School of the Moon E-Book

Stuart McHardy

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 451

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Behind the tales of cateran raiding in the Scottish Highlands was an age old practice, beloved of the clan warriors. Trained in the ways of the School of the Moon they liked little better than raiding other clans to lift their cattle and disappear into the wild mountains under the cover of darkness. If pursued and battle became necessary, that was no problem to the clansmen. This traditional practice of the Scottish Highland warriors, originating at least as far back as the Iron Age, has left us many grand stories, apocryphal and historical. Through investigating these stories Stuart McHardy came across material, some of it as yet unpublished, which leads to a startling new interpretation of what was going on in the Scottish Highlands in the years after Culloden. The British government called it cattle thieving but the men who returned to the ways of the School of the Moon were the last Jacobites, fighting on in a doomed guerrilla campaign against an army that had a garrison in every glen and town in Scotland.

Leseprobe

School of the Moon

The Highland Cattle-raidingTradition

by

Stuart McHardy

First published in 2004 by

Birlinn Limited

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © Stuart McHardy 2004

The moral 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

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.

ISBN 1 84158 300 6

ePUB ISBN: 978 1 78885 299 9

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library

Typeset by Hewer Text, Edinburgh

Printed and bound by

MPG Books, Bodmin

This book is dedicated to storytellers everywhere

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Oral Transmission

Battle, not War

The Background – Tribal Scotland

Storytelling

Terminology

Tracking

The Stories

Gilderoy

Coll Ban MacDonald

The Halkit Stirk

The Battle o Saughs

The Rose of Glenesk

The Men of Rannoch

The Shieling Booth of Brae Rannoch

Yellow Roderick’s Successful Raid?

Sarjeant Mor

Duncan Ban Leane

A Long-kept Secret

Russell and the Cateran

The Spanish Swees

Cam Ruadh

Spirit Castle

Chisholms versus Macleans

Black Donald the Egyptian

Big Donald

A Nice Surprise

An Gille Dubh nam Mairt, The Dark Lad of the Cattle

A Latter-day Diarmaid, Peter Roy McGregor

Achluachrach’s Bridal

Daft Davie

Donald Mor Cameron

The Thin-legged Man

The Loch of the Farrow Cow

Cattle 1: Cateran 0

One Beast Too Many

The Raid of Moyness

Seumas an Tuim

Cave of Raitts

The Piper’s Pool

The Duntroon Piper

The Finlarig Christening

Colin’s Cattle

A Sense of Humour

Gillesbuig Uarasach

Gillespie’s Revenge

A Cateran’s Penitence

Callum Beg

Cattanach of Bellastraid

Morven Jamie

A Cateran in Love

A Spirited Defence

A Winter Raid

A Bag of Meal and a Pair of Shoes

Epilogue

Appendix – Blackmail

One time the famous Cateran known as the Halkit Stirk was wounded in a skirmish in Strathspey and was left in the care of a family of Stewarts who were foresters at Glenmore. One day he said to his hostess, ‘That’s a fine manly son you have there. I would say he was ready for the school. How old is he?’ She replied, ‘He’s twelve and he has been going to the school at Ruthven for two years now.’ The reply came, ‘Cha neill e Sgoille a phaipear ghaeall bhami ciallachadh, ach sgoille-na-geallaich’ [It is not the School of the White Paper I am thinking of, but the School of the Moon]. The School of the Moon where the subject was cattle raiding and the classroom set in the moonlit nights of autumn. It was little wonder that the autumn moon was known in parts of Scotland as ‘MacPherson’s Lantern’, for it was by its light that the MacPhersons and so many other clans made their way through the wild country of Scotland to ‘lift’ the cattle of other clans and head off back home with them. There was also a saying that Highland chiefs counted out their daughters’ tochers [dowries] by the light of the Michaelmas moon.

Preface

This book presents both stories derived from traditional sources and historical information regarding one of the central activities of the warriors of the Scottish Highland clans – cattle raiding. Which collecting traditional tales about this ancient activity I began to realise that quite a few of the stories that told of events in the 18th century concerned identifiable historical characters. The contemporary records, some of which, like the Cantonment Registers of the British army – the records of the locations and activities of the army – are still unpublished, and tell a remarkable story. In the years after the last Jacobite battle on Drumossie Moor that we now call Culloden, the British Army was involved in what we would now consider ethnic cleansing. The widespread brutality – much of it perpetrated by Scotsmen of both Highland and Lowland origin – is well documented in a remarkable and heart-rending book called The Lyon in Mourning. The evidence from the period confirms that the Jacobite rebellions are best understood as Civil Wars, driven by a complex set of ideas.

What has not been documented is the extent of the Army occupation of Scotland throughout the 1740s and 1750s. There was hardly a town or glen that did not have its own garrison, and the ostensible reason for this was the fact that some of these historical characters, like Iain Dubh Cameron, the Serjeant Mor, took to cattle raiding as a means of survival. The records clearly suggest that what was going on was a form of guerrilla warfare in which scattered bands of Jacobite Highlanders continued to ‘stay out’ – i.e., they refused to give up their battle with the British Army, even though it must have been clear, to some of them at least, that they had no long-term chance of success, or even survival. In their reliance on cattle raiding these last Jacobites were continuing a practice of inter-tribal activity that had been part of clan life for many centuries, and may have had its origins as far back as the Iron Age.

So this book combines both traditional tales and historical information in an attempt to come to terms with the real story of the last years of the ancient Celtic-speaking warrior society that had survived in the Scottish Highlands from time immemorial into the modern age.

Introduction

For centuries the Highlands of Scotland, like the Border marches and the hills of Galloway were seen by central government as lawless, dangerous places, populated by battle-hardened thieves who came down from their hills and carried off the cattle of farmers in many parts of the Lowlands. In the Highlands these so-called thieves were simply men of the clan, all trained as warriors and keen to show their skill and judgement in raids on others’ cattle . . .

A story told by Edward Burt in Letters to a Gentleman from the North of Scotland, written in the 1730s, gives a clear example of how the Highlanders themselves viewed the activity of ‘cattle-lifting’.

A Highlander had been arrested after taking a considerable number of cattle and was brought to trial. The punishment, if found guilty, was death by hanging. The indictment was read setting forth that ‘as a common thief he had lain in wait’, etc. On hearing the accusation the Highlander burst forth in a torrent of indignation, ‘Common thief, common thief! One cow, two cows that be common thief! Lift a hundred cows that be gentleman drovers.’

If executed, such men were seen as martyrs by their peers, for to them it was not stealing. What they were doing was following an honourable tradition of inter-clan cattle-raiding that had probably been going on since the Iron Age, if not earlier. The clans (the Gaelic word clann means children), were a society totally different from Lowland society in Scotland and England. The clan was a tribe formed from the descendants – the children – of a shared common ancestor and all the men were warriors. And these warriors went by the name of cateran, which seems originally to have meant a band of armed men. It seems likely that the reference to raiding parties as caterans arose from the fact that this was a regular, if not an integral part of clan society.

Like their counterparts in the Borders and Galloway the Highlanders’ society was defined by kin-group – the family. Loyalty to the clan was paramount. Although by the 18th century the clans held title-deeds to their lands, in the main these charters were given in recognition of the fact that they had held these lands since time immemorial, a ghlaive – by the sword. This does not mean that they had come in and taken the land by force, but that they were a warrior race who held their lands against all incomers through their bravery and skill at arms. Surrounded by their kin, they were as tied to the land as the animals and birds that lived in the Highlands: this was their territory. And to hold that territory they had developed a society in which every able-bodied male was trained as a warrior. Taught as children how to fight with sticks, as young men they learned to handle the sword and the bow – later the gun – the shield and that ubiquitous weapon/tool – the dirk.

Much has been written over the years about the unswerving loyalty of the clansmen to their chief. Such loyalty was predicated on a complex network of duties and obligations between chief and clansmen, a strict code of honour being observed in all things. All members of the clan were subject to the rules of clan society, and the widespread view that the chiefs were all-powerful despots is unrealistic. The reality was that the chief was the focus of a whole society in which everyone man, woman and child, was his relation, either by blood or marriage. The loyalty of the people to the chief was based on the fact that he was the direct descendant of the ancestor from whom they all claimed descent, and later we shall consider exactly how this system worked. Another excerpt from Burt’s Letters features a story of how the relationship between the chief and his clansmen stood in the 1730s:

. . . and as the meanest among them pretend to be his Relations by Consanguinity, they insist upon the Privilege of taking him by the Hand whenever they meet him. Concerning this last, I once saw a Number of very discontented Countenances when a certain Lord, one of the Chiefs, endeavoured to evade this Ceremony. It was in Presence of an English Gentleman in high station, from whom he would have willingly have concealed the Knowledge of such seeming Familiarity with slaves of so wretched Appearance, and thinking it, I suppose, as a kind of Contradiction to what he had often boasted at other Times, viz., his despotic Power over his Clan.

It is noticeable that he says that it is the member of the clan insisting on his right to shake his Chief’s hand. While this does not mean that the two were absolute equals it does show that within the tribal/clan set-up there was a social system totally unlike that of England where there were aristocracy, gentry and effectively, serfs, or as Burt puts it here – slaves.

The following description of how the average clansmen saw himself is taken from Stewart’s Sketches of the Highlanders (1822), p. 48:

He [the clansman] believed himself well born, and was taught to respect himself in the respect which he showed to his chief; and thus, instead of complaining of the difference of station and fortune, he felt convinced he was supporting his own honour [and that of family and clan] in showing his gratitude and duty to the generous head of his family.

A little later, on page 51, Stewart goes on to describe how justice itself was dispensed within the clan system and he points out how the kin-based system was the direct opposite of the feudal ideas which some scholars have suggested were the basis of clan society.

Freemen could be tried by none but their peers. The vassals [sic] were bound to attend the courts of their chiefs [by mutual obligation not force; and the courts are of the clan not the chief], and amongst other things, to assist in the trials of delinquents. When they assembled on such occasions they established among themselves such regulations as, in their opinion, tended to the welfare of the community, and whenever it became necessary, they voluntarily granted such supplies as they thought the necessity of their superiors required. Their generosity was particularly shown in the marriage of the chief, and in the portioning of his daughters and younger sons. These last, when settled in life, frequently found themselves supplied with the essential necessaries of a family, and particularly with a stock of cattle, which . . . constituted the principal riches of the country. The land was held on behalf of the clan and apart from the generosity of his table and his personal dress and weaponry, which were often of very high quality, the chief had few more personal possessions than his clansfolk, though his household did have to support a sometimes extensive retinue. Apart from his weapons the warrior owned little. Until its later years money does not seem to have been of importance in the day-to-day life of the clan system. The economy was basically one of self-sufficiency, much of it based on the rearing of cattle. Thus a successful creach, or raid, would obviously be of significance within the immediate clan economy.

There is clearly a level of egalitarianism that not only contradicts but has no obvious precursors in feudalism. The supposed absolute power of the Scottish chief over his clansmen does not fit in with these accounts. In essence, to command the loyalty of the rest of the clan, the chiefs were required to show their bravery and skill at arms. The Highlander’s sense of honour and martial traditions meant that he would only follow someone in whom he had faith. Before being totally accepted as leader the young chief had to prove himself to the warriors of the clan. In the book A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland, circa 1695 Martin Martin tells us of this practice (1934 edn. p. 101):

Every heir, or young chieftain of a tribe, was obliged in honour to give a public specimen of his valour before he was owned or declared governor or leader of his people . . . It was usual for the captain to lead them, to make a desperate incursion upon some neighbour or other . . . and they were obliged to bring the cattle they found on the lands they attacked, or to die in the attempt.

The same point is made by Browne in A History of the Highlands (1851 edn, p. 129):

If they failed in their attempts, they were not respected; and if they appeared disinclined to engage in hostile rencontres, they were despised.

As we shall see, the raids or creachs in which the young chief participated to prove his valour were an integral part of Highland society and the focus of a great deal of activity, on the part of the men at least. They had their own rules and procedures and there were elaborate customs to be followed as the raiders drove their prey through the lands of other clans. This was necessary as these raids were often the cause of retribution, and raiding one’s near neighbours would have meant constant battle and feud. The standard practice was generally to travel a considerable distance and there are instances of Highlanders regularly raiding as far south as Galloway. The raids were virtually always to ‘lift’ cattle, for many centuries the main form of moveable wealth in the Highlands.

The general plan and procedure of the raid or creach was to come into your victim’s land stealthily before dawn and gather up the livestock with as little noise as possible, leading them off on the chosen path before the locals were awake. This obviously meant that an extensive survey was required in order that the cateran might know both the whereabouts of the cattle and the route by which they intended moving them. A great deal of skill in dealing with the animals was essential, and the most successful creach would be one where the cattle were gathered, taken away and brought back home with no interference from the clan that had been raided. Fighting was an expected part of the raiding process but it does not seem to have been the reason for it. The underlying idea seems to have been to show the skill and bravery of the cateran involved. As has been noted, such cattle-raiding was generally undertaken a good distance away from the clan’s homelands. Raiding nearby clans would make little sense as it would probably lead to continuing warfare, and though there were what amounted to established rules of combat amongst the Highland clans, there was always the possibility of a blood feud when one act of revenge would provoke another in an ongoing cycle of killing. Because the raids were undertaken at a distance, this meant that the raiders had to cross the territory of other clans between their home and that of their victims. It was standard practice for raiders to give up some of their booty to the clan whose lands they crossed, and this was known as ‘a road-collop’. Disputes could arise as to what was a suitable amount and in one instance a group of cateran from the Munro clan fell out with Mackintoshes in Strathardle when they offered what was deemed an insulting number of cattle; this in turn led to an open battle at Clachnaharry. In this instance the Munros escaped with most of their cattle but this illustrates how easy it could be for permanently armed men to turn to battle, on what we would nowadays consider a flimsy pretext.

Because of the nature of the Civil Wars of the 18th century we have strangely few eye-witness accounts of cateran raids other than through the traditional tales. The early histories of the Highlands all emphasise the bloodiness and savagery of clan life and appear to have been driven by ideas developed by the British establishment to justify their actions against the clans. This is particularly true as regards the Highland warrior’s sense of honour, about which most of our knowledge is decidedly second-hand. No contemporary historian ever seems to have addressed this directly.

Given the well-documented brutality in the period immediately after Culloden, which clearly represents how the ‘modern’ British establishment wished to deal with the Highland problem, this is perhaps unsurprising. However, there are recurring examples in stores of cattle-raiding where pursuing clansmen caught up with the cateran, the next event being a one-to-one sword fight to decide who shiuld have the cattle. This illustrates that the cothrom na Feinne, the fair play of the Fianna, was an inherent part of the Highland warrior tradition. This was an idea rooted in the ancient heroic tales of Finn MacCoul and the warriors of the Fianna, common to the Gaelic traditions of Scotland and Ireland. A comparison might be the well-attested behaviour amongst the Plains tribes of North America and their practice of counting coup. Here an experienced warrior would go into battle on horseback, with his lance or spear tied back in the shape of a shepherd’s crook, without its spearhead, and then he would go into the fighting, strike his chosen opponent and ride away without receiving any injury. This showed both bravery and skill and was intended to enhance a warrior’s status by demeaning his opponent or opponents. Although the Highland warriors, like the Plains tribes, fought in groups, they were warriors rather than soldiers.

In many raids, horses and sheep would often be taken along with the cattle, and particularly in later years, as Highland society began to disintegrate, there are instances of plain robbery, where money, arms and household goods were lifted. Such behaviour was not unknown in earlier times but may have been more closely associated with feuds between clans. There were also those who were simply criminal. The famous James MacPherson, the subject of the traditional song ‘MacPherson’s Rant’, was accused of a whole range of criminal activities at his trial, and there were witnesses to all of them.

The black cattle of the Highlands were a hardy breed and in later centuries the great cattle droves followed many of the same paths through the same glens and over the same mountains as had earlier been taken by caterans driving their booty. The creachs provided a splendid opportunity for the warriors to prove themselves: they could keep up their skill at arms and they had a chance to increase the wealth of the clan. Long after the money economy was a fact of life for many Highlanders, the cattle-raids continued and, as we shall see, the last flowering of Highland warrior traditions showed in the cattle-raiding of the remnants of the Jacobite Army who ‘stayed out’ after Culloden. Faced with death or transportation at best, these Highland warriors fought in a last vain battle to preserve a way of life that had lasted for many centuries in the Highlands of Scotland.

In his Northern Rural Life (1887) William Alexander has this to say of the practice of cattle ‘lifting’, p. 65:

The practice of cattle lifting came to be a well systematised business and the freebooting highlanders had their own code of honour in conducting it. When cattle were stolen, one means of recovery used was to send an emissary into the region where the thief was supposed to be, and offer a reward for his discovery. This reward was looked on with great abhorrence. With the high-minded Highlander, who scrupled not to rob his Lowland neighbours’ byres and girnals, tascal money as it was called was the ‘unclean thing’ and he and his fellows would solemnly swear over their drawn dirks that they would never defile their consciences by taking any such reward . . .

Oral transmission

Much of the education and entertainment of the clansfolk came through the tradition of the great epic poems concerning Finn MacCoul and other heroes who had lived long, long ago, but whose lives were echoed in many ways by the lives of the Highlanders. Finn MacCoul’s legendary warriors the Fianna, or Fenians, were very like the cateran bands who went raiding for cattle and, like the illustrious warriors of ancient times, the Highland warriors were fond of the hunt and ever ready for battle. Much of the material in this book arises from that same oral tradition, the handing down of traditional tales by word of mouth. Many commentators on the ancient story traditions of the Celtic-speaking peoples of Britain have considered that the material, believed to have come from the eighth century CE and before, in some way represented only a faded reflection of a way of life that had long died out. What we know of Highland society suggests that such ancient warrior society adapted and lived on. Just because the written word, originally the Bible, arrived, did not mean that the oral tradition had died out. Even today in Scotland, we cannot boast 100 per cent literacy. With us, the storytelling tradition itself has never disappeared, and is in fact currently undergoing a revival.

This storytelling tradition covers a long period. In Australian Dreaming, 40,000 years of Aboriginal History, Jennifer Isaacs has shown that oral tradition can carry stories that contain ascertainable facts over tens of thousands of years.

The historian’s general disdain for oral tradition serves us ill. It was through following up traditional stories from various parts of Scotland that I was able to discover just how extensive the military occupation of Scotland was in the period following Culloden and that what was going on in the guise of a ‘police action’, was actually the suppression of a guerrilla war. Many of the stories here have come originally from the oral tradition and have little or no precise historical worth, in that they do not concern identifiable individuals and actions. This does not diminish their value.

Collectors of folk tales since the 19th century have often commented upon the prodigious memories of tradition-bearers, many of them carrying remarkable amounts of remembered material. As an illustration of the tenacity of the oral tradition I can think of no better instance than the tale of ‘Jack and the Seven Magic Islands’ in Dr Sheila Douglas’s book The King of the Black Art and other Tales. This story, which Dr Douglas got from the traveller, James Stewart in the 1980s is a previously uncollected variant of the ‘Voyage of Brendan’, a tale which originated no later than the 8th century.

Battle, not War

Though their distant Caledonian ancestors had united against the invading Romans in the first century, the normal life of the clans, although involving regular creachs and resulting battles, seems rarely to have been interrupted by war. Their battles, if not exactly ritualistic, were fought along clearly organised lines and often involved equal numbers of men chosen from both sides in a battle with the overall victory, and any spoils thereof, going to the winning side. Probably the most famous instance of this type of structured battle was the Battle of the Inch at Perth in 1396 where thirty men from two clans, who appear to have been the MacPhersons and the Davidsons, fought before king Robert III, the MacPhersons taking the day. Cattle-raiding was endemic amongst the Highland tribes: it was how the warriors fulfilled their role in society, but as the ancient tribal way of Highland life began to break down the cateran increasingly raided the Lowlands. Effectively two different societies, the Gaelic-speaking warrior pastoralists and the Scots-speaking modern agriculturalists increasingly came into conflict. The Lowland saying, ‘Show me a Highlander, and I will show you a thief’, was matched by the Highlander’s, ‘show me a Southron and I will show you a glutton’.

Although the demarcation between the two societies along the Highland Line of Scotland was never like a modern border – there was interaction between the two language groups and Highland and Lowland families regularly inter-married – there is no doubt that we have here two societies whose beliefs and mores were so different that in many instances they were incapable of understanding each other.

Another Lowland saying describes the ‘lifting’ of the Lowlanders’ cattle in interesting domestic terms: ‘Highland lairds tell out their daughters’ tochers [dowries] by the light of the Michaelmas Moon’. A tocher is a dowry, and as the Highlanders counted their wealth in cattle, the raiding made sound business sense. It was under the light of the autumn moon, after the harvest was in, that the cateran went on their raids. This is from Carlo Ginsburg’s Ecstasies (1992) and gives a recognisable context for the beliefs and practices surrounding the ‘School of the Moon’ (p. 236):

In the legendary biography of the young hero, the theft of livestock carried out in league with their contemporaries was an obligatory stage, virtually an initiation ritual. It respected a very ancient mythical model, amply documented in the Indo-European cultural milieu: the journey to the beyond to steal the livestock of monstrous being.

Such mythical journeys obviously arose out of very ancient practice indeed, and in Scotland this ancient practice was still being followed in the 18th century. Probably the most remarkable story about the cateran originates from that period. Initially, in following the stories of the cattle-raiders, I came across reference to one Serjeant Mor, a cateran who was not captured, and hung, till 1753. According to folk tradition he had ‘stayed out’ after the defeat of the Jacobites at Culloden in 1746, leading a group of cateran, and in effect carrying on a kind of guerrilla campaign.

It was subsequently gratifying to find the details of the British Army occupation of the Highlands through the late 1740s and into the 1750s. Ostensibly the garrisons in every glen were there to stop cattle-thieving. And indeed this was how Serjeant Mor and his companions lived, by lifting cattle. But they were a group of Jacobite rebels who never surrendered, and fortunately, though there are no separate British Army casualty figures for Scotland in this period, we do have some of the situation reports sent in by junior officers on the ground. Among these young officers was one who would rise to fame as General Wolfe, and another – the man who finally captured Serjeant Mor – became a great hero of the Indian campaigns of the 18th century, General Sir Hector Munro. Serjeant Mor and perhaps as many as 400 others ‘stayed out’, and in order to survive in an occupied country they turned to their traditional practice of cattle-raiding, and for the last time utilised the skills that were learnt in the School of the Moon.

The Background – Tribal Scotland

The first written records concerning Scotland come from the Romans. Ptolemy’s 2nd-century map shows Scotland being occupied by a series of tribes. In the north he tells us there were the Caerini, Carnonacae, Cornavii, Decantae and Lugi; further south the Creones and Caledones; to the east the Taexali and Venicones; with the Epidii in Kintyre, the Damnonae in Strathclyde, the Novantae in Galloway, the Selgovae in the central borders and the Votadini on the east from the Forth south. Only a few of these names survived in later Roman texts, particularly the Caledonians and the Votadini, in whom we see the people later known as the Gododdin. In a poem entitled ‘The Gododdin’, written in an early form of Welsh from the early 7th century, we can make out something of how early tribal warrior society functioned. Welsh, like the Gaelic of the Highlanders, is a Celtic language and is referred to as P-Celtic while Gaelic is Q-Celtic. The ‘p’ sound replaced the ‘c’ sound at some time in the far distant past, e.g., the Gaelic Mac [son of] is Map in Welsh, while ceann [head] is peann. An easy way to understand the difference is to think of a Scot, ‘Ewan MacEwan’ and his Welsh cousin ‘Owen Map Owen’. The ‘p’ sound has replaced the ‘c’ sound and there are vowel changes, but the underlying similarity of the names is still obvious.

It is generally accepted that the tribes of what we now think of as Southern Scotland were predominantly P-Celtic speakers and that the Picts had a similar language. At the time the Romans arrived it is more than likely that there were Gaelic-speaking Scots living in Argyll, and on the east coast, through contact with continental Europe across the North Sea, the sound of Germanic languages would not be unknown. As far back as Megalithic times, when the great monuments of Maes Howe on Orkney, Calanais on Lewis, New Grange in Ireland and Stonehenge in England were erected, Scotland was part of an extensive cultural world. It is the descendants of the megalith builders who were the ancestors of the Highlanders, and of us modern Scots. The isolation of the Highland clans over much of Scottish history perhaps owed as much to their retaining the ancient tribal way of life as to geography, though until the building of General Wade’s roads in the 1730s travel in the Highlands was difficult and slow.

Later Roman sources refer to tribes like the Caledones, the Dicalydones, the Maetae and the Verturiones. While many scholars have attempted to define the precise areas that were inhabited by these people it is clear that we are dealing with essentially tribal societies. There were no great cities, though there were substantial areas of building on many hill-tops. These have always been interpreted as defensive military structures, but many of the hill-top sites featured prominently in communal rituals on the great feast days of Beltane (1 May) and Samhain (1 November) – the modern Hallowe’en. This suggests that while there may indeed have been some military aspect to many of these locations, they also had a social, or perhaps a religious function. In fact such imposing sites would provide a very handy central focus for social activities among the small scattered family groups within their immediate locality.

The ongoing resistance of the Highland clans to centralised control was rooted deep in their history. Within the clan system, loyalty to one’s kin was absolute, and particularly to the chief as the social, political, and originally perhaps, sacred focus of the entire tribe. The Highlanders saw themselves as answerable to no one but themselves, though in times of particular trouble they could ally themselves not only with their neighbours, but with other clans with whom they were often at odds. As early as the Battle of Mons Graupius, circa AD 80 we have Tacitus putting these words into the mouth of Calgacus, the Leader (not the King) of the Caledonians. It is in Tacitus’s Agricola (1948 edn,) p. 31:

Whenever I consider why we are fighting and how we have reached this crisis, I have a strong sense that this day of your splendid rally may mean the dawn of liberty for the whole of Britain. You have mustered to a man and to a man you are free . . .We, the last men on earth, the last of the free, have been shielded till today by the very remoteness and seclusion for which we are famed . . . Brigands of the world they have exhausted the land by their indiscriminate plunder, and now they ransack the sea . . . Robbery, butchery, rapine, the liars call Empire; they create a desolation and call it peace.

This passage is perhaps nothing more than Tacitus (enhancing the reputation of Agricola, his father-in-law), presenting Calgacus as an honourable and worthy opponent, but it does strike a chord that echoes down the centuries. The name Calgacus, thought to mean ‘The Swordsman’, is fitting for someone whose function was to lead the allied tribes against the invaders. It might be that this is echoed in later clan practice when the chief was known simply as ‘The MacPherson’ or ‘The Macdonald’.

The Roman writer Xiphilinus told of the Severan campaign of 208 CE, as given in Watson’s Celtic Place Names of Scotland, pp. 56–7:

. . . the two most important tribes of the Britons (in the North) are the Caledonians and the Maetae; the names of all the tribes have been practically absorbed in these. The Maetae dwell close to the wall which divides the island into two parts and the Caledonians next to them. Each of the two inhabit rugged hills with swamps between possessing neither walled towns nor cultivated lands, but living by pastoral pursuits and by hunting and on certain kinds of hard-shelled fruits. They eat no fish, though their waters teem with all kinds of them. They live in tents, naked and shoeless: they have their women in common, and rear all their offspring. Their government is democratic, and they take the utmost delight in forays for plunder. They fight from chariots, and have small swift horses. Their infantry are extremely swift of foot and enduring. Their weapons are a shield and short spear with a knob of brass on the end of the butt . . . they have also daggers. They can endure hunger and thirst and every kind of hardship. They plunge into marshes, and last out many days with only their heads above water, and in the woods they live on bark and roots, and above all they prepare a certain food such that, if they eat only the bulk of a bean of it, they suffer neither hunger nor thirst.

This remarkable passage raises several interesting points. His comment that all the names of all the tribes have been absorbed into just two is a little strange. Given that we know the people were living in small kin-groups, with no walled towns, it seems unlikely that the earlier tribes had merged into much bigger polities. Perhaps he is referring to a practice akin to later clan times when different clans shared allegiance within larger federations such as Clan Chattan and Siol Alpin. The reference to the hardiness of the natives is something that is echoed by many later commentators in describing Highland troops who seem to have retained their ancestor’s physical durability.

The reference to having their women in common has been seen by more than a few commentators as an outsider’s view of a society in which women actually had considerable status. One suggestion is that it was women who were free to pick any man they chose and that the children of different fathers were brought up together. Looking at this from the viewpoint of a patriarchal society, such as the Roman, it would be easy to misinterpret what was being seen. Xiphilinus, who was abridging an earlier writer, Dio Cassius, had no first-hand knowledge of Scotland and could hardly have been expected to understand modern ideas of tribal anthropology. The reference to weaponry mentions daggers and it is a notable fact that most complaints about the Disarming Act of 1746 were about the banning of the dirk – a very handy tool as well as a murderous weapon. The miraculous food he refers to, I am assured by Dr Brian Moffat of Edinburgh University, is a tiny tuber that grows on the roots of the Bitter Vetch and which contains an amazing array of concentrated sugars – enough in fact to do just what Xiphilinus tells us. The reference to democratic government can be understood as meaning the regular discussions that take place within all types of tribal society regarding practical, political and military matters. Tribes are social organisations that develop from familial relationships within given territories, and are never the result of the despotic endeavours of any individual.

Nearly thirteen hundred years later than Mons Graupius we have the remarkable Declaration of Arbroath in which the Scottish people gave voice (this is the translation from Professor Ted Cowan’s For Freedom Alone (2003, pp. 145–46)):

But from these countless evils we have been set free, by the help of Him, who though He afflicts yet heals and restores, by our most valiant prince, king and lord, the lord Robert, who, that his people and heritage might be delivered out of the hands of enemies, bore cheerfully toil and fatigue, hunger and danger, like another Maccabeus or Joshua. Divine providence, the succession to his right according to our laws and customs which we shall maintain to the death, and the due consent and assent of all of us, have made him our prince and king. We are bound to him for the maintaining of our freedom both by his rights and merits, as to him by whom salvation has been wrought unto our people, and by him, come what may, we mean to stand. Yet if he should give up what he has begun, seeking to make us or our kingdom subject to the king of England or to the English, we would strive at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own right an ours, and we would make some other man who was able to defend us our king. For as long as a hundred of us remain alive, we will never on any conditions be subjected to the lordship of the English. For we fight nor for glory nor riches nor honours, but for freedom alone, which no good man gives up except with is life.

Each of these statements speaks of a form of governance which is anything but the despotic rule of a single individual. In the first instance we are told that Calgacus is the leader of the massed tribes, not their king or supreme chief; the Roman Xiphilinus calls them democratic; and over a thousand years later, in Christian Scotland, it is clear that even the king is answerable to the people. He is the King of the Scots, not King of Scotland, a distinction of great importance because it underlines that without the consent of the ruled there is no ruler. And if the ruled are unsatisfied with their ruler, they will find themselves a new one. This is clearly not feudal.

We cannot be sure that Tacitus was doing anything other than presenting an idealised form of a suitable opponent in the panegyric to his father-in-law but it is remarkable that we have statements over such a period that have the same sense of egalitarianism. It is also worth noting that in the modern world such a fundamentally important document as the American Declaration of Independence was modelled to some extent on the 1320 Declaration.

Even in the latter, declining years of Highland Gaelic society, when most chiefs had accepted paper deeds for lands that they and theirs had held for centuries, and were on the way to becoming Lairds, sole owners of what had been the much loved lands of entire societies, society in all of Scotland was never as feudal or class-ridden as it was south of the border. An instance of this occurred when a chief, educated and living away from the clan, offended the clan members on his return to take his place as their head. The situation was thus described by Logan in The Scottish Gael (1876), p. 195:

The anecdote of the young chief of Clanranald is well known. On his return to take possession of his estate, observing the profuse quantity of cattle that had been slaughtered to celebrate his arrival, he very unfortunately remarked that a few hens might have answered the purpose. This exposure of a narrow mind, and inconsiderate display of indifference to the feeling of his people, were fatal.’ We will have nothing to do with a hen chief,’ said the indignant clansmen, and immediately raised one of his brothers to the dignity.

We can be pretty sure that part of the reaction to the ‘Hen Chief’s’ ignorance and disdain of his own clan’s traditions resulted from the fact that a feast greeting a new chief would have been considered a momentous occasion in clan life, and the excuse for a good party for the entire clan. The handing of power to his brother echoes ancient practice in Scotland where a brother was considered to be closer to the original founder of the clan than the chief’s son, who was a further generation removed. This was perhaps the reason why Malcolm Canmore’s sons succeeded each other to the throne in the eleventh century. The chief’s role however was absolutely central to the functioning of the tribe. This is from Skene’s The Highlanders of Scotland (1902), p. 102:

The chief exercises an arbitrary authority over his vassals, determines all differences and disputes that happen among them and levies taxes upon extraordinary occasions, such as the marriage of a daughter, building a house, or some pretence for his support or the honour of the name, and if anyone should refuse to contribute to the best of his ability, he is sure of severe treatment, and if he persists in his obstinacy, he would be cast out of his tribe by general consent. This power of the chief is not supported by interest as they are landlords but as lineally descended from the old patriarchs or fathers of the families, for they hold the same authority when they have lost their estates. On the other hand, the chief, even against the laws, is to protect his followers, as they are sometimes called, be they never so criminal. He is their leader in clan quarrels, must free the necessitous from their arrears of rent, and maintain such who by accidents are fallen to total decay.

Clearly chief and clan were bound together by age-old mutual duties and privileges. The clansfolk of the medieval period and later appear to have lived much like their remote ancestors in the Dark Ages, living in the same glens, practising a form of subsistence agriculture, hunting, fishing and enjoying the occasional raid to lift other clans’ cattle. Certainly by the medieval period they had become Christians and soon had access to more sophisticated weaponry in the form of firearms, but there seems to be much in their way of life that was just the same as in Pictish times. In this regard we should remember that many of the clans claim descent from the Picts. In his book The Scottish People, James Rennie suggested that as much as forty per cent of the clans were Pictish in origin. As late as the 14th century there is a record of Highlanders being referred to as ‘Picts’ or ‘Redshanks’.

We should perhaps think of the tribes of Dark Age Scotland as extended families banding together with neighbours to form tribes within defined territories when necessary, but spending much of their lives living in small, scattered kin-groups.

When the Romans first arrived in Britain it seems clear that the population was essentially tribal. The people were living in close-linked kin-groups, in what was essentially a subsistence economy. This does not mean there were no luxuries. It simply means that the people lived in small groups and effectively fended for themselves, without centralised city states and their political appurtenances. They were pastoralists, much of whose energy was focused on the raising of cattle, but hunting and foraging were an everyday part of their lives. Recent archaeological thinking is that the old picture of the past in which such tribal peoples were constantly in fear of invasion and attack and whose lives were nasty, brutish and short contains very little substance. Much of such thinking seems to have arisen from the essentially Victorian idea of progress wherein humanity was presented as growing steadily from a primitive and barbaric state towards ever more technologically advanced civilization. Given today’s problems with the subsequent pollution and climate change, this idea of progress has lost some of its attraction. However the instances of death in childbirth and the incidence of child mortality were much higher than would be acceptable today, and life was in general considerably more dangerous then.

The clan system is itself a development from these earlier tribal times and is differentiated to a great degree by the use of the patronymic – the name of the original father of the clan. Thus the MacLeods are descended from Leod, son of Somerled, Lord of the Isles, just as the MacAlpines claim original descent from Alpin, King of Scots and father of the first king of the Picts and Scots, Kenneth Macalpin. It is worth keeping in mind that Somerled, who had control of the Western Islands and some of the west coast was of mixed descent – Norse and Gaelic.

The attitude of the rest of Britain towards the Highlands in the centuries before Culloden was essentially one of fear. To a great extent it was fear of difference – different language, different social structure and fear of a people who still considered skill at arms the greatest masculine attribute. Such skills always needed to be practised and used. This difference led to the situation where the British government could garrison almost the whole of the Highlands in the period after Culloden under the guise of preventing cattle theft. In the introduction to Burt’s Letters (p. xviii), the editor, Jamieson, tells of the Lowland attitude towards the Highland warriors:

Of all their virtues, courage was the only respectable quality conceded to them, and this out of compliment to the best disciplined troops of the day, whom, with less than equal numbers, they had so often routed; but even their courage was disparaged, being represented as mere ferocity, arising from ignorance, and a blind and slavish submission to their chiefs.

It is understandable that many writers have tended to concentrate on the military skills of the Highland warriors and these skills were fundamental to the practice of cattle-raiding. Battle was central to their existence but it had to be fought according to the rules. Later we will look at remarkable instances of this sense of honour – the sense of honour, based on traditional practice, that led the Highlander mentioned above to react with such fury to being called a thief. By Lowland lights he was a thief, by his own, an honourable warrior pursing the way of life of his ancestors. Given the pride that was also a hallmark of the Highland warrior it is little wonder that they frightened many of their Lowland neighbours. In this context it is interesting to note that the arrangements between Lowland farmers and Highlanders, to protect their cattle from other Highlanders, and known as ‘Blackmail’, were not only regularised, but were put down in the form of contracts. Was Blackmail originally a form of insurance? It would certainly appear to be one way of reading the evidence (See Appendix).

However, we should resist seeing the Highlanders as essentially some kind of noble savages. Certainly they held on to an ancient way of life into modern times, but they were not living in a vacuum and there were advantages to the clan, or tribal system, for many of its members apart from the guaranteed support and care that arose from being a member of the clan. Jamieson notes the following, again in the Introduction to Burt’s Letters, p. xxiv:

This advantage of conversing freely with their superiors, the peasantry of no other country in Europe enjoyed, and the consequence was, that in 1745 the Scottish Highlanders, of all descriptions, had more of that polish of mind and sentiment which constitutes real civilization than in general inhabited any other country we know of, not even excepting Ireland . . . most of the gentlemen spoke Gaelic, English, Latin and French and many of them Spanish, having access to all the information of which these languages were the vehicles.

He has left out the fact that so many of them would have also spoken Scots, the language of the Lowlands. Jamieson here is interpreting clan society by a model that is fundamentally flawed. Although there were undoubted gradations of wealth and status within the clan system they were never as rigid as the class distinctions of English (and British) society that had arisen out of feudalism. Referring to someone who would happily stand shoulder to shoulder with his chief in battle against any odds, and willingly lay down his life in doing so, as a peasant, is simply wrong. Also many chiefs from the Middle Ages onwards sent their sons to be educated at Continental universities and they were usually accompanied by other young men of the clan, sometimes their foster brothers – in whose family they had been brought up. These were not primitive people in any sense and though their way of life may have seemed harsh to outsiders, it was the only way of life they knew.

Even with the growth of the money economy people in the Highlands continued to live in a basically subsistence economy into the 18th century. Great changes came about as a result of the Government’s road-building programme in the Highlands from the 1730s, but before that many areas had maintained the traditional way of life. We should remember that the Scottish governments had problems controlling the areas of Galloway and the Borders till at least the 16th century. Probably because the kin-groups here spoke Scots, a Germanic relation of English, they have been seen as totally different from the Highland clans. In fact in their lifestyles, kin-group arrangements and commitment to raiding, they were very similar, and it is possible they were also the direct descendants of earlier tribal systems. They too had long resisted any authority other than that of their own families, and the subjugation of these areas was at times as bloody as anything that went on in the Highlands, until Culloden, at least.

All of these groups were fiercely independent and generally opposed to any kind of central control, but they could be incredibly loyal to any cause they espoused. It is difficult to know at this distance in time what exactly the reasons were for so many of the clans to come out in favour of Prince Charles Edward Stewart in 1745. For centuries their ancestors had been resisting the centralising tendencies of the Stewart dynasty. Religion clearly played a part: the Highlands were mainly Catholic and Episcopalian and the British establishment was decidedly Protestant, and in Scotland, Presbyterian. There can be little doubt that many of the Highlanders realised their ancient way of life was under threat in the fast-changing 18th century – they only had to see the Wade roads to know that. In a victory for Prince Charlie they perhaps saw some hope of their being able to continue to live as their ancestors had done. Many would follow because their chiefs, in consultation with clan councils, had decided to support the Pretender. But many must have seen it as an opportunity to go on a gigantic raid, attacking their traditional enemies and lifting spoil on the way. There has been a persistent rumour that the Jacobite army turned back north at Derby in December 1745 because the Highlanders wanted to get back home. Whether this is true or not it does illustrate that the Highland warriors were fundamentally attached to their own way of life and possibly thought that their involvement in a dynastic struggle was unlikely to affect them much. If so, they were wrong. Their basic commitment was to family and land and their warrior’s code of honour. Tellingly, they were warriors, not soldiers – warriors tied to an understanding of the world that was about to be shattered for ever on the bloody field of Drumossie Moor. No matter how brutal and sadistic Cumberland and his troops were after Culloden, they were effectively carrying out what had been the policy of Scottish governments for centuries. At last the power of the clans, the ancient warrior tribes of the Highlands, was broken for good.

It was after this catastrophic defeat and the quasi-genocidal behaviour of the Redcoat army, with Lowland and loyal government Scots well to the fore, that some of these warriors, faced with certain death if captured, continued a last vain struggle against overwhelming odds by utilising the skills and techniques they had all learned at the School of the Moon.

He has felt from his early youth all the privations to which he can be exposed on almost any circumstances of war. He has been accustomed to scanty fare, to rude and often wet clothing, to cold and damp houses, to sleep often in the open air or in the most uncomfortable beds, to cross dangerous rivers, to march a number of miles without stopping and with but little nourishment, and to be perpetually exposed to the attacks of a stormy atmosphere. A warrior, thus trained, suffers no inconvenience from what others would consider to be the greatest possible hardships, and has an evident superiority over the native of a delicious climate, bred to every indulgence of food, dress and habitation and who is accustomed to marching and fatigue.

This is the description of the Highland warrior from The Analysis of the Statistical Account, p. 106, Sir John Sinclair’s commentary on his great project of the 1790s, The Statistical Account of Scotland