Anglo-Scottish Border Research Articles

Crossing and Transgressing Borders in The Heart of Midlothian

If the 1707 Act of Union removed the immaterial legal and political border between England and Scotland by merging them into the single kingdom of Great Britain, it could not erase the almost impassable natural boundary dividing the twin sisters. This tangible geographical barrier remained as a magnificent reminder of a former separation, thus questioning the disappearance of the national frontier. The confrontation between abstract and concrete boundaries, which is at stake in historical Scotland, is staged in Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian set a few decades after the Union. The heroine’s physical journey across the Anglo-Scottish border gradually takes on a more symbolic significance as she trudges through the marches to redeem her sinful sister. In studying the novel, I will analyse the series of embedded tangible boundaries present on the British territories and show how they are constantly crossed by the protagonists. This physical crossing of concrete borders often goes with the mental crossing of abstract barriers. Overstepping a physical boundary can lead to transgressing moral and societal limits as it is exemplified with the Scottish Borders, a den of iniquity and unlawful transactions. External borders can thus embody more internal boundaries and serve to map territories of the mind.

Borderland Subversions: Anti-imperial Energies in The Awntyrs off Arthure and Golagros and Gawane

Previous articleNext article No AccessBorderland Subversions: Anti-imperial Energies in The Awntyrs off Arthure and Golagros and GawaneRandy P. SchiffRandy P. Schiff Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 84, Number 3JULY 2009 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1017/S0038713400209329 Views: 99Total views on this site Citations: 7Citations are reported from Crossref © 2009 The Medieval Academy of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Andrew Murray Richmond Fluid Boundaries in The Awntyrs off Arthure and Sir Isumbras, Open Library of Humanities 4, no.11 (Apr 2018).https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.225Randy P. Schiff Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyn, (Aug 2017): 1–2.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118396957.wbemlb013Randy P. Schiff Golagros and Gawane, (Aug 2017): 1–2.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118396957.wbemlb015Joseph Taylor Sovereignty, Oath, and the Profane Life in the Avowing of Arthur, Exemplaria 25, no.11 (Nov 2013): 36–58.https://doi.org/10.1179/1041257312Z.00000000024Mark P. Bruce, Katherine H. Terrell Introduction: Writing Across the Borders, (Jan 2012): 1–14.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137108913_1Kylie Murray Passing the Book: The Scottish Shaping of Chaucer’s Dream States in Bodleian Library, Ms Arch. Selden. B.24., (Jan 2012): 121–139.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137108913_8Joseph Taylor Chaucer’s Uncanny Regionalism: Rereading the North in The Reeve’s Tale, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 109, no.44 (Oct 2010): 468–489.https://doi.org/10.5406/jenglgermphil.109.4.0468

The West March on the Anglo-Scottish Border in the Twelfth Century, and the Origins of the Western Debatable Land

'The West March on the Anglo-Scottish Border in the twelfth century and the origins of the Western Debatable Land'. Although there was a frontier zone between medieval England and Scotland where March Law applied, within that zone there was, at any rate in time of peace between the Crowns, an ascertainable frontier line. Two conflicting views on the location of this line west of the Cheviot are reviewed and a third proposal advanced. From William II's conquest of Cumberland in 1092 up to 1552, the line lay along the River Esk and Liddel Water, except when the Scots possessed Cumberland and Westmorland in 1136–1157 and 1216–1217. After 1136, David I granted to the lords of the English barony of Liddel additional land comprising the parishes of Kirkandrews-on-Esk and Canonbie, north of the Esk. From 1157, the barony remained a cross-Border holding until the Scots dispossessed the English lords of Kirkandrews and Canonbie between 1300 and 1318. The English lords continued to claim that land, however, and their claim was assigned to the English Crown after 1349. At that point, what had been a claim to private rights started to become confused with national sovereignty. In 1552, arbitrators partitioned what had become known as the Western Debatable Land, a no-man's-land, and the Border then assumed its present line.

Dalhousie University

There are only a handful of scholars who have their primary appointments in Dalhousie departments and a primary interest in medieval fields. In French, we have Hans Runte, best known among medievalists for his work on the Seven Sages of Rome, but his more recent publications have been in the field of Acadian letters. In English, we have Hubert Morgan, who works in Middle English, Old Norse, and Old English (romance, saga, and epic are particular interests), and Melissa Furrow, who has finally completed a long labour on reception of romances in medieval England (Expectations of Romance: Drasty Rymyng or Noble Tales, currently under review) and is now returning to an earlier editorial project (Ten Fifteenth-Century Comic Poems) to revise for a new edition with TEAMS. In History, we have Cynthia Neville, well known personally to members of CSM for her extensive work 011 the national and international scene on prize, review, and adjudication committees, and more broadly known through her scholarship on late medieval English legal history and on Scottish social, political, and cultural history. She is the author of Violence, Custom, and Law: The Anglo-Scottish Border Lands in the Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh UP, 1998) and the forthcoming Native Lordship in Anglo-Norman Scotland: The Earldoms of Stratheam and Lennox, 1170-1350 (Four Courts Press). A recent and exciting addition is Jennifer Bain in Music, a music theorist who works on Hildegard of Bingen, and on fourteenth-century music. This tiny number and the clearcut disciplinary boundaries proclaimed by departmental organisation might suggest that medieval study at Dalhousie has fallen off steeply from the days when we had a formally recognised honours degree in Medieval Studies and a bigger pool of faculty. It is true, a bigger pool would be helpful, and the priority within English for the next appointment is for a medievalist. But in various ways medieval studies at Dalhousie does better than it looks as if it should.

Post-devolution blues? Economic development in the Anglo-Scottish borders

Pike A. (2002) Post-devolution blues? Economic development in the Anglo-Scottish Borders, Reg. Studies 36, 1069–1084. Uneven regional development on each side of the Anglo-Scottish Border has underpinned a ‘post-devolution blues’ in North East England. The situation has been compounded by the economic development crisis in the Anglo-Scottish Borders region in the late 1990s. Rather than being a simplistic outcome of devolution, the ‘post-devolution blues’ are complicated by the particular nature of border(s) regions, the pre-devolution history of cross-border differences and the as yet inconclusive evidence of the impact of devolution on the Anglo-Scottish Borders. Future development and an antidote to the ‘post-devolution blues’ may require both a needs-based reform of the territorial distribution of public expenditure and a political settlement for the English regions at the national (UK) level.

Continuity and stability in past upland land uses in the western Cheviot Hills, southern Scotland

ABSTRACT Upland areas of the British Isles have frequently been seen as vulnerable to environmental stress, and because of this climatic and economic marginality, to have been colonised, abandoned and recolonised rather than to have endured and adapted. This paper presents 14C (radiocarbon)-dated palaeoecological data, supported by archaeological evidence, providing a continuous record of vegetation, settlement and land use in one upland landscape high in the western Cheviot Hills, on the Anglo-Scottish border, over the last 2,000 years. The data show that grassland has dominated this landscape without change from the Romano-British period. Adaptive elements like cereal cultivation were added but then withdrawn on two occasions during this period, but without deflecting from the primary purpose of agricultural activity, which was and remains, stock raising. Reasons for the early historic establishment of intensive pastoral activity may include late Roman economic stability, but irrespective of the engine for this single change, the data show, when compared with nearby settings in the same range of hills, how divergent individual landscape histories have been.

CYNTHIA J. NEVILLE, Violence, Custom and Law. The Anglo-Scottish Border Lands in the Later Middle Ages Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1998, pp.xiv + 226, Pbk. £16.95

CYNTHIA J. NEVILLE, <i>Violence, Custom and Law. The Anglo-Scottish Border Lands in the Later Middle Ages</i> Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1998, pp.xiv + 226, Pbk. £16.95

Shorter notice. Violence, Custom and Law. The Anglo-Scottish Border Lands in the Later Middle Ages. CJ Neville

Shorter notice. Violence, Custom and Law. The Anglo-Scottish Border Lands in the Later Middle Ages. CJ Neville

Greg Walker. Persuasive Fictions: Faction, Faith, and Political Culture in the Reign of Henry VIII. Aldershot, U.K.: Scolar Press; dist. by Ashgate Publishing Co., Brookfield, Vt. 1996. Pp. xv, 213. $74.95. ISBN 1-85928-139-7.

Faction in the Privy chamber?: The expulsion of the minions (1519) reconsidered 'And Never a Scotte Slayne': John Skelton and the Anglo-Scottish border crisis of 1522 'Ordered Confusion': The crisis of authority in Skelton's Speke, Parott Politics and ideals of Henrician England Known men, bretheren and evangelicals: Heretical sects in pre-reformation England saint or schemer?: The 1527 heresy trial of Thomas Bilney re-examined The image of dissent: Thomas More, Skelton and the 'lost' history of reformation in England The defence of Good Women: Sir Thomas Elyot and the politics of accommodation literature, faith and radical identity: The Vocacyon of John Bale, 1938-53

Response: North of the Border

Professor Morris and Dr Morton rightly argue against the fragmenta tion imposed by historians on the history of nineteenth-century Scotland. Social historians are particularly culpable here; for whereas in England the social history of the nineteenth century challenged a dominant political history, Scottish social history moved into a space which was not strongly held by political historians. Hence the microscopic approach, which often produces valuable results in social history, is not always complemented by a 'national' picture. Nevertheless, I do not share their anxiety about the boundaries of Scottish identity, or about the possible complexities of reconciling Highland and Lowland history. The Anglo-Scottish Border has always been more than a line on the map. It is also the division between two legal systems produced by many centuries of separate political development, a division deliberately left intact in 1707. One step over the Border, and the historian, like the escaping felon, is in a different world. This is reflected in the notorious inability of 'British' historians to produce genuinely British statistics on subjects ranging from crime to causes of mortality.1 And English historians are forced, because of the differing nature of Scottish and English sources, to accept that Scotland is a foreign country: they do things differently there. The separate legal codes affected the populations of England and Scotland from cradle to grave, and are more than a tedious bureau cratic issue.2 Scots births were not registered until a decade after the English, because of the profoundly different systems of local administration, and their methods of registration remained different.3 Scottish children attended schools and universities within a separate

Bastles and Bastle-Like Buildings in Allendale, Northumberland

Twenty years after the R.C.H.M. volume Shielings and Bastles drew attention to the survival of many bastles, thick-walled defensible upper-floor houses of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, characteristic of the Anglo-Scottish Border. Recent fieldwork in Northumberland has shown that bastles (the earliest vernacular house type to survive in any numbers within the county) also exist in considerable numbers in some areas slightly further afield, and notably in Allendale, to the south of the Tyne. Seven Allendale bastles or bastle-derivative houses are described in detail, and another twenty-seven listed in a gazetteer. The origins of bastles are discussed, and some possible medieval antecedents suggested; the fabric and morphology of the buildings are then considered, and various groupings—such as ‘extended bastles’ and groups around a common yard—examined. The continuance of the bastle tradition is seen in bastle-derivative houses of the later seventeenth century; the date at which convent...

Early Cultivation in Northumberland and The Borders

Recent discoveries on both sides of the Anglo-Scottish Border have shown that it is now possible to identify the surface remains of prehistoric cultivation without recourse to excavation. Numerous sites of very narrow ridged cultivation, generally no more than 1.4 m between the centre of the furrows and now known as cord rig, are associated with prehistoric settlements of various types. When taken in conjunction with the many examples of demonstrably pre-Roman cultivation terraces, this has finally destroyed the concept of a predominantly pastoral economy believed to have been practised in much of the Tyne-Forth area. It is now apparent that arable regimes formed a significant part of the local economy and that the currency of the myth of the footloose Celtic cowboy is at an end. This paper concentrates upon Northumberland. A more complete description of the Scottish material will be produced by S. Halliday.

The Reformation in the Anglo-Scottish Border Counties

The Reformation in the Anglo-Scottish Border Counties

The Reformation in the Anglo-Scottish Border Counties

(1979). The Reformation in the Anglo-Scottish Border Counties. Northern History: Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 24-42.

Priests and Patrons in the Fourteenth-Century Diocese of Carlisle

There were several possibilities open to a man entering the secular clergy in the later middle ages. Among these were careers as a royal, papal, or episcopal servant, as a teacher or scholar, or as the rector or vicar of a parish church. If he did not set his hopes high, he could join the ranks of the chaplains of his diocese, helping the incumbents of the parish churches with the administration of their benefices and with the cure of souls, serving chapels and perpetual chantries, and serving oratories in noble and gentry households. Whatever his ambitions and aspirations, however, the secular priest’s situation depended entirely upon the charity and good will of those in a position to exercise patronage: family and friends, the beneficed clergy, the bishop and his familia, and the established, landed families of the area. And whether the possibilities became opportunities in the form of the patronage desired depended to a large extent upon the social position of the priest’s family, the proper connections, and the extent of his education. These were the realities faced universally by the clergy of the universal church, but each region had its own particular system of patronage, varying with the needs and structure of society. As a case in point, the lives and success of the clergy of the northern English diocese of Carlisle, despite the mission and aims held in common with the clergy of the entire church, were dictated to a degree by the rural nature of the diocese and its location on the Anglo-Scottish border.