Despite the gloomy prognostications of some current luminaries of the field, as Cynthia Neville’s latest publication underscores, we are most definitely not at the end of any “golden age of Scottish historiography.” Indeed, in terms of the social history of the kingdom in the High Middle Ages, this volume constitutes the first monograph-length study of the interactions of native and newcomer across a broad social and regional spectrum and offers a stimulating reappraisal of the dynamics of that well-trodden theme of “continuity and change” that so dominated research in the 1980s. Neville, through her command of the contemporary sources and ability to tease out the subtleties embedded in those records, has revealed hitherto unexplored dimensions to materials and themes that she has visited before and that we thought we knew intimately. In particular, she has developed on issues that she explored in Native Lordship in Medieval Scotland (2005), but in this new study she has moved into a broader analysis of social and cultural interaction and change across two centuries.

Power and its exercise over land and people, and the emergence of a written legal culture, form unifying strands within the book. They turn what is in essence a series of tightly argued and sharply focused individual essays into a single coherent and cohesive thesis. Both strands are established from the outset in discussion of the development of baronial courts in Scotland, which explores the institutions through which, from the twelfth century, Scotland’s social leaders, native and newcomer, wielded political authority and the accommodation into them of the parchment-based traditions of English common and Roman law. Continuity, of venue if not of actual practice, is evident in the examples cited, and there is a cogent case presented for the evolutionary trends within the baronial court from the mid-twelfth to mid-fourteenth century. There is, however, less confidence to be had in the antiquity of the form and function of these courts or in the unconscious assumption that they were the mechanisms through which “lords” had always exercised coercive power over dependents. It cannot just be assumed that the privileged franchises evident in the courts and jurisdictions of the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries were signifiers of anciently established social hierarchies of “noble” rulers and “nonnoble” ruled whose relationships were mediated through the legal forum of the baronial court, not least because hard evidence for the existence of such social distinctions is lacking. Some discussion of alternative models for the origins of popular courts in, say, a ranked society, over which an emergent noble class gradually gained precedence (e.g., the role of the goðar in the Icelandic things) would have strengthened the argument substantially. Likewise, exploration of the manner in which heritable rights in property and jurisdictions were acquired by a class of individuals who might have originated as ministeriales or as kindred heads would have formed an additional link to the discussion of increasingly rigorous definition of real and abstract property rights, which is considered in subsequent chapters.

Perambulation of landed property is one process whereby the cultural interplay central to Neville’s thesis can be seen most clearly and whereby the redefinition of collective and individual rights is underscored. In this process we can observe the conjunction of the popular voice and private interest, deployed in a mechanism that enabled conflicts over property rights to be negotiated publicly. The longevity of a mechanism that depended on oral testimony and living witness is never quite reconciled with the increasing reliance on the security of written, closely defined title, but the mainly economic reasons for this preference are made clear. It is unfortunate that there is no consideration of the role of environmental change and mounting pressure on resources in driving more rigorous definition and recording of property rights through the thirteenth century—it was not simply the consequence of “an increasingly vigorous economy” (62)—but Neville is surely correct to identify economic pressure as a key factor behind the growing precision with which land divisions and access to shared resources was defined. It would be interesting to see how this trend toward greater written definition of rights correlates with the proxy climate data across this period.

Throughout the study, the principal actors are the legally empowered members of society and the changes that affected their relationships with property and with each other. Among the most valuable contributions of this exploration, however, is the new focus into which it throws those groups who experience legal disadvantage or unfreedom—the lowest echelons of Scottish society, the slave and servile classes, and the lower ranks of the peasantry. Voiceless except in the rarest of cases, they have been neglected in most social histories, and their legal unfreedom somewhat downplayed through teleological optimism founded on the knowledge that serfdom appears effectively to have disappeared from Scotland before the end of the fourteenth century. Neville’s discussion provides a timely corrective to that neglect and misconstruction, and also dashes current tendencies to present “prefeudal” Scotland as some free-peasant paradise of social equality and common ownership of property. It is to be hoped that her challenge will stimulate new research into these shadowy classes whose labor supported the revolution in resource exploitation so clearly charted in this book’s pages.

While there is much here that might seem familiar, it is viewed from new perspectives and in different contexts which mark this text as offering a new prescription for the study of people and society in medieval Scotland. Cynthia Neville has shown what can be done by rereading and asking new questions of the seemingly well-known sources. She has framed new questions that challenge long-held assumptions about the nature of Scottish medieval society in that misleadingly labeled “Anglo-Norman Era.” Her book, it is to be hoped, heralds the dawning of a new age of inquiry into the social and cultural dynamics that shaped the hybrid Scottish state of the later Middle Ages.