Borderlands in Medieval Britain and Ireland

Borderlands in medieval Britain and Ireland took many forms. Borders were sometimes physical boundaries within the landscape, whether natural features such as rivers or mountains, or man-made barriers such as Hadrian’s Wall or Offa’s Dyke. Yet most modern studies of medieval borderlands have argued for nuanced understanding of these regions as frontier zones within which a range of interactions took place rather than as strict dividing lines between different religious, political, linguistic, or ethnic groups. However, studies of medieval borderlands have largely still been informed by modern national perspectives. While some studies in both Britain and Ireland have focused on frontiers between regions or kingdoms, the vast majority have focused on ethnic, linguistic, and political frontiers. One consequence of this is that more studies of medieval borderlands have been produced for Britain than for Ireland (due to the focus on England’s frontiers with Wales, Scotland, and Cornwall); another is that studies of border regions in Ireland have largely focused on frontier zones between the island’s Gaelic Irish and English inhabitants after the Anglo-Norman incursion. This bibliography begins with broad surveys of borderlands in Britain and Ireland before turning to studies with a substantial focus on theorizing medieval borderlands and frontiers generally. The bibliography then considers Britain and Ireland as frontiers of the Roman Empire before turning to studies which focus on physical boundaries on the landscape. Britain’s most frequently-studied frontier zones—regional English borderlands, the Welsh borderlands, the Scottish borderlands, Cornwall, and the Danelaw—are then discussed before turning to frontiers in Ireland and the insular region’s maritime borderlands of the Irish and North Seas and with Normandy. A thematically unifying feature running throughout many studies of borderlands in medieval Britain and Ireland has been a focus on micro-details and on the landscape. The items cited in this article include many placename studies that trace local interactions between peoples, as well as studies discussing features of the local landscape, such as examinations of Old English landscape descriptions embedded within the boundary clauses of Latin charters. Maritime regions as frontier zones have also been a fruitful topic of recent scholarly discussion, featured here in studies on the Irish Sea and North Sea regions. Boundaries and borderlands could be real or imagined, and the final section explores representations of frontiers within medieval literature. The association between outlawry and the forest and the ethnic and supernatural borders found in medieval romance texts comprise this bibliography’s final examples of the many ways in which borderlands informed the history and culture of early medieval Britain and Ireland.