as his own people.’ His protection of the church probably refers to the right of holding provincial councils under a conservator, which, in spite of the opposition of the see of York and the English king, was granted by Pope Honorius in 1225, but Alexander failed to obtain from the same pope and his successor Gregory IX the coveted honour of coronation at the hands of a legate of the Holy See, a circumstance which may account for his unwillingness to allow the legate Otho to enter Scotland. His foundations were chiefly in favour of the Dominican and Franciscan friars. Monasteries of the former were established at Edinburgh, Berwick, Ayr, Perth, Aberdeen, Elgin, Stirling, and Inverness, and of the latter at Berwick and Roxburgh. The richer Cistercians obtained only Balmerino, and their reformed rule of Vallis Caulium Pluscardine in Moray. Possibly to this favour to the mendicant friars he owed the title of ‘dux miserorum,’ but it may refer also to the laws preserved in the scanty collection of his statutes by which he substituted trial by an assize or jury for the ordeal, recognised the protection of the girth or sanctuary, and regulated trial by battle with special provision for those who could not fight—the clergy and widows. The name of Peaceful can have been given him only in respect of his relations to England, for he was a warlike monarch strenuously enforcing the feudal levy, able, according to Matthew Paris, to raise 100,000 foot and 1,000 horsemen, and successfully resisting by force of arms all risings within or on the borders of Scotland. His character must be read in his deeds, for the chroniclers contribute little otherwise to enable us to individualise it. In the maintenance of order in Caithness, Moray, Galloway, the subjection of the mainland of Argyle, the alliance with the Celtic ruler of Ross, the attempted but unsuccessful annexation of the Hebrides, the wise policy which under some provocation preserved peace with England, the relations established between the papal see and the Scottish church and state, the strict enforcement of justice amongst his own subjects, there is sufficient evidence of a prudent king anxious to consolidate his small kingdom, to raise its rank, and to rule it well.
[Matthew Paris; Chronicles of Melrose and Lanercost, Bannatyne Club; Chronicle of Man (Munch's Notes); Saga of King Haco; Concilia Scotiæ (Joseph Robertson's Notes, Bannatyne Club); Statuta Alexandri I; Act. Parl. Scot. i.; Wyntoun, Cronykil; Fordun, Scotichronicon; Hailes's Annals; Robertson's Early Scottish Kings; W. F. Skene's Celtic Scotland; Grub's Ecclesiastical History of Scotland.]
ALEXANDER III (1241–1285), king of Scotland, son of Alexander II and Mary de Couci, succeeded to the throne when a boy of eight on his father's death (8 July 1249). The troubles of a minority commenced at his accession, but the attempt of Alan Durward, the justiciar, to prevent his consecration on the pretext that he had not yet been knighted, was frustrated by Walter Comyn, earl of Menteith, and on 18 July he was solemnly placed on the coronation stone at Scone, in the presence of seven lords and seven bishops and a great multitude of the people, the Bishop of St. Andrews performing the ceremony. At its close a highland sennachy hailed him in Gaelic as king of Alban, and recited his descent through a chain of real and imaginary ancestors to the eponymous hero of the race, Iber, the first Scot, son of Gaithel Glas, the son of Neorlus, king of Athens, and Scota, daughter of Pharaoh, king of Egypt, an acknowledgment that the descendant of the Saxon Margaret, in whose veins so much Norman blood had mingled, was also the descendant in the paternal line of the ancient Celtic royal family whose origin, lost in antiquity, was supplied by the fictitious genealogy. The translation in the following year of the corpse of Margaret at Dunfermline from her grave into a shrine set with gold and precious stones, with almost equal solemnity to the consecration of the young king, was probably intended to mark with equal emphasis his descent from the Saxon princess whose memory was dear to the church and people of the Lowlands. In 1251 Henry III requested from Innocent IV a declaration that the Scottish king was, as his vassal, not entitled to be anointed or crowned without his consent, and the inclusion of Scotland in the grant made to him of a tenth of the ecclesiastical revenues for a crusade, but the pope declined both requests. Baffled in this, he reverted to the marriage of Alexander, already betrothed to his daughter Margaret, and it was celebrated at York on 26 Dec, when Henry knighted Alexander and demanded homage for his kingdom. Matthew Paris records that Alexander answered ‘he had come peacefully and for the honour of the king of England, that by means of the marriage tie he might ally himself to him, and not to answer such a difficult question, for he had not held full deliberation on the matter with his nobles or taken proper counsel as so difficult a question required,’ a reply which must have been given, not without advice, by the boy king. It was not the less a decided refusal that it was couched in polite terms. The detection of a plot by Alan Durward to obtain from the pope the
