Welsh Journals

better term) of Strathclyde. He does well to remind us of its fluidity and its longevity, surviving as it did in one form or other from the fifth to the eleventh century. Amalgamation is much more directly the theme of the next essay by John Bannerman, investigating as it does in particular how the mormaers or earls of Fife successfully built a bridge from what he calls 'the kin-based society' of the past into the feudal and primogenitary world of the twelfth century. This is an essay of particular interest to medieval Welsh historians because the issues that were faced in Fife were similar to those of other kin-based societies (such as medieval Wales) and partly because Mr Bannerman in an important excursus on the first appearance of mac names in Scotland and Ireland touches very interestingly on issues familiar to those who have considered the emergence of gwely names in Wales. The power of the past is to be seen in a society not only in the juxtaposition of old and new but also occasionally in the deliberate cultivation of anachronism. It is not always easy to know-nor did contemporaries themselves probably know-when one moved from the one engagement with the past to the other. Such a comment is prompted by three intriguing essays in the current volume. In his reconsideration of the text of the Laws of the March, William Scott argues convincingly that, though the current surviving text of the Laws is based on inquests conducted in 1248-49, there is a strong possibility that a body of March Law and custom existed before 1066. Conscious anachronism was certainly at work in the text known as the Laws of Malcolm Mackenneth: Archie Duncan suggests that they were composed in the 1360s by a clerk familiar with the writings of John of Fordun and that they can be best understood when located in the context of that decade. Survival and adaptation is also the theme of the closing essay of the volume, that of Hector MacQueen on the office of kenkynnol, head of kindred, comparable with the Welsh pencenedl. With MacQueen we are back with much the same mind-set as that of Bannerman's essay, that of a conservative society whose institutions were often redolent of a past social order but which also succeeded in redesigning them for the brave new feudal world. Nowhere did the juxtaposition of old and new appear more strikingly-as Geoffrey Barrow himself pointed out in his Stenton Lecture on David 1-than in the institution of kingship. The Scottish monarchy clothed itself increasingly in the mythology and rituals of antiquity, but it is the way that it redefined itself in 'modern', 'European' terms in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries which is surely most noteworthy. In the longest and one of the most thought-provoking essays in this volume, Alexander Grant approaches this issue through a masterly study of thanes and thanages. It is not, for a non-Scottish historian, the most approachable of topics, but in his close study of the distribution, character and evolution of thanages Grant clearly shows how central it is to an understanding of power and monarchy in medieval Scotland. Grant Simpson's contribution is literally and metaphorically an essay in miniature: in an elegant discussion of the political, constitutional and iconographical context of the small seal of the minority of Alexander III, he sheds light on the political maturity of the Scottish political community before it was overwhelmed by the crises of the Wars of Independence. It is the rhetoric of that community-a topic very close to Geoffrey Barrow's historiographical heart-and its growing emphasis on the king's