MacPherson's Rant E-Book

Stuart McHardy

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 394

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

The fiddle has long played an important part in Scottish musical tradition. Here in MacPherson's Rant and Other Tales of the Scottish Fiddle there are stories that reflect that importance. Whether the fiddle is in the hands of the notorious Highland freebooter MacPherson or being played by a young man learning a fairy tune, these tales reflect a traditional culture that is still thriving. Some of the stories are truly ancient while others quite modern, but all show that throughout Scotland there has long been a ready audience for music made by horsehair on catgut. Today as Scottish culture continues to thrive in the face of all the modern world can throw at it we should perhaps think on what Robert Burns once did to a friend, 'Lang may yer elbuck, jink an diddle.' In addition to introducing some of the most famous, as well as some of the lesser-known, tales of the Scottish fiddle, Stuart McHardy also examines the history of the instrument, its repertoire and the place the fiddle and the fiddler have played in Scottish culture over the centuries. The result is a lively and informative companion to one of the central elements of the Scottish musical tradition.

Leseprobe

MacPherson’s Rant and Other Tales of the Scottish Fiddle

MacPherson’s Rant and Other Tales of the Scottish Fiddle

by

Stuart McHardy

First published in Great Britain in 2004 by

Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

www.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © Stuart McHardy, 2004

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

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

ISBN 1 84158 290 5

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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

Typeset by Initial Typesetting Services, Edinburgh

Printed and bound by

MPG Books Limited, Bodmin

Contents

Introduction

Fechtin Fiddlers

Notable Fiddlers

Otherworld Tales

Name that Tune

Fiddlers’ Humour

Fiddling and the Kirk

The Social Hour

A Couple o Lads o Pairts

The Fiddle and the Jail

Military Matters

Blind Fiddlers

The Fiddling Tradition

Fiddler Poets

The Fiddler’s Widow

The Fiddlemaker and the Hidden Fiddle

And Finally ...

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr Sheila Douglas and Colin Douglas for their help in putting this book together.

Introduction

The Fiddle

The role of the fiddle in Scotland is a long and chequered one. As far back as the medieval period there were stringed instruments played with a bow, such as the croud mentioned in the fourteenth-century poem Orfeo and Heurodis. The croud was an early form of the fiddle, with a shallow rectangular body about sixty centimetres by thirty centimetres and five centimetres deep; it was probably the direct ancestor of the traditional box fiddle that survived into the twentieth century. Originally it had two horsehair strings, which were bowed, but later it developed three and six-string versions. It is quite likely that the fiddle developed independently in Scotland, though there were similar instruments in the Baltic countries of Estonia and Finland at an early date. They, like the croud, were probably of a tenor pitch. A similar instrument, the crwth, was still in use in Wales in the nineteenth century. It had four strings for bowing and two which could be bowed or plucked, set to one side of the fingerboard. Another version of the same instrument was the Shetland gue and it has been suggested that the instrument originally either came from the British Isles or Scandinavia. The long-term contacts between the peoples of these two areas make it impossible to be precise about such matters, as there has not been a great deal of investigation into the mutual influence between the peoples of Scandinavia and what we now call Scotland.

Another early bowed instrument was the rebec and there is a carving of one on the twelfth-century Melrose Abbey. Arguments have been put forward that such stringed instruments were brought back from the Crusades, which lasted from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries. It seems more likely such stringed instruments were developed here in Scotland, or the British Isles. Similarities between the Shetland gue, the Welsh crwth and the bowed harp of Scandinavia make it impossible to decide in which direction influence travelled, so we might as well say that the fiddle is a truly Scottish instrument, as well as being indigenous to many other countries. What underlines its role as a native instrument is the music played on it and, as we shall see, in this respect Scottish music is distinctive. The name fiddle itself may have derived from an early Irish term ‘fidil’, but again it is impossible to be definitive about this.

What we can be absolutely sure of is the importance of the fiddle in Scottish music. There is the report of a French soldier and historian who visited Mary Queen of Scots in 1561 which tells of five or six hundred fiddlers coming to Holyrood to play for the queen. These were not professional musicians but citizens of Edinburgh. It is telling that John Knox, often portrayed as the personification of Puritanism, wrote positively about the same event. The instruments they were playing were most likely flattopped, like rebecs. The arch-top of the modern fiddle came about through the influence of viols, which generally had six strings but were bowed like the fiddle. These instruments were brought in from the Continent in the sixteenth century and were very popular at the court. The improved construction, volume and tone of these instruments had a profound effect on indigenous instruments and the development towards what we now think of as the traditional fiddle was given a significant boost. It is reported that viols were played at the Cross in Edinburgh on the occasion of the coronation of James V in 1513. A considerable amount of music was written for these instruments, which were usually grouped in sixes with two each of the bass, tenor and treble instruments. Although the music for these instruments cannot really be considered as traditional or folk music, it is part of the development of Scottish music as a whole. The cross-fertilisation of musical styles between high art and traditional art is something that has always taken place; but amongst those more concerned with the high art end of the spectrum such mutual interplay is generally ignored, or at best under-rated. This tends to be more the result of social prejudice rather than any meaningful divergence in the different types of music.

A poem attributed to Thomas the Rhymer, who is said to have lived in the thirteenth century, tells of:

Harp and fedyl both he fande

The getern and the sawtry

Lut and rybid ther gon gan’

Thair was al maner of mynstralsy.

Sir Walter Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,vol IV, 1833 ed., Appendix

Here the getern probably refers to an early form of English guitar or a cithern; the sawtry is the psaltery and the rybid the rebec. The fiddle is just one of the portable musical instruments mentioned in the poem, but over the centuries its popularity has in no way diminished, while the others have disappeared. There are those who contend that the guitar developed independently in the British Isles and there is no doubt that there were what are now called ‘English’ guitars being made here in the seventeenth century and probably earlier. There was a substantial repertoire of tunes for the guitar and the lute in eighteenth-century Scotland, but, like some other instruments, their popularity faded away in the face of the widespread use of the fiddle. By the time the modern violin was finally developed in Italy in the seventeenth century by the Amati family, there was a ready audience for it all over Europe. Scotland was no exception; soon fiddle-makers in Scotland were using the new techniques and the indigenous tradition of fiddle-making was well established. Scotland may not have given birth to a Stradavarius or Guarneri but there are many fine old instruments that still repay the love and attention paid to them.

Collections of Scottish music began to be published from the late seventeenth century onwards but specific collections of fiddle tunes did not appear till the mid-eighteenth century. This is still earlier than the collections of tunes for Scotland’s other main popular traditional instrument: the Highland bagpipe. The role of the pipes in Highland culture made them dubious in the eyes of many after the civil wars of the eighteenth century, even though pipes had actually been popular for a long time in many Lowland areas. The first collection of indigenous fiddle music was published in 1757, when Scots reels or country dances was published in Edinburgh. However, there are many extant copies of fiddlers’ manuscripts from even earlier. It was common practice for fiddlers to keep their repertoires in manuscript form. Many of these contain quite a variety of tunes, such as jigs and reels, now historical forms such as bourrees and chaconnes, reflecting French influence, as well as slow airs. By the late eighteenth century collections like that of Angus Cumming, published in 1780, show us a vibrant and popular tradition of traditional music, much of it used to accompany dancing, an activity that was embraced by all classes of society. Although many collections of fiddle tunes were subsequently published, the line between composing specific melodies and developing tunes from traditional music is one that at times is indistinct.

The fiddle has been at the heart of all kinds of social activity in Scotland for hundreds of years. Its portability, volume and range made it an ideal instrument to be played at weddings, dances and all kinds of small-scale gatherings, within families or in public places. Its usefulness for dance music, as the accompaniment to singing and also its solo playing have made it an integral part of traditional music in Scotland. Its versatility has ensured that many traditional Scottish fiddlers have also played other types of music from classical to jazz.

Shetland

To the north of Scotland are the Orkney and Shetland Isles, both of which were for a long time part of the possessions of the Norwegian Crown. The Shetland Isles are the most northerly outpost of the United Kingdom – over a hundred lowlying and virtually treeless islands cluster together about as far from Aberdeen as the Faeroe Isles or Bergen on the west coast of Norway. Shetlanders often maintain that they are no more Scottish than Scandinavian. The Shetlands were ruled from Norway until 1469, and remnants of the old affiliations remain. To this day the dialect of Shetland is very distinct from other Scots dialects, reflecting its origins in Norn, the old local dialect of Norwegian. Shetland men, like many other Scottish islanders, have long been sea travellers; musically, they have always been open to outside influence, while still maintaining local traditions.

The fiddle in particular had long had a central place in Shetland culture. Even today the most famous proponent of the Shetland style of fiddle, Aly Bain, travels the world, and the instrument retains its popularity amongst Shetland’s youngsters. The Shetland fiddle tradition is very much alive and well, preserving a continuity of traditional music that is hundreds of years old. The survival and growth of interest in the tradition was greatly encouraged by the late Tom Anderson in the twentieth century; under his influence, fiddle teaching became a regular part of the school curriculum in Shetland.

The development of the fiddle in Shetland has a unique history. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Sir Arthur Edmonstone wrote that around ten per cent of the Shetlanders played the violin and that at least some of the music was of Norse origin. He also mentioned the gue, an instrument with two horsehair strings that was played upright like a cello. Researchers have noted that this is something like an instrument from Iceland known as a fidla, and resemblances have also been noted with what has been called the Eskimo violin or ‘tautirut’, though both of these have also been referred to as bowed box-zithers. Whenever the violin actually arrived in Shetland, it is clear that it was absorbed into an indigenous and thriving string-playing tradition. In the 1970s a rough headcount of musicians was taken in the village of Cullivoe on the island of Yell. Of the seventy adult men, more than twenty were, or had been, fiddlers; guitars and accordions or melodeons were played by another nine. In addition, there were a further eight known to be singers, meaning that more than half the male adult community were musicians of one standard or another. Since then, of course, the fiddle has been taken up by more and more women, some of whom have achieved considerable professional success, and it is fair to say that the Shetland fiddle tradition continues to thrive into the twenty-first century.

Although there was no early history of violin-making in the islands, the tradition of Shetland men going off to sea – in the British navy and in the fishing and trading fleets of Britain, the Netherlands and Norway – meant there were always fiddles being brought back from elsewhere.

The role of the fiddle in Shetland was absolutely central in a variety of social rituals. These included weddings and the annual celebrations of Yule, during both of which the ancient tradition of guising also played a part. Guisers were groups of young men, dressed in truly ancient traditional clothes made primarily of straw, with high hats and blue veils over their faces, whose identity was always secret but without whose blessing many social occasions were considered incomplete, or worse. At weddings the ‘scuddler’ or chief guiser would lead off the dancing with the bride, while his companions danced with the other females of the wedding party. They would then be given a drink, after which they would leave and the general festivities would begin. One of the surviving auld or muckle reels that hark back to the days when Shetland was part of Norway is itself known as the Guisers’ Reel.

Dancing in Shetland had its own traditions too, some of which, like guising, seem to hark back to ancient times indeed. Some of the tunes survive in fragments known as the ‘Auld Reels’ or ‘Muckle Reels’. While it is clear that the old style was affected by incoming tunes from the mainland of Scotland, brought in by both Scottish farm workers and the fishermen who came to Shetland’s shores every year, the Shetland tradition remains distinctive. Though today the majority of tunes surviving in Shetland can be seen as part of the wider Scottish fiddle tradition.

A great deal of literature has been written about Shetland folklore, in which the fiddle played a central part, and it is clear that fiddlers have always had a respected role in island society. Descriptions of early weddings and dances all note the importance of the fiddler. They also had a role to play on ships, particularly during the nineteenth-century flourishing of the whaling industry. It was not unusual for whaling ships to be caught in the winter ice and forced to overwinter in the darkness of the far north. The presence of a Shetland fiddler or two amongst the crew would be a great advantage in staving off the boredom and monotony of the months spent in virtually permanent darkness. In fact, every Shetland ship would have at least one fiddle. Ships from other areas would have melodeon players or fiddlers. All were hired either as common sailors or specialists, such as carpenters, but their musical abilities entitled them to an extra share of the eventual catch.

The Fiddle and the Dance

The fiddle has long been central to the Scottish dance tradition even though, like all musical instruments, it was anathema to the more extreme Presbyterians of the period immediately after the Reformation. This period actually saw the prohibition of dancing and widespread denunciation from the pulpit of all sorts of normal human activities – in Scotland we have historically had a lot of problems arising from religious differences. The Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century seem to have been particularly incensed by the dances that took place at the Scottish court. Queen Mary brought back many new dances from France and some of these were considered almost obscene. That France was a Catholic country and the Reformers were of a puritanical Protestant bent just made the situation worse. This antagonistic attitude survived into the seventeenth century, with people regularly being hauled before Kirk Session and fined or otherwise punished for dancing. The fact that there are so many references to this from the period shows that the prohibition on dancing never really worked – it was too much part of contemporary culture to be eradicated completely. As late as 1668 a farmer in North Knapdale was refused a certificate of church membership because he practised dancing. Thankfully, he had the decision overthrown on appeal and we hear no more of this ridiculous prohibition, despite the minister concerned claiming that dancing ‘was a sin and bitter provocation to the Lord’.

Many eighteenth-century fiddlers continued the tradition of accompanying dancing – some fiddlers made a living as dancing masters and many of them toured the country instructing and playing for dances. The dances that took place ranged from those held in threshing barns on farmtouns to great society balls in Edinburgh, Glasgow and elsewhere – and all of them needed fiddlers. The farmtouns were where much of Scotland’s rural population lived until the eighteenth century. People farmed rented lands in common, using the ancient runrig system. These cottars, as they were known, suffered the same fate as so many of their Highland cousins later did – they were cleared from the land as soon as the landowners came up with a way of making more ready cash through ‘agricultural improvement’. As with all traditional music forms, there were also a great many people who played for their own amusement; though many of them wanted to ‘make the big time’ and become dancing masters themselves.

Auld Clootie and the Fiddle

During the tragic years of witch persecutions in Scotland, many women were burnt at the stake. Their execution usually followed their confession of their supposed evil deeds. The fact that these confessions were extracted by torture was in no way seen as diminishing their force and relevance. After all, hadn’t they been accused of being witches? Not only is the barbaric and misogynistic treatment of these women a foul blot on Scotland’s history, the confessions themselves seem to have been put in the women’s mouths. Time and again we hear the same things being confessed in virtually the same words. While there were undoubtedly some pagan cult activities surviving into the eighteenth century and later, the behaviour that the witches confessed to were more to do with the expectations of the people torturing them than with reality.

Time and again they confessed to having consorted with Satan and of dancing regularly at witches’ covens. The dances were rarely described in detail, but were assumed to be orgiastic. And time and again we find that the music for such dancing was said to have been provided by the devil himself. His preferred instruments were the fiddle and the bagpipes, the most popular instruments in Scotland throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The best description of this fantasy occurs in Burns’s ‘Tam o Shanter’, where Auld Clootie is playing the pipes. But in many other instances he is portrayed as playing the fiddle. We must remember that for many of the fanatically puritanical clergy of Scotland in the years following 1560 all music other than hymns and psalms were the devil’s work. Dancing too was seen as essentially sinful in anything other than strictly controlled gatherings. Burns satirised such notions in the song ‘The Deil’s Awa wi the Exciseman’, in which Auld Hornie ‘cam fiddlin thru the toun, and danced awa with Exciseman.’ Popular opinion of the exciseman made it likely that his idea of the devil taking away ‘gaugers’, as they were known, was widely appreciated. Although Burns himself worked as an exciseman, his basic beliefs regarding the taxation on spirits are probably summed up in the phrase ‘Whisky an Freedom gang thegither.’ It is notable that the devil in Scotland, sitting playing the fiddle or the pipes, bears little resemblance to the epitome of evil as represented by Satan, the fallen angel in charge of the fires of hell.

But the idea of the devil fiddling for the witches was a strong one, reinforced by the words put in the mouths of many so-called witches by their persecutors in the horrendous witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Time after time in the heartrending reports of such trials we clearly see that the poor victims were brutally and systematically tortured till they told their persecutors exactly what they wanted to hear. The idea of the satanic musician crops up in some odd ways, perhaps none more so than the placename Fiddlenaked Park in Airdrie. Local tradition tells us it was the rendezvous of wizards and witches, who met to celebrate their unholy Sabbats. They were said to have danced naked round their fiddler, who was also unclothed and may or may not have been Auld Clootie himself. It was generally a place that people reckoned was best avoided after dark. When we remember that traditional tales tell of public rituals in which young couples made love in stone circles at midsummer, it is conceivable that such remnants are in fact faint echoes of ancient religious practice from pagan times.

Even today people sometimes try to use what they think is magic. A couple of hundred years ago such practices were much more widespread. There were, for instance, widespread practices of divination – trying to see into the future – which took place at Halloween. These are relatively well known and many of them are described in Robert Burns’ poem ‘Halloween’. Some people think that ‘dookin for apples’ is a remnant of an ancient ritual of looking into the future. However, there were lots of other practices that were common when most of the population of Scotland still lived in rural areas. Many rituals, such as visiting healing wells, involved doing certain things a specific number of times. After making a prayer, it was common to have to go round such wells three or even nine times to make sure that the prayer worked. While many such rituals were basically concerned with healing, in days when going to the doctor was too expensive for many poor people, there were other types of magic practice that were resorted to.

While Christian ministers often saw such types of behaviour as little different from Black Magic, or seeking help directly from the devil, it is much more likely that they are remnants of practices that were common in pagan times. The idea that people worshipped the devil before the enlightenment of Christianity came upon them is erroneous. The truth is that long after Christianity came to the British Isles people continued to carry out ‘superstitious’ practices out of sight of the priests and ministers, mainly because they thought that such activities worked. Their parents and grandparents had done such things and it was better to be safe than sorry; so they kept up the practices.

One of the stranger beliefs was that if you crawled underneath a brier rose or bramble that was rooted in the earth at both ends your wishes would be granted. To make this charm or spell work it was necessary to crawl under it, naked, nine times in all. Such rites would usually be carried out on the ancient holy days of Beltane, 1 May, or Samhain, 1 November, which were the most magical days in the old pagan year.

The Role of Storytelling

The material in this book is taken from both traditional tales and reminiscences, and memoirs of actual events. Recent research has shown that the oral tradition, long spurned by historians as little more than entertainment, does in fact contain memories of events and societies that can help us gain a clearer picture of how people lived in the past. Many such stories have survived over remarkable periods of time and have eventually been written down in collections. Though some such stories may come from the twentieth century, others have roots that are hundreds or even thousands of years old. While historians prefer to rely on the written word to tell us of our past, we are only now becoming aware that the oral tradition can in fact retain factual data over thousands of years. Stories have been told for as long as people have been on the planet and the process of storytelling was how knowledge was passed on from generation to generation, whether it was practical knowledge, mythology and ritual, or tales of heroes and heroines. Such tales continue to be told for as long as the audience finds them relevant and are not necessarily superseded by the arrival of literacy. There is currently a worldwide surge of interest in storytelling and we are only now beginning to understand that these remnants of the past can teach us a great deal about our ancestors. We should remember that even in the modern Western world not everyone can read and write.

Just a couple of hundred years ago literacy was often very limited amongst the rural and urban working classes. So, although the storytelling tradition was not as structured as it had been in earlier times, it continued to flourish. Even today you hear people in pubs, at parties and other social gatherings who are natural storytellers; often the stories they tell are based on traditional material – old tales in new clothes. The historians’ obsession with paper and dates has blinded us to the fact that oral transmission retains a great deal of information about what life for our ancestors was like, and about how they saw the world they inhabited.

The fact that such fiddle tales occur in many different places tells us something more about the process of storytelling. In order to have the maximum impact – and particularly to ensure that children would understand the stories – the locale of all different types of story motif would be presented as immediately local to the audience. There would be little point in talking of far-off places that few if any of the audience would ever visit. This is why so many versions of significant tales, including those of ‘King Arthur’, can be found in so many different places. Such local variants do not have to stem from one original location, though they might possibly do so. Within the culture of the local group, reliant on oral transmission and memory to survive, stories, whether legendary or mythological, would always tend to be set in the local landscape.

This is something that is only now beginning to be truly understood – in the past the similarity of a story told in Scotland to one from England or even Greece was usually accounted for by the story being imported. Probably the clearest example of this is the existence of Arthurian material in both placename and story in different parts of Scotland. This has been explained in the past as having come about because of the literary influence of the works of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the twelfth-century monk who popularised Arthurian stories in his History of the Kings of Britain and the Life of Merlin. This has been accepted by historians without question, but ignores the fact that story survives longest amongst people who are the last to acquire literacy and are thus least influenced by it. Popular culture has always had a strong oral element and there are areas of overlap in both theme and presentation between story, song and music. Even into the twentieth century, many of the travelling people of Scotland were brought up within a culture that was still essentially oral-based, despite the last few generations having become literate.

The same stories survive in different locales, languages and cultures because they speak to common human understanding. Although some stories, such as tales of extinct animals and cataclysmic geophysical events in Australia, have survived for tens of thousands of years, our stories of fiddlers are of course much more recent. They are, however, part of a continuum of tradition that is truly ancient, and in their presentation of human society and activity retain the capacity to speak to us.

As interest in storytelling grew in the years after the Second World War, the extent of the treasure that was contained in the traditional tales of Scotland’s travelling people began to be understood. Some of the stories retold here are from that tradition, while others have been gleaned from local histories and literary collections. While much scholarship has concentrated on collecting tales from the lips of those travellers who still ‘had’ the stories, it has become clear that there are also many other stories hidden away in books. Other truly ancient stories survive in changed guise within urban traditions. Stories from the far distant past have survived alongside stories from more modern times and both types appear here. As our understanding of the value of the storytelling tradition and the material it has allowed to survive increases, we can perhaps begin to have a clearer idea of just what the past in Scotland was like. The historians tell us about the deeds of the ‘high heid yins’: kings and nobles, soldiers, religious leaders and the rich. The storytelling tradition reminds us that such material refers only to a tiny portion of human society at any one time.

In a fundamental sense, story tells us the true history of the people. And in Scotland the fiddle has always been important to the people playing it and the people listening to it, not just to the lairds who could afford to maintain professional musicians. Although we nowadays think of the professional musicians, fiddlers and pipers who attended clan chiefs as in some way the ‘chief’s’ musicians, their true original role was more like what we would nowadays recognise as a community musician. They played for all the people of the clan, a term meaning children, which really describes Scottish tribes all claiming descent from a single common ancestor. Traditionally, the chiefs were not over the clan, but part of it. Their role was like that of the town fiddlers, who, like the town pipers, were a fixture in many Lowland Scottish towns.

Dr Samuel Johnson showed how story has been misunderstood when he wrote the following:

Books are faithful repositories, which may be a while neglected or forgotten, but when they be are opened again, will impart their instruction: memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled.

This is true, but ignores the role of oral transmission in many areas, including the British Isles – a role that still continues in a diminished form. Books are usually written by individuals and very often for pay. The repetition of traditional story within a closed social group is something completely different; its authenticity is a matter of importance for the entire group, and there would always be people of considerable knowledge other than the bard or seannachie telling the story. In fact, the same stories would have been told and retold and most, if not all, of the social group would have a considerable knowledge of them, making it virtually impossible to alter or distort the inherent matter of such stories. Like all artists, however, each storyteller would probably have his own way of presenting his tales. It was through story that children learned moral precepts, the history of their ancestors, how the world was made and many practical lessons. Although stories have always had to be entertaining – to ensure people paid attention – within societies dependent on oral transmission they were never just entertainment, and even today many storytellers’ material has strong moral precepts. There is also the fact that story helps to teach the young about the world in which they live on many levels at once – the old notion that storytelling is a simple art form is not one which stands up to much scrutiny. Johnson’s point that memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled is true, but in Scotland we are in the very fortunate position that a great many traditional stories have been written down. And there are still stories being collected today that have survived through the process of oral transmission. In one sense, story itself is the point rather than the actual material of any particular tale – as long as people want to hear a particular story, and tell it among themselves, the psychological and social relevance of the tale will continue. History is certainly written by winners, but stories are told by history’s survivors.

Language

Traditional stories in Scotland survive in three languages, English, Gaelic and Scots. The latter two languages have been in use here for at least 1,500 years, probably longer, while English as it is spoken today in Scotland has come in since the sixteenth century. Stories survive in the languages people use and no story is any more authentic than another merely by virtue of its language. There has been an unfortunate idea propagated over the last couple of centuries that Scots is a descendant of English and thus is less truly indigenous than Gaelic. In fact Scots comes from the same roots as English but developed separately from it.

Fechtin Fiddlers

Even well into the eighteenth century there were many parts of Scotland where it was the norm for men to go around armed. Our history is one in which there have been long periods where the rule of law was little different from the rule of the sword. James MacPherson is probably the most famous of the fechtin fiddlers, but has been romanticised extensively. The indistinct figure of Rattlin Willie reminds us that for long enough the Borders of Scotland were just as wild as the Highlands, while the story of Johnny Faa has given rise to many songs of the Gypsy Davy style.

MacPherson’s Rant

James MacPherson was a man who embodied much of the spirit of the Highland warrior; he is remembered to this day as a famous swordsman and noted fiddler. Born in the second half of the seventeenth century, he was the natural son of MacPherson of Invereshie and a tinker lass of the Broun family. James was raised in both families and inherited much from both. Although ‘tinkers’ became almost a term of insult for the travelling people of Scotland, they have never forgotten that they are the descendants of travelling metal-workers whose skills were valued by communities all across the country. Some of today’s travellers suggest that they can trace their ancestry back to the original hunter-gatherers who came to Scotland when the Ice Age retreated, thousands upon thousands of years ago. Whatever the truth of that, the travelling people have a fierce pride in their own ancestry; James was probably as proud of his mother’s people as his father’s, and it is likely that his skill as a fiddler was learned among the former. His father, Invereshie – it was the norm for Scots to be called after the lands they owned, or worked – was a minor chieftain of the Clan MacPherson, and a man of some standing within the clan community. There was great emphasis on all the males being trained as warriors; this was in fact central to the social system of the Highland clans. James proved a ready pupil in this respect and developed into a fine swordsman. His preferred weapon was the claymore, the great double-handed sword of the Gael, and his own sword was of such size and weight that few could wield it with any skill.

In this period inter-clan raiding was rife; it was how the warriors proved their worth. When the harvest was in, groups of young, and not so young, clan warriors would set off by the light of the harvest moon to ‘lift’ the cattle of rival clans. For a long, long time the black cattle of the Highlands were how the Gaels judged wealth and success, and there was no greater feat than lifting the cattle of another clan. This was not rustling or theft, but the way of the warrior in a society that had probably changed little since the Iron Age. To Lowlanders the ‘caterans’ of the Highland areas seemed to be no more than thieves, but amongst the Gaels things were different. James was steeped in ancient tradition and clearly understood the ancient way of the cateran. However, even as far back as the seventeenth century the old ways were changing: more and more of the clan chiefs abandoned their traditional role as father of the tribe and began to become little more than large landowners, obsessed with personal wealth. As the Lowland areas began to develop their agriculture and the old ways of barter gave way to a modern money-based economy, the differences between the people farming the fertile lands adjoining the Highlands and the fierce proud people of the mountains grew greater. In the Lowland areas law was a matter for local judges, effectively answerable to the government in Edinburgh, while in the Highlands loyalty to clan and the power of the sword arm dominated. As the gulf between the societies grew, there were those of the Highland clans who increasingly saw their Lowland neighbours as fair game for raiding.

To the peaceful Lowlanders the Highlanders’ obsession with arms and fighting, and with ‘lifting’ cattle, was utterly foreign. Although there were those who spoke both Gaelic, the Celtic language of the Highland clans, and Scots, the Germanic tongue of the Lowland peoples, the cultural and language differences made the two communities increasingly alien to each other. It is hardly surprising in this situation that people in the Lowland areas came to see the Highland raiders as nothing more than thieves; there were many in both camps who had nothing but contempt for the other side. What was honourable to one side was criminal to the other and there were those in the Highlands who took advantage of the situation and lived off raiding alone.

James was a man who loved the outdoor life and spent many a night on the hill listening to the age-old stories of Finn MacCoul and his warriors, the Fianna, as they hunted and raided. Central to the belief of the Highland warrior was cothrom no Feinne, the fair play of the Fianna, a code of honour that had developed over the centuries. Traditionally, clans would never raid their neighbours, as this would lead to permanent warfare; so they often travelled long distances to lift cattle.

While James and his companions, some of whom were his cousins on his mother’s side, saw themselves as behaving like warriors, by the farmers and lairds they raided in the Lowland areas of Moray, Buchan and Aberdeenshire they were seen as a curse. The differences between the increasingly modern economy in the Lowland areas and the ancient warrior society of the Highland clans were bound to lead to problems. With the additional problems of clan feuds and personal enmity between fierce and proud warriors, it is clear that James lived in dangerous and volatile times.

The first we hear of him is when he was arrested for theft and found guilty at a court in Aberdeen. He had been betrayed and, as a Highland cateran in a Lowland court, he knew he had little chance of justice. His sentence was a foregone conclusion – death by hanging. However, James, as well as being a skilful warrior and a fine musician, was also known to have a way with the ladies and while he was in prison the serving maid of the magistrate who tried him took a fancy for the big, handsome Highlander. She herself had come from the Highlands and managed to get word to some of James’s closest companions that he was due to be hanged in Aberdeen on a certain day. The gallows was just outside the tolbooth, the traditional prison of Scottish towns, and James could see it from the window of his prison, where he was kept in chains. He was due to be hanged at noon on a Saturday, when all the common people of the city would be there to see the end of this Highland thief, as the judge had called him. Among that crowd would be many who originally came from the Highland areas, and many more who had relatives there. They were poor people and had no cattle to be stolen; many of them sympathised with the handsome Highlander.

The day of the execution came and a good crowd had gathered. Executions were not that common and were seen by the magistrates as giving a lesson to the populace, while many of the common people saw such events as entertainment. Large crowds would gather and that would attract pedlars and performers, much like the country fairs of the day. Among the crowd were two of James’s cousins, Donald MacPherson and Peter Broun, himself a noted fiddler. Donald was a giant, even by the standards of the Highlanders, and had been on many a raid with his cousin; Peter was himself a powerful, clever and nimble young man. An hour before the execution, the two men approached the tolbooth through the growing crowd. Up the stairs they went. Donald hammered on the tolbooth door with the pommel of his sword. Inside there was just one warder and, as he opened the door, Peter burst in. As the warder fell back, Donald came though the door and, with one blow from the hilt of his sword, laid the man out cold. Quick as a flash, Peter grabbed the keys from the man’s belt and opened the cell door. There was no time to try and loosen James’s chains, so Peter threw him over his shoulders and followed Donald back out of the door. Down the stairs of the tolbooth they went and a cheer went up from the crowd.

Not everyone in Aberdeen was sympathetic to the Highlander though. A local butcher, whose shop overlooked the tolbooth square, had suffered financially from raids by James and others and decided to intervene. He was as big as Donald and no coward. He had a great bulldog, which he commanded to attack Donald just as he reached the foot of the stairs. Donald was no fool. In a practised motion, he undid his belt and threw his plaid over the butcher. The dog, confused but smelling something strange, went for his master, pulling the unfortunate man to the ground. By now, some of the gathered crowd had cottoned on to what was happening and started a fight. Someone had sent for the town guard, but when they arrived the whole square was a seething, scrapping mass of humanity. Donald and Peter carried James through the crowd to where another of their band was waiting with horses in a side street. Unceremoniously, James was dumped over the back of a horse; the others mounted and off they rode. No one had a chance to tell the men on the city gates what was happening and the men of the town guard there could only jump aside as the Highlanders galloped through the city gate and off to their Highland retreat.

James returned to his cateran ways and his reputation increased. While this was perhaps to his advantage amongst the clansmen of Marr and Buchan, it caused even greater resentment in the Lowland areas of the northeast. He seems to have had the support of the laird of Grant, on whose lands he and his cousins, the Brouns, lived when not out raiding. Grant was keen to hold on to the old clan ways and considered all those who lived on his lands to be under his own jurisdiction. In an attempt to control the often bloody confrontations between raiding Highlanders and Lowland farmers, the government had given many clan chiefs legal control over their own clansmen, though they did not have supremacy over the established sheriff courts in the Lowland areas. The system had been out of use for twenty years, but Grant was still trying to control things as he had earlier.

A few years later, James, whose winning ways and popularity with the ladies caused some jealousy even among his own people, was once again betrayed. The laird of Braco, who was determined to put an end to the raiding, was informed that MacPherson and some of the Brouns were to be in attendance at the Summer’s Eve Fair in Keith. Accordingly, he set out with his brother-in-law Lesmurdie and over a dozen hand-picked men. Sure enough, as they got to the fair there was MacPherson. The battle was short but desperate, one of MacPherson’s band being killed outright. James and Peter were grabbed, along with Peter’s brother and another band-member, James Gordon, while the rest of the caterans made their escape. The four of them were taken to a nearby house and a guard of half a dozen men was set around the house. Braco and Lesmurdie were sitting in an upstairs room of the house when they heard a commotion outside. This was the laird of Grant, who had turned up with thirty of his own men to set MacPherson free. Braco, realising the seriousness of the situation, came down the stairs and said to Grant, ‘I had intended sending these men to prison, but that seems difficult now that you have arrived. There are too many of you to contend with, so I shall leave.’

Grant and his men stood aside to let Braco and his group go off, content that they had achieved their aim of freeing their friends. However, Braco, as soon as he was out of sight, headed back to the market and, finding two other justices of the peace there, soon rounded up sixty armed men. He then went hot-foot back to where he had left MacPherson and the laird of Grant. This time Grant was outnumbered – two to one – and, realising that there was no hope of victory, he went off leaving MacPherson and his companions to the mercy of Braco’s men.

The trial took place before the sheriff in Banff in November 1700. James and his companions were charged with a variety of offences, including the wonderful-sounding ‘masterful bangstrie and oppression’ – which translates as something like extortion and grievous bodily harm. The laird of Grant had sent a lawyer, who pleaded to the court that as the accused were all from his lands they should be surrendered for trial to him. He also offered a pledge for their lawful behaviour, but the situation was too far gone and the trial went ahead. Witness after witness was called to testify that they had stolen sheep, cattle and horses, had broken into houses, had stolen people’s purses and wallets, and generally oppressed many poor people in the area. They were said to have had their own language, probably a form of Romany cant, and to have spent many nights in debauchery and dancing, with MacPherson and Peter Broun providing the music on the fiddle. The verdict was a foregone conclusion and James and Peter Broun were sentenced to be hanged the next market-day, the following Saturday.

The time for the execution was set for one o’clock. The laird of Grant had many friends and was frantically trying to get a stay of execution from higher authorities in Aberdeen. In this he was successful, but it was a long way by horse from Aberdeen to Banff. The day of the execution came. At eleven o’clock James was told he was being hanged at twelve, not one o’clock. Somehow the sheriff had heard that a warrant to stay the execution was on its way from Aberdeen and that the bearer of the warrant was due at about half past twelve. James knew his time had come. His friend Grant would not be able to save him.