even unduly his personal claims to
feudal obedience whenever it served his purpose to do so. His
favourite motto, 'Keep troth' (_Pactum serva_), revealed his sense of
the inviolability of a personal engagement given or received, but his
legal mind often led him into construing in his own favour
engagements in which only the letter of the law was on his side,
whilst its spirit was against him. It was chiefly in his relations
with foreign peoples that he fell into this error, as it was here
that he was most strongly tempted to lay stress upon the feudal tie
which made for him, and to ignore the importance of a national
resistance which made against him. In dealing with Wales, for
instance, he sent David to a cruel death, because he had broken the
feudal tie which bound him to the king of England, feeling no sympathy
with him as standing up for the independence of his own people.

7. =The Scottish Succession. 1285-1290.=--In the earlier part of
Edward's reign Alexander III. was king of Scotland. Alexander's
ancestors, indeed, had done homage to Edward's ancestors, but in
=1189= William the Lion had purchased from Richard I. the abandonment
of all the claim to homage for the crown of Scotland which Henry II.
had acquired by the treaty of Falaise (see pp. 154, 159). William's
successors, however, held lands in England, and had done homage for
them to the English kings. Edward would gladly have restored the old
practice of homage for Scotland itself, but to this Alexander had
never given way. To Edward there was something alluring in the
prospect of being lord of the whole island, as it would not only
strengthen his own personal position, but would bring two nations into
peaceful union. Between the southern part of Scotland, indeed, and the
northern part of England there was no great dissimilarity. On both
sides of the border the bulk of the population was of the same Anglian
stock, whilst, in consequence of the welcome offered by the Scottish
kings to persons of Norman descent, the nobility was as completely
Norman in Scotland as it was in England, many of the nobles indeed
possessing lands on both sides of the border. A prospect of effecting
a union by peaceful means offered itself to Edward in =1285=, when
Alexander III. was killed by a fall from his horse near Kinghorn.
Alexander's only descendant was Margaret, a child of his daughter and
of King Eric of Norway. In =1290= it was agreed that she should marry
the Prince o