it was grey, round a stick, and [pulls] the hood of her cloak well over it” (148). Again, married women customarily wrapped their hair into a bun with a veil over it.76 Thus, Aud’s insistence upon maintaining this

Cori Gabbard IRSS 42 (2017) 75 propriety even in the absence of her comb constitutes her commitment to civilizing norms. But Aud’s response to the remarks of her young grandson constitutes a rebuke to his continuing support of the paganism that defines itself through its violence, which is specifically that of aggressive warfare. While expressing his thoughts aloud, Aud’s grandson is “thinking of his arm ring” (148) which he had earlier thrown into the sea as a sacrifice so that his grandmother’s ship might land safely in Iceland at the very moment when it was apparently about to be wrecked. That “arm ring,” which had been “his father’s last present to him” (118), is a “thick gold bracelet” (118). Notably, Thorstan’s first appearance in The Land the Ravens Found revolves around his return from a raid, the spoils of which explicitly include jewellery and hair ornaments for his daughters, Anlaf’s sisters. In this light, the novel implicitly contextualizes Anlaf’s “arm ring” as booty from that same attack. As such, it is an object of plunder and therefore an emblem of viking aggression. That Aud has already defined the valley below the cliff on which she eats as “her boundary” (146) notwithstanding, The Land the Ravens Found, like Landnámabók, relates her landnám as the follow-up to her experience in Combness:

They camped that night and went on the next day along the sides of the great sea loch that was called Hwamm Fjord. Aud made up her mind what land she would take. She did not want more than she could look after, but only part of any holding could be cultivated … In the end she made a biggish claim because she wanted to have plenty of land to give away to her shipmates. It would be better, having regard to the rest of the settlers, if she should be the one to make the claim and uphold it before the Thing, the Parliament, when it met, so that everything should be within the law. (148)

“Eyrbyggja saga,” Zoe Borovsky says, “states that women lost their rights as plaintiffs after a legal disaster circa 992.”77 In this light, Aud’s intention of establishing the legitimacy of her land 76 Naomi Mitchison claim by declaring it at court has no bearing on her identification with traditional Norse roles of either gender, although it is worth pointing out that Iceland’s first law code, Grágás (“Grey Goose” [1117-18]), more or less prohibited women from participating in the Þing78 and doubtless reflects long-standing social and legal conventions that predate its own existence in written form. Nevertheless, Aud’s settlement in The Land the Ravens Found substantiates her status as a woman overall. First, Aud’s justification for “[making] a biggish claim” indicates that she has both a sense of camaraderie and respect for the rules of the community that she has joined, two qualities that distinguish her as a civilized individual and thus associate her with society. Second, Aud’s landnám in The Land the Ravens Found is precisely what it is not in Landnámabók. Hauksbók’s description of Thor-gerd’s settlement, as I earlier pointed out, illustrates by way of contrast how Aud claims land in that text not as a woman but rather as a man. As Thor-gerd’s actions imply, a woman may legally claim as much land as she can encircle with a two-year-old heifer in tow between daybreak and dusk which in the spring constitutes an approximately twelve-hour span. That measure arguably defines Aud’s landnám in The Land the Ravens Found which, aside from the land that she claims temporarily for the purpose of giving it away, seems to fulfill her initial desire to claim no more land than she can manage. In the 1955 novel, then, the dimensions of Aud’s landnám coincide with the terms by which a “woman settler” (landnámskona) may take land.

Conclusion Near the end of its account of her, Landnámabók unequivocably praises Aud as “a worshipful lady” (84/ vegs-kona mikil).79 The literal translation of vegs-kona mikil, “great woman of glory,” points to its own equivocality in referring to Aud as such in that it is her accomplishments as depicted in Landnámabók80 that have earned her such regard, deeds that underscore how she embodies and performs the role of a “best-born settler” and that thereby identify her not only with masculinity but with war. Vegs-kona mikil also, I would argue, aptly describes Mitchison despite the fact that her depiction of Aud as the embodiment of pacifism in The

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Land the Ravens Found paradoxically identifies the latter with traditional womanhood, conventionalizing a medieval figure whom Landnámabók esteems even as it implicitly associates her with war. For when all is said and done, instituting peace is not merely preferable to perpetuating war but one of the highest goals that humankind can and should pursue. In this light, The Land the Ravens Found, which years after Mitchison’s demise still advocates on her behalf for the establishment of a pacifist community, defines her as an enduring force of progression—one not unlike her protagonist, as the novel’s final lines imply:

“She built Safe Farer,” said Thorgerd[,] “and brought us here. She made everything different.” “And better,” said Anlaf Feilan. (190)

NOTES

1 Julian Meldon D’Arcy, Scottish Skalds and Sagamen: Old Norse Influence on Modern Scottish Literature (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1996), 155. 2 Naomi Mitchison, Small Talk. . .Memories of an Edwardian Childhood in As It Was: An Autobiography 1897-1918 (Glasgow: Richard Drew Publishing 1988), 52. Mitchison does not specify which sagas she read at this time. 3 Naomi Mitchison, Mucking Around: Five Continents Over Fifty Years (London: Gollancz, 1981), 44. Mitchison states in this work that she was in Norway “in the late Twenties”; she specifies that she was in Oslo (and also Stockholm) in the spring of 1929 in You May Well Ask: A Memoir, 1920-1940 (London: Gollancz, 1979), 166. 4 Mitchison, You May Well Ask, 166. 5 D’Arcy, Scottish Skalds and Sagamen, 163. 6 Naomi Mitchison, Bibliography for The Swan’s Road (London: The Naldrett Press, Ltd., 1954), 151. 7 Mitchison, Bibliography for The Swan’s Road, 151. 8 Mitchison, Bibliography for The Swan’s Road, 151. 9 D’Arcy, Scottish Skalds and Sagamen, 163. 10 Although in her view Landnámabók cannot wholly be explained as a narrative justification of land ownership on the part of prominent 78 Naomi Mitchison

Icelanders between 1100 and 1199 given that many settlers mentioned in the text did not have illustrious descendants, Margaret Clunies Ross admits that “we cannot escape the hermeneutic circle in which early settlers are represented by their descendants as invoking supernatural revelations of an authority that was significant, as invested in the pioneers, to the extent that their descendants were successful in the colony” (“Land- Taking and Text-Making in Medieval Iceland” in Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, eds. Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998], 161). Adolf Friðriksson and Orri Vésteinsson largely concur in arguing that producing narratives of the nation’s prosperous familial dynasties was not inimical to that which they perceive as the impetus behind the composition of Landnámabók (“Creating a Past: A Historiography of the Settlement of Iceland” in Contact, Continuity and Collapse: The Norse Colonization of the North Atlantic, ed. James H. Barrett [Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2003], 139-161). 11 For the sake of readability, I will, for the most part, cite English translations before providing the corresponding Norse text; with respect to longer passages in the main text of this paper, the corresponding original text will be quoted in the endnote that respectively will accompany each translation. Aud’s appearance in five Old Icelandic texts besides Landnámabók—Ari Þorgilsson’s Íslendingabók (The Book of Icelanders); Brennu-Njáls saga (The Saga of Burnt Njal); Eyrbyggja saga (The Saga of the Dwellers of Eyrr); Eiríks saga rauða (The Saga of Erik the Red); and Laxdæla saga (The Saga of the People of Laxardal)—testifies to her significance within Norse culture as the common ancestor of those living in western Iceland, although only the latter text also provides a full account of Aud’s land-taking (which deviates somewhat from Landnámabók’s). Laxdæla saga is the only other text besides Landnámabók that imbues Aud with both narrative and thematic significance; from the perspective of character development, the saga provides a richer account of her settlement than Landnámabók does. Although an examination of Aud’s presence in this saga would be germane to my discussion here, I have elected, in part for reasons having to do with constraints of time and space and in part because Mitchison herself clearly positions The Land the Ravens Found in relation to Landnámabók, not to analyze Laxdæla saga‘s depiction of the settler in this essay. Another narrative in which Aud also features more prominently is “Gullbra og Skeggi í Hvammi” (“Goldbrow and Skeggi at Hvamm”).

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That the first extant allusion to “Gullbra og Skeggi í Hvammi” dates to 1690 does not rule out the possibility that it first surfaced during the medieval period, but there is no conclusive evidence indicating that the narrative existed before 1450. This story, which contextualizes Aud as a Christian foil for the (pagan) witch Gullbra, appears to take place long after the widow has settled in Iceland and does not seem to engage the themes that are the focus of this essay. 12 Naomi Mitchison, Postscript to The Land the Ravens Found (London: Collins, 1955), 191. 13 Mitchison, You May Well Ask, 166. 14 Landnama-book, or the Book of Settlements in Origines Islandicae: A Collection of the More Important Sagas and Other Native Writings Relating to the Settlement and Early History of Iceland, Vol. 1, eds. and trans. Gudbrand Vigfusson and F. York Powell (London: Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1905), Hauksbók V.17.2. Vigfusson and Powell’s translation of Landnámabók is the source of all quotations in English from this work; this edition is also the source of all quotations in Norse from Landnámabók. All subsequent citations for translations in English from this text will provide in-text page numbers only; the corresponding Norse text quoted in the endnote that will respectively accompany each translation will list the book, chapter and subsection in which it appears. 15 While Margaret Clunies Ross argues that Aud’s “landnám” as it is depicted in Landnámabók reinscribes contemporary perceptions of land- taking as a “male activity” (“Land-Taking and Text-Making”, 160) in its distinctiveness from the settlements of men that are described in the same text, a uniqueness that paradoxically renders it an exemplar of female settlement, Preben Meulengracht Sørensen (The Unmanly Man: Concepts of Sexual Defamation in Early Northern Society, trans. Joan Turville-Petre [Odense, Denmark: Odense University Press, 1983]) and Carol Clover (“Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early Northern Europe.” Speculum 68 (1993): 363-387) assert that Aud performs as a man. 16 Although Mitchison made her reputation as a writer of historical fiction, the endurance of that status has not matched that of her interest in composing it, a phenomenon that probably reflects the fact that the writer did not confine herself to any one genre (Lesley A. Hall, Naomi Mitchison: A Profile of Her Life and Work [Seattle: Aqueduct Press, 2007], 3; Moira Burgess, “Naomi Mitchison” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 319, ed. Cheryl Alexander Malcolm [Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson/Gale, 2006], 237). Mitchison was also a poet, playwright, 80 Naomi Mitchison

journalist and memoirist; before the Second World War, she debuted as a writer of contemporary fiction (to which audiences did not respond as favorably as they had to her earlier works of historical prose; folklore, history, realism and fantasy each informed her literary output during and after (for a good fifteen or so years) the Second World War (Burgess, “Naomi Mitchison,” 237). In the early 1960s, Mitchison added herself to the ranks of science fiction writers (Hall, Naomi Mitchison, 6). 17 Moira Burgess observes that The Conquered, Mitchison’s first novel which was published in 1923, takes place “in Roman-occupied Gaul in the first century B.C.,” that “[t]he epigraphs to each chapter indicate the relevance of the book to the troubled situation prevailing in Ireland at the time it was written” and that “such comparison of past with present is a recurrent feature of Mitchison’s writing” (“Naomi Mitchison,” 238). 18 D’Arcy, Scottish Skalds and Sagamen, 173. 19 Jill Benton, Naomi Mitchison: A Biography (London: Pandora, 1990), 140. Mitchison’s optimism about “racial relations” (D’Arcy, Scottish Skalds and Sagamen, 173) in The Land the Ravens Found informed her concern about the relationship between the Cold War adversaries thirty years later. In her 1984 foreword to Among You Taking Notes (ed. Dorothy Sheridan [London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1985]), the diary that she maintained during the Second World War as part of the Mass- Observation project that two of her friends, Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge, commenced in 1937 along with another colleague, Humphrey Jennings, with the goal of gaining insight into the daily routines of members of the British public, Mitchison states that her journal is “full of hope for a new kind of world, for something different, happier, more honest, for a new relationship between people who had been cut off from one another by money, power and class structure” and that it is her conviction that “these kind of hopes were common enough in the UK [the U.S.’s Cold War ally] and probably to some extent in all the countries involved in the war, above all in the Soviet Union” (12-13). 20 D’Arcy, Scottish Skalds and Sagamen, 170. 21 One of Mitchison’s biographers, Jenni Calder (The Nine Lives of Naomi Mitchison [London: Virago, 1997]), quotes from and discusses this essay but in linking it to The Land the Ravens Found does not mention the AWPA at all, let alone as a catalyst for either work. 22 Naomi Mitchison, “The Writer and the Child,” The New Statesman and Nation, 12 February 1955, 203. 23 Mitchison, “Writer and the Child,” 203-204.

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24 I am echoing Jill Benton’s assertion that Mitchison’s participation in the AWPA resulted in the composition of The Land the Ravens Found (Naomi Mitchison, 142). Critics have not uniformly defined The Land the Ravens Found as children’s literature, and Calder herself has asserted that stylistically and substantively, there is no real difference between Mitchison’s putative works for adults and books for children (Nine Lives, 216). 25 Mitchison, “Writer and the Child,” 203. 26 Mitchison’s oldest child, Geoff, had contracted meningitis and had died of it in 1927; her sixth child, Valentine, was born in 1930; Mitchison’s last child, a daughter, would die soon after birth in 1940. 27 The marriage ended with the death of her husband, Dick, in February of 1970. 28 Naomi Mitchison, “Comments on Birth Control” (London: Faber and Faber, 1930), quoted in Calder (Nine Lives, 94). 29 Calder, Nine Lives, 94. 30 Calder, Nine Lives, 95. 31 Mitchison, “Comments on Birth Control” quoted in Calder (Nine Lives, 95). 32 Orthographically speaking, from this point on, I will follow Vigfusson and Powell when referring to names of people in Landnámabók and Mitchison when referring to characters in The Land the Ravens Found. 33 “Efter um váret fóro þau Auðr í Breiða-fiaorð inn í landaleitan. . .” (Hauksbók II.14.7). In Hauksbók, the fact that Auðr’s entourage accompanies her is implicit. 34 “ . . .þau aoto daogorð fyr sunnan Breiða-fiaorð þar sem nú heiter Daogorðar-nes. Síðan fóro þau inn um Eyja-sund. Þau lendo við nes þat es Auðr tapaðe kambe sínom—þat kallaðe hon Kambs-nes” (Hauksbók II. 14.7). It should be noted that Hauksbók deploys “sunnan” (“south”) for that which in Sturlubók, the earlier of the two complete compilations of Landnámabók still in existence, (correctly) reads “norðan” (“north”). Vigfusson and Powell’s own translation accordingly follows Sturlubók here. It should also be noted that any emendations in the English translations of passages from Landnámabók that I quote at length are those of the translators, Gudbrand Vigfusson and F. York Powell. Emendations in English translations of brief phrases or lines from Landnámabók that I have embedded within my own sentences are mine. 35 Ross, “Land-Taking and Text-Making”, 176. 36 Ross, “Land-Taking and Text-Making”, 176. 37 Ross, “Land-Taking and Text-Making”, 176. 82 Naomi Mitchison

38 It isn’t quite clear as to whom “they” refers. I would argue that “they” likely alludes to his retinue. 39 “Skalla-Grímr kom þar at lande es nú heiter Knarrar-nes á Mýrom. Sídan kannaðe hann landet, ok vas þar mýr-lende miket, ok skógar víðer langt á miðle fiallz ok fiaoro. En es þeir fóro inn með firðenom, kómo þeir á nes þat es þeir fundo alfter—þat kaolloðo þeir Alfta-nes. . .” (Hauksbók I.8.1). 40 See Note 38. 41 “. . .kómo þeir at ao þeirre es þeir kaolloðo Œxar-ao, því at þeir týndo þar í œxe sínne. Þeir aotto dvaol under fiallz-múla þeim es þeir kaolloðo Reyðar-múla: þar laogo þeim efter á-reyðar þær es þeir tóko or aonne” (Hauksbók V.14.2). Hauksbók includes a slightly different second version of this account. Hauksbók claims that this alternative passage is from Sturlubók, but the latter does not contain it: “[Double text. ‘But when they had gone a short distance they came to a frozen river, and cut an ice-hole in it, and their axe fell in, whence they called it Ax-water. This water was afterwards led into the All-men’s-rift, and now it runs down along the Ting-wall [Moot-field]. Then they went to where it is now called Trout- mull; there they lost their [catch of] trout, whence they called it Trout- mull.]’ ” (228)/ “[Sturl. S.7.12: ‘En es þeir vóro þaðan skamt farner, þá kómo þeir á ár-ís, ok hioggo þar á vaok, ok felldo í œxe sína, ok kaolloðo hána af því Œxar-ao.—Sú ao vas síðan veitt í Almanna-giao, ok fellr nú efter Þing-velle.—Þá fóro þeir þar til es nú es kallaðr Reyðarmúle: þar urðo þeim efter reyðar þær es þeir fóro með,—ok kaolloðo þar af því Reyðar-múla.]’ ” (Hauksbók V.14.2). 42 “Þeir kómo í fiaorð þann es þeir fundo hrúta tvá—þeir kaolloðo þar Hrúta-fiaorð. . .” (Hauksbók III.5.2). 43 “Pole” is the English translation of “stöng.” 44 Peter G. Foote and David M. Wilson, The Viking Achievement (New York and Washington: Praeger Publishers, 1970), 174. 45 “I refer the stem syllable hor- to the root *hazwa-> ON hor-r, OHG haro, ‘flax.’ This word is connected with the IE root *kes. . . ‘to comb’ and evidently originally signified ‘that which was combed’ ” (Albert Morey Sturtevant, “Certain Old Norse Suffixes.” Modern Philology 26 (1928): 155). 46 Michael P. Speidel, Ancient Germanic Warriors: Warrior Styles from Trajan’s Column to Icelandic Sagas (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 180.

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47 Speidel, Ancient Germanic Warriors, 180. Speidel’s own sources for this information are Paul the Deacon’s Historia Longobardorum and Gregory of Tours’ History. 48 Speidel, Ancient Germanic Warriors, 180. Speidel’s sources for this information are Snorri Sturlusson’s Haralds saga Hárfagra, Höfler’s Runenstein and Rives’ Tacitus. 49 Generally speaking, the family sagas cite the tyranny of Haraldr Hárfagri (“Fair-hair”), who subjugated the territories comprised by Norway to his rule between 870-930, as the reason for emigration from Norway to Iceland. 50 Insofar as we might perceive the disarray of Aud’s hair as a performance of masculinity, it reinforces Preben Meulengracht Sørensen’s assertion, with which Carol Clover concurs (“Regardless of Sex”, 366), that the matriarch “[acts] as a man because the men who should have acted on her behalf were dead” (Unmanly Man, 22) and relates her to the Norse “shield-maiden,” a definition that applies “to any and all women who take up the sword or associate themselves with warfare or merely behave in unfeminine ways, however briefly and for whatever reason” (Carol Clover, “Maiden Warriors and Other Sons.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 85.1 (1986): 36). 51 Richard Cleasby, Gudbrand Vigfusson and William A. Craigie, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), s.v. “nema.” 52 Icelandic-English Dictionary, s.v. “nema.” 53 “Auðr nam aoll Dala-laond í innan-verðom firðenom frá Daogorðar-ao til Skraumo-hlaups-ár. Hon bió í Hvamme við Aurriða-ár-ós—þat heita Auðar-tofter” (Hauksbók II. 14.8). 54 These variations include basic constructions such as “[h]ann nam land. . .” (“he took land. . .”) and “[s]iðan nam hann [Y]. . .” (“after that took he [Y]. . .”) where the antecedent of “[h]ann” is the name of the settler, and compound sentences in which the subject noun or pronoun denoting the settler is not adjacent to the third person preterite singular of the infinitive “nema” (“to take”) such as the following example from Landnámabók’s description of the settlement of Helgi Beolan in Hauksbók I.5.1: “Hann vas með Ingolfe enn fyrsta vettr, ok nam með hans ráðe Kiarlar-nes allt miðle Mógils-ár ok Mýdalsár . . .” (He was with Ing-wolf the first winter, and took at his rede all Keel-ness between Mo-gils-river and Midge-dale- water” [26]). 55 Hauksbók identifies a total of thirty-nine of them. 56 See Hauksbók IV.4.1. 84 Naomi Mitchison

57 Icelandic-English Dictionary, s.v. “nema.” 58 Icelandic-English Dictionary, s.v. “nema.” 59 According to Sturlubók, Thor-gerd claims land jointly with her sons by As-beorn (see S 316). 60 Grágás, Iceland’s first law code, says nothing about the land claims of women (Laws of Early Iceland: Grágás I, trans. Andrew Dennis, Peter Foote, Richard Perkins [Winnipeg, Canada: University of Manitoba Press, 1980] and Laws of Early Iceland: Grágás II, trans. Andrew Dennis, Peter Foote, Richard Perkins [Winnipeg, Canada: University of Manitoba Press, 2000]). However, this omission makes historical sense given that Ari Þorgilsson tells us in Íslendingabók (The Book of Icelanders), the oldest account of medieval Icelandic society still in existence, that the final landnám occurred in 930, and Grágás did not come into existence until 1117—i.e., such a law would have been obsolete by the early twelfth century. 61 “2. En þat vas mælt, at kona skylde eige víðara nema land an leiða mætte kvígo tvæ-vetra vár-langan dag sól-setra miðle, half stalit naut ok haft vel. Því leidde Þórgerdr kvígo sína undan Tofta-felle skamt frá Kví-ao suðr, ok í Kiðjá-leit hiá Iaokuls-felle fyr vestan. “3. Þórgerðr nam þar land um allt Ingolfs-(haofðá)-hverfe, á miðle Kví-ár ok Iaokuls-ár; ok bió at Sand-felle” (Hauksbók IV.15.2-3). 62 Naomi Mitchison, The Swan’s Road (London, The Naldrett Press, Ltd., 1954), 14. 63 D’Arcy, Scottish Skalds and Sagamen, 163. 64 Benton, Naomi Mitchison, 117. 65 Benton, Naomi Mitchison, 119-21. 66 Benton, Naomi Mitchison, 121-123. 67 Naomi Mitchison, The Land the Ravens Found (London: Collins, 1955), 145-46. This volume is the source of all quotations from this work; all subsequent citations from this text will provide in-text page numbers only. 68 See Note 33. 69 Trausti Valsson notes that while the citification of modern Iceland has mitigated its vulnerability to the dangers posed by some of its geographical and climatic features, “[i]n earlier times many aspects of weather were. . .a great threat to people and their well-being, such as cold spells and heavy winds” (Planning in Iceland: From the Settlement to Present Times [Reykjavík: University of Iceland Press, 2003], 42). Indeed, as a 2001 examination of Iceland’s geographical conditions in and around Reykjavík during the Settlement Period has revealed, the land claim of Iceland’s first permanent resident, Ingólfr, was, with respect to its

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potential for agricultural development, optimally situated (Trausti Valsson, Planning in Iceland, 51). Notably, two of the elements in favor of the land that Ingólfr acquired were its “[s]heltered areas” and its proximity to water while “[s]teep terrain” was one of several “[n]egative or excluding factors” (Trausti Valsson, Planning in Iceland, 51). 70 Jenny Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 120; 129. 71 Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society, 120. 72 Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society, 124. 73 Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society, 123. 74 Nancy Edwards, “The Archaeology of Early Medieval Ireland, c.400- 1169: Settlement and Economy” in A New History of Ireland I: Prehistoric and Early Ireland, ed. Dáibhí Ó Cróinín (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008): 281. 75 Patrick F. Wallace, “The Archaeology of Ireland's Viking-Age Towns” in New History of Ireland I: 836. 76 Foote and Wilson, Viking Achievement, 174. 77 Zoe Borovsky, “Never in Public: Women and Performance in Old Norse Literature.” The Journal of American Folklore 112 (1999):12. 78 “The most important public event in medieval Iceland was the annual meeting of the Althing … where Icelandic law obtained. . . The performance roles at the Althing—lawspeakers, chieftains, judges, plaintiffs, and witnesses—were filled by males. . . A woman could attend … as a member of the general public, but she … had to ‘sit on the outside of the benches’ … However, the Icelandic law codes were inconsistent with regard to the kinds of cases women could plead, which suggests a legal loophole. A widow or an unmarried girl of 20 could take charge of her own lawsuit if it was about an assault or a minor wound (Grágás 1980: 158). One version of Grágás, “Konungsbók,” states that a woman in a similar position … could prosecute a killing case (Grágás 1980: 157), but another version, “Staðarhólsbók,” contradicts this and stipulates that in no instance could a woman be a plaintiff. . .” (Borovsky, “Never in Public,” 12). The exceptions to the rule that Borovsky describes do not apply to Aud because her reason to appear before the Þing has nothing to do with seeking compensation for physical harm. 79 Hauksbók II.15.15. 80 Laxdæla saga’s account of Auðr’s land-taking also relates most of these acts. 86 William Boyd

BRITISH FICTIONS AFTER DEVOLUTION: WILLIAM BOYD’S CULINARY ARTS

Dougal McNeill*

Where are we to place William Boyd? This question, vexed enough for most novelists, given the variety and transformation in any life and collection of works, takes on added complexities in Boyd’s case because the obvious answer—he is a contemporary British novelist—introduces follow-up questions of a currently unanswerable nature. Where is Britain; and what does it mean, in the twenty-first century, to be a British novelist? These definitions, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, seemed not to matter greatly, as Britishness, in its local national variations, provided an ambiguous synthesising terrain for Scottish, Welsh and English writers. National identity in Scotland, Wales and England could, through the long reign of the British Empire, be assimilated more-or-less successfully into a broader British identity: British novelists were, quite simply, novelists from Britain. In the twenty- first century, with devolution and moves to full independence on the ascendant in Scotland, greater calls for Welsh autonomy, and the fact of multiculturalism a lived reality in English cities like Birmingham, London and Manchester, the question of what it is that makes an author British becomes rather more interesting, and rather more vexed. William Boyd, a Scottish author born in Africa and long resident in London, fits uneasily in accounts of the regionalisation or “devolution” of English literature.1 This may explain why,

* Dougal McNeill teaches in the English Programme, Victoria University of Wellington. He is the author, with Charles Ferrall, of Writing the 1926 General Strike (Cambridge, 2015) and is co-editor, also with Charles Ferrall, of the 1920-1940 volume of the Cambridge series British Literature in Transition.

Dougal McNeill IRSS 42 (2017) 87 despite his critical and commercial success, Boyd has received scarcely any scholarly attention: he is a British author in the era of Scottish writing. Scottish literature, after all, provided the imagination of the era of Union; the Anglo-Scottish novelist, nowadays, is a rather more endangered species. Tracking the movements of one example may provide insights into these questions of literature, language, and location. My purpose here is not to suggest Boyd is central to this particular story. There are other writers, Alan Massie and his historical novels most notably, pursuing British literary projects still, and to perhaps greater effect. Boyd figures in what follows, rather, as an example or a symptom, a sampling from the world of British fiction as it circulates now. But then where is Britain in Boyd’s work? It was not until the turn of the century, with Armadillo (1998) and its account of financial dealings and family dramas in London, that Boyd set a novel in Britain. Scottish literature, from Smollett to Spark, has spent a good deal of time abroad, to be sure; Boyd takes this to boisterous new limits. Earlier works had covered Africa—from A Good Man in Africa (1981) to the east African settings of the First World War novel An Ice-Cream War (1982) and the tale of scientific research and human relations in Brazzaville Beach (1990)—Los Angeles and Manila in The Blue Afternoon (1993), and continental Europe in The New Confessions (1987). It was only in the twenty-first century, just as the Scottish Renaissance was reaching its full creative maturity, that Boyd made London the centre of his own fiction. His novels are restless, globe-trotting, varied creations, taking in everything from chimpanzee research to the film business, to war-time spying and conspiracies in the global pharmaceutical industry. The conventions of literary criticism train us to look for patterns, order, consistency, and to group authors under national labels. But Boyd’s thematic and stylistic eclecticism, as much as his uncertain connection to national location, makes this sort of approach difficult. This very eclecticism raises a further question: what does it mean to discuss the British novel now as a separate genre or group? Publishers and booksellers group “literary” fiction apart from “genre” works in the detective, science-fiction and romance traditions, but genre-crossing trends in recent writing—to say 88 William Boyd nothing of critical examination of this vague term “literary”— undermine the finality of these divisions on the bookshop floor. If bookshops and libraries in Scotland recognise the vitality—and viability—of the nation’s literary tradition, the rest of us are kept searching through the placidly unionist discriminations of the Library of Congress classification systems. In the libraries, if nowhere else, British fiction remains. Boyd is a rewarding writer to read and think with, then, because his novels raise questions relevant to wider trends in contemporary fiction: what are we to make of his turn to historical fiction? What are the relations between these novels’ globalised settings and their national (or, with devolution in Scotland, post-national) traditions and affiliations? What makes these “literary” fictions? What does it mean to talk about Britishness in literature in the twenty-first century? Boyd himself encourages us, in light-hearted and oblique ways, to read with these questions in mind: the first chapter of Restless (2006) announces our journey “into the heart of England.”2 Perhaps the distinction between Scottish, British, and globalised fiction is a false one. After all, as Robert Young has shown, British and English identities were, in the nineteenth century, produced as much abroad—in the settler colonies of the Empire—as they were at home, and many a Scottish writer, from Carlyle to Hume, was put in the service of imagining Britishness from Canada to New Zealand. English fiction, too, has long had an international—not to say imperial—reach, with authors such as Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh setting their fiction in distant locations and amongst foreign and bewildering events.3 What James Wood calls “the particular English inflection” of understated humour has been developed by Scottish authors among others, and so Boyd’s own blurred boundaries take up older hazy distinctions.4 His novels hint at this relation with their parade of quasi-Scots, Scottish figures and themes hovering in the background, as with Ordinary Thunderstorm’s whisky-drinking doctor, “a Scot who did not have a Scottish accent”. Characters are often quizzed about their origins, with Logan Mountstuart, narrator of Any Human Heart, quizzed if he had “any Scottish blood?” “Scots are very keen to establish this fact from the outset”. Other novels point to Scottish names (“is that Scottish?”) and Scottish

Dougal McNeill IRSS 42 (2017) 89 ancestors. Most obviously, too, Boyd’s Solo (2013), a James Bond story produced in cooperation with the Ian Fleming estate, takes up a fictional character famous, in both his literary and film manifestations, as a symbol of Britishness.5 Bond’s own ambiguities fit Boyd’s nicely: Scottish on his father’s side, as readers learn in You Only Live Twice (1964), and played to most acclaim by a Scottish actor, Sean Connery, Bond’s very Britishness is caught up with an insistent Scottish presence. Two academics writing about Bond have called him “a site for the elaboration … of a mythic conception of nationhood” and a character whose “role in organising and co-ordinating popular responses to the changing fate of the nation … has perhaps been the most vital of the diverse functions he has fulfilled.”6 It may well be, then, that, in this gesture that seems to turn from the questions of national identity most decisively—for what could be less serious than a spy thriller?—Boyd in fact produces his most sustained exploration of Britishness. Having cast doubt in his critical writing on whether “there is such a genre” as Scottish fiction, Boyd’s novels assert their connections to it on the sly.7 Slyness indicates other affiliations with this older line in Scottish fiction. Boyd has always been a fair distance from the postmodernist “historiographic metafictions” fashionable through his youth, and a fair way from their scepticism about plotting, narrative coherence and meaning-making; his own novels are much closer to “ripping yarns” than instances of “incredulity toward metanarratives.”8 For all that, however, his novels of the last decade display a very traditional enthusiasm for whimsy and play. James Bond in Solo reads Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (1948) while on his flight to Africa, drawing attention to his—and Boyd’s—links to this earlier English representation of Africa and shady business dealing. A single character—Sam M. Goodforth— appears across all Boyd’s novels as, variously, a rival novelist, a “temporary major” in the First World War, the author of The Hollow Mountain, a gun-shop owner, a medical researcher, a journalist, and a marine surveyor.9 He is, in each appearance, incidental, almost irrelevant to the plotting of each novel, and could well pass unnoticed on any first reading. His reappearance, 90 William Boyd however, links each novel together without making any explicit comment on what it is this linkage involves. Boyd enjoys the shapeless and the uncertain, having used fictionalised autobiography, in The New Confessions (1987) and fictionalised journals, in Any Human Heart (2002) to draw attention to the ways narrative form imposes order and finality on what is really “that collection of selves that form us, the individual human being … a true journal presents us with the more riotous and disorganised reality”.10 In his non-fiction Boyd has used alphabetized lists to similar effect, introducing, for example, his play Longing (2013) with an A-Z of words connected to Chekhov’s life and work. It is for the reader to make connections. This is one part canny business sense—“writers recycle avidly,” Boyd tells us; “nothing is lost”11—and one part thematic musing, a reminder of the centrality of play and mischief in the experience of art, those elements the Canadian critic Northrop Frye celebrated as drawing from the traditions of the riddle, “ciphers, acrostics, rebuses, concrete and shape poetry.”12 Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928–1960 (1998) is probably the cheekiest of Boyd’s contributions to this whimsical, humourous and mischievous tradition. Although advertising its account of “Nat Tate’s life and times” as “full of ambiguities and contention”13, Nat Tate was first published as a “straight” biography of an unjustly-forgotten American artist. An abstract expressionist who destroyed most of his work before his own suicide (and whose body was never found), Tate was introduced to the world on April Fool’s Day, 1998, when Boyd, David Bowie and other collaborators launched the “biography” with readings in New York. A week later an article in the Independent revealed the whole thing to be a hoax. Tate went on, with several other characters in his “biography” to lead a second fictional life in Any Human Heart. The narrator of that novel gets to know him when working as an art dealer in New York, and pursues an affair with Tate’s dealer. Fiction, hoaxing and double-hoaxing dance together through Boyd’s oeuvre.14 A shift in Boyd’s work over the last fifteen years, however, has seen these notes of whimsical interrogation replaced with a more self-conscious and serious treatment of “History” as theme

Dougal McNeill IRSS 42 (2017) 91 and material, in a series of what one reviewer called “moody thrillers.”15 The novels of the last decade take up Big Themes: war, revolution, terrorism (Any Human Heart), the Cambridge spies, Cold War betrayals, shifting loyalties in the Second World War (Restless), the politics of pharmaceutical big business, academic intrigue and the realities of homelessness (Ordinary Thunderstorms), the First World War and psychoanalysis (Waiting for Sunrise). Espionage, spy rings and betrayal are common components. These join in the last decade’s more general “explosion in the sales and popularity of novels set in the past,”16 to be sure, but it is not always clear what is being done with this historical material. Boyd presents a glamourous, enjoyably consumable version of the past, a kind of fictional equivalent of the heritage industry in historic homes or the vogue for shows like Downton Abbey on television. The reader realises, long before the narrator need tell her, that the man in a Vienna café in 1913 who is “in his late fifties” with “fine greying hair combed flat against his head” and a beard “completely white and trimmed with finical neatness” is Sigmund Freud.17 The “historical” in these historical novels comes with a form of narratorial heavy breathing, as when we are told of Lysander Rief, hero of Waiting for Sunrise,

drinking beer here in the middle of summer in England in 1914, he suddenly felt a stillness creep up on him as if he were suffering from a form of mental palsy—as if time had stopped and the world’s turning, also. It was a strange sensation—that he would be for ever stuck in this late June day in 1914 like a fly in amber—the past as irrelevant to him as the future18

Never such innocence again! This is not Henry James’s “palpable imaginable visitable past”19 so much as a kind of gesturing at something called History. Readers know, from countless novels, films and television serials, the story of the lead-up to war and the summer of 1914; this moment of a character reveling in their own certainty provides us with some foreshadowing while also reassuring us of our own historical literacy and sophistication. History, in Boyd’s recent fictions, is a kind of glamorous backdrop 92 William Boyd or waiting room. A great deal of drinking gets done in these novels, each sophisticated location and high-class café or hotel described, and we are allowed a touristic visit into the past. One way of placing Boyd, therefore, involves linking his turn to writing historical thrillers with wider patterns in what is happening to writing described as “literary fiction.” Boyd’s fictions assume an educated audience. Their topics draw on recent history and world events, and their epigraphs gesture at names— Hemingway, Sophocles, Henry James, Proust, Wordsworth— familiar to someone with a literary education. Their form, however, draws on the easily consumable and intellectually undemanding conventions of the thriller: there are surprising revelations and chase sequences (Waiting for Sunrise’s final revelation of the true spy and villain); climactic encounters (Ordinary Thunderstorms’ final confrontation with Big Pharma); and shock reversals and erotic betrayals (Restless’s cross-continental spy chase). Boyd’s fiction sits at the intersection of two trends in contemporary fiction. Literary reworking by authors such as Ian Rankin, Denise Mina, and Liam McIlvanney has given cultural capital and prestige to previously “popular” forms such as the historical novel, the detective novel and the thriller, dusting off from them the taint of the Large Print section and the marketplace. Meanwhile, the expansion of higher education over the past decades, combined with the exhaustion of high modernism’s project of difficult, demanding, world-changing fiction, has helped foster an audience keen to respond to the flattery of intellectual references without needing to endure their challenge. This is the era of the middlebrow, and Boyd’s fictions provide it historical novelty.20 Nowhere are the novels’ status as consumer items more apparent than in their descriptions of food. Boyd, in the 2000s, has developed a kind of Sunday supplement or in-flight magazine prose style, with descriptions of food and other consumer items forming each text’s libidinal centre. What Raphael Samuel called the “conspicuous display of good taste” replaces, in these novels, the development of an aesthetic, an outlook, a way of seeing: tell don’t show is these novels’ slogan.21 No meal goes unnarrated or undescribed, no cooking method unlisted (“red-wine vinegar, chopped shallots, black pepper and lemon juice with a roundel of

Dougal McNeill IRSS 42 (2017) 93 cold-buttered bread to follow”),22 no order uncatalogued (“malouf – stuffed cabbage rolls—followed by shish tawook—a simple chicken kebab with salty pickles”).23 Food makes otherwise buttoned-down prose break out: “the sausage is delicious: hot, shouting with pepper and garlic—and irresistible”.24 Whereas, in the usual cliché, talking about food is a substitute for talking about sex, with Boyd sex is an excuse for still more listing and detailing of memorable meals:

They both knew exactly what was going to happen later and that knowledge provided a satisfying sensual undercurrent to their conversation as they ate the meal she cooked for him—a rare sirloin steak with a tomato and shallot salad, the wine a light and fruity Chianti, with a thin slice of lemony torta della nonna to follow.25

This is prose that would not be out of place in a Harrods catalogue or one of Nigella Lawson’s collection of recipes: “a sudden need for Italian food: Italian food of a simple, honest, basic sort— insalata tricolore, pasta alle vongole, scallopine al limone, torta di nonna”.26 Some sort of an endpoint is reached in Solo when, just before the novel’s climactic scenes, a footnote is introduced to give the reader the recipe for “James Bond’s Salad Dressing.”27 Bertolt Brecht used the metaphor of “culinary theatre” to describe works he saw as offering intellectual snacks and sweets instead of challenges to their audiences. Boyd’s recent writing literalises this metaphor. Boyd’s novels flatter their readers; for all the high seriousness on display in the subject matter, the sentences themselves will never ask more of their reader than the demands of a detailed restaurant menu. These culinary blends of “literary” and “genre” fiction involve having one’s cake and eating it, setting up a character to refer to the “Zembla files” while also telling readers he was “very aware of its thriller-esque pretensions”.28 Boyd’s preference for first-person narrators and third-person narrators willing to offer something between reported thought and free indirect discourse produces, in his recent fiction, curious kinds of slackness, sentences 94 William Boyd that exist somewhere between a writer negotiating knowingly with bad writing and bad writing itself. “My God,” the narrator inflects Bond, “who could predict when your past would suddenly blunder into your life?” Another character is described as entering “the fraught and dangerous world of pure speculation”. An escape plan is described—to a character and the reader—in explicit (and textual) detail before the narrator tells us that “Lysander picked up the sub-textual message”. Clichés proliferate: “never had the word ‘bombshell’ seemed more apt”; “revenge is a dish best served cold”, “a toothless old mamy” and a “witch doctor” wait in darkest Africa.29 True to his principles of recycling, scenes, plot-lines and incidents recur across and between novels: war work spreading media misinformation in Any Human Heart and Restless, incarceration in Switzerland in Any Human Heart and Waiting for Sunrise, the Red Army Faction in Restless and Any Human Heart, explanations for betrayal in Waiting for Sunrise and Restless. Like baby-boomer rock stars touring on old material across the decades, Boyd novels revisit and rework past selves. A favoured phrase will be redeployed, a familiar message (“this complicated, difficult, mortal life we lead”)30 reused elsewhere. The vision these novels communicate is, along with the best contemporary English fiction, and in the tradition of Greene, “humane, enlightened, and morally serious.”31 It is also, along with many of his English contemporaries, quite without any sense of wider social forces, of class conflict and class inequality, of imaginative life outside of a quite remarkably provincial, and restricted, geographic and social range. Boyd is an avowed “Sloane Ranger”:

I live in Chelsea. I know the neighbouring “villages” of Fulham, South Kensington, and Knightsbridge well, very well indeed … To the north … lie places that are wholly alien and strange … Here in north London the buildings look darker, sootier, in less good repair. The streets seem more narrow, the people scruffier, the pavement littered and soiled … It is not so much that I have crossed a topographical frontier, it

Dougal McNeill IRSS 42 (2017) 95

is more of a psychological barrier that separates me from these other areas.32

Attempts to imagine himself beyond the narrow confines of upper- middle-class life are usually disastrous. Boyd has neither the political sophistication nor the creative ability to imagine class relations or lives outside of the world of wealth, and when his novels try to evoke something beyond the Chelsea of the mind they end up revealing the awkward situation of his implied reader. Part of the action of Ordinary Thunderstorms takes place on the Shaftesbury Estate, a depressed area of social deprivation. The narrator introduces a (fictional) architect and their heritage via the Estate to the reader: it is “austerely sculptural—exactly the aim and purpose that the architect, Gerald Golupin (1898-1969) had in mind as he had drawn up his visionary design for this complex of social housing.” A paragraph on the narrator will tell us that “Mhouse, of course, was thinking none of these thoughts as she plodded up the stairs to her flat”.33 But why of course? Simple snobbery may be one explanation, the poor—their lives being nasty, Brutalist, and short—not being expected to think about architectural theory. But this is undercut by the mock-catalogue detail of listing the architect’s birth and death in parentheses, making clear that the reader could not bring any of this effortlessly to mind either. The novels present a mimesis of erudition—or a simulation of the feeling of being well-read or educated (“I had been reading Taine, for some forgotten scholarly reason”)34—without the demands of actual learning or the challenge of genuine stimulation. They are consumer objects for a “post-ideological” middle class, reassurances of one’s learning and social status that will not discomfort as diversions during a flight or commute home. Is this, then, where the contemporary British wing of the Scottish novel is at? It is one destination, certainly, and an uncertainty of placing—where is the literary in British literary fiction? where is the Britishness?—plays out also in Boyd’s aversions to endings. The novels stop rather than finish, their collection of chapter-turning surprises and shock revelations having run out. Denying the satisfactions of narrative in stories made up of some of the most improbable and action-packed of narrative 96 William Boyd reversals is a stock Boydian device: “isn’t this how life turns out, more often than not? It refuses to conform to your needs—the narrative needs that you feel are essential to give rough shape to your time on this earth”.35 “The more I seemed to know,” the narrator of Waiting for Sunrise tells us, “the more clarity and certainty dimmed and faded away”.36 “As I stand here on my modest beach,” John James Todd ends The New Confessions, “waiting for the future, watching the waves roll in, I feel a strange, light-headed elation. After all, this is the time of Uncertainty and Incompleteness”.37 That ironic capitalisation offers a double distancing here, as the novel that contains Todd’s autobiography sets itself apart from more straight-faced announcements of the Age of Uncertainty. But the gap remains nonetheless. Bond, the narrator of Solo tells us, admired another character for “his futile ambitions, his sacrifice, his crazy integrity”.38 Boyd’s recent fiction wants the futility and the ambition. He writes from within a tradition of literary fiction that seems no longer certain of its place, audience, or address, but without that certainty hampering the tradition’s continuity. There is more to come. And we will be well fed—“cheese soufflé, lamb shank with pommes dauphinoises, strawberries with champagne 39 40 sorbet” —as we continue our descent.

NOTES

1 On this process see Robert Crawford’s classic Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992) and, on contemporary developments, Scott Hames, “The New Scottish Renaissance?” in Peter Boxall and Bryan Cheyette (eds.) The Oxford History of the Novel in English, vol. 7 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 2 William Boyd, Restless (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 1, hereafter abbreviated as R. For Boyd’s other novels, the following editions have been used, and quotations will appear with abbreviations as follows: The New Confessions (NC) (New York: Morrow, 1988). Blue Afternoon (BA) (London: Penguin, 1993). Nat Tate: An American Artists 1928-1960 (NT) (London: Bloomsbury, 1998). Any Human Heart (AHH) (London: Penguin, 2003). The Dream Lover: Short Stories (DL) (London:

Dougal McNeill IRSS 42 (2017) 97

Bloomsbury, 2008). Ordinary Thunderstorms (OT) (London: Bloomsbury, 2009). Waiting for Sunrise (WFS) (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). Longing (L) (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). Solo (S) (London: Jonathan Cape, 2013). Sweet Caress (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) reheats Any Human Heart’s leftovers, and is thus incidental to my argument in this essay. 3 See Robert J. C. Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008). 4 James Wood, “V.S. Pritchett and English Comedy” in Zachary Leader (ed.) On Modern British Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 9. 5 OT, 224, AHH, 117, WFS, 13, S, 61. 6 Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott, Bond and Beyond: the Political Career of a Popular Hero (New York: Methuen, 1987), 20, 28. 7 William Boyd, Bamboo: Non-Fiction 1978-2004 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005), 98. 8 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), xxiv. 9 AHH, 362, WFS, 254, R, 200, S, 222, OT, 40, NC, 154, BA, 199. 10 AHH, 7. These in turn recycle a character – Logan Mountstuart – and a form from earlier short stories, with “Extracts from the Journal of Flying Officer J” (first published in Giles Gordon, ed. Shakespearean Stories, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981) and “Hotel de Voyageurs” testing out the fictional journal and the Mountstuart character respectively. 11 DL, 5. 12 Northrop Frye, Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth and Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 124. 13 NT, 12. 14 AHH, 317. There is a further twist to the story: in 2011 a painting by Nat Tate, “Bridge 11” was sold at auction in London for over £7 000. Boyd was later revealed as the artist. See Maeve Kennedy, “Painting by mythical artist Nat Tate sells for very real £7 250 at Sotheby’s” The Guardian, 16 November 2011. 15 Edmund Gordon, “A Very Modern Man,” London Review of Books 34: 5(8 March 2012): 31. 16 Jerome de Groot, The Historical Novel (London: Routledge, 2010), 1. 17 WFS, 88. 18 WFS, 133. 98 William Boyd

19 Henry James, “Preface” to The Aspern Papers (New York Edition of the Novels of Henry James), vol. 12, 1908, x. 20 Here by all means see Gabriel Josipovici, What Ever Happened to Modernism? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 21 Quoted in Alex Callinicos, “The ‘New Middle Class’ and Socialists,” International Socialism 2: 20 (Summer 1983): 4. 22 R, 15. 23 S, 64. 24 AHH, 37. 25 S, 206. 26 OT, 3. 27 Interested readers should consult Solo, 269. The vinaigrette has amorous properties, without similarly elevating the prose: “His culinary hunger assuaged, a new one replaced it. He was hungry for Blessing, for her slim active body. Hungry for her to give him more precise instructions about what she wanted him to do to her.” (269) 28 OT, 313. 29 S, 217, S, 238, WFS, 108, R, 31, S, 213, 108, 113. 30 OT, 403. 31 Terry Eagleton, The English Novel: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 337. 32 Bamboo, 58. 33 OT, 99. 34 R, 3. 35 AHH, 295. 36 WFS, 345. 37 NC, 528. 38 S, 44. 39 OT, 141. 40 My thanks to the IRSS’s two anonymous reviewers for their insightful criticisms of an earlier, looser, version of this argument, and to James Acheson and Sarah Ross, without whom this essay would not have been written.

IRSS 42 (2017) 99

REVIEW

Philippe Laplace, ed., Environmental and Ecological Readings. Nature, Human and Post Human Dimensions in Scottish Literature & Arts (XVIII-XXI c.). Annales Littéraires de l’Université de Franche-Comté, n° 947 and Recherches Interdisciplinaires et Transculturelles, n°89. Besançon: Presses universitaires de Franche-Comté. 2015. Pp. 308. ISBN 9782848675305. €16.

The articles found in this volume engage with the work of key scholars in the field of ecopoetics and nature narrative, including Jonathan Bate (1991) and Louisa Gairn (2008). Like Gairn’s Ecology and Modern Scottish Literature, Laplace’s collection has a Scottish focus; however, through the inclusion of seventeen articles it covers a wider timeframe and range of genres, exploring how “preoccupations with nature, the environment, and the landscape are intrinsically linked to … the culture and literature of Scotland” (Laplace, 2015, 20). This collection is organized in two sections with articles presented chronologically, the first section focusing on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets, novelists, artists or travel writers, many of whom have been undervalued or neglected. The second section of the collection focuses on twentieth- and twenty- first-century writers and artists, and centers on modern and postmodern considerations. Notably, several of the authors make use of previously unpublished material to construct their arguments, providing new and engaging material to a wider audience. While this decision to structure the collection as two chronological periods may initially appear arbitrary, each section includes authors who engage with new and unfamiliar material. Essays are organized around several key themes, including the sublime and the picturesque, outsider perceptions of the Scottish Highlands and of Scotland as a whole, and the relationship between land and identity. Anne Mackim’s work highlights a change in British perceptions with the Scottish Highlands shown through early eighteenth-century travel writing, from desolate and dreary to sublime. By the late eighteenth century, Sarah Bisson 100 Review argues that Walter Scott’s work had shaped contemporary representations of Scotland, which encompassed both the sublime and the picturesque through an imposed vision of a national landscape. Daniele Berton-Charière highlights a return to earlier ambivalence, showing the paradox of the Scottish landscape as it is presented in plays by David Greig and Henry Adam, where typical pastoral depictions of Scotland are displaced by a barren set, which presents the land as barren and desolate. Several contributions, including those of Anne Mackim, Marion Amblard, and Alan Riach, engage with perceptions of the Scottish highlands, and Scotland as a nation. While Mackim’s piece engages with the sublime and the picturesque, she also argues that through the rising popularity of the British national tour the Highlands began to be presented not as dour, isolated, and hopeless, but rather as possessing a sublime beauty, Amblard discusses the shift in artistic representations of Highland landscapes created from the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries. Like Bisson, Amblard highlights the significance of Walter Scott’s novels in the creation of these sublime landscape paintings, noting that naturalism has become a dominant feature not only of representations of the Highlands, but of Scotland as a whole. Perhaps the most engaging theme with which many of the essays in this collection interact is the connection between land and identity, whether this be Gaelic, Scottish or Bilingual Identity. Christian Auer’s paper focusing on the Highland clearances highlights social and economic relationships between nature and the peoples of Scotland, and through focus on the polysemy of the word land, argues that the clearances were an attack not only on nature, but on the identity of Highland Gaelic society as well. Through examination of Christopher Whyte’s The Warlock of Strathearn, Robin M. J. Mackenzie highlights a connection between ecology, gender, sexuality and personal identity. By highlighting tension between fluid and ridged senses of self, Mackenzie argues that sensitivity and fluidity lead to an attentive reverence the natural world. Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen also focuses on personal identity, linking personal identity to national identity, and arguing that through post-human convergences of biology and technology, Brian McCabe highlights distortion of and longing for

IRSS 42 (2017) 101 stability and fixed identity. Through the instability of his own physical body, McCabe’s protagonist highlights the instability of the Scottish body politic. Through a close reading of Meg Bateman’s English poems, William Welstead examines Bateman’s position as a bilingual writer, and argues that through the lens of a fused Gaelic/English identity, the world is held in balance. Significantly many of the contributions to the collection show that environmental and ecological readings of Scotland are still ongoing, playing a large role in such issues as the recent Scottish independence referendum. Camille Manfredi highlights the significance of oil for the economic future of an independent Scotland, but notes the paradoxical environmental rhetoric that formed a key part of the Yes Scotland campaign. The decision to end the collection without a distinct and separate conclusion hints towards the ongoing debates in ecocriticism.

Mariah Hudec University of Guelph.

102 Review

REVIEW

Robert A. Dodgshon. No Stone Unturned: a History of Farming, Landscape and Environment in the Scottish Highlands and Islands. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. Pp 299. ISBN 978 1 4744 0074 9. $US 135.00.

In nine chapters, the Emeritus Gregynog Professor of Geography at Aberystwyth has developed his career-long interests in the historical and cultural geography of Highland Scotland in a well- crafted perspective that extends from earliest prehistory approximately to the First World War. Whilst the geographical focus is primarily on the western and northern highlands and the offshore islands from Islay north through the Hebrides to Shetland, data from the southern and eastern highlands is also rehearsed more selectively, especially in cases where developments here offer contrasts. If, inevitably, in light of the much fuller documentation available, evidence from more recent centuries is more fully rehearsed, Dodgshon none the less makes judicious use of information culled from field archaeology and the environmental sciences to flesh out the evolving complexities of the interplay between human settlement, land-uses and environmental change over the approximately ten millennia from the initial arrival of hunter-gatherer-fishers onwards. The outcome is a detailed and nuanced view of the changing relationships between agricultural and stock-raising possibilities, land ownership and legal dimensions, environmental variations from the local (such as the advancing waves of sand swamping croplands on Tiree) to the broad-scale (such as the lean-yield years of the 1690s), and the human population. For more recent times in particular the impacts of improved communications and access to both external markets and the destabilizing influxes of external capital are well- considered. Some elements of the story are relatively well-known in the ecological, archaeological or historical literatures, such as the spread of peatland (and the subsequent deliberate reduction of some

IRSS 42 (2017) 103 of it), the long-term decline in woodland cover (until its more recent partial recovery), the boom-and-bust of some industries (notably kelping during the Napoleonic Wars), and the varying significance of domestic and wild ruminants including goats, black cattle, Blackface and then the bigger Cheviot sheep, and finally red deer. Alongside these are set the changing fortunes of the human populations (so often encapsulated in the concept of ‘the Clearances’). The extra dimension which Dodgshon masterfully integrates into his long-term overview is the variation in the local patterning of the evidence which he is able to set against the broader, but not wholly synchronous, patterns of widespread change that are apparent across his study region. In a short review, it is impossible other than very selectively to outline some of the main currents and the key variations to which Dodgshon draws attention. Of major importance is his demonstration that the human communities represented in this north-west fringe of Europe were not the timeless prisoners of the more favourable niches within their ‘wet desert’, with their agricultural and other practices all but unchanging from those of their protohistoric forerunners; if locational preferences remain relatively fixed, institutional practices assuredly varied through time. While the farming ‘toun’ is the quintessential settlement form of the region for many centuries, Chapter 6 provides a succinct interpretative overview of the changes to them that occurred over time; and the drivers, both bottom-up (e.g. internal social conflicts) and top-down (e.g. imposed land assessments) that spurred them are elegantly summarized in Figure 6.14. The volume is generally helpfully illustrated, primarily with images of individual settlements and buildings for prehistory, but maps of settlement layouts and their associated enclosure and field systems for recent centuries are included. In some cases, however, locational information is rather spartan and keys are abbreviated, e.g. for Rosal (Fig 6.1) Arnol (Fig 8.4) or the Pairc district of Lewis (Figs 8.5-8.6), but the accessibility (free) of online resources now easily supplements and clarifies Dodgshon’s remarks, e.g. in the case of the 6 (not 12) – inch OS map for Arnol to which he refers (p. 244).1 Contrastingly, the extensive use of 104 Review unpublished archival material makes footnotes essential; but their use for published sources—some cited in full, some in abbreviated fashion and then only supplemented by a select bibliography—is incomplete and will leave some sources unfindable for the new reader. Only one typographical error of consequence was spotted: the 1882 flashpoint between crofters and the Glasgow police was at Braes, not Breas (p. 277). Such minor concerns should not be allowed to detract from the considerable significance of this major multifaceted study.

Ian Ralston Abercromby Professor of Archaeology University of Edinburgh

NOTES

1. Key free online resources are the National Library of Scotland’s georeferenced map and satellite imagery collection; and the inventory of sites and monuments (again with extensive imagery) held in the Canmore system of Historic Environment Scotland respectively http://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/ and https://www.historicenvironment.scot/archives-and- research/archives-and-collections/canmore-database/.

IRSS 42 (2017) 105

REVIEW

Jane Dawson. John Knox. New Haven: Yale, 2015. Pp. 373. ISBN: 9780300219708. $32.50 (USD).

Jane Dawson’s John Knox offers an original and interesting perspective on the most famous of Scottish reformers. It reveals a nuanced and expert understanding of this fascinating figure. In addition to building on past studies, Dawson’s narrative offers new and exciting ideas about Knox’s life that have emerged from the first new documentary evidence related to Knox to emerge since the mid-nineteenth century. Her analysis of this correspondence between Knox and the English reformer Christopher Goodman reveals a tender and lasting friendship between the two, as well as intriguing and exciting evidence that they were planning a preaching tour of Ireland in 1566. Although the tour never took place, even its possibility excites the reader, as it shows evidence of the broad demand for Knox’s preaching skills as well as his desire to bring a Reformed brand of Christianity to anyone who might lend an ear. The correspondence serves as important evidence of the personal and professional odyssey that was Knox’s life. The John Knox that is revealed in this book is certainly every bit the roaring force historians of the Scottish Reformation have come to know. He wears out his welcome in several locations; he rails against Catholics, fellow Protestants, and nearly all people who fail to see the world as he does. He holds grudges and refuses to spare the feelings of his enemies. But Dawson’s portrait moves beyond the superficial and provides a fuller picture of Knox’s sources of both darkness and light. He is shown to suffer several periods of depression and isolation brought on by his time as a galley slave and several periods in exile. In a more optimistic sense, Dawson’s portrayal also uncovers a man committed to creating and participating in an international network of Reformed believers that required forming and maintaining relationships over distance and time. He is also seen as a loving parent, a loyal friend, and a 106 Review devoted husband, relying on these relationships to see him through his darker periods. The book is impressive on many levels, but its effortless movement from descriptions of Knox’s personal life to international politics to the complexities of Reformed theology are particularly excellent. Over the course of a few pages in chapter eight Dawson first discusses Knox’s adjustment to married life as he balanced his ministerial duties with his obligations to his beloved and pregnant Marjorie. Dawson then moves on to provide a detailed analysis of Calvin’s Reformed community in Geneva, and finally describes Knox’s refutations of an Anabaptist tract on predestination. The seamless way in which Dawson approaches such a diversity of subjects is indicative of a scholar and biographer at the top of her game. It also reveals a mastery of her subject, and an understanding of how the personal lives of these so-called ‘great men’ are deeply influenced by both the women in their lives and the local and international contexts in which they operated. This book is without doubt the definitive biography of Knox. As such it will have a myriad of applications within the scholarly community and beyond, and will be valuable in both university classrooms and for those wishing to understand more about this giant of Scottish Protestantism.

Daniel MacLeod St. Paul’s College

University of Manitoba

IRSS 42 (2017) 107

REVIEW

Scott McG Wilson. The Native Woodlands of Scotland: Ecology, Conservation and Management. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. Pp. 353. ISBN: 9780748692859. $50.00 CAD.

Visible impacts of anthropogenically-driven climate and wider environmental change are evident all around us. But human agency must be understood as just one factor in a dynamic interplay of longer term atmospheric, oceanic and even tectonic changes affecting all planetary biota and better understanding is needed of how the impact of that interplay on natural ecosystems changed in scale and form over time. This volume looks at just one suite of ecosystems; the four distinct native woodland types recognised in Scotland. It provides a cool, even-handed assessment of the roles performed by human and “natural” actors in processes which have had—and continue to have—a direct effect on those ecosystems. Written ostensibly as a textbook/handbook for ecology and environmental science for students up to advanced undergraduate level, The Native Woodlands of Scotland also provides an invaluable entry-level reference point for non-science qualified environmental historians and a more general audience seeking a broad understanding of the historical development and current state of these distinctive habitats. Supplemented by a gazetteer of key sites, this volume is both a “state of the game” student text and an indispensable handbook and guide to Scotland’s still evolving but dangerously challenged native woodlands. From the perspective of the environmental historian, Scott Wilson has provided a broad outline of current understanding of Scottish woodland development from the end of the last episode of glaciation down to the present. That span—in excess of 10,000 years—has the benefit of permitting some understanding to be secured of the broad trends across the millennia and of dispelling the fallacy of popular notions of steady state conditions until the irruption of anthropogenic factors in the Mesolithic period. The downside is that to accommodate this span in a manageable text 108 Review requires a shallowness of discussion that does, in some places, become too superficial to provide any significant grasp of the complexities in the processes being reviewed. Where this becomes most evident is in the reflections on loss of TEK (traditional environmental knowledge) in respect of resource management and what this means in terms of impacts on biodiversity and the future sustainability of landscapes which have become cultural icons. What is lacking is recognition of the clear gulfs that persist between professional practice and official policy on the one hand and public perception and acceptance of the changes that will become increasingly evident in the coming decades. It is also clear to see where the academic discourse in respect of medieval population expansion and resource exploitation regimes across both uplands and lowlands, in the context of the medieval climate anomaly and the subsequent “little ice age”, that has been continuing within environmental history over the last twenty years has failed to engage with the conservation and management sectors (and vice versa). We have a far broader and deeper understanding of the human processes involved, of the cultural and socio-legal frameworks within which woodland exploitation occurred, and the responses to both anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic challenges to security of supply than the discussion in this volume suggests. The non-appearance in the reading lists of key pieces of research such as the work by Alasdair Ross on the northern Cairngorms in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries or by John Harrison on the exploitation of the natural resources of Flanders Moss from the twelfth century onwards, or by this reviewer on fuel transitions from medieval to mid-nineteenth-century Scotland, all produced in the last decade, is disappointing, especially as those regimes are described as “poorly understood”. There is now the capacity and the capability to produce better models for the ecological impact of these management regimes as they evolved in response to changing environmental conditions. Productive dialogue—and inter- disciplinary research projects—is needed between environmental historians and ecologists to broaden understanding of the interaction of human and wider environmental processes in creating the landscapes we value so much today. It is hugely encouraging to

IRSS 42 (2017) 109 see where convergence between disciplines is possible and happening. The contribution that environmental history can make to the debate that is still needed to win over public acceptance of some of the profound changes to come is huge. This volume shows where that dialogue can and should be happening now to both frame and better-inform public discourse on the future for Scotland’s woodlands.

Richard D. Oram University of Stirling

110 Review

REVIEW

Ian A. Olson. Bludie Harlaw: Realities, Myths, Ballads. Edinburgh: John Donald, 2014. Pp. 174. ISBN 978-1-906566-76-0. £14.99.

The Battle of Harlaw, fought between Donald Lord of the Isles and Alexander Earl of Mar on 24 July 1411 over the succession of the Earldom of Ross, had no decisive winner. The only certain outcome was that Donald failed to obtain the Earldom of Ross. The battle is steeped in myth and often depicted in highly romanticized terms. In this work, Ian Olson set out to classify and clarify the resulting accounts of the battle and later histories. He analyses contemporary records from chroniclers, near contemporary and later ballads, and histories dating from around 300 years after the battle. Olson provides transcriptions and translations for all of the source material discussed. Olson lays out the general myths that surround the battle for exploration later in the book, including: who actually won; the role of Sir Alexander Irvine and his many battle stories in later histories; and post-Jacobite historians’ notions that the battle was between Celt and Saxon for rule of Scotland, and that Donald invaded mainland Scotland for more than the Earldom of Ross. The work has a bit of a shaky start with excessive direct quoting, and a few incorrect historical facts, but the core substance of the book is well done. Olson presents the accounts of the Battle of Harlaw beginning with early “Highland” accounts and proceeding to early Lowland accounts, mainly chronicles. The chronicles are compared and contrasted for their content, likely places of source borrowing, and where the accounts build on one another. Olson provides excerpts in their entirety when possible, and brief backgrounds of the creation process when known. He highlights where each account adds new information and created a very helpful table (pp. 29-30) to illustrate which contemporary sources contributed different parts of the story that served as the foundation for later accounts of the battle. Olson demonstrates well how the

IRSS 42 (2017) 111 information in later sources builds upon the scanty information available in the early sources. One of the unique aspects of this work is the incorporation of ballads as sources for history. Olson treats the ballads discussed with the appropriate care to separate fact from fiction. For instance, he concludes that when the more fanciful portions are omitted, “The Ramsay Ballad” (c. 1530-1548) likely drew heavily on the Scots translation of Boece’s chronicle due to similarities in content and omissions, and that the author of the “Battle of Harlaw” (c. 1780s) was unaware of any of the medieval chroniclers given that ballad’s wild inaccuracies (however, the “Battle of Harlaw” does provide insight into the Jacobite rendering of the battle). Olson details many other accounts of the battle including family histories such as that of MacDonalds, descriptions in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century histories of Scotland, and literary representations like that of Sir Walter Scott. For the many accounts, Olson highlights differences and tries to find the roots of their representations, showing the similarities and contextualizing each account in its own time period. The presentation of the sources for the history of the Battle of Harlaw is impressively done. Bludie Harlaw attempts to clarify and find the roots of common myths about Harlaw rather than present many hard conclusions about the battle itself. For example, rather than reach a conclusion on the validity of the Alexander Irvine stories, Olson recaps the stories and gives a timeline to their appearance allowing the reader to see how the myth arose well after the writing of the contemporary sources. Olson does provide some concrete conclusions, such as disproving the myth that the battle pitted Celt against Saxon. Olson definitively demonstrates how this notion was developed after the Jacobite risings, and that contemporary chroniclers viewed the battle more as a family feud between the Lord of the Isles and the Albany Stewarts. Olson ends his work with a brief discussion of whether or not Donald Lord of the Isles submitted to the Duke of Albany, and why he invaded mainland Scotland in 1411. In doing this, he places the battle in the wider context of Scottish history and attempts to discuss whether this battle was a clash between barbarism and 112 Review civilization, which seems like a rehashing of the Celt-versus-Saxon discussion. Overall, Olson presents the evidence and accounts of the Battle of Harlaw admirably with translations and effective analyses. The historical background and discussion of the myths leaves a bit to be desired, as parts are redundant in places, and some sentences and ideas are repeated word for word. This book is certainly a good starting place for a reintroduction or re-evaluation of the Battle of Harlaw and its place in Scottish history and literature, and paves the way for further research.

Shayna Devlin University of Guelph

IRSS 42 (2017) 113

REVIEW

Rebecca Lenihan. From Alba to Aotearoa: Profiling New Zealand’s Scots migrants 1840-1920. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2015. Pp. 320. ISBN 978-1-877578-79-3. NZD$45.

Whoever it was who decided that New Zealand’s pre-1966 census forms should be destroyed owes historians a huge apology. The consequent impoverishment of source data for detailed studies of New Zealand in the century following the first census in 1851 seriously limits our understanding of European migration and settlement in that period. It means that building a solid statistical picture of discrete groups, such as the Scots, requires scratching around among census substitutes that simply cannot support the fine-grained analysis possible in other destination countries for the Scottish diaspora. Those limitations are one of the key takeaways from Rebecca Lenihan’s impressive effort to profile New Zealand’s founding generations of Scottish immigrants.

This book is another welcome contribution to Scottish studies with its genesis in Brad Patterson’s late lamented Irish-Scottish Studies programme at Victoria University’s Stout Centre. As well as running its marvellous biennial conferences, the programme also produced three doctoral theses. This is the second of them to be published (the first to appear was Tanja Bueltmann’s Scottish Ethnicity and the Making of New Zealand Society, 1850 to 1930 in 2011). Expanding on her two chapters in a previously published survey volume from the Scottish Migration to New Zealand project (Brad Patterson, Tom Brooking, and Jim McAloon, Unpacking the Kists: The Scots in New Zealand. McGill-Queen’s University Press/Otago University Press, 2013), Lenihan here takes “previous findings regarding the characteristics of New Zealand’s migrant Scots considerably further than earlier studies, using quantitative and qualitative sources to present a fuller and more detailed profile” (p.179).

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Her efforts, however, are seriously constrained by the nature of the sources. In the absence of census records and similar primary sources that “are either non-existent or of limited availability to New Zealand historians” (p.26) two alternative datasets have been used. The first is based on a register of Scottish immigrants prior to January 1921 created by the New Zealand Society of Genealogists while the second is a sub-sample of Scottish-born entries from the extensive sampling of post-1876 death certificates collated by Jock Phillips and Terry Hearn for their Peopling of New Zealand project. Both sources have clearly identified strengths and weaknesses but cross-checking them in a comparative way corrects inherent defects in each since “both sets of data are significantly biased, albeit in different ways” (p.112).

Data mining like this must be a thankless task, involving enormous efforts for relatively modest returns. The analysis of Scottish distribution around New Zealand in chapter two, for example, largely serves to confirm received wisdom: “The stereotype of Otago/Southland and Waipu as the Scottish settlements of New Zealand is based upon irrefutable fact” (p.91). It also provides the necessary corrective that Scottish settlement was also spread across the country, with a proportionate cross-section of the Scottish population reaching every major province in New Zealand. The colony was thus both Belich’s neo-Scotland, with a greater proportion of Scots than any other diasporic destination, and one with a distinctively Scottish heartland in Otago and Southland alongside almost nationwide dispersal in a pattern uniquely representative of the Scottish homeland.

Occasionally however, closer analysis of particular migrant attributes founders on the rock of inadequate sample sizes. Slicing and dicing the numbers can also miss significant groupings entirely when aspects of the datasets do not quite align with reality on the ground. Substantial Scottish communities in rural areas between Wanganui and Wellington, for example, “do not readily appear in statistical analyses” (p.84) and yet Lenihan’s account of these groups is one of the most engaging parts of the book, enriched by genealogical data beyond the raw numbers. It provides “the greater

IRSS 42 (2017) 115 understanding of the settlement patterns attainable when analysis moves beyond statistical evidence” (p. 85).

The most notable absence from Lenihan’s study is any substantive engagement with Scottish religious identity. This is inevitable given the absence of information on religious affiliation in any meaningful way from her datasets but it is a serious lack. I would echo her conclusion that “religion is an aspect of the New Zealand Scots migrant experience that calls for much deeper investigation” (p.30-31). It is surely past time for us to have Scottish Presbyterian equivalents to Lyndon Fraser’s benchmark studies of Irish Catholic community formation in Christchurch and on the West Coast (To Tara via Holyhead: Irish Catholic Immigrants in Nineteenth- Century Christchurch [1997] and Castles of Gold: a History of New Zealand’s West Coast Irish [2007]). Until such studies appear, Lenihan’s careful spadework provides a robust quantitative analysis of New Zealand Scots that will be indispensable to any discussion of their characteristics, religion excepted.

Seán Brosnahan Toitu Otago Settlers Museum, Dunedin

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REVIEW

Brian Bonnyman, The Third Duke of Buccleuch and Adam Smith: Estate Management and Improvement in Enlightenment Scotland. Scottish Historical Review Monograph Series, vol. 23. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Pp. vi-x, 1-211. ISBN: 9780748642007. GBP £45.

This book is a welcome addition to the scholarship on both the Scottish Enlightenment and eighteenth-century Scottish studies. It makes a number of important contributions to our understanding of the period. The book’s strength lies in its melding of biography, intellectual history, and social and economic history utilised to address a number of key issues in the field. Bonnyman’s approach allows him to explore the life of one of the central aristocratic and political figures of the period, his close relationship with one of the great philosophers of the period, and the role that both had in the agricultural revolution; the advancement of the project of improvement; and the debate about defence and the militia which were dominant themes in the social and economic life of Enlightenment Scotland. Bonnyman’s contribution to the longstanding debate on the nature of agricultural improvement is based on scrupulous scholarship of the Buccleuch family records and a series of detailed case studies regarding the implementation of improvements to the vast Buccleuch estates stretching across the border country. Bonnyman views these improvements on the Buccleuch estates as a project directed from above, motivated by the Duke’s economic interest, but more importantly, a commitment to a patriotic duty of improvement. Case studies focusing on the development of the Buccleuch estate’s arable and sheep farms accentuate reforms made to tenure, the drive to abolish entail, to enclose and improve land and to provide roads, bridges and new settlements. All of these are familiar activities from studies of the general phenomenon by Smout, Devine and others. Bonnyman’s account of improvement

IRSS 42 (2017) 117 from above, however, stresses the Duke’s motivation and concern for those who would be affected by his reforms (p. 92). Bonnyman’s research on the Buccleuch archives also allows historians to understand how the various estate administrators of the time debated how best to improve the estate’s management. The account of letters and arguments between William and Adam Ogilvie, John Davidson, and William Keir indicate the seriousness and care with which the projects were undertaken. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this is how Bonnyman brings out Keir’s scientific and evidence-based approach when assembling evidence over fifteen years to support the case for rent equalisation over the Duke’s sheep farms (p. 124- 9). This is an example, as Bonnyman says, of the Scottish Enlightenment having a direct impact on the society of rural Scotland (p. 8). Buccleuch himself is a relatively under explored figure in Scottish history. The biographical study that accompanies Bonnyman’s narrative on improvement creates a better picture of a figure who is often tangentially mentioned but rarely brought to life in any detail. Chapter 6 provides a stimulating discussion of the Duke’s relationship with his neighbour Henry Dundas and the apparently symbiotic relationship that existed in the background of Dundas’s long domination of Scottish politics. It has been a matter of some speculation as to why the Duke allowed Dundas to control the politics of the time, but Bonnyman provides a convincing account of Adam Smith’s influence on the young Duke, which goes some way beyond the view that Buccleuch’s retiring personality drove the apparent reversal of status. Over two chapters on the Duke’s education and early maturity, the book examines the close relationship between Smith and his student. Bonnyman shows how Smith was carefully selected by Charles Townshend to provide Buccleuch with an education fit for a “grounded politician” (p. 43). Townshend no doubt believed that Buccleuch would, in time, take his place as a major statesman. As Bonnyman demonstrates by drawing on Smith’s own writings about the nobility and the nature of eighteenth-century politics, Smith taught Buccleuch a particular style of politics that was dutiful, yet modest and local in its scope, and focussed on Scotland. 118 Review

On a more specific level, Bonnyman also illustrates how Smith’s activities on the Duke’s behalf align with arguments that appear in the Wealth of Nations: both in spirit, in terms of the opposition to entail, and as evidence, in connection with Smith’s advice to the Duke following the crash of the Ayr Bank. The passages on Buccleuch and Smith are generally excellent, and Bonnyman’s comparison of Keir’s Smithian theory of estate management and Smith’s own theory of economic development (p.130) nicely indicate how deeply the writings of the Scottish Enlightenment permeated the actions of grassroots reformers.

Craig Smith University of Glasgow

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REVIEW

Iain A. MacInnes, Scotland’s Second War of Independence 1332- 1357. Warfare in History. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2016. Pp. xiv and 275. ISBN 978-1-78327-144-3. £60.00.

Via the fourteenth-century account of John Barbour, Geoffrey Barrow’s classic study and a plethora of recent books on Bannockburn, the career of Robert Bruce is the best-known period of medieval Scottish history. However, within a few years of his death, Robert’s achievements seemed to have been reversed. A new round of wars began in 1332 and brought the prospect of renewed domination by the English crown. Iain MacInnes is right to point out that this struggle, which seems to have acquired nowadays the unfortunate title of the “Second War of Independence”, was as serious and sustained as the earlier conflict and has suffered from relative scholarly neglect. It is relative neglect. Since the 1960s the period has become much better known and understood through works by both English and Scottish historians. Nevertheless, this new volume is a welcome addition to a, still-small, body of material. MacInnes’s work is unabashedly a history of the warfare of this period. His chronological account of the period, entitled “Anglo-Scottish relations”, limits these relations to military conflict. Subsequent chapters deal with military organisation, the conduct of war and perceptions of warfare. A focus on the means of war is fine, but the ends need also to be considered. In a war fought to secure the submission of Scots to Bruce or Balliol and Plantagenet kings, the timing and terms of surrender agreements (like those made in 1335 and 1346) provide a crucial indicator of motivations and the impact of military events. The attempt by Edward III to achieve his goals through a negotiated agreement with the captive David II had a major effect in reducing the intensity of conflict in the early 1350s (and perhaps encouraging internal Scottish conflict). Although Michael Penman has looked at such issues in depth, their absence here makes the account of the 120 Review conflict seem rather one-dimensional. The same approach defines the chapter on Dramatis Personae. This studies the careers of a large group of nobles who supported David Bruce. The breadth of this group is interesting but they are discussed solely with regard to their military activities. However, as much recent work has stressed, for nobles like Robert Stewart and William Douglas of Liddesdale, war against the English cannot be neatly separated from their roles within Scottish political life. In terms of warfare, MacInnes argues that too much emphasis has been placed on “localised struggles” by nobles who sought to carve out “their own area of local influence” (p. 5). He may have a point on this, though the suggestion that the “logical conclusion” of this approach is that “the Bruce Scottish war effort (lacked) … any co-ordinated action” (p.5) is an Aunt Sally which no-one has really suggested. The chapter on “The Organisation of War” stresses the continuity of military practice in the summoning of the Scottish army of unpaid freemen and knightly tenants. However evidence for recruitment and service from within this period is hard to find and full armies may have been assembled relatively infrequently (perhaps only in 1332, 1333, 1339 and 1346). This topic has been dogged by the lack of record material for the crucial periods of the war, in the mid-1330s and from 1346 to 1357. By using evidence from outside these eras, MacInnes adds to our understanding of the organisation of Scottish armies but, as he recognises, except for a few major campaigns, “armies were of a far smaller scale” (p. 79). Such smaller armies, like that at Culblean, were composed of “retinues”, a term which leads us back to questions of private lordship. While dependence on such armed followings is not the same as arguing that there was no central military effort, it again raises questions about shifting political and social relationships and the link between government, war and lordship. As the above demonstrates, the study of this period is shaped by the limitations of the Scottish sources. And yet, the statement on page one of the book that the “contemporary Scottish chroniclers … allowed the Bruce victories and the romance of the war fought between 1296 and 1328 to overshadow the history of the years that followed” is not really accurate. The full accounts of

IRSS 42 (2017) 121 the period, in the chronicles of Walter Bower and Andrew Wyntoun, drew on a long, chivalric narrative from the later fourteenth century whose focus and tone suggest a similar approach to Barbour’s Bruce. This so-called “anonymous” chronicle provides MacInnes with much material for his discussions of chivalry and military behaviour but its character and close identification with particular noble families (as demonstrated by Steve Boardman) are not given sufficient consideration. It is an account of the war which demonstrates that such a conflict involved complex loyalties and left a complicated legacy. This book might do more to represent these complications but is, nevertheless, a valuable addition to our understanding of the period.

Michael H. Brown University of St Andrews

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THE FRANK WATSON PRIZE IN SCOTTISH HISTORY

The Frank Watson Book Prize will be awarded in 2019 for the best monograph and/or original work on Scottish History published in 2015 or 2016.

The Prize consists of a cash award, an invitation to present a public lecture, and permission to advertise success in the competition.

Authors, publishers, or other sponsors should submit three copies of books for consideration by 14 February 2019 to:

The Director Centre for Scottish Studies Department of History University of Guelph Guelph, ON, Canada N1G 2W1

Email: [email protected]