In Our Time - The Davidian Revolution

Episode Date: June 2, 2022

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the impact of David I of Scotland (c1084-1153) on his kingdom and on neighbouring lands. The youngest son of Malcolm III, he was raised in exile in the Anglo-Norman court and became Earl of Huntingdon and Prince of Cumbria before claiming the throne in 1124. He introduced elements of what he had learned in England and, in the next decades, his kingdom saw new burghs, new monasteries, new ways of governing and the arrival of some very influential families, earning him the reputation of The Perfect King.With Richard Oram Professor of Medieval and Environmental History at the University of StirlingAlice Taylor Professor of Medieval History at King’s College LondonAndAlex Woolf Senior Lecturer in History at the University of St AndrewsProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, in 1124, David I became King of Scotland, and so began what's been called the Davidian Revolution. David was raised in the south in the Anglo-Norman Court

and was already Earl of Huntingdon and Prince of Cumbria and brought some of what he learned with him when he came north. And in the next decades, his kingdom saw new boroughs, new monasteries, new ways of governing, the arrival of some very influential families, and for him, a reputation as the perfect king. With me to discuss the Libyan Revolution are Richard Oram, Professor of Medieval and Environmental History at the University of Stirling, Alice Taylor, Professor of Medieval History at King's College London, and Alex Wolfe, senior lecturer in history at the University of St. Andrews.

Alex Wolfe, what was David's childhood and how was he brought up? We don't know precisely when David was born, but sometime in the 1080s. And he would have been born in Scotland, perhaps in Dunfermline, but he was the youngest of his father's sons. His father had six sons by his mother, Margaret, and at least two sons by an earlier wife. So he had no expectation of becoming anyone important. Both his parents died when he was somewhere between seven and ten years,

old and at that point the family fled into exile when Donald Barn, the Donald Bain of Shakespeare's Macbeth, took over the kingdom of the Scots. And David then spent probably most of the next 30 years in England, the court of first William Rufus and then Henry I, where he would have been trained to be a knight and a nobleman and a young man in the now fashionable northern French style that we tend to associate with the normal conquest in England, but which was spreading across much of Europe in this period. And he wasn't the only young prince there, for example, Olaf Bittling, the future king of the Isle of Man, was also growing up at this court. What changed for him when he became the Earl of Huntingdon, one of the richest aldeums in England?

Yes, well, that was a huge leap forward for him. And it happened in 1113 when he was probably about 30. And at that point, he married the heiress, and he became one of the richest men. And at the same time, more or less, he was made Prince of Cumbria, which is the border area on the western side between England and Scotland, including the northern part of the modern county of Cumbria, the old Cumberland, but also, perhaps more importantly, the Strathclyde region of what's now Scotland. The elder of Huntingdon would have given him a vast income in cash as much as anything else, which was something that was absent from the northern parts of the island in that period.

And so he became one of the major... advisers of Henry I, who was his brother-in-law by this time, and he governed sometimes took over and governed England for Henry when Henry was in Normandy. He was at that level of power and significance in the kingdom. He still had two brothers alive at this point, and so it was, again, unlikely that he would be expected to become a king. So people probably thought his whole career would end up being as an English nobleman. But he was able to take advantage, not cynically,

to take advantage of the eruption caused by the 1066 adventure, which changed England forever. What was happening in David's lifetime is that this was now spreading further afield. Because of relationships that the Norman kings, like Henry I, established with people like David, like with the Welsh princes, this Norman culture was beginning to spread further afield, that by this time already interlinked with native culture. So it's becoming a fusion culture, if you like.

and it's very closely associated with ecclesiastical reform and improved government. Thank you very much. Alice Taylor, he was the youngest, as we've heard. How did he come to power? When he becomes Earl of Huntingdon, at that time, his elder brother, Edgar, who had become King of Scots in 1097, has actually died, and quite surprisingly so in a way. And he, Edgar, has succeeded by the next brother,

because there were many of them, who was called Alexander. And Alexander he marries, but his wife dies. He actually marries an illegitimate daughter of the English King Henry I. That marriage doesn't seem to have produced any children. And when Alexander dies, it seems relatively surprisingly so. You might think, well, it's obvious that David would indeed succeed as the kind of last remaining child of Malcolm and male child, I should say, of Malcolm and Margaret. And in many ways there are lots of reasons to think that this would be an obvious choice.

He's an adult male. He's the only surviving child. He's the brother of the previous king. And he's broadly speaking he's around. So he's been in Cumbria now for quite a long time. He's also received land in southern Scotland as a bequest from his brother Edgar. And although he's also very high up at the court of the English king and performs many important functions, he's clearly kind of quite a big cheese. He's in contact with a lot of the leading monastic reformers at the time, quite unusually so. But there are issues. And the first issue is that, Scotland at the time, the Scottish kingdom, isn't a dynastic kingship. It's not completely set that if you are essentially the nearest legitimate blood relative, essentially, that you would succeed. And indeed, there are, David has a number of rivals. And what's very interesting about Scottish kingship is that it's, you don't become king by being crowned and anointed in a kind of very holy ceremony. Part of what happens is the obedience that the political elite of the kingdom of the Scots, the Kingdom of Alba, give to you on the inauguration. Alba's another name for Scotland.

Alba's another name for Scotland. So political support within the kingdom itself is very, very important. So how did he get that? Well, we don't know very much. Well, you got that. There must be some reason. You can make it up if you want, but there's got to be some reason. How did he get to be King David I?

So when his brother Alexander I dies, it seems like he is inaugurated King of Scots at Schoon on the moot hill, as was traditionally the case, a few weeks after Alexander dies. And this is not particularly swift, but it is done relatively quickly. And there may have been a reason for that, because what we know is shortly after this occurs, he actually faces an uprising from the illegitimate son of Alexander I, who's a man called Malcolm, who's probably a bit younger than David, but perhaps not by much, and who clearly is deemed to be a credible alternative, even in 1124. Thank you.

In Scotland, Richard Oram. We're talking of Scotland, but what was Scotland? The land that David ruled. Well, it's not what we now see as the geographical entity of Scotland, with that hard border from the Solway to approximately Berwick. The core of Scotland, Alice has already mentioned Alva, and that is the territory primarily from the fourth estuary up to the southern edge of the Cairngorn Mountains.

so it's east central. And the kings who are ruling over that are variously successful, as maybe the way to put it, about exerting any kind of effective overlordship in territories beyond that. Where they've been most successful from the 10th century onwards

has been moving south into territory that had been under the domination of the old Anglian Kingdom of Northumbria, for example. So they've been taking over Lothian that has got pockets of Gallic character within it in parts of it, but is still largely Anglian in the coastal plain, but with admixtures of Welsh-speaking types dotted around through it. Over on the West, now Alex has already talked about Cumbria. You've mentioned his role as Prince of Cumbria. That had been a kingdom in its own right, gradually losing

its kingdom status, perhaps, is the best way to look at it at some point in the 11th century. In a conversation with Alex once he memorably described it to me as the kingdom of the M-74, the motorway from Glasgow to Carlisle. This is a territory that kings of Scots have been looking to move into. The south-west, proper of the mainland Galloway, is something completely separate that looked more to the western Ireland, the Irish Sea,

and the north of England. And the Isle of Man. It's an incredible hybrid territory. It's easy to think of England as the main neighbour of Scotland. But were the closer neighbours? You've begun to mention them. And what was their influence on Scotland? On the Scotland, it's called it David Scotland,

for sake of some ease in this huge show. England is also still a relatively fluid term. But around the core of Scotland, you've got a series of other statelets or embryonic kingdoms, things that don't quite actually mature into full statehood. In the far north, you've got the Norse earlum of Orkney, which also controlled large parts of the far north mainland of Scotland, almost down as far as Inverness at the Dornh Firth.

Out in the west, Alex has mentioned the Kingdom of Man. Well, it's Kingdom of Man and the Isles. So it's the whole of the Hebridean region. And this is a kingdom that at times also includes Dublin, also includes parts other parts of the Irish coast may claim parts of Galloway it's Gaelic and Scandinavian

and that's influencing connected to the core territory of Scotland as well Alex we'll hear about some of the changes David brought in some of them happened because of him others may have been coincidental can we start that one that was him

the boroughs like Edin Borough what change did he make there and why was it important Scotland, before David's time, had no towns to speak of. Archaeologists sometimes suggest that there were some places that were slightly bigger than farms, but they're not anything that would have been recognised as a town by people living in France or Southern England at the time. And there was no minted money, and there was very little circulation of foreign money even, which is quite surprising, particularly in contrasting with, say, Ireland,

which doesn't mint its own money, but has loads of foreign money circulating there. And what David seems to have done is, because of his experience having this huge old and eastern England and living in the south of England, he wanted to produce the same kind of economic structures. And he created about four or five towns from scratch. Berwick upon Tweed was probably the first. Roxburgh, which is just up the river Tweed from Berwick. Edinburgh, you mentioned, and Sterling and Schoon, possibly Aberdeen as well. And to create these, obviously the Scottish population, had with no experience of trade or urban life or consumer production of craft,

weren't capable of this. So he had to actually import Burgesses, town dwellers, mostly from north-east England or from Flanders. And these were probably mostly the younger sons of people who ran their own urban businesses in places like York and Lincoln and Ghent and Bruges. And they were given plots of land and they laid out towns. The best example we have of one of these being created in David's reign

is actually not created by David himself, but by the Bishop of St Andrews who built a town at St Andrews. And we know that he paid David a transfer fee to get one of his burgesses, Maynard the Fleming, to come from Berwick upon Tweed and lay out the grid of the town and set up the rules. And the regulations for running these towns, which were self-run corporations within the kingdom,

directly answerable to the king, or in the case of Adderge to the bishop, were borrowed from Newcastle upon Tyne, which was a relatively new town itself. What did these bring to Scotland that David was insistent that was brought to Scotland? They created the possibility for much greater international trade. A lot of this is probably cloth export, or wool export for the making of cloth,

which might be one of the reasons why Flemish people are so heavily involved, because Flanders was the big centre for cloth, production. And Eastern England, particularly areas like East Anglia and the Downs, have been producing and exporting wool for centuries. And David probably saw the potential for much of Scottish uplands for doing something similar. But in return for that export, you could bring in exotic goods like wine, fancy clothes and so on, maybe even sometimes silk and things like that, but certainly high-quality cloths from Italy and Flanders were coming in. creating places where you could lay off work.

Weren't they smithers, so you didn't have to do that in your own little village, you could take that up to the borough and leave your time to do more with your land and so on? Yes. Wasn't there a industrial dimension as well as a couture dimension? Yes, there's certainly more specialised craft production. As you say, what would have been happening normally, and would have continued to some extent for much longer, was that most things that were needed on farms were made on farms.

but now you had the opportunity to find a professional who did it all the time. Sometimes I tell my students that Burgess is a timeshare slaves. They do the kind of specialist work that a slave might do on a farm, but they're now co-owned by everybody potentially. There's a slightly repressive element to this as well, though, because one of the things that these boroughs had was they had a trading liberty. And what's meant by that is that each borough had a district delineated on the map by the king around it, in which it was illegal to buy or sell except for in the borough.

So if two villagers living in the area of the trading liberty, which would be several miles wide, maybe 20 miles wide, if they wanted to trade with each other, they could be fined if they didn't go and do the exchange in the borough. Thank you. Alice Taylor, who did David allocate land to? We've heard a hint of it, people from Flanders, people from what we now call East Anglia. Who did, and why did it matter? Can we develop that?

Yeah, so one of the things that David is famous for in a way is this idea that he initiates a replacement, essentially, of the political elite of Scotland. So that when he becomes king, he comes with a group of friends who have their own kind of connections, some people who are in his service. And in order to... And the Norman French represented there. Yep. So people whose families came over into England, settled into England after the Norman conquest, and who might have the odd kind of younger son kicking about who needs land and who attaches himself to David, but also people who are lords in their own right, but also perhaps the kind

of person that he met when he was at the court of Henry I. So people like Robert de Bruce, people like Walter Fitz-Allen, who was the progenitor of the Stuart House, so the Stuart Kings of Scotland and then later Britain descended from one of the people who becomes part of David's court later on in his reign. So there used to be this idea that David, partly because he is a bit of an interloper and he's bringing these new ideas, kind of supports this by bringing new people as well. And in fact, bringing new people that he gives land to and asks them to hold it on a slightly different basis. So instead of just being a lord and you've got your land, the traditional idea was that actually David said, well, you can have this large amount of land as he does, for example,

he gives to Robert de Bruce Allendale in the South West. But instead of it being like, now that's yours, you have to hold it from me and perform service to me. So he changes the basis on which the elites exercise their authority and gain revenue essentially from their lands. And it used to be thought that this was kind of a matter of policy. In Scotland north of the fourth, you have this idea that the kingdom is divided into these provinces,

which are ruled really by these more there, which later become earls, and that actually David does the same to them, that he says, OK, you're no longer in some way independently in control of this province. Instead, you hold your land directly from me. And as we have all these sorts of ideas, there's a lot of merit to this position. So we know that either on his inauguration in 1124 or shortly after, David does indeed give land a large tract of land.

land of Allendale to Robert de Bruce. He also, by his death, he's developed this reputation of being a really good rewarder of his friends that actually one of his really good friends, who's a Cistercian monk called Elred of Revo, actually says, David is really, really good at giving gifts to his followers and rewarding them with lands. But there are also some reasons to also really doubt this, the scale of this as well. The most important one, I would say, to slightly lessen the significance of what David's doing, is that actually it's more his successors who say that he's given this land to be held in this way for service. Richard, Richard Orham, another area in which David seems to be very active and successful

was to do with monasteries. Can you develop that? When he went there, there were Benedictine monasteries. The idea was as big and as impressive a building as you could and sit there and rule around the place and am mass wealth. That's a bit of a brutal summary, but it's something like that. Yes, well, there is a very, very powerful, deeply ingrained tradition of David as this great religious reformer, innovator, bring her in of new orders. But David sees this as part of his duty as a king to be improving religion.

And one key ingredient in that is bringing in the agents of continental reform, the great reform. movement that's sweeping across Europe from the middle of the 11th century. And so it's monastic orders, the reformed Benedictine orders in particular that David is associated with. But he's also bringing in Augustinians too. David's first flirtations with this are with the tyranensian order from Tirangarde in northern France. And he plants them, first of all, at Selkirk in the central east part of the borders of Scotland,

as it now is. And then he moves them down to Kelso just over the river from his great royal centre at Roxburgh. And he is showering them with patronage. He is giving them great lands. And we see that particularly when he, from 1136 onwards, is bringing in Cistercian monks. And that's what really gets him his international credentials. Why?

Because he then becomes beloved of Bernard of Clairvaux. And he regards David. as one of the greatest things ever to walk the face of the earth, a king of absolute Christian perfection, who is doing all the things that a good king should do. But the Cistercians also brought wealth, wool, and changed the economy as much coincidentally with the boroughs. Down until the late 1980s, early 1990s,

I might have agreed with you on that word, Melvin. You've come a bit late to the feast. Yeah, you've come a bit late to the feast. Yes, I mean, if you read some of the great traditional works on this, the Sestertians are these great land improvers, massive investors in farm development, self-supporting, really drawing in a great amount of revenue from the lands that they've got. But it's all done in the spirit of self-sufficiency

to free them from the entrapments of the world. They need to be able to sustain their own monasteries. But then, first of all, a Frenchman. historian Robert Fossier and then more recently an American Constance Berman has done this systematic demolition of the Cistercian myth and a lot of what you see

is, well almost everybody was doing what the Cistercians were doing but they're just actually very, very good propagandists. But isn't there evidence that the Sturians were innovators in the sense that there was a whiff of the pre-wif of the Industrial Revolution in the things that they were doing in some of their monasteries?

But you could say the same about... Same of others, could you? About the Tyranet scenes in particular. It does spoil it in a way but it sort of what it does help to do is actually get a sense that this is something that's happening and it is part of the

Davidian revolution. It's happening way way beyond the Sistercians and we see it as a monastic thing because monastic records survive better than secular records but if the monks are doing it and bear in mind most of the monks come from elite backgrounds

to use a term I know that Alex doesn't like hearing but they're coming from the upper levels of society. Their relatives are doing this on their great estates as well. They're bringing in specialists who can improve their revenues. Can we develop this, Alex, with you, as you've been pointed out in this observation that's just been put on the table.

How are these boroughs and the monasteries changing, or were they changing the economy in David Stein, and how significant was it? They do change the economy of Scotland, and it is because of what happens in David's reign. But it's probably more like that the seed is being sown and the transformation will take several generations. I think just briefly, following up on what Richard was saying about cistercians,

I think the reason that cistercians, we know so much about them and they have such a good press, is because what really marks them out is they remained a unified multinational corporation. So they talk about each other and different cistercian monasteries big each other up. Now, as Richard said, some of the major monasteries that were found in this area, the Tiridensians at Kelso and the Sistercians at Melrose, they're both right next to David's Castle and Borough at Roxburgh. And so there is probably some sort of direct interaction between the way that their estates are able to make the best of this international trade.

Thinking about that little area that we now think of as the Scottish borders, you've actually got quite a complex industrial setup. Berwick is on the sea coast. Roxburgh is the centre of the royal power, a borough, with these major monasteries around it. Things come into Roxburgh. They'll then go down the tweed on smaller boats, riverboats, and then they'll get reshipped into sea-going ships at Berwick

and head off for the Rhine, Flanders or Eastern England. And so we're able to see this area of Southern Scotland as it is proto-industrial. in a way, but it's all agrarian produce that's being driven out. And the wealth is going to be coming in, but how is that going to affect ordinary people? Presumably the tenants on the estates of the monasteries and also the people living in the liberties of the boroughs are going to start changing their production methods slightly and their strategies. You mentioned that you can now go to the borough to get your high-quality spade rather than make a rather shoddy spade yourself. And so you're

going to have to start thinking, well, I've got to produce some stuff that the burgesses will want. So you're going to have to try and work out what's most necessary. Will I be producing more grain that can go towards beer production, for example? That's what castles and boroughs and monasteries need. They need a lot of alcohol. And so you might see people growing more grain that's going to go into alcohol production. You might see people thinking about taking their cattle on the hoof into the burrows and so on. So it's going to change the strategy of the ordinary farmers, even those people who are still free farmers, still speaking local languages,

and who don't think they've changed, the fact that there's this new kind of market economy developing is going to change the way they run their farms. Alice, what was different about the way David ruled? He has spoken of as a great lawmaker and law change. What was different about the way he did it? David does have this reputation as in many ways the king who sets up the medieval Scottish state. That's one of the ways in which he's remembered.

And as always there are many reasons to understand why that was because some of the institutional infrastructure basically of the Scottish kingdom starts in David's reign and in particular local administration. So you're looking at the introduction of sheriffs as the king's local administrative officers. And very interestingly, he does this seemingly. on the model of the English as well, because the sheriff is an English institution, dates from the early 11th century. And shortly before David introduces sheriffs again in that southern area of the kingdom. We also know that Henry I was doing the shiring of Cumberland and Northumberland,

in part to bring them more closely into the English administrative infrastructure. So it's quite interesting that David's seemingly trying to do something. again, mostly in this southern area. It goes up as far as Perth, so very close to Schoon. But it's mostly within these boroughs that Alex was mentioning. And these are people who are essentially responsible for, first of all, collecting the king's revenue, which is a very, very important task. And second of all, enforcing the king's orders, that's what they seem to be there.

They don't seem to be holding their own courts in any way. So sheriffs are judicial officers now. but they don't seem to have been under David. And second of all, he also seems to have set up the rudiments of what looks like a royal judicial system. So in 1140, so about 15 years into his reign, quite suddenly in his royal charters, we have references to these justices.

We're not quite sure what they are. But again, they seem to be on the model of reforms that had previously happened in England when Henry I had introduced royal justices into the local county court to make sure that justice, was being done. And this is a very, very important part of 12 century kingship, because the ability to uphold justice is meant to be one of the justifications of, like, divinely ordained, kingly power.

Thank you, Richard. Richard. How did David interfere in England's affairs? It was a bit quite complicated for him. I mean, his money came from a great English estate. He'd been brought up in the English, Norman English court and so on, but how did he intervene? How did he intervene? Was he successful? David has got in some ways perhaps a great hand to play here when things begin to change in England after Henry I was death in 1135. The people who are likely to succeed are both related to him. The complication in this though was that David had sworn an oath in 1127, along with the majority of the English nobility, that they were going to take as their next ruler, Henry I, the first's remaining legitimate.

child Matilda. The problem was Matilda was not hugely popular because of her marriage to by that stage Geoffrey of Angu, the traditional enemy of the Normans, and also she had the dreadful misfortune of being a woman in a man's world. The other side of it is he has got through his other niece who also has the good fortune to be called Matilda. She is married. I can imagine. Creeping in here, isn't she is married to Stephen of Morten and when Matilda, the one who's married to Geoffrey of Enjou, is dallying, waiting to be acknowledged as queen in Enjou, Stephen hot-footes from Normandy and gets himself crowned king. The English nobility generally seem to support him until there is a sort of a collective intake of breath among certain of

them that wait a minute we've just perjured ourselves here and one of the people who seems to have that recognition is uncle david now what happens is in the winter of 1135 1136 he invades the north of england all the way through into the early 1140s with david moving back and forward between supporting stephen supporting matilda but he is the winner in this because he effectively takes control, certainly of Eastern England down to the Tyne and with a slowly fading out level of influence down towards the Tees. And on the west, he occupies that wonderful city of Carlisle, completes the castle and continues to expand south through the lakes ultimately into North Lancashire. Can I come in there?

Yes, Alex, please do. It's quite interesting that when David eventually dies, leaping for it a head a little bit, the Irish chronicles describe him as Rihalaban Oakhash Rish Rizakson, King of Scotland and King of England. There's also an interesting reference in one of the genealogies to, they don't call him David King of Scotland, but just as a slip, the scribe calls him, here is the genealogy of David King of England. Well, it's interesting that William of Malm's big history of the Kings of England is dedicated to David. So he seems to have thought of him as potentially the true heir of the English kings. Well, we've got to remember this goes back certainly through his mother's line, the House of Wessex.

He is the heir of the West Saxon kings of England. And this is something that you get in Scottish Chronicles, actually, for most of the rest of the Middle Ages. Sometimes it's played up other times when politically it's a bad thing to talk about your royal lines English connections. But generally it is there. And it resurfaces post-1603. as a real element in actually making the kings of Scots more acceptable in England again

because they are ultimately the legitimate heirs of the great Edward the Confessor. Alice, Debbie's been credited with changing the legal system. We've touched on that in Scotland. Does it deserve it? Short answer is no, I would say. I mean, not if you're thinking about, say, the origins of the Scottish legal system as a separate system of law. You wouldn't find, I think, a historian of law who would say, oh, it's David's reign that's kind of particularly important there.

That's not to say he doesn't do things. He does actually quite a lot of things. We know that he legislates quite a bit about, say... He legislates in Latin and in writing, doesn't he? Instead of it means orders and the tongues of the time and the place. Yes. Well, to put it, the difficulty about understanding, say, David's legislation is that none of it survives. in its original form.

And that which does survive, we can make pretty good guesses, but we can't actually say for sure which ones of these might be authentically David's and which ones not. So just to give an example, there is actually a legal compilation, which is called the Assizes or the statutes of David I.

But this is a 14th century compilation, and out of 44 chapters, it contains probably four that are arguably David's himself. So he is very interested in law. It's a reputation that he has. So Elred of Revo, his close friend, which I mentioned before, talks about his dispensing justice. But what is absolutely clear is that on his, almost immediately on his death,

he is seen to be the lawgiver of Scotland. And this is a reputation that develops and is sustained for hundreds of years until the point in the early 14th century, where Scotland is actually conquered by Edward I, Edward I, first temporarily. And Edward sets up a team to kind of say, this is how we're going to govern Scotland from here on in. And one of the things that he says, he asked this team to go through the laws which King David made and all other amendments that his successors in order to revise an amend them if they need amending. And so there's this sense in the early 14th century that the

law of Scotland is the same as the law of David. And this isn't just something that, say, first is saying, because he can't really be bothered to figure it out, it's also something that his rival Robert Bruce is doing as well. So the earliest jurisprudential tractate that survives from Scotland, which is called Regiam Meyer-Startem, is put together in the early 14th century under Robert Bruce. And who do they attribute it to? Well, they attribute it to David. And they say, this is the ancient law of the kingdom, the old law of the kingdom. And it's put together on the command of David. So it's just very, very clear that this reputational power that David has as a lawmaker really, really works and is continually repeated by successive

generations of kings. So are we saying, Richard, that David is credited with having shaped Scotland, partly because people who followed him held him in such high regard or used him to such good effect, that that was the best way to go about it? That, yes, Melvin, it's a large part of David's success, if you like, is he has certainly in his lifetime, his reign displayed most of the attributes of what would be regarded as perfect or ideal kingship for the first half of the 12th century. And that then provides a vehicle that everybody afterwards is able to take and mould in a positive way and enhance and embellish because it reflects well on them, bearing in mind that they're descended from him, therefore

the same blood is flowing in their veins. So it's almost like a progressive inflation of And it continues right through into the 20th century, actually. You know, the things that you read about David and that he single-handedly achieved are quite remarkable. I think one other factor that feeds into that as well relates to somebody we've not talked about before, but who's one of the most important people in David's circle, which was his nephew, William Fitz Duncan, as we tend to call him. He's the son of David's oldest brother, who was briefly king in the 1090s. And he remains David's right-hand man for much of his reign. But in the time of David's grandsons, particularly William the Lion and great-grandson Alexander II,

William Fitz Duncan's descendants did rise up on numerous occasions to try and claim the kingdom. And there was this constant anxiety of the people who called the McWilliams in the historiography. And making David the font, rather than say his father, who was also William's grandfather, or some earlier king, means that you can say, well, nobody who's descended from a king before David is really of royal blood. So David became the focus for his grandsons and great-grandsons, because if you went further back, you'd have to grant that the McWilliams were also royal princes. How did you become known as the perfect king? He became known as the perfect king, as Alicester said,

because he gave land to his friends, particularly to the church, particularly to the Cistercians, as we heard from Richard. He had some very good write-ups from Bernard of Clair-Voe, Ayelred of Revo, two major Cistercian writers. Aelred, who had been a household knight of Davids when he was young, he was the son of the hereditary arch priest of Hexham, and went on to become a Cistercian abbot of Revo in Yorkshire,

wrote a kind of long obituary of David when he died that still survives. And that became kind of the starting place for understanding him. and it was because of his promotion of the church because he was also perceived to be bringing modern French courtly culture into the Scottish court. There was a sense in this period that you see in a lot of the writing about the Irish

and to some extent the Northern Scots and the Islesmen that that traditional Gallic culture was somehow barbaric and horrified French aristocrats and churchmen. And what David was seen to do was to somehow encourage his people or make his people learn to dress properly, to comb their hair properly, if you like, and to become part of the Anglo-Norman world without an act of genocide and so on.

And that marked him out because it's something that none of the other regional rulers of these islands outside of the core of England were able to do. The real long-term achievement of David is that Scotland didn't suffer the fate of Ireland of Wales. Can we come into the end now? We've called this programme the Davidian Revolution

in what way could it be justified as a revolution? In terms of many of the facets of that revolution and in particular the governmental change and the change in political elites and also the shift in the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the monasticism, all these things, you can say begin in David's reign. They're not completed in David's reign,

but if you're looking for origins, as historians are often want to do when they're creating narratives, David's reign is where you start. And the fact that there is something to that, I think, is represented by the fact that this was something that they said at the time, you know, that his successes said at the time, they saw themselves as looking back to David and carrying on what they were doing, even if what they were doing was actually very different

and quite a lot more important for the later development of the Scottish policy and where it kind of sat in the geopolitics of Europe. I think though, when, because of the nature of the evidence, which really is very, very little, we have very, very, we have no evidence really. really that comes from David himself, you know, David the man. And when you start to strip back the layers of actually what is very, very partial and very, very difficult to get to grips with evidence, is that almost inevitably the figure of David himself becomes smaller. So there's less that we can say that he did and he wasn't as good as all that,

and it's all kind of propaganda and stuff. And that I think is very important because it's through that kind of stripping back that you get to see how these stories about reputation are developed, and why it is that actually that figure of David I first has been such an enduring image in the history of not only medieval Scotland but also early modern and modern Scotland. Could I come in on that one as well? Just to add, the idea of David is a revolutionary king.

I mean, the actual term comes from late 90th, 30th, 20th century historian Peter Hume Brown. And what Hume Brown was trying to do was not claim that David single-handedly transformed everything, but he was the instigator and agent through whom change was affected. And that, I think, is the big success of David. Well, you've just answered the question I was going to ask you as the last question of the programme. Prescience. Very impressive, a lot of empathy going on here.

What do you think his longer-term legacy is? We've had the qualifications, we've had the subtractions, we've had the layers showing him diminishing all of that. But there he is, David, the first. Scotland with all this credited to him, some bit falsely and so on. What do you think his longer term legacy is? What we start to see in David, if we take it right back to David's reign, rather than looking at the legacy just after that,

is for the first time we can start to see a geographical entity that we would begin to recognise as Scotland, now, still a bit fuzzy round the edges, still with bits that are going to change and fluctuate about. But he has begun the process that his churchmen are really keen to push all the time of creating a national kingship in a way that a lot of his predecessors aspired to have. He's got the physical reality of it. He's going into parts of mainland Scotland that his predecessors had at best gone maybe for a raid or two every now and but he is going there and he's planting his people there

and he's establishing monasteries there and he's regulating and re-establishing dioceses and things like that. So that I think is David's true legacy is that he gives an enormous kickstart to the formation of the later medieval kingdom that we would recognise as Scotland proper and that's not diminishing him

but it's maybe actually recognising he didn't do everything, but he started the process. Well, thank you very much. Thanks to you, Richard Aram, to Alice Taylor and Alex Wolfe and to our studio engineer John Boland. Next week, it's the golden age of Chinese poetry, the Tang era, principally Li Bai and reputedly the greatest Chinese poet, Du Fu. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What did you want to to say, which you didn't have time to say. I think the thing that I would have liked to have said more about,

but it would have been a bit of a tangent from the questions, is that it follows up from the last points that I made about the division revolution turning Scotland into a sort of a mainstream medieval kingdom up to David's reign. Scotland was principally perceived both internally and externally as an extension of Ireland. The word Scott, Latin Scottish means an Irishman. And the language was the same language,

the learned language of the forms of Gallic were just standard Middle Irish as we would call it today. Most early Scottish churchmen in the early 12th century would have trained in Ireland. And what this division revolution does is it turns the face of Scotland away from the Irish Sea and Armagh

and to look into the North Sea and down towards England and the continent. And Scotland is reoriented. And although at the end of David Drain most Scots were still speaking in Galilee, It ceases to be the learned language fairly quickly. And the idea that the Scottish kings were just one of the Irish provincial kings. Now, my friend Cathy Swift, who teaches the University of Limerick, gave a talk recently where she showed the page in the mid-12th century book of Leicester, in which the pedigrees of all the Irish kings are listed from every kingdom.

And in the middle of this list is David's pedigree, because this book was written in David's time. And the point she made is it's not added on the end. It's in the middle. And she pointed out the geographical spread that you can see that the Scottish kingdom is just put into a circuit of Ireland, which is what's the governing principle of which pedigrees come where. And that was in David's time. That was the way Irish intellectuals thought. 150 years later, no one would have thought that.

And that's because of what happens in David's time. And just to add on to that as well, I think it's coming in and seeing the marriage of Malcolm and Margaret as well, so David's parents, as being something that really showed a different sort of political ambition. And what I wanted to say was actually about the naming of their children, which is that they name their children very, very specifically after Anglo-Saxon kings prior to the Norman Conquest.

So they named their first son, Edward, and then they go to Edmund and then Athelred and then Edgar, and you get right back to the 970s. And then they're like, all right, well, we've done that. So we'll do Alexander, you know, conqueror of the world. And then for our final son that we're not expecting to go anywhere, we'll call him David, who at this point is understood to be, you know, the biblical king, the king who is the type in the Old Testament

that represents essentially Jesus. So there's something there that this family had huge ambition for their children that really, again, really speaks to what Alex was saying about the turning of the political geography of the kingdom and actually how controversial that was. And these names that are non-ethnic names, that's very unusual for this period. And maybe it spread further

because something else we haven't said about David's role. Something actually, to my shame, only discovered relatively recently is that one of his many offices that he had when he was in England was that he was the steward of the Diocese of St. David's in South.

Wales and something that his son Earl Henry inherited after him. And I think it's pretty certain that all the Welsh people today who are called Daveth are named after him. Because you see no Daviths until the mid 12th century where his contemporary O'Ine King of Gwyneth named one of his sons Davith. And after that it becomes a common name. And I think that Daviths are all named after David I, the First of Scotland. One of the things I would do is temper all of this by saying most Scottish historians or most historians of medieval Scotland

would emphasise the continuity and change aspect of David's reign we've talked a lot about the change but there's a hell of a lot within David's activity that is all about continuity from the past he is north of the fourth he is reigning as a king of Alba and if we look at what he does, rightly you emphasise what he's doing with the reformed monastic orders.

But if you look at what he's doing with the church more generally, he is as supportive of native institutions. A lot of the clergy that he's advancing into senior bishoprics within the kingdom are Scots. They're not foreigners that are being brought in. Yes, in the two dioceses that are identified as, the one that is uniquely associated with his principality in Cumbria, Glasgow, and the principal bishopric of the Scots, St Andrews,

he's wanting to bring in people who have got these big reformist agendas. But elsewhere, as long as you have got somebody who is committed to a reform tradition, doesn't matter what their cultural background is, they are being put forward as well. And a lot more, as we scratch away at the little evidence we have really brings out this balance that is being achieved a lot of the time within his reign. And as Alice was saying right back at the start, he isn't booting out the natives to make room for colonists. There's a lot more accommodation and it's a piecemeal, oh, there's an opportunity.

There's nobody better, I'll drop one of my friends in there. and he's doing the same in the church. I also think on that it's quite interesting that I would say he's a very, and this is in some way total speculation, but I would say he's a very good politician that knows the limits of what he's doing. So when, for example, his eldest son, well his only son, Henry dies, the year before he does, and it's totally, well, it's not entirely unexpected

because there's indications he was ill beforehand, but it is a real blow because he leaves very young. young children, Henry does. And instead of David taking Henry's eldest son, Malcolm, kind of round a tour of the Scottish King, kind of proclaiming him as his heir, he actually, north of the fourth, he sends him with the leading Morver, Dorhad, Morvair of Fife, who does that tour of the province instead. And there have been lots of reasons as to why this might have been. He might have felt that he was too ill, but he did take his second youngest grandson,

William to Northumberland to kind of be proclaimed as Earl of Northumberland there. So he's clearly not that ill. And that sense, my reading of it is that he's actually somebody who understands that it would mean more for Malcolm to be kind of sent round with the Morver of Fife than it would to be sent round by David himself. I think that's a very good point that you've both made, that he's ruling the different parts of his kingdom in different ways. Those great Anglo-Norman fiefs he creates for his friends are nearly all

sort of marcher lordships around the edge of Galloway, the most unruly part of the kingdom. And as Richard says, north of the fourth. Thank you very, very much. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hello, I'm Lucy Worsley, and I want to tell you about Lady Killers. It's a new series from BBC Radio 4.

It's a programme that mixes true crime with history, but with a twist. With our all-female team of experts, I am re-examining the crimes of Victorian murderresses through the eyes of 21st century feminists. What can we learn from these women, and would it be any different today? Listen to Lady Killers on BBC Sounds.