Welsh Journals

MEDIEVAL SCOTLAND: CROWN, LORDSHIP AND COMMUNITY. ESSAYS PRESENTED TO G. W. S. BARROW. Edited by Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer. Edinburgh University Press, 1993. Pp. xvi, 319. £ 25.00. If the primary purpose of a festschrift is to salute the scholarly achievement of the honorand, few scholars of medieval Britain are as deserving of that honour as Geoffrey Barrow. His books and articles-carefully listed in the bibliography of his writings prepared by his daughter, Julia, for the current volume-have single- handedly transformed our knowledge and understanding of medieval Scotland. He has operated successfully at almost every level of the art of the professional medieval historian. His monumental editions of the acts of Malcolm IV and William the Lion mark him out as one of the great charter scholars of this century, while his truly daunting mastery of genealogical and toponymic detail-particularly evident in his pioneering volume on The Anglo-Norman Era in Scottish History-places him in the ranks of the great erudits and antiquarians of an earlier age. But that is only one half of Geoffrey Barrow. Readers of his path-breaking biography of Robert Bruce- the first modern book on medieval Scottish history' as it was appropriately called on its first appearance (it is now in its fourth edition)-will also know him as the author of compelling and passionate prose, and there have been few miniaturists who have said so much so effectively as Geoffrey Barrow did in his Kingship and Unity: Scotland 1000- 1306, or in a series of powerful, but never over-stated, essays (now conveniently available in two volumes of his collected papers). Nor has he confined himself to Scotland. His Feudal Britain (1956) was a remarkable, and at that date very novel, attempt by a young scholar to treat the medieval history of these islands as a whole. We in Wales have a particular reason to be grateful to him: he has taken over the years a kindly and informed interest in the history of medieval Wales and he has graced the pages of the Welsh History Review with an article and with a series of regular and regularly perceptive reviews. He is, first and foremost, the scholars' scholar. The contributors to his festschrift must have known (as I once knew as one of his undergraduates many years ago) that nothing less than the highest standards of scholarship would be acceptable in a volume submitted in honour, but also to the critical scrutiny, of Geoffrey Barrow. He will surely not be disappointed at that level, and his pleasure will be enhanced by the high standards of production and the meticulous editing of this volume. It is not easy, even in a longish review, to do justice to a volume which ranges so widely as this one does; but perhaps the task can be made the more manageable by selecting three broad themes which seem to inform the essays. They also happen to be themes which have, at least in some degree, informed much of Geoffrey Barrow's own writings. The first such theme may be said to be the interplay of the old and the new, the Celtic and the Anglo-Norman, in Scottish medieval history. Scotland, both as a word and as a kingdom, was a very recent phenomenon in the thirteenth century; it was also a very complex and, as it proved, a very successful amalgam ethnically, culturally and politically. In the opening essay of the volume, Alan Macquarrie looks at the history of one component of that amalgam, the British kingdom (or perhaps kingship would be a