Peace in Medieval Times

This resource was created as part of the University of St Andrews’ Vertically Integrated Project Visualising Peace, which seeks to explore habits of narrating and representing peace, as well as how those habits might shape our mindsets and behaviours. This timeline shares this aim, but has a few of its own too: namely, to give an overview on the temporal complexities of peace and to create an accessible resource which showcases first-hand narratives of peace around a central conflict. 

The conflict which I chose to centre these goals around was Anglo-Sottish relations throughout the medieval and early modern periods. I chose this issue as I believe it contains interesting sources, it has lasted through varied generations, and it is of modern interest with Scottish and English history being a large part of each nation’s national identity and politics. However, this was also a very complex conflict to choose. By keeping a focus on English and Scottish voices in the timeline entries, narratives that shaped the Anglo-Scottish relationship such as from French royalty or European reformation leaders were somewhat excluded. It is impossible to represent the true complexity of a conflict which has lasted for over 1000 years, with hundreds of sources feeding into the conflicting perspectives of the era.