The Black Douglases by Brown Michael;

Author:Brown, Michael;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Birlinn

CHAPTER NINE

‘Eldest Son of the Pope’: The Douglases and the Church

PROTECTOR AND DEFENDER

The lords and earls of Douglas made much of their fame as defenders ‘of the liberty of the kingdom’.1 This reputation was largely formed and transmitted by Scottish churchmen. Poets and chroniclers like Barbour, Bower, Wyntoun and Holland were clerics. Their view of liberty related, not just to the survival of the Scottish kingdom, but to the defence of the rights and freedoms of the Scottish church, at liberty from English domination.2 While the perceptions and priorities of these clerical historians differed from the goals of the Good Sir James, the knight of Liddesdale and Earl William, and the experience of the communities of the south, Douglas warleaders were conscious of their duty to the church. As physical protectors and generous benefactors of many religious institutions across the south, they sought to show their worth as secular lords and a desire to cleanse their deeply besmirched souls. They also sought to harness the material resources of the church to extend their own resources, and the influence of Douglas lords with the religious communities of the south was a vital element in the accumulation of regional power by the family in the years of war after 1296.

By that date the Douglases already had a range of ties with the Scottish church. Like many other secular lords they were lay patrons of the principal church in their lordship. The church of Douglas was dedicated to the Irish Saint, Bride or Bridget of Kildare, and, like Frankish lords across the British Isles, the Douglases developed an affection for their Celtic patroness. Barbour described Sir James Douglas swearing by St. Bride, and in 1320 ‘on the ninth day of the blessed Bridget’ in the park of Douglas, James endowed masses for his soul on St. Bride’s day (1 February) to be said at Newbattle abbey. However, it was with the reformed structures of the church rather than its older traditions in Scotland that the Douglases principally identified themselves. Contacts were strongest with the local bishopric of Glasgow, and in providing one bishop and several canons for the church of Moray in the thirteenth century, the family was associated with the extension of ecclesiastical reform and royal authority to the northern province, where their kinsmen, the Murrays, were the crown’s chief secular lieutenants and vassals. During the same period the family was also involved with several of the new religious houses which formed the centres of the reformed church in the south. The Tironensian abbey of Kelso founded a daughter house at Lesmahagow, whose lands neighboured Douglasdale, and one of its earliest priors was a younger son of the lord of Douglas. Kelso itself held lands and rights within Douglasdale, probably as gifts of the lords, as part of an ecclesiastical estate which included appropriated churches, rights and lands across Lothian, Clydesdale and the Borders. A second abbey also had direct early contacts with the lords of Douglas. The Cistercian house at Melrose

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