Alice Taylor, The Shape of the State in Medieval Scotland, 1124–1290
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2017.0429 |
| Date | 01 May 2017 |
| Author | Hector L MacQueen |
| Pages | 310-315 |
| Published date | 01 May 2017 |
It should straightaway be said that this book is the most significant contribution in half a century to a general understanding of the development of government in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Scotland. No-one with a serious interest in any aspect of the subject will be able to neglect it. A very important part of it is concerned with the law of the period in its substance as well as its judicial institutions and court procedures. This review will focus most on that aspect of the book. A much fuller (and very helpful) discussion can be found in Dr Andrew Simpson's review article published in (2016) 4(2)
My focus will be Chapters 3 to 5. It is however necessary to start by summarising Dr Taylor's method and her general conclusions. Her approach to the scattered and relatively scanty sources that survive from her chosen period is, as rigorously as possible, not to read earlier evidence in the light of later or comparative material. Rather she seeks to understand it first in its own terms and not to go beyond what that shows for the source's own point in time without good reason to do so being first established. By this means she pursues a much sharper chronology for the (long generally accepted) intensification of Scottish royal government in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This then becomes the platform for her more general analysis. The argument is that the twelfth century saw a gradual territorialisation of power in the kingdom of the Scots, with jurisdiction in particular ceasing to be based primarily on kinship relations and instead being defined by links to defined units of land. Her overall thesis is that in government royal authority worked in a symbiotic relationship with aristocratic power: “While the king's governmental structure was based on aristocrats and their landed power, aristocratic landed and jurisdictional power was based on royal authority” (455). In the period under review, there was “a dynamic relationship” (455), in which royal and aristocratic power developed and changed together. It is thus contended that twelfth- and thirteenth-century Scottish government was throughout quite distinct from its English counterpart, and that developments in Scotland are not to be seen as a process of “Anglicisation” or imitations of what was happening south of the border. More generally still, the concept of the medieval “state” needs to be re-thought, not as the growth of public power (represented by the king and his officials) at the expense of private aristocratic power, but as embracing both. “In Scotland, aristocratic power was not separate from the state” (454).
Chapter 3 (entitled “Written Law and the Maintenance of Order, 1124–1230”) builds on Dr Taylor's previously published and very impressive recovery work on written laws attributable to David I (reigned 1124–1153), William I (1165–1214) and Alexander II (1215–1249). The chapter offers much penetrating new insight on criminal law processes, the justice of the feud, and compensation systems for wrongs. Dr Taylor also sees a critical change in written law during this period: from the declarations of what she calls “legal specialists” (the
All this leads Dr Taylor to criticise Alan Harding's argument (published in 1966) that grants of the king's peace and protection were the most important elements in legal development in twelfth-century Scotland. “For Harding, because the king's peace was inherent in
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