One of the central themes in the traditional historiography of medieval Scotland is that in parallel with the emergence from the late 1000s of an identifiable noble stratum comparable to the aristocratic hierarchies of Norman England and Frankish Europe there was an attendant development of new forms in the physical expression of lordship. The exercise of lordly power was, it is argued, reinforced through the formalising of lord-dependent relations in a suitable "arena where social relations are negotiated".2 What the formalising of lordship relations meant in physical terms, however, remains largely a matter of conjecture, for, powerfully presented though the argument has been, current knowledge of the character and composition of centres of secular power in ninth-to twelfth-century Scotland, when a novel expression of lordly power -the castle -was apparently imported as part of the cultural baggage of colonists from England and Frankish Europe, remains too fragmentary to provide substantive support to sustain it. For the period after c.1100, furthermore, the focus has fixed primarily upon the emergence of the castle as the principal architectural manifestation of lordly power to the neglect of possible continuity in indigenous traditions in some areas. In large part, this imbalance has resulted from the dearth of easily datable architectural remains from the period 1050-1150 from which to establish the character of native high status residences, and the paucity of archaeological excavation at all but some of the highest status Early Historic period sites. Castle studies in Scotland, moreover, despite a considerable output of publications which stress the longevity of timber and earthwork construction, 3 has continued to be dominated by a methodology grounded in a chronologically ordered sequence of development from motte and bailey forms, through stone-built enclosures to tower-houses of increasingly complex design, a scheme originally devised for Scotland in the late nineteenth century founded on analogous comparison principally with England and northern France. 4 It is the aim of this paper to review the evidence for centres of royal and lordly 1 I am grateful to Dr Oliver Creighton, Dr Kieran O"Conor and Mr Geoffrey Stell for all their generous and invaluable advice and comments on earlier drafts of this article. 2 Driscoll 1998, 34. 3 See, for example, Haggarty and Tabraham 1982; Oram 2000, 228-229. 4 This framework bears close comparison with that reviewed in Coulson 1996 for England, where a "military architecture" paradigm which was founded principally upon inappropriate analogy with northern mainland European experience, retrospective projection of post-medieval military power in Scotland from the mid-eleventh to mid-thirteenth century, identify the principal cultural traditions in building design, and to offer a critique of some of the traditional interpretative models. It is important to stress at the outset how little work at any level, archaeological or historical, has been undertaken on Scott...
Informing historical and archaeological discourse with environmental data culled from documentary and climate proxy records is transforming understanding of political, social economic and cultural change across the North Atlantic and European Atlantic regions generally. Limited record evidence and region-specific proxy data has hindered engagement by historians of medieval Scotland with the exploration of environmental factors as motors for long term and large scale change and adoption of the interdisciplinary methodologies involved in their use. This paper seeks to provide an overview of the potential for such data and methodologies in providing context for the well-rehearsed narratives of political upheaval and socio-economic realignment that have characterised much past Scottish historical discourse.
The great majority of Scottish parish churches owe their present appearance to reconstructions carried out from the later eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. It was the view of the authors of this paper, however, that in many cases those reconstructions had been relatively superficial, and that medieval work might have survived under what could, in some cases, be little more than a modern veneer. To test this view, a survey was carried out of all medieval parish sites within the dioceses of Dunblane and Dunkeld. The findings from that survey are summarized in this paper.The loss of medieval parish churches in Scotland has been so great that there is a widely held view that too few survive for a detailed understanding of pre-Reformation parochial architecture to be reached. In a paper published in 1939, for example, it could be suggested that there were no more than about sixty substantially medieval churches in the whole of Scotland that were still in use for worship.1 As a result of our work in a number of areas of Scotland, however, the authors of this paper have come to the view that a higher proportion of the existing stock of parochial churches than might appear either embodies medieval fabric or has been closely governed by medieval predecessors.2 It is also our view that more of the abandoned churches for which structural remains survive are likely to be of medieval date than is generally assumed. Here it should be remembered that the economic situation of the Church in the aftermath of the Reformation meant there was initially little alternative to retaining the majority of medieval parish churches with little change, 3 and it was only once the fortunes of the Church began to improve that it became possible to consider the general provision of more suitable buildings. The question should be asked how those more suitable buildings were created.To test these views it was determined that a critical analysis should be undertaken of the fabric and parochial history of all churches and church sites that served parishes of 1. Anderson 1938-9. 2. The detailed results of this project are presented on a website at ,http://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/ corpusofscottishchurches.; this paper is based on the conclusions set out in the introductory sections of that website. The website should be consulted for fuller architectural and historical accounts of all of the churches. 3. Howard 1995, 177-88.
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