Papal pronouncements on legitimate lordship and the formulation of nationhood in early fourteenth-century Scottish writings
Early fourteenth-century Scotland produced some of the period's clearest expressions of nationhood, most famously with the so-called Declaration of Arbroath of 1320. Despite the letter's fame, its conceptual language and that of related Scottish texts has not hitherto been entirely recognised. The present article demonstrates that these writings are closely informed by contemporary legal ideas concerning lawful jurisdiction and just war. Their use of legal ideas can be shown to have been inspired by the concerns and outlook of the papacy, particularly with regard to its temporal lordship in Italy. It is this inspiration that can explain the clarity and force with which the Scottish texts of these decades present the kingdom as specifically Scottish and the nation as a political force, for which they have since become renowned.
The beginnings of royal pardon in Scotland
ABSTRACT The well attested (and comprehensively studied) animus that informed English attitudes towards the Gaelic-speaking peoples of the British Isles in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries has tended to obscure important developments in the legal landscape of contemporary Scotland. This article argues that soon after 1200, the king of Scots deliberately abandoned as barbaric, obnoxious and unbecoming a Christian prince the practice of mutilating high-status political enemies and ritually defiling their bodily remains. The transformation reflected influences from England and Europe in general, but the argument here is that ultimately the change reflected the maturation of the Scottish ideas about Christian kingship, royal justice and royal mercy.
The Frankish Church
This survey of the development of the Frankish Church under the Merovingian and Carolingian kings (approximately AD 500 - 900) is the first of its kind to appear in English. It is not a story of unimpeded advance towards the Church of medieval France but rather of painful adaptation. It takes account of unsolved problems: the reaction of the Church to heresy, to Judaism, to the Frankish ethos of marriage, and to the conversion of peoples outside Francia itself. Special attention is paid to the intellectual interests of churchmen and to the role of the vernacular in transmitting the Christian message to clergy and laity whose Latin was negligible or nil. Much turned on the authority of a succession of rulers who combined deep piety with material needs that were inimical to the Church's position as a great landowner. The advance of the Church was thus hesitant and often baulked. What emerges is the Churchmen's increasing resolve to unite against the pressures of lay domination, and to press forward with their basic duties as converters and teachers.