162 Dumfries : Its Burghal ORiom. 



send knights to serve as guards in the castle for 40 days 

 each year, a duty subsequently commuted to a payment of 

 20s a year. There is charter reason for believing that such 

 commutations were already made by the year 1221 in some 

 cases. The necessity of personal attendance of knights for 

 castle duty annually is believed to have been a weighty 

 influence in the development of the little towns which grew 

 up at the foot of the castle rampart or within the encircling 

 ditch of its wide base-court. If William the Lion or his 

 brother Malcolm the Maiden, who was a gallant fellow 

 despite the feminine epithet, made the castle — the mote- 

 mound crowned with a fortress dwelling, doubtless not very 

 magnificent at first — the burgh-town was a natural sequence 

 as likely to be royally encouraged from military considera- 

 tions as from the broader ends of national policy. It 

 secured so much the better the supply of stores for the 

 garrison ; it increased the resources in point of arms and 

 men ; and it tended to the promotion of agriculture, reclaim- 

 ing from the waste acre upon acre, with every toft which 

 found its burgess occupant. The land was the king's too, 

 its rental was increased thus, and the town was a burgh of 

 the king's. Such was the story of Ayr; such, it is scarcely 

 possible to doubt, had been the earlier tale of Lanark. And 

 now we reach Dumfries. 



The fates of Strath Nith as a province are not un- 

 ravelled. We do not know how the property at Dumfries 

 came to be the King's, but certainly under William the Lion 

 the King's it was. However this may have happened, it 

 is the fact which is of chief account. Perhaps the local and 

 national circumstances of the time may aid us in the attempt 

 to grasp the complex whole. Dumfries was reckoned in the 

 twelfth century and later as in Galloway ; and Galloway in 

 the latter part of the twelfth century was a very lively place. 

 Time after time the Kings of Scotland — aye, and at least 

 one King of England — had tackled the project of its sub- 

 jugation; but in spite of " scutage of Galloway" in the 

 southern realm, and invasion and fortress building by the 

 northern Kings, the moorland heights of Criffel and Cairns- 

 moor and Merrick were as hard to girdle with a permanent 



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