This book offers a fresh perspective on the question of Scotland's relationship with Britain. It challenges the standard concept of the Scots as an ancient nation whose British identity only emerged ...in the early modern era.
Discussions of medieval statehood are guided (explicitly or implicitly) by the work of social scientists. The exiguous sources for studying Scotland in the central middle ages offers an opportunity ...to approach the question of statehood in a new way that depends more on the creative potential of arts and humanities. Social sciences remain crucial for understanding statehood. Instead of being guided by them during the research, however, the medieval material can itself become the basis for a dialogue with formulations of statehood by social scientists, or by historians drawing on social science. The focus is on 'Scotland' (the country between the Forth and the Spey), examining the basis of secular authority in local lordship, and how this underpinned the mobilisation of society for the sake of safeguarding its peace and security. This includes a consideration of the power of lordly kindreds, the lands assigned to the offices of
mormaer
and king, and the changing relationship of lords to individual settlements, and how this could underlie the transition from
pett
to
baile
in place names
c
.1100. As a result, a fresh view is taken on the antecedents of earldoms and the nature of shires, and on the role of the
mormaer
.
This paper describes several aspects of a formal digital semantic model that expresses some issues presented by medieval charters. Surprisingly, perhaps, this model does not deal directly with a ...charter's text and is not mark-up based. Instead, it draws on the authors’ experience with the construction of three highly structured factoid-oriented prosopographical databases that drew heavily on charter sources, and that also did not explicitly contain a digital representation of the charter texts. The paper explains the way in which the structured data model thus derived differs from text-oriented approaches such as TEI/CEI work that has been done so far on charters. It presents a view on why this factoid-based model seems to capture more readily some of the complexity in the apparent meanings of the charters, and suggests that this is because it is also more likely to relate to a richer conception of the broader medieval world in which these charters were created than text-oriented work does. Finally, drawing on recent work on the ChartEx project, it explores how a combined approach, that takes the best of both text-markup and structured data modelling techniques, could evolve in the future.
This book examines the power of the past upon the present. It shows how generations of Scots have exploited and reshaped history to meet the needs of a series of presents, from the conquest of the ...Picts to the refounding of Parliament.
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