How King David I transformed the landscape of Scotland

For reasons we shall discover, I think that coronation was a hugely important moment in Scottish history, but once again, as always, it is left to The National and Sunday National to highlight our country’s historical matters.

We do not know the exact date of David’s coronation at Scone, not least because all of Scotland’s royal records were stolen, and presumably destroyed, by King Edward I of England, while Scottish church records were almost all obliterated during the Reformation.

So David’s coronation date will remain a mystery but the evidence of his greatness as a king is all around us. As I wrote last week, to this day we live in a nation replete with governance introduced by David in his reign from 1124 to 1153.

I told how he spent many years at the English court and married a wealthy heiress, Matilda or Maud, the daughter of the Earl of Northumbria, before being designated as effective ruler of southern Scotland by his brother Alexander while his brother-in-law King Henry I of England recognised him as Prince of the Cumbrians.

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No sooner had he taken the Scottish throne than David’s transformation of Scotland began with the establishment of royal burghs such as Berwick, Roxburgh, Perth, Edinburgh and Scone by 1130.

He did this against the background of rebellions against his kingship. As I suggested last week, it took him a decade to completely suppress opposition to his rule, but even as he was battling for survival – often with the military support of Henry I – he was already getting on with the job of modernising Scotland. For instance, he founded Selkirk Abbey a decade before he became king, while still Prince of the Cumbrians.

The burghs, of which he founded at least 15, would be the most far-reaching innovation by David. The trading rights he gave to burghs as far north as Elgin and as far south as Roxburgh greatly encouraged the growth of the nation’s economy, and also enabled the royal treasury to better collect taxes.

David encouraged English incomers to settle in these burghs, some of which grew around existing castles, and bring their trading culture and language into Scotland – as a result, the very language of lowland Scotland began to change. Previously, the highest rank of lords below the king who had charge of provinces were called mormaers, Gaelic for great stewards. During David’s reign, the term earl gradually replaced mormaer, while the use of the word thane for a sub-mormaer also began to fall out of favour.

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Historians still argue nine centuries on about the other achievements of David I. No one argues, however, that they were not extensive and nation-changing, but exactly how far they transformed Scotland is still debated.

I am very much in the camp that believes in the Davidian Revolution – basically, in the course of his 29-year reign, I think David I completely altered Scotland.

As well as the burgh system, he brought in feudalism, changing the old form of land tenure into a new system by which lords held land in return for services, usually military. The lords in turn controlled their lands and the peasant class on those lands owed their services to their masters, though they enjoyed considerable freedoms, especially farmers who were able to employ people to work the land.

Agriculture greatly improved under the new system, and David also instituted a new system of legal control by creating sheriffdoms. Before then, the laws were enforced and indeed often written by landowners but now David brought in law officers, sheriffs, which also enabled him to enforce national laws that he had passed. We have sheriffs even now.

To assist him in the governance and control of his country, David invited some of the Norman and Flemish nobles he had met at Henry I’s court to come to Scotland and he gave them lands, some of them very considerable tracts, in return for military and administrative service. Many of those nobles who would later fight in the Wars of Independence could trace their ancestry back to immigrants in the Davidian era, not the least of them Robert the Bruce who was descended from Robert de Brus, 1st Lord of Annandale, who was given his land and title by David I.

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While most of his changes were wrought in the south and east of his country, David did not neglect the North – the pacification of Moray was a huge accomplishment – the Highlands, the Islands and parts of the west coast. The problem was that the Norwegians still controlled these areas and David had to accept that his writ did not run in a large area of Scotland, including Galloway. Where he could, he installed his own people to take over and control regions which is why the Stewarts eventually ended up with Renfrewshire.

Having inherited the piety of his mother Saint Margaret, David founded a plethora of abbeys, monasteries and priories. He did not, as is sometimes stated, found the parish system of the church because that had been in existence for centuries before his reign, but recognising the benefits that religious institutions brought to an area, he founded or patronised the likes of Holyrood, Melrose, Newbattle, Kelso, Dryburgh and Jedburgh abbeys. He reorganised the diocesan system, restoring Glasgow as a bishopric and founding other bishoprics, while he fiercely defended the Scottish church’s independence when England’s archbishops demanded control.

He encouraged education of the children of nobles and patronised the arts, and thanks to his ownership of a silver mine near Carlisle, David introduced Scotland’s first decent coinage.

He was not perfect – he lost the Battle of the Standard when he sided with his niece, the Empress Matilda, against the usurper English king Stephen, but both kings signed the Treaty of Durham which confirmed that Scotland was an independent kingdom.

David’s son and heir, Prince Henry, died in 1152, and David himself died on May 24, 1153, after a short illness. He was succeeded by his grandson Malcolm IV, who never matched David’s achievements – I would argue no monarch of Scotland ever has.