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Economy of Scotland in the Middle Ages

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

One of the oldest surviving mercat crosses at Prestonpans, East Lothian, which often indicated the commercial centre of a burgh

The economy of Scotland in the Middle Ages covers all forms of economic activity in the modern boundaries of Scotland, between the End of Roman rule in Britain in the early fifth century, until the advent of the Renaissance in the early sixteenth century, including agriculture, crafts and trade. Having between a fifth or sixth (15-20 %) of the arable or good pastoral land and roughly the same amount of coastline as England and Wales, marginal pastoral agriculture and fishing were two of the most important aspects of the Medieval Scottish economy. With poor communications, in the early Middle Ages most settlements needed to achieve a degree of self-sufficiency in agriculture. Most farms were operated by a family unit and used an infield and outfield system.

Arable farming grew in the High Middle Ages and agriculture entered a period of relative boom between the thirteenth century and late fifteenth century. Unlike England, Scotland had no towns dating from times of Roman Britain. From the twelfth century there are records of burghs, chartered towns, which became major centre of crafts and trade. There are also Scottish coins, although English coinage probably remained more significant in trade, and until the end of the period barter was probably the most common form of exchange. Craft and industry remained relatively undeveloped before the end of the Middle Ages and, although there were extensive trading networks based in Scotland, while the Scots exported largely raw materials, they imported increasing quantities of luxury goods, resulting in a bullion shortage and perhaps helping to create a financial crisis in the fifteenth century.

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Transcription

Hi there my name’s John Green, this is Crash Course World History and today we’re going to talk about the Dark Ages, possibly the most egregious Eurocentrism in all of history, which is really saying something. (We’re Europe! The Prime Meridian Runs Through us; We’re in the Middle of Every Map; and We Get To Be a Continent Even Though Were Not a Continent.) But let’s begin today with a pop quiz: What was the best year of your life, and what was the worst year? Mr. Green, Mr. Green: Best 1994, Worst 1990. Oh, me from the past. It gets so much better, and also so much worse. For worst year I’m gonna go with 2001; best year 2006. Alright now it’s your turn, dear pupils: share your best and worst years in comments during the intro. [music intro] [music intro] [music intro] [music intro] [music intro] [music intro] Right, so what you will quickly find is that your worst year was someone else’s best year. So, too, with history. The period between 600 and 1450 CE is often called the Middle Ages in Europe because it came between the Roman Empire—assuming you forget the Byzantines—and the beginning of the Modern Age. And it’s sometimes called the Dark Ages, because it was purportedly unenlightened. But was the age so dark? Depends on what you find depressing. If you like cities and great poetry, then the Dark Ages were indeed pretty dark in Europe. But if like me your two favorite things are Not Dying From Wars and not dying from anything else, the Dark Ages actually weren’t that bad— at least until the plague came in the 14th century. And meanwhile, outside of Europe, the Dark Ages were truly an Age of Enlightenment.But we’ll get boring Europe out of the way first. Let’s go to the Thought Bubble. Medieval Europe had less trade, fewer cities, and less cultural output than the Original Roman Empire. London and Paris were fetid firetraps with none of the planning of sewage management of places 5,000 years older like Mohenjo Daro in the Indus Valley Civilization, let alone Rome. But with fewer powerful governments, wars were at least smaller, which is one reason why Europeans living in Medieval Times— Uhh THOUGHT BUBBLE I KNEW YOU WERE GOING TO DO THAT. Anyway, people in Medieval Times lived slightly longer— life expectancy was 30— than Europeans during the Roman Empire— when life expectancy was 28. Instead of centralized governments, Europe in the middle ages had feudalism, a political system based on reciprocal relationships between lords, who owned lots of land, and vassals, who protected the land and got to dress up as knights in exchange for pledging loyalty to the lords. The lords were also vassals to more important lords, with the most important of all being the king. Below the knights were peasants who did the actual work on the land in exchange for protection from bandits and other threats. Feudalism was also an economic system, with the peasants working the land and keeping some of their production to feed themselves while giving the rest to the landowner whose land they worked. The small scale, local nature of the feudal system was perfect for a time and place where the threats to peoples’ safety were also small scale and local. But of course, this system reinforces the status quo – there’s little freedom and absolutely no social mobility: Peasants could never work their way up to lords, and they almost never left their villages. Thanks, Thought Bubble. One more point that’s very interesting from a world history perspective: this devolution from empire to localism has happened in lots of places at lots of different times. And in times of extreme political stress, like after the fall of the Han dynasty in China, power tends to flow into the hands of local lords who can protect the peasants better than the state can. We hear about this a lot in Chinese history and also in contemporary Afghanistan, but instead of being called feudal lords, these landlords are called warlords. Eurocentrism striking again. The other reason the Dark Ages are called Dark is because Europe was dominated by superstition and by boring religious debates about like how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. And while there’s something to that, the Middle Ages also saw theologians like Thomas Aquinas, who was quite an important philosopher, And women like Hildegard of Bilgen, who wrote all this important liturgical music and also basically invented the genre of the morality play. All that noted, things were certainly brighter in the Islamic world, or Dar al Islam. So when we last left the Muslims, they had expanded out of their homeland in Arabia and conquered the rich Egyptian provinces of the Byzantines and the entire Sassanian empire, all in the space of about 100 years. The Umayyad Dynasty then expanded the empire west to Spain and moved the capital to Damascus, because it was closer to the action, empire-wise but still in Arabia. That was really important to the Umayyads because they’d established this hierarchy in the empire with Arabs like themselves at the top and in fact they tried to keep Arabs from fraternizing with non-Arab muslims throughout the Empire. This of course annoyed the non-Arab Muslims, who were like, “I don’t know if you’re reading the same Quran we are, but this one says that we’re all supposed to be equal.” And pretty quickly the majority of Muslims weren’t Arabs, which made it pretty easy for them to overthrow the Umayyads, which they did in 750 CE. Their replacements, the Abb(ah)sids, Abb(uh)sids? Hold On... D’ahh, I’m right twice! Right, so the Abbasids were from the Abb(ah)si or the Abb(uh)-see family which hailed from the Eastern and therefore more Persian provinces of the Islamic Empire. The Abbasids took over in 750 and no one could fully defeat them— until 1258, when they were conquered by— wait for it— the Mongols. The Abbasids kept the idea of a hereditary monarchy, but they moved the capital of the empire to Baghdad, and they were much more welcoming of other non-Arab Muslims into positions of power. And under the Abbasids, the Dar al Islam took on a distinctly Persian cast that it never really lost. The Caliph now styled himself as a king of kings, just like the Achaemenids had, and pretty soon the caliph’s rule was a lot more indirect, just like the original Persians’. This meant that his control was much weaker, and by about 1000CE , the Islamic Caliphate which looks so incredibly impressive on a map had really descended into a series of smaller kingdoms, each paying lip-service to the caliph in Baghdad. This was partly because the Islamic Empire relied more and more on soldiers from the frontier, in this case Turks, and also slaves pressed into military service, in order to be the backbone of their army, a strategy that has been tried over and over again and has worked exactly zero times. Which you should remember if you ever become an emperor. Actually our resident historian points out that that strategy has worked-- if you are the Mongols. More important than the Persian-style monarchy that the Abbasids tried to set up was their openness to foreigners and their ideas. That tolerance and curiosity ushered in a golden age of Islamic learning centered in Baghdad. The Abbasids oversaw an efflorescence of culture unlike anything that had been seen since Hellenistic times. Arabic replaced Greek not only as the language of commerce and religion, but also of culture. Philosophy, medicine, and poetry were all written in Arabic (although Persian remained an important literary language.) And Baghdad was the world’s center of scholarship with its House of Wisdom and immense library. Muslim scholars translated the works of the Greek Philosophers including Aristotle and Plato as well as scientific works by Hippocrates, Archimedes and especially the physician Galen. And they translated and preserved Buddhist and Hindu manuscripts that might have otherwise been lost. Muslims made huge strides in medicine as well. One Muslim scholar ibn Sina, wrote the Canon of Medicine, which became the standard medical textbook or centuries in both Europe and the Middle East. And the Islamic empire adopted mathematical concepts from India such as the zero, a number so fascinating and beautiful that we could write an entire episode about it but instead I’m just gonna write it a little love poem: Oh, zero. Pretty little zero. They say you’re nothing but you mean everything to mathematical history ....and me. Oh it’s time for the Open Letter? [Scoots to chartreuse throne of pure velvety awesomeness] An Open Letter to Science and Religion: But first lets see what’s in the Secret Compartment. Oh, champagne poppers? Stan, what am I supposed to do with these? Dear Science and Religion, You’re supposed to be so irreconcilable and everything, but not so much in the Abbasid Empire. I mean, Muslim mathematicians expanded math to such a degree that we now call the base ten number system and the symbols we use to denote it “Arabic numerals.” And religion was at least part of what pushed all that learning forward. Like the great philosopher Ibn Rushd argued that the only path to religious enlightenment was through Aristotelian reasoning. And Muslim mathematicians and astronomers developed algebra partly so they could simplify Islamic inheritance law. Plus they made important strides in trigonometry so that people understand where to turn when trying to turn toward Mecca. You were working so well together, science and religion, but then like Al and Tipper Gore, just couldn’t last forever. Nothing gold can stay in this world, nothing gold can stay. Best wishes, John Green Baghdad wasn’t the only center of learning in the Islamic world. In Spain, Islamic Cordoba became a center for the arts, especially architecture. This is perhaps best exemplified by the Great Mosque at Cordoba, built by the Umayyad ruler Abd al-Rahman I In 785-786 CE. That’s right, this building, still standing today and one of the most amazing mosques in the world, was built in a year, whereas medieval cathedrals typically took, like, a million years to finish. The Muslims of Spain were also engineers who rivaled the Romans. Aqueducts in Cordoba brought drinkable water into the city, and Muslim scholars took the lead in agricultural science, improving yields on all kinds of new crops, allowing Spanish lives to be longer and less hungry. Everybody wanted to live in Spain, even the greatest Jewish philosopher, Maimonides, wanted to live in Spain, but sadly he was expelled and ended up in Alexandria Egypt. There he wrote his awesomely titled defense of rationality, A Guide for the Perplexed. I’m translating the title, of course, because the original text was written …in Arabic. Meanwhile, China was having a Golden Age of its own: The Tang Dynasty made China’s government more of a meritocracy, and ruled over 80 million people across four million square miles. And they might’ve conquered all of Central Asia had it not been for the Abbasids, whom they fought at the most important Battle You’ve Never Heard Of, the Battle of the Talas River. This was the Ali-Frasier of the 8th century. The Abbasids won, which ended up defining who had influence where with the -- with the Abbasids dominating to the west of the river and China dominating to the east. The Tang also produced incredible art that was traded all throughout Asia. Many of the more famous sculptures from the Tang Dynasty feature figures who are distinctly not-Chinese, which again demonstrates the diversity of the empire. The Tang was also a golden age for Chinese poetry with notables like Du Fu and Li Bo plying their craft, encouraged by the official government. And the Song Dynasty, which lasted from 960 to 1258, kicked even more ass-it’s-not-cursing-if-you’re-talking-about-donkeys. By the 11th century, Chinese metalworkers were producing as much iron as Europe would be able to produce in the 18th century. Some of this iron was put to use in new plows, which enabled agriculture to boom, thereby supporting population growth. Porcelain was of such high quality that it was shipped throughout the world, which is why we call it “china.” And there was so much trade going on that the Chinese ran out of metal for coins, leading to another innovation– paper money. And by the 11th century, the Chinese were writing down recipes for a mixture of saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal, that we now know as gunpowder. That becomes kind of a big deal in history, paving the way, as it does, for modern warfare and arena rock pyrotechnics, and— ohhhh, THAT’S WHY. [Pulls Champagne popper along with a mysterious lady hand from behind chalkboard.] Not so dark after all. Thanks for watching. We’ll see you next week. Crash Course is produced and directed by Stan Muller, our script supervisor is Danica Johnson. [bazinga!] The graphics team is ThoughtBubble, and show is written by my high school history teacher Raoul Meyer and myself. Last week’s Phrase of the Week was also good advice: Quit Smoking! If you want to suggest future Phrases of the Week or guess at this week’s, you can do so in comments where you can also ask questions about today’s video that will be answered by our team of historians. If you liked today’s video please click the thumb’s up button. You can also follow us on Twitter @thecrashcourse or on Facebook. There are links in the video info. Our writer and historian, Raoul Mayer, also tweets awesome Crash Course pop quizzes, so there’s a link to follow him as well, and me, you know, because I’m a narcissist. [music outro] We get to be a continent, even though we're not a continent... [music outro] We get to be a continent, even though we're not a continent... [music outro] We get to be a continent, even though we're not a continent...

Background

Main article: Geography of Scotland in the Middle Ages
Map of available land in early medieval Scotland.[1]

Scotland is roughly half the size of England and Wales and has approximately the same amount of coastline, but only between a fifth and a sixth of the amount of the arable or good pastoral land, under 60 metres above sea level, and most of this is located in the south and east. This made marginal pastoral farming and fishing the key factors in the pre-modern economy.[2] Its north Atlantic position means that it has very heavy rainfall, which encouraged the spread of blanket peat bog, the acidity of which, combined with high level of wind and salt spray, made most of the western islands treeless. The existence of hills, mountains, quicksands and marshes made internal communication and conquest extremely difficult.[3]

After the departure of the Romans from Northern Britain, in the fifth century four major circles of influence had emerged in what is now Scotland. In the east were the Picts, whose kingdoms eventually stretched from the river Forth to Shetland; in the west the Gaelic (Goidelic)-speaking people of Dál Riata with their royal fortress at Dunadd in Argyll, with close links with the island of Ireland, from which they brought with them the name Scots; in the south was the British (Brythonic) Kingdom of Alt Clut, descendants of the peoples of the Roman-influenced kingdoms of "The Old North"; finally, there were the Angles who had overrun much of southern Britain and held the Kingdom of Bernicia (later the northern part of Northumbria), in the south-east.[4] This situation was transformed from the eighth century when ferocious Viking raids began. Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles eventually fell to the Norsemen.[5] These threats may have speeded a long term process of gaelicisation of the Pictish kingdoms, which adopted Gaelic language and customs and which probably facilitated a merger of the Gaelic and Pictish crowns. This culminated in the rise of Cínaed mac Ailpín (Kenneth MacAlpin) in the 840s, which brought to power the House of Alpin, who became the leaders of a combined Gaelic-Pictish kingdom, known as the Kingdom of Alba and later as Scotland.[6]

From the sixth century, Scotland experienced a process of Christianisation, traditionally seen as carried out by Irish-Scots missionaries, including St Ninian, St Kentigern and St Columba and to a lesser extent those from Rome and England.[7] However, Gilbert Markus highlights the fact that most of these figures were not church-founders, but were usually active in areas where Christianity had already become established, probably through gradual diffusion that is almost invisible in the historical record. This would have included trade, conquest and intermarriage.[8]

There are almost no written sources from which to re-construct the demography of Medieval Scotland. Estimates have been for the early period made of a population of 10,000 inhabitants in Dál Riata and 80–100,000 for Pictland, which was probably the largest region.[9] From the formation of the Kingdom of Alba in the tenth century, to before the Black Death reached the country in 1349, estimates based on the amount of farmable land, suggest that population may have grown from half a million to a million.[10] Although there is no reliable documentation on the impact of the plague, if the pattern followed that in England, then the population may have fallen to as low as half a million by the end of the fifteenth century.[11]

Agriculture

Main article: Agriculture in Scotland in the Middle Ages

In the early Middle Ages, poor transport forced self-sufficiency on small settlements. Lacking the urban centres created under the Romans in the rest of Britain, the economy of Scotland in the early Middle Ages was overwhelmingly agricultural. With a lack of significant transport links and wider markets, most farms had to produce a self-sufficient diet of meat, dairy products and cereals, supplemented by hunter-gathering.[12] Limited archaeological evidence indicates that throughout Northern Britain, farming was done on single homesteads or amongst a small cluster of three or four homes. Each of these probably contained a nuclear family, with kinship relationships likely to be common among neighbouring houses and settlements, reflecting the partition of land through inheritance.[12] A system was adopted that distinguished between the infield, around the settlement, where crops were grown every year, and the outfield, further away, where crops were grown and then left fallow in different years. This would be the predominant system until the eighteenth century.[13]

Rig and furrow marks at Buchans Field, Wester Kittochside.

The nature of agricultural production was determined by the land and climate. The cold and wet climate meant that more oats and barley were grown than corn.[14] The evidence of bones indicates that cattle were by far the most important domesticated animal, followed by pigs, sheep and goats, while domesticated fowl were very rare.[15] Bone evidence indicates that there was a significant growth in the fish trade around 1000.[16] This increased marine exploitation of the Highlands and Islands may have been as a result of the arrival of Scandinavian settlers in this period.[17]

The early Middle Ages were a period of climatic deterioration, with a drop in temperature and an increase in rainfall, resulting in more land becoming unproductive.[18] Climate change had a major impact on agriculture in this period and terms emerged to describe different quantities of land. In the period c. 1150 to 1300, warm dry summers and less severe winters allowed cultivation at much greater heights above sea level and made land more productive.[19] Arable farming grew significantly, but was still more common in low-lying areas than in high-lying areas such as the Highlands, Galloway and the Southern Uplands.[20] The main unit of land measurement in Scotland was the ploughgate, also known as the davoch and in Lennox as the arachor.[21] It may have measured about 104 acres (0.42 km2),[22] divided into 4 raths.[23] The average amount of land used by a husbandman in Scotland might have been around 26 acres.[24]

The ruins of Penshiel Tower, East Lothian, a sheep grange of Melrose Abbey

Most farming was based on the lowland fermtoun or Highland baile, settlements of a handful of families that jointly farmed an area notionally suitable for two or three plough teams, allocated in run rigs to tenant farmers. They usually ran downhill so that they included both wet and dry land, helping to offset some of the problems of extreme weather conditions. Most ploughing was done with a heavy wooden plough with an iron coulter, pulled by oxen, which were more effective in heavy soils and cheaper to feed than horses. Obligations to the local lord usually included supplying oxen for ploughing the lord's land on an annual basis and the much resented obligation to grind corn at the lord's mill.[25]

In the late Middle Ages, average temperatures began to reduce again, with cooler and wetter conditions limiting the extent of arable agriculture, particularly in the Highlands.[19] The introduction of new monastic orders such as the Cistercians in this period also brought innovations in agriculture. Their monasteries became major landholders, particularly in the Borders. They were sheep farmers and producers of wool for the markets in Flanders.[26] By the late Middle Ages, Melrose Abbey and the Earl of Douglas had about 15,000 sheep apiece, making them among the largest sheep farmers in Europe.[27]

New farming methods began to transform agriculture in some parts of the country. Monastic agriculture was organised in granges, farms run by lay brothers of the order.[28] Granges were theoretically within 30 miles of the mother monastery, so that those working there could return for services on Sundays and feast days. They were used for variety of purposes, including pastoral, arable and industrial production. However, to manage more distant assets in Ayrshire, Melrose Abbey used Mauchline as a "super grange", to oversee lesser granges.[26] The rural economy appears to have boomed in the thirteenth century and was still buoyant in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death, which reached Scotland in 1349, and may have carried off a third of the population. However, by the 1360s there was a severe falling off in incomes that can be seen in clerical benefices, of between a third and half compared with the beginning of the era, to be followed by a slow recovery in the fifteenth century.[29]

Burghs

Main article: Burgh
Burghs established before 1153

Records of burghs, small towns granted legal privileges from the crown, can be found from the eleventh century. Burghs (a term derived from the Germanic word for fortress), developed rapidly during the reign of David I (1124–53). Up until this point there were no identifiable towns in Scotland. Most of the burghs that were granted charters in his reign probably already existed as settlements. Charters were copied almost verbatim from those used in England,[30] and early citizens, called burgesses, that were usually English or Flemish.[14] They were able to impose tolls and fines on traders within a region outside their settlements.[14] Most of the early burghs were on the east coast, and among them were the largest and wealthiest, including Aberdeen, Berwick, Perth and Edinburgh, whose growth was facilitated by trade with the European continent. In the south-west, Glasgow, Ayr and Kirkcudbright were aided by the less-profitable sea trade with Ireland, and to a lesser extent France and Spain.[31]

Burghs had unique layouts and economic functions. They were typically surrounded by a palisade or possessed a castle, and usually had a marketplace, with a widened high street or junction, often marked by a mercat cross (market cross), beside houses for the burgesses and other inhabitants.[14] The foundations of around 15 burghs can be traced to the reign of David I[32] and there is evidence of 55 burghs by 1296.[33] In addition to the major royal burghs, the late Middle Ages saw the proliferation of baronial and ecclesiastical burghs, with 51 being created between 1450 and 1516. Most of these were much smaller than their royal counterparts. Excluded from international trade they mainly acted as local markets and centres of craftsmanship.[31] In general, burghs probably carried out far more local trading with their hinterlands than nationally or internationally, relying on them for food and raw materials.[25]

Manufacture and trade

Main article: Scottish trade in the Middle Ages

While burghs acted as centres of basic crafts. These included the manufacture of shoes, clothes, dishes, pots, joinery, bread and ale, which would normally be sold to inhabitants and visitors on market days.[14] However, there were relatively few developed manufacturing industries in Scotland for most of this period. By the late fifteenth century, there were the beginnings of a native iron-casting industry, which led to the production of cannon and of the silver and goldsmithing for which the country would later be known.[25] As a result, the most important exports were unprocessed raw materials, including wool, hides, salt, fish, animals and coal, while Scotland remained frequently short of wood, iron and, in years of bad harvests, grain,[25] which was imported in large quantities, particularly from the Baltic ports, through Berwick and Ayr.[14]

A silver penny of David I, the first silver coinage to bear a Scottish king's head.

Limited sources indicate for the early Middle Ages indicate that there was some trade of luxury goods with continental Europe. For most of the period there are not the detailed custom accounts that exist for England, that can provide an understanding of foreign trade, with the first records for Scotland dating to the 1320s.[33] In the early Middle Ages, the rise of Christianity meant that wine and precious metals were imported for use in religious rites, and there are occasional references of trips to and from foreign countries, such as the incident recorded by Adomnán in which St Columba went to a port to await ships bearing news, and presumably other items, from Italy.[34] Imported goods found in archaeological sites of the period include ceramics and glass, while many sites indicate iron and precious metal working.[15]

In the High Middle Ages, although the Scottish economy was still dominated by agriculture and by short-distance, local trade, there was an increasing amount of foreign trade. Coins were replacing barter goods, with Scottish coins being struck from the reign of David I. Mints were established at Berwick, Roxburgh, Edinburgh and Perth,[14] but until the end of the period most exchange was done without the use of metal currency, and English coins probably outnumbered Scottish ones.[32] Until the disruption caused by the outbreak of the Wars of Independence in the early fourteenth century, most naval trade was probably coastal and most foreign trade was with England. The wars closed English markets and raised the levels of piracy and disruption to naval trade on both sides. They may have led to an increase in continental trade, and isolated references indicate that Scottish ships were active in Norway and Danzig, and the earliest records from the 1330s indicate that five-sixths of this trade was in the hands of Scottish merchants.[33]

Wool and hides were the major exports in the late Middle Ages. From 1327 to 1332, the earliest period for which figures survive, the annual average was 5,700 sacks of wool and 36,100 leather hides. The disruption of the Wars of Independence, which not only limited trade but damaged much of the valuable agricultural land of the Borders and Lowlands, meant that this fell in the period 1341–42 to 1342–43 to 2,450 sacks of wool and 17,900 hides. The trade recovered to reach a peak in the 1370s, with an annual average of 7,360 sacks, but the international recession from the 1380s saw a reduction to an annual average of 3,100 sacks.[27] The introduction of sheep-scab was a serious blow to the wool trade from the early fifteenth century. Despite a levelling-off, in the Low Countries there was another drop in exports as the markets collapsed in the early-sixteenth century. Unlike in England, this did not prompt the Scots to turn to large-scale cloth production and only poor-quality rough cloths seem to have been significant.[25]

Exports of hides and particularly cod, where the Scots held a decisive advantage in quality over their rivals, appear to have held up much better than wool, despite the general economic downturn in Europe in the aftermath of the Black Death.[29] Exports of hides averaged 56,400 a year from 1380 to 1384, but fell to an average of 48,000 over the next five years and to 34,200 by the end of the century.[27] In the late Middle Ages, the growing desire among the court, lords, upper clergy and wealthier merchants for luxury goods, that largely had to be imported (including fine cloth from Flanders and Italy),[14] led to a chronic shortage of bullion. This, and perennial problems in royal finance, led to several debasements of the coinage, with the amount of silver in a penny being cut to almost a fifth between the late fourteenth century and the late fifteenth century. The heavily debased "black money", introduced in 1480, had to be withdrawn two years later and may have helped fuel a financial and political crisis.[25]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Lyons, Anona May (cartographer) (2000), "Subsistence Potential of the Land", in McNeil, Peter G. B.; MacQueen, Hector L. (eds.), Atlas of Scottish History to 1707, Edinburgh: The Scottish Medievalists and Department of Geography, University of Edinburgh, p. 15, ISBN 0-9503904-1-0.
  2. ^ E. Gemmill and N. J. Mayhew, Changing Values in Medieval Scotland: a Study of Prices, Money, and Weights and Measures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), ISBN 0521473853, pp. 8–10.
  3. ^ C. Harvie, Scotland: a Short History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), ISBN 0192100548, pp. 10–11.
  4. ^ J. R. Maddicott and D. M. Palliser, eds, The Medieval State: essays presented to James Campbell (London: Continuum, 2000), ISBN 1-85285-195-3, p. 48.
  5. ^ W. E. Burns, A Brief History of Great Britain (Infobase Publishing, 2009), ISBN 0-8160-7728-2, pp. 44–5.
  6. ^ B. Yorke, The Conversion of Britain: Religion, Politics and Society in Britain c.600–800 (Pearson Education, 2006), ISBN 0-582-77292-3, p. 54.
  7. ^ R. A. Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity (University of California Press, 1999), ISBN 0520218590, pp. 231–3.
  8. ^ G. Markus, "Conversion to Christianity", in M. Lynch, ed., The Oxford Companion to Scottish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), ISBN 0-19-211696-7, pp. 78–9.
  9. ^ L. R. Laing, The Archaeology of Celtic Britain and Ireland, c. AD 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), ISBN 0521547407, pp. 21–2.
  10. ^ R. E. Tyson, "Population Patterns", in M. Lynch, ed., The Oxford Companion to Scottish History (New York, 2001), pp. 487–8.
  11. ^ S. H. Rigby, ed., A Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003), ISBN 0631217851, pp. 109–11.
  12. ^ a b A. Woolf, From Pictland to Alba: 789 – 1070 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), ISBN 0748612343, pp. 17–20.
  13. ^ H. P. R. Finberg, The Formation of England 550–1042 (London: Paladin, 1974), ISBN 9780586082485, p. 204.
  14. ^ a b c d e f g h A. MacQuarrie, Medieval Scotland: Kinship and Nation (Thrupp: Sutton, 2004), ISBN 0-7509-2977-4, pp. 136–40.
  15. ^ a b K. J. Edwards and I. Ralston, Scotland after the Ice Age: Environment, Archaeology and History, 8000 BC – AD 1000 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), ISBN 0748617361, p. 230.
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