WI: A very different Scotland

Ok so this is probably for those in the know, of which there may be few. What if after the death of King Macbeth in battle against his rival Malcolm Canmore, King Lulach (stepson of Macbeth) had a longer reign. In OTL he reigned 7 months before being assassinated by Malcolm Canmore but what if this was the other way round and Malcolm was killed leaving Lulach with no rival?
 
Ok so this is probably for those in the know, of which there may be few. What if after the death of King Macbeth in battle against his rival Malcolm Canmore, King Lulach (stepson of Macbeth) had a longer reign. In OTL he reigned 7 months before being assassinated by Malcolm Canmore but what if this was the other way round and Malcolm was killed leaving Lulach with no rival?

razers are for fish

Wasn't Lulach supposed to be mentally deficient? I think he was called Lulach Lack-wit or something like that.

If he wasn't, since that could be propaganda by the winning side, possibly you get a Pickish resurgence, at least for a while and possibly some prolonged conflict or at least tension between the northern regions that were supporters of Macbeth and the southern ones supporting Canmore.

Steve
 
Don't believe Canmore's rewriting of history...

... Lulach was a threat to Canmore.

I'd hope to see Lulach wed Princess Margaret (Aetheling's daughter) as it's a good political move.

The changes wouldn't be that great - same old same old.
 
We don't know that Lulach was feeble-minded: history was written by Canmore's descendants. He was unlucky, certainly, but we can't say for certain whether he genuinely was simple or not. I have a sneaking suspicion that if he were simple, someone else would have been chosen for the job by Macbeth himself (he wasn't even Macbeth's biological son).

Supposing Lulach turns the tables and kills Canmore, it doesn't leave him completely clear - he would still have to face Malcolm's brother, Donald Ban. Malcolm was sponsored by the English, and without him as their figurehead, they would *maybe* focus their attention on sponsoring his brother. But then, Donald wasn't nearly as receptive to English ideas of cultural superiority as his brother was, and when he eventually did become king he made a lot of enemies by throwing out the colonists who had come with his sister-in-law Margaret. Without English aid to Donald, Lulach should have no real problem holding Scotland. After all, his step-father didn't, and reigned for 17 years, which is pretty much a record for any Dark Age king of Scots.

There certainly wouldn't be a Pictish resurgence (the Picts were long gone by this point), but the House of Moray would continue to dominate a Scotland with a Gaelic speaking court. There will be no St Margaret and, as a result, no poncy, southern, wine-drinking Anglo-Saxon refugees to bring European feudalism to Scotland. The centre of power won't gravitate to Edinburgh, but probably somewhere more central - Stirling or Perth, nearer the Moray power base. If the Scots kings ever get round to having a formal capital, that is.

At the same time, you can expect some kind of Norman infiltration to begin in earnest. Macbeth is known to have deployed Norman knights, so it's likely that a few hardy adventurers will set up shop north of the border, though nowhere near the scale that they did in real life.

Lulach probably won't consider Margaret for marriage, as he was already married at his time of death and had at least one son called Malesnecta. Whether some kind of subsequent union between the House of Moray and the House of Wessex might take place, I don't know, but I'm inclined to say it won't. The circumstances that led to Margaret being in Scotland in the first place were very random, and dependent on luck: kill Canmore, and I'd say they butterfly away.

Although I would expect the English kings to continue sponsoring pretenders, eventually it might become politically expedient to come to some kind of agreement with the Moray kings. That leaves the Norwegian-dominated Northern and Western Isles to deal with, and the corresponding low-level thuggery associated with having Scandinavians occupying adjoining territories to your own, but the Moray kings had been dealing with that for centuries. Malcolm II had drawn the Orkney jarls into his orbit in the preceding century, so we can expect some kind of loose relationship to continue developing between the Northern Isles and the mainland.
 
Unfortunately you ignore the two main reason why the capital of the Scottish kingdom moved to Edinburgh.

1 - the Lothian’s were the richest and most productive part of the kingdom. Therefore the nobles there were the richest and the ones most in need of close attention. The lords to the north could plot, scheme and certainly revolt but if the Lothian’s were to rise against the King he would be in real trouble. Despite the romantic image of the kilted Scot standing defiant against the brutal English in truth the solid backbone of the Scottish army was always the sturdy Lallans speaking spearman of the lowlands.

2 - it was the closest and strongest hold close to the southern border - initially, as few Scots will admit, close to the lands of Northern England that the expansionist early medieval Kingdom of Scotland coveted but later it allowed the King to watch his most dangerous border.
 
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