David I

David I: The King who Made Scotland . By Richard Oram . Tempus . 2004 . 255 pp. £17.99 . The ‘Scottish Monarchs’ series of Tempus Publishing is intended to offer the general public a collection of royal biographies that are at once ‘scholarly and accessible’. Oram's volume is the first. If, by the term ‘accessible’, the series editor has in mind a lively narrative style and a vivid engagement with the subject matter, then Oram's choice as a founding author is highly appropriate. Historians familiar with his publications will recognize here the energy that characterizes all his work and the vigour with which he pursues his arguments. The ‘scholarly’ aspects of this book (which, surprisingly, represents the first attempt ever to write a biography of this much-respected ruler) are rather less apparent. Oram's David I is a composite figure, made up in large part of the author's own interpretation of published chronicle sources and a selection of secondary works. There are some glimpses of originality in his account of the king's life, notably the suggestion that the ‘lost years’ between 1108 and 1113 may have seen David on campaign in Normandy in support of his brother-in-law, King Henry I of England. The concluding chapter, moreover, offers a well-balanced and in many respects highly illuminating assessment of David's reputation over the course of almost a thousand years of historical writing. His protestations that his biographical study is not intended to be a ‘definitive study’ of early twelfth-century Scotland notwithstanding, Oram in fact attempts to do much more in this work than retell the events of the king's life. While he touches on some important developments within and beyond the realm, however, he ignores a much larger number of equally momentous changes. In these portions of the book, moreover, he draws on the scholarship of a few, clearly favoured, colleagues, omitting entirely the equally meritorious work of many more. The result is a one-dimensional view of the king who, as the subtitle alleges, ‘made’ medieval Scotland. Readers of Oram's book will come away knowing a great deal about David I, his family, his achievements and his reverses, but they will have very little understanding of the ways in which he so thoroughly changed the lives and mores of the people he ruled

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