Auld Enemies E-Book

Ross David

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 155

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

For almost a thousand years, Scotland and England have been neighbour nations. For more than half that time, they were foreign countries, often at war. Four hundred years ago, they began to share a monarchy; three hundred years ago, they joined in a United Kingdom. A new concept of 'Britishness' arose, but for most purposes Scots remained Scots and English remained English, and the old sense of rivalry remained. In olden times, a war of words and propaganda accompanied the fighting. As the countries got to know each other better and the fighting died down, the verbal exchanges continued, and became sharper, more wide-ranging, and funnier. This book provides a unique record of the long contest of verbal warfare across the Border, from its beginnings right up to the present day. Auld Enemies will be a useful handbook that can be enjoyed whichever side you're on.

Leseprobe

Auld Enemies

The Scots and the English

Also by David Ross

Scotland: History of a Nation

The Killing Time: Scotland 1638–1707

Awa’ and Bile Yer Heid: Scottish Insults and Curses

England: History of a Nation

Royalist, But: Herefordshire in the English Civil War

This eBook edition published in 2012 by Birlinn Limited West Newington House Newington Road Edinburgh EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

This new edition first published in Great Britain in 2012 By Birlinn Ltd

Text copyright © David Ross 2012

Illustrations copyright © Rupert Besley 2012

The moral right of David Ross to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

eBook ISBN: 978 0 85790 573 4

ISBN: 978 1 78027 049 4

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

Scotland is not wholly surrounded by the sea – unfortunately.

Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘The Sea’, in Scottish Scene

It is very rare to find a foreigner, other than an American, who can distinguish between English and Scots.

George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn

The fact is, there is no such thing as national character.

There are, however, plenty of stupid prejudices masquerading as scholarly enquiry into how and why we are different from the English.

James Murphy, in The Herald, 1992

The Englishman and the Scot have long served as one another’s alter ego.

Karl Miller, Doubles

What ethic river is this wondrous Tweed

Whose one bank vertue, other vice doth breed?

Andrew Marvell, The Loyal Scot

What is clear is that since devolution the English and Scots are drifting further apart and growing more ignorant of each other.

Institute for Public & Political

Research (North), Newcastle, 2008

Contents

An Exploration

Things Are Speeding Up

Changing Perceptions

Theories, 1. No Scots, No English – Just Brits

Theories, 2. Different Mind-Sets?

Theories, 3. The Evolution of the Tribe

Some Current Cross-Border Thoughts

Getting to Know Each Other

What is an Anglo-Scot?

The English in Scotland

The Scots in England

An Awful Truth

Some Aspects of Englishness

Some Aspects of Scottishness

Interchangeable Jokes

History and Myth

Generalities from Both Sides

Out of the Mouths of Babes

An Observer of the Scots: Sydney Smith

A Would-be Scourge of Scotland – The Unspeakable Scot

An Observer of the English: A.G. Macdonell

Aspects of Difference: Dress

Aspects of Difference: Food and Drink

Aspects of Difference: Humour

Aspects of Difference: Music

Aspects of Difference: The Sexes

Aspects of Difference: Sport

Literary Encounters

John Bull and Sister Peg

Old Wars, and Battles Long Ago

Church and Kirk

Divided by a Single Language

A Stushie Between Historians

The Intolerable Sense of Superiority of the English

The Intolerable Sense of Superiority of the Scots

Mr Boswell’s Bear

Some Reflections on the Union

Afterword

A Select Bibliography

Index of Personal Names

An Exploration

The Scots and the English have been neighbour-nations for almost a thousand years. That’s a long time in which to get acquainted, and to understand each other. But still today, there is plenty of evidence that despite those ten centuries, much intermingling, and a shared language, the Scots and the English are still something of a mystery to one another. Some observers suggest the mutual ignorance is growing. This book looks into that zone of mystery. It’s not about devolution, independence or politics – its raw material lies in the many things the Scots and English have said and written about each other, particularly of a humorous nature, though the humour can be sharp and bitter at times. The relationship has embraced bloody battles, commercial rivalries, treaties of perpetual friendship made only to be broken, invasions, dynastic links, influences both intended and accidental; and a host of personal connections through many generations. Reaching back into time, drawing on writing, memoirs, conversational remarks, jokes and insults, a complex and many-layered relationship is unpicked. It’s a kind of exploration, across one of the oldest unchanged frontiers in Europe. England and Scotland have coexisted as might a dog and a cat in the same household: the one much larger and stronger, sure of its place and willing to be benevolent as long as its supremacy is not challenged, yet puzzled and daunted by the other’s scratchy fierceness and complete refusal to assume the secondary role that its smaller size seems to imply. The Scots have always had to explain themselves to the world, and never been reticent about doing so; the English have explained everybody else to their own satisfaction, but kept themselves a mystery.

Things are Speeding up

Between 1707 and 1999 many aspects of the Union between Scotland and England changed. But there was also a solid stability in the political relationship. There was just one Parliament – for much of the time known not merely as the British, but the Imperial Parliament. This did not mean that the two nations coalesced into one. If anything, during the Victorian era (encouraged by the Queen herself) a whole new kind of Scottishness was fashioned, based on aspects of the picturesque past, while in England, the trend was to discard old ways and old styles. In recent years, however, the existence of a Scottish Parliament has set real events in motion. The clever people who planned the Parliament’s structure took great care to ensure a voting system that allowed representation of minority parties and would not ensure a permanent majority for the Labour Party. They should have remembered that Scotland is home of the phrase about best laid plans ganging aft agley (Robert Burns was second only to William Shakespeare as a coiner of remarks destined to become clichés). Labour confidently expected that it would remain the largest and dominant party. Within seven years the Scottish National Party had taken that position, and in only another four it achieved the supposedly impossible, an absolute majority of seats at Holyrood.

Future developments are impossible to forecast, and no direct concern of this book. But what can’t be ignored is that since 1999 the relationship between Scotland and England has acquired a new sort of dynamism. Significant differences have opened up. Scotland’s policies on care for the aged, on the National Health Service, on bridge tolls and on university fees are all markedly different from England’s. Any increase in the powers at the disposal of the Holyrood Parliament is likely to widen the gap. These are all domestic issues. But, if a referendum on staying within the EU should result in an English majority against, and a Scottish majority for, external relations would become a vital issue. Or in another scenario, if Scotland resumed full political independence, what would be the status of the treaties negotiated by the United Kingdom – including its membership of the European Union? Would England and Scotland have to reapply, separately?

A funny thing is, it’s all so private. No other nation gives a hoot. The only international bodies who take an interest in Scottish separation are those sporting ones who would prefer to see it ended and have only a single ‘British’ side, and therefore only one vote, in their deliberations. Scotland and England field separate teams for the Commonwealth Games, but not for the Olympics (had the Olympics been invented in these islands, it would be another story).

Changing Perceptions

The shape of the island of Great Britain probably has something to do with it: the border is narrow compared to the length of both countries. Had the divide run north–south, there would have been far more scope for assimilation (or maybe not: perhaps Celtic-speaking people glaring across barbed wire at English or Danish speakers on the other side). Geologists like to point out that Scotland and England were once two quite separate land-masses, within the vast primeval Iapetus Ocean, and did not drift into union until around 450 million years ago. Perhaps, in another couple of hundred million years, they will separate again.

The last time a full sense of ‘Britishness’ existed was between 1939 and 1945, when the struggle to survive and fight for victory took precedence over everything else. But two generations have grown up and reached voting age in postwar Britain. For most electors in England and Scotland, World War II is not even a memory. It is very noticeable that the ‘discourse’ on Scotland’s future – in Scotland – has moved on in the past ten years. From complaint about the Union’s failure to take in Scottish aspirations and opinions, it now openly considers how an independent, or semi-independent Scotland could exist in the world. Many people in England would break the treaty which makes the United Kingdom part of the European Union, while resisting ‘with every fibre’ (to quote Prime Minister David Cameron) the dissolution of the Treaty of Union made in 1707. For Scotland’s young voters, political detachment from England is already obvious and important because it affects their lives. For England’s young voters, the notion of political detachment from Scotland has little importance at present, though this may change. The Scottish First Minister got some stick in 2007 and 2011 for the apparently flippant remark that he would like to see a self-governing England. Some English people might like that too, though not all: the journalist Madeleine Bunting wrote, ‘I dread the small shorn-ness of England’ (Guardian).

If Great Britain were a shared beach towel, on a typically windswept North Sea strand, Scotland was the partner on the outer edge, the windward side, entitled to some of the towel but not too much. Each occupant took the other’s presence for granted. Both were equally prepared to get up off their red-white-and-blue towel to shove off anyone who planted themselves too near. Now, it seems to England that Scotland is edging off, on to a towel of its own, perhaps a little more sheltered from the wind, perhaps even provided with little windbreaks that England does not have. The fulcrum has moved, the balance is tipped.

But how different are the Scots and the English, anyway?

Theories, 1. No Scots, No English – Just Brits

When Julius Caesar’s ships came to the coast of Kent, fiftyfive years before the beginning of the Common Era, all the inhabitants of the largest island of the British archipelago spoke essentially the same language, Brythonic. Possibly other tongues, older and unrelated, were also used in certain areas, but from north to south, Brythonic was the common speech, no doubt with local variations. It was a ‘Celtic’ language (indeed it is only in language terms that the word ‘Celtic’ has any meaning). The inhabitants went in for body decoration; as an old student song has it:

Ancient Briton never hit on anything as good as woad to fit on

but were divided politically into tribal groups. Some may have been descendants of people who had lived there since the last Ice Age, a few thousand years before; others had crossed over recently from the European continent. The Romans noted their tribal names (perhaps gave these names in some cases), but also knew them all as Britons. There were no Scots, and no English, and for that matter no Welsh, though the adjacent, next-largest island, Hibernia, was inhabited by people who might plausibly be referred to as Irish, though some at least would call themselves Scots.

New arrivals and new names reshaped the identities of Britannia’s inhabitants. Scots crossed over from Hibernia, and eventually the wider population assumed their tribal name. Further south, as Roman imperial power collapsed, mercenaries, settlers, and colonists began to arrive from the continent. Two of these north European groups were known to their neighbours as Angles and Saxons; and though the Angles gave their name to the new country, the Saxons were not forgotten, or there would be no Sassenachs. Had certain events gone otherwise, South Norwegians and Western Danes might now be comparing their differences, instead of Scots and English.

Was there genocide or inter-mingling? What the new arrivals did to the earlier inhabitants has long been argued over by historians, archaeologists and linguists. Much more recently, the debate has been joined by genetic scientists, linking our DNA with ancient groups in areas as disparate as the Pyrenees and the Near East. Muscling in on other disciplines, one Oxford geneticist has suggested that a primitive form of Old English was spoken long before the time of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ arrivals. Traditional historians tend to treat such intervention as irrelevant, and emphasise the role of culture and environment in the development of national qualities. The show will run and run. In all that follows, though, it is important to remember that whatever the differences in national character, there are no racially ‘pure’ Scots or English: both have, in the words of the novelist William McIlvanney, a mongrel inheritance.

Theories, 2. Different Mind-sets?

The English mind has a tendency to be pragmatic and to think in terms of what is real and actual. The Scottish mind has a tendency to be abstract and to think in terms of what can be proved by reasoning. Many, perhaps most, people would agree with this generalisation. In the early 19th century, Sydney Smith gave a fine example of Scottish thinking: ‘I overheard a young lady of my acquaintance, at a dance in Edinburgh, exclaim, in a sudden pause of the music, “What you say, my Lord, is very true of love in the aibstract, but –” here the fiddlers began fiddling furiously, and the rest was lost.’ To put it another way, English thinking works inductively: based on prediction or inference made from regular and sustained observation, as in ‘Rain before seven, fine before eleven’. David Hume wondered whether induction was a process of reasoning at all. In Scotland, when directed to serious or intellectual affairs, thought is deductive – it moves towards a conclusion or inference derived from certain premises. If the premises are true, a conclusion drawn from them cannot be false. Even if the premises are false, the process itself is always valid. As the poet Alastair Reid observed, a casual remark about a fine day can be answered by, ‘We’ll pay for it.’

Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–62), a Londoner, a pioneer of ‘scientific history’, which looked for basic laws underlying human and national activity, embarked on a vast ‘History of Civilization’ but never got beyond the first two volumes, ostensibly on English Civilisation, but much more about France, Spain and Scotland. Buckle was one who argued that the Scots held to a deductive style of reasoning, and thought it related to their religious beliefs. Even when the eighteenth century witnessed a revolutionary development of intellectual life in Scotland, he claimed that this deductive mode limited the benefits of progressive thought. In England, by contrast, the inductive style of thought clarified and passed on by Francis Bacon had eroded the influence of the clergy and largely accounted for English progress. Buckle’s general approach to history has been discredited, but the suggestion of different thought-processes is interesting. Sympathetic mutual understanding would not necessarily happen.

This bi-polarity would account for the English being a more conservative people than the Scots. The difference between the law of the two nations may also be a reflection of it: Scottish law, following the continental and old Roman approach, is based on precepts and principles; in England the common law is based on cases and precedents.

Theories, 3. The Evolution of the Tribe

Sir Arthur Keith (1866–1955) was an eminent Scottish scientist, anatomist and palaeontologist. A keen follower of Charles Darwin, he published Ethics and Evolution in 1948. In this book he suggests that evolution was not just a physiological process but a social one, and that an ancient, basic evolutionary drive has formed human communities and still underpins them. He saw it as a natural force which works through us to protect, preserve and enlarge the tribal community against rival groups (all other groups are rivals), by violence if necessary. Arguing against scientists who claimed that humanity was intrinsically an ethical species, he believed that at a basic level, the only good that matters to us is the survival of the tribe. For Keith, the role of the politician was to understand this process and work to avoid its bloody, and at worst genocidal, implications. Seeing ‘disruption’ as natural, if not necessarily desirable, he said in 1919, ‘… the nearer the blood relationship between two adjacent peoples, the more likely is disruption to occur’.

The old self-awareness of the Scottish people as ‘the community of the realm’ expressed in the Arbroath Declaration of 1320, and the continuing stalwart refusal to merge Scottish identity with that of the larger adjacent group, come to mind (a thought reflected by the poet Edwin Muir: ‘We were a family, a tribe, a people’). Keith’s theory can be contested, but it is certainly thought-provoking in any examination of why the Scots and English remain ‘different’ from one another. The Scottish tribe, officially at least, proclaims itself as wide-open. The term ‘affinity Scot’ was coined to describe non-Scots with an ancestral or emotional link to Scotland – the English are by no means excluded – who might be persuaded to visit Scotland and spend money. The most hopeful estimate of the size of this ‘diaspora’ is 100 million people. There is no affinity-English equivalent. Is England one tribe, or several? Keith also noted that ‘In England itself the sense of nationality is usually dormant; only an insult or a threat from without stirs this gigantic force into life … it dozes quietly on the hob. Nevertheless English nationality is a force which pervades the whole population lying between Berwick-on-Tweed and Land’s End.’

Incidentally, the word ‘Scot’ has the advantage of not being gender-specific. There is no unisex word for ‘person of English origin’: is this just happenstance, or another example of different self-perceptions?

Some Current Cross-Border Thoughts