morentur in Domino libere et in pace: Cultural identity and the remembered past in the mediaeval Outer Hebrides

The title of this paper is taken from the text of the Treaty of Perth, in 1266 AD, outlining the terms of the settlement between the Crowns of Norway and Scotland for the transfer of the Hebrides to Scotland. It allowed for former subjects of the Norwegian Crown to stay (or leave) the Hebrides `freely and in peace¿. After nearly 450 years of Norwegian cultural and political dominion, the inhabitants of the islands were of mixed Gaelic and Norse genetic, linguistic and cultural background, but increasingly evidence suggests that the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw significant shifts of settlement and architecture throughout the Hebrides. Amongst these shifts was the reoccupation of some Iron Age duns and brochs, abandoned during the ninth to twelfth centuries, where these fitted into the new landscape of settlement. The reuse of the monumental remains of the pre-Scandinavian past, so emphatically abandoned at the Scandinavian advent, would seem to reflect an emphasis on the local and potentially Gaelic roots of the most powerful island families, mirroring the contemporary political changes.