A Short History of Scotland | Page 9

rights of trading in its area, and of taking toll on
merchants coming within its Octroi. An association of four burghs,
Berwick, Roxburgh, Edinburgh, and Stirling, was the root of the
existing "Convention of Burghs."

JUSTICE.
In early societies, justice is, in many respects, an affair to be settled
between the kindreds of the plaintiff, so to speak, and the defendant. A
man is wounded, killed, robbed, wronged in any way; his kin retaliate
on the offender and his kindred. The blood-feud, the taking of blood for
blood, endured for centuries in Scotland after the peace of the whole
realm became, under David I., "the King's peace." Homicides, for
example, were very frequently pardoned by Royal grace, but "the
pardon was of no avail unless it had been issued with the full
knowledge of the kin of the slaughtered man, who otherwise retained
their legal right of vengeance on the homicide." They might accept
pecuniary compensation, the blood-fine, or they might not, as in
Homer's time. {27} At all events, under David, offences became
offences against the King, not merely against this or that kindred.
David introduced the "Judgment of the Country" or Visnet del Pais for
the settlement of pleas. Every free man, in his degree, was "tried by his
peers," but the old ordeal by fire and Trial by Combat or duel were not
abolished. Nor did "compurgation" cease wholly till Queen Mary's
reign. A powerful man, when accused, was then attended at his trial by
hosts of armed backers. Men so unlike each other as Knox, Bothwell,
and Lethington took advantage of this usage. All lords had their own

Courts, but murder, rape, arson, and robbery could now only be tried in
the royal Courts; these were "The Four Pleas of the Crown."

THE COURTS.
As there was no fixed capital, the King's Court, in David's time,
followed the King in his annual circuits through his realm, between
Dumfries and Inverness. Later, the regions of Scotia (north of Forth),
Lothian, and the lawless realm of Galloway, had their Grand
Justiciaries, who held the Four Pleas. The other pleas were heard in
"Courts of Royalty" and by earls, bishops, abbots, down to the baron,
with his "right of pit and gallows." At such courts, by a law of 1180,
the Sheriff of the shire, or an agent of his, ought to be present; so that
royal and central justice was extending itself over the minor local
courts. But if the sheriff or his sergeant did not attend when summoned,
local justice took its course.
The process initiated by David's son, William the Lion, was very
slowly substituting the royal authority, the royal sheriffs of shires,
juries, and witnesses, for the wild justice of revenge; and trial by ordeal,
and trial by combat. But hereditary jurisdictions of nobles and gentry
were not wholly abolished till after the battle of Culloden! Where
Abbots held courts, their procedure, in civil cases, was based on laws
sanctioned by popes and general councils. But, alas! the Abbot might
give just judgment; to execute it, we know from a curious instance, was
not within his power, if the offender laughed at a sentence of
excommunication.
David and his successors, till the end of the thirteenth century, made
Scotland a more civilised and kept it a much less disturbed country than
it was to remain during the long war of Independence, while the
beautiful abbeys with their churches and schools attested a high stage
of art and education.


CHAPTER VI.
MALCOLM THE MAIDEN.

The prominent facts in the brief reign of David's son Malcolm the
Maiden, crowned (1153) at the age of eleven, were, first, a Celtic rising
by Donald, a son of Malcolm MacHeth (now a prisoner in Roxburgh
Castle), and a nephew of the famous Somerled Macgillebride of Argyll.
Somerled won from the Norse the Isle of Man and the Southern
Hebrides; from his sons descend the great Macdonald Lords of the Isles,
always the leaders of the long Celtic resistance to the central authority
in Scotland. Again, Malcolm resigned to Henry II. of England the
northern counties held by David I.; and died after subduing Galloway,
and (on the death of Somerled, said to have been assassinated) the
tribes of the isles in 1165.

WILLIAM THE LION.
Ambition to recover the northern English counties revealed itself in the
overtures of William the Lion,--Malcolm's brother and successor,--for
an alliance between Scotland and France. "The auld Alliance" now
dawned, with rich promise of good and evil. In hopes of French aid,
William invaded Northumberland, later laid siege to Carlisle, and on
July 13, 1174, was surprised in a morning mist and captured at Alnwick.
Scotland was now kingless; Galloway rebelled, and William, taken a
captive to Falaise in Normandy, surrendered absolutely