Scotland and the Low Countries 1124-1994 (eBook)

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TWELFTH-CENTURY FLEMISH SETTLEMENTS IN SCOTLAND

Lauran Toorians

Flemings in twelfth-century Scotland: no-one doubts their existence, and yet no-one has ever been able fully to tell their story. I do not pretend that I can fill this gap in our historical knowledge, for that could only be done with a great deal of fantasy. What I propose to do in this paper is to show how terse and fragmentary our sources are, and try to sketch something about the background against which these Flemings moved about.

First it is useful to establish some definitions. What, for instance, is a Fleming? Two definitions seem possible here, and I will use them loosely and in combination. The one: ‘A Fleming is a person from the county of Flanders, or dependent on the count of Flanders’; the other: ‘A Fleming is a person speaking Flemish’. Both definitions give rise to problems.

Outside the Low Countries the name Flanders in the Middle Ages was as loosely used as ‘Holland’ is today, and so in the British Isles the term ‘Fleming’ may well cover people from Artois, Cambrai, Hainault, Brabant, Zeeland and Holland as well. Language is a problematic criterion also, as in medieval times the county of Flanders was already bilingual. Furthermore, neither Flemish (or Dutch) nor French are exclusively used in Flanders, and so language can never be a criterion in itself. To complicate the linguistic matter even more, the division between Flemish and French was in medieval Flanders much more a division between social classes than between different geographical areas. The linguistic border probably ran more or less along the present south-western border of the French département du Nord (south-west of Lille to Dunkirk), enclosing the area known today as French Flanders.

In south-western Wales, where Flemings also settled in the twelfth century, available sources mention Flemish as one of the languages spoken there. And in the area around Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, a Flemish speech-community must have existed and perhaps even survived into the sixteenth century.1 About Scotland no such information is available, and although Scots contains a considerable number of Dutch loan-words, none of them can be assigned to a period as early as the twelfth century.2 Sometimes, personal names may betray a Flemish, or at least a ‘continental Germanic’, origin, as, for example, with Willelmus Finemund, who was lord of Cambusnethan in Lanarkshire in the 1150s.3 If ‘Finemund’ means that William was a man of refined speech he would in English have been nicknamed ‘finemouth’, without the -n- before the final dental consonant.

Dutch borrowings in Scottish Gaelic have never been looked for, but a colleague has pointed out to me a possible example, which might be of interest here4 The Gaelic word blàr has exactly the same meaning as in Dutch: ‘having a white forehead, especially of cows and horses’. Celticists have tried to link this word in Gaelic to Old Irish blár and Middle Welsh blawr, both meaning ‘grey’, which is semantically not very convincing.5 But, even if this example holds, it is only an isolated case, though it might neatly illustrate the early sixteenth-century Scots poem about ‘How the first Helandman of God was maid, of ane hors turd in Argylle, as is said’, in which the first thing the Highlandman wants to do is to go ‘doun in the Lawland (…) and thair steill a kow’.6

With or without a clear definition, Flemings occur in most books on the history of Scotland In J D Mackie’s History of Scotland ‘Flemings’ occur with four references in the index, of which only one is to a passage where Flemings in Scotland are more than just mentioned. The subject is the wool trade, as an indication of the fact that a burgh was economically not a fully self-supporting entity. ‘The presence of Flemings in the early burghs’, Mackie writes, ‘may be indicative of a trade in wool, which rose to considerable proportions in the southern lands, … and Berwick became the great exporting centre. There the Flemings had their own house, the Red Hall, under whose burning timbers they all died during the brutal sack of the city by Edward I in 1296.’7

This burning of Flemish traders in their Red Hall in Berwick must have made an enormous impression on later historians, for the incident can be found in nearly every general history of Scotland. Mackie’s namesake R L Mackie, for instance, recalls the incident in a rather more colourful way. After describing how Edward could enter the town without meeting any resistance, except from the Red Hall and from the castle, he writes: ‘The castle surrendered before nightfall; the thirty gallant Flemings, however, defended their hall even after it had been set on fire, and to a man perished in the flames’.8 And even John Prebble, in his popular The Lion in the North, recalls this heroic moment in similar words.9

Referring to the Chronicle of Walter of Guisborough, Professor Duncan tells us that these Flemish traders held the Red Hall ‘on condition of defending it at all times against the English king’, but styles this information ‘monastic gossip’ and ‘a most unlikely tale’.10 More important is his remark that the Red Hall most probably had its origin in the first half of the thirteenth century. But this still does not take us back into the twelfth.

That wool from Scotland, and even more important, from England, was essential for the cloth industry in Flanders from about 1100 is common historical knowledge. Twelfth-century sources, however, are scarce and not very informative when it comes to personal doings of the people involved in this wool-trade.11 Furthermore, though it is generally accepted that many of the burgesses populating the burghs set up by Kings David I and Malcolm IV were Flemings, hardly any of them are named as such in the surviving documents. Still, Berwick’s Red Hall shows us that we might expect Flemish traders in these burghs. Indicative of their presence are remarks like that by Malcolm IV, when confirming to the canons of St Andrews the obligations and rents due to the church of the Holy Trinity. The king specified that these rents were due ‘as well from Scots as from French, as well from Flemings as from English, living within or without the burgh’.12

When it comes to persons, our problem may be demonstrated by two examples. One is a man called Mainard, King David’s own burgess in Berwick and later given by the king to Bishop Robert of St Andrews to be reeve there. Ritchie says of this Mainard that he has a French name, but that Bishop Robert described him as a Fleming.13 The name may, however, be Germanic if it means something like ‘the strong one’, as in Old English mæegnen-heard, a poetic word meaning ‘strong’. Duncan, who mentions this same man also, obviously considers him not a Fleming.14 Duncan contrasts this Mainard with another burgess, whom he does consider a Fleming, namely Baldwin ‘the lorimer’, living about 1160 in Perth.15 In this case Ritchie also mentions this same Baldwin ‘the lorimer’, but without calling him a Fleming.16 I have not found any reference to a statement from the sources in which this Baldwin ‘the lorimer’ is actually said to be from Flanders – he merely seems to have a Christian name favoured among Flemings. Other explicitly named Flemings are Michael Fleming, who was sheriff of Edinburgh in 1190,17 and a Jordan the Fleming who gained fame in Alnwick in 1174, and who seems to have possessed land in Crail, Fife, but of whom nothing more is known.18

But my theme here is ‘Flemish settlement’, which implies more than individual traders or craftsmen working in Scotland. In two instances the term ‘settlement’ seems to be applicable to groups of people who apparently originated from Flanders. The cases are already quite well known and have been described by Ritchie, Barrow and Duncan. The areas involved are Upper Clydesdale and Moray. The explicit evidence for Flemings is, again, scarce. In many instances Flemishness is supposed only, on the basis of the names of the people involved and because of the close relations binding them together.

The Flemings named as such in Upper Clydesdale are Baldwin, lord of Biggar and sheriff of Lanark (I am not even sure about this one); Lambin, whose brother is named as ‘Robert, brother of Lambein Fleeming’; and Theobald the Fleming, who was granted land in Douglasdale in the 1150s. In Moray all we have is one name: Berowald the Fleming, to whom Malcolm IV gave Innes and Nether Urquhart in the sheriffdom of Elgin.

The general context of both these settlements has been given by Ritchie, Barrow and Duncan. In short there is the fact that in both areas the traditional rulers had been ousted by King David, who replaced them with newcomers who had no local ties and could be trusted as faithful followers of the crown. In Moray, the Flemish character of this settlement is hard to define. Only Berowald is stated to be a Fleming. The other settler of importance has always been taken as such, mainly on the grounds of his Flemish-sounding name: Freskin.

Berowald had earlier held land in West Lothian, where he left his name in Bo’ness (Berowalds-toun-ness).19 He was granted a toft in the burgh of Elgin and became known among historians as the first landowner in Scotland whose feudal service was explicitly defined as including castle-ward20 His grandson appears in a charter from 1226 as ‘Waltero filio Johannis filii Berowaldi Flandrensis’,21 and it has been suggested that...