ne, who had
taken refuge with him while vainly plotting against William the
Conqueror. This was in 1067, the year after the conquest. So at this
critical period in English history, the door leading to the South,
which had until now been kept bolted and barred, except for hostile
bands, was left ajar. A host of Saxon nobles, following their leader,
Edgar, streamed into Scotland, and soon formed the most powerful
element about the throne, bringing new speech, new ways, new customs;
in fact, doing at Scone precisely what the Norman {256} nobles were at
the same time doing at London, substituting a more advanced
civilization for an existing one. The manners of the Norman nobles
were not more odious to the Saxon nobility in England, than were those
of the Saxons to the proud thanes and people in Scotland. Then Malcolm
began to bestow large grants of land upon his foreign favorites,
accompanied by an almost unlimited authority over their vassals, and
feudalism was introduced into the free land. With these changes there
gradually formed a dialect, a mingling of the two forms of speech,
which became the language of the Court, and of the powerful dwellers in
the Lowlands. And so, in succeeding reigns, the process of blending
went on, the wave of a changed civilization driving before it the
Celtic speech, manners, and habits, into their impregnable fastnesses
in the Highlands, there to preserve the national type in proud
persistence. Such was the condition for one hundred and fifty years,
the Crown in open alliance with aliens, subverting established usages
and fastening an exotic feudalism upon the South; while an angry and
defiant Celtic people remained unsubdued in the North.

{257}

It was a favorite amusement with the Scottish kings to dart across the
border into Northumbria, the disputed district, not yet incorporated
with England, there to waste and burn as much as they could, and then
back again. In one of these forays in 1174, the King, "William the
Lion," was captured by a party of English barons. Henry II. of England
had just returned from Ireland, where he had established his feudal
sovereignty by conquest. Now he saw a chance of accomplishing the same
thing by peaceful methods in Scotland. He named as a price of ransom
for the captive King an acknowledgment of his feudal lordship. The
terms were accepted, and the five castles which they included were
surrendered. Fifteen years later, his son Richard I