David II, 1329-71 (review)

The career of the first king of Scots to be married and succeed to the throne while still an infant, to be anointed and crowned, to flee his kingdom for exile in France, to spend eleven years in English captivity, and to reign for over forty years, though ruling for only eighteen (1341-46, 1357-71), was sufficiently unusual to offer the prospect of an interesting biography. Balfour-Melville's work on David II ended with his death; Ranald Nicholson gave 60 pages to the reign, and Regesta volume VI gave a scholarly conspectus of one range of sources in 1982. But Dr Penman's study is welcome as a 'first' from a modern scholar surveying in detail the whole reign, the traumas of Anglo-Scottish war, absentee kingship, and a succession debate. If the broad picture remains largely undisturbed, there is much that is new in the detail, and the final assessment of the king, from the school of 'more in sorrow than in moral indignation' historians, is a well-judged verdict on a man and a reign haunted by his inability to father a child. For the man, we should have had the sketches in the initial D of several charters; the best, showing him full-faced and crowned, is on Aberdeen University, Marischal College charters, no.1/4, but a collection would be of great interest.

The reign began under the shadow of the parliamentary decision in 1326 (of which we have no text) to restore the right of Robert Stewart as heir presumptive, striking not for what it did, but for what it was—a further acceptance that the succession could be regulated if ratified by the community. The crux of the reign, at Neville's Cross, ended one pay-back, of those who had been disloyal before 1341, and sowed the seeds of another, of the Steward, who fled from the battle where David was captured, wounded but still fighting. In this, each man must have his following.

This book belongs to the tradition which sees politics as a factional struggle in which a king struggled to contain the power of nobles seeking to protect their territorial and political influence and autonomy. The king was the fount of much patronage, able to buy with it the support of the upwardly mobile in church and lay society, and even of the occasional magnate. The evidence for patronage and its disbursement is mainly the royal charters edited in Regesta, and in the Great Seal Register and the lists of its lost rolls. Making these dry sources come alive is no easy task, for if they give a reason for the grant, it is usually only the conventional 'for his homage and service'. Rarely other sources may tell us of circumstances which show the king buying off an enemy or rewarding a friend, and for the most part we know who the friends and enemies were; but the floating voters are less easily handled, and Dr Penman sometimes lines them up with a confidence that his evidence, notably the witness lists of charters, does not warrant.

I find it difficult to follow Dr Penman in reading political meaning into documents so formal as charters, especially when they are confirmations or inspections. To take an example chosen at random, when David inspected the charter of Patrick earl of March and Moray granting Markle to John Hepburn with reversion to Patrick Hepburn of Hales (RRS, vi, no. 297) was this really designed to increase the king's hold over Earl Patrick's affinity and lands (p. 297), and if so, how did it do so? That Hepburn sought the charter, at a time in 1363 when Earl Patrick had blotted his copybook with the king, to better secure their (the Hepburns') title, seems to me at least as probable an explanation; some charters certainly had a political context, but many, like this one I suspect, surely passed the seal because the fees had been paid...