Models of authority: Scottish charters and the emergence of government 1100-1250

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This project is about government and the way it emerged and developed in the middle ages. Government as we would think of it today can first be recognised in western Europe during the twelfth century. But was it the natural result of increasing royal power and authority; or was it a response of kings to disorder? Understanding the emergence of medieval government has to be based on understanding the main source of evidence - charters - and it is in the twelfth century that charters begin to survive in large numbers. This project's new approach is to focus on understanding and interpreting the most distinctive features of charters -the appearance of their handwriting and the formulaic aspects of their prose. Charters are artefacts of authority: the content of their text and the style of their script is significant for understanding the authority they embody. But charters are not only artefacts of authority; they acted as models of authority too. Seeing how royal charters served as models for non-royal ones is important if we want to examine the emergence of government and the role of kingship in its development. The handwriting and prose of charters are a huge untapped resource for tracking the increasing profile of kingship as a source of social authority in relation to the growth of government. It would be a mistake to assume that this was simply a 'top down' process. Scribes were usually guided in their work by styles of handwriting and prose. At the beginning of this period there was a lot of variation in how charters were written. Later, non-royal scribes chose more and more to follow the evolving and increasingly innovative style of royal scribes. In Scotland this was not because royal administration was growing rapidly: unlike England, royal bureaucracy was limited. It was, instead, because royal charters were being adopted as a model of authority by non-royal scribes. This aspect has not been investigated before, in Scotland or elsewhere. It offers a new way to investigate the emergence of government, one that can allow us to see this process from the perspective of non-royal scribes.Digital images of a large number of original charters from Scotland will act as our case-study. Scotland is best placed to be the case-study because of its unparalleled corpus of digital images of charters from a range of medieval archives. It is a corpus small enough to be manageable but large enough for the analysis of their handwriting and prose to give significant results.Such research is now possible because new tools for the digital analysis of medieval handwriting have been pioneered in the DigiPal project by Co-I Peter Stokes. DigiPal has an online framework for analysing early medieval English bookhand by linking portions of images of handwriting to structured information about the text, context, and handwriting itself. 'Models of Authority' will break fresh ground by investigating how the DigiPal tools can be adapted in the fundamentally different environment of cursive writing, where letter-forms are inherently less stable and linked to other letters. Instead of analysing letter-forms individually, they will be investigated in the context of words and groups of words. We shall then be able not only to identify details that are shared in many charters, and when and where they were used, but also to establish how far they correlate with a specific situation. We should then be able to see how far the emergence of government was anticipated by an increasing emphasis on royal models in non-royal charters, and investigate the contexts in which this first occurred.The contexts in which non-royal scribes were prone to mimicking royal scribes are unlikely to be unique to Scotland. If the profile of kingship as a model in charters could grow in Scotland, where royal administration developed late, then we can ask whether the emergence of government elsewhere might have been as much, or more, 'bottom up' than 'top down'.