Scotland in The Early Middle Ages - Kingship

Kingship

In the early Medieval period British kingship was not inherited in a direct line from the previous king. Candidates for kingship usually needed to be a member of a particular dynasty and to claim descent from a particular ancestor. Kingship could be multi-layer and very fluid. The Pictish kings of Fortriu were probably acting as overlords of other Pictish kings for much of this period and occasionally were able to assert an overlordship over non-Pictish kings, but occasionally themselves had to acknowledge the overlordship of external rulers, both Anglian and British. Such relationships may have placed obligations to pay tribute or to supply armed forces. In victory they may have received rewards in return. Interaction and intermarriage into subject kingdoms may have open the way to absorption of such sub-kingdoms and, although there might be later overturnings of such annexation, it is likely that a complex process by which kingship was being gradually monopolised by a handful of the most powerful dynasties was taking place.

The primary role of the king was to act as a war leader, reflected in the very small number of minorities or female reigning monarchs in the period. Kings organised the defence of their people's lands, property and persons and negotiated with other kings to secure these things. If they failed to do so the settlements might be raided, destroyed or annexed and the populations killed or taken into slavery. Kings also engaged in the low level warfare of raiding and the more ambitious full scale warfare that led to conflicts of large armies and alliances and which could be undertaken over relatively large distances, like the expedition to Orkney by Dál Riata in 581 or the Northumbrian attack on Ireland in 684.

Kingship had its ritual aspects. The kings of Dál Riata were inaugurated by putting their foot in a footprint in stone, signifying that they would follow in the footsteps of his predecessors. The kingship of the unified kingdom of Alba had Scone and its sacred stone at the heart of its coronation ceremony, which historians presume was inherited from Pictish practice. However, it was Iona, the early centre of Scottish Christianity, that became the burial site of the kings of Scotland.