This collection of essays brings into print several papers presented at a 2012 conference in Durham, the purpose of which was a reassessment in light of recent research of the history of “middle Britain” in the high medieval period. A common theme of the work is that throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (oddly—and inexplicably—labeled here the “central” Middle Ages) southern Scotland and northern England shared features of a single British identity.
In addition to a lucid introduction by co-editor Keith Stringer, the book consists of ten essays. The first five ask fundamental questions about national identity in the context of high medieval secular and ecclesiastical politics. The remaining contributions explore rural and urban medieval settlement patterns and secular and religious landownership. Many of the essays apply to the region of middle Britain methodologies that have informed the recent historiography of English medieval peasant and landscape studies. Each contribution also addresses the challenges of applying the modernist construct of the “transnational” to the medieval period.
Not surprisingly, evidence of closely shared experiences that transcended the political line which marked the boundary between two realms is most compelling in the essays that examine the history of the church. Rival royal claims to the territories that had once been part of the kingdoms of Strathclyde/Cumbria and Northumbria complicated the formal establishment of diocesan boundaries north and south of the line, but there were “greater opportunities for innovation” (215) in the laying out of new parishes than those that obtained either in England south of the Humber or in Scotland north of Forth. The reformed religious orders of the high Middle Ages, and the Cistercians in particular, weathered more successfully than did lay landholders the political strife of the period. Additionally, throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there was regular movement across the border of monks, regular canons, and friars.
Greater contrasts between southern Scotland and northern England are apparent in the ways in which secular lords gave expression to their authority. Aristocratic fortunes in middle Britain were in turn closely tied to the ability of the kings of England and Scotland to control the peripheries of their respective realms. Keith Stringer finds that Henry II's legal innovations proved far more “exacting, inflexible and invasive” (130) to landholders of all ranks than do William I and Alexander II of Scotland's earliest efforts to give real force to royal jurisdiction in their own border region. The more effective (and better-funded) reach of a belligerent English crown is apparent also in the architectural sphere: in Northumberland especially, Philip Dixon and Christopher Tabraham show, almost all border fortifications were built at the behest of Norman conquerors as statements of their new overlordship; in southern Scotland, by contrast, “there seems not to have been a military imperative behind the building of … royal and baronial castles” (339). In his study of towns, markets, and trade, David Ditchburn argues convincingly that the tendency of scholars to “nationalize” urban history has obscured the shared corporate experience of townspeople and merchants (great and small) in middle Britain.
The differences between the English and the Sottish experiences that some of the authors find in royal, baronial, and urban power structures are more ambiguous in the essays that examine local conditions, but here, too, the theme of shared cultural practices across the England-Scotland divide enables these authors to revisit old interpretations with fresh eyes. Close scrutiny of onomastic evidence, patterns of land exploitation, and traditions of lord-tenant relationships, leads several authors to demonstrate how artificial the political boundary line might prove on the ground. Thus, place names in southern Scotland and northern England bear similar witness to the multiplicity of languages spoken by the people of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century border region and to the changes wrought to the countryside by the migrations of Norsemen and Gaels into the old kingdoms of Strathclyde/Cumbria and Northumbria. An important legacy from the early medieval past is apparent in the survival on both sides of the border of large-scale royal and noble shires and thanages, which long continued to influence the siting of lordly power centers, as well as the layout of fields, pastures, moors, wastes and shielings. The geography of these ancient land divisions in turn determined the ways in which English and Scottish border lords exploited the labor of their serfs, free and unfree. The border line between Scotland and England is at its most attenuated in these studies. Of significant relevance, by contrast, were the differences between the landscapes of the east and those of the west of middle Britain, and between the upland and lowland economies in each of these sub-regions. While one of the contributors is at pains to argue that the east-west division of middle Britain is by no means “axiomatic” (325), that distinction appears in each and every one of the essays in this book.
Several of the essays have clearly been revised and updated since the 2012 conference. Four of the authors, for example, make thoughtful use of the People of Medieval Scotland database (www.poms.ac.uk), which was not widely available until 2012. Dauvit Broun brings to the collection the first findings of a large (and ongoing) research project, Models of Authority: Scottish Charters and the Emergence of Government, 1100–1250 (www.modelsofauthority.ac.uk). His essay makes a compelling case for locating in the generation and a half between 1150 and 1190 the genesis of a Scottish regnum that included territory both north and south of Forth, and of the kingship of the Scots itself as “an abstract concept that was intrinsically equated” with these extensive lands (47). This conclusion represents a revision of much of Broun's own groundbreaking work on the early history of Scottish identity and it has important consequences for the future studies of the polities of high medieval Britain. While the essays in this collection vary in length and quality, collectively they demonstrate the value of studying traditional “national” histories through the lens of new theoretical constructs.
