Land Assessment and Lordship in Medieval Northern Scotland

This book re-examines the ancient landscape divisions of medieval northern Scotland and discusses these in a European context. It demonstrates for the first time that the secular and ecclesiastical units of lordship across more than half of medieval and later Scotland were built out of an earlier Pictish (pre-ad 900) unit of land assessment, the dabhach (plural dabhaichean). It is also demonstrated that these dabhaichean remained in use as viable units of land assessment for many hundreds of yea…