"The Gudeman of Ballangeich": rambles in the afterlife of James V

Folklore, August, 2004 by David Stevenson

Abstract

This article concerns a corpus of legends in which James V of Scotland disguised himself as the "Gudeman of Ballangeich" in order to enjoy amorous adventures. The traditions may or may not be contemporary, and equally there is no certainty about whether they reflect actual behaviour (although kings in general, including the Stuart kings, have been known to disguise themselves for a variety of reasons, including pleasure). However, in later centuries, allusions to the "Gudeman of Ballangeich" were used by Scots to refer surreptitiously to a Scots king, by Jacobites to refer to a Stuart king, and members of The Beggar's Benison, an eighteenth-century libertine club, used tales of James V to evoke memories of a better, pre-Union, pre-Calvinist Scotland of cultural creativity and sexual liberty. The legends of James V helped maintain the positive, popular image of this monarch as the "poor man's king" in the face of less kind judgements from contemporary elites and subsequent generations of historians.

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Ballangeich is the name of a place on a path that passed along the foot of the eastern walls of Stirling Castle in Scotland. Gudeman or goodman (probus homo) was originally a formal designation used in charters to describe a landowner who held his land not directly from the crown but from a tenant in chief (Innes 1872, 36n), but by the late Middle Ages it had become an informal name accorded to heads of households, usually of a fairly humble sort, but of some local standing--say a substantial farmer. But, in a society that saw itself as ranked in a hierarchy of families and authority as being patriarchal, even a king could refer to himself as a gudeman, for he was the head of the ultimate household, the realm itself. In 1590 James VI wrote from Denmark to his privy council, citing what was evidently a proverbial expression: "when the gudeman is awaie he cannot be wyted" (blamed) for disorder in his house (Simpson 2000, 152).

The Reputation of James V

"The Gudeman of Ballangeich" was, according to tradition, a name commonly adopted by James V of Scotland when in disguise, for he liked to go among his people disguised to relax and enjoy himself--not least sexually. What weight, if any, should historians give to such traditions as evidence? They only appear in print at the end of the eighteenth century, two hundred and fifty years after James's death in 1542. Strictly contemporary written sources and early chroniclers of his reign have nothing to say about his rovings among the common people, but the chroniclers are agreed on one aspect of his reputation that seems relevant: he was known as the poor man's king, or the king of the commons, and as a king who was severe in his dealings with the great. The two were seen as linked: it was the powerful who oppressed the poor, so a king who was harsh on the powerful was perceived to be on the side of the commons.

The earliest accounts, starting a generation or so after James's death, are unanimous in stressing this. John Knox set the tone in 1566: "Hie was called of some, a good poore manis King: of otheris hie was termed a murtherare of the nobilitie, and one that had decreed thair hole destruction." But while Knox praised James's repression of theft and oppression, he added that others "dispraised him for the defoulling of menis wyffes and virgines" (Knox 1846-64, vol. 1, 92-3). Again, in or before 1571, and this time from the Catholic side of the religious divide brought about by Reformation, James was described, by John Lesley, former bishop of Ross, as a good and sure justiciar, "be the quhilk one thing he allurit to him the hartis of all the people, because they lived quietly and in rest, out of all oppressioun and molestacioun of the nobilytie and rich persones" (Lesley 1830, 167). Indeed, he was called "Rex plebeiorum" (Lesley 1578, 460). Another chronicle agreed in 1572 that he "wes callit the puir manis King" (Chronicle 1830, 8). Such phrases remain standard in historians' descriptions of James until the beginning of the twentieth century. By then, it was generally assumed that calling him a poor man's king was a compliment, but it is clear from the earlier narratives that the phrase was originally double-edged. Being good to the poor had been seen as involving being bad to the great. In dealing with them James had been at times harsh, even vindictive. "A good poor man's king" might be said by nobles or higher clergy with sarcastic bitterness of a king who was perceived as having his priorities wrong and from whose severity and extortionate taxes they suffered. A really good king would have been one who accepted that the interests of the great should come first. When James's reign ended disastrously with defeat by the English at Solway Moss in 1542, after noble backing for the war effort proved lukewarm, there were no doubt many who drew the moral that James should have spent more time wooing the powerful, less in pleasing the commons.

In the twentieth century, with democracy emerging, it might have been thought that having been reputed the king of the commons would have won James favour from historians. Instead, in the supposed century of the common man, the poor man's king largely disappears from serious history. To those academic historians determined to win a reputation for their discipline as scientific, with its finding based strictly on contemporary documentary evidence, traditions about James's attitude to the commons--and their attitudes to him--were no more than hearsay. James, who had sometimes been hailed as one of the country's best kings, was quickly transformed into one of the worst. With the "evidence" about him and the commons relegated to the dustbin, what was left was a greedy king who had acted viciously towards members of the nobility. One historian (even though mentioning James's reputation as poor man's king) has spoken of "the revulsion with which he must be regarded'--although rather arbitrarily attributing his faults to the English blood of his mother, Margaret Tudor (Donaldson 1965 , 61 and 62; quoted in Cameron 1998, 328-9). Another judged him "probably the most unpleasant of all the Stewarts" (Wormald 1981, 12 quoted in Cameron 1998, 329). Recently, however, efforts have been made, not to whitewash James, but at least to take a more balanced look at his character (Cameron 1998).