Royal Piety in Thirteenth-Century Scotland: the Religion and Religiosity of Alexander II (1214-49) and Alexander III (1249-86)

Abstract

From introduction: It is perhaps inevitable that both the public and personal piety of Scotland’s thirteenth-century kings should appear, at first, unremarkable in contrast to that of the long-reigning Henry III of England and Louis IX of France. Henry’s consuming spiritual and material investment at Westminster Abbey in the cult of his ancestor, Edward the Confessor, and, from 1247, the associated veneration at that house of a Holy Blood relic, were but the most outward signs of a deep personal faith wedded tightly to Plantagenet political ends. The studies of David Carpenter, Paul Binski, Nicholas Vincent, Sarah Dixon-Smith and others have revealed in Henry a commitment to a wide, varied and costly round of religious building as well as daily and annual observances through masses, alms-giving and ritual commemoration.1 Many of these practices were continued by Henry’s son: as Michael Prestwich has illustrated, Edward I’s rule can also be shown to reflect a strong personal as well as heavily politicised faith.2 Nonetheless, the contemporary and historical reputations of both these English monarchs have always struggled to compete with that of the ‘most Christian’ French king. Louis was a charismatic religious exemplar, canonised in 1297, but during his lifetime already praised throughout Europe for his charity, devotion to his royal predecessors at St Denis, veneration of both local and universal saints and their newly translated relics and, of course, his firm will to actually crusade.3