TWO
A Viking-Norman-Anglo-Scots dynasty
Fundamental to the enigma that surrounds Rosslyn, its chapel and its castle, is the pedigree of its remarkable owners, the Viking-Norman-Anglo-Scots St Clair family, whose sphere of influence during the three centuries which preceded their acquisition of the Rosslyn Estate, and those that followed, embraced not only Scotland, but France, England, Norway and Sweden. With such a diverse pedigree, it is tempting to wonder how they came to be at Rosslyn in the first place. The answer is to be found in a chain of circumstances precipitated by the politics of continental Europe and, to a large degree, predetermined by the strategic position of Scotland’s eastern seaboard and its many marine trading routes to northern Europe.
In an age of supersonic travel it is hard to imagine that people could be mobile a thousand years earlier, in a world without aeroplanes, trains or cars. Yet European nobility and their retainers covered enormous distances on foot, on horseback, and by boat. In the east of Scotland, the Firth of Forth, with Culross and Burntisland on the Fife Coast, and the well-appointed inlets of coastal East Lothian on its southern shores, provided a string of maritime gateways to Holland and the Low Countries. In contrast to today, when mediaeval travellers arrived in Scotland, it was usual for them to arrive directly from the sea, in preference to taking the more hazardous overland routes through England.
In 1068, when Prince Edgar Atheling, Saxon heir to the throne of England, fled north after the Norman invasion of William the Conqueror two years before, he sailed up the Northumberland and Berwickshire coasts and landed at a Fife anchorage which today is known as St Margaret’s Hope. Escorting him and his older sisters, Princess Christina and Princess Margaret, after whom the anchorage is named, was William St Clair, a Norman knight, known as ‘the Seemly’ for his handsome blue-eyed, blond-haired appearance. William the Seemly was to benefit significantly from his association with the Athelings.
The surname Atheling, which was attached to the grandchildren of Edmund Ironside, means noble youth, derived from adel meaning noble, and the suffix -ing meaning young. Edgar was aged seventeen, Christina, nineteen, and Margaret, twenty, and through their veins coursed the blood of England’s Saxon kings. At this juncture, however, it is important to acknowledge that William the Seemly himself was no ordinary hanger-on. He too came of royal blood. The ubiquitous St Clair family of Normandy, Scotland and England are descended from a family of Norwegian jarls (earls) who, towards the end of the first millennium, held dominion over the majority of the islands situated off Scotland’s northern coast. Not content with this, Rognvald the Mighty, Earl of Moere and Romsdaal in Norway, had, in the ninth century, well before the establishment of a unified Pictish/Celtic sovereignty, conquered the region of Caithness on the north-east Scottish mainland.
The acquisition of territory was paramount in the minds of these Norsemen, isolated as they were in their chill Scandinavian fiefdoms. In the early tenth century, Rou or Rollo, younger son of Rognvald the Mighty, set his sights on more distant horizons and rapidly embarked upon a murderous expedition far south into northern France, and the Frankish kingdom of Charles ‘the Simple’. Having created havoc, but not much else, Rollo was persuaded to sign a peace treaty in return for the dukedom of Normandy. This treaty was signed at St Clair-sur-Epte, and it is from here that Rollo’s family and their descendants took their surname.1
Thus, a century later, we find that William the Seemly St Clair is none other than a blood relative of William the Conqueror, natural son of the 6th Duke of Normandy, and the very man from whom he and his royal Saxon companions were escaping. And not just a distant blood relative, if one ignores Duke William’s illegitimacy, which, it has to be acknowledged, was rather an important consideration in the religious climate of the age. Duke William was the son of the 6th duke and a tanner’s daughter. However, being a bastard was relatively commonplace in the Middle Ages. All that was required was a word from the Pope to declare legitimacy.
William the Seemly’s mother, Helena St Clair, was the 6th duke’s sister, and, in all likelihood, took a dim view of her brother’s libido. Moreover, William the Seemly’s father, Walderne (or Wildernus), and his mother, were both grand-children of the 3rd Duke of Normandy, and were bitterly opposed to their bastard kinsman’s claim to the Normandy dukedom. Unfortunately for them, the Conqueror was not a man to tolerate defiance. Both Walderne and his brother Hamon were killed in the ensuing conflict, the Battle of Vals-es-Dunes, in 1047.
The St Clairs and their cousin, the Conqueror, were principally related to the Athelings through Emma St Clair, the Atheling children’s great-grandmother and daughter of the 3rd Duke of Normandy, who had not only married the Saxon Aethelred II, ruler of England between 1014 to 1016, but his successor, the Danish Canute, who was also King of Denmark and Norway. It makes perfect sense, therefore, that Walderne St Clair’s son should have sought refuge with his kinsfolk, who by then were in exile from England in Hungary.
However, families are fickle. Another of Walderne St Clair’s sons, Richard, appears to have joined forces with his father’s enemy to invade England and was rewarded with land in Essex, Kent, Somerset, Cornwall and Devon. Their sister Agnes is reputed to have been married to Robert de Bruis, ancestor of Scotland’s hero king, who also accompanied the Conqueror to England. That is not all. Tradition has it that eight St Clair knights fought for the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings. Within this incestuous context, William the Seemly’s secondment to the exiled Saxon and Royal House of Wessex tends to suggest that the Norman Conquest was, in many respects, only the latest stage in an ongoing family feud.
But how and where exactly did the meeting between William and the exiled Athelings take place? Prince Edgar Atheling, Saxon heir to the English throne, and his two sisters were brought up by their mother’s family in Hungary. The accepted version of their origin is that the three grandchildren of Edmund Ironside were brought up at the Hungarian Court, and that their mother Agatha was a daughter of King Stephen. However, through research in continental archives, the author Gabriel Ronay has recently established that Edward, Edmund Ironside’s son, and his bride were married in Kiev, at the court of Yaroslav the Great, and that Agatha was a niece of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry III.
Unable to return to England at this stage, a civil war having broken out between supporters of Edmund Ironside and Canute, the family were given sanctuary in the retinue of their cousin King Andrew of Hungary. Subsequently, back in England at the court of Edward the Confessor, their grandfather’s half-brother, they met up with the future Scottish king, Malcolm Canmore. It was therefore not, as has sometimes been claimed, divine providence that took them and their followers to Scotland when they fled from England for the second time.2
It was in all probability at the Hungarian Court that they first encountered William the Seemly. Ten years later, he accompanied them first to England, then, after a further eleven years had passed, to Scotland. When the 21-year-old Princess Margaret married Malcolm III, King of Scots, in 1069, William the Seemly was rewarded with a knighthood and the lifetime gift of the strategic lands of Rosslyn which, then as now, guard the southern frontal approaches to Edinburgh. He was not alone in his good fortune. From England there had been a general exodus of the Athelings’ continental supporters, who had taken up residence at their great-uncle’s court: members of influential Norman/French families such as Boswell, Fowlis, Fraser, Lindsay, Preston, Ramsay, Sandilands, Montgomerie, Monteith, Telfer and Maxwell. From Hungary came the Borthwicks, Crichtons, Fotheringhams, and Giffords.
King Malcolm was both welcoming and generous to the incomers, and many of them adopted the Celtic/Pict surnames of the lands upon which they were settled: Abercrombie, Calder, Dundas, Gordon, Mar and Meldrum. Bartolf, a Hungarian nobleman, was given the Barony of Leslie in the Garioch, and similar to the way that the St Clairs had taken their name from St Clair-sur-Epte, Bartolf ’s descendants became Leslies.3
Most of what we know about William the Seemly and the early St Clairs in Scotland we owe to Father Richard Augustine Hay, a Roman Catholic priest who lived in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Father Hay was born in Edinburgh, educated at the Scots College in Paris, and became Canon Regular of Sainte Genevie`ve’s, Paris, later Prior of St Piermont-en-Argonne. Roman Catholicism was outlawed by the Scottish Parliament in 1560, but the faith remained strong regardless and, funded discreetly by such families as the St Clairs, seminaries for training Scottish priests were established in Rome, Madrid, Paris and Tournai, the latter eventually moving to Douai, 20 miles south of Lille. Father Hay’s stepfather being Sir James St Clair of Rosslyn, he was made chaplain to the St Clair family and towards the end of his life set himself the task of writing a three-volume study of St Clair records and charters. His project, written in Latin, was completed in 1700, and part republished in 1835 as Genealogie of the Sainteclaires of Rosslyn. It has recently been edited, translated and republished by the Grand Lodge of Scotland.
The family’s wider dimension, however, is infinitely more complex. In England, they held land in Norfolk, Suffolk, Kent, Sussex, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall.4 They continued to own land in Normandy and, as the centuries progressed, were to reclaim some of their Scandinavian territories. France, however, was the key to unravelling the dynasty. Following the Norman Conquest, cultural and political links between the British Isles and France were reinforced as never before. Over the eleventh and twelfth centuries, England and Normandy virtually shared the same aristocracy, not to mention the same rulers. By the thirteenth century there were St Clairs established in every province of France and Alsace. They controlled the castle of St-Clair-sur-Epte and Gison, protecting the gateway to Paris, and, while domestic politics inevitably took precedence, it was impossible for them to ignore the interests and intrigues of the burgeoning Holy Roman Empire. At the same time, family ties on both sides of the English Channel, and as far north as Scotland, irrespective of dynastic power struggles, remained strong.
Over the following two hundred years, despite their domestic ups and downs, every European nation, without exception, became embroiled in the Crusades. Among those who responded instantly to Pope Urban II’s call for the Holy Land to be liberated from Islam were the Scottish queen’s brother, Edgar Atheling, and his companion, Henry St Clair, son of William the Seemly. By then, of course, William the Seemly was long dead. He had been given the responsibility of defending Scotland’s Southern Marches against England, and, as aggression between the two countries escalated under the Conqueror’s son William Rufus, he was killed during an English raid. King Malcolm immediately confirmed the barony of Rosslyn, and the additional barony of Pentland, upon Henry, which, even in his absence overseas, gave him legal jurisdiction over the territory and its tenancy, but disaster soon followed disaster.
Within a further three years, the King of Scots was mortally wounded at the Battle of Alnwick. Having been given the news of her husband’s death, the heartbroken Queen Margaret expired too.5 In the ensuing seven years, Scotland was ruled over by King Malcolm’s brother, Donald Ban, twice; Malcolm’s eldest son Duncan for one year; and his second son Edmund, for three years. Stability of a sort was established in 1097 with a third brother, King Edgar, reigning for ten years, followed by a fourth brother, Alexander I, for a further seventeen. While the majority of all of this was taking place in Scotland, however, Henry St Clair was out of the country, heavily immersed in what was to become known as the First Crusade.