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Scotland - Norman English influence
Malcolm III's victory over Macbeth in 1067 foreshadowed what became a major thread of Scottish history for the next thousand years.
He had relied on English assistance to return to the throne, and from then on Scotland at no time remained very far from the thoughts of England's rulers. The reciprocal condition equally applied.
In 1066 the Norman Conquest shook England to its foundations, and one of the claimants of the English throne opposing William the Conqueror, Edgar, eventually fled to Scotland.
Malcolm married Edgar's sister Margaret, and thus came into opposition to William who had already disputed Scotland's southern borders.
William invaded Scotland in 1072, riding through Lothian and past Stirling on to the Firth of Tay where he met up with his fleet of ships. Malcolm submitted, paid homage to William, and surrendered his son Duncan as a hostage.
When Malcolm died in 1093, his brother Donald III succeeded to the throne, but William II of England backed Malcolm's son (by his first marriage) Duncan as a pretender.
With the English behind him Duncan briefly seized power as Duncan II. His murder within a few months saw Donald returned to the throne.
The eldest son of Malcolm's marriage to Margaret supported him, but the next two younger sons fled to England, and returned supported once again by the English.
Victorious, the invaders imprisoned Donald III and the eldest son for life, and the elder of the two refugees became King Edgar in 1097. Shortly afterwards King Magnus Bare Leg of Norway bullied King Edgar into ceding the Hebrides and Kintyre to Norway, the setting for the independence of the Lords of the Isles.
Margaret achieved fame for another achievement: the restoration of the Scottish church to the rule of Rome.
Invasions by the pagan Norse and Danish in the centuries previous had cut Scotland and Ireland off from the bulk of European Christianity, and their local Churches had evolved along their own paths.
Margaret, however, had an English father and a Hungarian mother, and grown up in Hungary with her background steeped in the Roman Catholic church.
At her instigation, the Benedictine order founded a monastery at Dunfermline, and the rites of the Scottish church became gradually re-integrated with mainstream Western Catholicism from that base.
When Edgar died in 1107, Margaret's third son Alexander became king, and when he in turn passed away in 1124, the crown passed to her fourth son David I.
Half-English, David had a large hand in the spread of Scots in the Lowlands of Scotland, thus introducing the second great thread in Scottish history up until the middle of the 18th century: the tensions between the Scots-speaking Lowlands and Gaelic Highlands.
The governmental and cultural innovations introduced by the Norman conquerors of England impressed David greatly, and he arranged for several notables to come north and take up places within the Scottish aristocracy.
With this act, Scotland became finally wedded to the mainstream of European civilization, after having been relegated to beyond the fringe as far back as Roman times.
In a mirror of the invitation of the Normans northwards, David received lands south of the border in fee from the English kings. This meant that the Kings of Scotland also functioned as Earls of Huntingdon, and that the Earls paid ceremonial homage to the English kings for the lands received.
This homage proved problematic, however, as Malcolm Canmore as the King of Scotland had paid homage to the Kings of England twice after defeats during his various campaigns against the English on behalf of Margaret's brother.
The English maintained that this meant Scotland had become subordinate to England.
David himself during his reign fended off this claim, but Henry II defeated David's grandson, William the Lion and hauled him off to the English holdings in Normandy.
There William had to swear fealty in 1174, not as Earl but as King.
For the first time, Scotland became nominally unified with England. The vow was nullified in 1189 when Richard I accepted a payment from William, needed for Richard's crusade to the Middle East, but the submission hung over the Scottish kings for some time afterwards.
In 1263 Scotland and Norway fought the Battle of Largs for control over the Western Isles. The battle proved a success for the Scots, and in 1266 the Norwegian king Magnus VI of Norway signed the Treaty of Perth, which acknowledged Scottish suzerainty over the islands.
A series of deaths in the line of succession in the 1280s, followed by King Alexander III's death in 1286 left the Scottish crown in disarray. His grand-daughter Margaret, the "Maid of Norway", a four-year old girl, became Queen of Scots.
Edward I of England, as Margaret's great-uncle, suggested that his son (also a child) and Margaret should marry, stabilizing the Scottish line of succession.
In 1290 Margaret's guardians agreed to this, but Margaret herself died in Orkney on her voyage from Norway to Scotland before either her coronation or her marriage could take place.
Article is provided courtesy of Wikipedia.org and distributed under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License.
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