It was this quotation from Rees Davies's masterful The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093–1343 (2000) that first gave voice to the notion of the ‘paradox of medieval Scotland’, a notion which we took as the title of the project that led to this book. Davies was concerned with showing that an expansive socio-cultural and linguistic ‘Anglicisation’ was harnessed by the Anglo-Norman and Angevin kings to establish a ‘first English empire’ across Britain and Ireland in the central middle ages. Tempered by a hard-edged ethnic worldview which cast the Celtic-speaking peoples of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland as backward and uncivilised, this expansion was ultimately the victim of its own paradox, resulting in an incomplete conquest and fourteenth-century ‘ebb tide’ which left behind messy bifurcated societies in Wales and Ireland and lingering ethnic prejudice everywhere. Davies described this process of Anglicisation as the British Isles's experience of the much wider phenomenon of Europeanisation, which Robert Bartlett had recently outlined.