Abstract
In his fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman history, Scalacronica, Sir Thomas Gray narrates that after the death of Alexander III of Scotland—an event that caused “great disturbance” between England and Scotland—the lords of Scotland sensed the “beginnings of an eventual contest for the realm” (13).2 As a result, the Scottish nobility agreed with Edward I of England’s council that his son, Edward of Caernarvon, should “take as his wife Margaret,” Alexander’s granddaughter “so as to have peace” (13). While the proposed marriage between the future Edward II and the Maid of Norway is a well-known part of Anglo-Scottish relations in the late thirteenth century, it is the proposal for governance that Gray narrates that is particularly interesting. Scalacronica recounts how the English and Scottish councils agreed that prince Edward should
remain in Scotland while his father lived, and that after his death, he should always remain for one year in one realm, and another year in the other; and that he should always leave his officers and ministers of the one realm at the beginnings of the Marches of the other, so that his council should always be of the nation of the realm in which he was staying at the time. (13)
This chapter considers Sir Thomas Gray’s Scalcronica and Richard Holland’s Buke of the Houdat to explore the ways in which the Anglo-Scottish Border becomes a signifier of both coalition and division.
The border is not a paper frontier. At several crossing points, perhaps most noticeably the Tweed at Coldstream, you are aware of an immediate cultural shift.1
John Sadler
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Notes
John Sadler, Border Fury: England and Scotland at War, 1296–1568 (Harlow: Pearson, 2006), p. 4.
J. Stevenson, Documents Illustrative of the History of Scotland, 1286–1306, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: H.M. Register House, 1870), 1.162–73.
Kate Ash, “Terrifying Proximity: The Anglo-Scottish Border in Sir Thomas Gray’s Scalacronica,” in Boundaries, eds. Jenni Ramone and Gemma Twitchen (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), pp. 30–44.
Regino of Prüm, Epistula ad Hathonem aechiepiscopum missa, in Reginonis abbatis prumiensis Chronicon cum continuatione traverensi, ed. Friedrich Kurze (Hanover: SRG, 1890), pp. xix-xx.
Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 197.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 5;
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 207.
Steven F. Kruger, “Conversion and Medieval Sexual, Religious and Racial Categories,” in Constructing Medieval Sexuality, eds. Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schultz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 164 [158–79].
E.L.G. Stones, Anglo-Scottish Relations, 1114–1328: Some Documents (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965; reprint 1970), pp. 136–39.
Ranald Nicholson, Scotland: The Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh: Mercat, 1974; reprint 1997), p. 131.
Michael Brown, The Black Douglases: War and Lordship in Medieval Scotland, 1300–1455 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2007), p. 133.
On the dating of the Howlat, see Felicity Riddy, “Dating The Buke of the Howlat,” Review of English Studies 37 (1986): 1–10.
See Marion Stewart, “Holland’s‘Howlat’ and the Fall of the Livingstones,” Innes Review 26 (1975): 67–79.
Michael Brown, “‘Rejoice to Hear of Douglas’: The House of Douglas and the Presentation of Magnate Power in Late Medieval Scotland,” Scottish Historical Review 76 (1997): 167 [161–84].
Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. xv.
On the inclusion of Gaelic, see Matthew P. McDiarmid, “Richard Holland’s Buke of the Howlat: An Interpretation,” Medium Ævum 38 (1969): 277–90.
Richard Bosworth, Nationalism (Harlow: Pearson, 2007), p. 13.
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© 2012 Mark P. Bruce and Katherine H. Terrell
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Ash, K. (2012). Friend or Foe? Negotiating the Anglo-Scottish Border in Sir Thomas Gray’s Scalacronica and Richard Holland’s Buke of the Howlat . In: Bruce, M.P., Terrell, K.H. (eds) The Anglo-Scottish Border and the Shaping of Identity, 1300–1600. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137108913_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137108913_4
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