Twilight of the Overkings: Edward I’s Superior Lordship of Scotland as Paradox

Summary

During the summer of 1301, a Scottish lawyer by the name of Baldred Bisset was tasked with responding to a royal letter which had recently been sent by Edward I to Boniface VIII. The English epistle had been written, in part, to justify the Plantagenet monarch's decision to impose himself on Scotland as its superior lord (superior dominus regni Scocie) nearly a decade earlier. In the preliminary version of his reply, known to posterity as the Instructiones, Bisset denounced Edward's short-lived and ill-fated experiment in overkingship, declaring that ‘an equal should not possess authority over an equal, by reason of which a king is not subject to a king, nor a kingdom to a kingdom’. Evidently, this was a learned jurist's appeal to theory (and not a statement of fact), but it was one which was well adapted to the political environment of the contemporary Latin West. During the early and early High Middle Ages, the sub-continent had been replete with petty kingdoms, many – if not most – of them organised hierarchically. Indeed, long before the emergence of the idea that there was something inherently unnatural or contradictory in a rex owing his regnum to another, greater and more powerful rex, Western Europe had proved to be immensely fertile ground for vassal-monarchy. Some regions had even comprised multi-tiered systems of overkingship, with overkings themselves having been subject to supra-overkings – in the case of Gaelic Ireland, such supra-overkings had in turn been subordinate to a supreme overking of the island (ard rí). However, by the turn of the fourteenth century, largely through the process of territorial consolidation, vassal-monarchy had all but vanished from the political landscape. Excluding claims of universal imperial sovereignty and cases of papal overlordship on the grounds of dissimilarity, there remained only a handful of historical anomalies: the kingdom of Bohemia, which, by virtue of the Golden Bull of Sicily (Bulla Aurea Siciliae) (1212), enjoyed a uniquely regalian status among the states of the Holy Roman Empire; the kingdom of Majorca, a secundogeniture of the Barcelona dynasty, which was subject to the corona d‘Aragón; and, arguably, the emirate or kingdom (reino) of Granada, the last vestige of Muslim rule on the Iberian peninsula, which was subject to the corona de Castilla.