Note I. p. . The Cession of Lothian

The question with regard to Lothian is briefly this. Was the cession of that part of Northumberland to the Scottish crown a grant from Eadgar to his faithful vassal Kenneth? Or was the district wrung by Malcolm from the fears of Eadwulf Cutel, or won by force of arms after the battle of Carham in 1018?

Mr. Robertson (Scotland under Early Kings, i. 96; ii. 390 et seqq., 426 et seqq.), consistently with his theory, strongly adopts the latter view, and maintains the former to be a mere “fabrication.” To me the question seems a very difficult one, about which it will be well to go minutely through all the authorities.

The Chronicles, Florence, William of Malmesbury, Simeon of Durham in his main history, are all silent as to any transfer of Lothian from English to Scottish dominion. And yet nothing is more certain than that Lothian was at one time English and that at a later time it became Scottish. The only question is as to the date of the change. The first beginnings of the Scottish occupation of Lothian are certainly older than either of the dates given above. Indulf, who reigned from 954 to 962, occupied Edinburgh, Eadwinesburh, the frontier fortress of the great Northumbrian Bretwalda, which ever after remained in the power of the Scots. This does not seem to have been a conquest made in war. The English forsook the post. “In hujus tempore,” says the Pictish Chronicler (Ant. Celt. Norm. p. ), “oppidum Eden vacuatum est, ac relictum est Scottis usque in hodiernum diem.” Possibly Edinburgh was a grant made by Eadred on his final acquisition of Northumberland in 954. Eadred’s relations with Scotland were friendly. The Scots made full submission to him on his election in 946; they acted as his allies in his wars with the rebellious Northumbrians; Scots and English, “the men of Alba and the Saxons,” were, according to the Four Masters (vol. ii. p. ), defeated by the “foreigners”—doubtless the Danes—in 951. If Eadred rewarded his Scottish ally with the grant of Edinburgh, the step would be very like the grant of Cumberland to Malcolm in 945. On the other hand, it is quite possible that the relinquishment of Edinburgh by the English may have been less wholly an act of free will than the grant of Cumberland; it may have been found difficult or useless to maintain so distant a fortress during the troubles of the reign of Eadwig. But on any showing, the event of Indulf’s reign was simply a relinquishment of the single fortress of Edinburgh, though such a relinquishment may well have been felt, especially on the Scottish side, to be merely a step towards the transfer of the whole province. For the date of the great cession our authorities are John of Wallingford (p. ) and Roger of Wendover (i. 416), who give the earlier date, and Simeon of Durham in his Tract on the Northumbrian Earls (X Scriptt. 81), who gives the later.

According to John of Wallingford, Eadgar (see p. and Appendix KK), in a meeting of the Northumbrian Witan at York (“barones Northumbrenses in concilium convocans apud Eboracum”), divided the ancient kingdom into two earldoms, giving Deira to Oslac and Bernicia (which John confusedly calls Deira) to Eadwulf “Evelchild.” The name of Eadwulf is seemingly due to some confusion with Oswulf, whom John fancies to be dead. But Lothian, the northern part of Bernicia, lying exposed to the incursions of the Scots, was little valued by the English Kings. The King of Scots moreover asserted a claim to it by hereditary right. Kenneth accordingly went to London, accompanied by the two Northumbrian Earls and by Ælfsige Bishop of Lindisfarne, to seek a conference with Eadgar. Eadgar received him friendly, and Kenneth opened his case, praying for Lothian as an ancient possession of the Scottish Kings. Eadgar referred the matter to his Witan (“caussam curiæ suæ intimavit”), by whose consent the province was granted in fief—I cannot avoid the terms of a later jurisprudence—to Kenneth, who did homage for it. Kenneth also promised that the ancient laws and customs of the country should be preserved and the English language retained, an engagement which was strictly carried out (“sub cautione multa promittens quod populo partis illius antiquas consuetudines non negaret, et sub nomine et lingua Anglicana permanerent. Quod usque hodie firmum manet”). Thus the old dispute about Lothian was settled, though new ones often arose (“sicque determinata est vetus querela de Louthion, et adhuc nova sæpe intentatur”).

Roger of Wendover is briefer. He tells how Earl Eadwulf—he does not mention Oslac—and Bishop Ælfsige took the Scottish King to the court of Eadgar; how the King of the English gave Kenneth many magnificent presents, and granted to him the whole land of Lothian. The tenure was that, each year, on the great feasts when the King wore his crown (see the Peterborough Chronicle under the year 1087), the King of Scots should come to his court with the other princes of his realm. Eadgar also assigned to his royal vassal and his successors several houses at different points of the road, at which they could be entertained on their way to the English court, which mansions the Kings of Scots retained down to the time of Henry the Second.

Simeon places the cession after the death of Uhtred in 1016 (see p. );

“Quo [Ucthredo] occiso, frater ipsius Eadulf cognomento Cudel, ignavus valde et timidus, et successit in comitatum. Timens autem ne Scotti mortem suorum quos frater ejus, ut supradictum est [see p. ], occiderat, in se vindicarent, totum Lodoneium ob satisfactionem et firmam concordiam eis donavit. Hoc modo Lodoneium adjectum est regno Scottorum.”

Now, looking at our authorities in the abstract, there is no doubt as to the infinite superiority of Simeon, our very best authority for Northumbrian affairs, over two late and often inaccurate writers like John of Wallingford and Roger of Wendover. If there is an irreconcileable contradiction between the two stories, Simeon’s story is to be preferred without hesitation. I hold that Simeon’s statement distinctly proves that some cession of Lothian was made by Eadwulf, and, if so, we can hardly be wrong in setting down that cession as a result of the battle of Carham. The question is whether this can be admitted, and at the same time some kernel of truth be recognized in the story told by John and Roger. Let us first see what the witness of those writers is worth in itself.

I need hardly say that secondary writers of this sort, even the best of them, must be subjected to much severer tests than any that we apply to the Chronicles, to Florence, or even to William of Malmesbury. We accept nothing, strictly speaking, on their authority. We weigh their statements and judge what they are worth, both according to the laws of internal evidence and according to the way in which they may incidentally fall in with or incidentally contradict the statements of better writers. We put very little faith in their details, which are more likely than not to be romantic additions. Still in all cases we acknowledge the likelihood that there is some kernel of truth round which the romantic details have grown. John of Wallingford is undoubtedly a writer whom it is not safe to trust, unless his statements have some strong confirmation, internal or external. Of his way of dealing with matters, I have given some specimens in the course of this volume (see Note GG). Still he is not to be cast aside as wholly worthless. A few pages before the passage with which we are concerned (pp. , 540), he shows a good deal of critical acumen in pointing out the chronological impossibility of the tale which makes Rolf an ally of the great Æthelstan (see above, p. ). Roger of Wendover is, on the whole, a more trustworthy writer than John, and when he comes nearer to his own time, he becomes a very valuable authority; but for times so far removed from their own days, John and Roger must be set down as writers belonging essentially to the same class. Now in comparing their two statements as to the cession of Lothian by Eadgar, we are at once struck by the fact that the two accounts seem quite independent of each other. There is no sign that either narrative is borrowed from the other, no sign that the two are borrowed from some common source. The two stories do not directly contradict one another; but they have nothing in common, except the bare facts that Kenneth received the province from Eadgar, and that Earl Eadwulf and Bishop Ælfsige had a hand in the business. They are two independent witnesses, pointing, as it seems to me, to two independent sources of tradition or lost record. And of the two, the narrative of John of Wallingford certainly has the clearer inherent signs of trustworthiness. If there is any ground to suspect fabrication with a motive—not necessarily in the historian himself, but in those whom he followed—it certainly appears in the narrative of Roger rather than in that of John. Roger gives no account of the circumstances of the grant, he assigns no intelligible political motive for it, he describes no intelligible tenure by which the fief was to be held; he dwells mainly on the magnificence of the presents made by Eadgar to Kenneth, and on points bearing on questions which, when he wrote, were matters of recent controversy and negotiation. The points brought out into the greatest prominence are the duty of the King of Scots to attend at the English court, and the signs at once of English munificence and of Scottish submission displayed in the preparations made for the due reception of the royal vassal. These were points of no small interest in the times when Roger was young, and which were not forgotten when he wrote. There is nothing of this kind in the narrative of John of Wallingford. He has undoubtedly made a false step on ground on which it is very easy to make a false step, namely in the succession of the Northumbrian Earls. Even the accurate Simeon, writing so much nearer to the place and to the time, has himself, in one case at least, done the like (see Note LLL). John’s Eadwulf Evelchild ought to be Oswulf, just as Simeon’s Uhtred, in the account of the battle of Carham, ought to be Eadwulf. But John’s main story fits in very well with the facts of the case. Mr. Robertson (ii. 391) objects that there was no “old quarrel about Lothian.” But the facts show that there was. Surely Lothian was an old Pictish possession which had been conquered by the Angles, and which was sometimes partially won back by its old owners. The wars of Æthelfrith (Bæda, i. 34) and of Ecgfrith (iv. 26) surely make up a very old “querela de Louthion,” but one not too old for Celtic memories to bear in mind. The acquisition of Edinburgh, however made, shows that the Scottish Kings in the tenth century were looking steadily in the direction of Lothian. Kenneth himself, friendly as he now was to Eadgar, had made at least one foray into the country. The Pictish Chronicle (Ant. Celt. Norm. 143) says, “Primo anno perrexit Cinadius et prædavit Saxoniam [Lothian] et traduxit filium regis Saxonum” (see p. ). The captivity of an English Ætheling is a grotesque exaggeration; but we may accept the fact that Kenneth had some border skirmishes with the local Earl, who in 971, the first year of Kenneth, would be Oswulf. All this shows that the acquisition of Lothian was at this time a favourite object of Scottish ambition. And now that Eadgar and Kenneth were on friendly terms, a grant of the country, like the undoubted grant of Cumberland, like the probable grant of Edinburgh, might be an act of thoroughly good policy on the part of England. A distant province, which it was hard to keep as an integral part of the kingdom, might be prudently granted as a fief to the prince by whom it was claimed, and to whose incursions it lay open. That the conditions spoken of by John of Wallingford, the retention of the laws and language of Lothian, were strictly kept, is proved by the whole later history. The laws and language of Lothian became the laws and language of the historic Scotland.

The cession recorded by John of Wallingford seems therefore to be in itself highly probable. But is it inconsistent with the later, and undoubtedly better authenticated, cession recorded by Simeon of Durham? It does not seem to me to be so; neither did it to Sir Francis Palgrave (Engl. Comm. i. 474, 477) or to Dr. Lappenberg (ii. 141, 207, p. of the original). It may be that the word Lothian, a somewhat vague name, has a slightly different meaning in the two passages; it may be that a cession was made to Kenneth by Eadgar, and a further cession by Eadwulf Cutel to Malcolm. It is less easy to believe, with Sir Francis Palgrave, that Eadwulf’s cession was a cession of the rights of the local Earl, reserved, or not formally surrendered, at the time of the earlier grant by the King. The simplest explanation is to suppose that Lothian was recovered by the English after the great victory of Uhtred in 1006, that it was occupied again by the Scots after their victory at Carham, and that then the cowardly Eadwulf gave up all claim to it. Cnut however, in 1031, if not before (see p. and Note LLL), set matters straight. In that year at least, “Scotta cyng him to beah,” “and wearð his mann”—Malcolm then became the liegeman of the King of all England for Scotland and Lothian and all that he had.

This I believe to be the most probable explanation of this difficult question. The silence of the Chronicles proves nothing either way; it has to be accounted for equally on either view of the story. No transfer of Lothian at any time is mentioned in the Chronicles, yet we know that a transfer did take place at some time. The positive argument from the statement of the Chronicles is always the strongest that can be found; the negative argument from their silence is, under varying circumstances, of every degree of strength and weakness. Here it seems easily accounted for. The Chroniclers are at all times somewhat capricious in their mention or neglect of Scottish affairs. They mention neither the victory of Durham nor the defeat of Carham. And the reigns of Eadgar and Cnut, the periods with which we are immediately concerned, are periods in which the Chronicles are decidedly meagre, as compared with their minute narratives of the reigns of Æthelred and of Eadward the Confessor.

How thoroughly English Lothian was held to be long after either date assigned to the cession appears from the words of the Chronicler, 1091; “Melcolm ... for mid his fyrde ut of Scotlande into Loðene on Englaland.” Florence translates “Northymbriam invasit.” One would like to know whether the “xii. villæ quas in Anglia sub patre illius [Willelmi Rufi sc.] habuerat [Malcolmus]” (Flor. Wig. 1091) were in Lothian or where.