The Kingdom of the Scots: Government, Church and Society from the eleventh to the fourteenth century (review)

Thirty years after its first publication, in 1973, Professor Barrow's groundbreaking collection of essays dealing with the structure of the Scottish kingdom in the central Middle Ages has been re-issued. There has been only minimal revision of the papers published in the first edition but three additional chapters have been added on 'The Scots in the North of England', 'King David I and Glasgow' and 'Growth and Structure of the Border'. The Kingdom of the Scots was, and remains, a collection of previously published essays. Like many 'Greatest Hits' albums it contained one previously unreleased item, the first essay on 'Pre-feudal Scotland: shires and thanes', a paper which stands Janus-like on the portal between 'early Scottish History', located firmly in the world of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, and '[later] Medieval Scottish History' whose students, to some extent, represent an annex, historiographically speaking, of the Feudal Kingdom of England. This one paper, the only original contribution in the volume, has proved enormously influential and has often seemed to be the only point of contact between early and late medievalists, each camp imagining that it encapsulates the methodologies and presumptions of the other. Whilst historians entering the twenty-first century may feel less happy than Professor Barrow did in 1973 that the terminology of 'shire' and 'thane' dates very far back into the Scottish past (the twelfth-and thirteenth-century forms of these words are too close to their English roots to have been transmitted for long, if at all, through the media of Pictish and Gaelic), it is undoubtedly the case that the phenomena themselves have some antiquity. What might be questioned, in the light of research outwith Scotland in the last three decades, is whether the undoubted continuity of the territories Barrow identified as shires necessarily requires that the mechanisms of exploitation practised within them by kings and others are equally ancient. In 1973 Glanville Jones' 'multiple estates' were very much the flavour of the month but since then critiques and modifications of the model have continued to be produced by those working on the English and Welsh material from which it was developed. Whatever the shortcomings of this essay, and those can only be seen with hindsight, it remains the only significant work on the topic and more recent publications, such as Sandy Grant's contributions to the Festschriften for Professors Barrow and Campbell, have relied heavily on the 'infrastructure' it has provided, as have archaeological interpretations of the later prehistoric and early historic landscape such as Stephen Driscoll's work on Strathearn. 'Pre-feudal Scotland' remains essential reading.

Of the new contributions one may, for most of us, count as a 'previously unreleased item'. Chapter 14, 'Growth and Structure of the Border' previously appeared in a German regional publication which is not widely available in the UK. This chapter covers again some of the territory explored in chapter 4, 'The Anglo-Scottish Border', originally published in 1966. It is very tempting to set students to compare and contrast the two pieces written some thirty-five years apart.

Although a collection of previously published essays, The Kingdom of the Scots in its first edition attained something of the status of a text book. For many years it was the only 'monograph' focused solely on the central middle ages and the range covered by the essays seemed comprehensive. There were, however, significant gaps in coverage. The section on the Church did not include any discussion of the episcopacy. In the present volume Chapter 9, on 'David I and Glasgow', makes some redress in this direction but it is a great shame that a broader essay, analogous to Chapter 6 on 'The Royal House and the Reformed Orders', discussing the apparent reform of the episcopacy in the twelfth century were not...