 Thank you. As the historian in this interdisciplinary project, I study the written sources for Ireland and Scotland, and the territorial units and place names of the hint lands around the project central places in Munster, Dalrida and Pictland. I aim to place this in an international context so we can produce an analysis integrated with the archaeological and environmental research. I'm currently undertaking a literature review which is showing how scholars interpret Ireland and Scotland differently. Both countries have generally been regarded as peripheral to the core of European development, thought to be best represented by England and Francia. Scotland has been considered a successful, as Gordon showed, baffling case of state formation with a unified kingdom of the Picts being the precursor of the later medieval kingdom of the Scots, and hence Scotland. While Ireland has been regarded as politically divided, unstable and backward, retaining hundreds of kingdoms with competing royal kindreds into the 12th century. However, recent scholarship for both countries has been moving in opposite directions to each other. In Ireland, historians like Duncan Caroyne have increasingly argued for the development of powerful early medieval kingdoms which suppressed minor polities, employing taxation in officials to dominate their realms more comprehensively, especially from the 10th century onwards. The importance of the church working alongside kings and encouraging economic development has also been stressed. In Scotland, in contrast, scholars used to argue for substantial royal early royal government, reflected in officials, churches the more there, per precursor to the later medieval Earl, and also a figure called the Thane who's a local official according to some scholars. But recently scholars such as Alex Wolff, David Brune, and Alice Taylor have convincingly proposed that by the early 12th century, these were not royal officials, but the leaders of local kindreds chosen from their regional power bases. The kingdom of the Scots at this time was ruled by the king through the aristocracy rather than in spite of it, as often as the view. So scholarship on kingship and governance seems in these countries to have switched viewpoints. But what was the reality? It is difficult to undertake a comparison between Ireland and Scotland because there is such a greater abundance of evidence, both textual and archaeological, surviving for Ireland rather than you can see for Scotland. However, if we bring the fragments of surviving evidence together for Scottish history and utilize developing fields in archaeology and landscape history in place names in which the evidence of the disciplines overlap, it becomes possible to produce comparative material. So we can consider individual texts which I'll be doing to some extent and these do provide us with some important evidence. So for instance, in the Leipzig and Colomba, written at the end of the 7th century AD by Adolf Narn, Abbot of Iona, there are a number of episodes involving kings, including an interesting group about Pickland focused on the Pictish king, Brithay, son of Maelkon. This is a potential goldmine of evidence for Brithay and his power center, including this episode, which is in book 2, chapter 33, when Colomba was staying with the Pictish king, Brithay, and saves the life of the wizard, Brithay, to free a slave girl. In this episode, as you can see from the highlighted texts, there is a fortress with a house, a hall, and also a place for royal treasures. It also includes information about people linked with Brithay. There is the wizard Breuchen, who's described as Brithay's foster father. There are Brithay's familiares, his household members, who have considerable status since they and Brithay sent the messengers on horseback to Colomba. We can therefore create a picture of a court government with a king and his key supporters around him, and elsewhere the text has a sub-king of the Orkneys in attendance with Brithay. These people presumably helped Brithay make important decisions of the realm, as well as being his subordinates. While there are issues with the use of this material, as with any hagiographical text, it is presumably a relatively plausible depiction in this account, since there was a Pictish audience to the text and Aduthnan had visited Pictlander. I think it's very likely that he was, as someone who had subordinate monasteries there, that he would have been visiting at least once or twice. It may therefore tell us about the situation in the late 7th century, it may tell us more about the situation in the late 7th century than about the 6th century when Colomba was writing, but it's still very useful for us. Unfortunately, our written evidence for early medieval Scotland is very sparse, so we often can't draw definite conclusions from it. Steve Driscoll has argued from the written sources and the archaeology that after 700 there was a shift from hilltop sites like Brithay's and Dundern, which you can see here, to less defensive low-lying sites with connections to the church, like for Teviot and Skun in Persia. But at least with the texts, we cannot be sure whether the apparent decline in references to forts is due to the changing nature of our sources, as the main source for the forts, the Irish Chronicles, provides very few details at all about any places after 740, when the Iona Chronicle sees this to be a major component and instead what we find is that we get overall in our Scottish evidence, we get more evidence for non-military places and events, such as where laws were being promulgated or where a king died, because the sources we have are increasingly about the deaths of kings and where they're enacting events, so we then get the sources that are about non-defensive sites. So what we find is there's a shift in the evidence type, away from sources that are going to tell us about hill forts, to type sources that have a wider range of places, so in effect the written sources are not going to be the answer to a question about the change in use of central places, and only archaeological investigation can determine whether the shift suggested by fiscal was a real one and how much of a change that was. Another subject to be considering in this project is the land units used in different regions and how they reflect territories, social structures and methods of taxation and renders and other types of governance. This might help us understand whether structures of governance were based on kinship, as in kin groups, not kingship. Clientship or local communities, how stable or fluid local society was, what levels of society had kings or different types of rulers, and how resources were redistributed from the general population to elites. For Ireland, Paul McCotta has argued that in the 12th century there was a hierarchy of kings, ruling territories of different sizes, the smallest of which was what he calls the local kingdom, the Tuath, so this is the left hand side here, sorry the local kingdom, which is the Chika Khed. There are about 180 of these in Ireland, below that was the Tuath, led by the non-royal Taishach Tuath, and who Paul McCotta argues had very little real power by this time. McCotta argues that the Tuath was not ruled even around about 700 on the right hand side by a king, but I'm not sure that he's correct about this, the evidence is probably indicates that there were some who were kings, some who were not earlier on. Smaller than the Tuath was the Balio Beatef, a key unit focused on the kin group, which provided food renders and military service to the Chika Khed kings. McCotta argues that the equivalent of the Balio Beatef in 700 was the Koikroth Khedat, sorry about all the names, but you can see that one's there, the Koikroth Khedat. This is a unit, it's described in the legal text as a unit with five wraths, the five wraths being ring forts, which are found abundantly, as Gordon said, around the Irish countryside, and were probably on the whole usually occupied by free commoner farmers. The early Irish legal text state the contrast that they described kings as having dunes, dunes, ring forts, which presumably had a higher number of ring ditches, and this was a marker of social status. Kings provided cattle to farmers as part of their client ship relationship, and they had base clients who were in this sort of relationship, and in exchange for the cattle, the farmers gave food renders annually, and also cattle, and also labor service, including digging the ditches around the royal dunes, among other duties. Dunes, the same word that is used for fortresses in pick land in our sources, and also happens to be used as the word for often the fortresses in Ireland too. So what I'll be doing is looking at how this word has different connotations or similar connotations in the different case study areas. It has been argued by Paul McCotter, John Bannerman, and Alasdair Ross, who are two Scottish historians, that some of this Irish structure was also the same in pick land and the later Scottish kingdom. In particular, scholars have equated the Balya Beardach with the Scottish unit called the Dabba on the right hand side, regarding it similarly as a compact economic unit, which was a multiple estate. In the 12th century, the Dabba was a unit used for raising the common burdens for the crown. These were army service, financial and military aid and military campaigns, and also labor services on buildings like castles and bridges. The Dabba certainly dates to the 11th century, but might be dated earlier. The argument is usually that it's Pictish. The word is Gaelic, meaning vat in those Irish Gaelic sources, but is much debated whether it relates to an arable food render or unit or something else. I follow Alasdair Ross in viewing it as relating to both arable and pastoral farming, probably originally referring to a mixed render to the value of that vat or whatever containers it is is content. In addition to the Dabba, in the Kingdom of the Scots, there was also a local figure, I've mentioned before, the Thane, comes in sources of Latin, Thanus. This is in Gaelic sources, the Toyshech. So naturally scholars have linked this to the Irish Toyshech who ruled the two of the island. This can all fit an argument that Scotia and the successor of Picland and therefore Picland. So shared a fundamentally similar territorial and social pattern with Ireland, but there are problems with this. First, in some cases Dabba can be divided into separate parts, distributed about the parish. So this is a picture of one parish. I haven't marked them all, but they all have multiple parts dotted around. So a Dabba could be divided into different sections. In contrast, in Ireland, the Baljebiadach is usually a single unit instead. So the other difference is that while the Baljebiadach is often the basis for the later parish, although not always the Dabba, it's always the subunit of the parish. And so we seem to be seeing something different. In addition to this, we get often in Ireland Baljebiadach units have the place name element Balla, which is the first part of Baljebiadach in the name of that unit. But while Balje was also introduced into Scotland, as you can see on the left hand map and is found in many cases, it seems to have been introduced in the late 11th century and 12th century, exactly roughly around the same time. You don't see the Dabba having a place name element Balla in these names of these units. They do sometimes have the element Pet, which seems to be a share of land or some units of some size. And also often it's just the name of the Dabba, because it can be just a general place name, presumably a more central place in that small Dabba. So what we see therefore is the difference in terms of the names. And also it is noticeable that place name scholars in Scotland would regard Balje as meaning a settlement, whereas in Ireland, Macotta argues that it is a land unit and that settlement is a secondary, well actually the original usage, and then it becomes a land unit and then becomes a settlement. So it does seem as if there seem we need to investigate this more, but the Scottish Dabba does seem to be, although it has some similarities to the Baljebiadak, there are some key differences too. In addition to this, we do have some other general differences between Ireland and Scotland. Most notably, as Gordon mentioned, after the references to the lesser kings in Alba and Pickland, Seath in the middle of the 8th century, only kings of the Pits or Alba appear in sources. So the kingdom of the Pits becomes around about from 900 onwards, they're called the kings of Alba, that's so if I'm switching that's why they basically get renamed, it becomes a Gaelic kingdom rather than Pits. So but under the kings of the of Alba, there is also a regional lord called the Moorvair, which you can see, hasn't moved on. Yeah, so it didn't move on before, sorry, let's see. Sorry, you've not been on the right picture for a minute. It's only one. Yeah, so I didn't realise. No, you have to drag it and drop it under the euro screen if you would extend it. No, no, it's two up. Yes, that's it. Okay, so yeah, so what we have in the kingdom of Alba is this figure known as the Moorvair, who is a regional lord, which means the word is Gaelic means great or sea steward. Whatever the situation was when we start to get this figure much more often than other figures at around about 1100, it's likely that this position was initially an appointed one. And as David Bruner's argued, we can infer that there was an earlier stage before the Moorvair, which was probably already the stage had already been reached by about 700 AD when there's a figure called the Maya steward found in Pipland. We can guess this from one or two place names. While I'm still researching, while I'm still researching whether there were similar positions in Ireland, including whether the Maya, the Moora and the rector that we find in Irish sources are anything similar at all with the Scottish ones. At the moment, it does seem that the officials in Pipland seem to be a significant difference from Ireland. What explains the comparative lack of kings in Pipland and Alba in comparison to Ireland? Was the geography an environment of eastern Scotland more suited to political centralization, perhaps favouring hill forts, which could dominate localities, enabling elites to consolidate wider polities? Did the agricultural economy of eastern Pipland, with arable lands near the coast, and just relatively discrete, but still substantial, highland area, but with valleys that are quite, they're accessible from each other, but they're still quite, and they're not really isolated, but they're still quite discrete. Did this sort of landscape play a role too? In contrast, what we see in Ireland is generally more low-lying lands with coastal and riverine waterways as well. And overall, it's likely that you could travel around if you had a kingdom in one place you could be attacked from lots of directions more than you would be able to in Scotland. And also, the excess landscape in general is more accessible, so making it perhaps a bit more difficult for a smaller polity to expand and defend against all its competitors. In addition to this, there is the other possibilities, which there are lots of different possibilities, but one of the major ones is polity competition. The obvious competitors to the Picts were the English Northumbrians who dominated Pipland until the Battle of Nethansmere in AD 685 when they were defeated and driven out, and earlier on the Romans, who may have altered local power structures and ideology significant, did such interventions favour a few larger kingdoms able to compete while suppressing local royal polities, even if the effects of this were perhaps only noticed a century later. Overall, the comparative approach brings up a lot of questions, I think, about how Ireland and Scotland compare with each other and also the rest of Europe. Combining disciplinary approaches is the key to success, enabling us to test interpretations and to build up a better picture of how kingship and governance developed. Thank you.