ABSTRACT
If the essays in this volume prove anything, it is that the ‘medieval frontier’ poses difficult problems of definition; these problems are part of a wider difficulty that historians at the start of the twenty-first century are bound to have with the description of a society whose political foundations rested on different concepts of the relationship between man and man (not to mention woman) and between God and man to those that have developed in the wake of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution. While modern society retains a good number of medieval institutions, such as the universities, parliaments, the English legal system, virtually none of them operates any longer within the conceptual framework which brought them into being. It is only recently that historians of either frontier societies or the ‘inner lands’ of medieval Europe have come to terms with the problems in describing a political world built on different assumptions about power relations, about the nature of territorial control, about overlordship and sovereignty.
