How the Borders’ great abbeys came into being

The Battle of Carham in 1018 brought the Lothians firmly under Scottish control, but much of the Borders was still English-speaking and owed allegiance to the rulers of Northumbria in Bamburgh.

After his victory at Hastings in 1066, William the Conqueror accepted that Scotland was a separate entity – even if he claimed overlordship of the kingdom then ruled by Malcolm III, known as Canmore, who married Margaret of the Atheling royal family ousted by the Conqueror.

Margaret would have a huge influence on her husband and made the church in Scotland more pro-Roman in character, work for which she was canonised in 1250.

She could not curb the warrior spirit of her husband, however, and in 1071 Malcolm went south with an army in what appears to have been a failed attempt to set a firm border line between Newcastle and Carlisle.

The following year, William came north with a large army and naval force, causing Canmore to open peace negotiations that culminated in the Treaty of Abernethy. That long-lost treaty saw Malcolm given lands in Cumbria in return for swearing allegiance to William, but also saw the forced exile from the Scottish court of Edgar Atheling, Margaret’s brother and the last Anglo-Saxon claimant to the throne of England. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle stated about 1072: “This year king William led an army and a fleet against Scotland and he stationed the ships along the coast and crossed the Tweed with his army; but he found nothing to reward his pains.

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“And king Malcolm came and treated with king William, and delivered hostages, and became his liege-man; and king William returned home with his forces.”

It was a son of Malcolm and Margaret, King David I, who transformed the Borders as he did with much of Scotland: by building fortresses, religious institutions and, above all, by founding burghs that changed the way Scotland was run.

After his father and elder brother were killed at Alnwick in 1093, David’s elder brothers fought to secure their succession to the Scottish throne, while David was exiled to the court of King William II (William Rufus).

David looked to have few prospects until Henry I seized the English throne after Rufus’s death in 1100 and made a dynastic marriage with Princess Matilda, David’s sister.

David was heavily influenced by Henry and by 1113 he was fully Normanised and ready to claim his inheritance, which was much of southern Scotland that was grudgingly ceded to him by his brother King Alexander under pressure from Henry.

David thus became the Prince of the Cumbrians, his lands comprising some of Cumbria and what later became Berwickshire, Roxburghshire, Selkirkshire, Peeblesshire and Lanarkshire.

King Henry also arranged David’s marriage to Matilda of Huntingdon, which brought him considerable wealth from large swathes of land in England known as the Honours of Huntingdon.

That year of 1113 was very busy for David, who styled himself the earl, and who, in the manner of a Norman prince, decided to establish religious institutions – Christians in those days believed in the afterlife, and founding and endowing a monastery, abbey or church guaranteed your soul would be prayed for to help get you out of purgatory and into heaven.

The small settlement of Selkirk, home to an ancient church, was chosen by David for his first abbey. Sadly no trace of it remains but we know it was the first abbey of the so-called reformed orders anywhere in Britain and initially had 13 monks led by Abbot Ralph. They came from Tiron in France, hence the order’s name of Tironensian.

The order was founded by Bernard d’Abbeville (also known as St Bernard of Ponthieu), a Benedictine monk who was dissatisfied with the old order’s failure to uphold the Rule of St Benedict. He insisted on a more austere form of monastic life with monks trained to be farmers and woodworkers. Selkirk thus set the template for the abbeys and monasteries that would be founded across the Borders and the rest of Scotland, but sadly the initial construction must have been limited as the monks left after just 15 years.

An attempt to find the lost abbey was made in 2015 when Scottish Borders Council archaeologist Dr Chris Bowles told The Scotsman: “Selkirk was the first reformed monastic community in Britain, before Melrose, Jedburgh or any other Border abbey. It’s probably the most important abbey in Britain.

“So the obvious questions are: Where is Selkirk Abbey? What did it look like? What’s the early history of Kelso Abbey, when the community moved there from Selkirk? And what were the links with the mother monastery, in Tiron in France?”

The seal of King David

The search for the lost abbey continues. Alistair Moffat considers its foundation to be such a crucial moment for the Borders that in his book The Borders: A History From Earliest Time he quotes the entire charter given to the first monks by David.

Here's a flavour of it: “Let it be known to all those present and all those to come in the future that I have founded a certain monastery at Selkirk. That is an Abbey in honour of Saint Mary and Saint John the Evangelist and for the salvation of my soul and of my father’s and my mother’s, that of my brothers and my sisters, and all of my ancestors.

“To the church of monks I have given in perpetual gift the land of Selkirk from exactly where a stream flows down from the hills and runs down into the Yarrow [later renamed as the Ettrick].”

There then follows a long list of endowments such as lands, fishings, tax revenues and cattle including some from David’s English possessions. It was such an important document that David had it witnessed by his wife, Countess Matilda, his son Henry, and a host of chaplains, earls and sheriffs. In among the names is one “Robert de Bruis”, ancestor of Robert the Bruce.

After his ascension to the throne in 1124, King David set about what some historians call the Davidian Revolution in which, with the mainly Anglo-Norman support of his friends such as de Bruis, he utterly changed the governance and institutions of Scotland.

Around castles, he founded royal burghs, the first two being Roxburgh and Berwick in the Borders. He brought in sheriffs to administer justice and even founded the first Scottish coinage with silver from mines he owned near Carlisle.

It should be noted that the church in Scotland already had a parish system but David oversaw a re-organisation of the church’s governance and developed more abbeys and monasteries, which were not just vital for spreading and maintaining the Christian religion but also became educational and cultural resources.

Just four years into his reign, David authorised the transfer of the Selkirk monks to Kelso where a stunning new masterpiece of a building was created. The king probably wanted his new abbey to be close to his royal castle at Roxburgh and although it took many years to complete, enough of it was built by 1152 when David’s son and heir Prince Henry died that he was buried there.

King David also founded the priory of Augustinian monks at Jedburgh that was raised to full abbey status in 1147, and certainly authorised the foundation of Dryburgh Abbey in 1150. But his greatest and most influential abbey in the Borders was Melrose, which David founded in 1136.

All these abbeys saw settlements grow around them and they would become hugely important centres in the development of the Borders for centuries afterwards.

Moffat concludes: “Until his death at Carlisle in 1153, David closely associated himself, his tremendous energy and his flare for innovation with southern Scotland for 46 years, almost the span of two generations. Men were born, lived and died knowing no other authority than David’s. And in all that long time he changed the face of the Borders, more profoundly than anyone before or since.”

The four great abbeys of Kelso, Jedburgh, Melrose and Dryburgh are all now left in ruins, and I will show how that happened in future columns. But now I must turn to the royal burghs which David I created in the Borders, namely Roxburgh, Berwick-upon-Tweed and Peebles.

The ancient history of this trio of burghs is very instructive, as all played their part in the development of what I call a Borders mentality. I will look at Berwick and Peebles next week when I start to tell the stories of the ancient towns of the Borders.

Today, however, I am concentrating on Roxburgh whose story is quite extraordinary but is known by few Scots, precisely because the royal burgh disappeared. The present small village of Roxburgh in the Scottish Borders only dates from the 17th century and is actually two miles from the site of the original burgh.

The village is attractive but it just does not have the scale or importance of the ancient town of Roxburgh which, if you follow the doctrine that the capital of a country is where the monarch resides, must be considered one of the earliest capitals of Scotland.

Not only did King David I make the town one of his first royal burghs, he also invested considerable sums in making Roxburgh Castle a formidable royal fortress and resided there for a good part of his reign between 1124-53.

Moffat writes: “There is now no trace of it to be seen … Roxburgh exists only in ink and vellum, in documents associated mainly with Kelso Abbey.”

Though there is no exact evidence, we can guess where Roxburgh town stood because there are fragmentary remains of its castle on the site just across the River Tweed from Kelso and Floors Castle, ancestral home of the Dukes of Roxburghe.

As with other ancient towns in my recent series, Roxburgh grew in importance because of its strategic location and royal patronage. Standing on the Tweed at a navigable point 20 miles upriver from Berwick, under David I and his successors Roxburgh became a market town and port, and the place from where Scottish armies set out. Thus it was also a target for English ire.

From the documentary evidence, the town was to the east of the castle and had named streets – Moffat mentions Headgate, King’s Street and Market Street. It had at least one church dating from the 1100s, the long-lost parish church dedicated to St James, one of the 12 Apostles.

From the reign of David I, who gave the town numerous mercantile advantages including two markets a year, Roxburgh became a centre of the lucrative trade in Scottish wool and hides, and it is known that merchants from the Continent established businesses in the town.

The products of Scottish farms, mostly controlled by the religious orders in the Borders, were exported as far as Northern Italy, while one very popular import via Berwick was wine – claret became Scotland’s national drink before whisky was even thought about.

David I also oversaw the establishment of a mint in Roxburgh, again confirming its importance, but in the absence of archaeological finds we can only speculate about what life was like in the mediaeval town. For as Moffat states: “Its total disappearance remains a tantalising enigma.”

In a future column I will show how Roxburgh disappeared and how the great Borders abbeys were ruined. You will not be surprised which nation I will blame for those depredations…