John Mair is regarded as the first unionist thinker because of his advocacy of dynastic union between Scotland and England in his ‘History of Greater Britain’ (1521). In this article his ‘History’ is reread in a new context as part of a late-medieval Scottish identification of Britain as Scottish. The idea of England as Britain is more than a millennium old; identifying Britain as an extension of the Scottish kingdom, and of Scottish independence as compatible with British identity, is much less familiar. It is traced in this article in John of Fordun's work (written in the mid-1380s), Thomas Barry's poem on the Battle of Otterburn (1388), and in an unpublished compendium of king-list, chronicle and origin-legend material in a recently discovered booklet from the early sixteenth century. It is proposed that, rather than ‘banal unionism’, there was ‘banal Britishness’ based ultimately on sharing the same island. Not only does this suggest that there was even less of an inherent contradiction between Scottish independence and being British than is apparent within the spectrum of unionism delineated by Colin Kidd; it also raises the question of whether there are only Scottish, English and Welsh British identities, each with their own spectrum which have only occasionally intersected as a common Britishness.

Fordun's principal source (‘proto-Fordun’) has been dated to 1285 based on assumptions that are challenged in this article. The material following Fordun's history in key manuscripts is investigated afresh as a survival of part of proto-Fordun. Proto-Fordun emerges as a seven-book work whose narrative may have reached as far as Edward I's conquest of 1304. It finished, however, with a series of documents relating to the case at the Curia in 1301 led by Baldred Bisset. At the heart of this analysis is prioritising the way this material is configured in the manuscripts, taking account particularly of all book-divisions, however confusing they may seem to be. It is suggested that proto-Fordun was probably composed in the late 1320s or 1330s. Superficially proto-Fordun could be regarded as Scotland's first ‘national’ history in the sense developed by Norbert Kersken in his study of similar works across Europe. It is suggested, however, that if our understanding of ‘national’ histories is determined chiefly by what is found in manuscripts (which can seem inconsistent and confusing) rather than by scholarly editions, then the development of ‘national’ histories can be seen (at least in a Scottish context) as an essentially organic process involving a range of authorial, editorial and scribal activity across generations, rather than solely about key works by individual authors.

"A sociolinguistic history of Scotland." Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2

Journal Article The Laws of Medieval Scotland: Legal Compilations from the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, ed. Alice Taylor Get access The Laws of Medieval Scotland: Legal Compilations from the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, ed. Alice Taylor (Edinburgh: The Stair Society, 2019; pp. xii + 657. £45). Dauvit Broun Dauvit Broun University of Glasgow, UK Dauvit.Broun@glasgow.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, cead159, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cead159 Published: 18 October 2023

Review of: Neil McGuigan, Máel Coluim III Canmore: An Eleventh-Century Scottish King. (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2021).

This paper describes several aspects of a formal digital semantic model that expresses some issues presented by medieval charters. Surprisingly, perhaps, this model does not deal directly with a charter's text and is not mark-up based. Instead, it draws on the authors’ experience with the construction of three highly structured factoid-oriented prosopographical databases that drew heavily on charter sources, and that also did not explicitly contain a digital representation of the charter texts. The paper explains the way in which the structured data model thus derived differs from text-oriented approaches such as TEI/CEI work that has been done so far on charters. It presents a view on why this factoid-based model seems to capture more readily some of the complexity in the apparent meanings of the charters, and suggests that this is because it is also more likely to relate to a richer conception of the broader medieval world in which these charters were created than text-oriented work does. Finally, drawing on recent work on the ChartEx project, it explores how a combined approach, that takes the best of both text-markup and structured data modelling techniques, could evolve in the future.

The DigiPal project for palaeography has featured in previous DH conferences. It includes a generalised framework for the description and analysis of handwriting, initially applied to Old English of the eleventh century but subsequently extended to Latin, Hebrew, and decoration; it incorporates a novel model for describing handwriting; and a recent addition allows the embedding of linked palaeographical images into prose description. The purpose of this poster is to present new developments which form part of two further major grants, one of which is the Models of Authority project. Specifically, the focus here is on the incorporation of textual content into the model for handwriting.