Landscape and the making of the medieval Anglo-Scottish border: power, place, and perspective c. 1200-c. 1500

The political development of the medieval Anglo-Scottish border and its borderland culture has long been of interest to historians. However, because of the non-monumental nature of the Anglo-Scottish border, archaeology is seldom incorporated into their political narratives. And yet, modern border studies indicate that even seemingly ephemeral borders have important physical components. Therefore, the archaeology of the medieval Anglo-Scottish borderland offers a valuable opportunity to investigate relationships between physical landscapes and the development of medieval political international boundaries.

To do this, the project utilises an idea from contemporary border studies, the border-scape, to construct a more holistic picture of the landscapes of the Anglo-Scottish borderland. Concentrating on the eastern half of the borderland and the formative years between 1200 and 1500, the project conducts the largest cross-border synthesis of medieval landscape data to date. This data was organised into a spatial database using GIS software which is used to explore the Anglo-Scottish border-scape through two case studies—cross-border court sites and fortifications—and a five-part theoretical framework that reveals how landscape was involved in the creation and enforcement of the medieval border.

This project exposes important characteristics of the Anglo-Scottish border-scape. It distinguishes processes which link the physical medieval landscape to medieval bordering, and, moreover, the intersections of these bordering processes with other medieval cultural processes. It also identifies mechanics through which the border-scape was co-produced by communities at national and local scales. Finally, the project proposes an ‘alternative geography’ of the medieval border, one based on the experience of bordering rather than territoriality, and argues for the existence of many other medieval geographies of the region yet to be discovered. Overall, the project represents the most sophisticated analysis, to date, of the relationship between landscape, power, and the formation of political geographies along the Anglo-Scottish border.