Royal and Lordly Residence in Scotlandc1050 toc1250: an Historiographical Review and Critical Revision

Abstract

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...

A new chronology for crannogs in north-east Scotland

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