|
|
The
Feudal System in Scotland
In the absence of land charters before 1094 and of reliable early
statements of land law, many historians of pre—feudal Scotland
have been to relying on analogies drawn from Irish and Welsh law
tracts and comparisons with Scandinavian custom taken from Norwegian
and Icelandic sources. Such analogies may mislead, and it seems
safer to start with the evidence for modes and patterns of landholding
in the feudal age and search for traces of native systems older
than the twelfth century. This evidence points both to a kin-based
system and to strong royal lordship. Land seems to have been inherited
by all the freeborn males within a particular lineage and held,
perhaps jointly, by the sons of a single owner as his equal heirs
— hence place names such as Balcanquhal, Fife (Balemacanecol,
farm of Anecol’s sons), and Petmacdufgille, Perthshire (farm
of Dougal’s sons).
References to clans or lineages between the twelfth and the fourteenth
centuries concern either lesser free men below the rank of tenant-in-chief
(e.g. the Clan Morgan in Buchan) or else men of even lower status,
unfree or semi—free (e.g. the men of Tweeddale transferred
by David I from dependence on the Crown to the service of Dunfermline
Abbey). Lordship of a territorial type was nevertheless present
well before 1100, involving the king, the provincial mormaer
(governor) and the toisech (local officer: Scots toshach,
or thane) who exercised the king’s or mormaer’s authority
yet was also related to a local kindred group. Thus notices of
twelfth century (and earlier) grants in the Book of Deer mention
such a person as Donnchad, toisech of Clann Morgainn, while many
documents of this and later date show thanes and toshachs associated
with territorial units usually called ‘shires’ or ‘thanages’.
With the advent of military feudalism under Norman impact and
royal initiative in the twelfth century, important modifications
took place in the landholding pattern at the upper levels of Scottish
society, though to a notably lesser extent in the Highlands than
in the Lowlands. Monarchy and provincial rulers (now usually called
earls) retained their dominant role, and the nature of their lordship
proved slow to change, but a new aristocratic class, based on
the knight’s fief, the barony and the castle, was brought
into existence and spread from south to north between c.1120 and
1250. Feudalism made little headway in the west Highlands and
none at all in the islands, yet the nobility of these areas was
strongly influenced by feudalism. Some accepted specific military
or naval service as the condition on which they held their estates;
even more strikingly, from the early thirteenth century some began
to build formidable stone fortresses, often on rocky islets or
promontories (for example, Kisimul in Barra, Castle Tioram in
Moidart, Dunstaffnage near Oban and Castle Sween in Knapdale).
Only a minority of these Gaelic-speaking lords were tenants-in—chief
of the Crown, on a par with the greater baronial magnates of eastern
and southern Scotland.
Most of the Highland nobility were tenants of the greater lords,
enjoying hereditary preeminence, by virtue of their lineage
and holding (often without any charter of infeftment), by an essentially
kin-based tenure which was echoed by the ‘kindly (i.e. kin—based)
tenure’ characteristic of their own lesser dependants. It
was thus possible for a relatively fluid and vigorous clan organization
to survive within the Highland area alongside a formally universal
and Crown-imposed feudalism and for it to remain after feudalism
had been reduced to little more than a set of legal rules governing
the ownership of land.
Return
to Scottish History
|
|
