Scotland in the High Middle Ages

The High Middle Ages of Scotland encompass Scotland in the era between the death of Domnall II in 900 AD and the death of King Alexander III in 1286, which was an indirect cause of the Wars of Scottish Independence.
At the close of the ninth century, various competing kingdoms occupied the territory of modern Scotland. Scandinavian influence was dominant in the northern and western islands, Brythonic culture in the southwest, the Anglo-Saxon or English Kingdom of Northumbria in the southeast and the Pictish and Gaelic Kingdom of Alba in the east, north of the River Forth. By the tenth and eleventh centuries, northern Great Britain was increasingly dominated by Gaelic culture, and by the Gaelic regal lordship of "Alba", known in Latin as either "Albania" or "Scotia", and in English as "Scotland". From its base in the east, this kingdom acquired control of the lands lying to the south and ultimately the west and much of the north. It had a flourishing culture, comprising part of the larger Gaelic-speaking world and an economy dominated by agriculture and trade.
After the twelfth-century reign of King David I, the Scottish monarchs are better described as Scoto-Norman than Gaelic, preferring French culture to native Scottish culture. A consequence was the spread of French institutions and social values including Canon law. The first towns, called burghs, appeared in the same era, and as they spread, so did the Middle English language. These developments were offset by the acquisition of the Norse-Gaelic west and the Gaelicisation of many of the noble families of French and Anglo-French origin. National cohesion was fostered with the creation of various unique religious and cultural practices. By the end of the period, Scotland experienced a "Gaelic revival", which created an integrated Scottish national identity. By 1286, these economic, institutional, cultural, religious and legal developments had brought Scotland closer to its neighbours in England and the Continent, although outsiders continued to view Scotland as a provincial, even savage place. By this date, the Kingdom of Scotland had political boundaries that closely resembled those of the modern nation.
Historiography.
Scotland in the High Middle Ages is a relatively well-studied topic and Scottish medievalists have produced a wide variety of publications. Some, such as David Dumville, Thomas Owen Clancy and Dauvit Broun, are primarily interested in the native cultures of the country, and often have linguistic training in the Celtic languages. Normanists, such as G.W.S. Barrow, are concerned with the Norman and Scoto-Norman cultures introduced to Scotland after the eleventh century. For much of the twentieth century, historians tended to stress the cultural change that took place in Scotland during this time. However, scholars such as Cynthia Neville and Richard Oram, while not ignoring cultural changes, argue that continuity with the Gaelic past was just as, if not more, important.
Since the publication of "Scandinavian Scotland" by Barbara E. Crawford in 1987, there has been a growing volume of work dedicated to the understanding of Norse influence in this period. However, from 849 on, when Columba's relics were removed from Iona in the face of Viking incursions, written evidence from local sources in the areas under Scandinavian influence all but vanishes for three hundred years. The sources for information about the Hebrides and indeed much of northern Scotland from the eighth to the eleventh century, are thus almost exclusively Irish, English or Norse. The main Norse texts were written in the early thirteenth century and should be treated with care. The English and Irish sources are more contemporary, but according to historian Alex Woolf, may have "led to a southern bias in the story", especially as much of the Hebridean archipelago became Norse-speaking during this period.
There are various traditional clan histories dating from the nineteenth century such as the "monumental" "The Clan Donald" and a significant corpus of material from the Gaelic oral tradition that relates to this period, although their value is questionable.
Origins of the Kingdom of Alba.
At the close of the ninth century various polities occupied Scotland. The Pictish and Gaelic Kingdom of Alba had just been united in the east; the Scandinavian-influenced Kingdom of the Isles emerged in the west. Ragnall ua Ímair was a key figure at this time although the extent to which he ruled territory in western and northern Scotland including the Hebrides and Northern Isles is unknown as contemporary sources are silent on this matter. Dumbarton, the capital of the Kingdom of Strathclyde had been sacked by the Uí Ímair in 870. This was clearly a major assault, which may have brought the whole of mainland Scotland under temporary Uí Imair control. The south-east had been absorbed by the English Kingdom of Bernicia/Northumbria in the seventh century. Galloway in the south west was a Lordship with some regality. In a Galwegian charter dated to the reign of Fergus, the Galwegian ruler styled himself "rex Galwitensium", King of Galloway. In the north east the ruler of Moray was called not only "king" in both Scandinavian and Irish sources, but before Máel Snechtai, "King of Alba".
However, when Domnall mac Causantín died at Dunnottar in 900, he was the first man to be recorded as "rí Alban" and his kingdom was the nucleus that would expand as Viking and other influences waned. In the tenth century the Alban elite had begun to develop a conquest myth to explain their increasing Gaelicisation at the expense of Pictish culture. Known as MacAlpin's Treason, it describes how Cináed mac Ailpín is supposed to have annihilated the Picts in one fell takeover. However, modern historians are now beginning to reject this conceptualization of Scottish origins. No contemporary sources mention this conquest. Moreover, the Gaelicisation of Pictland was a long process predating Cináed, and is evidenced by Gaelic-speaking Pictish rulers, Pictish royal patronage of Gaelic poets, and Gaelic inscriptions and placenames. The change of identity can perhaps be explained by the death of the Pictish language, but also important may be Causantín II's alleged Scoticisation of the "Pictish" Church and the trauma caused by Viking invasions, most strenuously felt in the Pictish kingdom's heartland of Fortriu.
Scandinavian-influenced territories.
Kingdom of the Isles.
The Kingdom of the Isles comprised the Hebrides, the islands of the Firth of Clyde and the Isle of Man from the 9th to the 13th centuries AD. The islands were known to the Norse as the "Suðreyjar", or "Southern Isles" as distinct from the "Norðreyjar" or "Northern Isles" of Orkney and Shetland, which were held by the Earls of Orkney as vassals of the Norwegian crown throughout the High Middle Ages.
After Ragnall ua Ímair, Amlaíb Cuarán, who fought at the Battle of Brunanburh in 937 and who also became King of Northumbria, is the next King of the Isles on record. In the succeeding years Norse sources also list various rulers such as Gilli, Sigurd the Stout, Håkon Eiriksson and Thorfinn Sigurdsson as rulers over the Hebrides as vassals of the Kings of Norway or Denmark.
Godred Crovan became the ruler of Dublin and Mann from 1079 and from the early years of the twelfth century the Crovan dynasty asserted themselves and ruled as "Kings of Mann and the Isles" for the next half century. The kingdom was then sundered due to the actions of Somerled whose sons inherited the southern Hebrides while the Manx rulers held on to the "north isles" for another century.
The North.
The Scandinavian influence in Scotland was probably at its height in the mid eleventh century during the time of Thorfinn Sigurdsson, who attempted to create a single political and ecclesiastical domain stretching from Shetland to Man. The permanent Scandinavian holdings in Scotland at that time must therefore have been at least a quarter of the land area of modern Scotland.
By the end of the eleventh century the Norwegian crown had come to accept that Caithness was held by the Earls of Orkney as a fiefdom from the Kings of Scotland although its Norse character was retained throughout the thirteenth century. Raghnall mac Gofraidh was granted Caithness after assisting the Scots king in a conflict with Harald Maddadson, an earl of Orkney in the early thirteenth century.
In the ninth century Orcadian control stretched into Moray, which was a semi-independent kingdom for much of this early period. The Moray rulers Macbeth (1040–1057) and his successor Lulach (1057–1058) became rulers of the entire Scottish kingdom for a time. However, Moray was subjugated by the Scottish kings after 1130, when the native ruler, Óengus of Moray was killed leading a rebellion. Another revolt in 1187 was equally unsuccessful.
South west Scotland.
By the mid tenth century Amlaíb Cuarán controlled The Rhinns and the region gets the modern name of Galloway from the mixture of Viking and Gaelic Irish settlement that produced the Gall-Gaidel. Magnus Barelegs is said to have "subdued the people of Galloway" in the eleventh century and Whithorn seems to have been a centre of Hiberno-Norse artisans who traded around the Irish Sea by the end of the first millennium. However, the place name, written and archaeological evidence of extensive Norse (as opposed to Norse-Gael) settlement in the area is not convincing.
The ounceland system seems to have become widespread down the west coast including much of Argyll, and most of the south west apart from a region near the inner Solway Firth. In Dumfries and Galloway the place name evidence is complex and of mixed Gaelic, Norse and Danish influence, the last most likely stemming from contact with the extensive Danish holdings in northern England. Although the Scots obtained greater control after the death of Gilla Brigte and the accession of Lochlann in 1185, Galloway was not fully absorbed by Scotland until 1235, after the rebellion of the Galwegians was crushed.
Strathclyde.
The main language of Strathclyde and elsewhere in the "Hen Ogledd" in the opening years of the High Middle Ages was Cumbric, a variety of the British language akin to Old Welsh. Some time after 1018 and before 1054, the kingdom appears to have been conquered by the Scots, most probably during the reign of Máel Coluim mac Cináeda who died in 1034. At this time the territory of Strathclyde extended as far south as the River Derwent. In 1054, the English king Edward the Confessor dispatched Earl Siward of Northumbria against the Scots, then ruled by Macbeth. By the 1070s, if not earlier in the reign of Máel Coluim mac Donnchada, it appears that the Scots again controlled Strathclyde, although William Rufus annexed the southern portion in 1092. The territory was granted by Alexander I to his brother David, later King David I, in 1107.
Kingdom of Alba or Scotia.
Gaelic kings: Domnall II to Alexander I.
Domnall mac Causantín's nickname was "dásachtach". This simply meant a madman, or, in early Irish law, a man not in control of his functions and hence without legal culpability. The following long reign (900–942/3) of his successor Causantín is more often regarded as the key to formation of the Kingdom of Alba.
The period between the accession of Máel Coluim I and Máel Coluim mac Cináeda was marked by good relations with the Wessex rulers of England, intense internal dynastic disunity and, despite this, relatively successful expansionary policies. In 945, king Máel Coluim I received Strathclyde as part of a deal with King Edmund of England, an event offset somewhat by Máel Coluim's loss of control in Moray. Sometime in the reign of king Idulb (954–962), the Scots captured the fortress called "oppidum Eden", i.e. Edinburgh. Scottish control of Lothian was strengthened with Máel Coluim II's victory over the Northumbrians at the Battle of Carham (1018). The Scots had probably some authority in Strathclyde since the later part of the ninth century, but the kingdom kept its own rulers, and it is not clear that the Scots were always strong enough to enforce their authority.
The reign of King Donnchad I from 1034 was marred by failed military adventures, and he was killed in a battle with the men of Moray, led by Macbeth who became king in 1040. Macbeth ruled for seventeen years, peaceful enough that he was able to leave to go on pilgrimage to Rome; however, he was overthrown by Máel Coluim, the son of Donnchad, who some months later defeated Macbeth's stepson and successor Lulach to become king Máel Coluim III. In subsequent medieval propaganda, Donnchad's reign was portrayed positively while Macbeth was vilified; William Shakespeare followed this distorted history with his portrayal of both the king and his queen consort, Gruoch, in his play "Macbeth".
It was Máel Coluim III, not his father Donnchad, who did more to create the dynasty that ruled Scotland for the following two centuries. Part of the resource was the large number of children he had, perhaps as many as a dozen, through marriage to the widow or daughter of Thorfinn Sigurdsson and afterwards to the Anglo-Hungarian princess Margaret, granddaughter of Edmund Ironside. However, despite having a royal Anglo-Saxon wife, Máel Coluim spent much of his reign conducting slave raids against the English, adding to the woes of that people in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest of England and the Harrying of the North. Marianus Scotus narrates that "the Gaels and French devastated the English; and [the English] were dispersed and died of hunger; and were compelled to eat human flesh".
Máel Coluim's Queen Margaret was the sister of the native claimant to the English throne, Edgar Ætheling. This marriage, and Máel Coluim's raids on northern England, prompted interference by the Norman rulers of England in the Scottish kingdom. King William the Conqueror invaded and Máel Coluim submitted to his authority, giving his oldest son Donnchad as a hostage. From 1079 onwards there were various cross border raids by both parties and Máel Coluim himself and Edward, his eldest son by Margaret, died in one of them in the Battle of Alnwick, in 1093.
Tradition would have made his brother Domnall Bán Máel Coluim's successor, but it seems that Edward, his eldest son by Margaret, was his chosen heir. With Máel Coluim and Edward dead in the same battle, and his other sons in Scotland still young, Domnall was made king. However, Donnchad II, Máel Coluim's eldest son by his first wife, obtained some support from William Rufus and took the throne. According to the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" his English and French followers were massacred, and Donnchad II himself was killed later in the same year (1094) by Domnall's ally Máel Petair of Mearns. In 1097, William Rufus sent another of Máel Coluim's sons, Edgar, to take the kingship. The ensuing death of Domnall Bán secured the kingship for Edgar, and there followed a period of relative peace. The reigns of both Edgar and his successor Alexander are obscure by comparison with their successors. The former's most notable act was to send a camel (or perhaps an elephant) to his fellow Gael Muircheartach Ua Briain, High King of Ireland. When Edgar died, Alexander took the kingship, while his youngest brother David became Prince of Cumbria.
Scoto-Norman kings: David I to Alexander III.
The period between the accession of David I and the death of Alexander III was marked by dependency upon and relatively good relations with the Kings of England. The period can be regarded as one of great historical transformation, part of a more general phenomenon, which has been called "Europeanisation". The period also witnessed the successful imposition of royal authority across most of the modern country. After David I, and especially in the reign of William I, Scotland's Kings became ambivalent about the culture of most of their subjects. As Walter of Coventry tells us, "The modern kings of Scotland count themselves as Frenchmen, in race, manners, language and culture; they keep only Frenchmen in their household and following, and have reduced the Gaels to utter servitude."
This situation was not without consequence. In the aftermath of William's capture at Alnwick in 1174, the Scots turned on the small number of Middle English-speakers and French-speakers among them. William of Newburgh related that the Scots first attacked the Scoto-English in their own army, and Newburgh reported a repetition of these events in Scotland itself. Walter Bower, writing a few centuries later about the same events confirms that "there took place a most wretched and widespread persecution of the English both in Scotland and Galloway".
The first instance of strong opposition to the Scottish kings was perhaps the revolt of Óengus, the Mormaer of Moray. Other important resistors to the expansionary Scottish kings were Somerled, Fergus of Galloway, Gille Brigte, Lord of Galloway and Harald Maddadsson, along with two kin-groups known today as the MacHeths and the MacWilliams. The threat from the latter was so grave that, after their defeat in 1230, the Scottish crown ordered the public execution of the infant girl who happened to be the last of the MacWilliam line. According to the "Lanercost Chronicle":
Many of these resistors collaborated, and drew support not just in the peripheral Gaelic regions of Galloway, Moray, Ross and Argyll, but also from eastern "Scotland-proper", and elsewhere in the Gaelic world. However, by the end of the twelfth century, the Scottish kings had acquired the authority and ability to draw in native Gaelic lords outside their previous zone of control in order to do their work, the most famous examples being Lochlann, Lord of Galloway and Ferchar mac in tSagairt. By the reign of Alexander III, the Scots were in a strong position to annex the remainder of the western seaboard, which they did following Haakon Haakonarson's ill-fated invasion and the stalemate of the Battle of Largs with the Treaty of Perth in 1266. The conquest of the west, the creation of the Mormaerdom of Carrick in 1186 and the absorption of the Lordship of Galloway after the Galwegian revolt of Gille Ruadh in 1235 meant that Gaelic speakers under the rule of the Scottish king formed a majority of the population during the so-called Norman period. The integration of Gaelic, Norman and Saxon culture that began to occur may have been the platform that enabled King Robert I to emerge victorious during the Wars of Independence, which followed soon after the death of Alexander III.
Geography.
At the beginning of this period the boundaries of Alba contained only a small proportion of modern Scotland. Even when these lands were added to in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the term "Scotia" was applied in sources only to the region between the River Forth, the central Grampians and the River Spey and only began to be used to describe all of the lands under the authority of the Scottish crown from the second half of the twelfth century. By the late thirteenth century when the Treaty of York (1237) and Treaty of Perth (1266) had fixed the boundaries with the Kingdom of the Scots with England and Norway respectively, its borders were close to the modern boundaries. After this time both Berwick and the Isle of Man were lost to England, and Orkney and Shetland were gained from Norway in the fifteenth century.
The area that became Scotland in this period is divided by geology into five major regions: the Southern Uplands, Central Lowlands, the Highlands, the North-east coastal plain and the Islands. Some of these were further divided by mountains, major rivers and marshes. Most of these regions had strong cultural and economic ties elsewhere: to England, Ireland, Scandinavian and mainland Europe. Internal communications were difficult and the country lacked an obvious geographical centre. Dunfermline emerged as a major royal centre in the reign of Malcolm III and Edinburgh began to be used to house royal records in the reign of David I, but, perhaps because of its proximity and vulnerability to England, it did not become a formal capital in this period.
The expansion of Alba into the wider Kingdom of Scotland was a gradual process combining external conquest and the suppression of occasional rebellions with the extension of seigniorial power through the placement of effective agents of the crown. Neighbouring independent kings became subject to Alba and eventually disappeared from the records. In the ninth century the term "mormaer", meaning "great steward", began to appear in the records to describe the rulers of Moray, Strathearn, Buchan, Angus and Mearns, who may have acted as "marcher lords" for the kingdom to counter the Viking threat. Later the process of consolidation is associated with the feudalism introduced by David I, which, particularly in the east and south where the crown's authority was greatest, saw the placement of lordships, often based on castles, and the creation of administrative sheriffdoms, which overlay the pattern of local thegns. It also saw the English "earl" and Latin "comes" begin to replace the "mormaers" in the records. The result has been seen as a "hybrid kingdom, in which Gaelic, Anglo-Saxon, Flemish and Norman elements all coalesced under its 'Normanised', but nevertheless native lines of kings".
Economy and society.
Economy.
The Scottish economy of this period was dominated by agriculture and by short-distance, local trade. There was an increasing amount of foreign trade in the period, as well as exchange gained by means of military plunder. By the end of this period, coins were replacing barter goods, but for most of this period most exchange was done without the use of metal currency.
Most of Scotland's agricultural wealth in this period came from pastoralism, rather than arable farming. Arable farming grew significantly in the "Norman period", but with geographical differences, low-lying areas being subject to more arable farming than high-lying areas such as the Highlands, Galloway and the Southern Uplands. Galloway, in the words of G. W. S. Barrow, "already famous for its cattle, was so overwhelmingly pastoral, that there is little evidence in that region of land under any permanent cultivation, save along the Solway coast". The average amount of land used by a husbandman in Scotland might have been around 26 acres. The native Scots favoured pastoralism, in that Gaelic lords were happier to give away more land to French and Middle English-speaking settlers, while holding on tenaciously to upland regions, perhaps contributing to the Highland/Galloway-Lowland division that emerged in Scotland in the later Middle Ages. The main unit of land measurement in Scotland was the "davoch" (i.e. "vat"), called the "arachor" in Lennox and also known as the "Scottish ploughgate". In English-speaking Lothian, it was simply ploughgate. It may have measured about , divided into 4 "rath"s. Cattle, pigs and cheeses were among the chief foodstuffs, from a wide range of produce including sheep, fish, rye, barley, bee wax and honey.
David I established the first chartered burghs in Scotland, copying the burgher charters and "Leges Burgorum" (rules governing virtually every aspect of life and work) almost verbatim from the English customs of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. Early burgesses were usually Flemish, English, French and German, rather than Gaelic Scots. The burgh's vocabulary was composed totally of either Germanic and French terms. The councils that ran individual burghs were individually known as "lie doussane", meaning the dozen.
Demography and language.
The population of Scotland in this period is unknown. The first reliable information in 1755 shows the inhabitants of Scotland as 1,265,380. Best estimates put the Scottish population for earlier periods in the High Middle Ages between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people, growing from a low point to a high point.
Linguistically, the majority of people within Scotland throughout this period spoke the Gaelic language, then simply called "Scottish", or in Latin, "lingua Scotica". Other languages spoken throughout this period were Old Norse and English, with the Cumbric language disappearing somewhere between 900 and 1100. Pictish may have survived into this period, but the evidence is weak. After the accession of David I, or perhaps before, Gaelic ceased to be the main language of the royal court. From his reign until the end of the period, the Scottish monarchs probably favoured the French language, as evidenced by reports from contemporary chronicles, literature and translations of administrative documents into the French language. English, with French and Flemish, became the main language of Scottish burghs. However, they were, in Barrow's words, "scarcely more than villages ... numbered in hundreds rather than thousands".
Society.
The legal tract known as "Laws of the Brets and Scots", probably compiled in the reign of David I, underlines the importance of the kin group as entitled to compensation for the killing of individual members. It also lists five grades of man: "King", "mormaer", "toísech", "ócthigern" and "neyfs". The highest rank below the king, the mormaer ("great officer"), were probably about a dozen provincial rulers, later replaced by the English term earl. Below them the toísech (leader), appear to have managed areas of the royal demesne, or that of a mormaer or abbot, within which they would have held substantial estates, sometimes described as shires and the title was probably equivalent to the later thane. The lowest free rank mentioned by the "Laws of the Brets and Scots", the "ócthigern" (literally, "little" or "young lord"), is a term the text does not translate into French. There were probably relatively large numbers of free peasant farmers, called husbandmen or bondmen, in the south and north of the country, but fewer in the lands between the Forth and Sutherland until the twelfth century, when landlords began to encourage the formation of such a class through paying better wages and deliberate immigration. Below the husbandmen a class of free farmers with smaller parcels of land developed, with cottars and grazing tenants (gresemen). The non-free "naviti", "neyfs" or serfs existed in various forms of service, with terms with their origins in Irish practice, including "cumelache", "cumherba" and "scoloc" who were tied to a lord's estate and unable to leave it without permission, but who records indicate often absconded for better wages or work in other regions or in the developing burghs.
The introduction of feudalism from the time of David I, not only introduced sheriffdoms that overlay the pattern of local thanes, but also meant that new tenures were held from the king, or a superior lord, in exchange for loyalty and forms of service that were usually military. However, the imposition of feudalism continued to sit beside existing system of landholding and tenure and it is not clear how this change impacted on the lives of the ordinary free and unfree workers. In places, feudalism may have tied workers more closely to the land, but the predominantly pastoral nature of Scottish agriculture may have made the imposition of a manorial system on the English model impracticable. Obligations appear to have been limited to occasional labour service, seasonal renders of food, hospitality and money rents.
Law and government.
Early Gaelic law tracts, first written down in the ninth century, reveal a society highly concerned with kinship, status, honour and the regulation of blood feuds. Scottish common law began to take shape at the end of the period, assimilating Gaelic and Celtic law with practices from Anglo-Norman England and the Continent. In the twelfth century, and certainly in the thirteenth, strong continental legal influences began to have more effect, such as Canon law and various Anglo-Norman practices. Pre-fourteenth century law among the native Scots is not always well attested, but extensive knowledge of early Gaelic Law gives some basis for its reconstruction. In the earliest extant Scottish legal manuscript, there is a document called "Leges inter Brettos et Scottos". The document survives in Old French, and is almost certainly a French translation of an earlier Gaelic document. It retained a vast number of untranslated Gaelic legal terms. Later medieval legal documents, written both in Latin and Middle English, contain more Gaelic legal terms, examples including "slains" (Old Irish "slán" or "sláinte"; exemption) and "cumherba" (Old Irish "comarba"; ecclesiastic heir).
A "Judex" (pl. "judices") represents a post-Norman continuity with the ancient Gaelic orders of lawmen called in English today "Brehons". Bearers of the office almost always have Gaelic names north of the Forth or in the south-west. "Judices" were often royal officials who supervised baronial, abbatial and other lower-ranking "courts". However, the main official of law in the post-Davidian Kingdom of the Scots was the Justiciar who held courts and reported to the king personally. Normally, there were two Justiciarships, organised by linguistic boundaries: the Justiciar of Scotia and the Justiciar of Lothian. Sometimes Galloway had its own Justiciar too.
The office of Justiciar and Judex were just two ways that Scottish society was governed. In the earlier period, the king "delegated" power to hereditary native "officers" such as the Mormaers/Earls and Toísechs/Thanes. It was a government of gift-giving and bardic lawmen. There were also popular courts, the "comhdhail", testament to which are dozens of placenames throughout eastern Scotland. In the Norman period, sheriffdoms and sheriffs and, to a lesser extent, bishops (see below) became increasingly important. The former enabled the King to effectively administer royal demesne land. During David I's reign, royal sheriffs had been established in the king's core personal territories; namely, in rough chronological order, at Roxburgh, Scone, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Stirling and Perth. By the reign of William I, there may have been about 30 royal sheriffdoms, including ones at Ayr and Dumfries, key locations on the borders of Galloway-Carrick. As the distribution and number of sheriffdoms expanded, so did royal control. By the end of the thirteenth century, sheriffdoms had been established in westerly locations as far-flung as Wigtown, Kintyre, Skye and Lorne. Through these, the thirteenth-century Scottish king exercised more control over Scotland than any of his later medieval successors. The king himself was itinerant and had no "capital" as such although Scone performed a key function. By ritual tradition, all Scottish kings in this period had to be crowned there by the Mormaers of Strathearn and Fife. Although King David I tried to build up Roxburgh as a capital, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, more charters were issued at Scone than any other location. Other popular locations were nearby Perth, Stirling, Dunfermline and Edinburgh. In the earliest part of this era, Forres and Dunkeld seem to have been the chief royal residences.
Records from the Scandinavian-held lands are much-less well documented by comparison. Udal law formed the basis of the legal system and it is known that the Hebrides were taxed using the Ounceland measure. Althings were open-air governmental assemblies that met in the presence of the "jarl" and the meetings were open to virtually all free men. At these sessions decisions were made, laws passed and complaints adjudicated. Examples include Tingwall and Law Ting Holm in Shetland, Dingwall in Easter Ross, and Tynwald on the Isle of Man.
Warfare.
Land warfare.
By the twelfth century the ability of lords and the king to call on wider bodies of men beyond their household troops for major campaigns had become the "common" ("communis exertcitus") or "Scottish army" ("exercitus Scoticanus"), the result of a universal obligation based on the holding of variously named units of land. Later decrees indicated that the common army was a levy of all able-bodied freemen aged between 16 and 60, with 8-days warning. It produced relatively large numbers of men serving for a limited period, usually as unarmoured or poorly armoured bowmen and spearmen. In this period it continued to be mustered by the earls and they often led their men in battle, as was the case in the Battle of the Standard in 1138. It would continue to provide the vast majority of Scottish national armies, potentially producing tens of thousands of men for short periods of conflict, into the early modern era.
There also developed obligations that produced smaller numbers of feudal troops. The Davidian Revolution of the twelfth century was seen by Geoffrey Barrow as bringing "fundamental innovations in military organization". These included the knight's fee, homage and fealty, as well as castle-building and the regular use of professional cavalry, as knights held castles and estates in exchange for service, providing troops on a 40-day basis. David's Norman followers and their retinues were able to provide a force of perhaps 200 mounted and armoured knights, but the vast majority of his forces were the "common army" of poorly armed infantry, capable of performing well in raiding and guerrilla warfare. Although such troops were only infrequently able to stand up to the English in the field, nonetheless they did manage to do so critically in the wars of independence at Stirling Bridge in 1297 and Bannockburn in 1314.
Marine warfare.
The Viking onslaught of the British Isles was based on superior sea-power, which enabled the creation of the thalassocracies of the north and west. In the late tenth century the naval battle of "Innisibsolian" (tentatively identified as taking place near the Slate Islands of Argyll) was won by Alban forces over Vikings, although this was an unusual setback for the Norse. In 962 Ildulb mac Causantín, King of Scots, was killed (according to the "Chronicle of the Kings of Alba") fighting the Norse near Cullen, at the Battle of Bauds, and although there is no evidence of permanent Viking settlement on the east coast of Scotland south of the Moray Firth, raids and even invasions certainly occurred. Dunnottar was taken during the reign of Domnall mac Causantín and the "Orkneyinga saga" records an attack on the Isle of May, by Sweyn Asleifsson and Margad Grimsson.
The long-ship, the key to their success, was a graceful, long, narrow, light, wooden boat with a shallow draft hull designed for speed. This shallow draft allowed navigation in waters only one metre deep and permitted beach landings, while its light weight enabled it to be carried over portages. Longships were also double-ended, the symmetrical bow and stern allowing the ship to reverse direction quickly without having to turn around. In the "Gàidhealtachd" they were eventually succeeded by the Birlinn, highland galley and lymphad, which, in ascending order of size, and which replaced the steering-board with a stern-rudder from the late twelfth century. Forces of ships were raised through obligations of a ship-levy through the system of ouncelands and pennylands, which have been argued to date back to the muster system of Dál Riata, but were probably introduced by Scandinavian settlers. Later evidence suggests that the supply of ships for war became linked to military feudal obligations. Viking naval power was disrupted by conflicts between the Scandinavian kingdoms, but entered a period of resurgence in the 13th century when Norwegian kings began to build some of the largest ships seen in Northern European waters, until Haakon Haakonson's ill-fated expedition in 1263 left the Scottish crown the most significant power in the region.
Christianity and the Church.
By the tenth century all of northern Britain was Christianised, except the Scandinavian north and west, which had been lost to the church in the face of Norse settlement.
Saints.
Like every other Christian country, one of the main features of medieval Scottish Christianity was the Cult of Saints. Saints of Irish origin who were particularly revered included various figures called St Faelan and St. Colman, and saints Findbar and Finan. The most important missionary saint was Columba, who emerged as a national figure in the combined Scottish and Pictish kingdom, with a new centre established in the east at Dunkeld by Kenneth I for part of his relics. He remained a major figure into the fourteenth century and a new foundation was endowed by William I at Arbroath Abbey and the relics in the Monymusk Reliquary handed over to the Abbot's care. Regional saints remained important to local identities. In Strathclyde the most important saint was St Kentigern, in Lothian, St Cuthbert and after this martyrdom around 1115 a cult emerged in Orkney, Shetland and northern Scotland around Magnus Erlendsson, Earl of Orkney. The cult of St Andrew in Scotland was established on the Eastern coast by the Pictish kings as early as the eighth century. The shrine, which from the twelfth century was said to have contained the relics of the saint, brought to Scotland by Saint Regulus, began to attract pilgrims from Scotland, but also from England and further away. By the twelfth century the site at Kilrymont, had become known simply as St. Andrews and it became increasingly associated with Scottish national identity and the royal family. It was renewed as a focus for devotion with the patronage of Queen Margaret, who also became important after her canonisation in 1250 and the ceremonial transfer of her remains to Dunfermline Abbey, as one of the most revered national saints.
Organisation.
There is some evidence that Christianity made inroads into the Viking controlled Highlands and Islands before the official conversion at the end of the tenth century. There are a relatively large number of isles called Pabbay or Papa in the Western and Northern Isles, which may indicate a "hermit's" or "priest's isle" from this period. Changes in patterns of grave goods and the use of Viking place names using -kirk also suggest that the Christianity had begun to spread before the official conversion. According to the "Orkneyinga Saga" the Northern Isles were Christianised by Olav Tryggvasson in 995 when he stopped at South Walls on his way from Ireland to Norway. The King summoned the "jarl" Sigurd the Stout and said "I order you and all your subjects to be baptised. If you refuse, I'll have you killed on the spot and I swear I will ravage every island with fire and steel." Unsurprisingly, Sigurd agreed and the islands became Christian at a stroke, receiving their own bishop in the early eleventh century. Elsewhere in Scandinavian Scotland the record is less clear. There was a Bishop of Iona until the late tenth century and there is then a gap of more than a century, possibly filled by the Bishops of Orkney, before the appointment of the first Bishop of Mann in 1079.
At the beginning of the period Scottish monasticism was dominated by monks called "Céli Dé" (lit. "vassals of God"), anglicised as culdees. At St Andrews and elsewhere, "Céli Dé" abbeys are recorded and the round towers at Brechin and Abernethy are evidence of Irish influence. Gaelic monasticism was vibrant and expansionary for much of the period and dozens of monasteries, often called Schottenklöster, were founded by Gaelic monks on the continent. The introduction of the continental type of monasticism to Scotland is associated with Queen Margaret, the wife of Máel Coluim III, although her exact role is unclear. She was in communication with Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, and he provided a few monks for a new Benedictine abbey at Dunfermline (c. 1070). Subsequent foundations under Margaret's sons, the kings Edgar, Alexander I and particularly David I, tended to be of the reformed type that followed the lead set by Cluny. These stressed the original Benedictine virtues of poverty, chastity and obedience, but also contemplation and service of the Mass and were followed in various forms by large numbers of reformed Benedictine, Augustinian and Cistercian houses.
Before the twelfth century most Scottish churches had collegiate bodies of clergy who served over a wide area, often tied together by devotion to a particular missionary saint. From this period local lay landholders, perhaps following the example of David I, began to adopt the continental practice of building churches on their land for the local population and endowing them with land and a priest, beginning in the south, spreading to the north-east and then the west, being almost universal by the first survey of the Scottish Church for papal taxation in 1274. The administration of these parishes was often given over to local monastic institutions in a process known as appropriation. Scotland had little clear diocesan structure before the Norman period. There were bishoprics based on various ancient churches, but some are very obscure in the records and there appear to be long vacancies. From around 1070, in the reign of Malcolm III, there was a "Bishop of Alba" resident at St. Andrews, but it is not clear what authority he had over the other bishops. After the Norman Conquest of England, the Archbishops of both Canterbury and York each claimed superiority over the Scottish church. The church in Scotland attained independent status after the Papal Bull of Celestine III ("Cum universi", 1192) by which all Scottish bishoprics except Galloway were formally independent of York and Canterbury. However, unlike Ireland, which had been granted four Archbishoprics in the same century, Scotland received no Archbishop and the whole "Ecclesia Scoticana", with individual Scottish bishoprics (except Whithorn/Galloway), became the "special daughter of the see of Rome". It was in practice run by special councils made up of all its bishops, with the bishop of St Andrews emerging as the most important player.
Culture.
As a predominantly Gaelic society, most Scottish cultural practices throughout this period mirrored closely those of Ireland, or at least those of Ireland with some Pictish borrowings. After David I, the French-speaking kings introduced cultural practices popular in Anglo-Norman England, France and elsewhere. As in all pre-modern societies, storytelling was popular. The English scholar D. D. R. Owen, who specialises in the literature of this era, writes that "Professional storytellers would ply their trade from court to court. Some of them would have been native Scots, no doubt offering legends from the ancient Celtic past performed ... in Gaelic when appropriate, but in French for most of the new nobility". Almost all of these stories are lost, although some have come down in the Gaelic or Scots oral tradition. One form of oral culture extremely well accounted for in this period is genealogy. There are dozens of Scottish genealogies surviving from this era, covering everyone from the Mormaers of Lennox and Moray to the Scottish king himself. Scotland's kings maintained an "ollamh righe", a royal high poet who had a permanent place in all medieval Gaelic lordships, and whose purpose was to recite genealogies when needed, for occasions such as coronations.
Before the reign of David I, the Scots possessed a flourishing literary elite who regularly produced texts in both Gaelic and Latin that were frequently transmitted to Ireland and elsewhere. Dauvit Broun has shown that a Gaelic literary elite survived in the eastern Scottish lowlands, in places such as Loch Leven and Brechin into the thirteenth century, However, surviving records are predominantly written in Latin, and their authors would usually translate vernacular terms into Latin, so that historians are faced with researching a Gaelic society clothed in Latin terminology. Even names were translated into more common continental forms; for instance, "Gilla Brigte" became "Gilbert", "Áed" became "Hugh", etc. As far as written literature is concerned, there may be more medieval Scottish Gaelic literature than is often thought. Almost all medieval Gaelic literature has survived because it was sustained in Ireland, not in Scotland. Thomas Owen Clancy has recently all but proven that the "Lebor Bretnach", the so-called "Irish Nennius", was written in Scotland, and probably at the monastery in Abernethy. Yet this text survives only from manuscripts preserved in Ireland. Other literary work that has survived include that of the prolific poet Gille Brighde Albanach. About 1218, Gille Brighde wrote a poem — "Heading for Damietta" — on his experiences of the Fifth Crusade. In the thirteenth century, French flourished as a literary language, and produced the "Roman de Fergus", one of the earliest pieces of non-Celtic vernacular literature to survive from Scotland.
There is no extant literature in the English language in this era. There is some Norse literature from Scandinavian parts such as "Darraðarljóð", which is located in Caithness, the story being a "powerful mixture of Celtic and Old Norse imagery". The famous "Orkneyinga Saga", which pertains to the early history of the Earldom of Orkney, was written down in Iceland.
In the Middle Ages, Scotland was renowned for its musical skill. Gerald of Wales, a medieval clergyman and chronicler, explains the relation between Scottish and Irish music:
Playing the harp ("clarsach") was especially popular with medieval Scots – half a century after Gerald's writing, King Alexander III kept a royal harpist at his court. Of the three medieval harps that survive, two come from Scotland (Perthshire), and one from Ireland. Singers also had a royal function. For instance, when the king of Scotland passed through the territory of Strathearn, it was the custom that he be greeted by seven female singers, who would sing to him. When Edward I approached the borders of Strathearn in the summer of 1296, he was met by these seven women, "who accompanied the King on the road between Gask and Ogilvie, singing to him, as was the custom in the time of the late Alexander kings of Scots".
Outsiders' views.
The Irish thought of Scotland as a provincial place. Others thought of it as an outlandish or barbaric place. "Who would deny that the Scots are barbarians?" was a rhetorical question posed in the 12th century by the Anglo-Flemish author of "De expugnatione Lyxbonensi" ("On the Conquest of Lisbon"). A century later Louis IX of France was reported to have said to his son "I would prefer that a Scot should come from Scotland and govern the people well and faithfully, than that you, my son, should be seen to govern badly."
This characterisation of the Scots was often politically motivated, and many of the most hostile writers were based in areas frequently subjected to Scottish raids. English and French accounts of the Battle of the Standard contain many accounts of Scottish atrocities. For instance, Henry of Huntingdon notes that the Scots: "cleft open pregnant women, and took out the unborn babes; they tossed children upon the spear-points, and beheaded priests on altars: they cut the head of crucifixes, and placed them on the trunks of the slain; and placed the heads of the dead upon the crucifixes. Thus wherever the Scots arrived, all was full of horror and full of savagery." A less hostile view was given by Guibert of Nogent in the First Crusade, who encountered Scots and wrote that: "You might have seen a crowd of Scots, a people savage at home but unwarlike elsewhere, descend from their marshy lands, with bare legs, shaggy cloaks, their purse hanging from their shoulders; their copious arms seemed ridiculous to us, but they offered their faith and devotion as aid."
There was also a general belief that Scotland-proper was an island, or at least a peninsula, known as Scotia, Alba or Albania. Matthew Paris, a Benedictine monk and cartographer, drew a map in this manner in the mid-thirteenth century and called the "island" "Scotia ultra marina". A later medieval Italian map applies this geographical conceptualization to all of Scotland. The Arab geographer al-Idrisi, shared this view: "Scotland adjoins the island of England and is a long peninsula to the north of the larger island. It is uninhabited and has neither town nor village. Its length is 150 miles."
National identity.
In this period, the word "Scot" was not the word used by vast majority of Scots to describe themselves, except to foreigners, among whom it was the most common word. The Scots called themselves "Albanach" or simply "Gaidel". Both "Scot" and "Gaidel" were ethnic terms that connected them to the majority of the inhabitants of Ireland. As the author of "De Situ Albanie" notes at the beginning of the thirteenth century: "The name Arregathel [Argyll] means margin of the Scots or Irish, because all Scots and Irish are generally called 'Gattheli'."
Likewise, the inhabitants of English and Norse-speaking parts were ethnically linked with other regions of Europe. At Melrose, people could recite religious literature in the English language. In the later part of the twelfth century, the Lothian writer Adam of Dryburgh describes Lothian as "the Land of the English in the Kingdom of the Scots". In the Northern Isles the Norse language evolved into the local Norn, which lingered until the end of the eighteenth century, when it finally died out and Norse may also have survived as a spoken language until the sixteenth century in the Outer Hebrides.
Scotland came to possess a unity that transcended Gaelic, English, Norman and Norse ethnic differences and by the end of the period, the Latin, Norman-French and English word "Scot" could be used for any subject of the Scottish king. Scotland's multilingual Scoto-Norman monarchs and mixed Gaelic and Scoto-Norman aristocracy all became part of the "Community of the Realm", in which ethnic differences were less divisive than in Ireland and Wales.


Harrien County

Harrien County (, , , , ) was one of the four counties of the Russian Empire located in the Governorate of Estonia. It was situated in the central part of the governorate (in present-day northern Estonia). Its capital was Tallinn ("Reval"), which was the capital of the governorate as well. The territory of Kreis Harrien corresponds to the present-day Harju County and most parts of Rapla County.
Demographics.
At the time of the Russian Empire Census of 1897, Kreis Harrien had a population of 157,736. Of these, 82.9% spoke Estonian, 7.3% German, 6.8% Russian, 0.7% Swedish, 0.7% Yiddish, 0.7% Polish, 0.2% Latvian, 0.2% Finnish, 0.1% Belarusian and 0.1% Ukrainian as their native language.


Laukininkas

A laukininkas (plural: "laukininkai") was a free peasant in the early Grand Duchy of Lithuania. "Laukininkai" formed the majority of the Grand Duchy's population. They formed communities, called "laukas" (in modern Lithuanian the term means "field"). The term was later replaced by volosts () and subsequently laukininkas became known as "valstietis", which is a modern Lithuanian term for farmers and peasants.
History.
In ancient times, when tools were crude and a single family could not support itself, the land was owned and worked by egalitarian communities. In the 12th century tools improved and more efficient techniques were adopted; increased harvest meant that individual families could sustain themselves. This facilitated transition from the community-based to family-based agriculture. By early 13th century the land was divided into individual lots that were owned and cultivated by a single family of "laukininkai". The lots were inherited from one generation to the other (allodial title, known in Lithuanian as "alodas"). The community continued to own forests, meadows, rivers and lakes. Private ownership allowed stratification into early social classes and division of labor. Wealthier families could acquire dependent people – kaimynas or šeimynykštis. To maintain such structure in the society an organized state was needed. This need contributed to the formation of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
The early "laukininkai" community, or "laukas", was obligated to provide the dukes and their officials with food and other accommodations when they stayed in the vicinity, and to help in building and maintaining castles and defense fortifications. Since the 14th century "laukininkai" were required to pay regular taxes, known as "sidabrinė" and "dėkla". "Sidabrinė" was paid in silver and was the main source of revenue for the military. "Dėkla" was paid in grain, hay and other products. To administer the collection, the state territory was subdivided into "volots", governed by a "tijūnas", who was appointed to collect the tax and serve as a judge in "laukininkai" trials and disputes.
In the beginning of the 15th century rising grain prices in Europe prompted "bajorai", a class of warriors and future nobility, to shift from warfare into landownership. Grand Duke Vytautas the Great started gifting "laukininkai" to his trusted followers for military services. Thus some "laukininkai" became "veldamai" – a class of peasants, which retained ownership of land, but owed taxes and levies imposed by the nobles. Increasingly rights of veldamai were curtailed by various privileges to the nobility issued by the Grand Dukes. It was a transitional stage between free peasants and serfs, fully established by the Wallach reform in 1557. After the reform all peasants lost personal freedom and land ownership.


Van der Meulen family

The van der Meulen family of Brussels was an important bourgeois family of freshwater fish merchants. Many of its members were deans of the guild of freshwater fish merchants.
Properties and estates.
They owned the fiefdom of the Roetaert as well as numerous fishponds and lakes, especially in the Sonian Forest, such as the famous Enfants Noyés ponds, which Elisabeth van der Meulen (1720–1769), wife of Jean-Baptiste van Dievoet (1704-1776), sold to the state in 1744.


Protocol of Kapshtica

Protocol of Kapshtica also known as Kapshtica Protocol, or Kapshtica Agreement, was an agreement between Albanian and Greek representatives signed in the border town of Kapshticë on 28 May 1920. Under this agreement both sides accepted the pre-World War I Greek-Albanian border status, as well as a number of provisions for the protection of the local Greek population of Korçë District and its educational and religious rights.
Background.
During World War I, Greece was one of seven countries to occupy Albania, filling the vacuum left after the collapse of Ottoman Empire in the Balkans during the Balkan Wars. Greece claimed parts of southern Albania as "Northern Epirus", since a sizeable Greek minority lived there. In 1915, Greek positions were occupied by Italian troops in Gjirokastër and French troops in Korçë.
After the disestablishment of the Autonomous Albanian Republic of Korçë, French troops left the area which incorporated in the newly created Albanian state, and the Paris Peace Conference reaffirmed the borders. Nevertheless, tensions were present in that part of Albanian-Greek border.
Agreement.
French troops stayed in Korçë until May 24, 1920. Two days later, on May 26, 1920, after a big rally held at Korçë, and later in Bilisht and Pogradec, Albanians demanded the incorporation of former Autonomous Albanian Republic of Korçë into the Albanian state, informing the Tirana government via local representatives there about the tense situation in Korçë, especially on the border with Greece. Greek government was waiting for an approval from the British side and would not take any military action in southern Albania without their consent. Considering (allegedly) the recent oil discoveries, and the negotiation for Thrace and Dodecanese Islands taking place at that time, the British shifted their positioning towards the conservation of the actual border and support to the Albanian state, thus the only way left were the negotiations. After a quick meeting, made in Florina between the Greek and Albanian representatives, it was decided on 28 May 1920 to proceed with the meeting in Kapshticë where the agreement was signed and was known as "Kapshtica Protocol", or "Albanian-Greek Protocol of Kopshtica", which would remain in force until the issue would be resolved by the Peace Conference. The head of delegations were Josif Koçi for the Albanian side and Achilleas Kalevras for the Greek side. This would be the very first protocol signed between Albania and any foreign country.
Terms.
Both parts declared their friendly relations. The Albanian side proclaimed that it will respect the rights of the Greek communities of the region, including the operation of Greek schools and churches.
Aftermath.
From the strategic point of view, this treaty was important for the Albanian state. Not only the southeastern border was temporarily assured, but the Albanian side could gather forces and concentrate on western areas of Vlorë, occupied by the Italians, which would finalize with the Vlora War.
After the Italian-Albanian reconciliation, in August 1920, the Albanian side refused to recognize the validity of the Protocol of Kapshtica. Latter, in 1921 it declared to the League of Nations that it will respect the rights of the Greek population. However, a Greek minority was recognized only around Gjirokastër, in southwest Albania.


Windmill Hill culture

The Windmill Hill culture was a name given to a people inhabiting southern Britain, in particular in the Salisbury Plain area close to Stonehenge, c. 3000 BC. They were an agrarian Neolithic people; their name comes from Windmill Hill, a causewayed enclosure. Together with another Neolithic tribe from East Anglia, a tribe whose worship involved stone circles, it is thought that they were responsible for the earliest work on the Stonehenge site.
The material record left by these people includes large circular hill-top enclosures, causewayed enclosures, long barrows, leaf-shaped arrowheads, and polished stone axes. They raised cattle, sheep, pigs, and dogs, and grew wheat and mined flints.
Since the term was first coined by archaeologists, further excavation and analysis has indicated that it consisted of several discrete cultures such as the Hembury and the Abingdon cultures; and that "Windmill Hill culture" is too general a term.


Tylocidaris

Tylocidaris is an extinct genus of echinoids that lived from the Early Cretaceous to the Eocene. Its remains have been found in Europe and North America.


Galleria Rinaldo Carnielo

The Galleria Rinaldo Carnielo is a museum encompassing the small palace and studio of the artist Rinaldo Carnielo (1853-1910), located on Piazza Savonarola #3, Florence, region of Tuscany. Italy.
The eclectic collection consists of nearly 300 works or models, mainly sculptures, by Carnielo, as well as some paintings by Carniello, and some of his colleagues Silvestro Lega, Michele Gordigiani, and Arturo Calosci. Among the works of Carnielo are some macabre sculptures such as "Tenax Vitae", "Dying Mozart", and "Angel of Death".
The small palace is built in the Italian counterpart of Art Nouveau, known as "Stile Liberty", and was donated to the commune in 1957 by the sculptor's son. In October 2015, the museum was temporarily closed.
The design and construction of the palace dates to the 1880s and appears to have involved Rinaldo Carnielo and Enrico Lusini. The facade has various inscriptions including a bust of the artist with the inscription "Non ominis moriar". A scroll in the center facade states "Onorate l'arte che è vita della vita" (Honor art which is the life of life).


John George Nathaniel Gibbes

Colonel John George Nathaniel Gibbes (30 March 17875 December 1873) was a British army officer who emigrated to Australia in 1834, becoming a Crown-appointed member of the New South Wales Legislative Council and the Collector of Customs for the Colony of New South Wales for a record term of 25 years.
In his capacity as head of the New South Wales Department of Customs, Colonel Gibbes was the colonial government's principal accumulator of domestic-sourced revenue − prior to the huge economic stimulus provided by the Australian gold rushes of the 1850s − through the collection of import duties and other taxes liable on ship-borne cargoes. Thus, he played a significant role in the transformation of the City of Sydney (now Australia's biggest State capital) from a convict-based settlement into a prosperous, free enterprise-based port replete with essential government infrastructure.
Gibbes was born and schooled in London. He saw active service as a military officer during Great Britain's wars against Napoleon which occupied most of the early years of the 19th century.
Then, in 1814, while on convalescence leave from the armed forces, Gibbes married Elizabeth Davis, the daughter of a clergyman, at the 17th-century Church of St Andrew, Holborn, in London. Their relationship gave rise to a total of eight children, namely: George (who married Mary Ann Fuller), Eliza (subsequently Mrs Robert Dulhunty), William (who married Harriet Eliza Jamison), Mary (subsequently Mrs Terence Aubrey Murray), Frances (subsequently Mrs Alfred Ludlam), Edmund (who married Frances Simmons), Matilda (subsequently Mrs Augustus Berney), and Augustus (who married Annie Bartram).
Following his arrival in Sydney on 19 April 1834, he occupied a seat in the Legislative Council from 1834 until his retirement from politics in 1855. Moreover, he was the Collector of Customs for New South Wales for an unsurpassed period spanning one quarter of a century, being the incumbent from 1834 to 1859. Indeed, it was Colonel Gibbes' who persuaded the Governor of NSW, Sir George Gipps, to begin construction of the Customs House, Sydney on Circular Quay in 1844 in response to port's growing volume of maritime trade. This major building project also doubled as an unemployment relief measure for stonemasons and laborers during an economic depression which was afflicting the colony at the time. (The Customs House at Circular Quay replaced inadequate departmental accommodation for Gibbes and his team of officers in The Rocks area of Sydney.)
Colonel Gibbes resided in a series of historically and architecturally important private dwellings during his time in New South Wales, including the since demolished Palladian-style Point Piper House (also known as Henrietta Villa or The Naval Villa), Wotonga House (now part of the vice-regal establishment known as Admiralty House on Kirribilli Point), Greycliffe House (which overlooks Shark Beach in the Sydney suburb of Vaucluse), and, finally, Yarralumla Homestead (now the site of Australia's Government House, Canberra).
Parents and education.
Gibbes's parentage is unknown. He was a bigamist about whom much has been invented. The "Australian Dictionary of Biography", I (166) 439, says that he was 'born in London on 30 March 1787 the son of John Gibbes, planter, of Barbados and later of London. Part of his education was by Rev. D. Geary Dejether, North Wales', but the "Dictionary" provides no sources and these people (if they existed) cannot be identified. Gibbes is assumed to be the John Gibbs, born 30 March 1786 (sic), who appears without parentage in the published register of Merchant Taylors' School as having been educated in the school, 1795-99. He entered the British Army as an ensign (junior commissioned officer) in 1804. Ten years later as 'John Gibbes' he married Eliza Davies at Holborn in central London. Eliza had borne Gibbes two children prior to the marriage, six more children followed later. He married bigamously at Quebec, Canada, in 1818, Mary Ann Bell, but he left her the following year and returned to Eliza Davis.
Military service in brief.
The future Colonel Gibbes filled a vacancy with the 40th Regiment of Foot upon joining the army as an ensign in 1804 and was promoted to lieutenant the following year. He was made captain in the 4th Garrison Battalion in 1806 before transferring to the 85th Regiment of Foot in 1808 and then the 69th Regiment of Foot in 1811. He was granted brevet rank as major in 1819, as lieutenant-colonel in 1837 and colonel in 1851, retiring from the Army on 11 November that year. Early on, he participated in some fierce fighting during the wars against Napoleon and the French Emperor's allies. He saw action firstly in South America, where he participated in the siege and capture of the fortified city of Montevideo and the follow-up assault on Buenos Aires, which degenerated into a savage sequence of street-fight battles between the British redcoats and the ultimately victorious Spanish defenders of the city.
In 1809, Captain Gibbes was called in from staff officer duties in Southern England and given orders to take part in a massive amphibious operation that was about to be mounted across the English Chanel, from Kent, with the aim of directing a smashing blow against Napoleon's forces stationed in the Low Countries of Europe. This operation, known as the Walcheren campaign, turned into a military disaster for the British, however, when their military machine got bogged down in the marshy, muddy, miasmic countryside that guarded the approaches to Antwerp, which was their ultimate battlefield objective. This delay gave their French foe ample time to regroup and reinforce their lines with fresh troops. Moreover, an alarming number of British soldiers had begun to collapse and die in their camps from a virulent form of malarial fever that they had contracted after one of the mission's successes—the ferocious bombardment and capture of the strategic town of Flushing.
Gibbes was one of the disease's victims. Near death, he was evacuated back to England to recuperate from his illness for a protracted period on half-pay and share in Britain's collective loss of face when the failed Walcheren campaign was wound down and terminated by the government. Once Gibbes had recovered his health sufficiently, he was reinstated to the army's active-service list. Henceforth, he would serve his country as a staff officer at various military stations in southern and northern England (chiefly in the counties of Berkshire and Yorkshire), and reaching the rank of brigade major in the process.
Following the cessation of hostilities with France in 1815, following Waterloo, Gibbes went back on the army's half-pay list. During this difficult period, he appears to have contracted a bigamist marriage in Quebec with the daughter of a wealthy Canadian industrialist named Matthew Bell, according to information supplied by the College of Arms in London. Gibbes managed to return unscathed to England (and his legal wife Elizabeth) after this strange episode.
Customs service.
Then, in 1819, Gibbes' fortunes changed for the better when the British Government agreed to appoint him Collector of Customs for the wealthy Caribbean sugar port of Falmouth, Jamaica. He would serve in this posting from 1819 to 1827, drawing a large annual salary of approximately £1500. While stationed on Jamaica, Gibbes and his growing family lived in a plantation house located inland from the actual town of Falmouth. Census returns show him as owning livestock as well as several black slaves. Gibbes enjoyed life in the West Indies but ill-health, probably a recurrence of malaria brought on by Jamaica's tropical climate, forced him to leave the island in 1827 with his family.
They voyaged back to London and moved into a secluded house, Fulham Lodge, in the west of the metropolis, which formerly belonged to a mistress of the Duke of York and Albany. Gibbes, meanwhile, had applied successfully to the British Board of Customs for a transfer to the collectorship at the North Sea trading and fishing port of Great Yarmouth, in the English County of Norfolk. He would occupy this new post until 1833, working with military-style diligence to improve physical conditions and work practices at what he discovered, on arrival, to be a somewhat rundown red-brick customs house, situated on Great Yarmouth's main quay. He strengthened, too, the law-enforcement partnership which existed with the naval coast guard, in order to counteract smuggling along 'his' section of the Norfolk-Suffolk coast. Privately, he also set about building a small network of potentially productive friendships and acquaintanceships with certain well-connected members of East Anglia's naval-officer class and the region's leading merchants and established families. In 1831, he and Mrs Gibbes had the satisfaction of seeing their eldest child, George, advantageously wed a local East Anglian girl (see below), while some years later, their youngest daughter, Matilda, would marry into the Norfolk landed gentry (below).
Nonetheless, Gibbes never felt completely happy during his tenure in Norfolk. So, he decided to leave England permanently, and emigrate to the Port of Sydney, in the Colony of New South Wales, on the east coast of mainland Australia. His motives for emigration were multiple. First, the Australian billet paid significantly more money than he was currently receiving in Great Yarmouth. Secondly, he had grown tired of the area's cold winters, buffeting North Sea gales and rusticated habits. Thirdly, he felt frustrated by the lack of promotional opportunities to be had for a middle-aged man within the Customs service in England.
In 1833, the Board of Customs in London accepted Gibbes' application to be appointed the next Collector of Customs for New South Wales under an exchange arrangement with his counterpart in the port of Sydney. Soon after his arrival in Sydney on 19 April 1834, he was sworn in by Governor Richard Bourke as a Crown appointee to the colony's governing Legislative Council. During his time as a Legislative Councillor, he would serve on a number of maritime-related government boards and parliamentary committees. Perhaps his most important contribution in this regard was to recommend the introduction of gaslight into Sydney, as chairman of the committee charged with examining this proposal. The subsequent establishment of the Australian Gas Light Company at Darling Harbour during the 1840s would transform the lifestyle of Sydney's 19th-century residents in terms of street-lighting and domestic illumination, and, later, gas cooking. For details of Colonel Gibbes' political career, access Gibbes' entry on the New South Wales Legislative Council Website.
Arrival in Australia.
When Gibbes arrived in the colony aboard the "Resource" in 1834, he held the military rank of major. Later, in 1837, he would be promoted to lieutenant-colonel and then to full colonel shortly before his retirement from the army in 1851. Initially, he lived with his family in Henrietta Villa, also known as the Naval Villa, on Sydney's scenic Point Piper, under a leasehold arrangement. In 1843–44, the Gibbes family moved to "Wotonga", a stone house on Kirribilli Point, that had been designed and erected by Gibbes. Wotonga now forms part of Admiralty House. (Point Piper House was torn down in the 1850s and the site redeveloped.)
Physically, Colonel Gibbes was a compact, spare person with grey eyes and receding light brown hair. He looked taller than he was because he walked with an erect military carriage. Contemporary accounts portray him as an urbane, cultivated gentleman and record how his wife, children and in-laws figured as prominent members of Sydney society throughout the early and mid-Victorian eras. However, the burdens of public office increasingly irked the Colonel as his career unfolded and he sometimes became prone to angry outbursts. The "Australian Dictionary of Biography" said of him:
"As collector of Customs at a salary of 1000 pounds Gibbes found his department inadequate to cope with the growing demand of shipping and trade and he constantly appealed for more and better paid staff. He carried out his duties with more zeal than discretion and, when his suspicions were aroused [about possible smuggling activity], he seized whole cargoes which often led to tedious litigation. His accounts were always confused because of inefficient clerks and often showed him liable for surcharges which were removed only after long and acrimonious correspondence with the Board of Customs in London. All these irritations frayed his temper and hen gained a reputation for irascibility."
Admiralty House.
Colonel Gibbes began work on Wotonga House in 1842 on the five-acre Kirribilli Point site, which he had leased from the wealthy merchant Robert Campbell, before proceeding to buy it after Campbell's death. He completed the house-building project about a year later. Wotonga was a graceful single-storey house with wide verandahs and elegant French doors. Gibbes designed the house, which he called "Wotonga" (or "Woottonga"), himself. The stone for the house's walls was quarried locally and the hardwood and cedar joinery came from George Coleson's timber-yard in George Street, Sydney. Gibbes engaged James Hume, a well-known builder who dabbled in ecclesiastical architecture, to supervise the construction of the building and its stables. Gibbes, however, hired his own masons, bricklayers, carpenters, plumbers and ironmongers to work on the project, paying each of them separately as work progressed.
Colonel Gibbes used the Custom Department's cutter to commute to and from the building site. Once completed, Gibbes' L-shaped residence featured a plain, yet stylish, double façade to maximise the building's magnificent, sweeping views across Sydney Harbour. These views enabled Gibbes to monitor shipping traffic in and out of Darling Harbour and, more importantly, Circular Quay, where the Sydney Customs House was situated.
In 1849, Robert Campbell died and the executors of the estate sold the property, comprising the house and land, to Colonel Gibbes for about 1,400 pounds. On 27 December 1851, Gibbes (who was contemplating a departure from the Customs Service at the age of 64), sold the property to James Lindsay Travers, a merchant of Macquarie Place, Sydney, for 1,533 pounds.
Colonel Gibbes subsequently changed his mind about leaving his position as head of the NSW Customs Department; instead, he leased Greycliffe House at Shark Beach, Vaucluse, from the Wentworth family and remained in Sydney for the better part of eight years. Greycliffe is now listed by the government as one of the Heritage homes of Sydney.
Today, Wotonga forms the core of Admiralty House and the building's 180-degree, east-west panoramic sight-lines are even more spectacular than they were in Gibbes' day, owing to the subsequent high-rise growth of Sydney's CBD.
A portrait of Colonel Gibbes, painted in 1808 when he was a redcoat captain service on the personal staff of William Craven, 1st Earl of Craven (1770–1825), now hangs in Admiralty House.
New South Wales Customs Service.
Colonel Gibbes took up a commission in 1819 as the Collector of Customs for Falmouth, Jamaica, but remained on the army's half-pay list, which meant that he could be recalled to active service in times of war. Then, from 1827 to 1833, he held the equivalent position of Collector in the major East Anglian port of Great Yarmouth. In 1833, Colonel Gibbes exchanged positions with Michael Cotton who was the Collector of Customs for New South Wales. He arrived in Sydney the following year to take up the post. He served as Collector of Customs for New South Wales for a record term of 25 years, from 1834 until 1859. He was forced to retire from the Customs Service when his libertine of a second son, William John Gibbes, became embroiled in a smuggling scandal.
Earlier, in 1844, Colonel Gibbes had persuaded the then Governor of NSW, Sir George Gipps, to begin construction of the Customs House on Circular Quay in response to Sydney's growing volume of maritime trade. The building project also doubled as an unemployment relief measure for stonemasons and laborers during an economic depression which was afflicting the colony at the time. The original sandstone edifice of the Customs House on Circular Quay remains as the core of a subsequently enlarged edifice on the site.
As we have seen, Gibbes lived by the water at Kirribilli Point, on Sydney's northern shore. The Customs Service in the 1840s had an important link with Kirribilli, because the locale afforded panoramic views of Circular Quay and shipping movements on Sydney Harbour's main channel. It was therefore no coincidence that both Colonel Gibbes and his departmental deputy and personal friend, Thomas Jeffrey, elected to live in Kirribilli. The Customs Department's flagstaff, for instance, was located on Thomas Jeffrey's house, serving as a key maritime marker for mercantile vessels.
Colonel Gibbes also had an interesting connection in his later years to Henry Parkes, known as the "father" of Australia's Federation as a unified nation in 1901 and five times Premiere of New South Wales. About a year after Parkes arrival in Sydney, he was hired by the New South Wales Customs Department as a Tide Waiter, and given the task by Colonel Gibbes of inspecting merchant vessels in the port of Sydney in order to guard against the importation of contraband. He had been recommended for this responsible post by Sir John Jamison's son-in-law, William John Gibbes, who was manager of Sir John's Regentville estate, and the third-born offspring of Colonel Gibbes. Parkes left the employ of the Customs Department during the 1840s and went into the newspaper industry and, later, the political arena; but he remained on friendly terms with the Gibbes family for the rest of his life.
Retirement.
On retirement, Colonel Gibbes and Mrs Gibbes moved to Yarralumla homestead, now the official Canberra residence of the Governor-General of Australia, in late 1859. Yarralumla was owned from 1859 to 1881 by the Colonel's youngest child, Augustus Onslow Manby Gibbes.
Incidentally, the Colonel's second daughter, Mary, had married the prominent New South Wales parliamentarian, Sir Terence Aubrey Murray (1810–1873) who had purchased Yarralumla in 1837. In July 1859, he would sell the property to his brother-in-law Augustus Onslow Manby "Gussie" Gibbes (who had been managing Yarralumla on Murray's behalf for the past four years).
Death and Burial.
Colonel Gibbes and his wife Elizabeth (known affectionately as Eliza or Betsy) lived to advanced ages by 19th-century standards. Their final years were clouded by various age-related health problems, and they died at Yarralumla homestead in 1873 and 1874 respectively. They were buried initially in a family vault at Yarralumla but, in 1880, their son Augustus moved their remains to the graveyard at the St John the Baptist Church, Reid, where they were re-interred under an inscribed marble headstone which still stands. Interred with him and his wife are the remains of his son Augustus Gibbes, his grandson Henry Gibbes, and his great-grandson Wing-Commander Robert "Bobby" Gibbes. Two stained-glass windows, dedicated to their memories and bearing the Gibbes coat of arms, were also erected in the nave of the church.
Offspring.
The Colonel and Mrs Gibbes had eight children, born in the 1809–1828 period. All of them migrated to Sydney with their parents except for the eldest, George Hervey Gibbes (1809–1883), who remained in London and became a senior bureaucrat with the British War Office. They were:
George Hervey Gibbes (1809–1883).
Unlike his seven siblings, George remained in England. He was born at Kirk Ella, Yorkshire. He entered the British Public Service at the age of 18, being appointed to the personal staff of the Duke of Wellington in London. He rose subsequently through the bureaucratic ranks at Horse Guards (the headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief of the British Army) and the War Office in Whitehall. In 1869, he retired on an annual half-pay pension from his £1300 per annum position of Assistant Military Secretary. He had wed Mary Ann Fuller (1811–1896) at Gorleston, Norfolk, in 1831. They spent their married life living in London (in the suburbs of Chelsea and Belgravia) and at a holiday house in Ryde on the Isle of Wight. There were no children of the marriage.
Eliza Julia Gibbes (1811–1892).
The eldest daughter of the family as born in the naval and military port of Gosport, Hampshire. As a girl, according to her own account, she worked in an unofficial capacity for Queen Adelaide. In Sydney in 1837, she married Robert Dulhunty (1802–1853), an English-born grazier and Police Magistrate who owned Claremont, near Penrith, NSW. During the 1840s, Dulhunty and his family pioneered the Dubbo region of central-western NSW. Dulhunty died at Old Dubbo Station at the age of 51, leaving Eliza to bring up their large brood of children and run their portfolio of rural properties, many of which were lost to the banks due to the adverse effects of drought and economic recessions. Eliza died in hospital in the NSW town of Bathurst and is buried in the local cemetery.
William John Gibbes (1815–1868).
Colonel Gibbes' second son was William John Gibbes (1815–1868), who had been born in the English garrison City of York. In 1837, William John married Harriet Eliza Jamison in the Anglican Church of St James, Sydney.
Harriet's father was Sir John Jamison (1776 – 29 June 1844), an important Australian physician, pastoralist, banker, politician, constitutional reformer and public figure. Sir John fathered a number of illegitimate children by several mistresses.
Her mother (one of Sir John's mistresses), Catherine Cain(e), the convict 'housekeeper' assigned to him at his Sydney residence. Catherine gave birth to a daughter by Sir John, Harriet Eliza Jamison, in 1819.
Harriet grew up to be a cultivated and pious young woman. In 1837, she married into the colonial establishment when she wed William John Gibbes. The wedding took place at St James' Anglican Church, Sydney, in the presence of the governor. Harriet died in Sydney in 1896. By this stage, she had seen her three children, all sons, carve out successful careers for themselves in the political, legal and sporting/civil-service sectors of Sydney society.
William John Gibbes, incidentally, lived with his wife at Regentville House, near Penrith, New South Wales, following his marriage. Later, in the second half of the 1840s, he lived in Beulah House at Kirribilli, before moving to Camden Villa in the then Sydney garden-suburb of Newtown in the early 1850s. Beulah was later lived in by the Riley and Lasseter families. Regrettably, this elegant sandstone residence was eventually demolished and its grounds subdivided into numerous residential blocks which were auctioned off by developers in 1905.
William became a notorious libertine who sired a number of illegitimate children. He spent the 1850s in a state of bankruptcy with debts exceeding £20,000. William was convicted (in the NSW Supreme Court) of a smuggling charge in 1859 and sentenced to two years imprisonment at Parramatta Gaol in Sydney. Subsequently, he lived in Melbourne and East Sydney. He died at the latter location of a blood disorder, aged 52. William was estranged from his wife at the time of his passing, and the two lived separately. He lies buried in the Old Balmain Cemetery (now Pioneers' Park, in the Sydney suburb of Leichhardt.
Mary "Minnie" Gibbes (1817–1858).
Mary, known affectionately as Minnie, was born in the garrison town of Pontefract, Yorkshire. She later married the prominent Irish-born parliamentarian, Sir Terence Aubrey Murray (1810–1873). Murray was the proprietor of Winderradeen sheep station near Lake George, NSW. He also purchased 'Yarralumla sheep station, in what is now Canberra, in 1837. Yarralumla subsequently became Government House, Canberra. Mary's health was frail, and she died at Winderradeen at the start of 1858, following the birth of her third surviving child. She is buried in the grounds of the homestead.
In 1859, Murray sold "Yarralumla" to his brother-in-law, Augustus Onslow Manby Gibbes. Later that same year, Augustus' parents came to live with him at Yarralumla homestead. Eventually, in 1881, Augustus sold Yarralumla for 40,000 pounds to Frederick Campbell, a descendant of Robert Campbell.
Frances "Fanny" Minto Gibbes (1822/23–1877).
Frances "Fanny" Minto Gibbes (1822/23–1877) was born in Trelawney Parish on the north coast of the West Indies island of Jamaica during her father's term there as Collector of Customs for the port of Falmouth. In Sydney, in 1850, she married Alfred Ludlam (1810–1877). Irish-born Ludlam was a leading New Zealand politician, horticulturist and farmer who owned land at Wellington and in the Hutt Valley. Ludlam was a member of three of New Zealand's four earliest parliaments, he was also a philanthropist and a founder of Wellington's Botanic Garden.
Ludlam was a periodic visitor to NSW. The main reason for these trans-Tasman Sea visits of Ludlam's was to do business in Sydney, which served as New South Wales' principal trading port, population centre and seat of government; but he also found time to socialise. On 1 October 1850, he married into Sydney's colonial establishment with his wedding to Fanny Gibbes. His wedding took place at St Thomas' Anglican Church (in what is today the North Sydney local government area).
Fanny was living with her parents at Wotonga House—nowadays part of Admiralty House complex on Sydney's Kirribilli Point—at the time of her marriage to Ludlam. She and her husband spent their honeymoon relaxing at the New South Wales country property of Yarralumla (now the site of Australia's Government House in Canberra), which at that stage belonged to Fanny's brother-in-law, (Sir) Terence Aubrey Murray. During the 1870s, Fanny and her husband holidayed in London, taking a house at Maida Vale. Fanny fell fatally ill there with an intestinal blockage and was buried in London. Her husband returned to New Zealand, dying in Wellington later that same year (1877) of kidney disease. They had no children.
Edmund Minto Gibbes (1824–1850).
Like his sister Fanny, Edmund was born on Jamaica. After his arrival in Sydney, he was educated with his brother Augustus at Sydney College. He worked for his father as a NSW Customs Department officer in Sydney and at the whaling port of Eden on the NSW South Coast. During the 1840s, he eloped with a wealthy Jewish teenager, Frances Simmons (1833–1910), scandalising colonial Sydney in the process. They would have two children, both of whom died in infancy. Edmund belatedly wed Miss Simmons at Campbelltown, NSW, in 1849. He contracted pulmonary tuberculosis and sailed for England with his bride in 1850 to begin a fresh life. He died on the voyage and was buried at sea. Edmund's widow later married a London lawyer named Roger Gadsden and returned to Sydney to live.
Matilda Lavinia Gibbes (1826–1916).
Matilda was the third and last child to be born during her father's collectorship at the port of Falmouth, Jamaica. She was born at Brompton on 13 March 1826. She spent her infancy in Norfolk and came to Sydney at the age of seven. In 1858, she married Augustus Berney (1831–1910). Her husband was an officer in the Sydney Customs Department and the heir to landed estates in Norfolk, including Morton Hall and Bracon Ash. They had four children, one of whom died in infancy, and lived in the Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst. In 1896, Matilda's husband inherited his family properties in Norfolk and the family returned there to live. Matilda died at Bracon Ash house, aged 90, during the height of World War I and is buried locally in the Berney family mausoleum.
Augustus Onslow Manby Gibbes (1828–1897).
Augustus, nicknamed "Gussie", was the youngest child. He was born in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk. His godfathers were George William Manby and Captain John Onslow, RN. He became a large-scale sheep farmer and horse breeder in rural New South Wales, owning the Yarralumla estate from 1859 to 1881. He then travelled overseas for a decade before settling down on a farming property named Braemar, near the town of Goulburn, New South Wales, in the early 1890s, with his wife and their four surviving children, all sons. His wife, Annie Bartram (1865–1914) came from the City of Bath in England The two had met in the mid-1880s, entering into a relationship and touring around the United Kingdom. Augustus, however, did not officially marry her until 1896 (at Penrith, NSW). The following year, he died at Braemar House after suffering a stroke and was buried with his parents in Canberra.
Norfolk friends.
Members of the Berney family of landed gentry were close associates of the Gibbes' during their time in Norfolk. Indeed, the two families would later inter-marry. Another friend of the Gibbes' in Great Yarmouth was George William Manby, who became one of the godfathers of Augustus Onslow Manby Gibbes (1828–1897). Manby was a well-known inventor and a member of England's Royal Society.
Great grandson — Bobby Gibbes.
One of the numerous great-grandsons of Colonel Gibbes was Bobby Gibbes DSO, DFC & Bar, OAM (6 May 1916 – 11 April 2007) who was a leading Australian fighter ace of World War II.
He was officially credited with shooting down 10¼ enemy aircraft, although his score is often reported as 12 destroyed.


Rethra

Rethra (also known as "Radagoszcz", "Radegost", "Radigast", "Redigast", "Radgosc" and other forms like "Ruthengost") was, in the 10th to the 12th centuries, the main town and political center of the Slavic Redarians, one of the four major Lutician tribes, located most likely in present-day Mecklenburg. It was also a major worship center, devoted to the cult of the Slavic deity Radegast-Swarożyc.
Etymology.
The name "Radgosc" (or its close forms) derives from old Slavic and roughly translates as "hospitable" ("radość" or "radi" meaning "glad" or "happy" and "gość" or "gost" meaning "guest"). Alternately it may be translated as "council hosting", from "rada" (Czech, Polish, Slovak, Ukrainian) - council (also advice, counsel, committee), and "hostit" (Czech "to host"), "goszczący", "gościć" (Polish "hosting", "to host"), and relate to a place, person, or deity hosting the council. Similar place names (Radhost, Radogoszcz, Radgoszcz) are found in some Slavic countries.
Chronicles.
Radagosc is described in the chronicles of Thietmar of Merseburg, who used the name "Riedegost", while, writing about fifty years later, Adam of Bremen referred to it as "Rethra".
Thietmar (VI, 23) described Riedegost as a castle ("urbs") with three horns ("tricornis") and three gates ("tres in se continens portas"), two of which could be reached by land, while the third, smallest gate faced a lake ("mare") to the east. This complex was surrounded by a virgin forest ("silva"), and a wooden temple elevated on animal horns was inside. Idols of several pagan deities were there, each of whom had a name engraved and wore helmet and armor, with "Zuarasici" being the highest deity. Guidons ("vexilla") of these deities were stored inside the temple and were only to leave the room during a war.
Thietmar wrote his chronicle when the Lutici were allies of the Holy Roman Emperor, an alliance he opposed, and composed his report to advise the Holy Roman Emperor against it. He also explicitly addresses the reader and advises him not to follow the pagan Lutician cult, but instead to adhere to the Holy Bible.
Adam of Bremen wrote his "Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum" when Radgosc was already in decline, and gave a somewhat different account: according to him, Radgosc, or "Rethra", "seat of the idols" ("sedes ydolatriae") was surrounded by a deep lake and had nine gates. He described "Redigast" as the superior deity in a large demonic temple ("templum ibi magnum constructum est demonibus, princeps est Redigast"), that could be reached by a wooden bridge by those who wanted to sacrifice or ask the oracle. The 12th-century chronicler Helmold largely followed Adam's version. The difference in the numbers used by Thietmar ("three", "tricornis") and Adam ("nine") might be explained with the symbolic use of these numbers, meant not to accurately describe Radgosc, but rather connect it to the underworld. The boar, who according to Thietmar came out of the lake before a war to take pleasure in the mud, thereby "terribly shaking and appearing to many", might likewise be a symbol that Thietmar used for the devil rather than an actual oracle, in contrast to the horse oracle.
Location.
The precise location of the city is unknown, however, its most likely location is on the islands and in the swamp area of the Lieps and Tollense lakes near Neubrandenburg (see Fischerisel). Theories that the town might have been at Feldberg, Wanzka Abbey or Gnoien were refuted.
In addition to the disputed location of the place, even the assumption that Thietmar and Adam were writing about the same town has been controversial. This is in part because the main deity worshiped in Riedegost/Rethra was reported as "Zuarasici" ("Swarożyc") by Thietmar (VI, 23), and as "Redigost" ("Redigast, Riedegost") by Adam of Bremen (II, 21; III, 51) as well as the 12th century chronicler Helmold (I, 2). This is interpreted by historians and linguists in different ways: probably, the different names mark the transition from an appellativum related with the Iranian root "xvar", "sun", to a distinct personalized deity with the name Riedegost. This could then have been adopted as the name of the temple in the town and as the name of the tribe settling there (Redarii, Redarians, Redars). Following the alternative hypothesis, it was the other way around: Adam of Bremen and Helmold mistakenly adopted the name of the temple site as the name of the deity, which was correctly identified by Thietmar and corresponds with Svarožič or Svarog. According to a third theory, Riedegost was the second name of Thietmar's Zuarasici.
In slavic languages, the suffix "-yc","-ič", "-wicz", "-vič" added to a personal name creates a patronym, meaning a "son", or more generally "offspring" or "descendant" of the person bearing the name, therefore Svarožič, or Swarożyc is "a son", "grandson" or other offspring of Svarog (with "g" replaced with "ż", or "ž", according to Slavic grammar rules).
Political center and Slavic revolts.
According to Helmold of Bosau, the Slavic revolt of 983 was started after a meeting at the "civitas Rethre". Likewise the successful beginning of the Obotrite revolt of 1066 was, according to Adam of Bremen celebrated in "Rethra" by the ritual decapitation of captured bishop Johann of Mecklenburg and the sacrifice of his head, stuck on a lance, to "Riedegost". The last historical record of "Rheda" is an entry in the Annals of Augsburg for the year 1068, describing its capture by bishop Burchard and the abduction of its sacred horse. It is assumed that Radgosc was destroyed either in this or one of the following campaigns; probably it was destroyed and rebuilt several times since Ebo's " Vita Ottonis episcopi Bambergensis" (III, 5) mentions the destruction of "the Lutician civitas and temple" by king Lothair of Supplinburg in 1126/27, without specifying its name.


Councils of Braga

Many church councils were held in Braga in the Middle Ages. Braga was the metropolitan of an ecclesiastical province and it was the chief bishopric of the Kingdom of Galicia during the Suevic period and in the High Middle Ages.


Friedrich Karm

Friedrich Karm ( – 3 October 1980) was an Estonian international footballer who scored 9 goals in 13 games for the Estonian national side.