Fiefs and Vassals in Scotland: A View from Outside

Abstract

In 19941 published a book in which I attempted a reinterpretation of the evidence in medieval sources about fiefs and vassalage in England, France, Germany, and Italy but not Scotland.1 Its argument was that neither the relationship that medieval historians call vassalage nor the kind of property that they call fiefs took their shape from the warrior society of the earlier Middle Ages. Rather, the evidence suggests that they owed it to the more bureaucratic governments and estate adminis trations that developed from the twelfth century, and to the arguments of the professional and academic lawyers who appeared alongside. In so far as some of the obligations and terminology that historians associate with fiefs are to be found in earlier sources, they are found chiefly in doc uments that record the relations of great churches with their tenants. This may be partly because so much of our information about the earlier period comes from records preserved by churches, but we need to con sider how far it is right to use the relations of bishops or abbots with their tenants as evidence of relations between kings and lay nobles, or between the nobles and their own followers. They were surely different. Although we have less evidence about the property of laymen before the twelfth century apart from what they held as tenants of churches, we have enough to show that the rights and obligations attached to land do not seem to have generally conformed to the feudal pattern, while such evidence as we have of political relations suggests that they were not based exclusively on the individual, interpersonal bonds medieval histo rians associate with vassalage. Before the twelfth century nobles and free men did not generally owe military service because of the grantor even the supposed grant to them or their ancestors of anything like fiefs. However they had acquired their lands, they normally held them with as full, permanent, and independent rights as their society knew. Whatever service they owed, they owed, sometimes in rough proportion to their status and wealth, not because they were vassals or tenants of a lord, but as what can be better thought of as property-owners, because they were subjects of someone more like a ruler. So far as words go, great men were