by Marc Morris
Walter Scott is rightly revered as Scotland’s most famous literary son. Born in 1771, he overcame a host of personal misfortunes (polio, insolvency and romantic rejection among them) to become the most prolific and popular writer of his age. Esteemed in his own day (he was created a baronet in 1820), he was commemorated after his death by the great monument that still stands on Prince’s Street in his home town of Edinburgh. As a writer, his speciality was making history dramatic. As well as a clutch of historical novels, he also wrote a popular history of Scotland entitled Tales of a Grandfather. Like any granddad trying to hold the attention of his young audience, Scott packed his history with lots of exciting detail: dramatic reported speech, feats of derring-do, and struggles against impossible odds. The only drawback was that much of this detail was made up. To be fair to Scott, this was not entirely his fault; for the most part, he was just skilfully reworking tales that had been in circulation for centuries. Most of them were first told in the sixteenth century, by writers with very definite political agendas, who had good reason to pour scorn on the rulers of the not-too-distant past. Walter Scott’s unique contribution was to take these biased histories and make them digestible, memorable and hugely popular. Countless editions of the Tales were churned out, including specially abridged versions for use in schools. Just as for generations of English people Shakespeare was the only history they ever read, so Walter Scott provided Scotland with a gripping and dramatic version of its medieval and early modern past. Neither author, however, got even remotely close to what had really happened.
So how can we find out ‘what really happened’? The problem facing historians of late medieval Scotland is the appalling state of contemporary written evidence. For Walter Scott, the lack of chronicle material was in itself sufficient proof of his basic point: ‘Everybody was too busy fighting to write anything down’, he reasoned. There is, however, enough evidence to nip the more outrageous myths in the bud. Take, for example, the struggle between James II and the Black Douglases. Walter Scott would have us believe that the Douglases at one point raised forty thousand men against the king; the contemporary Auchinleck chronicle puts the size of the earl’s force at Stirling at just six hundred. Such information has led to a drastically revised picture of the realities of power in late medieval Scotland. The Walter Scott version suggests a king in danger of being eclipsed by his turbulent nobility. The reality was a king who, in spite of his violent and plainly unjust methods, enjoyed wide-ranging support from the political community as he set out to destroy one of his great noble families. But kings teetering on the edge of destruction make for more gripping reading than kings doing just fine. Grisly stories always make the front pages and help keep the grandchildren quiet. The reality of the matter was that the Stewart kings worked in partnership with their nobles in the business of governing Scotland.
Indeed, the kings of Scotland would have been hard pushed to rule in any other way. To a large degree, the extent of their power was limited by the Scottish landscape. A country crossed with mountains and lochs is far harder to govern directly than a land of rolling hills and fields. Communication and travel was arduous, not just for the king and his armies but also for his ministers. Even the most energetic monarchs found it difficult to make their presence felt across the kingdom. In addition, Scottish kings had no regular tax base; on the rare occasions that they did try to mulct their subjects, they encountered hostility. As a result, despite their deepest desires to cut a dash on the European stage, the Stewarts were poor cousins in the international family of princes. To take an obvious example, the kings of England in the fifteenth century could count on at least £50,000 a year from taxes and customs. A Stewart king would count himself extremely lucky if he managed to raise a tenth of this sum.
So, geography and poverty limited the extent of the Stewarts’ power. It obliged them to work with their nobles, not against them. It meant that they had to rule through consensus and co-operation, and accept the fact that large chunks of their authority had to be delegated for others to exercise.
Nowhere was this more true than on the northern and western fringes of the kingdom – the point where the lowlands met the highlands. Nowadays, of course, the highlands provide the corporate identity for all of Scotland: the image of the tartan-clad clansman is the predominant motif of the Scottish heritage industry. It will hardly come as ground-breaking news that this is invented history – surely everyone now knows that the modern kilt was invented by a nineteenth-century factory owner? The Heritage Highlands are almost entirely the work of nineteenth-century enthusiasts, and once again the chief culprit is Walter Scott. Through his romantic novels (especially Rob Roy), and also in his other capacities (he was, for example, Master of Ceremonies during the royal visit of George IV to Edinburgh, an occasion which demanded the rapid invention of a lot of ‘traditional’ festivities and costumes), Scott helped to devise and perpetuate the image of the highlander as a ‘noble savage’. Under the weight of these fantasies, the true identity of the medieval highlands was buried.
There is, however, more than enough evidence to resurrect the real highlanders of the late Middle Ages. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, power in the north and west of Scotland rested with the Lords of the Isles – the Clan MacDonald. They governed these areas as independent rulers in all but name, occasionally paying lip-service to the Stewart kings. Descended from ancient Gaelic and Scandinavian tribes, their power was on the increase from the middle of the fourteenth century. At the height of their power in the fifteenth century, they could muster an army of ten thousand men.
There was much more to these clans, however, than just fighting, as even a cursory examination of their culture will reveal. The extent of their literacy can be appreciated by the large number of written documents that have survived, drawn up in both Gaelic and Latin. The men of the Isles used their great galley-ships more often for trading, especially with their Gaelic relatives in Ireland, than they did for raiding. Highland society took unchecked violence and disorder seriously, and attempted to combat it through a network of local courts. In other words, the Lords of the Isles in the fifteenth century had a reputation for good government.
‘In thair time,’ wrote one sixteenth-century Scottish historian, ‘thair was great peace and welth in the Iles throw the ministration of justice.’
The men and women of the Isles were not savages, but rather the eventual losers in a clash of cultures – a clash that had been on the cards for some time. By the end of the fourteenth century, lowland chronicler John of Fordun acknowledged the culture gap when he described the northerners as ‘wild Scots’.
The highlanders, for their part, had come to regard their southern neighbours as weak and effeminate, and hardly worth taking seriously. They had, for example, started to drink a rather effete new draught called ‘whisky’, rather than drinking red wine like real men. But despite occasionally trading punches, the gloves only really came off at the end of the fifteenth century. The seeds of trouble were sown in 1462, when the Lord of the Isles, John MacDonald, entered into a secret treaty with the exiled Earl of Douglas and the King of England – an agreement in which they conspired to carve up the kingdom of Scotland between them.
Although it came to nothing, King James III took a very dim view of the plan when it came to light in 1475. He charged MacDonald with treason, confiscated his properties on the Scottish mainland, and compelled him to acknowledge his status as a vassal. John himself proved willing to submit, but the rest of the Clan MacDonald, and in particular John’s son Angus, resented both the territorial losses and the humiliation. For the next twenty years the Isles were divided by this bitter internal dispute, and the struggle left them fatally weakened. In 1490, shortly after defeating his father in battle, Angus was murdered. Three years later, the king of Scots intervened and imposed his authority. The days of the Lords of the Isles, he declared, were over – all their lands and power were forfeit to the Scottish Crown.
The king
in question was James IV, who was rather a good king. Although apparently unpleasant in his youth, he matured into a highly capable ruler, a man who understood the realities of power in Scotland and knew how to work the system to his best advantage. More than competent as a military leader, and highly assiduous when it came to travelling his realm and dishing out justice, James IV’s real strength lay in his ability to delegate power to the right people. His decision in 1493 to intervene in the Isles was his first political act as an adult, but he was already old enough to appreciate that he would need plenty of help in enforcing the confiscation of the lordship. Even his less capable ancestors had encouraged their lowland nobles to build castles along the highland-lowland divide, entrusting them to bring order to the region.
It was under James IV, however, that the greatest amount of castle-building took place, as Crown and nobility worked together to tackle the problem of reducing the North-West to obedience. The major beneficiaries of this joint-stock enterprise were the Gordon family, earls of Huntly, and the Campbells, earls of Argyll. However, few of the castles built by these men survive today; in fact, the best architectural example of the collaboration between the Scottish Crown and its aristocracy was provided by someone a little more lowly.
Castle Urquhart is one of the most dramatically sited buildings in Scotland. It stands on a rocky spur on the shores of Loch Ness. The site has been fortified since ancient times, but the first castle was built to an enclosure design in the thirteenth century. Because of its position on the highland-lowland fault-line, control of Urquhart was long contested by the Stewart kings and the Lords of the Isles, and the castle was taken and retaken several times by both sides during the fifteenth century. Following the forfeiture of 1493, however, James IV was determined to hold on to it. And so, paradoxically, he gave it to someone else – a minor nobleman called John Grant of Freuchie.
The king’s gift of Urquhart to John Grant in 1509 was a big thank you for more than twenty years of loyal service to the Crown. It made permanent an arrangement that had existed since the last years of the fifteenth century, under which the Grants had held the castle on a series of temporary leases. Nevertheless, the perpetual custody of a former royal castle was a terrific prize, and as such it came with several conditions attached. In return for holding Urquhart in perpetuity, the Grants were obliged to keep the castle in good repair, and bound to restore the damaged buildings to their former glory. According to the text of the charter that confirmed the king’s gift, the Grants were ‘to construct within the castle a hall, chamber and kitchen, with all the requisite offices, such as a pantry, bakehouse, brewhouse, oxhouse, kiln and dovecote’.
Most importantly, the king wanted them to construct a tower house on the site. They were ‘to repair or build at the castle a tower, with an outwork or rampart of stone and lime, for protecting the lands and the people from the inroads of thieves and wrong-doers’.
The line about thieves and wrongdoers is the real catch, and goes to show that there is no such thing as a free castle. The king could have got anyone to agree to rebuild Urquhart had it not been located on the fringes of hostile territory; the real job was going to be holding on to the castle in the face of attacks from the disinherited and disgruntled Clan MacDonald. Unsurprisingly, the Lords of the Isles did not take too kindly to being told that their authority was forfeit. In the fifty years after 1493 they endeavoured to win it back, making frequent raids on the mainland, and often sweeping up the Great Glen to try and reclaim Urquhart. On All Saints Day 1513, just four years after John Grant took ‘permanent’ custody, they succeeded. The Grant family were driven out of the castle, and were unable to return for a full three years. When John Grant later listed his losses before the king’s council, it was clear that the clansmen had taken everything but the kitchen sink. Pots, pans, kettles, beds, sheets, blankets and pillows had all been carried away as booty. All the castle’s stores of fish, bread, ale, cheese and butter had been similarly confiscated or consumed. Moreover, the lands around the castle had been completely devastated; three hundred cows and a thousand sheep had been comprehensively rustled. Altogether, John Grant estimated his losses at over £2,000.
Small wonder, then, that the Grant family, when they eventually got a moment’s peace, built one of the more defensible tower houses of the sixteenth century. Although it is now very ruinous, having suffered at the hands of a great storm in the eighteenth century, the Grant Tower still exhibits certain features of real warlike intent. The machicolations around the top of the castle are, for the most part, purely decorative (there are no holes), and may in fact date to a later rebuilding. Over both the entrances, however, they suddenly get serious, standing discreetly but distinctly proud of the wall. Equally subtle but no less murderous in intent are the pistol holes secreted under most of the windowsills. It should also be remembered that, in addition to the tower, the Grant family rebuilt the rest of the castle, as the conditions of their tenure demanded. The strength of the restored fortifications indicate that, come what may, they were determined to cling on tight to the castle the king had given them. And so they did. In spite of repeated attacks, it was not until 1911 that the family finally surrendered their castle, this time into the friendly arms of the state.
John Grant of Freuchie was favoured in 1509 in the expectation that he would defend the area around Urquhart from attack. His role, however, was not simply a military one. He was also expected to govern the region in peacetime, and to this end he was entrusted with extensive police powers. This hardly made him exceptional – even a good, energetic king like James IV, who hardly stopped touring his country to hear court cases, was only able to exercise a loose, supervisory jurisdiction over his kingdom. Most of the decisions and judgements that affected people’s everyday lives were in the hands of men like John Grant.
People who fell foul of the law in John Grant of Freuchie’s neighbourhood could expect to end up in the prison at castle Urquhart. Cold, dank and windowless, its facilities (or lack of them) are typical of castle prisons at the time. Apparently the long narrow cell once had a latrine chute at one end, which must been a source of some consolation to both gaoled and gaoler. Because Urquhart is an older castle and had its tower house added later, the prison is situated in the old thirteenth-century gatehouse. With tower houses built from scratch, it was more common for prisoners to be kept in the basement of the tower itself, as was the case at Threave and Borthwick. Prisons in towers like this were, quite literally, pits. Accessible only from a hatch above, they lacked even the basic sanitary facilities once on offer at Urquhart. The only solace for a detainee in such circumstances was that his or her incarceration would probably not last long: days or even weeks, but probably not years. Imprisonment in the Middle Ages was rarely used as a form of punishment. Rather, a prison was used like a cell in a police station or a remand centre – somewhere to hold the accused until it was time to go to court.
Court was never very for away – sometimes just a walk upstairs. At Urquhart it was a short distance across the courtyard to the castle’s great hall. Today little remains of this; only low ruins of walls and cellarage are now visible, but in its day it would have been an all-purpose room, used for public business as well as for dining and entertainment. When occasion demanded, it would also have served as a courtroom for John Grant. Lords in England and Wales would use their castle halls in much the same way, but there was a big difference in the powers they possessed. South of the border, the jurisdiction of a local lord in his manor court would only extend to minor matters – drunkenness, brawling and so on. Everything else was the responsibility and preserve of the king, and lords who exceeded their remit were in turn punished severely. In Scotland, the opposite was true. Even at the lowest level of the baron’s court, lords had the right to fine, mutilate and even execute criminals. An English lord could have you clapped in the stocks, but John Grant of Freuchie could send you to the gallows.
John Grant’s powers over the life and death of offe
nders in his locale may seem remarkable, but they are far from being the most startling aspect of justice in his day. Beyond the court and prison lay another route, at once more ancient and more commonplace: the blood feud. The word itself conjures up the worst images of medieval Scottish society – the bloody feuding of Walter Scott legend: marauding clansmen armed with claymores, sweeping down from the hills and laying waste to villages; rival families slugging it out for generations… an endless cycle of mindless violence. Like boisterous schoolboys left to play unsupervised, the turbulent nobles of Scotland apparently knew no better.
It would be silly to pretend that there is not some truth in this. Fighting between clans could indeed be drawn out and bloody. The Grants of Freuchie had their fair share of scraps with their neighbours, the Farquharsons; they would frequently make off with each others’ cattle or grain, and raids could end in mutilation and murder. Such a view of feuding, however, gives only half the picture. Blood feuds could also be a way of limiting violence and ensuring peace in a society where the power of the state was weak. The documentary record reveals that individuals and communities would go to extraordinary lengths to restore order when the peace was broken. In October 1527, for example, John Grant of Freuchie made his last datable appearance in a written agreement with the Farquharsons. As chief of the Grants, and accompanied by his sons and other leading members of the clan, he met with Finlay Farquharson and family, his former enemies. Both sides had come together to lay down their weapons and put aside their differences.
‘Deploring of the taking ill, and the cutting off, and the plundering,’ the document began, and went on to say that both sides desired ‘so far as human weakness can, to redeem, satisfy and amend the disgraceful crimes towards God and each other.’
