SANDY Grant has been waiting for this volume for some time. It was originally intended to mark his retirement and we apologise profusely to him, to his partner and champion, Alison Grant, and also to the contributors to this volume, for the delay. We can offer no excuses. But we do hope that Sandy will, nonetheless, enjoy what follows and we genuinely look forward to hearing his characteristically informed, animated and thought-provoking critique of the essays published here in his honour. The various articles in the collection reflect not only Sandy's personal academic connections and the legacy he has left through his doctoral students, but also the various fields of study to which he has made important contributions. The themes of kingship, lordship and identity have all featured prominently in his publications – which are discussed in more detail below. In this volume the first of these themes is central to the chapter by Judith Green, a former colleague of Sandy's at Queens University Belfast, and to that by Aly Macdonald. Both investigate royal reputations, Green examining the kingship and historical reputation of Alexander I of Scotland (1107–24), who has been thoroughly (and perhaps unfairly) overshadowed by his younger brother, David I (1124–53). David is generally regarded as a man who brought about a sweeping transformation of the twelfth-century kingdom. Although Alexander's reign did not witness the influx of ‘Frankish’ aristocrats and churchmen that marked David's rule, Green highlights evidence that King Alexander was alive to wider currents of ecclesiastical reform, to new ways of presenting and justifying royal status, and had extensive social and cultural ties outwith his own realm, not least through his rather mysterious wife, Sibyl. David's kingship may not, then, have represented as radical a break from that of his predecessor as has sometimes been claimed. Macdonald, meanwhile, tackles the English king Henry V (1413–22), laying out a compelling case that Henry's reputation for shrewd and effective diplomacy was ill-deserved. Macdonald's analysis of the response of the Scottish nobility to Henry's unwisely belligerent and threatening approach to their realm chimes with Sandy's own consistent emphasis on the willingness of the Scots, throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, to pursue aggressive military and diplomatic strategies against their southern neighbour when these seemed advantageous, appropriate or unavoidable.

THE year 1979 saw a series of momentous events whose consequences still reverberate today. Margaret Thatcher became prime minister of the United Kingdom, Saddam Hussein took over in Iraq, Rhodesia was supplanted by Zimbabwe, the U.S.S.R. invaded Afghanistan – and Sandy Grant arrived to take up a lectureship in history at Lancaster University. He came from Queen's University, Belfast, and was naturally highly recommended by, among others, Lewis Warren – though if memory serves it was stressed that allowances would have to be made for his fervent support of clubs competing in the Scottish football league. For the next thirty-five years, until Sandy's retirement in September 2014, Lancaster's history department was his professional home and it is on his role as a contributor to departmental life that this appreciation begins. Sandy replaced Anthony Tuck, who left for the mastership of Collingwood College, Durham, and Sandy made an immediate impact, not least by strengthening the department's ability to offer medieval and renaissance courses in genuinely British history at a time when such were far from fashionable. He progressed to senior lecturer in 1992 – in an era when such appointments were exceptionally difficult to obtain – and he was awarded a very well-merited readership in 1995. Never a shrinking violet, Sandy also established himself as a lively and vociferous – as well as, in some guises, a challenging and dissenting – colleague, one who was and remained very much part of the lifeblood of the department. What marked out his many contributions to the department's affairs can be summed up in two words: passion and commitment.

Only the most introverted of Sandy's colleagues remained unaware of his impressive range of academic contacts beyond Lancaster, especially north of the border; none failed to appreciate his burgeoning scholarly reputation, particularly (but by no means exclusively) in the field of medieval Scottish studies. We shall say more about his research and publications shortly but it was characteristic of Sandy's loyalty to the department that as a co-editor and/or contributor he was involved in the production of as many as seven books that bore something of a distinctive ‘Lancaster stamp’.

THE Scottish Legendary is a collection of saints’ lives written in Early Scots apparently dating to the last quarter of the fourteenth century: internal references in the text suggest that it was composed after 1371 by an author (assuming a single author is responsible for the entire work) whose life overlapped with the reign of David II (1329–71). The saints’ lives included in the collection are drawn from various texts but the single most significant source was the thirteenth-century Legenda Aurea (Golden Legends) of the Dominican Jacobus Voragine, a widespread and popular work across late medieval Europe. The Scottish Legendary survives in one fifteenth-century manuscript (Cambridge, University Library, MS Gg.2.6), the provenance of which can be traced to the library of a bishop of Ely who died in 1714, but no further back. The work has been the subject of recent historical and literary scholarship, most notably a monograph by Eva von Contzen. The author of the Legendary remains unidentified although several candidates have been proposed. The prologue claims that the work of translating the legends from Latin was taken up at the point that the writer became too frail to continue his duties as a ‘mynistere of haly kirke’. The inclusion in the collection of material on St Machar, a saint whose cult was largely confined to Aberdeen and its hinterland, has led to suggestions that the author was connected to that region/burgh. Aberdeen cathedral kirk was dedicated to St Machar and the preamble to the tale of the saint in the Legendary noted that Machar was the patron of the city of Aberdeen before lamenting that he was not better known in the land where he wrought his miracles: ‘bot in tis land we ken hym nocht’. It may, or may not, be a coincidence that the tale preceding that of St Machar in the Legendary was an account of St Nicholas of Myra, dedicatee and patron of the parochial church of the burgh of Aberdeen. By the mid-fourteenth century the church of St Nicholas in the burgh had acquired a well-endowed altar dedicated jointly to St Lawrence and St Ninian.

Late medieval Scotland saw the production of a series of chronicles that sought to trace the story of the Scottish kingdom and people from their earliest origins. John of Fordun's Chronica Gentis Scottorum (1371-87), Andrew of Wyntoun's Original Chronicle (1408-1424) and Walter Bower's Scotichronicon (1441-7) all attempted to provide a coherent and unified historical narrative that explained and illustrated the emergence and development of the Scots as a distinct people under its own sovereign rulers from biblical times onwards. At the heart of these accounts was the story of Scottish kingship and the royal dynasty that stood for and symbolised the Gens Scottorum. The chronicles established ancient precedents for the political status and territorial integrity of the late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century kingdom as a fully independent monarchy, and gloried in the way in which that standing had been won and maintained against a series of internal and external enemies and threats.

Historians have tended to see the production of these late medieval chronicles as part of a ‘war of historiography’ and propaganda that ran alongside and contributed to the less cerebral conflicts of the Wars of Independence. Fordun's work, in particular, has been characterised as a direct response to the English crown's deployment of the mythical history of the ancient British kingdom to justify its claims to superiority over the entire island of Britain. The appearance of Fordun's Chronica Gentis Scottorum is also held to have introduced a view of the kingdom's past that was swiftly established as the orthodox and dominant tradition in Scotland. Fordun's Latin chronicle was certainly incorporated, and to an extent modified and expanded, by Walter Bower, abbot of Inchcolm in the production of his mammoth work, the Scotichronicon (also in Latin), in the 1440s. Thereafter, most chronicles of the second half of the fifteenth century and the early sixteenth century relied heavily on the narrative framework provided by Fordun/Bower as the basis for their discussion of the history of the Scottish kingdom. By the midfifteenth century Fordun's vision of the origins of the Scottish royal line in the eponymous Egyptian princess Scota, and the subsequent history of the dynasty and race descended from her, was to be found also in short vernacular histories.

Despite the many scholarly examinations of The Bruce, there has been relatively little interest in the particular political and social context in which Barbour composed his work, or in the way the text might have been moulded for, and received and interpreted by, its original audience in the years around 1375–76. Instead, Scottish historians have been most concerned to discuss The Bruce in terms of its potential usefulness as a historical source for developments in the first three decades of the fourteenth century. The likely dating and nature of the various narratives underpinning The Bruce are obviously important in any debate over the historical reliability of the text. The tendency has been to stress the likelihood that Barbour’s tale incorporated, or made extensive use of, sources composed much closer in time to the events they recorded and described. The recycling of this earlier material made, it has been suggested, The Bruce more historically ‘trustworthy’ than its date of compilation might imply. The notion that The Bruce might have been significantly shaped by the concerns and pre-occupations of Barbour’s own time has received less sustained attention. In some ways this is surprising, since the themes raised and discussed in The Bruce about the nature of Anglo-Scottish relations and the causes, aims and appropriate conduct of warfare between the two kingdoms would seem to have had an obvious relevance to many in the Scottish realm at the point when the work was actually completed. Barbour certainly openly articulated the hope that the exemplary behaviour and attitudes of his principal protagonists would be held up as a mirror to the noblemen of his own time, who were expressly urged to replicate the virtues of their ‘nobyll eldrys’. The belief that the deeds of great chivalric figures were worthy of remembrance and emulation was, of course, something of a truism in late medieval secular texts, but there is no particular reason to doubt that the picture of early fourteenth-century Scotland laid out in Barbour’s work was genuinely intended to be both resonant and inspirational for the nobility of the Scottish realm in the 1370s. The Bruce provides prolonged reflection on the nature of Anglo-Scottish conflict earlier in the century and a justification and encouragement for the pursuit of war with the English crown to recover ‘illegally’ occupied lands and lordships.

Barbour’s Bruce is an account of the reign of Robert I of Scotland (1306–29) composed c.1375, most probably at the court of his grandson, Robert II, the first Stewart king of Scotland (1371–90). The poem narrates the deeds of Robert I and his trusted companions: his brother, Edward Bruce; Thomas Randolph, earl of Moray; and, in particular, ‘the good’ Sir James Douglas whom Barbour emphasizes as the focus of his buk, together with the king: ‘King Robert off Scotland/ That hardy wes off hart and hand,/ And gud Schir James off Douglas/ That in his tyme sa worthy was […]/ Off thaim I think this buk to ma’.

The poem, written in octosyllabic couplets and in Early Scots, is the story of the celebrated deeds of these men during the so-called wars of independence between Scotland and England. These famous exploits are the substance of the text; they recall perilous situations, were widely disseminated, are concerned to depict chivalry and constituted a life. A biography of a knight was understood to record memorable deeds performed by men placed in gret distress. Fifteenth-century manuscripts of Barbour’s Bruce focus on these celebrated exploits in their titles; for instance, NLS, Advocates’ MS 19.2.2 calls The Bruce ‘the book composed about the deeds, wars and virtues of Sir Robert the Bruce, the famous king of Scotland and of Sir James Douglas’.

Barbour’s Bruce was completed in the reign of Robert II and has remained to today an essential historical source for the reign of Robert I, sometimes the sole source. As the earliest surviving complete literary work of any length produced in English in late medieval Scotland, Barbour’s Bruce is usually treated as the meaningful starting point for any discussion of the language and literature of Early Scots. Apart from Scottish history and Scottish literature, The Bruce is also crucial to studies on chivalry, national identity and scholastic culture, all of which form the focus of this volume. Barbour has made his mark across disciplines, but scholarship has been divided largely along historical and literary lines. This volume was conceived to redress this and to consider John Barbour and his seminal text in their literary, historical, cultural and intellectual milieu. The chapters below look afresh at what remains one of the most engaging, vibrant and beautifully compiled narratives in medieval historical writing.

The significance of patrilineal descent, and the concomitant ties of blood and surname, for the way in which late medieval Scottish aristocrats thought about and articulated their identity and place in society has been much discussed in recent scholarship, most notably in two brilliant studies by Jenny Wormald published in the 1980s. One of the most important conclusions arising from Wormald's wide-ranging analysis was that the obligations of kinship, feud, lordship and service, far from acting to disrupt and destabilise local society (as older interpretations assumed), were vital to the successful operation of justice and the maintenance of social order and governmental authority. In evaluating the relative strength of the ties that bound aristocratic society together, Wormald broadly accepted the evidence for the primacy of links between male kinsmen, and the fundamental importance of the sense of belonging to, and being obliged to defend and promote the interests of, an agnatic kin-group. The bonds established through marriage and the obligations to marital and maternal kinsmen were seen, in comparison, as essentially fragile and ephemeral.

Examples of noblemen expressing commitment to the welfare and prosperity of their male lineage are certainly not hard to find in late medieval Scotland. One document type where these sentiments could be invoked with particular clarity was the charter of tailzie (entail), by which landowners sought to regulate the descent of property rights to the advantage of family members who might not otherwise have had strong claims on part or all of a lord's estates after his death. The entailing of property to male relatives (typically brothers, uncles or cousins and their male heirs) at the expense of heirs general was an intermittent practice in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Scotland, although a full assessment of the scale and frequency of this type of arrangement is still required. The concern to avoid female inheritance could sometimes be articulated with startling vehemence, as in James Douglas of Dalkeith's 1369 entailing of his barony and castle of Dalkeith, which limited the descent of the properties ‘always to heirs male of the said James having the surname [cognomen] Douglas’, with descent to a female heiress only countenanced if ‘all heirs male of the for said surname of Douglas’ had ‘wholly failed’.

We are grateful to our colleague Judith Green for reminding us of the hostage to fortune that Jenny Wormald left buried in the acknowledgements to her book Lords and Men in Scotland: Bonds of Manrent, 1442‒1603 (Edinburgh, 1985). By remarking on the coincidence that the earliest known bond of manrent was dated exactly 500 years before her own date of birth, Jenny had enabled scholars of 2011 to work out that her seventieth birthday was approaching. The result was a conference in 2012 celebrating her achievements – a conference in which Jenny participated with éclat, being one of the last to leave the restaurant, with her sons, at the end of a long and enjoyable day.

It was always intended that the conference would be a first step towards an edited volume, and this book is the result. We are grateful to all those who spoke at the conference; mention should be made here of Steven Gunn, whose paper was promised for publication elsewhere but was much appreciated on the day. Revised versions of the other conference papers appear below, along with a number of other chapters that all address themes prominent in Jenny's work. Thanks are due to the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, and to the conference administrator, Adrienne Miller.

Edinburgh University Press expressed early interest in the project and has been a consistently supportive publisher.

Jenny Wormald's contribution to the transformation of Scottish historical scholarship is manifest in a number of areas, as the various studies that make up this volume confirm individually and collectively. Through a series of innovative and original monographs and articles she has launched an often brutally witty iconoclastic assault on hoary misconceptions about the medieval and early modern kingdom and left a landscape littered with the battered remains of old prejudices and muddled thinking in her wake. For festschrift editors, circling the site of battle and attempting to identify juicy titbits amongst the wreckage, the scale of Jenny's triumph and the rapidity of her subsequent advance present their own problems in terms of supplying a bewilderingly wide choice of possible targets. Rather than flap aimlessly across a broad and still developing front, we have alighted on a few fundamental aspects of Jenny's work that might repay more detailed consideration.

The question that lies behind much of our discussion is that of periodisation. When was medieval Scotland? When was early modern Scotland? Why does this book begin in 1300, and why does it end in 1625? Lord Acton's advice that historians should ‘study problems, not periods’ is as wise as ever, but any investigation of the problem of how relationships among ‘kings, lords and men’ were articulated in political culture must address the question of when the main changes occurred. As we shall see, Jenny's unconventional approach to this question has generated fresh insights.

A persistent feature of Jenny's historical approach has been a cheerful disinclination to accept the idea that there were necessarily profound differences between fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Scotland. Indeed, the chronological sweep of much of Jenny's published work implicitly brings into question the usefulness and utility of thinking in terms of the constructed historical categories of ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’. In the Scottish context, in particular, Jenny's studies have ranged widely in both theme and chronology, analysing social, legal and governmental structures and developments from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. The particular breadth and coherence of her vision for the century and a half between c.1450 and c.1600, straddling what has occasionally been presented as the shift from the medieval to the early modern, rests on her identification of basic patterns in Scottish social and political life that endured, despite a variety of challenges, throughout that period.