A study of the people of Scotland in the era before the death of Malcolm III, were such a task to be carried out for any statistical end, would be more or less meaningless on account of the incomplete, scrappy, and patchy nature of the evidence. Kathleen Hughes indeed had good reason to ask, ‘Where are the writings of early Scotland?’ A comparison of the sparse numerical data about the people of Scotland in the Christian centuries leading up to the watershed of 1093 against the substantial resources of information available after that date – when the continuous evidence of charters commences – presents a basic problem of method. Almost all the historical people of the earlier period can be gleaned from the various texts edited or collected by Alan Orr Anderson; and nearly all of these people are to be found gathered into the first part of his two-volume collection, Early Sources of Scottish History A.D. 500 to 1286. We know, then, of a few hundred historical people in the six centuries leading up to 1093; yet in the 193 years down to 1286 the evidence of charters alone yields over 15,000 named persons; and a large proportion of that number can be categorized according to their relationships, occupations, properties, and life-span.

Such questions of numerical data are relevant to my present purpose because in Scotland before the twelfth century the number of persons to be found with Old Testament names can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and three of those are associated with the episcopal and monastic church of Kingarth on the Isle of Bute. By the middle of the twelfth century, however, there has apparently been an explosion of personal names of Hebrew origin. We must suspect that this phenomenon is in part a result of the dramatic increase of written records around the same time. Nevertheless, the prosopographical database of the People of Medieval Scotland, 1093–1286 shows about 1350 persons spanning a potential range of thirty-six Hebraic names, so that about 9% of the strictly historical people of Scotland in the period 1093 to 1286 bore a name either taken from the Old Testament or which was of Hebrew origin.

Introduction: Family, land and inheritance

Families tell lies. Medieval English society, at many different levels, had a keen sense of the importance of dynastic history, since it was on the basis of understandings about lineage that many of the key issues about property and rights were determined. Yet when the transmission of tenure or other rights was particularly complicated and became a matter of dispute, the sorts of written evidence taken for granted today were virtually unknown. Substantial landed families who kept archives of estate records, charters and even basic genealogies found that such material was often of little use in resolving complex disputes that included players in relatively distant collateral branches beyond the immediate line of descent in the senior line. The unexpected extinction of a family also left other dynasties with the challenge of reclaiming the history of a title in order to support claims to the inheritance rights of their wives, mothers or grandmothers. Under such circumstances, the limitations of the written record and the necessary resort to memory could result in highly subjective statements about the past and the construction of sometimes wildly different stories told by rival factions within a family about the supposed rightful line of descent.

For those who held some or all of their land in chief of the Crown, these disputes were played out principally at the inquisitions post mortem held by the royal escheators in each county where a deceased person had property, and whose evidence was required before the agreed heir could take posses-sion. As in so many other cases before the courts in later medieval England, the juries in these inquests could be subject to the abuse known generically as ‘maintenance’: the bringing of untoward pressure by rival parties wishing to influence the outcome of the process. In some inquisitions post mortem, indeed, the whole process was clearly something of a fait accompli: with or without the collusion of the escheator, a claimant with sufficient clout in the local area might effectively nominate the jurors themselves and simply have them ‘rubber stamp’ their own decidedly partial account of their right to the inheritance. In other instances, jurors might disagree among themselves or, when multiple juries were called upon the same case, could return strikingly different evidence as to the existence of heirs.

Leicestershire has often been considered something of a backwater when it comes to the 1381 revolt. In most modern work on the rebellion, when the county is mentioned at all, it is usually only to note that, around 17 or 18 June, some 1,200 inhabitants of Leicester assembled south-east of the town at Gartree Hill. Once gathered, they prepared to repel insurgent peasants rumoured to be marching from the south, bent on destroying the Leicestershire possessions of their local lord, the duke of Lancaster, a well-known focus of rebel hatred. Though the confrontation between the townspeople and the rebels never came to pass, this brief drama remains our main impression of the part the town and the county played in the rising. Unsurprisingly, then, the events in Leicester and its environs have sat more comfortably in Lancastrian historiography, especially the life of John of Gaunt, than in that of the revolt per se. Aside from this non-event, only a couple of other disturbances in Leicestershire are mentioned in modern discussions of the revolt, and usually in quite dismissive language. Such commentaries almost always base their discussion of events in the county on Knighton's Chronicle, a source which, as we will see, has its weaknesses. In other words, due to an embedded historiographical tradition and the considerable reliance on one narrative source, most modern accounts of Leicestershire's connection with the Great Rising are generalized, shop worn and tell only a small part of the county's story.

Yet Leicestershire's neighbours did take part in the uprising, sometimes with considerable vigour. Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire witnessed disturbances of varying degrees of severity, with Northampton, Cambridge, Ely and Peterborough all providing ‘stages for violent display’. Nonetheless, most of the Midlands has been written out of the modern history of the revolt. Over a century ago, Charles Oman made Lincolnshire, along with Leicestershire, a minor footnote in the events of 1381, and downgraded the situation in the county to ‘village ruffianism’, while also claiming that ‘The whole of the West Midlands, from Gloucestershire to Derby and Nottingham, seem to have been practically undisturbed by the insurrection.’ It was not for another eighty years, even with much publication for the revolt's 600th anniversary in the early 1980s, that the geography of the rebellion was substantially expanded to include Leicestershire's north-western neighbour, Derbyshire.

The essays in this volume of Fourteenth Century England engage with many of the themes and subjects which make the period so attractive to scholars and the wider public alike. The authors reflect on issues of kingship and changing theories of power at a number of levels; they tackle questions concerning loyalty and rebellion; examine the role of law, both domestic and international; give consideration to the nature of memory – legal, historical and fabricated; and they address the relationship between the Plantagenets and the rulers of those nations and territories over which England claimed dominion.

In so doing, the essays draw on a vibrant array of new scholarship, some of which was published in earlier volumes of FCE, that is transforming our understanding of and approach to the later Middle Ages. They also take advantage of sources which are now much easier to access and which can be interrogated in new ways. The digital revolution has shaped the direction of a good deal of recent research both in terms of international collaborations and what individual scholars may study and how they conduct their studies. The establishment of major databases and digitized source collections has been a key feature of this process. In addition to opening new avenues of enquiry such resources have also prompted a return to more familiar subjects by allowing investigations to be carried out in wholly new ways. Prosopographical work using such materials and employing data analysis software in order to explore the relationships between members of various groups is only one example of this.

As with earlier volumes in this series, several contributions to this collection originated in papers sponsored by the Society for Fourteenth Century Studies at the International Medieval Congress (University of Leeds) and the Society of the White Hart at the International Conference on Medieval Studies (University of Western Michigan). Over many years, these meetings have helped shape broader scholarly agendas as well as individual research projects while maintaining a tradition of friendly collegiality. They have ensured that the fourteenth century, a period of intense and often brutal change, is a very welcoming one to study.

It has been well established that the name-stock of Scotland changed during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in common with many other European countries. This change was characterized by a narrowing of the pool of personal names, and an expansion of the use of a smaller number of names (male names such as William, Richard, Stephen, and Jocelin; female names such as Matilda/Maud, Margaret, and Ada), mostly of Germanic or Latinate derivation, in common with other parts of Europe. The locus classicus for our appreciation of this phenomenon is Robert Bartlett's The Making of Europe, where he included this change amongst others in a package of what he termed ‘Europeanisation’. He illustrated his point with reference to the royal family of the Scots, where the eleventh-century kings such as Mac Bethad, Máel Coluim, and Domnall were succeeded by individuals with names such as William and Henry; in place of queens such as Bethóc and Gruoch, we find Margarets and Matildas.

Prominently, of course, King Máel Coluim mac Donnchada (Malcolm III, 1058–93) had younger sons named Alexander and David, new names amongst the Scottish royalty, and innovative names more widely in the eleventh century. While David was probably a biblical name, Alexander is more problematic. Its potential origin has been explored by Stephen Marritt, but certainly one aspect of it is likely to be its literary resonance, drawing, as it does, on the cycle of tales circulating in various languages in Europe at this stage relating to Alexander the Great. In this chapter, we argue that literature-inspired naming was a more widespread phenomenon amongst the nobility of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Scotland. Importantly, the fashion of innovating in naming practice by using names derived from literature was a cross-cultural phenomenon, with both the speech communities of the namers, and the linguistic and cultural origins of the literature from which these literary names were derived, being quite diverse. We will survey the data regarding this, and then drill down to examine a number of case studies which reveal the variety and diversity of this practice.

The data collected for the projects which go to make up The People of Medieval Scotland, 1093–1314 (poms.ac.uk) allow us to apply some numbers to this phenomenon.

The showdown between King John of England and his barons, climaxing with the sealing of Magna Carta at Runnymede on 15 June 1215, was surely one of the most dramatic and weighty events in the course of medieval English history. The document and the circumstances of its ratification continue to be valorized, perhaps with dubious accuracy, as a key moment in the development of Western human rights and liberties. Such judgments, while reinforcing Magna Carta's mythological status, require some serious historical qualification. First and foremost, one must recognize that the final and ‘official’ version of the document – the one that was reconfirmed by English kings on numerous occasions during the Middle Ages and beyond – was actually ratified in 1225, early in the reign of King Henry III. The 1225 Magna Carta was in many ways a changed document, in terms of its length and organization (it contains 37 articles in contrast to the 63 of the 1215 original), as well as some of its language. Even in its 1225 redaction, however, the grievances expressed were of limited applicability. Cursory examination of the text of Magna Carta would lead one to the entirely reasonable conclusion that it reflects the interests of a tiny population of England, namely, the upper echelons of the landed nobility. Certainly, its specific articles in its earliest form pertained almost exclusively to grievances expressed by that class.

Most importantly, serious scholarship has challenged and decisively defeated the once-dominant view that Magna Carta was instantly recognized by thirteenth-and fourteenth-century Englishmen to be a document that embraced constitutional monarchy and limited government. The concentration of recent research concerning the Charter has generally been devoted instead to its technical dimensions as applied in the courts and (after the late thirteenth century) parliament, for example, its many reconfirmations and, more broadly, the shifting significance of the utilization of its various articles during the 1200s and 1300s. Any further conceptual features ascribed it have been now relegated to the revival of interest in it among sixteenth-and seventeenth-century English legal theorists such as Edward Coke and William Blackstone, who found in it common law principles of constitutionalism. Certainly, opportunities existed during the thirteenth century to put Magna Carta to work in normative writings.

Edward I's 1301 letter (‘the King's Letter’) to Boniface VIII is widely known. Indeed, it is perhaps the most famous royal letter ever sent by an English king to a Roman pontiff. The document is particularly memorable for its attempt to prove Edward's claim to overlordship of Scotland via an audacious ‘historical’ argument which began chronologically in the time of Brutus, a legendary descendant of Aeneas of Troy. The King's Letter was governed by a simple but remarkably ambitious contention: the kings of England, along with their predecessors and progenitors, had exercised uninterrupted overlordship of Scotland from antiquity to contemporary times. The sheer scale of the task that Edward and his clerks set for themselves, as well as the effect that the text ostensibly had in swaying papal policy, captured the imagination of contemporaries as readily as it has held the attention of modern scholars.

Yet the intellectual origins of the King's Letter remain largely obscured from view. It is little known that the text was the culmination of a long-drawnout process that had begun a decade earlier amidst the Scottish succession crisis. Indeed, it was at the commencement of the Great Cause that Edward had, in a rather rudimentary fashion, first articulated his historical claim to overlordship of Scotland. This paper will trace the evolution of the king's argument from its modest beginnings at Norham in 1291 to its celebrated apogee at Anagni in 1301. It seeks to demonstrate how, in the space of ten years, Edward's contention grew increasingly sophisticated as it responded to various challenges, real and imagined, from the Roman Church and Scots alike. In order to accomplish these tasks, it is necessary to reconstruct the intellectual and political context in which Edward's historical argument was composed. Only then will it be possible to explain why it took the precise shape and form that it did.

From modest beginnings: monastic chronicles at Norham

Edward I chose to pursue his claim to overlordship of Scotland at a time when that realm was in a state of disarray and confusion. Margaret of Norway, the seven-year-old heir to the Scottish throne, died in late September 1290 en route to her own inauguration ceremony at Scone.

The Ordinances of 1311 do not appear to have aroused the interest of contemporary chroniclers to the same extent that they have historians. Many chroniclers evidently found the Ordinances rather dull, not least the author of the Vita Edwardi Secundi, who remarked that he would not include a full account of them in his text, ‘because I would break the flow of the narrative and prove tedious to readers’. In consequence, their accounts of how, why and by whom the Ordinances were drafted are chiefly confined to the most general of outlines, snatches of gossip and colourful anecdote. Indeed, several chronicles do not even mention the Ordinances at all. Yet this has not prevented historians from ascribing them central significance in the politics of the early fourteenth century. While their reasons for doing so have changed, few scholars would dissent from Davies’ judgment of a century ago that ‘of all the experiments in the constitution made during the reign [of Edward II] the Ordinances of 1311 were the most important … all subsequent attempts to restrain the king were based upon them or drew a considerable amount of inspiration from them’. Accordingly, historians of the period have been left in a curious position: agreeing that the Ordinances are essential to understand-ing Edward II's reign, but with frustratingly little evidence to understand the composition of the Ordinances themselves. As Phillips put it, ‘little is known about how the Ordainers carried out their work or who, if anyone, was the major contributor to the Ordinances’.

Yet one aspect of the Ordinances’ creation about which historians have been confident is the absence of ecclesiastical influence behind them. Although scholars like Tout and Davies once considered the bishops to be leading players in the programme of 1310–11, this has been met with short shrift from at least the middle years of the twentieth century, when Edwards acknowledged that that ‘there is little evidence for bishops’ direct influence on the framing of the Ordinances’. This view has been endorsed by many of the leading recent historians of Edward II's reign, with Maddicott remarking that ‘the Ordinances … show few signs of clerical influence’; Prestwich claiming that there exist ‘scant signs of clerical involvement’; and Phillips arguing that ‘there is little in the Ordinances themselves to suggest that the clergy made any significant contribution to their formulation’.