ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explains the aims of the Norman Edge project were to investigate in a collaborative fashion the salient characteristics of Norman expansion on the peripheries of Christian Europe, in order to contribute to a re-evaluation of the contours and coordinates of the Norman world or worlds and, more generally, to assess in novel ways the processes of medieval state-making and the construction of identities. The circumstances in which Normans and other French incomers first arrived at the northern periphery are elucidated by Alexander Grant. In Scotland, in striking contrast to the rest of the Norman Edge, such men were not invaders but invitees brought in by an independent crown, which, though it enjoyed the kind of institutional and political control lacking among the vulnerable native polities in Wales and Ireland, sought to develop its power systems along the lines of up-to-date European monarchy.
