Friend or Foe? Negotiating the Anglo-Scottish Border in Sir Thomas Gray’s Scalacronica and Richard Holland’s Buke of the Howlat

Abstract

In his fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman history, Scalacronica, Sir Thomas Gray narrates that after the death of Alexander III of Scotland—an event that caused “great disturbance” between England and Scotland—the lords of Scotland sensed the “beginnings of an eventual contest for the realm” (13).² As a result, the Scottish nobility agreed with Edward I of England’s council that his son, Edward of Caernarvon, should “take as his wife Margaret,” Alexander’s granddaughter “so as to have peace” (13). While the proposed marriage between the future Edward II and the Maid of Norway is a well-known part of Anglo-Scottish relations in the late thirteenth century, it is the proposal for governance that Gray narrates that is particularly interesting. Scalacronica recounts how the English and Scottish councils agreed that prince Edward should

remain in Scotland while his father lived, and that after his death, he should always remain for one year in one realm, and another year in the other; and that he should always leave his officers and ministers of the one realm at the beginnings of the Marches of the other, so that his council should always be of the nation of the realm in which he was staying at the time. (13)

This chapter considers Sir Thomas Gray’s Scalcronica and Richard Holland’s Buke of the Houdat to explore the ways in which the Anglo-Scottish Border becomes a signifier of both coalition and division.

The border is not a paper frontier. At several crossing points, perhaps most noticeably the Tweed at Coldstream, you are aware of an immediate cultural shift.¹

John Sadler