Every generation or so a book is produced that is truly transformative of our understanding of the historical processes that led to evolutionary step changes in the development of a culture or polity. Such is the status of Alice Taylor’s magisterial study of the formation of the medieval Scottish state. Over the last two decades, a raft of new research has built on—and in some instances overturned—the pioneering, charter-based scholarship of the post-1945 generation of Scottish academic historians, led by the late Geoffrey Barrow and by Archie Duncan. It has cast new light on the political development of the kingdom, its territorial expansion, and on the power relationships that gave coherence and cohesion to counterbalance the fissile conditions created by the challenging topography and cultural diversity of the land and its people. Taylor has been a major contributor to this new historiography over the last decade, producing a suite of probing studies into the nature of royal power in Scotland; the fiscal foundations of statehood, bonds, burdens, and obligations that defined social relationships; and the legislative framework and tribunal structures that regulated interactions and underpinned the spread of royal authority. In this volume, she brings together that research to produce what is a systematic deconstruction of the traditional narratives accompanied by a convincing reassessment of the primary sources as the underpinning to an equally systematic exposition of a new prescription.

Building on her own research and the groundbreaking contributions made by Dauvit Broun and his colleagues at Glasgow University to this new historiography, Taylor has toppled several shibboleths that have long dominated understanding of the exercise of power in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Scottish state. Central to her argument is a comprehensive reevaluation of the evidence for the nature of the hierarchical relationships outlined in the series of “life-values” preserved in the tract known as Leges inter Brettos et Scotos. Teasing out the evidence, she has built a convincing model for a flatter structure in which the mormaer is stripped of lingering nineteenth-century notions of derogated tribal kingship with province-wide jurisdictional, fiscal, and military leadership powers and repackaged as holder of the highest socio-legal rank among a provincial community headed by other men of high social capital. From that vantage point she conceptualizes the territorialization of the mormaers’ powers in the landed holding that they possessed within the wider province—what became the comitatus of an earl—and the transformative agency of such territorialization on the operation of the interpersonal socio-legal bonds that supported power relationships from the highest to lowest social ranks. Here in the dynamic between central and local actors rather than in the institutionalization and bureaucratization of royal government, it is argued, occurred the fundamental switch that triggered the development of the political codependency between the nobility, administrative institutions, and Crown that characterized the later medieval Scottish state and distinguished its functionality from that of its southern neighbor. Having thus recalibrated the established trend in the historiography of Scottish state formation, Taylor throws down the challenge to her peers to consider how the structures she has posited affected the political dynamics and wider socioeconomic behavior of all ranks within the kingdom.

By suggesting that historians change their fundamental approach to understanding the working of the state—away from notions of centralizing kings in conflict with nobles’ private interests and toward recognition of the necessary codependency of these actors—Taylor has laid the foundations for a revision of the history of Scotland’s medieval development as revolutionary as that envisioned by Geoffrey Barrow half a century ago. Debate there will be, for in a study as broad ranging as this there are evident elisions and leaps of faith begging interrogation and critical development. This is especially true of the discussion of the extension of royal fiscal rights beyond the kingdom’s core and how they were accommodated into the legitimate coercive apparatus of lordship in polities with different socio-legal structures. Through Alice Taylor’s scholarship we have been presented with a new historiographical horizon; now we need to populate the new landscape with the detail of the new world beyond it.