Reassessing the Political Community: Politics and the Public Domain in Fifteenth-Century Scotland

It is over fifty years since the birth of the ‘new orthodoxy’ in the political history of fifteenth-century Scotland.1 Pioneered by Jenny Wormald and Alexander Grant, this approach cast aside the prevailing assumption, that late medieval Scotland was a wild and lawless place where overmighty magnates held sway over a weak crown, and replaced it with a model of political relations which had co-operation at its heart.2 Wormald argued that Scotland was so decentralised and ‘relatively underdeveloped’ in terms of legal institutions that the maintenance of order in the localities relied heavily upon the nobility, who were responsible for the administration of justice within their own jurisdictions.