New Perspectives on Medieval Scotland, 1093-1286 9781843838531

Citation preview

CMYK PMS

156+4mm

MATTHEW HAMMOND, EMILIA JAMROZIAK, CYNTHIA NEVILLE, MICHELE PASIN, KEITH STRINGER, ALICE TAYLOR.

Cover image: seal of John, prior of St Andrews (1264–1304), showing St Andrew on the cross.TNA, SC13/E43. Used by permission of The National Archives.

Series: Studies in Celtic History Broun, Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, Huw Pryce

234+6mm

Contributors: JOHN BRADLEY, STUART CAMPBELL, DAVID CARPENTER,

1093-1286

New Perspectives on Medieval Scotland 1093-1286

Matthew Hammond is a Research Associate at the University of Glasgow.

New Perspectives on Medieval Scotland

ed.

This volume includes a range of new studies casting fresh light on the institutions and people of the Scottish kingdom, especially in the thirteenth century. New perspectives are offered on topics as diverse as the limited reach of Scottish royal administration and justice, the ties that bound the unfree to their lords, the extent of a political community in the time of King Alexander II, a view of Europeanisation from the spread of a common material culture, the role of a major Cistercian monastery in the kingdom and the broader world, and the idea of the neighbourhood in Scots law. There are also chapters on the corpus of charters and names and the innovative technology behind the People of Medieval Scotland prosopographical database, which makes use of over 6000 individual documents from the period.

MATTHEW HAMMOND

The years between the deaths of King Máel Coluim and Queen Margaret in 1093 and King Alexander III in 1286 witnessed the formation of a kingdom resembling the Scotland we know today, which was a full member of the European club of monarchies; the period is also marked by an explosion in the production of documents.

GENERAL EDITORS: Dauvit

156+4mm

25mm

Edited by Matthew Hammond

Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sat, 05 All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

34:19 UTC

Studies in Celtic History XXXII NEW PERSPECTIVES ON MEDIEVAL SCOTLAND 1093 –1286

STUDIES IN CELTIC HISTORY ISSN 0261-9865 General editors Dauvit Broun Máire Ní Mhaonaigh Huw Pryce Studies in Celtic History aims to provide a forum for new research into all aspects of the history of Celtic-speaking peoples throughout the whole of the medieval period. The term `history’ is inderstood broadly: any study, regardless of discipline, which advances our knowledge and understanding of the history of Celtic-speaking peoples will be considered. Studies of primary sources, and of new methods of exploiting such sources, are encouraged. Founded by Professor David Dumville, the series was relaunched under new editorship in 1997. Proposals or queries may be sent directly to the editors at the addresses given below; all submissions will receive prompt and informed consideration before being sent to expert readers. Professor Dauvit Broun, Department of History (Scottish), University of Glasgow, 9 University Gardens, Glasgow G12 8QH Dr Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, St John’s College, Cambridge, CB2 1TP Professor Huw Pryce, School of History, Welsh History and Archaeology, Bangor University, Gwynedd LL57 2DG

For titles already published in this series see the end of this volume

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON MEDIEVAL SCOTLAND 1093–1286

Edited by MATTHEW HAMMOND

THE BOYDELL PRESS

© Contributors 2013 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2013 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 978-1-84383-853-1

The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mount Hope Ave, Rochester, NY 14620-2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A catalogue record of this publication is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate Papers used by Boydell & Brewer Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests

Typesetting by User design, UK Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

Contents List of illustrations and tables

vi

List of contributors

vii

Acknowledgements



Abbreviations

viii ix

Maps 1 Introduction: The paradox of medieval Scotland, 1093–1286 Matthew Hammond

xiv

2 The Scottish ‘political community’ in the reign of Alexander II (1214–49) Keith Stringer

53

3 Homo ligius and unfreedom in medieval Scotland Alice Taylor

85

1

4 Scottish royal government in the thirteenth century from an English perspective David Carpenter

117

5 Neighbours, the neighbourhood, and the visnet in Scotland, 1125–1300 Cynthia J. Neville

161

6 Cistercian identities in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Scotland: the case of Melrose Abbey Emilia Jamroziak

175

7 The language of objects: material culture in medieval Scotland Stuart D. Campbell

183

8 Structuring that which cannot be structured: a role for formal models in representing aspects of medieval Scotland John Bradley and Michele Pasin

203

Bibliography

215

Index

237

ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES Table 1.1. Documents by grantor type Table 1.2. Types and numbers of transactions Table 1.3. Minimum and maximum numbers of documents per decade, 1093–1199 Table 1.4. Document types: simplified categories Table 1.5. Locations of place-dates Table 1.6. Documents in the names of abbots, priors, and other monks and canons Table 1.7. Documents in the name of lay grantors Table 1.8. Fifty most frequently attested personal names Table 1.9. Names of New Testament figures Table 1.10. Twenty most frequently attested women’s names Table 4.1. Lucra of the justiciars as found in the 1260s accounts Table 6.1. References to other Cistercian abbeys in the chronicle of Melrose Figure 7.1. Gold annular brooch from Carriden © Crown Copyright Figure 7.2. Typical styles of finger rings, ca 1200 © Crown Copyright Figure 7.3. Harness pendant from Ballumbie, Angus © Crown Copyright Figure 7.4. Enamelled bronze dagger pommel from Doune castle © Crown Copyright Figure 7.5. Seal matrix from Baldovan, Angus, showing a stag © Crown Copyright Figure 7.6. Bronze and gilt belt buckle, from Burghead, Moray © Crown Copyright Figure 7.7. From left to right, a silver pendant cross, a fragment of Limoges-style reliquary, and a harness pendant, all from Dunstaffnage castle © Crown Copyright Figure 7.8. Seal matrix from Dunstaffnage castle with galley © Crown Copyright Figure 8.1. Prosopography of the later Roman empire: Eucherius 4 Figure 8.2. The factoid model of prosopography Figure 8.3. PASE factoid: Guthlac

vi

11 13 17 20 21 25 29 33 39 44 135 179 187 189 193 194 196 197 199 200 205 207 208

CONTRIBUTORS John Bradley is Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities at King’s College London. Stuart D. Campbell is Head of the Treasure Trove Unit at National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh. David Carpenter is Professor of Medieval History at King’s College London. Matthew Hammond was Lead Researcher for the ‘Paradox of Medieval Scotland’ project from 2007 to 2008 and Lecturer in Scottish History at the University of Edinburgh from 2008 to 2011. Emilia Jamroziak is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Leeds. Cynthia J. Neville is George Munro Professor of History, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada. Michele Pasin was Research Associate at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. Keith Stringer is Professor of Medieval British History at Lancaster University. Alice Taylor is Lecturer in Medieval History at King’s College London.

vii

ABBREVIATIONS A. B. Ill. Illustrations of the Topography and Antiquities of the Shires of Aberdeen and Banff, ed. Joseph Robertson, Spalding Club, 4 vols (Aberdeen 1847–69) Abdn. Reg. Registrum Episcopatus Aberdonensis, ed. Cosmo Innes, Spalding and Maitland Clubs, 2 vols (Edinburgh 1845) Add. Additional Ancient Burgh Laws The Ancient Laws and Customs of the Burghs of Scotland, ed. Cosmo Innes, Scottish Burgh Records Society, vol. i (Edinburgh 1868) App. Appendix APS The Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, ed. Thomas Thomson and Cosmo Innes, 12 vols (Edinburgh 1814–75) Arb. Lib. Liber S. Thome de Aberbrothoc, ed. Cosmo Innes and Patrick Chalmers, Bannatyne Club, 2 vols (Edinburgh 1848–56) A. S. Rels Anglo-Scottish Relations, 1174–1328: Some Selected Documents, ed. E. L. G. Stones (Oxford 1970) Balm. Lib. Liber Sancte Marie de Balmorinach, ed. William B. D. D. Turnbull, Abbotsford Club (Edinburgh 1841) BL British Library, London Camb. Reg. Registrum Monasterii S. Marie de Cambusken neth, ed. William Fraser, Grampian Club (Edinburgh 1872) C. A. Chrs Charters of the Abbey of Coupar Angus, ed. D. E. Easson, Scottish History Society, 2 vols (Edinburgh 1947) C. A. Rent. Rental Book of the Cistercian Abbey of Cupar Angus, ed. Charles Rogers, Grampian Club, 2 vols (London 1879–80) CDS Calendar of Documents Relating to Scotland Preserved in Her Majesty’s Public Record Office, London, ed. Joseph Bain, 4 vols (Edinburgh 1881–8); Calendar of Documents Relating to Scotland Preserved in the Public Record Office ix

Abbreviations and the British Library, vol. v, ed. Grant G. Simpson and James D. Galbraith ([Edinburgh] 1986) Chron. Bower Walter Bower, Scotichronicon, ed. D. E. R. Watt et al., 9 vols (Aberdeen and Edinburgh 1987–98) Chron. Fordun Johannis de Fordun, Chronica Gentis Scotorum, ed. W. F. Skene, The Historians of Scotland 1 and 4, 2 vols (Edinburgh 1871) Chron. Holyrood A Scottish Chronicle known as the Chronicle of Holyrood, ed. M. O. Anderson (Edinburgh 1938) Chron. Melrose The Chronicle of Melrose from the Cottonian Manuscript, Faustina B. IX in the British Museum, ed. A. O. Anderson and M. O. Ander son, with an index by W. Croft Dickinson (London 1936) Chron. Melrose (London) The Chronicle of Melrose, trans. J. Stevenson, Church Historians of England, vol. iv (London 1856) Chron. Wyntoun The Original Chronicle of Andrew of Wyntoun, ed. F. J. Amours, Scottish Text Society, 6 vols (Edinburgh 1903–14) Chrs David I The Charters of King David I: The Written Acts of David I King of Scots, 1124–53 and of His Son Henry Earl of Northumberland, 1139–52, ed. G. W. S. Barrow (Woodbridge 1999) Cold. Corr. The Correspondence, Inventories, Account Rolls and Law Proceedings of the Priory of Cold ingham, ed. James Raine, Surtees Society (London 1841) CPR Calendar of the Patent Rolls (London 1891–) CRR Curia Regis Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office Richard I–1250, 20 vols (London and Woodbridge 1922–2006) DLV The Durham Liber Vitae, ed. David Rollason and Lynda Rollason, 3 vols (London 2007) Dryb. Lib. Liber S. Marie de Dryburgh, ed. William Fraser, Bannatyne Club (Edinburgh 1847) Dunf. Reg. Registrum de Dunfermelyn, ed. Cosmo Innes, Bannatyne Club (Edinburgh 1842) ER The Exchequer Rolls of Scotland, ed. John Stuart et al., 23 vols (Edinburgh 1878–1908) ESC Early Scottish Charters prior to 1153, ed. Archibald C. Lawrie (Glasgow 1905) Foedera Foedera, Conventiones, Litterae et Cuiuscunque Generis Acta Publica, ed. Thomas Rymer, Record Commission, 4 vols (London 1816–69) x

Abbreviations Fraser, Douglas William Fraser, The Douglas Book, 4 vols (Edinburgh 1885) Fraser, Lennox William Fraser, The Lennox, 2 vols (Edinburgh 1874) Glanvill Tractatus de legibus consuetudinibus regni Anglie qui Glanvilla vocatur [The Treatise on the Laws and Customs of the Realm of England Commonly Called Glanvill], ed. G. D. G. Hall (London 1965, 1994) Glas. Chrs, ii Charters and Documents Relating to the City of Glasgow 1175–1649: Part 2, ed. James D. Marwick, Scottish Burgh Records Society (Glasgow 1894) Glas. Reg. Registrum Episcopatus Glasguensis, ed. Cosmo Innes, Maitland and Bannatyne Clubs, 2 vols (Glasgow and Edinburgh 1843) H. C. Reg. The Register and Records of Holm Cultram, ed. F. Grainger and W. G. Collingwood, Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, Record Series (Kendal 1929) Holy. Lib. Liber Cartarum Sancte Crucis, ed. Cosmo Innes, Bannatyne Club (Edinburgh 1840) Inchaff. Chrs Charters, Bulls and Other Documents Relating to the Abbey of Inchaffray, ed. William Alexander Lindsay et al., Scottish History Society (Edinburgh 1908) Inchcolm Chrs Charters of the Abbey of Inchcolm, ed. D. E. Easson and A. Macdonald, Scottish History Society (Edinburgh 1938) Kel. Lib. Liber S. Marie de Calchou, ed. Cosmo Innes, Bannatyne Club, 2 vols (Edinburgh 1846) Lind. Cart. Chartulary of the Abbey of Lindores 1195–1479, ed. John Dowden, Scottish History Society (Edinburgh 1903) Macphail, Pluscardyn S. R. Macphail, History of the Religious House of Pluscardyn (Edinburgh 1881) Melr. Lib. Liber Sancte Marie de Melros, ed. Cosmo Innes, Bannatyne Club, 2 vols (Edinburgh 1837) Midl. Chrs Charters of the Hospital of Soltre, of Trinity College, Edinburgh, and other Collegiate Churches in Midlothian, ed. David Laing, Bannatyne Club (Edinburgh 1861) Moray Reg. Registrum Episcopatus Moraviensis, ed. Cosmo Innes, Bannatyne Club (Edinburgh 1837) Newb. Reg. Registrum S. Marie de Neubotle, ed. Cosmo Innes, Bannatyne Club (Edinburgh 1849) xi

Abbreviations North Durham The History and Antiquities of North Durham, ed. James Raine (London 1852) NLS National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh NRS National Records of Scotland (formerly National Archives of Scotland), Edinburgh ODS David Farmer, Oxford Dictionary of Saints, 5th edn (Oxford 2003) Pais. Reg. Registrum Monasterii de Passelet, ed. Cosmo Innes, Maitland Club (Edinburgh 1832) PNF Simon Taylor with Gilbert Márkus, The Place Names of Fife, 5 vols (Donington 2006–12) PoMS ‘The Paradox of Medieval Scotland, 1093–1286’, AHRC project PoMS 2010 Amanda Beam, John Bradley, Dauvit Broun, John Reuben Davies, Matthew Hammond, Michele Pasin (with others), The Paradox of Medieval Scotland, 1093–1286 (Glasgow and London 2010), www. poms.ac.uk [accessed before 23 Aug. 2012] PoMS 2012 Amanda Beam, John Bradley, Dauvit Broun, John Reuben Davies, Matthew Hammond, Michele Pasin (with others), The People of Medieval Scotland, 1093–1314 (Glasgow and London 2012), www. poms.ac.uk [accessed after 23 Aug. 2012] Reg. Brieves The Register of Brieves 1286–1386, ed. T. M. Cooper, Stair Society (Edinburgh 1946) Regiam Maj. Regiam Majestatem and Quoniam Attachiamenta, ed. Lord Cooper, Stair Society (Edinburgh 1947) RMS Registrum Magni Sigilli Regum Scotorum. The Register of the Great Seal of Scotland, ed. John Maitland Thomson et al., 11 vols (Edinburgh 1882–1914; reprinted 1984) Rot. Litt. Pat. Rotuli Litterarum Patentium in Turri Londinensi Asservati, ed. T. D. Hardy, Record Commission (London 1835) RPS The Records of the Parliaments of Scotland to 1707, ed. K. M. Brown et al. (St Andrews 2007–11) (on line at www.rps.ac.uk) RRS, i Regesta Regum Scottorum, vol. i, The Acts of Malcolm IV King of Scots 1153–1165, together with Scottish Royal Acts prior to 1153 not included in Sir Archibald Lawrie’s ‘Early Scottish Charters’, ed. G. W. S. Barrow (Edinburgh 1960) RRS, ii Regesta Regum Scottorum, vol. ii, The Acts of William I King of Scots 1165–1214, ed. G. W. S. Barrow with the collaboration of W. W. Scott (Edinburgh 1971) xii

Abbreviations RRS, v Regesta Regum Scottorum, vol. v, The Acts of Robert I King of Scots 1306–1329, ed. A. A. M. Duncan (Edinburgh 1988) RRS, vi Regesta Regum Scottorum, vol. vi, The Acts of David II, ed. Bruce Webster (Edinburgh 1982) Scone Liber Liber Ecclesie de Scon, ed. William Smythe, Bannatyne Club (Edinburgh 1843) Scot. Pont. Robert Somerville, Scotia Pontificia (Oxford 1982) Select Cases Select Scottish Cases of the Thirteenth Century, ed. Lord Cooper (Edinburgh 1944) Spalding Misc., v Miscellany of the Spalding Club, vol. v, ed. John Stuart (Aberdeen 1852) St A. Lib. Liber Cartarum Prioratus Sancti Andree in Scotia, ed. Thomas Thomson, Bannatyne Club (Edinburgh 1841) Stevenson, Documents Documents Illustrative of the History of Scotland 1286–1306, ed. Joseph Stevenson, 2 vols (Edin burgh 1870) Theiner, Monumenta Vetera Monumenta Hibernorum et Scotorum Historiam Illustrantia, ed. A. Theiner (Rome 1862) TNA The National Archives, Kew, London Watt, Graduates D. E. R. Watt, A Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Graduates to A.D. 1410 (Oxford 1977)

xiii

xiv

xv

1 INTRODUCTION: THE PARADOX OF MEDIEVAL SCOTLAND, 1093–1286

Matthew Hammond

It is not the least of the paradoxes in the history of the British Isles that it was in the kingdom of the Scots – the very area in which the English kingship did not directly impose its military and political power and in which English settlers and institutions were absorbed comfortably into the existing society and polity – that the English language and with it English culture arguably made its greatest and most enduring advances in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.1

It was this quotation from Rees Davies’s masterful The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093–1343 (2000) that first gave voice to the notion of the ‘paradox of medieval Scotland’, a notion which we took as the title of the project that led to this book. Davies was concerned with showing that an expansive socio-cultural and linguistic ‘Anglicisation’ was harnessed by the Anglo-Norman and Angevin kings to establish a ‘first English empire’ across Britain and Ireland in the central middle ages. Tempered by a hard-edged ethnic worldview which cast the Celtic-speaking peoples of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland as backward and uncivilised, this expansion was ultimately the victim of its own paradox,2 resulting in an incomplete conquest and fourteenth-century ‘ebb tide’ which left behind messy bifurcated societies in Wales and Ireland and lingering ethnic prejudice everywhere. Davies described this process of Anglicisation as the British Isles’s experience of the much wider phenomenon of Europeanisation, which Robert Bartlett had recently outlined.3 According to Scotland’s own national historiography, these concepts were not entirely new, and had often travelled under the banner of ‘Normanisation’. The difference in names points to a bigger reality: where the change was overseen by the king of England, we know it as Anglicisation. Where the change was brought by a seemingly amorphous mass of knights, monks, and merchants, it has been called Normanisation.4 Davies, The First English Empire, 157. I would like to thank Dauvit Broun for reading and commenting on this chapter, and Alice Taylor for very helpful conversations on the legal history dimension. 2 Explained in ibid., 201–2. 3 Ibid., 170; Bartlett, The Making of Europe. 4 Hammond, ‘Domination and conquest’. 1

1

Matthew Hammond The king who has always been recognised as the standard-bearer of this change is David I (1124–53). Anyone who has taught first-year Scottish history will attest to the narrative ease, the seductive simplicity, of the story of this younger son of Malcolm III and Margaret who was raised at the English court with a Norman king and brought all his new English and Norman ways up to Scotland – knights, castles, charters, feudalism, monasteries, parishes, burghs, and coins, to name but a few. More than anyone else, Geoffrey Barrow has elucidated our understanding of this era. Despite acknowledging the ‘balance of new and old’ inherent in David I’s reign, Barrow’s chief legacy has been a great emphasis on the ‘Anglo-Norman Era’ as a key turning-point in Scottish history, the point when Norman or European influences left a lasting mark on Scottish society.5 Barrow’s excellent editions of the charters of David I and his grandsons, Malcolm IV (or Máel Coluim, 1153–65) and William I (‘the Lion’, 1165–1214), seem to bolster the almost universally assumed presumption that the twelfth century was the crucial moment in the creation of an independent and unified kingdom.6 More recent research, however, has highlighted the tenuous, even fragile, nature of Scottish kingship under David and his grandsons at the hands of both domestic and external opponents.7 The work of Dauvit Broun in particular has emphasised the extent to which the twelfth-century kingdom was still an assortment of distinct lands under a common monarch. Many of David and his grandson’s changes were directed at the lands which their predecessors had conquered or which they hoped to conquer: Moray, Galloway, Strathclyde, Lothian.8 In the twelfth century, Scottish bishops insisted on independence from English archbishops, resulting eventually in papal protection and the establishment of a national church. The position of the Scottish kings in relation to their English counterparts reached a nadir under Máel Coluim and William, only to rebound in prestige under their successors, Alexander II (1214–49) and Alexander III (1249–86).9 It was in this period that the Scots started composing a national history10 and the inhabitants of the lands south of the Firth of Forth started thinking of themselves as Scots.11 In the light of Davies’s paradox, one wonders whether Scotland ‘gelled’ in the thirteenth century as a result of the spread of the English language and culture, or, in spite of it; or was this a process which was occurring in response to the political aspirations of the English crown?

Barrow, ‘David I of Scotland’; Barrow, The Anglo-Norman Era. Chrs David I; RRS, i; RRS, ii. 7 For example, it is now known that David faced serious opposition in the north until 1134: see Ross, ‘The identity of the “prisoner of Roxburgh”’. Ross has emphasised the significant opposition to David’s grandsons in ‘Moray, Ulster, and the MacWilliams’. 8 A very useful exposition of Broun’s views can be found online in the Broun-penned ‘Explaining the Paradox’ and ‘Historical Introduction’ sections of the website: http://paradox. poms.ac.uk/about/explaining.html and http://paradox.poms.ac.uk/about/introduction. html. 9 Broun, Scottish Independence and the Idea of Britain. For the church, see chapters 4 and 5. For thirteenth-century kings, see chapters 6 and 7. 10 With the work of Richard Vairement, a.k.a. ‘Veremundus’, probably in the 1260s; see ibid., 252–60. 5 6

2

The Paradox of Medieval Scotland 1. The project and the book The reimagining of the role of David I and the relative importance of twelfthcentury phenomena like the spread of ‘feudalism’, viewed together with a concomitant new emphasis on an emergent new Scottish identity in the mid-thirteenth century, give rise to the sense that a thoroughly fresh look at this defining period must now be made. This was the raison d’être of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project which lies behind this book: ‘The Paradox of Medieval Scotland, 1093 to 1286: Social Relationships and Identities before the Wars of Independence’, which ran from September 2007 until August 2010. Headed by Dauvit Broun, Professor of Scottish History at the University of Glasgow, the project involved collaboration with humanities computing experts and academics at King’s College London (KCL), resulting in a publicly available database known colloquially as ‘PoMS’. This companion volume addresses the issues raised by the prosopographical database as well as the broader research questions of the project. Its chapters comprise the majority of the papers delivered at a conference entitled ‘New Perspectives on Scotland before the Wars of Independence’ held at the University of Glasgow on 16 July 2010. The contributions to this volume are indicative of three distinct degrees of involvement in the ‘Paradox’ project. Two of the chapters to follow were contributed by members of the project team based at KCL, namely David Carpenter, expert on thirteenth-century England, offering the comparative perspective with England, John Bradley, whose role in the groundbreaking design of the charter-based database was vital, and Michele Pasin, who spearheaded innovative features for the end user. (Glasgow’s Broun and John Reuben Davies have already made invaluable contributions to a dedicated volume on charters, while the important new work by Gaelic expert Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh will come out in a companion volume on personal names, alongside pieces by Davies and Hammond.12) Most of the remaining chapters in this volume were penned by members of the project’s International Advisory Group, including the editors of the acta of Kings Alexander II (1214–49) and Alexander III (1249–86), respectively, Keith Stringer and Cynthia Neville, in addition to Alice Taylor, editor of the medieval Scottish lawcodes known as Leges Scocie, and Emilia Jamroziak, expert on Cistercian history, including Melrose Abbey and its mother house, Rievaulx. Finally, Stuart Campbell of the Treasure Trove Unit, based at the National Museums of Scotland, represents the interaction of the work of the ‘Paradox’ project with scholars using different methodologies to approach similar questions. The work of the ‘Paradox’ project has continued with the AHRC-funded project, ‘The Breaking of Britain: Cross-Border Society and Scottish Independence 1216–1314’, which has enabled the team to expand the database up to 1314 and continue research into many of the questions central to ‘Paradox’.13

11 12

13

Broun, ‘Becoming Scottish’. Broun, The Reality behind Charter Diplomatic, is available online at paradox.poms.ac.uk/ ebook/. www.breakingofbritain.ac.uk/. 3

Matthew Hammond The chapters in this volume, as well as the other published outputs of the ‘Paradox’ project14 and the PoMS database itself,15 are focused around the set of six themes underpinning our understanding of social identities and relationships: ethnicity, new institutions, status, charters, law and custom, and language.16 The project’s members, especially Broun and Hammond, have discussed the topic of ethnicity elsewhere, and the database’s capacity to illuminate the naming patterns, relationships, and networks underlying ethnic identities will be harnessed in future to further our understanding of this complex issue.17 Our knowledge of linguistic matters, especially the expansion and contraction of Gaelic, will also be enhanced by the database, and Ó Maolalaigh’s groundbreaking work on Gaelic personal names has contributed greatly to the PoMS 2012 database. This introductory chapter lays out some of the issues related to naming traditions which are important for both language and ethnicity, as well as discussing the importance of a third theme, charters, for the structure of the PoMS database and the make-up of the documentary corpus of the central middle ages (a theme which is also touched on by Bradley and Pasin in chapter 8). The majority of this book, however, deals with the questions inherent in the remaining three project themes: status, law and custom, and new institutions. The sweeping social and cultural changes which so deeply affected the Kingdom of the Scots, like so many other kingdoms in medieval Europe, and which have been described as Europeanisation and Anglicisation, perhaps left their most lasting mark on these three areas. In chapter 7, the archaeologist Stuart Campbell offers up a fresh perspective on how status was displayed visually in the central middle ages. Campbell describes the enthusiastic adoption of a new Europe-wide material culture across all boundaries of ethnic and linguistic identity. High-status individuals were anxious to adopt the jewellery and other trappings (such as seal matrices worn on the body) as new ways of expressing their power, and lesser-status people with sufficient resources were equally eager to emulate the powerful through purchasing cheaper alloy ‘knock-offs’; all this was wrapped up in the proliferation of a cash economy. Rather than being necessarily associated with a specific cultural package tied to knighthood, ‘feudalism’, castles, and reform monasteries, Campbell argues, associating oneself with this new material culture indicated ‘membership of a wider and far less specific cultural and intellectual community’.18 At the other end of the social spectrum, Taylor takes on the supposed transition from slavery to serfdom See especially the ‘Features of the Month’ and ‘charter e-book’ available online at http:// paradox.poms.ac.uk/. 15 The PoMS 2010 database has now been superseded by the PoMS 2012 or ‘People of Medieval Scotland 1093–1314’ database, which is available at www.poms.ac.uk. 16 These and other aims of the PoMS project are laid out in detail at http://paradox.poms. ac.uk/about/. 17 Broun, Scottish Independence and the Idea of Britain; Broun, ‘Becoming Scottish’; Hammond, ‘Ethnicity and the writing of medieval Scottish history’; Hammond, ‘Ethnicity, personal names, and the nature of Scottish Europeanization’; Hammond, ‘The use of the name Scot’. Hammond’s forthcoming monograph will examine identities against the backdrop of social networks. 18 Campbell, chapter 7, below, 187. 14

4

The Paradox of Medieval Scotland which was a hallmark trait of this era and has been seen as an effect of new Norman ideas. Instead, Taylor suggests that the personal bonds of dependence between peasants and their lords were likely to have predated the arrival of Anglo-Normans, perhaps by a very long time. Taylor posits a much more dynamic range of relationships between individuals, and, stating that the ties between peasants and lords were expressed in much the same way as the bonds between free people and even aristocrats, concludes that ‘unfreedom was an inherently relational, not absolute, position’. The first major new study on feudalism in Scotland in many years, this contribution, with its assertion that there was no discernable shift from slavery to serfdom in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, leaves a profound impact on our view of how Scottish society functioned and how the ‘new institution’ of ‘feudalism’ may have operated on the ground. Cynthia Neville draws attention to another kind of bond between individuals in medieval Scottish society – the connection of locality or neighbourhood. Charting the adoption and use of the French-derived legal term ‘visnet’ in the documentary evidence, Neville asserts that the practice of relying on the local neighbourhood for legal knowledge was a long-standing one, and thus marks an important and oft-overlooked element of the blending of traditions in thirteenth-century Scotland. None of this is to argue that Europeanisation, in all its forms, did not bring with it genuinely new institutions to the Scottish kingdom. From the twelfth century, reformist monasteries played an important role in the kingdom’s spiritual and economic life. As Emilia Jamroziak argues in chapter 6, communities of monks like the Cistercians of Melrose Abbey balanced their role in the kingdom with their place in the much larger Cistercian order. Through their network of mother, daughter, and sister houses spread across Britain and Ireland, the Melrose monks expressed a nonnational Cistercian identity and maintained their focus on their religious mission. At the same time, however, the monks saw producing bishops for the Scottish church as an important duty of their order. In this project, they worked hand in glove with their patrons the kings of Scots. In building a national church, independent of the suzerainty of Canterbury or York, Scottish bishops like Jocelin of Glasgow, former abbot of Melrose (d. 1199), were (perhaps unwittingly) laying the groundwork for an expansive new ‘Scotland’ with an unprecedented degree of unity, independence, and prestige on the European stage.19 While the Scottish kingship itself was not a new institution, the political community – eventually a full-blown ‘community of the realm’ – which grew up around it in the thirteenth century was a new thing. The reign of Alexander II (1214–49) encompassed a crucial period in this process, as Keith Stringer argues in chapter 2. Stringer’s meticulous work on the charters of Alexander II, now nearing completion, allows him the unique capacity to approach this question properly for the first time. Using nearly 2,000 charter attestations, Stringer notes that household officers account for one-third of this number, forming a core for the political community. Another large group – about 22% – comprised earls and other great provincial lords, and Stringer argues that a new generation of earls, not least the Comyn earls of Buchan, placed much greater emphasis on their connections at the king’s court. Another feature of the Scottish court was the relative prominence of a number of knights of gentry level, including those who did Broun, Scottish Independence and the Idea of Britain, chapters 4 and 5.

19

5

Matthew Hammond not owe homage directly to the king. The degree of access to the king afforded men of this social level is one of the distinguishing characteristics of this new political community, one which drew together the constituent ‘lands’ of the twelfth-century kingdom, from Lothian to Strathclyde to Alba/Scotia to Dumfriesshire, and developed a new, chiefly lay-dominated, forum for networks to emerge on a ‘national’ level. While we are still some distance from the self-defining ‘community of the realm’ of the late thirteenth century replete with parliamentary assemblies, there had nevertheless developed by and during the reign of Alexander II a ‘broad-based political club’ in which the king’s more loose-limbed brand of power (as compared to England) seems to have been the primary contributing factor to what Stringer terms a ‘a greater degree of unity and consensus’ in the kingdom. In chapter 4, David Carpenter approaches the same process – the development of a national community and identity, based around the king – from a different angle. Carpenter argues that the intensification and expansion of Scottish national identity in the thirteenth century was bolstered by the likelihood that the burdens of royal government on landholders in Scotland were substantially lighter and less intrusive than in England. Carpenter notes that while Scottish royal government had many of the same administrative offices as its English counterpart, there were major differences in the way they operated, with the scope of Scottish officials like sheriffs much more limited. Moreover, Carpenter breaks from the conventional wisdom on the adoption and use of common law procedures like novel disseisin (or dissasine), arguing that its use was very limited despite its availability from 1230, and that heavy penalties for unsuccessful prosecution meant that in practice only the very wealthy could afford to instigate such a procedure. While all this meant the Scots king had less power to raise revenue and enforce justice, it also allowed for a loose-limbed kind of polity which engendered a degree of unity within the political and social community that was not evident in England. As far as a national identity based on the king is concerned, Scotland had the best of both worlds – a king with enough power and prestige to provide a focal point for unity and identity, but with power sufficiently devolved to allow the aristocracy and gentry the kind of freedom they did not have south of the border. While all the chapters in this book reveal new perspectives on Scotland in the central middle ages, the larger work of the ‘Paradox’ project, especially the prosopographical database, emphasises the broad range of opportunities for pushing our knowledge further on all the project themes mentioned above, as well as on many others. 2. Methodologies: prosopography, charters, and a database New technologies afford scholars unprecedented opportunities which aid us greatly in our quest for a fresh look at the kingdom of the Scots. Indeed, the advent of digital methodology that underpins PoMS, of which the technical director John Bradley was a major driving force, has been termed ‘new-style prosopography’, and has been praised for allowing ‘qualitative and quantitative approaches’ to

6

The Paradox of Medieval Scotland ‘co-exist harmoniously’.20 The development of a new model of publicly funded, freely available, digital online resources by the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (now Department of Digital Humanities), together with the design of sophisticated yet accessible programming structures for such forerunners as PASE and PBW, rendered possible for the first time the construction of a resource that held the whole Scottish kingdom within its purview.21 Comprising 15,221 persons and institutions22 drawn from 6,014 documents, the PoMS 2010 database (now subsumed into PoMS 2012) is an exhaustive collection of evidence from administrative sources touching on persons, possessions, and privileges in the Scottish kingdom between the death of Malcolm III in 1093 and the death of Alexander III in 1286. (The borders of the kingdom were those in effect on 19 March 1286: they include the Isle of Man but not Orkney or Shetland.) The prosopographical methodology is uniquely suited to addressing the themes of the ‘Paradox’ project: the arrival of new institutions and changes in social status can be explicitly charted and studied because the structural design of the database specifically integrates these things; changes in ethnic identity and language are more malleable concepts, but a database of this type provides an excellent resource for the study of onomastics which is so important for those subjects.23 The remaining two themes, charters and law and custom, have not in the past been intricately interwoven with prosopography. The PoMS database, however, has several sui generis features which make it uniquely suited to the study of these topics. Finally, the database emphasises the connections between individuals: over 15,000 relationship factoids broken down among more than 150 distinct relationship types make it fertile ground for the emergent discipline of social network analysis. PoMS 2010 was the first online prosopographical database to comprise exclusively and exhaustively the corpus of administrative documents of a European kingdom in the central middle ages. The decision to build a database consisting entirely of charters and similar document types was in some ways forced upon us by necessity; compared to England or France, the surviving body of narrative sources such as annalistic chronicles and histories, saints’ lives, and liturgical texts from pre-Wars of Independence Scotland is paltry. By comparison, the corpus of 6,014 charters and similar records from before the death of King Alexander III in 1286 represents the most vital resource for the study of the period. The PoMS database occupies new ground between traditional large-scale prosopographies, which incorporate data from a broad range of evidence types (for example, PBW, PASE), and databases that are primarily concerned with charters, such as the central 20 21 22

23

Keats-Rohan, ‘Introduction: chameleon or chimera?’, 13–14. www.pase.ac.uk; http://blog.pbw.cch.kcl.ac.uk/. There are 14,642 named persons, 84 ‘generic persons’, and 495 institutions in the PoMS 2010 database. We have avoided explicitly defining the ethnic identities of individuals in the PoMS 2010 database, as this becomes increasingly unwise during this period when many persons were descended from individuals of multiple ethnolinguistic backgrounds within the same family, or may have spoken a different language than their predecessors due to cultural shifts, or were able to successfully balance two or more ethnic identities as required. Cf. Keats-Rohan, Domesday Descendants, 7. 7

Matthew Hammond European database of digital images, Monasterium,24 or the French online database of cartularies, CartulR.25 The database is fundamentally a prosopographical database, whose structure is built on the ‘factoid model’ utilised for PASE, as explained in chapter 8 below. However, its structure has been specially modified to reflect many of the specific characteristics of charters as text. Therefore, while it does not include texts or translations of the charters themselves, and should not be used as a substitute for the text, it is possible to search the PoMS database for many of the features of charter texts that interest scholars. Thus, while its primary focus is people, it is also a guide to the sources. David Bates argued as long ago as 1995 that ‘the prosopographical analysis of charters must take into account the diplomatic of the documents under discussion and the social structure which produced them’.26 Not all charter attestations are created equal, he argued. In the context of prosopographical databases, this means that every incident of a person ‘appearing’ in a document should not be treated in the same way. As Bates elaborated in 2005, ‘both the type and form of a document and the relationship between content and witnessing must be taken into account’.27 The nature of an attestation can vary greatly depending on whether the document is a charter, brieve, memorandum, letter patent, inquest, etc., so document type must always be considered. The PoMS database records the type and language of the document, its dates of time and place, as well as whether or not the document is a contemporary original, whether the document was witnessed only by the grantor or addressor (‘teste me ipso’), and whether the sole surviving cartulary copy failed to record witnesses who had originally been listed in the single sheet.28 Perhaps the core feature of the PoMS database, however, is that attestations by persons in the sources always appear in the context of that person’s ‘role’. The most commonly occurring roles, as one might expect in a database built out of charters, are ‘grantor’, ‘beneficiary’, and ‘witness’, although charters recording donations, confirmations, and similar transactions also contain people in other roles, such as persons mentioned in pro anima clauses (we distinguish between five types of these), ‘consentor’, ‘sealer’, ‘neighbouring landholder’, ‘previous landholder’, and so forth. Other document types tend to give us different roles: letters and brieves have addressors and addressees rather than grantors and beneficiaries, agreements have ‘Party 1’ and ‘Party 2’, other document types give us ‘judges’, ‘jurors’, ‘performers’ (of homage), ‘perambulators’, ‘pledges’, etc., and these are just a sampling of the most common roles. PoMS also places a strong emphasis on the relationships which are at the heart of the research questions about how society functioned in the central middle ages. Relationship factoids in the database fall into three broad categories: family, employment, and tenure and lordship. In addition to the roles and relationships which highlight the connections between people and the context of their actions on the ground, the PoMS database www.monasterium.net/. www.cn-telma.fr/cartulR/index/. 26 Bates, ‘The prosopographical study of Anglo-Norman royal charters’, 89. 27 Bates, ‘Charters and historians’, 10. 28 These can be searched in the ‘Source Features’ and ‘Transaction Features’ sections of the ‘Browse’ search facility. 24 25

8

The Paradox of Medieval Scotland records with a high degree of specificity the features of charter diplomatic which will allow users to put meat on the bones of their research into the context and function of the sources themselves. Users can search many of these features in the ‘Terms of Tenure’ facet of the ‘Browse’ search facility. The data drawn from these elements of the charter diplomatic illuminate the nature of the tenurial relationships between individuals, especially when it comes to landholding – for example, whether they held the land ‘for homage and service’, ‘in feu and heritage’, ‘for their own uses’, ‘in free alms’, or ‘in free marriage’, or if they had exemptions from rents and burdens. Users can also search the kinds of returns, whether in kind, in money, or in nominal renders such as gloves or spices, which were involved in tenurial relationships, as well as the (often significant) dates on which these renders were due. We also note rights of legal courts held by many in Scottish society, such as ‘sake and soke’, ‘infangthief’, and ordeal pit and gallows. Finally, common burdens due by landholders, such as aids, works, and army service, which Alice Taylor has done much to illuminate, are searchable in PoMS.29 As well as providing the greatest level of searchability of charter features in a prosopographical database, these special diplomatic features will facilitate new research into the ‘Paradox’ project’s ‘law and custom’ theme. Readers may be wondering at this point whether charters and similar sources are reliable enough witnesses to events in the past to build this kind of database, regardless of how sophisticated the mechanisms for reflecting the nuances of the documents. After all, as Bates noted, ‘almost no document can be taken as describing fully the context which brought it into existence’.30 Indeed, scholars should keep the same salutary advice in the back of their minds when using a database like PoMS as they would when examining original documents or translated texts. Nicholas Vincent has drawn attention to the likelihood that charter witness-lists almost never give a complete picture of attendance at the royal court, and users should be aware that witness-lists should not be taken as an exhaustive guide to any given social context.31 Indeed Vincent’s specific points, which come from comparison of administrative documents with narrative sources, clearly hold true for Scotland as well: Aelred of Rievaulx held an important position in King David I’s court, yet he does not appear as a witness to any surviving royal charter text.32 This is not the same thing, however, as claiming that charters and witness-lists do not reflect some kind of real event that took place. Scholars have long posed questions about the reliability of witness-lists as indicators of people actually being present together at the same place and time, and Geoffrey Barrow has pointed out the problems inherent in ‘composite charters’ which cobble together records of previous transactions along with some new event, carrying along at times witnesses taken from more than 29 30 31 32

Taylor, ‘Common burdens in the regnum Scottorum’. Bates, ‘Charters and historians’, 10. Vincent, ‘The court of Henry II’, 284–7. PoMS, no. 2566 (http://db.poms.ac.uk/record/person/2566/) (note that all PoMS records in this chapter were accessed 13 Nov. 2012); Bell, ‘Ailred of Rievaulx’, see www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/8916, accessed 28 Oct. 2012. It should be noted that fewer documents survive from the first period of David’s reign, when Ailred was part of the household. 9

Matthew Hammond one context, even if some of the witnesses were dead by then.33 But these composite charters (which often seem to relate to monastic houses several years after their initial founding, when the houses sought to consolidate gains) are the exception and their different stages can be unpacked. Even Barrow admitted that ‘it was perhaps not invariable that such a person actually saw and heard the transaction which he was called upon to witness, although there would be little point in naming as witness someone who was not only absent but in complete ignorance of what was being transacted’.34 In other words, witness-lists were not created out of whole cloth, and charter attestation involved a legal responsibility. Witnesses might be called upon years later to recall these events. Dauvit Broun’s recent analysis of surviving letters to absent witnesses suggests that ‘the presence of witnesses was acknowledged as the norm; it was only when witnesses could not be brought together for the occasion that a letter to them might be written’.35 In unusual circumstances, when a particular witness was desired but was unable to be there on the day, some attempt might be made to contact him to have him added as a witness. Letters were sometimes employed, perhaps especially by Cistercian monasteries. Broun has also drawn attention to the two-staged process whereby scribes sometimes composed the body of the charter in advance of the event, then added the witnesses later, presumably to ensure it better reflected who actually turned up.36 Broun’s analysis reassures those with a ‘nagging anxiety about the presence of witnesses at the making of private deeds’ with ‘indications that exceptions were rare, and were confined to abnormal circumstances’.37 3. The classification of documents Two new schemes relating to the classification of documents have been developed under the auspices of the ‘Paradox’ project: one is a method for organising and numbering all of the texts within the corpus of over 6,000 administrative documents; the other is a new way of understanding the types of documents based on their contemporary meaning and purpose. Matthew Hammond’s system for numbering all pre-1286 administrative documents is in some ways similar to that developed for Anglo-Saxon charters by Peter Sawyer, and the project has begun the habit of referring to these as ‘H-numbers’.38 The chief difference from Sawyer numbers, apart from there being many more documents in the (later) Scottish corpus, is that the unique numbers in the ‘People of Medieval Scotland, 1093–1314’ database are made up of three parts, which allow researchers to identify immediately certain characteristics of the document. As with the Sawyer system, H-numbers are Barrow, ‘Witnesses and the attestation of formal documents’, 2–4. Barrow draws attention particularly to charters of David I for the abbeys of Melrose and Holyrood; see now Chrs David I, nos 120, 147. 34 Barrow, ‘Witnesses and the attestation of formal documents’, 14. 35 Broun, ‘The presence of witnesses’, 246. 36 Ibid., 258–65. 37 Ibid., 270. 38 Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters; see also now ‘The Electronic Sawyer’: www.esawyer. org.uk. 33

10

The Paradox of Medieval Scotland categorised according to the grantor, author, or principal parties of the document. The first part of the tripartite number identifies the general class of grantor, and these correspond to the volume numbers of a forthcoming calendar of Scottish documents to stand alongside the database.39 Documents beginning in H1/ are royal, those starting with H2/ are ecclesiastical, while H3/ documents are private charters and letters, and H4/ indicates two-sided documents such as agreements, as well as documents relating to legal cases, such as sentences, settlements, and inquests (Table 1.1). The second part of the three-part ‘H-number’ is the series within that volume, such as the documents of the bishops of St Andrews or the earls of Lennox. The third number is the unique number of a document within that series. These series are listed in detail on the PoMS website.40 Table 1.1. Documents by grantor type Category

H-number Documents Percentage

Royal Ecclesiastical Private Agreements, inquests, etc.

1/ 2/ 3/ 4/

1339 1900 2362 415

22% 32% 39% 7%

Perhaps the most significant contribution of the project to charter studies in Scotland has been made by John Reuben Davies, whose scheme introduces a new clarity to the way we talk about charters. In the past, most charters have been described as ‘grants’ and ‘confirmations’; it is now clear that these terms are too vague in two senses. First, a term like ‘grant’ has been used to refer to both the event which has transpired – the alienation of property or conferring of privileges – as well as the document itself which recorded that transaction, as summed up in a statement like ‘Robert de Brus had a grant from David I for Annandale’. Second, terms like ‘grant’ and ‘confirmation’ have been used in ways that describe a number of different scenarios on the ground; for example, a ‘confirmation’ traditionally could refer to either a superior lord’s (often the king’s) sanctioning of a gift made by someone in his allegiance, or, alternatively, to the generational renewal of a gift made by the heir of the original grantor. The database incorporates a number of changes to introduce consistency and better reflect the contemporary context of the production and use of the document. A clear distinction has been drawn between the form of the document, based on its diplomatic, and the events which are transacted (or attempting to be transacted) in the document. Based on Richard Sharpe’s classification of Anglo-Norman charters, Davies has applied a more precise system for describing the transactions in Scottish charters, according to the way dispositive 39

40

It is hoped to release in the first instance a basic handlist of the pre-1286 corpus. Funding permitting, an online version of this first draft of the calendar will enable users to organise the documents according to archive, document type, and other characteristics. Furthermore, it will provide the framework for incorporating recent and future work on composite, forgeries, and other difficult charters. www.poms.ac.uk/information/numbering-system-for-documents/. 11

Matthew Hammond verbs are employed in the charter diplomatic. Davies tests his observations against a number of Scottish charter examples in his chapter on ‘The donor and the duty of warrandice’ in the project’s charter e-book, and suggests that inclusion of the Latin verb dare (‘to give’) carried an implied duty of warrandice (or warranty), a legal burden which the verb concedere (‘to grant, concede’) did not necessarily indicate.41 Implicit within what has been traditionally called a ‘grant’ are a number of new transaction types – a ‘gift’ (of property) with warrandice implied on the part of the donor (use of dare or donare), a ‘grant of property’ in which that level of commitment was not claimed or placed upon the grantor (use of concedere), or indeed the ‘concession’ of incorporeal privileges (usually indicated by concedere). The relevant verb in what have conventionally been called ‘confirmations’ is not confirmare (‘to establish, to make firm’), which serves to emphasise the ability of the physical document to establish the terms of the text, but rather concedere: someone other than the ‘original’ donor or grantor is now conceding or granting that this transaction may take place or continue.42 Davies has defined a ‘confirmation’ much more precisely as ‘the licensing by a lord of a gift of land made by a tenant’; using similar diplomatic language but quite distinct in terms of context and purpose are the ‘renewal’ (‘the reaffirmation to a tenant of his holding land as under the lord’s predecessor’) and the ‘succession’ (‘the gift to a tenant’s heir, by his lord, of succession to land as held by his antecessor’). Making the distinction between document type and transaction type was the key step in creating a database model which could allow for multiple transactions – both present and past – within a single document. This allows the database to reflect that grantors were sometimes responsible for more than one action within a single charter; for example, some charters contain renewals by an heir of the gifts of his predecessors, plus additional new gifts made by that heir. In total, the PoMS 2010 database to 1286 includes 14,112 transactions from 6,014 documents, an average of 2.35 transactions per document. Many documents have only one transaction, whereas general royal and papal confirmations and renewals of a religious house’s possessions may routinely include twenty or more. Transactions such as gifts, confirmations, renewals, quitclaims, sales, and successions are more likely to appear in the charter document form, and others, such as commands or instructions, are more likely to appear in brieves; however, as a rule, the transaction type is not defined by the document form. Other transaction types are most likely to appear in twosided documents (chirographs), letters, or memoranda. The table of the majority of transactions is reflective of the predominance of charters (as opposed to diplomas, brieves, letters patent and close, etc.) in the PoMS 2010 corpus. Nearly a quarter of transactions are gifts,44 and the total number of gifts, grants, concessions,

Davies, ‘The donor and the duty of warrandice’, 120–65. Barrow suggests the translation ‘to establish’, ‘The Scots charter’, at 95. 43 Davies, ‘The donor and the duty of warrandice’, 122–3. 44 Including 254 gifts within agreements, which constitute 1.8% of all transactions, or 7.4% of all gifts. 41 42

12

The Paradox of Medieval Scotland confirmations, renewals, successions (all of which would have formerly been described as ‘grants’ or ‘confirmations’) as well as sales, leases, resignations, and quitclaims, not including those which occur in the text of agreements, is 7,665, or 54% of all transactions. Moreover, the lion’s share of these involve the Church; the small number of successions is a testament to the paucity of the kind of lay archives which would preserve charters recording the relationship of lord and tenant reflected in the succession of lay landholdings (Table 1.2). Table 1.2. Types and numbers of transactions Type

Number Percentage

Giftsa Grants of property (without dare) Concessions Confirmations Renewals Successions Sales Quitclaims/ Resignations Leases Obligations (Bonds) Agreements Settlements Commands/Instructions Statements/Notifications Inquests/Recognitions Requests/Petitions Appointments Correspondence Inspections of documents Receipts Othersb

3429 440 685 1232 701 135 353 1282 91 226 921 454 877 823 500 361 419 219 125 100 739

Total

14112

24% 3.1% 5% 9% 5% 1% 2.5% 9%