The Lion, the Lily, and the Leopard: The Crown and Nobility of Scotland, France, and England and the Struggle for Power (1100–1204) by Melissa Pollock (review)

Melissa Pollock’s study of family connections and their impact on Anglo-Norman politics is a testament to tenacity and thoroughness. The author’s aim is to reincorporate Scotland into the cultural and family networks of the Anglo-Norman world, in response to earlier scholarship that has often treated the northern kingdom as an outlier or a completely separate case. While studies have been undertaken on local links spanning the Borders, Pollock succeeds in showing just how close and numerous were the ties between aristocratic families with interests in Scotland as well as other more distant regions during the twelfth century. These were disrupted, she argues, by the loss of Normandy to the French monarchy in 1204, after which separate national identities in France, England, and Scotland were more effectively able to emerge. The ‘Auld Alliance’ between France and Scotland, so much a feature of the later Middle Ages, had its origins, in Pollock’s view, in the family associations developed during the twelfth century.

In making this claim, Pollock offers a political narrative centred on Norman and Angevin rulership that will be familiar to students of the period. This skeleton is fleshed out with immensely detailed examination, conducted largely on a genealogical and prosopographical basis, of marital alliances and personal relationships among major landholding families. Impressive detective work into the evidence provided by documentary and charter records and witness lists, as well as the reasonably abundant twelfth-century chronicle narratives, allows the author to reconstruct (often tentatively and with appropriate caution) the family trees of those involved in the political machinations of their lords and rulers. Much attention is given, for example, to the conflict of 1173–74 in which Henry II was opposed by a coalition led by his own sons and Louis VII of France, in alliance with William ‘the Lion’, King of Scotland. The lengthy chapters examining this episode and its immediate aftermath are dominated by descriptions of the family groupings that chose to support either side.

The risk, though, is that the sheer volume of evidence overwhelms the presentation of the central points that the author wishes to make. In places, the work takes on an almost antiquarian tone, in the sense that it feels as if the details of innumerable family relationships are being presented for their own sake, as much as they are to advance an argument. Furthermore, this attempt at comprehensiveness means that the central focus on Scotland is lost at times. So insistent is the author on identifying every possible family connection between members of the Anglo-Norman elites that the reader is inclined to ask, on occasion, what all this means for the big picture: it is not always evident how the intricacies of genealogy on either side of the Channel illuminate interconnections with Scotland in the way the author purports to describe. It is also worth noting that the study’s introduction presents a rather curious assemblage of methodological possibilities, most of which are not followed through in the subsequent text. Comments on Arthurian romance, Oedipal psychology, and antiviral drug therapy (the last used as an analogy for co-operative alliances against external threats) are introduced and then just as quickly abandoned (pp. 6–11). Some reference back to these explanatory models at later points in the text would have been helpful to remind the reader of their potential usefulness.

These cautions are not meant to undermine the value of the volume. Pollock has completed an enormous task in tracing and setting forth complex sets of relationships among the Anglo-Norman aristocracy. Their exposition (often aided by clearly presented genealogical charts) will, at the very least, be a wonderful resource for future scholars. On...