Scotland the Brief

Part 1: The Community of the Realm
2 A Kingdom of five Peoples

What succeeded it in the Scottish lordships north of the Wall wasnt the so-called Dark Ages but an astonishing creative output, which reached its climax in the seventh century in the illuminated books of Kells and Durrow, and the ritual crosses of Celtic Christianity. The Romano-Christian order was pressed by the Saxons to the islands and mountains of the north and west, in the period of St Ninian and St Patrick and St Mungo (mythic figures based on the activity of real priests, travelling between now-isolated Christian communities). Then, using the sea and rivers, the Celtic church undertook energetic missionary activity which covered and converted much of Western Europe: ending up in Würzburg in Germany, St Gallen in Switzerland, Bobbio in Italy.

This was a distinctive social order: its members ranged from scholarly or contemplative monks to churchmen-diplomats politically engaged among the clans and small kingdoms. The Irish warrior-chief Columba of the Ui Neil (521-97) turned holy man and established his monastic enclosure on the island of Iona in Dal Riata, later bringing the Pictish kingdom to the east, centred on Inverness, into the Christian sway. His biographer Adamnan publicised pilgrim travel to the Holy Land and established a principle of consideration for civilians in time of war: a first step in international law. This success, based on the sea-lanes and the wood-framed, skin-clad galley (rather like the Irish curragh) ended with the creation under Kenneth mac Alpin of a unified kingdom of the Picts and Scots, around 850. But another people-movement from the east, the assault of the Northmen, began by the end of the eighth century.

The Northmen Vikings was a later term in their hydrodynamic longships, swift under sail or oar, wooden clinker planking secured by iron nails, worked as great a revolution in Europe as Moslem cavalry did at the same time with their thoroughbred horses. Their initial raids were brutal thievery From the fury of the Northmen, Lord God deliver us! but were soon followed by trade and religious conversion, and a powerful elite rule ranging from northern France to Sicily and Russia. They settled in Orkney and Shetland and down the western seaboard from Stornoway to Dublin. This became a junction for further colonies in the Faroes and Greenland.

The outcome of this period was remarkable: the creation in Scotland of a political structure that stretched across five ethnic groups Scots, Picts, Britons, Inglis and Norse, and held them in some sort of unity. This was unique in early medieval Europe , and its imperial pretension was apparent in the names David (Israel) Constantine (Rome), Alexander (Greece), Robert (Sicily) the Scots kings gave themselves. The way they were elected was less inspirational. Power rested with great regional magnates, the Mormaers or Thanes, and the general practice was a short sharp war which established the best-qualified: the sort of situation William Shakespeare borrowed from the chronicler Andrew of Wyntoun for his Macbeth (1604).

The real Macbeth seems to have been a progressive ruler by the standards of the time, and the first Scots king to visit Rome. In 1057 he was defeated and killed by Malcolm III Canmore, who had married the Saxon princess Margaret. Shortly afterwards, in 1066, the Saxon kingdom of England ended at the Battle of Hastings, and energetic campaigns by William the Bastard established Norman rule as far as the Tyne.