Highly fragmented, intensely connected : developing a paradigm for connectivity across the early medieval North Channel seascape, c. 500-800 CE

This thesis advances a framework for understanding the early medieval North Channel as a dynamic and interconnected seascape. Building on the seascape approaches of maritime scholarship, it argues that the North Channel should not be framed as a static or ahistorical dividing line between Britain and Ireland, but as an active historical agent shaping past connectivity at multiple, overlapping scales. Rather than directly applying Mediterranean models, the project employs them as tools for developing a distinct North Channel paradigm defined by a paradoxical logic of “high fragmentation” and “intense interconnectedness”. It further proposes three flexible sub-regions within the North Channel (the “Atlantic-facing”, “High-Contrast”, and “Mirrored Littoral” regions) to facilitate a more textured analysis and to bridge the smallest analytical level (e.g., the microregion) with the broadest level (e.g., the seascape as a whole). Methodologically, the thesis adopts a multiscalar framework. It begins at the smallest scale by exploring early medieval “taskscapes” of mobility, examining landing places and portages where individuals routinely and dynamically engaged with the seascape. At the intermediate level, it examines mechanisms of coercion (including captivity, political exile, and hostageship) alongside mechanisms of community-building (including fosterage and exogamous marriage), arguing that these practices functioned as connective strategies embedding early medieval communities within expansive networks across the seascape. It then explores processes of group formation and the mobilising of crews and fleets, as well as processes of assembling in both ecclesiastical and political contexts, through which early medieval communities were connected at increasingly wide scales. Seascape approaches thus emerge as meaningful tools to think with in the historiographical recentring of the early medieval North Channel, emphasising the complex relationships between rhizomatic networks of interactions, movement, and the sea in addressing questions about how and why connections were formed, sustained, and transformed across this fragmented-yet-interconnected maritime world.