Today I m setting off on a road trip south of the border.
You see a number of people in the comments section have asked me to talk about an
English town that actually belongs to Scotland and today I m heading south to do just that.
If you re interested in the people, places and events in Scottish history
then click the subscribe button at the bottom right of the screen.
In the meantime, let me tell you a story
We ve just crossed the Scottish English border. I ll be honest, I don t feel any different,
but I know that when I come back, as I pass the sign in the other direction
somehow my heart and spirit lifts. but some people say that there s a
little piece of England that should make my heart lift in exactly the same way
so I m going to take you back in time and visit a castle.
I m spending the night in Cumbria, before I head further south tomorrow to that
English town that belongs to Scotland, and this is the perfect place to stop.
We re spending the night in Appelby Castle.
Not just because it s a convenient distance to break the journey,
but also because it relates to our story. This area has sometimes been under Scots
control, sometimes English control. The castle itself has changed hands too.
It was granted by a Scottish king to the Norman knight Hugh de Morville
and De Morville s son was one of those knights who rid Henry II of his troublesome priest
by killing Thomas Becket at the altar. William the Lion took the castle unopposed,
then lost it... and pretty much the rest of Scotland.
I have a couple of videos about that if you want more detail.
Now you might be thinking that I m doing pretty well for myself if I can afford to
stay in a place like this, but number one, it s just too conveniently positioned and
relevant to the story not to stay here. More importantly, you can get a room within
my budget, so long as you take a bedroom at the top of the tower.
They tell me there are ghosts? Wish me luck.
Ah I slept like a king. Stephen King
Now Appleby Castle is based round this Norman Keep which was built in 1170.
The 12th Century Normans were not only significant to Scotland, but to this particular story.
They may have had an influence on England as well.
If you were to draw a Venn diagram that brought together subsets of Celtic,
Anglo Saxon, Scottish, English, and Norman; there would be one guy more than anyone else
that represented the intersection of all sets. That was King David I of Scotland.
David s dad had been Malcolm, the Gaelic king who defeated Macbeth.
David s mum was Queen (later Saint) Margaret, the Anglo Saxon princess of the
Atheling royal line. That line that had been
ousted by William the Conqueror in 1066. David s sister married the son of William
the Conqueror Henry I of England. Marrying a daughter of the previous
Saxon house would give Henry I and his offspring more legitimacy
Remember this was a period of huge change on these islands, with an ethnopolitical
metamorphosis changing previous languages, borders and power structures, and at this point
there was no guarantee that the Normans would win out.
For David, his sister marrying Henry I was also convenient.
As the youngest of Malcolm and Margaret s sons he was never
likely to inherit the Scottish throne, but now he could hang about the Norman
English court as the Brother of the Queen , gradually becoming right hand man to Henry I.
Henry granted David lands in Normandy, Yorkshire and elsewhere.
It was Henry that pressured David s elder brother, Alexander I of Scots,
to give David swathes of land across Strathclyde and The Scottish Borders.
Galloway wasn t yet part of Scotland at the time. It was also Henry who granted David marriage to
the great niece of William the Conqueror which brought him lands in the English Midlands,
but more crucially to our story across Northumbria
and HERE To secure these lands
David brought knights such as Robert Bruce (not our warrior king, but the original one),
Walter Fitz Allan who was the patriarch of the Stewart line
and here he placed Hugh de Morville I mentioned earlier.
David was the king who Normanised Scotland,
but he did it from a power base in what we would call the borderlands.
I said that Henry I marrying a daughter of the previous Saxon royal family gave added legitimacy
to his children as successors but
what if you re surviving child is a girl Henry named his daughter Matilda as his successor,
but when he died, he d need somebody he could trust to enforce that decision.
So, if your right-hand man David, who you d nurtured, supported and granted lands,
was not only your wife s brother, and by definition your daughter s uncle,
but he was also descended from that previous Saxon English line AND
BY A STROKE OF LUCK was also now The King of Scots
He was just the guy to secure your daughter s succession rights
and had sworn an oath to do. Surprise surprise when Henry I did die,
his daughter Matilda needed that powerful uncle, because her cousin Stephen jumped
on to the English throne before you could say: Scheming Norman usurper
Uncle David was Duty bound to head south and enforce
the niece s rights he d sworn to protect and if he gained more lands along the way
By the time Stephen came north, David had captured large swathes of the North of England,
so they negotiated a truce. The Treaty of Durham meant that
David would go home in return for Carlisle and Cumberland, large parts of Lancashire
and the Yorkshire town that we re heading for today
and your niece David?
Two years later he must have remembered her, because David headed south again.
This time even deeper into English territory,
and I m going to take you 50 miles deeper into England to tell you about it.
This monument commemorates a battle that doesn t register in the consciousness
like Bannockburn or Culloden, but it might be the battle which most
defined the structure of the British Nations. The reason that Stephen had been so willing
to give David lands in the Treaty of Durham was because, having usurped the throne from Matilda,
he was dealing with challenges on multiple sides:
in Wales, the south of England and of course from David here in the north.
Given that they would call this messy period of English history The Anarchy,
you can probably see that things for Stephen were a wee bit hairy.
and David was going to take advantage of that.
Stephen of England was in so much trouble, that he couldn t come north himself.
It was Archbishop Thurstan of York who galvanised forces, telling
people of Yorkshire that this was a holy war. They brought with them the banners and standards
of saints and religious houses and mounted them on a wheeled cart to go before them.
That s why this would become known as The Battle of the Standard.
Twenty five miles north of here, David has crossed the River Tees into Yorkshire.
If he wins this battle, he effectively extends Scotland s border to encompass Yorkshire.
Let s think about what that that means. Obviously we know David lost the battle
Apparently because of the impetuosity of the Galovidians,
who insisted in charging from the front and they weren t even Scottish.
They were involved because Fergus of Galloway had married one of Henry I s daughters.
Galloway didn t become part of Scotland until two generations later ,
but nobody questions it s part of Scotland today.
What about Yorkshire. Would it have been the same?
If David wins, do Scottish monarchs or their peoples hold that territory
for the next 900 years? Would the people of Yorkshire
see themselves as Scottish today? Would their accents be different,
maybe even comprehensible?
Just imagine, if you could actually understand people from Yorkshire!
In the historical conflicts between Scotland and England,
England had the advantage of a larger population and wealth generating land rather than beautiful
but rocky and infertile Highlands. If for the last 900 years we d been able
to call on the resources generated by lands down to the Humber
how does that change history? I know it s a speculative question
but here s the thing. Alan Shearer
would have played football for Scotland.
They tell me that Yorkshire contributed more players to England s Euro 2020 Championship
team than any other English region. They d be ours!
I m not saying they d make it into the current Scotland squad, but we d gain
a whole raft of their rugby players to act as solid second string to our rugby team as well.
What would a Scotland England crowd at Murrayfield look like? What would it sound like?
Would Murrayfield even be in Edinburgh? Maybe our capital is Carlisle, Newcastle or
Leeds. Maybe even, God forbid Sheffield I ve never been there
We might even have ended up playing cricket. Och aye there are doon sides an a
People often comment that they ve had DNA tests and are x% Scottish and y%
English, z% Scandinavian but what does that mean if
what is Scotland and what is England, may have turned on a bunch of Galovidians
that were neither 900 years ago, and the people who so confidently quote
these figures live on a different continent? I m not trying to piss on your chips my Aussie,
American, Canadian friends. I m just saying that if the future
path of a nation can turn on whether or not Biff Tannen finds a sports almanac and Mary
McFly can retrieve it anything can happen.
But it also raises questions about Scottish independence and what that means today.
If David I had won the Battle of the Standard, or if a million other tiny turning
points in history had been different what then? How different are we? and does it really matter?
Let s go to the town this is all about.
This is Doncaster. It s where we ve been headed all along.
They ve been worshipping here on the site of The Minister since before David I was born
so they were worshipping here when Doncaster was
given to David as part of the Treaty of Durham in 1136.
After David lost the Battle of the Standard, there was a second Treaty of Durham.
That awarded David even more English lands , but Doncaster wasn t mentioned.
In fact, they tell me that there s no record that Doncaster was EVER taken back.
Does this mean that Doncaster still belongs to Scotland?
Are the people walking around me Scots, but they just don t know it?
If the English DNA in that test of yours came from a 9 times great grandad in Doncaster ,
is it really English DNA? If a medieval monarch laid claim to this town,
what does that mean in this day and age? and if a land charter is torn up in a forest
of paper when there s nobody there do these people owe me rent?
What about when David lost the Battle of the Standard?
Did that mean all treaties were cancelled and no mention of Doncaster makes it English?
I don t expect the international viewers to know, care or understand
the constitutional issues of these islands. Most people across the Atlantic can t tell the
difference between Britain, England and the UK but this is Scotland History Tours,
and the messy constitutional arrangements of the British Isles
feeds into the debate about Scotland s autonomy and those constitutional arrangements are much
less straight forward than politicians on either side of the debate would make out.
For hundreds of years people have been making treaties, compromise agreements
and short-term political fixes that have had consequences for future generations
and Doncaster is just one part of that , In 2014 we had an independence referendum
in Scotland, and Peter Davies, the Mayor of Doncaster, said that he felt he should
have a vote in that referendum. Now maybe he was having a lark,
but maybe we let the people of Doncaster vote?
Freedom come a Ye but would it even matter?
Since that independence referendum two successive Scottish parliaments have been elected with the
mandate to bring forward a second referendum. A duly, and democratically elected, Scottish
Parliament has even voted to hold another referendum
but that democratic expression has been rejected by Conservative Prime Ministers in London.
A petition to the London Parliament (possibly frivolous) to debate whether
the people of Doncaster could have dual nationality was also rejected out of hand.
You see it doesn t matter if every one of
the 100 000 people of Doncaster wanted to be Scottish or not.
One man in London says: No.
I try not to get too caught up in the debate between Nationalism and Unioinism
but there s a more important debate between those who want democracy
and those who don t. because those who don t
are a dangerous thing whatever your politics. Boots don t always stay on the same feet.
Now some raj bams in the comments section are going to misinterpret what I ve said,
so let me reiterate I m not questioning your
political opinion Or right to it but if one guy in London
can overrule an elected parliament, it feels like we ARE back in the 12th century
In the 21st Century, DNA and treaties made by medieval kings don t decide nationhood,
democracy does. and I don t think
that conservative prime minister in London is any more concerned about democracy in this
southern outpost than Scotland in eneral. In that sense, at least,
the border doesn t really matter. If you d like a more light hearted
video about the Scottish English border then there s a video coming up on screen now.
In the meantime
Tha mi an dochas gum bith lath math leibh. Tiorridh an drasda.