Medieval State-Building and the Churches of the Celtic Fringe

Abstract

Although cultural and institutional differences separated Nor man and Angevin England from medieval Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, these differences were diminished from the eleventh century forward by a modernizing process which drew much of Britain's Celtic fringe within the arena of Anglo-French civiliza tion.1 Especially on the higher social and political levels, Celtic society was transformed by the adoption of imported institutions like feudalism, manorialism, Anglo-Norman statecraft and law, and the organizational and liturgical practices of Continental Christianity. The traditional culture of the Celts was submerged beneath a veneer of Anglo-French culture, or else it was exiled to remote refuge areas in the northern and western highlands.2 In certain respects this modernizing process predated the Norman conquest of England in the eleventh century. The Scottish low lands had been thoroughly Anglicized by immigration and inter marriage during the late Saxon period; South Wales was showing signs of reacting to English influence in the ninth and tenth cen turies; and from the late tenth century forward native Irish clerical reformers and Scandinavian merchants were drawing Ireland within the orbit of Continental religion and commerce.3