While key aspects of her argument have been explored in a series of articles published over the last decade, Alice Taylor's The Shape of the State in Medieval Scotland, 1124–1290 is the first book to take a close look at the emergence of the medieval Scottish state and government across the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

At its core, Taylor's aim in this book is to circumvent the paucity of surviving medieval Scottish government records by turning to the corpus of surviving legal material—an area where few historians of medieval Scotland have either dared or cared to tread—and utilizing wider context from across medieval Europe. Taylor puts her three main points into the context of Scotland's rule by just one dynasty between 1124 and 1290: First, that King David I (1124–53) was not fully responsible for introducing a governmental structure slavishly followed by his successors. Second, that the much loved “Anglo-Norman Era” needs to be divorced from current understanding about the development of royal government in Scotland. And, third, that while government in medieval Scotland may have been in part inspired by the equivalent English experience, it was significantly adapted for local usage.

In the words of Taylor, this is a book of two halves. In the first, consisting of three chapters, “The Early Scottish State?,” “Common Burdens in the Regnum Scottorum,” and “Written Law and the Maintenance of Order, 1124–1230,” she takes the reader from 1124 to 1230 and discusses different aspects of royal power. In her introduction to this first section Taylor also takes time to define the geography of Scotia. This is important because it adds to the dramatic tension when the author later moves on to discuss the expansion of Scottish government, providing the reader with some sense of the sheer scale of the task faced by the royal dynasty descended from King David I. For Taylor, this period saw major changes to the definition of aristocratic power via territorialization and in the discharge and levying of (some) common burdens, both taking place over a longer period of time than is sometimes realized.

The second (and longer) half contains four chapters, running from 1190 to 1290: “The Institutions of Royal Government, c.1170–1290”; “The Development of Common Law, 1230–1290”; “Accounting and Revenue, c.1180–1290,” and “A Bureaucratic Government?” The first of these chapters is one of the most interesting (at least for this reader) because it examines changing institutions via three offices: the sheriff (local government and administration), the justiciar (developments in royal justice), and the chamberlain (managing a king's income and expenditure). The other chapter in this section that deserves attention is that about accounting and finance. Here, Taylor's writing is clear and logical and, at least for this reviewer, reinforced the wider arguments she had made up to that point.

The final chapter, “The Shape of the State in Medieval Scotland, 1124–1290,” although the book's shortest, is crucial to reinforcing and bringing together everything that came before. In it, moreover, Taylor describes her vision for reimagining the changing government of medieval Scotland during the period, together with the casualties who fell by the wayside.

Taylor concludes with a useful two-part appendix. The first section provides an informative narrative about the early laws of Scotland, the recovery of which is largely down to Taylor. The second, an illustrative table, helpfully summarizes the previous narrative in tabular form.

The publication has been well served by Oxford University Press and is presented in an attractive format with footnotes, though it would have benefited from more illustrative materials (there are only four maps) for readers unfamiliar with the regional minutiae of medieval Scotland.

All told, this is an impressive book. It should appeal to many historians of different hues, ranging from those interested in high politics to legal experts. It also raises a number of new and hugely interesting questions that will occupy us for some time to come. There will be dissenters who do not agree with everything Taylor has proposed—that is inevitable given the nature of the evidence. But with this book Taylor simultaneously raises the bar and provides a new baseline for future discussions. It is a big step forward in our understanding of the surviving legal material, and I can award Taylor's book no higher honor than a place upon my bookshelf alongside A. A. M. Duncan's inimitable Scotland: The Making of the Kingdom (1978).