"Bastard Fuedalism .... In Scotland. " Topic

In England, 1450s-1480s roughly, a lord or wealthy man could pay for his own retinue. These he could clad in his colours and give badges to.
I'm fairly sure the Welsh were doing the same system. Or at least lords in Wales.

What about Scotland and Ireland? Did they follow suit?

Any famous soldiers raise any colourful retinues? What liveries are known or did they have a different system?

Yes, to a degree, not sure about Ireland, but defiantly Scotland,

there are household accounts of bolts of cloth being purchased and liveried men. But I suspect most wore badges at least of their lord or overlord.

Some coats of arms here for inspiration.

link

Cheers
Matt

Yes, though the law in Gaelic areas was different, lords maintained their own retinues. The Gaels did not go in for liveries but the sumptary laws did dictate what soldiers and lords might wear in terms of colours. You could paint your units to differentiate nobles and soldiers. It looks nice.

defiantly Scotland

As is only natural!

Sumptuary laws really had no effect in Scotland (and precious little in England AFAIR). There was no separate legal code for Highland areas and no visible difference between highland and lowland troops – or English troops for that matter, so you can achieve Scottish units simply by having alternative command groups with Scottish heraldry. . Since people had top provide their own kit you should avoid having the same colours as far as possible other than – perhaps – a standard bearer/command group. The latter might well comprise father and son, so a suitable 'differencing' for the heraldry would look the part.

Since many of the " nobility" in Scotland were of Norman origin, surely they would have behaved pretty much like their "English" cousins as far as raising retinues etc.

"Sumptuary laws really had no effect in Scotland (and precious little in England AFAIR). There was no separate legal code for Highland areas"

You will be telling us why you think that I hope.

I was in two minds.

On one hand I thought they'd all look no different to the Welsh and Englush in terms of equipment and armour… But I had this niggling feeling that possibly they had their own system or that they might have some difference between Gaelic Scots and Inglis Scots.

Did the Scots get involved in the wars that much. While the Englush are knocking seven bells out of each other it would seem like a good time to nab some land or livestock.

Oh …the lack of evidence would be the chief thing. You might want to start with Prof. Nicholson 'Scotland in the Later Middle Ages'…it's a bit dated, but still a good place to start and has the advantage of being eminently readable. That's not unimportant – I can promise you I've written more than one book which would be pretty dull to anyone other than a medieval history anorak…and a fur-lined anorak at that.
Steaming Dave….this is a thorny area, but essentially it's a matter of children taking their father's surnames rather than their mother's…incomer marries heiress, so the children have the father's name, but the mother's ancestry is just as important. Check out the ascending lines of just about any medieval Scottish lord's family tree and you'll see what I mean.
The same applies in England, though to a lesser degree.In part it's also to do with popular romanticism overcoming analysis. Thinking of – for example – Robert I or John Comyn of Badenoch as being 'Norman' in origin would be like describing today's infant Prince George as 'German'or 'Greek' because of his ancestry of umpteen generations past.

Scotland is always defiant. That is definite!

UFB there is evidence in the early Scottish texts to begin with there we can see the law operating quite clearly as events unfold. Where we see it the correspondence with Brehon Law is quite clear. The tricky bit is knowing Brehon Law and what to look for.

The Isles and Highlands looked west to Ireland and remained oriented to a Gaelic polity till long after the period we are discussing here.

Here's a link contra Dumville on the Dal Riada dynasty in it there is a very clear example of Brehon Law at work.

PDF link

The Normans in Scotland and their descendents held land from the King of Scots the Gaelic lords of the west didn't see it that way. They held the lordship of the people of their polity. Two different legal concepts.

Dummville is writing about the 7th century – neither England or Scotland had really yet to come into existence. It's all a bit early for me as a 13/14th century specialist, by which time Gaelic lords held their property (and had done so for some considerable time) by charter from the crown or from one another – though in earlier times they had held it by good old might and main.
They certainly did not hold it from the people of their polity, though many romantic writers have claimed this to be the case. Incidentally, tenure for military service (which we rather clumsily call 'feudal') was standard practice long before the arrival of any Normans; check out 'drengage' tenures….possibly more akin to a crown tenancy than a free tenancy, but probably effetively heritable more often that not.
Dependence of the authority (warrandice) of the crown should not, however, be automatically linked with primogeniture. Up until the late 1100s – if not beyond – some properties were passed by agnatial inheritance. That does not mean for a moment that lordship was in any sense approved or sanctioned by the people of the land, but by a very small group of influential members of a family – reaching as wide a cousins and even 2nd cousins – who would decide inheritance. It was a good system in that it guaranteed inheritance by a (male) adult, but a bad one since it led to trouble and violence if someone felt they had been overlooked. That's why it withered away as central authority became more settled in the 10/11/12th Centuries. I understand that a similar process can be seen in England and Wales, but you'd have to ask an appropriate scholar about that.
One might make a more interesting point about the Earls of Fife (though hardly Gaelic) whose title was not dependent on the king until Robert I; presumably because his family's possession of the lordship pre-dated Kings of Scotland.
Have you tried the work of Alex Woolf at St. Andrews? This is very much his sort of thing. Alternatively there's Professor Duncan's 'Making of the Kingdom' and Barrow's 'Kingship and Unity'? Both a bit dated now, but good starting points.
West Highland Scotland and the Western Isles did indeed maintain a considerable degree of interaction with the northern part of Ireland in the 15th C,but to a great degree that's about soldiering(and other) opportunities for a relatively modest number of gentry and nobility. Hard to know precisely what you mean by a 'Gaelic polity'. Do you mean a largely formalised cultural/administrative/legal entity within medieval Scotland? One that was not subject to the laws and practices of the rest of the country? You could certainly find differences in practices between one location and another, but that was normal in all medieval countries and the distinctions might be greater between two neighbouring communities than between communities hundreds of miles apart.
For Gaelic lords the focus of the top end of political life was the crown and the crown – as in most medieval countries – was the focus of the law and the king's justiciars dispensed justice (or not…depending very much on the size of bribes offered). Local political life was of course dominated by local potentates and local issues – just like any other country.

Dalriada was proto Scotland if you like and was certainly a Gaelic polity. Following the conversion of the Picts by Irish missionaries and the creation of Scotland by a Pictish prince largely educated and protected in Ireland we can say Scotland was a Gaelic polity. I doubt the law changed much aside from the Roman and Christian elements that the Irish influence brought in.

A Gaelic polity is one where the Gaelic language and law prevailed. Scholars have rightly described the law as providing a virtual state indeed its breath taking the reach it provided on almost all matters.

The romantic thing should be be ignored it does not help anyones argument. Gaelic lords might well have held their title by might and main but they and their kindred were the only ones with the legal right to enter the contest. The one who won would be aclaimed by the people of the polity. Nothing romantic about that. The nature of lordship was of people in clientage not land. If enough clients defected to an opponent a lord would fall.

What you are describing in the C11th is very familiar to me and reflects the system I've described above. The bedrock of the system was contracts garunteed by kinship groups and enforced by legal professionals and nobles.

Treaties or accomodations might be made with powerful outsiders but within the polity the law continued to operate. It provided for a duty of military service on all free men for attack and defence (fuba and ruba)and failure to turn up led to heavy fines.

Eventually the Brehon system would give way to Frankish Feudalism but it left its imprint on Scottish law. Its interesting to look at none highland Galloway home of the Gall Gael in that regard.

The Irish connection was once a significant on for the whole of Scotland and indeed for English Northumbria it lasted longest in the west. It should be seen as a geopolitical feature rather than an opportunity for mercenary service for the few. Bruce's letter, dynastic marriages and the too and fro of people all attest this.

I'll look out for the books.

Interested to know what you've been reading that has led you to these conclusions
There's a man- whose name escapes me – who writes a good deal about pre-medieval Gael and Pict societies but with very little grasp of the history or the archaeology, however the books are quite popular.
By the 15th C. – which is what the OP discusses – agnatial inheritance had long disappeared and Highland lords, like those elsewhere, held their property from the crown or from superior lords.
By the 13th century the Irish geopolitical dimension had disappeared as well. taking Robert I as an example – his marriage to Elisabeth de Burgh was a product of English and Scottish political developments and manouvering. The fact that her father was Earl of Ulster was not really relevant; he might just as easily have been Earl of Hereford or Lincoln if that had suited the purposes of Edward I and Robert.

I think if you want a big picture grasp on the transition starting with Heather The Restoration of Rome and then onto Bartlett The Making of Europe is as good a begining as any.

For Irish Scottish connections the list is endless but the recently published Duffy's Clontarf offers insights and his older Robert The Bruce's Irish Wars is worthwhile. It is not possible to maintain that the Irish geopolitical dimension was gone at this early date. It continued to count for quite a while to come with alliances between the Mac Donalds and Campbells and the O'Neill's and O'Donnell's. For simplicity's sake lets just acknowledge the Galloglaich and the New Scots.

Indeed the career of the later Alisdair mac Colla ciotagh McDonnell demonstrates nicely both the perseverance of agnatic inheritance and Scottish Irish geo political links.

On a personal not I'm always struck by the number of Glasgow folk in Donegal and Donegal folk in Glasgow its an ancient link.

For Celtic law its always worth a look at O'Rahilly, Patterson and Charles Edwards.

I may have read a book by the man whose name escapes us both but its not reflected here.

And how embarrassed are we that we can't recall his name?

Not very I suspect!

Errrrmm…now that you come to mention it…..'not very' pretty much covers the ground.

You might be interested to know that Oxbow Books have Cynthia J Neville's "Native Lordship in Medieval Scotland(The Earldoms of Strathearn and Lennox 1140-1365) for the excellent price of £12.95 GBP.

There is a bit of a review here.

link

It's an excellent piece of work; if I did n't already have a copy I'd be getting it now. If you're interested in lordship issues below the comital level you might enjoy (or endure; it's not exactly a page-turner) Chris Brown's Ph.D. book 'Knights of the Scottish Wars of Independence'which looks at the parish gentry.

@Ugly: "…agnatial inheritance …"
What's that word? "Agnatial". Shouldn't it be "agnatical"?

You used it twice and I was unfamiliar with it, so went to look it up. I think that maybe you have dropped the "c" by habit and haven't noticed?…

I have n't heard (or read) anybody use 'agnatical', but I'm inclined to think that you're technically correct.

UFB I'll look out for it 'twould be enjoy for me that's my sort. I've reached the age of beer books and baccy as GMF's Flashman would have it.

Oh (or Oh Bleep)….Don't look out for it; apart from anything else it's quite pricey. PM me and I'll send you a PDF of the original thesis (St. Andrews) c/w field work appendices. If you're sad enough (as I am) to read this kind of stuff in the first place you might as well get the whole shooting match.