Chapter 2 Family Ties: The Politics of Scottish Genealogical Memory

In the prologue to his own working copy of Scotichronicon (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 171, the ‘Corpus MS’; hereafter MS C), Walter Bower, abbot of the Augustinian house of Inchcolm, refers to himself as a ‘debtor, not through necessity but compelled by love’ (Debitor sum […] non necessitate sed caritate compulsus; Chron. Bower 9. 3) to copy an older chronicle and to continue this work through to the present time. This confessional beginning to Bower’s lengthy chronicle refers to the text’s composition in the 1440s at the request of Sir David Stewart of Rosyth, a neighbouring laird of the abbey (Chron. Bower 9. 3). The chronicle incorporates and extends Fordun’s late fourteenth-century Chronica Gentis Scotorum, which covered the history of the Scots from their mythical origin to the death of David I in 1153 as well as incorporating scraps of information covering the next two hundred years to Fordun’s own time. Bower supplements Fordun’s work and then extends the Scotichronicon to deal with Scottish history through to the murder of James I in 1437. Prior to James’s death, Bower had occupied a prominent position in Scottish royal administration; for example, in 1433, he was involved in reporting on a debate at a council general to discuss a peace embassy from England.5On Bower’s career, see D.E.R. Watt, ‘Bower [Bowmaker], Walter (1385–1449), abbot of Inchcolm and Historian’, ODNB [accessed 3 June 2020]. He began his chronicle during James II’s tempestuous minority, which witnessed the rise of magnate factionalism in the attempt to control the government of the kingdom. The Auchinleck Chronicle (c. 1460), the only contemporary chronicle for James II’s reign, evidences the violence that defined the opening years of James’s kingship and intimates an ongoing struggle between the crown and the Scottish nobility as James sought to assert his authority.6The Auchinleck Chronicle, ane schort memorial of the scottis corniklis for addicioun, ed. by Thomas Thomson (Edinburgh, 1819), esp. pp. 3–5. While Bower was writing for a specific patron he was doing so in the context of a minority in which government was in the hands of the Black Douglases, as well as the Crichtons and Livingstons who had achieved a sudden rise to power and had fallen just as quickly.7See Katie Stevenson, Power and Propaganda: Scotland, 1306–1488 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), esp. pp. 42–4; Brown, The Black Douglases, esp. pp. 255–82; Christine McGladdery, James II (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2015), pp. 58–64. Concerns with national cohesion in Scotichronicon are therefore not surprising, and in this chapter I explore one of the strategies that Bower employs in this regard: the use of genealogy as a way of memorialising collective identity.

Gabrielle Spiegel has done what is perhaps some of the most important work on medieval genealogies in her work on twelfth- and thirteenth-century France. In designating genealogy as a ‘perceptual grid’ – a structure ‘already residing in the social reality’ that limited and controlled the historian’s narrative – Spiegel suggests that lineage or, more specifically, written genealogy has distinctly social rather than intellectual origins and therefore presented important ways of thinking about social relationships.8Gabrielle Spiegel, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 103. Spiegel argues that genealogy becomes a central focus of historical narratives at the same time that agnatic consanguinity became the dominant structural model of European noble societies.9Spiegel, Past as Text, p. 104. These genealogical structures reorder time such that past and present (and, indeed, future) exist simultaneously in the genealogical imagination. Genealogy serves as a memory of the passage of time at the very moment that it assures continuity through inheritance. If genealogy becomes a national practice as well as a personal one, agnatic succession assumes potency for thinking about national identity, for, while it bolstered dynastic powerbases, the model might also be used rhetorically to remind readers of the very real transference of memory through blood from one generation – or monarch – to the next.

Outwith the main text of MS C, several folios contain genealogical items in varying states of completeness. In the prelims, there survives a full-page genealogical tree (fol. 2v) that depicts the interrelationships of the English and Scottish royal families; beginning with Máel Coluim III and his wife, St Margaret, the table ends with James II (rex modernus). In MS C there is significant damage to the page, but the tree also appears (and is complete) in three other manuscripts, and a revised version appears in MS E, Edinburgh University Library MS 186, f.345r (Fig. 1).10The three manuscripts are: MS R (BL MS Royal 13 E. X), fol. 26v; MS D (Darnaway Castle, the ‘Donibristle MS’), fol. 435; and MS H (BL MS Harleian 712), fol. 276 v. The genealogical table in MS E can be accessed at: https://edin.ac/4dWNudM or https://images.is.ed.ac.uk (image reference: 0001272). Two additions to MS C are also of interest. The first (fol. 370) comprises notes on the succession to the earldoms of Orkney and Caithness, which has led Barbara Crawford to conclude that this is an aide-memoire connected to William Sinclair of Roslin’s claims to the earldom of Caithness in the 1430s.11James I acquiesced to Sinclair’s claim in 1434. B.E. Crawford, ‘The Fifteenth-century “Genealogy of the Earls of Orkney” and Its Reflection on the Contemporary Political and Cultural Situation in the Earldom’, Mediaeval Scandinavia, 10 (1977), 156–78 (esp. 158). The genealogy traces Sinclair’s claim and ancestry through a maternal line connected to Malise, earl of Strathearn, who had succeeded to the earldoms of Orkney and Caithness ‘by right of lineal descent’ (successionis linealiter; Chron. Bower 9. 41). Immediately following this paragraph connected to Sinclair, a genealogical table sets out the French royal dynasty, beginning with St Louis and ending with both Louis XI, eldest son of Charles VII (and husband of James I’s daughter, Margaret) on one side and Henry VI of England on the other. Along with this table are additional notes concerned with the right of succession in France. The writer specifically notes, in stark contrast to the material about Orkney and Caithness, that ‘it needs to be understood that’, in France, ‘a woman does not succeed, nor does a male who is a descendant through the female line’ (Chron. Bower 9. 44). In commenting specifically on English claims to the French throne, the end of the notes details that ‘Edward Windsor king of England was not [related to King Philip VI], for he descended through the female line’ (Chron. Bower 9. 44). Taken together, these preliminary and additional items point not only to a broader concern with genealogy in Bower’s composition of Scotichronicon (and his readers’ responses to it); they also attest to specific cultural differences in the ways inheritance – traced genealogically – functioned.12Primogentiure had been instituted in Scotland by the mid-thirteenth century; however, it is also the case that female succession (or, certainly, male claims to succession through a female line) was not unheard of. There appears to have been an (albeit not always comfortable) acceptance of matrilineal inheritance in Scotland. All of these genealogies indicate an understanding that power, authority and territorial possession rested on remembering and tracing ancestry; they also demonstrate that the ways in which those memories could be deployed were culturally contingent and, therefore, up for debate.

The Scota myth, which recounts the descent of the Scots from an Egyptian refugee princess named Scota, had circulated in the northern part of Britain since at least the twelfth century. The bare bones of the narrative can be found in the Scottish records from the tenth century and the essence of the story survives in the ninth-century Historia Brittonum and in the eleventh-century Irish Lebor Gebála.15See William Matthews, ‘The Egyptians in Scotland: The Political History of a Myth’, Viator, 1 (1970), 289–306 (294). See also, Broun, Irish Identity, esp. pp. 12–15. Baldred Bisset, the leading Scottish procurator in Rome, made significant use of genealogical strategy and origin myth in disputing Edward I’s use of the Brutus narrative as a way of claiming overlordship of Scotland.16For a discussion of the Brutus myth, and its connections to English claims of Scottish overlordship, see: Wingfield, Trojan Legend, pp. 10–15; Terrell, Scripting the Nation, pp. 15–26; Goldstein, Matter of Scotland, pp. 64–5. Bisset’s Processus, presented to the papal curia in 1301, argued that Scota had overthrown the Picts and taken over their kingdom and, as a result, the Scots and Scotland took their name from her.17For more detailed discussion of Bisset’s Processus, see R. James Goldstein, ‘The Scottish Mission to Boniface VIII in 1301: A Reconsideration of the Instructiones and Processus’, SHR, 70 (1991), 1–15; Terrell, Scripting the Nation, pp. 46–51. As such, Bisset proclaims, ‘the Scots and Scotland are no concern of the king of England; and the English could have claimed no more of a right to the kingdom of Scotland than the Egyptians’ (Chron. Bower6. 183). The earliest surviving extended account of the Scota story in Scotland appears in Fordun’s Chronica Gentis Scotorum, although, as Broun has demonstrated, this lengthier narrative indicates that Fordun incorporated Gesta Annalia into his chronicle rather than creating it himself.18Broun, Scottish Independence, pp. 215–34. This narrative is extended by Bower and, for the purposes of my discussion, deserves to be presented at length.

Fordun and Bower recount how ‘In the third age, in the time of Moses there was a certain king of one of the kingdoms of Greece’ (Chron. Bower 1. 27). This king had a son, Gaythelos, who ‘was provoked to anger’ as a result of not being ‘permitted to hold any position of power in the kingdom’ (Chron. Bower 1. 27). With the support of ‘a large company’, he ‘inflicted many disasters on his father’s kingdom with frightful cruelty’, such that ‘he was driven out of his native land and sailed off to Egypt’ (Chron. Bower 1. 27), where he was ‘united in marriage with Scota the daughter of the Pharaoh’ on account of his being ‘outstandingly brave and daring and also of royal descent’ (Chron. Bower 1. 27). Following the death of the pharaoh, Gaythelos is exiled along with his followers, so that ‘all the nobles both Greek and Egyptian alike […] were cruelly driven away by peasants enrolled in a servile uprising’ (Chron. Bower 1. 31). Gaythelos, understanding that ‘his return route to Greece was barred to him […] firmly decreed that he would either seize a kingdom and territory from other peoples’, or he would ‘take possession of some uninhabited place for settlement’ (Chron. Bower 1. 33). The story continues that Gaythelos ‘entered Africa’ along with his followers and ‘settled peacefully’ in Numidia, where, for the ‘forty years during which the children of Israel lived in the wilderness under the leadership of Moses’, Scota and Gaythelos wandered ‘through many lands’, eventually leaving Africa and sailing ‘to the vicinity of the islands of Cadiz in Spain’ (Chron. Bower 1. 35). This, however, was not a welcome development and the local inhabitants ‘rushed together from all sides in resentment of their arrival’ (Chron. Bower 1. 39). Gaythelos ‘pursued the inhabitants and plundered a considerable part of their territory’ (Chron. Bower 1. 39). Returning to the shore, Gaythelos ‘pitched his tents on a small mound on higher ground’ and surrounded them ‘with a wall’ and built a ‘very strong tower called Brigantia’ (Chron. Bower 1. 39). Involved in continual warfare, Gaythelos, whose ‘whole mind was intent on the protection of his people, as befits a practical and careful ruler’, determined that ‘he had brought the hardships […] upon himself since he had given up the plan which he had originally decided upon, that is to acquire unoccupied lands and so harm no-one’ (Chron. Bower 1. 39–41). Determined to ‘return to the plan he had formed before he left Egypt’, Gaythelos ordered his sailors to ‘explore the boundless Ocean in search of uninhabited lands’ (Chron. Bower 1. 41). Seeing ‘an island rising up in the distance’, they ‘sailed quickly back to Brigantia’ to report back. Gaythelos, however, was ‘overtaken by sudden death’ (Chron. Bower 1. 41) and it was left to his sons, Hiber and Hymec, to take possession of the land ‘not by force’ but because they found it ‘empty and completely uninhabited’ (Chron. Bower 1. 43). They called it Scotia ‘after [their] mother’s name’ (Chron. Bower 1. 45). Bower notes that this land is the land of Hibernia (Ireland), while it is the northern part of Britain that is known as Scotia:

R. James Goldstein has argued that the story Fordun narrates betrays the political attitudes of the fourteenth century, particularly the ‘right of a sovereign people to hold their native soil against foreign invaders’.19Goldstein, Matter of Scotland, p. 121. In this, we can see Fordun moulding his history very much in line with the deployment of the Scota narrative during the ‘Great Cause’. This issue of territorial sovereignty is still one that concerns Bower in the mid-fifteenth century, but his narrative of Scota and Gaythelos also betrays its own deeply contemporary concerns: ambition and the struggle for power internally and the necessity of good rulership. The Scota myth is simultaneously a migration narrative and a remembrance of the beginnings of a community. Like Moses, Gaythelos and Scota lead an exiled people to a promised land, but the story is also a narrative of the naming of the Scots and their settlement in the northern part of the British Isles in an ancient past. In recollecting and reimagining this story, Bower immediately links the Scottish people with their claim to territory; in doing so, the account enables Bower to claim genealogical and geographical heritage and sovereignty for the Scots at a time when they were trying to reclaim lost border territories, such as Berwick and Roxburgh.

Scota initially appears to be a marginal figure in this story of Scottish origins, granted an appearance only by the fact that her sons honour her by naming land after her. The main focus is on Gaythelos and his Greek ancestry. Indeed, in his account of the inauguration of Alexander III (which I discuss later in this chapter), Bower provides his audience with a lineage that can be traced to Iber, the ‘son of Gaythelos […] by Scota’ (Chron. Bower 5. 295). The stress here seems to be on agnatic consanguinity (relation through male descent or on the father’s side), with Scota present as a passive vessel of childbearing. Such a perspective is hardly unique; for example, in the English Brutus myth, Brutus’s wife, Ingoge, disappears as soon as she has served the purpose of providing an heir. For Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, this narrative hesitancy stems from the fact that maternal bodies are ‘problematic sites of origin’, either because they are forced to marry men they do not desire (in the case of Ingoge) or because they are unfaithful (in the cases of women such as Guinevere and Ygerna).20Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 47. For Cohen, this inconstancy and instability reflects the fact that ‘no secure place’ existed for mothers within the ‘narratives of nation building connected to the Trojan diaspora’.21Cohen, Of Giants, p. 47. Of course, the Scota myth is situated distinctly outside of this Trojan framework and, although Goldstein notes only one example (preserved in Fordun) in which the Scottish migration narrative is seen from Scotia’s perspective, Bower’s text does not register an anxiety about the importance of Scota to an understanding of Scottish origins.22In Book 1, Chapter 13, Fordun narrates how Scota ‘went forth in terror out of Egypt’ (Chron. Fordun 1. 13. 11). Scotichronicon’s narrative stresses that it is Scota who reaches Ireland and settles the land with her sons. As Bower recounts, ‘Grosseteste says: “And because their duchess [ducissa; female leader], who was the highest in rank of all those that were there, was called Scota, they called that part of the country where they first landed (i.e. Ulster) Scotia”’ (Chron. Bower 1. 45). Moreover, in the only manuscript image to depict Scota and Gaythelos on their travels, it is Scota who is the focus.

The image (Fig. 2) depicting Scota and Gaythelos in a ship is found in MS C. Despite the apparent emphasis on Gaythelos in the written account, the main figure in the illustration is Scota. She stands in the most prominent position on the poop deck and the open gesture of both her hands indicates that she assumes the role of commanding the raising of the sail and the direction of the ship. Gaythelos is not hidden, but he stands almost obscured. The picture represents the greater importance afforded to Scota that is found in the materials associated with the Great Cause, where Scottish models of inheritance competed with English insistence on agnatic kinship. The relationship between text and image in MS C is therefore not straightforward; it intimates how rewriting – or redrawing – the past inflects historical narrative with current affairs. In Book 11, Bower includes a copy of Bisset’s draft letter to the papal curia. He later includes the letter itself (Chron. Bower 6. 169–89). This letter details the right of Scotland to be free from subjection to Edward I and argues that Edward’s aggression ‘disturbed the previous state of Scotland’s ancient freedom’ (Chron. Bower 6. 135). Bisset’s letter accuses Edward of having ‘omitted to write down the truth […] touching only on what seemed to suit his purpose’ (Chron. Bower 6. 143). It then suggests that the Scots will ‘tell more fully’ what Edward ‘has not yet put in writing, in order to provide fuller knowledge of the story’ (Chron. Bower 6. 143). Here Scotichronicon points to the ways in which memory and forgetting become a rhetorical tool of debate, a nexus of the politics of national sovereignty. Bower reproduces the letter that contains a potted history of the origin myth and asserts that Scotland was ‘named after the woman Scota’, the ‘lady of the Scots’ (Chron. Bower 6. 143). An important point for the Scottish argument is that it is Scota’s maternity that enables her role as a figurehead.23Claire Harrill has argued similarly for the centrality of St Margaret of Scotland’s significance as a mother. See ‘Sanctity and Motherhood in the Miracula of St Margaret’, in Christianity in Scottish Literature, ed. by John Patrick Pazdziora (Glasgow: Scottish Literature International, 2023), pp. 16–34. For a detailed analysis of Scota’s role, see Michelle A. Smith, ‘Assessing Gender in the Construction of Scottish Identity, c. 1286–c. 1586’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Auckland, 2010), pp. 80–129. The independence and sovereignty that stems from this assertion of the Scots’ distinct lineage from Scota seems to push Gaythelos to the margins of the story.

I do not think that Bower intends to set Scota and Gaythelos in opposition in Scotichronicon, however; rather, he puts forward a productive model of cognatic kinship – a system of family relationships based on both maternal and paternal sides of a person’s family – where, although succession had become agnatic by the mid-fifteenth century, the partnership of husband and wife demonstrated the prestige and power each brought to the heritage and family line of the Scots. Bower asserts that ‘the Scots gain additional lustre from the fact that they are sprung from the stock of the king of Athens’ as well as from the matrilineal line of Scota (Chron. Bower 5. 295). This lustre stems from Bower’s characterisation of the Greeks as being

The importance of joining two illustrious genealogies is certainly suggested throughout Scotichronicon in relation to other dynastic lines. In his depiction of the partnership of Máel Coluim III and St Margaret of Scotland, for example, Bower seeks to keep the idea of family and nation at the forefront of his audience’s mind. I have argued elsewhere that the two major vision narratives of Margaret in Scotichroncion seek to reimagine her role as both queen and wife in distinctly national terms and that Bower seeks to present the Scottish saint as a mother of a nation determined to resist attempts to challenge its sovereignty.24See Kate Ash, ‘St Margaret and the Literary Politics of Scottish Sainthood’, in Sanctity as Literature in Late Medieval Britain, ed. by Eva von Contzen and Anke Bernau (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), pp. 18–37, esp. pp. 25–34. In Book 10 of Scotichronicon, Bower narrates how the remains of Margaret and Máel Coluim were translated at Dunfermline abbey in 1250. The translation of Máel Coluim and Margaret occurs in Scotichronicon immediately after the recitation of Alexander III’s genealogy at his inauguration (which I discuss below); in shaping the narrative in this way, Bower suggests to his audience a memorial thread between the recited genealogy, the Scota–Gaythelos myth and the translation of Alexander’s eleventh-century saintly ancestors.

Bower narrates that in 1250, Alexander III had the remains of Margaret translated from the grounds of Dunfermline abbey to the interior of the church. While moving Margaret’s remains, the bearers’ arms became paralysed once they reach the chancel door close to where Máel Coluim was buried at the north side of the nave (Chron. Bower 5. 297). It was one of the bystanders, seemingly speaking through divine inspiration, who confirmed that Margaret’s remains could be moved only in conjunction with her husband’s. Once again, the emphasis is on seeing Margaret and Máel Coluim as a partnership, each supporting and enhancing the power of the other. Parallels might be drawn between Bower’s account and Wyntoun’s emphasis on Máel Coluim and Margaret’s lineage that combines ‘Saxonys and Scottys blude’ (IV.355.407), which, as Boardman points out, suggests Wyntoun’s determination to show that the marriage of Máel Coluim and Margaret ‘fundamentally altered the nature of the Scottish monarchy’.25Steve Boardman, ‘A People Divided? Language, History and Anglo-Scottish Conflict in the Work of Andrew of Wyntoun’, in Ireland and the English World in the Late Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Robin Frame, ed. by Brendan Smith (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 112–29 (122). A similar idea can be seen in the Liber Extravagans, which describes Máel Coluim’s ‘family of Scottish stock mingl[ing] with Saxon blood’ (sanguine mixta; Chron. Bower 9. 73). The partnership is an image that Bower pursues in a later recollection of John Wemyss’s vision of St Margaret ahead of the Battle of Largs in 1263 (Chron. Bower 5. 337–9). In this dream, Wemyss sees a lady ‘of radiant beauty’ leading ‘a distinguished-looking knight’ on her right arm, with three ‘noble knights’ following her. The image here depicts Margaret, Máel Coluim and their three sons ‘hurrying to defend [their] country’ from the ‘usurper’ King Hákon IV of Norway (1217–63), who was ‘unjustly trying’ to ‘subject [Scotland] to his rule’ (Chron. Bower 5. 337). Of course, this was also the decisive battle which led to the transference of the Hebrides from Norwegian to Scottish authority. Alongside the memory here of Margaret’s sanctity, is an expectation that the reader connects this recollection with Scottish territorial expansion. While the defence of the realm against those who would seek to conquer it is the dominant concern, here the familial image of Margaret, Máel Coluim and their sons compels the reader to remember the narrative images of the originary Scottish family which pervade the earlier books of Scotichronicon and official documents of the Wars of Independence.26See my discussion of this vision in Ash, ‘St Margaret and the Literary Politics of Scottish Sainthood’, pp. 28–31. Bower’s text therefore relies on narrative cues and repetition to embed national memory; the visionary episodes demonstrate how the lineage of Scotland’s kings is not only to be seen as chronological – a single trajectory of ancestry and descent – but also that these images of origin and community repeatedly play themselves out within Scottish history.

To a certain extent, this is not a wild exaggeration on Bower’s part; as Keith Stringer has argued, during Alexander’s reign the ‘unified Scottish policy envisaged by David I finally emerged’ and ‘royal power was unprecedentedly penetrating and all-encompassing’, to the point that ‘regnal cohesion was fortified by clearly defined frontiers, unitary legal and administrative frameworks, a “national” Church, and the unmistakable imprint of a single sovereign authority’.27Keith Stringer, ‘The Emergence of a Nation State, 1100–1300’, in Scotland: A History, ed. by Jenny Wormald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 39–76 (73). Given that Bower was writing with hindsight of the aftermath of Alexander III’s untimely death, the succession crisis and consequent Anglo-Scottish conflict it engendered, it is understandable that Bower sought to codify this king’s reign as a distinctive moment in Scottish history. It is also a portrait that mirrors Bower’s assessment of Alexander II, whom he describes as a ‘renowned king’, who ‘always hated wrong doing and loved equity and justice’, who ‘like the morning star … grew into the light and sunshine until the fulness of day’ (Chron. Bower 5. 191). For Bower, Alexander II ‘proved to be a source of strength to his fellow-soldiers, appreciative to religious, humble before priests, generous to those in need … sober with the arrogant, alarming to malefactors and merciful towards the defeated’ (Chron. Bower 5. 191–3).

The inclusion of truth in the description of Alexander III is particularly powerful, carrying with it notions of faithfulness, loyalty, allegiance and confidence as well as integrity. Alexander is depicted as a king who possesses all of these qualities and inspires these characteristics in his subjects. Alexander is thus a ‘copy’ of his father just as his Scottish subjects, Bower imagines, emulate him in his loyalty to Scotland and Scottish interests. The reference to Ecclesiasticus and the image of Alexander II leaving behind an image of himself exemplifies what Ernst Kantorowicz has famously called the ‘mystic function’ of the ‘King’s Two Bodies’, the body natural and the body politic, which exist together in the figure of the monarch.28Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957; repr. 1997), p. 3. Alexander II had left behind a body natural image of himself in the form of his biological son and namesake; he had also bequeathed a body politic image of the king of Scots in siring an heir for the kingdom. Biological and political continuity are thus embodied within the king (and King) of Alexander III. This sense of harmony and continuity through dynastic history manifests in Bower’s Scotichronicon in the recitation of the King’s genealogy at Alexander’s inauguration. In doing so, Bower uses this historical moment not only as a recollection of an individual’s claim to power but also as a commemorative assertion of the independent identity of the Scots under the political sovereignty of the king.

Bower narrates that after the solemnitatem regie coronacionis, and ‘in accordance with the custom which had grown up in the kingdom from antiquity’, Alexander III was taken from the church at Scone and was ‘with due reverence […] installed […] on the royal seat’ [the stone of Scone] (Chron. Bower 5 .293). The use of coronacionis is a misnomer here, for Scottish kings were inaugurated and did not, as such, have a coronation, but the slippage is interesting for thinking about the relationship of the king to the Scots as a nation, for the term ‘coronation’ reminds the reader that Alexander was being crowned (corona) as the head of the nation (natio). Bower plays with these associations of coronacionis, which suggests that, for him, the inauguration was a symbolic connection between the king and people, nation and identity. Bower then recalls that a ‘venerable, grey-haired figure, and elderly Scot’ (Scotus) appeared at the inauguration and, although a ‘wild highlander’ (silvester et montanus), ‘was honourably attired after his own fashion’ (Chron. Bower 5. 295). This highlander greets the new king ‘in a scrupulously correct manner’ and ‘in his mother tongue’ (materna lingua, i.e., Gaelic) (Chron. Bower 5. 295). He then proceeds to recite the genealogiam of the king of Scots, ‘linking up each person with the next, until he came to the first Scot, that is Hiber the Scot’, son of Gaythelos and Scota (Chron. Bower 5. 295). The investiture reveals an act of memoria through the ritual of inauguration: the recitation of the monarch’s genealogy becomes a memorial act that generates (as it performs) a commemorative narrative. The recitation of the king’s lineage ends powerfully with a return to origins (Scota), drawing the reader’s attention back to Scotland’s mythic foundation, which, through the process of ritualised remembrance, is directly linked with the foundational moment of Alexander’s own reign. The ceremony demonstrates how national memory is heavily inflected with notions of memorial practice. Bower remembers Scottish history in such a way as to identify Alexander III not only as his father’s heir through his personal body but also as the heir of Scota through his public body. The genealogy of Alexander’s personal and public body demonstrates, then, a preoccupation with foundations that has as much to do with the perception of regnal (or national) continuity as it has to do with the private genealogy of an aristocratic family. King and crown, individual and state, are inextricably knitted together and serve as a model for – and expression of – the community as a whole.

The inauguration of Alexander is depicted in a miniature in MS C (fol. 206r), one of five illustrations in this manuscript – the other four depicting the journey of Scota and Gaythelos (which I have already discussed, see Fig. 2), the meeting between Máel Coluim and Macduff, the funeral of Alexander III and the Battle of Bannockburn. These illustrations depict particularly significant moments in Scottish history and Scottish kingship, with Alexander’s reign notably highlighted by two visual narratives: the beginning and end of his kingship. The miniature of the inauguration (Fig. 3) depicts a seated Alexander holding a sceptre, flanked by two nobles, one of whom holds a sword. John Higgitt suggests that these two figures are likely to be Malcolm, earl of Fife, and Malise II, earl of Strathearn.29John Higgitt, ‘Decoration and Illustration’, Chron. Bower 9. 157–85 (174). The identification of the earl of Fife would certainly make sense in this instance, given the earl’s holding of the right to crown the kings of Scotland.30Malise’s son, Malise III, was the brother-in-law of John Comyn, earl of Buchan, whose wife, Isabel, played a significant role in Robert Bruce’s coup of 1306. Behind these three figures stands a cross, and to the left of them, a man in significantly different attire genuflectens before the king. This man is also in the act of speaking, demonstrated by the scroll coming from his mouth, on which is written: benach de re albane alex[ander] mak alex[ander] (God bless the king of Albany, Alexander son of Alexander).31Beannachd indicates a blessing or benediction, and beannaich to bless. Colin B.D. Mark, The Gaelic–English Dictionary: A Dictionary of Scots Gaelic (London: Routledge, 2007), bennaich, v. ‘De’ is the genitive of ‘Dia’ (God). Thanks to Duncan Sneddon and Kate Mathis for their helpful discussions of this phrase with me. See also, John Bannerman, ‘The King’s Poet and the Inauguration of Alexander III’, SHR, 68 (1989), 120–49. The scroll repeats the first spoken words in Bower’s account of the inauguration on the same page, but it does so in the highlander’s materna lingua, Gaelic, which is then translated into Latin by Bower, who notes that the man recites Alexander’s lineage back to ‘Fergus, first king of the Scots in Albany’ (Chron. Bower 5. 295).

More than just a visual complement to Bower’s text, however, the image of Alexander’s inauguration serves several specific functions within Scotichronicon.32Higgitt notes particular differences between the image and Bower’s text. See Chron. Bower 9. 172. The inclusion of this image as one of only five in the manuscript points to the importance of this occasion, but the depiction of the highlander and his speech scroll also represents Bower’s text as speech made visible (or speech rendered as text by Bower). The speech act – in Bower’s text and its visual representation – is at once documentary and performative: documentary in its recording Alexander’s inauguration and performative in actively changing Alexander from boy to king (personal to public body) through the remembrance and recitation of his monarchical heritage. Along with Bower’s text, the manuscript image re-enacts the past to enable the present and the future; genealogy as performance makes lineage living memory and Alexander a living embodiment of regnal memory. However, the illustration is also an attempt to impose a certain interpretation of the past and to shape the memory of Scotichronicon’s audience. While John Bannerman has argued that the description of the poet as a Scotus montanus was never intended by Fordun to be understood as a mark of rusticity, the differentiation of the man is significant.33Bannerman, ‘The King’s Poet’, 122. The inclusion of the Gaelic text and the description of him as a ‘wild highlander’ simultaneously denote the man’s linguistic and social otherness. The translation of his Gaelic speech – as confirmed by the scroll – into Latin subsumes his cultural difference by appropriating his role as a keeper of monarchical memory, and suggests that he is seen as part of the Scottish realm where, at other points in Scotichronicon, Bower demonstrates an ambivalence to this collective national imagining. At the same time, his inclusion in the account and the illustration acknowledges his necessary role in confirming the legitimacy of the Scottish king. He is at once a figure central and marginal.

One immediately noticeable part of the image is the highlander’s hands, both drawn in pointing positions. While Higgitt has suggested that these hands indicate merely that the highlander is speaking to the king, I propose that they more specifically denote him pointing and that the gesture is for the benefit of Scotichronicon’s audience as well as for the imagined participants of the original scene in 1249.34Higgitt comments that ‘He [the highlander] looks up to the king and the speaking gestures of his hands show that he is addressing him’: ‘Decoration and Illustration’, Chron. Bower 9. 172. Like the nota manicules that appear so often in the margins of medieval manuscripts, the pointing finger indicates an object of importance, something to be taken notice of: something worthy of being remembered. At first glance, it would seem that the object of interest and importance is Alexander himself, the king who has just been crowned and whose lineage the highlander recites (as Higgitt concludes). That the highlander is depicted in a double-handed gesture also represents a particularly significant gesticulation that points towards more than the body of the young king.35As Gale Owen-Crocker has argued in relation to the gestures of figures in the Bayeux Tapestry: ‘a minority of figures have both hands free and so are able to make double gestures. They […] are usually significant characters depicted at important occasions’; ‘The Interpretation of Gesture in the Bayeux Tapestry’, in Anglo-Norman Studies 26: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 2006, ed. C.P. Lewis (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 145–78 (175). I am particularly grateful to Professor Owen-Crocker for her advice during our discussions about the images in the Corpus Christi MS of Scotichronicon. The pointing finger of the highlander’s left hand appears to touch the pommel of the sword held by one of the two attending nobles. If a straight line is traced from the finger of the highlander’s right hand, it points not only at Alexander but also at the crown he is wearing and the tip of the sceptre that he holds. The highlander gestures not only to the boy, then; he draws the audience’s attention more specifically to the secular and divine symbols of sempiternal kingship: the sceptre and the crown indicate the divinity of the king, the sword the actual power wielded in the kingdom. The emphasis on kingship as a ritualised state of being is more apparent in the image than in Bower’s text. It highlights one of the main concerns of Scotichronicon as a whole: that of good kingship conferred through royal destiny.

The image of Alexander’s inauguration is also reminiscent of late medieval depictions of the Annunciation to the Virgin. Drawing on conventions of Annunciation iconography in which Gabriel is depicted kneeling on the left and the Virgin seated on the right, the salutation of the highlander mirrors that of Gabriel to the Virgin with his initial blessing: Ave gratia plena Dominus tecum. Ann van Dijk comments that Gabriel’s salutation ‘projects straight from his mouth, describing an oblique path directly towards its object, the Virgin’.36Ann van Dijk, ‘The Angelic Salutation in Early Byzantine and Medieval Annunciation Imagery’, Art Bulletin, 81.3 (1999), 420–36 (420). If the Scotichronicon’s illustration deliberately recalls the Annunciation, the emphasis is on heralding a new age: just as the Annunciation signified the incarnation and the beginning of Christ’s earthly mission, so Alexander’s inauguration heralds a new beginning for Scotland in the reign of its new monarch.37Elizabeth L’Estrange has argued that images of the Annunciation and the Nativity purposely employed the Virgin mother as a model of aristocratic motherhood. Holy Motherhood: Gender, Dynasty and Visual Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), esp. pp. 135–42. Emily Wingfield has written about a similar interplay in the Trinity Altarpiece. She notes that the details of the altarpiece, including the parallel depictions of the Stewart trinity (of James III, Margaret of Denmark and the future James IV) and the divine Trinity imagine ‘a comparison between Margaret as mother of a future Scottish king, and Mary as mother of the heavenly king’. Scotland’s Royal Women and European Literary Culture, 1424–1487 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2023), p. 178. I am grateful to her for allowing me access to proofs of this book ahead of its publication. This is indicated by the fact that the inauguration image also calls to mind the depictions of Christ holding a sceptre. The illustrator’s presentation of Alexander thus conflates and recollects two devotional tropes that emphasise, for the viewer, divinely ordained Scottish sovereignty. The succession of Alexander maintains the unbroken continuity of Scottish kingship and reinforces his predestined position as Scotland’s rightful ruler. The reader is directed not only to remember the temporal genealogy of the Scottish royal line but also to understand that lineage as prophetic as that of the line of the biblical David.

The authority and authenticity that genealogy lends to the monarch and to the kingdom in this passage come from its re-enactment of a continuity from antiquity, transmitting tradition through performance and repetition. In setting down the highlander’s speech, Bower enables the memory of the ritual to be performed in perpetuity. Transforming the speech act into written record prevents tradition from being lost. Once spoken, the moment of the highlander’s speech cannot be repeated; it exists only in the memory of the speaker and the hearer. But, through recording the words Bower creates a memory aid, produced almost two hundred years after the event, which recollects the highlander’s speech every time a reader comes to that section of the chronicle. In essence, Scotichronicon rewrites public memory to focus on this legitimising image of Scottish kingship. The tracing of Alexander’s genealogy back to Gaythelos and Scota in the fifteenth-century text commemorates the direct continuity between the mythical Scottish past and the historical present; in doing so, it reminds the Scots that their independence was justified because of its antiquity. Bower also generates a link between the highlander and the ecclesiastical historiographer. As ollamh ríg Alband (master poet of the king of Scotland), the highlander becomes a keeper of national – or at least sovereign – memory; Bower asserts his own role as the next in line of a keeper of another kind of national memory by performing the cultural function of master historian, reproducing Fordun’s work and adding to it. The genealogies at work in Bower’s Scotichronicon become what Maurice Halbwachs calls a ‘collective framework’ of memory, a structure that not only preserves but also forges memory through acts of ritual and commemoration.38Halbwachs, Collective Memory, p. 43. For Bower, this framework is one that authorises the Scottish royal line at the same time that it encompasses the Scottish community of the realm within its claim to identity and independence.

This seemingly glorious and peaceable transfer of power memorialised by Bower was quite unlike the conditions under which he was writing. James II was a similar age to Alexander III when he came to the throne in 1437, which suggests that in the image of the golden age of Scottish kingship conferred on Alexander – and on James I later in Scotichronicon – Bower reveals an anxiety about the minority of the 1440s. As Sally Mapstone notes, the contrast between James I’s exemplary kingship in the recent past and ‘the chaos of the kingless present’ offered ‘one of the most forceful statements of the attraction of the ideal of authoritative kingly rule in fifteenth-century Scottish literature’.39Sally Mapstone, ‘Bower on Kingship’, Chron. Bower 9. 323. Bower’s use of history as a mirror here exploits the Advice to Princes tradition. At the same time it points to the ways in which history-as-memory could be harnessed: history might not only be reinterpreted in light of current events, but it could also be used to shape them.

Despite the idealised depiction of rightful kingship in Scotichronicon, however, Bower describes an incident at Alexander III’s inauguration in which there is disagreement among the magnates as to whether the young Alexander should be crowned or simply made knight at this point. Walter Comyn, earl of Menteith, brings the two opposing sides together, maintaining that ‘just as a boat is tossed about among the waves without an oarsman, so a kingdom without a king or ruler is left in the lurch’ (Chron. Bower 5. 291–3). The maritime analogy is typical of late medieval thinking about kingship; the ship of state’s medieval locus classicus is Thomas Aquinas’ De regimine principum (c. 1265), in which he writes:

The recitation of the king’s genealogy at Alexander’s inauguration functions as an individual claim to power that stretched back to antiquity and as an assertion of the independent identity of the Scots. In the context of Bower’s mid-fifteenth-century chronicle, these two genealogical objectives combine to reassert the importance of Scottish sovereignty for a contemporary audience. Scotichronicon claims the remembered past as a legitimising force in the present, and the narrative of national lineage – inheritance from Scota – uses genealogical epistemology to articulate a history of connection between people and territory. By envisioning geography as well as consanguinity, Scottish genealogy asserts that cultural power, imagined as an intimate relationship between the monarch and his subjects, might be recalled, particularly in that very specific designation of the monarch as king of Scots rather than king of Scotland. In his very title, the Scottish king’s genealogy functioned as an implied genealogical memory of the people (or nation), creating not only a vertical bond through time but also a horizontal bond of community united by sempiternal kingship. In bringing together past and present, Scotichronicon’s genealogies function in memorial terms by reordering time, asking readers not only to recall the history that they represent but to see their contemporary resonance and their future potential.

In Book 15 of Scotichronicon, Bower once again calls to his readers’ minds the image of eternal kingship. Rather than looking to the past this time, Bower propels the reader into the future, expressing the hope that James I’s ‘kingly exercise of government may be to the kings who follow him like a picture delineated in a mirror, reflecting the warm characteristics of virtue (Chron. Bower 8. 147). Thinking of more recent history and the minority of James II, Bower fashions genealogy as the transference of virtues deemed to be part of Scottish kingship and identity. In her consideration of the use of amatory verse in the fifteenth-century political sphere, Joanna Martin notes that genealogy was used as a way of ‘supplying models of virtuous kingship’ in both chronicle and romance.42Joanna Martin, Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), p. 88. In this respect, genealogy functioned not only as a legitimising narrative of power structures but also as a way of ‘correcting’ the king through the remembrance and emulation of his kingly ancestors. Like the traditions of the inauguration, genealogy adopted a ritualistic function that linked the identity of the king and the nation in a single commemorative structure. Through the idea of the king as rex qui nunquam moritur (a king that never dies), Bower demonstrates that Alexander III, James I and, by implication, James II were images not just of their fathers but of the king of Scots as an unbroken line stretching into both past and future.

Of course, the greatest test of genealogical memory came as a result of the sudden death of Alexander III. In March 1286, hurrying to meet his new bride (he had married Yolanda, daughter of the count of Dreux, in October 1285), Alexander, who had ‘spurned’ the advice of his companions not to ride ‘beyond Inverkeithing that night’, fell from his horse and broke his neck (Chron. Bower 5. 421). Bower laments how the ‘losses of times which followed clearly show how sad and harmful his death was for the kingdom of Scotland’ (Chron. Bower 5. 421), not least because, with no surviving son, there was no ‘copy’ to assume the throne.43David died without issue in 1281, followed by his sister, Margaret, in 1283 and then his brother, Alexander, in 1284. What followed was a succession crisis that precipitated not only the outbreak of war with England but also the threat of civil war within Scotland. In 1284, a parliamentary act of entail (tailzie) regulating royal succession had stated that, should Alexander III die leaving no legitimate son, the magnates would receive his grand-daughter Margaret, the Maid of Norway, as ‘our lady and rightful heir of our said lord the king of Scotland, of all the kingdom, and of the Isle of Man’.44APS, 1. 424. Despite this, in April 1286, six guardians were elected to head the royal government in the belief that the queen, Yolanda, was pregnant. By November, it was clear that Margaret of Norway was Alexander’s only descendant; nevertheless, the oath of 1284 did not guarantee her acceptance as queen.45For a more detailed discussion of the events of 1286–87, see Brown, The Wars of Scotland, pp. 159–61. Negotiations between the guardians and King Eric of Norway saw Margaret set sail for Scotland in September 1290. She died shortly after she reached the Norwegian territory of Orkney.

Much ink has been spilt on the succession crisis that followed, as I indicated in the Introduction. There is one point, however, that is particularly pertinent to the discussion of genealogy that I would like to focus on: the council of 1284 opened the floodgates for claims to the Scottish throne to be argued through female heredity. From several contenders, two major claimants to the throne emerged. John Balliol and Robert Bruce, Lord of Annandale (Robert I’s grandfather), both claimed their right to succeed through their descent from David, earl of Huntingdon, the younger brother of Alexander III’s grandfather, William I (1163–1214). To do this, each had to look to their maternal ancestors: David’s daughters, Margaret and Isabel. While both Bruce and Balliol fundamentally sought to locate their legitimacy in their descent from William I’s brother, this mediation through female ancestry is significant. While Margaret and Isabel might not be women at the beginning – as Scota was – their place within the Great Cause focuses attention on the repeated appearances that women made in Scottish history in relation to family memory.46For a discussion of the women of the Wars of Independence, see Nicola Royan, ‘Some Conspicuous Women in the Original Chronicle, Scotichronicon and Scotorum Historia’, Innes Review, 59.2 (2008), 131–44; Elizabeth Ewan, ‘The Dangers of Manly Women: Late Medieval Perceptions of Female Heroism in Scotland’s Second War of Independence’, in Woman and the Feminine in Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing, ed. by Sarah Dunnigan, C. Marie Harker and Evelyn S. Newlyn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 3–18. It was also at this point that Edward I of England began to appeal to the memory of mythical origins to press his own claim to Scotland, in turn providing an impetus for a more sustained narrative of the Scota story to be developed.47For more detail on Edward I’s reliance on mythical origins, see Michael Prestwich, Edward I (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 356–75; 469–516. The Great Cause meant that claims for and against Scottish sovereignty generated arguments about history and memory, about foundations and origins, that placed female figures at the centre.

John of Fordun narrates that in March 1306, ‘when a few days had rolled after the death’ of Sir John the Red Comyn, Robert Bruce, earl of Carrick, took ‘as many men as he could get’ and ‘hastened to Scone’. On ‘being set on the royal throne’, Bruce was crowned ‘in the manner wherein the kings of Scotland were wont to be invested’ (Chron. Fordun 2. 333). Bower’s Scotichronicon recollects this episode almost verbatim and Barbour’s Bruce describes Robert riding ‘to be set / In kingis stole and to be king’ (Bruce 2. 150–1). The narratives of Bruce’s inauguration unsurprisingly depict the episode as a hurried affair, carried out with little thought to the sense of occasion, such as that reflected in the account of Alexander III’s inauguration, for example. However, in Gray’s Scalacronica, Bruce’s inauguration is depicted slightly differently and in ways which point to the variability of memory and the instability of national remembrance. Gray’s narrative of Bruce’s inauguration, while still presented as hastily arranged, recounts that Robert ‘had himself crowned as King of Scotland at Scone […] by the Countess of Buchan, in the absence of the earl, her son, who was then staying in England at his manor of Whitwick, near Leicester, and to whom the office of coronation of the kings of Scotland belonged in heredity’ (Scal. 53).48Gray is incorrect in his account. The office to which he refers belonged to the earl of Fife, who was Isabel’s nephew, not her son, although he was in England at the time of Bruce’s inauguration. See Michael Brown, Wars of Scotland, p. 200. The countess of Buchan’s role does not appear in the major Scottish chronicles or in Barbour’s epic poem. Aside from the episode in Scalacronica, the countess is mentioned in connection with Bruce’s inauguration in two English texts: the fourteenth-century Flores Historiarum – in which she is represented as an adulteress (adultera) and the Passio Scotorum Perjuratorum, which calls her an ‘impious conspirer’ (impia conjuratrix).49See Flores Historiarum, ed. by Henry Richards Luard, 3 vols (London: HMSO, 1890), 3. 130; the Passio Scotorum Perjuratorum, appears in Marquis of Bute, ‘Notice of a Manuscript of the Latter Part of the Fourteenth Century, Entitled Passio Scotorum Perjuratorum’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 19 (1885), 166–92 (167–84). Yet, the episode suggests a way of reading Bruce’s inauguration as a contemporary foundation myth with imagery that recollects the Scota story and the matrilineal foundations of the Scottish nation.

Gray’s account tells how the countess of Buchan takes the place of the absent earl whose right it was to crown the kings of Scotland, but this does not give us the whole picture of the event, nor of the perceived significance of the countess’s presence. The office belonged the earl of Fife, the countess’s nephew who, at the time, was a ward of Edward I, but the Buchan connection is significant. The countess’s husband was John Comyn, earl of Buchan, whose cousin, Sir John the Red Comyn, had been murdered by Bruce in 1306, an act for which Bruce was excommunicated. At this time, then, not only was there growing hostility towards the kingdom itself, but Scotland itself was on the brink of civil war between the Comyn and Bruce factions.50See Alan Young, Robert the Bruce’s Rivals: The Comyns, 1212–1314 (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1997), esp. pp. 184–214. Bower writes that ‘from the first occurrence of dissension between the noble men Bruce and Balliol over the right to succeed to the kingdom of Scotland […] the kingdom was split in two’, with ‘all the Comyns’ supporting Balliol (Chron. Bower 6. 75). All, apparently, except for the countess of Buchan. As a Comyn, Isabel’s husband allied himself with his family – and, ultimately, the English – but the countess fled to Bruce’s side, even stealing her husband’s best horses and clandestinely travelling to Bruce’s inauguration to act as a representative of her (originary) family – the Macduffs of Fife – and to provide the legitimating force for the occasion. Once again, ideas of lineage and memory surface here and what is quite clear is the potential resonance with the past that might be exploited. The countess of Buchan’s allegiance is clearly to the hereditary office of the crowning the Scottish sovereign and her fidelity is determined by consanguinity rather than marriage. It is the countess’s memory of her blood-kin’s allegiances and responsibilities that dominates her actions.

Returning to Scotichronicon for a moment, it is possible to see that here Robert the Bruce is being drawn as a ‘second Maccabeus’, who adopted ‘forceful measures in order to free his fellow-countrymen’ and endured innumerable and unbearable burdens and toils of the heat of the day, cold and hunger by land and sea’ (Chron. Bower 6. 301). The parallel between the Scots and the Maccabees is one that surfaces regularly in Scotichronicon and serves to portray the Scots as a divinely chosen people that must struggle to ensure its survival and independence. It also forms an important part of the Declaration of Arbroath, in which the community of the realm recounts its liberation ‘by our most valiant prince … who, that his people and his heritage might be delivered … bore cheerfully toil and fatigue … like another Maccabeus’ (Chron. Bower 7. 4–9). The trials and tribulations suffered by Bruce – and by implication the Scots as a whole – certainly mirror those of the Maccabees, but they also call to mind the struggles of the ancient ancestors of the Scots in Egypt and Spain. This intertextual narrative seems to be an important feature of Scottish writing, particularly writing about the Wars of Independence, and it suggests that the process of ‘struggle’ takes on a particularly significant role for the Scots and their relations with the English. As a careful and practical ruler, Bruce, like Maccabeus and Gaythelos, has the protection of his people at the forefront of his mind. The Scotichronicon and the Declaration of Arbroath both prompt their readers to call to mind, to remember, not only the story of the Maccabees but also that of the Scots’ founding mother and father. As such, Robert is not only another Maccabeus but also another Gaythelos; he is linked directly to Scotland’s founding father and this promotes a sense of continuity rooted in both mythological and biblical origins.

In Scalacronica, Gray memorialises the countess of Buchan as a female figure instrumental in legitimising Bruce as the new Scottish monarch. In this, she recalls the image of Scota deployed by so many Scottish texts and documents: Isabel assumes the role of a glorious founding mother whose presence at Bruce’s inauguration reasserts her own family’s hereditary office as it simultaneously invests the scene with a triumphant symbolism that harnesses the legendary sovereignty of the Scots for a markedly contemporary purpose. Read in this way, the countess becomes central to a renewed sense of Scottish independence that finds its expression in the heroic figure of Robert the Bruce. Furthermore, in her position as Comyn’s wife, the countess symbolically suggests the greater need for the Scots to put aside their differences, to unite against a common enemy: the English. This need for unity is something that resurfaces in the mid-sixteenth century during calls for an Anglo-Scottish union, which I will discuss in Chapter 6. In Scalacronica, then, Bruce’s inauguration might be read as a fourteenth-century point of origin, with Scotland emblematically reborn through Bruce and the countess, which takes as its analogy the memory of Scota and her sons. Not only does Robert the Bruce figuratively become the father of the nation, alongside the mother in the person of the countess, but he is also reimagined, as arguably all Scottish monarchs were, as a surrogate son of the familial office of the Macduffs, who claimed the privilege of establishing the new king on the throne.

Gray’s narrative draws the reader’s attention not only to ideas of loyalty but also to the ways in which memory might function quite practically in certain moments. Evident in Gray’s depiction of Isabel is the privileging of certain memories over others: nation over personal polity. In substituting herself for her English-affiliated son (as the text of Scalacronica reads), the countess of Buchan might have forgotten, or chosen not to remember, her role as a dutiful wife to her husband and his political ambitions, but, in doing so, she remembered her blood family’s role in ways that her male relatives seemed unable or unwilling to do.51 Whereas Scota provided an origin and focus for dynastic and national legitimacy, the countess of Buchan becomes its custodian, a figure of memoria. Elisabeth van Houts’ work on aristocratic women’s roles in the construction of memory is particularly pertinent for thinking about the countess of Buchan. Van Houts argues that, in being expected to become repositories of family memories, aristocratic women were seen as instrumental in the preservation of genealogical remembrance. Moreover, van Houts suggests, a wife would have been expected to shape herself according to the demands of her new family.52Elisabeth van Houts, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe, 900–1200 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), esp. pp. 65–92. In Gray’s recollection, the countess of Buchan maintains her original familial allegiances. Once again, private and public, family and nation intersect – albeit uneasily – and it becomes possible to discern a suggestion that members of a nation might, in some way, constitute a family unit with its assumed duties and obligations. Reading the episode in this way implies that those members of Scotland who aligned themselves with the English – or with other Scots who did not support Bruce – enacted a forgetting of rightful allegiance. Gray’s countess of Buchan seems to feel more keenly her allegiances to Scotland than does her husband.53As a comparable figure, see my discussion of the countess of March in Gray’s Scalacronica, in ‘Terrifying Proximity’, p. 55. This intersection of family, nation and commemorative practice indicates that for the memory of Bruce’s inauguration recorded in Scalacronica – as with that of Alexander III’s in Scotichronicon – the foci are legitimacy, power and, fundamentally, a memory of origins.

Both inauguration accounts use memories of origins to signal the importance of identity and belonging and the central role of women in these embodiments of national identity.54Emily Wingfield has written about shifts in female identity as a result of marriage. For example, she notes that an inscription on folio 122v of Paris, BnF, MS fr. 958 (a copy of the Somme le Roi) ‘neatly highlights [Isabella Stewart’s] natal identity and the multiple power bases attached to her marital identity’ as the wife of François I, duke of Brittany. Focusing on Margaret Tudor, Wingfield suggests that her books of hours ‘articulated and commemorated [Margaret’s] natal identity as well as (or indeed perhaps more so than) her marital identity, and they acted as memorial volumes through which she was able to maintain ties of family, friendship, and loyalty back to England’; Scotland’s Royal Women, pp. 105, 234. Gray suggests that the countess of Buchan is a particularly significant figure for what she comes to represent in this episode, and it was a significance not lost on the English who sought to use her image to create certain memories of their own. Gray records that in the same year as Bruce’s inauguration, the countess was captured by the English after the Battle of Methven and ‘brought to Berwick’ (Scal. 53). At Edward I’s command ‘she was put in a wooden hut, in one of the towers of Berwick castle, with criss-crossed walls, so that all could watch her for spectacle’ (meruail; Scal. 53). However, Edward I not only displayed the countess in a cage – as he had done with female members of Bruce’s family – he also prohibited any Scots man or woman from talking to her.55‘Qe ele ne parle ad nulli ne qe hōme ne fēme qi soit de la nacion d Escoce’: Documents and Records Illustrating the History of Scotland and the Transactions between the Crowns of Scotland and England, preserved in the Treasury of Her Majesty’s Exchequer, ed. by Francis Palgrave (Record Commission, 1837), p. 358.

Gray’s description of the countess as a meruail (marvel), coupled with the prohibition of her fellow Scots to speak to her, invests Isabel with a symbolic power both for the Scots and the English, although that power might be rendered differently depending on the observer’s allegiance. In her discussion of wonder, Caroline Walker Bynum argues that the marvellous is singular, both in ‘its significance and its particularity’.56Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001), p. 73. This might go some way to explain why Gray includes the countess in Scalacronica but not, for example, Bruce’s sister, Mary, who suffered the same fate. For Gray to give details of other Scots who were captured and imprisoned by Edward in 1306 would suppress the amazement that the singular figure of Isabel invokes, and this carries a distinctly memorial charge (it is something to which I will return in my discussion of Hary’s Wallace in Chapter 4). The complex meanings of ‘wonder’ mean that the countess arrests attention but she might do so in one of two ways, depending on who is looking at her. As Bynum notes, the reaction to wonder ‘ranges from terror and disgust’ to ‘solemn astonishment and playful delight’; attention and memory might therefore be prompted by desire or terror.57Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, p. 130. As a meruail, the countess of Buchan might be remembered as Bynum’s wondrous figure or Cohen’s monstrous one – or, indeed, both – and Scalacronica resists making its interpretation clear.58See Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), esp. p. 7. Like the mythic Scota, the countess represents a site around which memory and identity can converge. Gray plays with these ambiguities of representation and its memorial implications. In her assumption of an official function, Isabel represents Scotland and its resistance to English military action; her role in Bruce’s inauguration invests him with the same symbolic power. If, however, we read the countess according to Bynum’s concept of ‘wonder’ in which, she argues, the wondrous is ‘a reaction of a particular “us” to an “other”’, the textual memory of Isabel as a meruail suggests her unusual particularity, and this seems to work against any positive reading.59Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, p. 55. In Scalacronica, however, it is only to the English that Isabel appears marvellous, because they cannot comprehend her and what she represents. The implication is that the Scots fully understand her significance and this is why Edward imposes the prohibition on speech. The moment is one in which wonder is staged, deliberately, to evoke reactions of terror, and the imagining of her as a ‘spectacle’ aims to create a distinctive memory of her in the minds of the English. Gray suggests that in determining to present the countess as marvellous, Edward also seeks to highlight her monstrosity. In doing so, he aims to show and to warn English spectators of the dangers presented by the Scots more broadly.60Monsters are named from the verb, monstrare (to show), deriving from monere (to warn); OED, monster, n. This monstrosity is compounded by the countess appropriating masculine behaviour and by the assumption that the Scots – in recognising Isabel’s power – condone this behaviour.

While the countess of Buchan’s actions are recalled in Scalacronica, they are not preserved in any of the Scottish histories. It perhaps seems strange that an episode with such potential echoes of the Scota myth was not exploited as a political tool by the Scots themselves, especially when they had negotiated narratives of other examples of female heroism during the Wars of Independence.61See Ewan, ‘The Dangers of Manly Women’. If this account had appeared in Fordun, Bower or even in Barbour’s Bruce, the ideological imagery and its political resonance would perhaps seem more straightforward. Nicola Royan argues that the Scots engage in acts of strategic forgetting in choosing to write Isabel out of historical memory, deliberately choosing silence because her presence ‘would emphasise the abnormality of the event’, as well as the ‘divided nature of the Scottish nobility’.62Royan, ‘Some Conspicuous Women’, 133. Royan suggests that the uncertainties of Bruce’s accession to the Scottish throne meant that Stewart historiography ‘suppress[ed] any episodes that might permit questions regarding the legitimacy of the symbolic act’ of Bruce’s inauguration.63Royan, ‘Some Conspicuous Women’, 133. The omission of the Scottish chronicles is just as significant as Gray’s remembering, because it demonstrates the ways in which writers of national history impose forgetfulness as part of memorial creativity.