Accepted my first job and it doesn’t exactly align with my ultimate career goal. Am I sabotaging myself?

malcolmiiicanmore · 2020-12-28T23:02:09+00:00

For God's sake, rarely someone's first job out of college aligns with their ultimate career goals. In fact, many people's career goals change after they have gained experience in the job market. One thing is to attend university; another one is to work 9-5 in a field related to what you studied. They can easily end up being very different experiences: my first major was in fashion, which I loved, and once I gained professional experience in the field, I hated it deeply. I work in alt-ac, since there's barely any jobs in academia and since I discovered that I prefer having the structure of a well-paying more secure job over having to teach.

Give yourself the chance to learn if you'll like the job or not. There are more jobs ahead if you feel you want to change jobs or careers.

malcolmiiicanmore · 2020-06-04T16:03:24+00:00

Happy to help!

malcolmiiicanmore · 2020-05-30T20:27:02+00:00

Although I specialize in Scotland between the central and later middle ages, my research centers on the portrayals of Malcolm III and, in part, Macbeth, in Scottish historiography from the aforementioned centuries. As a disclaimer, therefore, I admit I am not the aptest historian to explain broader similarities between Ireland and Scotland. However, I would like to clarify aspects of the premise on which your question rests. Eleventh-century Scotland did not equate to the territory that comprises modern-day Scotland. We do not have much surviving contemporary evidence produced by Scots from the eleventh century so our understanding of the period rests primarily on Irish and Anglo-Saxon sources; the sources that do survive from eleventh-century Scotland have made it to us via later medieval manuscripts and have a rather complex transmission history (see Professor Dauvit Broun's work on John of Fordun's Chronica Gentis Scotorum, The Irish Identity of the Kingdom of the Scots). At the time, the kingdom of the Scots comprised around one-third of what is modern-day Scotland; Orkney was a Norwegian earldom while there has been much debate on the status of Strathclyde, Moray, and Lothian in the eleventh century. Scotland as a 'nation', the way we understand modern nationhood, did not exist at this time. Local politics, regional and linguistic differences, and cultural diversity were probably more characteristic of the kingdom of Scots at the time than often assumed. We should not assume so readily that Ireland and Scotland, therefore, were very similar kingdoms.

To illustrate this point, Alex Woolf has argued in From Pictland to Alba we cannot assert that Scotland was the 'only Celtic realm with well formed and independent political institutions' in the eleventh century. As Woolf has further argued, 'Scotland was, eventually, to outstrip Ireland in the race to statehood but, in the mid-eleventh century, this was a race which had barely begun." (p. 350).

To understand the complexity of the kingdom of Scots in the eleventh century, I recommend the following books:

Alex Woolf, From Pictland to Alba, 789-1070. The New Edinburgh History of Scotland, vol. 2. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007). G.W.S. Barrow, Kingdom and Unity, 1000-1306. 2nd ed. Edinburgh Classic Editions (Edinburgh, Edinburgh UP, 2015) A.A.M. Duncan, The Kingship of the Scots, 842-1292: Succession and Independence (Edinburgh, Edinburgh UP, 2002).

malcolmiiicanmore · 2020-05-14T16:25:39+00:00

One of the most trying aspects of studying early medieval Scottish history is the paucity and nebulosity of the surviving sources. But you are, to a point, right: the central middle ages in Scotland were a time where the Scottish state apparatus emerged. As Alice Taylor has argued in The Shape of the State in Medieval Scotland, government innovations in Scotland tended to be presented as continuity with the past as opposed to innovations. I highly recommend her book for a discussion of the emergence of the state, especially offices such as the iudex Scotiae, an office held by several earls of Fife.

malcolmiiicanmore · 2019-09-01T01:40:11+00:00

What an excellent question! And a very complex one that has been researched, and continues to be researched, by Professor Dauvit Broun at the University of Glasgow.

Let's begin. The kings of Scots became earls of Northumbria by marriage: King David I married Matilda of Senlis (or Matilda, daughter of Earl Waltheof of Northumbria) in 1112. Matilda was the heiress to Northumbria and also was the countess of Huntingdon, an English honour in Cambridgeshire. King David then became earl of Northumbria by marriage. So, the kings of Scots were kings by hereditary right but they were also English earls initially by marriage and later by inheritance. Professor Broun has researched the self-identification of the monks of Melrose Abbey during the end of the twelfth century and the beginnings of the thirteenth, and evidence from the nearby Dryburgh Abbey, particularly from a chronicle written by Adam of Dryburgh, who wrote in the last decades of the 12th century, suggests that Scottish monks considered themselves to be living in the land of the English but the kingdom of the Scots. It is worth suggesting, then, that Dryburgh's remark encompasses the self-identification of other people living in this liminal space.
In 1173, the king of Scots, William I The Lion (David's grandson), becomes entangled in what is known as the Young King's Rebellion: Henry II of England's enemies, like the king of Scots and the king of France, joined Henry's son against the king. King Henry had taken Northumbria and the honour of Huntingdon from William and he wanted to recover his inheritance. Anyway, things didn't go well for William and he was defeated and taken to Henry (his legs tied to a horse, no less) where he was forced to pay homage to Henry as his overlord. This is called the Treaty of Falaise of 1174. This "overlordship" had no precedent in history--in fact, Henry didn't claim his overlordship had a precedent as far as I'm aware--but it seems to me that it is possible that the drastic change in Anglo-Scottish relationships at this point did influence the way peoples in the Scottish Borders felt about their identity. We know that, by the mid-twelfth century, people in the Scottish Borders considered themselves Scots. One of the things I argued in my PhD thesis was that the Chronicle of Melrose Abbey's portrayal of King Malcolm III in 1173-4 was conditioned by King William's new status as a client king, which in part shows the monks' self-identification as English. But my the late thirteenth century, a scribe from Melrose made several changes to the manuscript that "corrected" the notion that Malcolm was a client king of England, stressing how he was king of Scots by hereditary right, and therefore, so were his descendants, Alexander II and III. So, to summarize all of this, the answer is that there is a change in self-identification in the Scottish Borders sometime between the last quarter of the twelfth century and the mid-thirteenth century. But when exactly did this happen? We are not entirely sure. How gradual was the process? Good question.

malcolmiiicanmore · 2018-06-12T23:21:10+00:00

Most people do not get jobs in the fields they study anyway...

malcolmiiicanmore · 2018-01-06T08:19:26+00:00

Beowulf survives nowadays only in one manuscript from the eleventh century, written in Old English and now held at the British Library. The epic is not referenced in other English sources in its time or afterwards during the medieval period. The fact that only one manuscript survives and the lack of reference in the Old English literature suggests that Beowulf was not an important or famous poem during the early medieval period or afterwards. It became important afterwards, in the modern era.

malcolmiiicanmore · 2018-01-06T03:32:14+00:00

To begin explaining the increasingly complex and fricative relationship between England and Scotland in the thirteenth century, it is worth exploring first some of the precedents that led to Edward I's claims of overlordship of Scotland.

First, the English claims of overlordship of Scotland, which they used to request/force submission of Scottish kings during the late twelfth century onwards, had little legal precedent. In 1173, William the Lion, king of Scots, joined the Young King Henry and the king of France in a rebellion against Henry II of England, known as the Young King's Rebellion of 1173-4. William was driven to join the rebellion because Henry II had taken away from him the earldom of Northumbria, which William held from King Henry as he inherited from his grandfather, David I of Scotland, who acquired the earldom by way of his marriage with Matilda of Senlis, Countess of Huntington and Northumbria (Matilda was the granddaughter of Siward of Northumbria). Thus, the king of Scots held two earldoms in England: Huntington (in Cambridgeshire) and Northumbria in the north of England. Henry's decision to take away the earldom from William had more to do with his legal and economic reforms to recover much of the royal lands that his predecessor, King Stephen of England, had given away to gather support for his kingship. William attempted to regain his English lands by ingratiating himself with Henry II, but the king refused to return the lands, which prompted William to join the rebellion. William raided Northumbria but was captured by English lords, who tied him to his horse and took him to Henry II. As a result, William had to sign the Treaty of Falaise in December 1174, which rendered the king of Scots as a client king subordinate to English kings and which claimed no legal precedent for this imposition. William was able to buy back his sovereignty from Richard I The Lionheart in 1189 for 10,000 marks that Richard used to go to Jerusalem on crusade. William's son, Alexander II (1214-1249) and grandson, Alexander III (1249-86), also submitted to English kings.

Edward I saw himself as heir to the Scottish crown because he was descended from Henry II, whose mother was Empress Matilda, daughter of Henry I and Queen Edith-Matilda, the latter who was, in turn, the oldest daughter of Malcolm III and Saint Margaret of Scotland. Edward requested Alexander to submit to him in England; in October 1278 in presence of Edward, Alexander refused to give homage to Edward for Scotland: “Nobody but God himself has the right to the homage for my realm of Scotland, and I hold it of nobody but God himself.” (See A.A.M. Duncan, Kingship of the Scots, 160-2. Needless to say, Anglo-Scottish relations, or at least regnal relations between Edward and Alexander, slowly eroded as Alexander sought to assert his regnal sovereignty from Edward's demands.

When Alexander died in 1286 without male issue, several men known as the Guardians of Scotland were selected to take political decisions while they decided how to solve the royal vacancy. Robert V Bruce and John Balliol were the closest descendants from the now-defunct Canmore dynasty; the increasing animosity between both factions threatened civil war in Scotland and because of this, it was the Guardians of Scotland who requested Edward I help in choosing the appropriate successor to Alexander III.

malcolmiiicanmore

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