Provincial lordships is a modern term used by historians to describe large feudal landholdings created in Scotland during the 12th and 13th centuries.
[2] As the term "provincial lordship" is a modern description rather than a formal contemporary status there are no strict criteria for assigning landholdings to the category,[1] and lists of them differ.
[7] Similar lordships were created to the north of Alba in the late 12th and early 13th centuries including Badenoch, Garioch, Strathbogie and Sutherland.
1400 some of the earldoms and provincial lordships were much smaller than their original extent, but they still collectively covered two thirds of the land area of modern Scotland, and 425 of the kingdom's 925 parishes.
[9] By this time the landholdings of earls and major lords were often fragmented and geographically dispersed, without the unity and identification with specific territories that had characterised the earlier earldoms and provincial lordships.