Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 01.djvu/275

Alexander  vindicator of the national independence of Scotland. His wife Sibylla deceased before him in 1121, and he founded on an island in Loch Tay a church to her memory, as a cell of Scone. His gifts to Dunfermline, where he was buried, the erection of the chapel royal at Stirling and a monastery on Inchcolm in gratitude for an escape from shipwreck, and the restoration of the lands called the Boar's Chase (Cursus Apri), formerly granted by a Pictish king, Hungus, to the church of St. Andrew's, prove him to have been almost as great a benefactor of the church as his brother David. In connection with the last of these benefactions the register of St. Andrews and the poet Wyntoun describe a ceremony which, as illustrating the customs of the age and Alexander's liberality, may be given in the latter's words:— Before the lordys all the kyng Gert them to the awtare bryng Hys cumly sted off Araby Sadelyd and brydelyd costlykly .  .   .   .   .   .    Wyth hys armwys of Turky That princys than oysid ginerally And chesyd maist for thare delyte With scheld and speir of silver quhyt .  .   .   .   .   .    With the regale and all the lave That to the Kirk that time he gave. The gift of the Arab steed and Turkish arms suggests the question whether Alexander may not have gone with his uncle Edgar and Robert of Normandy on the first crusade, but there is no record that he did. His character is thus described by the Scottish historian, Fordun: ‘A lettered and godly man, very humble and amiable towards the clerics and regulars, but terrible beyond measure to the rest of his subjects; a man of large heart, exerting himself in all things beyond his strength. He was most zealous in building churches, in searching for relics of saints, in providing and arranging priestly vestments and sacred books; most open-handed, even beyond his means, to all newcomers, and so devoted to the poor that he seemed to delight in nothing so much as in supporting them.’ He died on 27 April 1124, leaving no children, and was succeeded by his brother David.

[Liber de Scone,Bannatyne Club; Eadmer, Historia Novorum; National MSS. of Scotland; Fordun's Scotichronicon; Wyntoun's Chronycle; William of Malmesbury; Simeon of Durham. Modern authorities—Robertson, Scotland under her early Kings; W. F. Skene, Celtic Scotland; Freeman, Norman Conquest and Reign of William Rufus. In Stubbs and Haddan's edition of the Concilia, ii. part i., the most important original documents of Alexander's reign are printed, pp. 169–209.]  ALEXANDER II (1198–1249), king of Scotland, son of William the Lion and Ermengarde, daughter of Richard, viscount of Beaumont, was born at Haddington on 24 Aug. 1198, to the joy of the people, who had seen the kingdom for twelve years after the king's marriage without a male heir. The nobles swore fealty to him at Musselburgh when he was three years old, a custom of the age designed to give stability to the hereditary succession. By the treaty of Norham, 1209, a threatened war between England and Scotland was averted, upon the conditions that the English castle at Tweedmouth should not be rebuilt, and Margaret and Isabella, the daughters of King William, married to Henry and Richard, the infant sons of the English King John, with a considerable dower, to be paid in two years. Homage was also to be rendered to John by Alexander for the lands which his father held, and which were resigned in his favour into the hands of the English king. This was done at Alnwick in the same year, and three years later, in London, Alexander was knighted by John. At a great council in 1211, the barons and the burghs of Scotland granted the requisite aid for the stipulated dowry, but the marriages were never accomplished. The elder princess became, in the reign of Henry III, the wife of Hubert de Burgh, earl of Kent, and the younger of Roger, son of Hugh Bigod, earl of Norfolk, two of the greatest nobles of England, alliances which mark the connection between the Scottish royal house and the English barons. On the death of William the Lion in 1214, Alexander was crowned at Scone (6 Dec.), just in time to take part in the constitutional struggle which resulted in Magna Charta. Alexander, as might have been anticipated from the disputes between the two kingdoms raised by the question of homage, and his position as an English baron in respect of his English fiefs, was for the barons and against the king. Probably soon after the meeting at Edmundsbury (20 Nov. 1214), an agreement was made between the barons and Alexander by which Carlisle was to be rendered to the Scottish king, along with the county of Northumberland, and, if we may conjecture from what followed, the engagement on the part of the English king's sons to marry the king's sisters was renewed. The precise date of this agreement we cannot determine, for the documents recording the facts were amongst those seized by Edward I in 1291, and now lost. But, in accordance with the 