Macbeth and the Making of Medieval Scotland

1. Kenneth MacAlpin and the Pictish–Gaelic union (and the "MacAlpin's Treason" myth)

Kenneth MacAlpin (Gaelic Cináed mac Ailpín) has long been cast as the founder of Scotland — the Gaelic conqueror who overthrew the Picts and forged a nation. The evidence tells a quieter, more complex story. In contemporary and near-contemporary sources Kenneth is styled "king of the Picts" (rex Pictorum), not "king of Scots" or "king of Scotland." As Card #3 (The Picts) noted, the shift from a Pictish to a Gaelic identity was already well advanced before him: Pictish kings had patronised Gaelic culture for generations. His reign is conventionally dated from 843, though he probably did not overcome all his rivals until around 848; he died on 13 February 858 at Forteviot and was buried on Iona. The Chronicle of the Kings of Alba, compiled in the reign of a later namesake, records simply that "Kinadius son of Alpinus, first of the Scots, ruled this Pictland prosperously for 16 years."

His genuine legacy was dynastic: he founded the line (the Alpínids) that would rule for centuries. That is very different from "founding Scotland." Indeed, the neat genealogy connecting Kenneth to the old kings of Dál Riata was itself constructed retrospectively by later medieval writers to give his dynasty a pedigree.

The lurid tale of "MacAlpin's Treason" — that Kenneth invited the Pictish nobility to a banquet at Scone and had them treacherously slaughtered, some versions describing them tumbling into pits of blades hidden beneath collapsing benches — must be flagged clearly as legend. It has no contemporary source. It first appears in the late 12th century, in Gerald of Wales's (Giraldus Cambrensis) De principis instructione, and Gerald had lifted the motif from a story of Saxon treachery at a feast in Geoffrey of Monmouth's largely fictional Historia Regum Britanniae. Modern historians reject the "conquest myth" of a single violent takeover. The union of Picts and Gaels was a protracted process of dynastic marriage, warfare, political consolidation and gradual Gaelicisation — with Norse pressure (covered on Card #5) as an accelerating backdrop after the catastrophic Pictish defeat by Vikings in 839 — not a single night of murder.

2. From "king of the Picts" to "king of Alba"

The word that matters is Alba. It is at the death of Donald II (Domnall mac Causantín) in 900 — killed at Dunnottar — that a ruler of this kingdom is first recorded in the Irish annals as rí Alban, "king of Alba," where his predecessors had been rex Pictorum. Building on what Card #3 established, this change of vocabulary is often taken as the symbolic "birth certificate" of Scotland. Historians caution, however, that Donald's own reign was unremarkable (his epithet Dásachtach, "the Madman," hardly suggests a nation-builder), and the scholarly view — following Alex Woolf's From Pictland to Alba, 789–1070 — is that the change of title is "part of a broader transformation of Pictland," with the origins of the kingdom of Alba traced to the lifetime of Constantine II rather than to Donald himself. The name-change reflects a new, deliberately neutral identity encompassing both Picts and Gaels rather than one people's conquest of another.

3. Constantine II and the Battle of Brunanburh

Constantine II (Causantín mac Áeda, r. 900–943) was one of the most consequential of the early kings, reigning for more than four decades and doing much to shape Alba as a durable kingdom. His reign is defined for posterity by the Battle of Brunanburh in 937. Alarmed by the growing power of Æthelstan, the first king to dominate all of England, Constantine joined a grand coalition with Olaf (Amlaíb) Guthfrithson, the Norse-Gael king of Dublin, and Owain, king of Strathclyde. Æthelstan and his brother Edmund crushed the alliance. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle celebrates it in a famous Old English poem; the Irish annals called it a "huge war, lamentable and horrible." Constantine escaped back to Scotland but reportedly lost a son in the slaughter, said to have claimed five kings and seven earls.

Brunanburh's importance is stressed across the scholarship: the historian Alfred Smyth called it "the greatest single battle in Anglo-Saxon history before Hastings," while Michael Livingston argues that its combatants "forged a political map of the future that remains, arguably making the Battle of Brunanburh one of the most significant battles in the long history not just of England, but of the whole of the British Isles" — Livingston going so far as to call it "the moment when Englishness came of age." Its site, however, remains unidentified, with the Wirral among the leading candidates. For Scotland its lesson was sobering: the southern border could not be pushed by force against a united England. Constantine abdicated in 943 to enter religious life, dying at St Andrews around 952.

4. Malcolm II and the Battle of Carham

Where Brunanburh checked Scottish ambitions, the Battle of Carham advanced them. Fought near the River Tweed around 1018 (some evidence points to 1016), it saw Malcolm II (Máel Coluim mac Cináeda, r. 1005–1034), allied with Owain the Bald of Strathclyde, defeat the Northumbrians. The victory is traditionally credited with securing Lothian — the fertile, Anglian-influenced south-east — for the Scottish crown and helping to fix the kingdom's southern boundary at approximately the Tweed, roughly where it still runs.

Here honesty requires nuance. There are no strictly contemporary accounts; the battle goes unmentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and is known mainly from 12th-century Durham material. Its significance is genuinely debated: some historians (notably Marjorie O. Anderson) argue Lothian had largely passed to the Scots earlier, by a grant of the English king Edgar around 973, so that Carham confirmed rather than created Scottish control. G.W.S. Barrow characterised the English "cession" of Lothian as recognition of a long-standing fait accompli. Either way, after Carham the Tweed line held: even conquerors of England such as Cnut and William I did not seriously try to reclaim Lothian.

5. Duncan I and the succession

Duncan I (Donnchad mac Crínáin, r. 1034–1040) was a grandson of Malcolm II, through Malcolm's daughter Bethóc and Crínán, lay abbot of Dunkeld. His peaceful accession in 1034 marked a departure from the usual bloody contests. Crucially — and against the whole premise of Shakespeare's play — the real Duncan was a young man, not an aged and venerable king. His reign was not a success: a raid on Durham around 1039–1040 ended in disaster. In 1040 he led an army north into Moray, the power-base of his cousin Macbeth, and there he was killed in battle at Bothnagowan (later Pitgaveny), near Elgin, on 14 August 1040. His young sons Malcolm and Donald were taken to safety abroad.

6. Macbeth's real reign

The historical Macbeth (Mac Bethad mac Findláich, r. 1040–1057) bears almost no resemblance to the stage villain. He was Mormaer (earl) of Moray, a great semi-autonomous northern province, from 1032, and probably a grandson of Malcolm II in his own right; his wife Gruoch was a granddaughter of an earlier king (Kenneth III), giving them a doubly royal claim. When he defeated and killed Duncan in 1040, he was acting within the rough-and-ready norms of 11th-century Scottish kingship, in which kings were routinely made and unmade in battle under the Gaelic system of contested succession among royal kin. He did not murder a sleeping guest; he won a throne on a battlefield.

Macbeth then ruled for 17 years — a long and, by the standards of the age, notably stable reign. Near-contemporary Gaelic verse remembers him warmly: the Prophecy of Berchán (Stanza 193) calls him "the generous king," and the Verse Chronicle notes that "in his reign there were productive seasons." He put down a rebellion led by Duncan's father, Crínán of Dunkeld, in 1045. The single most telling sign of his security is that in 1050 he left Scotland altogether to make a pilgrimage to Rome — the only reigning Scottish king ever to do so — where, according to the near-contemporary Irish chronicler Marianus Scotus (Máel Brigte of Mainz, 1028–1082/83, writing within a generation of the event), he "scattered money like seed to the poor" (the underlying Latin verb being seminando, "sowing as seed"; the entry falls under the year 1050, and is translated in Alan Orr Anderson's standard Early Sources of Scottish History). No insecure usurper could have risked being absent for the better part of a year, and historians treat the pilgrimage as the clearest evidence that his grip on the kingdom was firm.

The end came from the south. In 1054 Siward, Earl of Northumbria, backing Duncan's exiled son Malcolm, defeated Macbeth at Dunsinane. Macbeth fought on for three more years before being killed at the Battle of Lumphanan in Aberdeenshire on 15 August 1057 by forces loyal to Malcolm. He was buried on Iona, the traditional resting place of Scottish kings — itself a mark of legitimacy. His stepson Lulach ("the Unfortunate") was inaugurated at Scone but reigned only months before Malcolm killed him at Essie in Strathbogie on 17 March 1058.

7. The Shakespeare myth and its origins

Why, then, is Macbeth remembered as a monster? The answer lies in a chain of storytelling that runs from medieval Scotland to the Jacobean stage.

The real reputation was blackened over centuries by chroniclers loyal to the rival, Anglicising House of Dunkeld/Canmore, whose kings had every reason to darken the memory of the Moray line they had displaced. Hector Boece's Scotorum Historia (1527), a patriotic but heavily embellished history dedicated to James V, gathered and dramatised these traditions. Boece's work was rendered into Scots and, crucially, fed into Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (first edition 1577; revised 1587), which in turn was William Shakespeare's principal source when he wrote Macbeth around 1606. Shakespeare compressed a 17-year reign into a frenzied few months, moved Duncan's death from a battlefield to a bedchamber, invented the guilt-crazed tyranny, and imported the witches — the latter especially topical for a king, James VI and I, who had written a treatise on witchcraft (Daemonologie).

The Banquo problem is the clearest evidence of political myth-making. Per the standard account, "Boece's work is the first known record of Banquo and his son Fleance (spelled Banquho and Fleancho in the Latin), and scholars such as David Bevington generally consider them fictional characters invented by Boece." Their purpose was genealogical: through Fleance they supplied a legitimising ancestral lineage for the Stewart (Stuart) dynasty, and thus for King James VI and I, who was believed in his own day to descend from Banquo. (The Stewarts' real ancestor was Walter fitz Alan, son of a Breton knight, Alan fitz Flaad — no Banquo required.) This is why Shakespeare made one telling change to his source: in Holinshed, Banquo is Macbeth's accomplice in the murder of Duncan; in the play he is a noble, innocent victim. Shakespeare's company had become the King's Men under James's patronage in 1603, and portraying the king's supposed ancestor as a regicide would have been both impolitic and dangerous. The flattering, myth-reinforcing play was, in effect, tailored for its royal audience.

8. Malcolm III and Margaret of Wessex

Malcolm III "Canmore" (Máel Coluim mac Donnchada, r. 1058–1093) — Duncan's son — took the throne by defeating Macbeth and then Lulach, with Northumbrian/English backing. His long reign is a hinge in Scottish history, above all because of his second marriage. Around 1070 he wed Margaret of Wessex, an Anglo-Saxon princess of the pre-Conquest English royal line (granddaughter of Edmund Ironside), who had been born in Hungarian exile and fled north after the Norman Conquest.

Margaret's influence was profound. Deeply pious, she reformed the observances of the Scottish church along Roman lines, promoted continental and Anglo-Saxon religious practice, corresponded with Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury, and brought Benedictine monks to Dunfermline, where she founded a church that became the dynasty's favoured religious and burial centre. Her family's cultural imprint is visible even in their children's names: Malcolm's sons by Margaret bore English royal names — Edward, Edmund, Edgar, Alexander, David — rather than Gaelic ones. Margaret was canonised in 1250, Scotland's only royal saint. Malcolm was killed near Alnwick in 1093; Margaret died at Edinburgh days later. Their daughter Edith (Matilda) married Henry I of England — a union that would shape the next generation.

9. The Davidian Revolution under David I

The youngest son of Malcolm and Margaret, David I (r. 1124–1153), is arguably the most transformative king of medieval Scotland. Raised largely at the Anglo-Norman court of Henry I of England — his brother-in-law, since Henry had married David's sister Edith/Matilda in 1100 — David absorbed the culture, governance and military methods of the Anglo-Norman world. Henry's patronage made him a great English magnate: through marriage to Maud, Countess of Huntingdon (c. 1113), David became Earl of Huntingdon, and he ruled southern Scotland as Prince of the Cumbrians before succeeding his brother Alexander I as king in 1124.

Historians — following G.W.S. Barrow, who coined the term — call the sweeping changes of his reign the "Davidian Revolution." Its main strands were:

- Feudalism and a new aristocracy. David settled Anglo-Norman, Breton and Flemish knights on Scottish land in return for military service, introducing heavily armoured cavalry and castle-building. Many great families of later Scottish history arrived this way — the Bruces, Balliols, Comyns and the Stewarts among them. - Royal administration. He installed sheriffs and sheriffdoms (at centres such as Roxburgh, Berwick, Stirling, Perth and Scone), created justiciars, and staffed a more professional royal household — chancellor, chamberlain, steward, constable. - Burghs and coinage. He chartered Scotland's first royal burghs — trading towns such as Berwick, Roxburgh, Edinburgh, Stirling, Perth and Aberdeen — and struck Scotland's first coinage, stimulating trade (notably the wool export that abbeys would drive). - Church reform and monastic foundation. A famously generous patron — James I of Scotland later reportedly complained that David's lavish endowment of the church had made him "ane sair sanct for the Croune" (a costly saint for the crown to inherit) — David revived or created bishoprics and personally founded around ten major monasteries. Chief among them were the great Border Abbeys: - Kelso — a Tironensian community first established at Selkirk in 1113, moved to Kelso in 1128; among the wealthiest houses in Scotland. - Melrose — founded 1136 as the first Cistercian monastery in Scotland, colonised from Rievaulx in Yorkshire; its church was dedicated in 1146. - Jedburgh — founded as an Augustinian priory in 1138, raised to abbey status in 1154. - Dryburgh — founded in 1150 for Premonstratensian canons from Alnwick; strictly the foundation of David's constable Hugh de Morville rather than the king himself, but very much part of the same wave. - (He also founded Holyrood, for Augustinians, in 1128.)

David's ambitions extended south. On the death of Henry I in 1135, he backed the claim of his niece Empress Matilda against King Stephen in the English civil war known as the Anarchy, and repeatedly invaded northern England. At the Battle of the Standard, near Northallerton on 22 August 1138, his army — its front ranks of unarmoured Galwegian spearmen exposed to English archery — was defeated. Yet the defeat did not undo his gains: by the Treaty of Durham (1139) his son Henry was made Earl of Northumberland (he was already Earl of Huntingdon), and David held Cumberland and Northumberland, extending his effective frontier towards the Tees, until his death.

David died at Carlisle on 24 May 1153. His son Henry had predeceased him in 1152, so he was succeeded by his 12-year-old grandson Malcolm IV ("the Maiden"). The institutions David had planted endured — but so did the exposed, unresolved question of the border with an increasingly powerful Anglo-Norman England, which the next four reigns would spend a century and a half working through.

10. Malcolm IV "the Maiden": a boy king loses ground

Malcolm IV (Máel Coluim mac Eanric, r. 1153–1165), David's grandson, came to the throne at just 12 years old. His youth was quickly exploited. In 1157 Henry II of England — now firmly established on the English throne after the chaos of the Anarchy that had allowed David I to expand south — summoned Malcolm to Chester and, in the words of the standard account, "demanded the return of Northumberland, Cumberland, and Westmorland." Facing overwhelming Anglo-Norman military strength, Malcolm had little real choice. Under the Treaty of Chester (1157) he surrendered his grandfather's and father's hard-won northern English territories entirely, retaining only the Earldom of Huntingdon as compensation — his by hereditary right in any case. Historian Michael Lynch has judged the treaty "a strategic defeat for Malcolm IV," one that "underscored the limits of Scottish military power." The border settled roughly on the line from the Solway to the Tweed that still holds today.

Malcolm's short reign was troubled at home as well as abroad. Deeply resented by nobles who disliked his grandfather's Anglo-Norman ways, he provoked further anger by campaigning alongside Henry II in France in 1158–59; in 1160 six of his own earls besieged him in Perth Castle before the clergy negotiated a reconciliation. He did have real domestic successes, however: he crushed a rising by the ambitious western lord Somerled of the Isles at the Battle of Renfrew in 1164, and campaigned to bring Galloway and Moray more firmly under royal control — part of the longer transition, as one historian puts it, "from a tribal kingdom to a centralized feudal state." Malcolm never married; his nickname "the Maiden" reflects reported vows of chastity. He died young, at Jedburgh on 9 December 1165, aged just 24, leaving no heir. His brother William succeeded him.

11. William I "the Lion": captured, humiliated, and then vindicated

William I (r. 1165–1214), nicknamed "the Lion" from the lion rampant on his royal seal, reigned for nearly 49 years — one of the longest reigns in medieval Scottish history. His overriding ambition, never entirely abandoned, was to recover Northumberland, lost so completely by his brother at Chester.

In 1173–74 he saw his chance, joining the great baronial revolt of Henry II's rebellious sons and invading Northumbria. It went badly wrong: on 13 July 1174, in thick fog near Alnwick, William and a small mounted party were surprised and captured by an English force. Transported to Normandy as a prisoner, he had no choice but to accept whatever terms Henry demanded. The result, signed on 8 December 1174, was the Treaty of Falaise — described by Oxford Reference as "the earliest Anglo-Scottish treaty whose terms are known in full." Its terms were harsh and explicit: William did homage to Henry II "for Scotland and for all his other lands," formally acknowledging Henry as feudal overlord of the Scottish kingdom itself — not merely of William's English possessions — and surrendered key castles including Edinburgh, Stirling, Roxburgh and Berwick to English garrisons, at Scottish expense. It was, as Historic Environment Scotland puts it, "a humiliating arrangement."

Amid this political low point, William remained a vigorous patron of the Scottish Church: he founded Arbroath Abbey around 1178 (the house that would give its name to the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath, covered on Card #9), and in 1188 secured a papal bull declaring the Scottish Church subject to Rome alone, free of the English archbishops' claimed authority.

Vindication came from an unexpected direction. When Henry II died in 1189, his son and successor Richard I "the Lionheart" urgently needed cash to fund the Third Crusade. William seized the opportunity, offering 10,000 merks (roughly £6,500, "a significant portion of Scotland's annual revenue," per one recent assessment) to be released from the Falaise terms. Richard, prioritising ready money over nominal overlordship of a distant kingdom, agreed at once. The Quitclaim of Canterbury, sealed on 5 December 1189, explicitly annulled the Treaty of Falaise in its entirety, restoring Scotland to full, unencumbered sovereignty — a reversal achieved not by battle but by Richard's crusading debts. William died at Stirling in 1214, after nearly half a century on the throne, and was buried at his own foundation of Arbroath Abbey.

12. Alexander II: fixing the border, reaching for the Isles

Alexander II (r. 1214–1249), William's son, succeeded at 16 and is remembered by modern historians with the (retrospective) epithet "the Peaceful" — a fair summary of a reign spent consolidating rather than conquering. He first tightened royal authority within his own kingdom, suppressing a serious rebellion in Galloway in 1234–35 and extending effective royal control toward Argyll and the western seaboard, regions still only loosely tied to the crown.

His most lasting achievement was diplomatic. Meeting Henry III of England at York in 1237, the two kings concluded the Treaty of York (25 September 1237). Alexander formally renounced any Scottish claim to Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland — the territories fought over by every Scottish king since David I — in exchange for certain English estates. In return, as the Royal Family's own historical account states, "the border between Scotland and England was now fixed almost exactly on its present line from the lower Tweed in the east to the Solway Firth in the west." After a century and a half of grinding, inconclusive warfare over the north of England, the frontier question was, in essence, settled — a durable peace that would hold, with the brief and catastrophic exception of the Wars of Independence, for centuries.

With his southern border secured, Alexander turned west. The Hebrides and much of the western seaboard remained, at least nominally, under Norwegian overlordship, a legacy of the Norse settlement covered on Card #5. In 1244 Alexander tried diplomacy first, offering to purchase the islands from King Håkon IV of Norway; rebuffed, he prepared a military expedition in 1249. The campaign never properly began: while his fleet gathered in the Firth of Lorne, Alexander fell ill — one near-contemporary account speaks of a premonitory dream — and died on the small island of Kerrera, near Oban, on 6 or 8 July 1249 (sources differ by two days). He was buried at his father's foundation of Melrose Abbey. His unfinished business with Norway would be settled, decisively, by his son.

13. Alexander III and the "Golden Age"

Alexander III (r. 1249–1286) came to the throne at just eight years old, crowned at Scone on 13 July 1249. His minority was, inevitably, contested by rival factions of guardians and by continued English interest in Scottish affairs — in 1251, aged just ten, he was married to Margaret of England, daughter of Henry III, cementing the peace his father had won at York. But once he took the reins of government fully into his own hands in his early twenties, his reign became, in the judgment of generations of Scottish historians, a "Golden Age": a sustained period of internal peace, growing royal authority, expanding trade with the Continent, and monastic and burgh prosperity, in marked contrast to both the turbulence that preceded it and the catastrophe that would follow.

The reign's central achievement was completing his father's unfinished ambition in the west. When Håkon IV of Norway responded to renewed Scottish pressure on the Hebrides with a full invasion fleet in 1263, the two forces met inconclusively at the Battle of Largs — already covered in detail on Card #5 — and Håkon's subsequent death in Orkney fatally weakened Norwegian resolve. The resulting Treaty of Perth (2 July 1266), also covered on Card #5, saw Norway formally cede the Hebrides and the Isle of Man to the Scottish crown. For the first time, the kingdom of Scotland's western frontier ran, in essentials, to the Atlantic.

Alexander's later years, however, were shadowed by a mounting succession crisis of a different kind. His wife Margaret died in 1274; then, in a devastating sequence, all three of his children by her predeceased him — his younger son David in 1281, aged eight; his daughter Margaret (by then Queen of Norway) in childbirth in 1283; and finally, in 1284, his elder son and heir Prince Alexander, aged only 20. Within a week of the prince's death, Parliament recognised Alexander's infant granddaughter, Margaret, "the Maid of Norway," as heir presumptive — an unprecedented and precarious solution. Seeking a male heir of his own after all, the 44-year-old king remarried, to Yolande de Dreux, on 14 October 1285.

14. The end of the Golden Age

Five months later it was over. On the evening of 19 March 1286, Alexander presided over a council meeting at Edinburgh Castle, then insisted — against the urgent advice of his nobles, in filthy weather — on riding through the night across the Firth of Forth to be with Yolande at Kinghorn Castle in Fife, reportedly because the next day was her birthday. Separated from his guides in the dark near Kinghorn, his horse apparently lost its footing on the cliff path above the shore. He was found dead the next morning, his neck broken, on the rocks below. He was 44 years old, and was buried at Dunfermline Abbey, the dynastic mausoleum his ancestors Malcolm III and Margaret had founded two centuries before.

The consequences were immediate and immense. With no surviving son, and his second wife's pregnancy (announced but never carried to term) offering no certainty, the throne passed in law to a three-year-old girl living in Norway who had never set foot in Scotland — Margaret, the Maid of Norway. A council of Guardians was elected at Scone within weeks to govern in her name. What followed — her death before ever reaching Scotland, the resulting succession dispute known as the Great Cause, and Edward I of England's fateful intervention as arbiter — is the story with which Card #7 (The Wars of Scottish Independence, from 1296) opens. It is only a modest exaggeration to say that the fall of a king's horse on a dark clifftop in Fife set in motion the chain of events that produced William Wallace, Robert the Bruce, and two and a half centuries of intermittent Anglo-Scottish warfare.