This book discussed the processes by which the Gaelic kingdom of Alba established its mastery over the lesser kingdoms of northern mainland Britain and transformed itself into a state recognisable as Scotland.

In The Lordship of the Isles, twelve specialists offer new insights on the rise and fall of the MacDonalds of Islay and the greatest Gaelic lordship of later medieval Scotland. Portrayed most often as either the independently-minded last great patrons of Scottish Gaelic culture or as dangerous rivals to the Stewart kings for mastery of Scotland, this collection navigates through such opposed perspectives to re-examine the politics, culture, society and connections of Highland and Hebridean Scotland from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. It delivers a compelling account of a land and people caught literally and figuratively between two worlds, those of the Atlantic and mainland Scotland, and of Gaelic and Anglophone culture. Contributors are David Caldwell, Sonja Cameron, Alastair Campbell, Alison Cathcart, Colin Martin, Tom McNeill, Lachlan Nicholson, Richard Oram, Michael Penman, Alasdair Ross, Geoffrey Stell and Sarah Thomas.

David I was never expected to become king, but on succeeding to the Scottish throne in 1124 he quickly demonstrated that he had the skills, ruthlessness and ambition to become one of the kingdom's greatest rulers. Drawing on the experiences and connections of his youth spent at the court of his brother-in-law, Henry I of England, and moulded by the dominant personality and intense piety of his mother, St Margaret, he set out to transform his inheritance and create a powerful and dynamic kingship. After neutralising all challengers to his position and building a new powerbase that drew on support from both Scotland's native nobles and the English and French knights whom he settled in his realm, David emerged as a power-broker in mid twelfth-century Britain as England descended into civil war. He pursued his wife Matilda's lost inheritance in Northumbria, gaining control over much of northern England and giving him access to economic resources that allowed him to invest in patronage of the reformed monastic orders, and in the reconfiguration of the secular Church in Scotland. The peace and stability of his kingdom, coupled with the economic boom brought by burgeoning population during an era of benign climate conditions, secured him a reputation as a saintly visionary who achieved the cultural and political transformation of Scotland.

This book, a revised and extended version of Professor Davies's 1988 Wiles Lectures, explores the ways in which the kings and aristocracy of England sought to extend their domination over Ireland, Scotland and Wales in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It analyses the mentalities of domination and subjection - how the English explained and justified their pretensions and how native rulers and societies in Ireland and Wales responded to the challenge. It also explains how the English monarchy came to claim and exercise a measure of 'imperial' control over the whole of the British Isles by the end of the thirteenth century, converting a loose domination into sustained political and governmental control. This is a study of the story of the Anglo-Norman and English domination of the British Isles in the round. Hitherto historians have tended to concentrate on the story in each country - Ireland, Scotland and Wales - individually. This book looks at the issue comparatively, in order to highlight the comparisons and contrasts in the strategies of domination and in the responses of native societies.

The social and political meaning of lordship in western France in the tenth and eleventh centuries is the focus of this study. It analyses the development and features of lordship as it was practised and experienced in Maine and the surrounding regions of France, emphasizing the social logic of lordship (why it worked as it did, and how it was socially justifiable and even necessary) and the role of honour and charisma in shaping lordship relationships. The vision and chronology of tenth- and eleventh-century lordship on offer here departs from the model of "feudal mutation", and emphasizes two major themes - the centrality of intangible, charismatic elements of honor, prestige and acclamation, and the lack of foundation for any notion of "feudal transformation": while acknowledging changes in the geography of power across the tenth and eleventh centuries, the argument insists that the practicalities of the practice of lordship remained essentially the same between 890 and 1160. RICHARD E. BARTON is assistant Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

This volume centres upon the era conventionally labelled the 'Making of the kingdom', or the 'Anglo-Norman' era in Scottish history. It seeks a balance between traditional historiographical concentration on the 'feudalisation' of Scottish society as part of the wholesale importation of alien cultural traditions by a 'modernising' monarchy and more recent emphasis on the continuing vitality and centrality of Gaelic culture and traditions within the twelfth- and early thirteenth-century kingdom. Part I explores the transition from the Gaelic kingship of Alba into the hybridised medieval state and traces Scotland's role as both dominated and dominator. It examines the redefinition of relationships with England, Gaelic magnates within Scotland's traditional territorial heartland and with autonomous/independent mainland and insular powers. These interrelationships form the central theme of an exploration of the struggle for political domination of the northern mainland of Britain and the adjacent islands, the mechanisms through which that domination was projected and expressed, and the manner of its expression.Part II is a thematic exploration of central aspects of the society and culture of late eleventh- to early thirteenth-century Scotland which gave character and substance to the emerging kingdom. It considers the evolutionary growth of Scottish economic structures, changes in the management of land-based resources, and the manner in which secular power and authority were acquired and exercised. These themes are developed in discussions of the emergence of urban communities and in the creation of a new noble class in the twelfth century. Religion is examined both in terms of the development of the Church as an institution and through the religious experience of the lay population.

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the Normans had a formative influence on the development of states and societies in the British Isles, southern Italy and the Levant. Their achievements still resonate powerfully today, and represent a vital field of historical study. But how far did colonial elites define themselves as Norman, and to what extent were they categorized as such by others? What were the defining attributes of the supremacies achieved by the Normans, and by other incomers associated with them, and how decisive and diverse was the impact of their influence on local power-structures and native societies? How readily did they reach accommodations with those societies, and how might their own identities be renegotiated within the context of cross-cultural encounters? And, in terms of the progress and practices of state-formation, what was the balance between ’old’ and ’new’? These are some of the key questions addressed in this collection of essays, which also treats the Normans as a genuinely European phenomenon. Norman activity in the British Isles and in the Mediterranean lands receives equal coverage; and the topics explored include identities and identification, marriage policies, acculturation, the pre-existing landscapes of power and how far they were transformed, castle-building strategies, the nature of frontiers, urban government, and law and legislation. This volume therefore serves both to illustrate and to open up for fresh debate many of the salient themes concerning the Norman experience of diaspora and settlement. At the same time, it seeks to underscore how the dynamics, character and consequences of Norman expansion - and the connections, continuities and contrasts - can better be appreciated by taking the wider Norman world, or worlds, as the focus for collective study.