History, Wonder Tales, Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends The Flemish | Page 54

THE RISE OF THE FLEMISH FAMILIES IN SCOTLAND
Annette Hardie - Stoffelen
For the Anglo-Flemish, the half century between the Norman Conquest of 1066 and
the witnessing of that Glasgow Inquisitio which brought them into Scottish affairs in
1116 must have seemed like the summit of the world. After the awe-inspiring repulse
of the Vikings by their fathers in Flanders, they had gone on in their own time to reach
and sustain a pinnacle of achievement never known before in the history of a nation.
Nationhood itself was a very young concept. Family bonds, loyalty to a liege lord, be
he count, duke or king, the honour of a sacre d cause, adherence to the chivalry code these things were what bound men together, with national borders apt to be
secondary to kinship, perhaps because they were so unfixed. Those Flemings who
had followed Count Eustace II of Boulogne to England in 1066 and received their
territories there from William of Normandy, were now being offered large tracts of
Scotland because their Lady had become that country’s Queen.
In England, Henry II’s reign was marked by acts of oppression against those Flemings
who had supported Stephen of Blois. Flemish noblemen were compelled to flee back
across the Channel for their own safety and many of their humbler followers were
forcibly removed to farming colonies such as those in Pembrokeshire, far from both
the seats of English power and the cross-Channel ports from which help might have
come. The East Midlands Boulonnais instituted a second wave of immigration into
Scotland, where they joined their relatives already there, and were joyfully received by
their royal kinsmen, successively kings of Scotland, Malcolm the Maiden and William
the Lion. The latter’s choice of heraldic device, of necessity an innovatory one since
he was not heir to any Boulonnais territory, underscores the sudden fashion for lions.
But the tinctures were those of Boulogne. That curious device the tressure, found only
in the armorials of Flanders and Scotland must have been adopted from the former
country to mark the Charlemagnic descent from Queen Maud through her grandfather,
Count Lambert of Lens.
In Scotland the seed of the Eustaces had ruled untroubled since the marriage of Maud
de Lens to David I. Supported by descendants of her own house of Boulogne and their
kinsmen, men such as Walter the Fleming (now Seton), Gilbert of Ghent/ Alost (now
Lindsay), Robert de CominesISt Pol (now Comyn and Buchan), Arnulf de Hesdin (now
Stewart and Graham), the counts of Louvain (now Bruce), the hereditary advocates of
Bethune (now Beaton), the hereditary castellans of Lille (now Lyle), and all their
cadets and followers, her own descendants continued on the throne until the tragic
untimely death of her great-great-grandson, Alexander II, in 1286, followed by the
equally disastrous death at sea of his own heiress and granddaughter, the little Maid
of Norway, in 1290.
It has not been sufficiently understood that the wars of the Scottish succession were
intimately concerned with an insistence by the Boulonnais there that their own blood
should continue on the throne. For Flemings had married Flemings and by now south
and east Scotland was largely populated by men and women whose ancestors had
come from Gent, Guines, Ardres, Comines, St Omer, St Pol, Hesdin, Lille, Tournai,
Douai, Bethune, Boulogne. The 1290 break in the Scottish-Boulonnais succession
provided the English monarchy with a heaven-sent opportunity to annul the
Charlemagnic descent. Stepping in as friend and mediator, Edward I flung his armed
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