5 - Wives, Daughters, and Sisters

Summary

Quha was mare ioyfull na the ladie fare,

That God hed send hir a son to be hir are

Walter Bower in Scotichronicon offers a tale purporting to be an account of an exchange between a Scottish and English knight at a banquet following a Scottish victory at a tournament in England near the end of the fourteenth century. An unnamed English knight says to a Scottish counterpart, Sir William de Dalzel, that the military prowess shown by Sir David Lindsay could be accounted for by the possibility that he was fathered by an Englishman:

it will not have escaped your recollection that not long ago your unhappy province was carved up and conquered by Englishmen. At that time there were perhaps among you some fair and desirable young ladies with whom some noble Englishmen of high birth and brave spirit had sexual relations and fathered young branches growing from noble roots. Such a man is perhaps this David Lindsay of yours… he has conducted himself so robustly to the extent that, bearing in mind his origin, his distinction should by rights be ascribed to English blood.

Dalzel retorts that the wives of the English knights, while their husbands were away in Scotland fathering illegitimate children on Scotswomen, were at home conceiving the illegitimate offspring of others, since these wives,

being deprived too long of marital sexual relations and not having the strength to contain themselves any more but desiring new sexual partners, invited into their closest intimacy cooks and churls, villeins and serfs, and sometimes friars and confessors. From these unions there emerged (unless I am mistaken) men neither suited to warfare nor efficient at fighting battles. We rejoice therefore that we have arisen from your stock and that we are born as gentlemen while you from your stock have turned out degenerate.

Clearly this is intended to be an amusing story, one that humorously turns the tables on the backhanded compliment from the English knight, a compliment that praised the Scots by denying their Scottishness and called them bastards into the bargain.