Scotland, England and France after the Loss of Normandy, 1204-1296: ‘Auld Amitie’ by M. A. Pollock (review)

Melissa Pollock’s book on the nobility of Scotland, England, and France during the thirteenth century serves in many ways as a companion volume to her discussion of a similar topic during the twelfth century in The Lion, The Lily, and the Leopard: The Crown and Nobility of Scotland, France, and England and the Struggle for Power (1100-1204), published by Brepols in 2015. Her goals in the current volume mirror and build on those offered in the The Lion, the Lily, and the Leopard: to establish Scotland’s place in the Anglo-Franco political and cultural realm of western Europe, and to discuss how the nobility of those three realms were interconnected. While the title indicates a desire to consider Scotland, England, and France equally, the focus is largely on Scotland, and in that area Pollock succeeds in offering a useful and intriguing look at noble politics and alliances in Britain during the thirteenth century.

Pollock begins her discussion by setting the stage for the period by outlining the troubles facing King John of England and his loss of Normandy to King Philip II of France in 1204. The narrative is well-known and follows the traditional interpretation of John as a capricious and unpopular monarch at odds with a large number of his nobles. She then turns her attention to Scotland and its struggle for independence from England during the thirteenth century. She offers an important caveat against the assumption (prevalent in popular culture) that agitation for independence in Scotland correlated with a broader cultural assertion of “nationalism” in the modern sense. By the middle part of the 1200s, however, she argues that a separate national Scottish identity was in fact emerging (though it is a strand of argument that gets somewhat lost in the later discussions of the book) (4). Finally, the Introduction examines the relations between Scotland and France, but does so with a focus on England, which helps to ground the interconnectivity of these three realms with a British focus.

The book itself is arranged chronologically around five chapters, beginning with John and ending in the midst of Edward I’s reign, though coverage is concentrated on the later parts of John’s reign and that of his son Henry III. The discussion is focused, as one might imagine, on the affinities created by noble families in Scotland, England, and France. There is a significant amount of political narrative, however, which serves to give good background and context to the noble machinations, though it also serves to inhibit the thematic analysis and discussion of the nobility.

The first chapter, focusing on the period between John’s loss of Normandy in 1204 and the noble rebellions of his later reign a decade later, serves as the foundational introduction to how the nobility of the three kingdoms interacted. It is a narrative-heavy chapter, and focuses on the very traditional arguments of John as a “Bad King.” Pollock does, however, point out that the loss of Normandy exacerbated the shift from an Anglo-Scottish-Franco nobility (which she discusses at great length in The Lion, The Lily, and the Leopard) to a largely Anglo-Scottish one. This had two major effects: it predisposed the nobility to work to avoid a large-scale war between Scotland and England, and over time it necessitated the establishment of an official alliance between Scotland and France, since affinity based on organic interactions among the nobility no longer existed.

Chapter 2 continues Pollock’s examination of John’s reign, with a focus on the period of the first baronial uprisings against him and culminating with his death in 1216. She uses the Briouze and Lacy families as her cipher for understanding baronial opposition to John, and she demonstrates that many of the families rebelling against the king after 1210 came from the extended kinship groups of those two noble lines. These men also oversaw the...