Portal:Middle Ages/Selected article/10

The High Middle Ages of Scotland encompass Scotland in the era between the death of Domnall II in 900 AD and the death of king Alexander III in 1286, which was an indirect cause of the Scottish Wars of Independence.

At the close of the ninth century various competing kingdoms occupied the territory of modern Scotland, with Scandinavian influence dominant in the northern and western islands, Brythonic culture in the south west, the Anglo-Saxon or English Kingdom of Northumbria in the south-east and the Pictish and Gaelic Kingdom of Alba in the east, north of the River Forth. By the tenth and eleventh centuries, northern Great Britain was increasingly dominated by Gaelic culture, and by the Gaelic regal lordship of Alba, known in Latin as either Albania or Scotia, and in English as "Scotland". From its base in the east, this kingdom acquired control of the lands lying to the south and ultimately the west and much of the north. It had a flourishing culture, comprising part of the larger Gaelic-speaking world and an economy dominated by agriculture and by short-distance, local trade.