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

这个项目是关于政府及其在中世纪出现和发展的方式。我们今天所认为的政府，最早是在12世纪的西欧得到承认的。但这是皇家权力和权威不断增长的自然结果，还是国王对混乱的反应？要理解中世纪政府的出现，必须以理解主要的证据来源--特许状--为基础，而特许状开始大量存在是在12世纪。这个项目的新方法是专注于理解和解释宪章最显着的特点-他们的笔迹和他们的散文公式化方面的外观。宪章是权威的人工制品：其文本的内容和脚本的风格对于理解它们所体现的权威具有重要意义。但是，特许状不仅是权威的人工制品;它们也是权威的典范。如果我们想考察政府的出现和王权在其发展中的作用，那么了解皇家特许状如何成为非皇家特许状的典范是很重要的。宪章的笔迹和散文是一个巨大的未开发的资源，可以用来追踪王权作为与政府发展有关的社会权威来源的日益增加的形象。如果认为这只是一个“自上而下”的过程，那就错了。抄写员通常以书写和散文的风格来指导他们的工作。在这一时期开始时，宪章的撰写方式有很大的变化。后来，非皇家文士越来越多地选择跟随皇家文士不断发展和日益创新的风格。在苏格兰，这并不是因为皇家行政机构迅速发展：与英格兰不同，皇家的官僚机构是有限的。相反，这是因为皇家特许状被非皇家书记员当作权威的典范。这方面以前在苏格兰或其他地方都没有调查过。它提供了一种新的方式来研究政府的出现，一个可以让我们看到这一过程的非皇家文士的角度。来自苏格兰的大量原始宪章的数字图像将作为我们的案例研究。苏格兰最适合作为案例研究，因为它拥有来自一系列中世纪档案的无与伦比的特许状数字图像库。这是一个小到足以管理的语料库，但足够大，他们的笔迹和散文的分析，以给出显着的结果。这样的研究现在是可能的，因为新的工具，数字分析中世纪的笔迹已经率先在数字项目由Co-I彼得斯托克斯。Digitech有一个在线框架，通过将手写图像的部分链接到有关文本、上下文和手写本身的结构化信息，来分析中世纪早期的英语手写体。“权威模型”将通过调查如何在草书书写的根本不同的环境中适应DigiKey工具来开辟新的天地，在草书书写的环境中，字母形式本质上不太稳定，并且与其他字母联系在一起。而不是单独分析字母形式，他们将在单词和单词组的背景下进行研究。这样，我们不仅能够确定许多宪章中共有的细节，以及它们在何时何地被使用，而且还能够确定它们与特定情况的关联程度。这样，我们就可以看到，在非皇家特许状中越来越强调皇家模式，这在多大程度上预示了政府的出现，并调查这种情况最初发生的背景，非皇家文士倾向于模仿皇家文士的背景不太可能是苏格兰独有的。如果王权作为特许状模式的形象在苏格兰（皇家行政管理发展较晚）得以发展，那么我们可以问，其他地方的政府是否也是“自下而上”而不是“自上而下”的。

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'.