Violence, Custom and Law

Cynthia J. Neville is the George Munro Professor of History at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada. She has published extensively on various aspects of the legal and social history of the Anglo-Scottish border lands in the period 1200-1500 and on the social and cultural encounter between Gaels and Europeans in medieval Scotland. She is the author of Violence, Custom and Law: The Anglo-Scottish Border Lands in the Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh University Press, 1998) and Native Lordship in Medieval Scotland: The Earldoms of Strathearn and Lennox, c.1140-1365 (2005).

Considerable detail ... Well researched ... drawing together under one cover a comprehensive list of all the books and papers relative to English border policy in the Middle Ages. -- Dr William Taylor Neville's study of mechanisms of law in a war-zone and her efforts to place the region in the context of the British Isles add much to the debate on the attitudes of the English crown to the difficult frontiers of its authority. Especially welcome is Professor Cynthia Neville's thoughtful and ambitious survey of 'violence, custom and law' in England's most continuously violent frontier region ... Cynthia Neville's book owes much of its cogency to her ability to synthesize some very extensive reading as well as her determination to concentrate on what she regards as the essential elements of her story. Here at last is a historian of Anglo-Scottish conflict during the period between the battles of Bannockburn and Flodden who is less interested in war as such than she is in 'law' and 'custom' ... Violence, Custom and Law already deserves to be required reading for modern historians of the territorial frontier as well as medieval students of the Anglo-Scottish Border itself. Considerable detail ... Well researched ... drawing together under one cover a comprehensive list of all the books and papers relative to English border policy in the Middle Ages. Neville's study of mechanisms of law in a war-zone and her efforts to place the region in the context of the British Isles add much to the debate on the attitudes of the English crown to the difficult frontiers of its authority. Especially welcome is Professor Cynthia Neville's thoughtful and ambitious survey of 'violence, custom and law' in England's most continuously violent frontier region ... Cynthia Neville's book owes much of its cogency to her ability to synthesize some very extensive reading as well as her determination to concentrate on what she regards as the essential elements of her story. Here at last is a historian of Anglo-Scottish conflict during the period between the battles of Bannockburn and Flodden who is less interested in war as such than she is in 'law' and 'custom' ... Violence, Custom and Law already deserves to be required reading for modern historians of the territorial frontier as well as medieval students of the Anglo-Scottish Border itself.