David I. was, according to James VI., nearly five centuries later, “a
sair saint for the Crown.” He gave Crown-lands in the southern
lowlands to the religious orders with their priories and abbeys; for
example, Holyrood, Melrose, Jedburgh, Kelso, and Dryburgh—centres of
learning and art and of skilled agriculture. Probably the best service
of the regular clergy to the State was its orderliness and attention to
agriculture, for the monasteries did not, as in England, produce many
careful chroniclers and historians.
Each abbey had its lands divided into baronies, captained by a lay
“Church baron” to lead its levies in war. The civil centre of the
barony was the great farm or grange, with its mill, for in the
thirteenth century the Lowlands had water-mills which to the west
Highlands were scarcely known in 1745, when the Highland husbandmen
were still using the primitive hand-quern of two circular stones. Near
the mill was a hamlet of some forty cottages; each head of a family had
a holding of eight or nine acres and pasturage for two cows, and paid a
small money rent and many arduous services to the Abbey.
The tenure of these cottars was, and under lay landlords long
remained, extremely precarious; but the tenure of the “bonnet laird” (
hosbernus) was hereditary. Below even the free cottars were the
unfree serfs or nativi, who were handed over, with the lands
they tilled, to the abbeys by benefactors: the Church was forward in
emancipating these serfs; nor were lay landlords backward, for the
freed man was useful as a spear-man in war.
We have only to look at the many now ruined abbeys of the Border to
see the extent of civilisation under David I., and the relatively
peaceful condition, then, of that region which later became the cockpit
of the English wars, and the home of the raiding clans, Scotts,
Elliots, and Armstrongs, Bells, Nixons, Robsons, and Croziers.