Scotland's Future History E-Book

Stuart McHardy

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 203

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

McHardy presents a new approach to history, changing our mindset to look at Scotland as the centre of our story. Rather than starting from the Mediterranean, from the classical/Christian bias we have been taught for centuries. Rather than being a remote dark land populated by barbaric tribes. Perhaps we were the centre of a well-organised civilisation around the Orkneys and islands and coasts and rivers, with our own priorities, community-centred, locally self-sufficient, well-versed in lore of all kinds. Who were/are we? The great centres of ritual in Orkney, Lewis and Kilmartin suggest an indigenous population much more sophisticated in terms of social ritual and communal rule than we have been led to believe. In whose interest is it that we accept the classical/Christian version of history relayed to us by monks? These are some of the questions McHardy addresses in a passionate and accessible style. Read and become more Alba-centric in terms of what we see as important to research, study and understand.

Leseprobe

STUART McHARDY is a writer, occasional broadcaster, and storyteller. Having been actively involved in many aspects of Scottish culture throughout his adult life – music, poetry, language, history, folklore – he has been resident in Edinburgh for over a quarter of a century. Although he has held some illustrious positions including Director of the Scots Language Resource Centre in Perth and President of the Pictish Arts Society, McHardy is probably proudest of having been a member of the Vigil for a Scottish Parliament. Often to be found in the bookshops, libraries and tea-rooms of Edinburgh, he lives near the city centre with the lovely (and ever-tolerant) Sandra and they have one son, Roderick.

Scotland’sFuture History

STUART McHARDY

Luath Press Limited

First published 2015

Reprinted 2015

ISBN: 978-1-910021-41-5

ISBN (EBK): 978-1-910324-30-1

The author’s right to be identified as author of this work under the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

© Stuart McHardy 2015

Contents

Foreword by Ian McHardy

Preface

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE:First Steps

CHAPTER TWO:The Far Past

CHAPTER THREE:An Indigenous Mythology?

CHAPTER FOUR:Between the Walls

CHAPTER FIVE:Spinning the Scots

CHAPTER SIX: What War of Independence?

CHAPTER SEVEN:What’s in a Name?

CHAPTER EIGHT:After Charlie Left

CHAPTER NINE:Thomas Muir, the Radical

Epilogue

A Wish List

Appendix: How the Future can Change History – Some Examples

Further Reading

Photo Credits

Foreword by Ian McHardy

LET US BE CLEAR: the past does not dictate the future, or even the present. Let us not wallow in the past, using it to excuse our present day shortcomings, to blame others for those shortcomings, or to justify anti-English prejudice.

Let us not claim that the sun shines out of our own backsides, that we have clean karma sheets, or that Scotland’s history is simply one of being unfairly beaten by our evil twisted neighbours.

Let us not claim the suffering of the common people in the Highland Clearances was any worse than that of most other native peoples throughout the world at the hands of similar foes.

Let us not claim that we were blameless in the genocidal colonialism which swept the world after those Clearances. Becoming the foe to so many other native peoples, after having been subject to such treatment in the first place, is possibly even more morally repugnant – we should have known better.

But above all, let us not feel sorry for ourselves with history. Doing so negates the potential of who we are and who we could be. I’m sure ‘nature’ hates a whinger as much as she loves a trier.

However, these ‘whinges’ are just some of the ways in which the past can, if not dictate, certainly help to shape identity in the present moment and actions in the future. This is as true in a personal sense as it is in the cultural or national: many talented individuals have been hamstrung by a lack of confidence, rooted in some painful childhood experience. Deep down they know they can do better, but success is just not happening. This could leave them with what can be called a ‘Chip on the Shoulder’.

Scotland has often been seen as an appendage attached to the main body of activity down south (i.e. England). In terms of factors like political influence, people per square mile and global finance, this is perhaps an accurate depiction of Scotland today. However that backwater situation is not the way things always were, nor indeed the way things always need to be. So-called ‘diffusionist’ archaeologists of early 20th-century Britain such as V. Gordon Childe interpreted all the evidence in terms of waves of people or ideas coming from the south. This school of thought has been significantly challenged by archaeological discoveries indicating that, for example, the highly sophisticated Iron Age (c. 700BC – 700AD) Brochs (or Atlantic Round Towers, to give them their technical name) of northern Britain were actually invented in northern Britain and not copied from the south of England. A similar argument can be made today regarding Neolithic (4000BC – 2000BC) monuments – it seems the date, scale and sophistication of the monument at Ness of Brodgar in Orkney is such that the assumption of southern superiority or primacy must be questioned – especially if we look in terms of the whole of western Europe. The extreme west and north of the Atlantic coast seems to be where all the action was back then. Central Europe, Brussels for example, lacked any massive communal stone monuments at the time. As did London.

Thus History – and Archaeology – can create ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’. Much worse than that, there is no doubt that both have been used by Totalitarian and Colonial powers to legitimise their subjugation of people and even justify horrific ends. In North America, it was ‘Manifest Destiny’ that the Native people were killed and driven out of their land. In the 20thcentury, Adolf Hitler created the idea of a ‘perfect’ past of only Aryan people in order to justify forcibly creating that idea in the present. To offer a Scottish example particularly relevant to this book, James I of Scotland forcefully banned Gaelic from all Schools and Bibles and he sent the children of Chiefs and Lairds to be educated in the far south, force-feeding them a different view of life and the past, and pretty much starting the clearance of the common people.

As Jared Diamond argues in his bookGuns, Germs and Steel(1997), there are reasons why some cultures overrun others, mostly to do with guns, germs and steel. However this was clearly not the case between Scotland and England as we both had all of the above. The reasons why should probably never be discussed under influence of alcohol, but suffice to say that in the end, most of today’s government went to Eton.

InScotland’s Future History, Stuart McHardy describes some less dramatic, more insidious mechanisms which he argues have distorted our views of history without us barely noticing. One of the first things I agreed with Stuart about was that deep down in the unconscious of the south-centric perspective is the idea that the Romans were great – the best thing since sliced bread. Generations of scholars, historians, antiquarians, and let’s face it, mostly toffs, have fawned and gushed over how bloody great the Romans were and what a shame it was they left. I find this bizarre. If the Romans were around today we would be calling them Nazis and spending every last drop of effort in fighting them to the death. We had our own indigenous culture and ways of life, admittedly not as advanced in terms of technology and organisation but arguably far superior in terms of ethics. Who knows what sort of society may have developed if these indigenous ways of life had been left to flourish. Our sycophantic worship of Romans may have, in turn, subconsciously justified our own subsequent British Empire and the atrocities carried out under its name, such as the genocide of Native Americans, Slavery of African people, and subjugation of countless others.

It is not a competition in sophistication which matters to me. That kind of competition has been constantly written about elsewhere. I care more that many peoples and ways of life have been lost, all over the world, crushed under the rumbling leviathan of War and Empire.

However, it may be argued that much has also resulted from this, not least from the mixtures of different peoples thrown together in adverse situations and becoming friends. There’s the rub: mixing isn’t negotiable, it’s essential. Even if you live on St Kilda. It all depends upon how it is done and it should be damned good fun! An equal footing for each person or culture would seem like the obvious place to start.

This is what Stuart is trying to achieve with this book – to redress the balance. If you accept the argument that history has been written by the winners, our history will contain many distortions. By going back and questioning some commonly, or nationally, held histories, we can have a profound effect upon important relationships today.

The Establishment may put this book down, criticise it for a supposed lack of sufficient scholarship, shakily supported conclusions or language unfit for a scholarly journal. This is because Stuart is not Establishment – he is a storyteller, a folklorist as well as a historian. By definition, he has grown from the grass roots.

Ian McHardy, Hebridean Archaeologist

Preface

There is a subject called British history, but so far as I can discover it consists of English history, with an occasional side-glance at Scotland at times when Scotland crossed England’s path.

This is a society devoted to the study and furtherance of Scottish history, and it seems a little odd to me that this educational policy should still prevail. It is well calculated to condition the Scottish mind into turning instinctively towards London with the submission of the Moslem turning towards Mecca.

LORD COOPER, Lord President of the Court of Session,to the Scottish History Society 1948

IN THE PAST HALF CENTURY, Scotland has undergone a cultural resurgence. This, in turn, has helped develop current political trends where the possibility of the break-up of the United Kingdom is being treated as a distinct, possibly even likely, outcome. In this cultural resurgence, the indigenous languages of Gaelic and Scots, deliberately removed from the education system in the 1870s, have begun to re-assert themselves as the first languages of a substantial part of the Scottish population. There has also been a growing interest in Scotland’s past as the Highland Clearances became studied and other periods like the 1st millennium and the 18th century have been given much more attention than formerly. Recently the stunning archaeological discoveries at Ness of Brodgar in Orkney have led to a fundamental questioning of what has traditionally been understood as Scotland’s past. The investigation which started in 2002 has to date uncovered a wide range of artefacts and a series of structures, the most stunning of which is the Neolithic ‘temple’ known as Structure Ten. Dating from before 3000BCE with its five-metre thick walls, this is the largest Neolithic non-funerary stone structure ever found in Britain, long predating Stonehenge and the building of the pyramids in Egypt. The site was in use for over a thousand years and evidence suggests Structure Ten was replaced by eight smaller, similar but non uniform stone buildings. This may indicate a ritual site where separate groups, or tribes had their own sacred space. The investigation is ongoing and it is clear that there is more, and earlier material to be uncovered concerning what has been referred to as ‘a Stone Age Cathedral’.This book argues that, in these and other areas, the actualities of Scotland’s history have been neglected due to a perceived need within the political and educational establishments to present a version of our past that conforms wherever possible to the idea of Britishness that has been developed since the Union of 1707.

With the institution of the Scottish Parliament and the subsequent election to power of a party whose focus has been on Scotland – rather than the at-best nebulous notion of a Great Britain, which has lost ‘the Great’ – one very important result has been the official introduction of Scottish history into Scottish schools. It is an ongoing shame on the heads of succeeding generations of politicians and educators that this has had to be done – no other nation in Europe would countenance the possibility of not teaching their children about their own history and culture, yet we have had generations of such scandalous and servile behaviour. With the introduction of Scottish history into the official curriculum, however, we have to ask, what history? What should Scotland’s Future History be? I suggest that it should be a history that is based on sound scholarship, but a scholarship that is rooted in a critical and even sceptical approach to interpreting the past. It is no coincidence that regime change throughout the world over millennia has often been accompanied by deliberate attempts to efface the story of the past and create a new one, in keeping with the beliefs of those coming into power. While we have never seen anything here quite as soul-numbing as the wanton destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban in 2001, Scottish history has been constantly and insidiously arranged to fit what can be interpreted as an essentially colonialist mentality. It is this issue that requires a sceptic’s eye to ensure that we truly seek to have the best possible understanding of Scotland’s history to pass on to succeeding generations. Anyone who writes history is working to an agenda, explicit or implicit, and to deny this is to fly in the face of common sense. To hope for a truly objective history developing in Scotland’s future is perhaps to aim too high but we can hope to instil the idea that history must be subjected to substantial critique as an essential part of the process, not just of writing, but understanding, history. The concept of treating history forensically which is mentioned herein, would subject history to just the kind of examination that courts of law demand.

At the absolute centre of future Scottish history should be one simple idea. That we use what we know of ourselves to find out more. To this end I have already suggested inA New History of the Picts(2010), that we might well develop a better understanding of 1st-millennium Scotland by concentrating on the fact that the people then lived in tribal societies and use what we know of later clan and family histories in the Highlands and the Borders to help us gain a clearer understanding. Essentially Scotland’s history should be what we, the Scots, no matter how recent, tell as our own story based on what we know and can discover about our predecessors here in Scotland itself. For far too long we have used the reality of so much of our early documentation having been destroyed, as an excuse to accept ideas of history that developed elsewhere as the core of our attempts to understand ourselves. The ongoing, and somewhat pathetic, fascination with the Romans in Scotland is a case in point, a fascination emanating from our universities,

funded directly from London, a city which, like the country in which it sits, was under Roman control for four centuries. Rightly the educational institutions of England are deeply interested in the Romans, since they helped to make the English people who they are. Their relevance in Scotland, while important, is not of the same order, but you would hardly know that from our history books.

Similarly we have had a story foisted on us that the last Jacobite rebellion was a Highland adventure by a flawed if Romantic young charmer that ended on Drummossie Moor, on 16 April 1746. This is simply not true and increasingly scholars are taking notice of the undoubted nationalist components of 18th-century Jacobitism in Scotland. We need a truer picture of our past than we have been given until now. In the future, it is absolutely necessary that we deal with the limitations of history as it has been taught thus far and hand on an approach to history that is critical, watchful and ever ready to change when evidence suggests it should. As the Ness of Brodgar dig has shown, new evidence means new thinking. The very idea that around 10,000 people gathered in Orkney 5,000 years ago for a feast, apparently to celebrate the changing use of monumental stone-built buildings long before the Pyramids or Stonehenge were thought of, means we must begin to recalibrate the far past. I hope this selection of essays shows that we must recalibrate much more than that if we are to pass on the best, and most critically created picture of ­Scotland’s past that we can to the coming generations.

Stuart McHardy

Edinburgh, 2015

Introduction

ALL MY LIFE Ihave had people ask me why I am so obsessed with ­Scotland’s past. The word ‘obsessed’ hints that there is something a bit strange in my behaviour. Those asking me rarely thought of themselves as dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries – more often than not they thought of themselves as socialists. Of a sort. If anyone had suggested to them that an Inuit, a Native American, a Zimbabwean, a Høng or a Catalan was strange in trying to understand their own history and culture, my interrogators would have been appalled. Yet the idea that I should be so interested in finding out who I am and where I came from historically, gave them some feeling of unease. On pointing this out, I would be met with blustering generalities about having to stand together with the working class in England. Yet they would not have thought of telling a French or a German person to neglect their own history to concentrate on working with the workers of a neighbouring land. It was as if they could not understand what internationalism actually meant when it came to Scotland, as if we should deny our own cultural and historical identity. Those not of a left-leaning attitude have tended to move towards the argument that we live in the modern world and by caring too much about what was, after all, only one constituent part of a once mighty empire, I was turning my back on that modern world and all the material advances it represented. Move On; Get Over Yourself; History Belongs in The Past, etc.

This type of thinking is, of course, grounded in the delusive notion of perpetual progress, where economic development is seen as a form of Darwinian evolution in which material and technological advancement will endlessly continue ‘to make things better’. Leaving aside the matter of for whom things have been getting better, the mounting evidence of global warming, accelerating depletion of natural resources and its consequent increasing habitat destruction tells us that that the grand idea of perpetual progress is a busted flush. The human race is facing ever harder times (though many of us have never had it easy at all) and the capitalist obsession with short-term return – the religion of Mammon, which most governments worldwide slavishly follow today – can only ensure that the rich scoop up more and more of the planet’s limited resources to try and defend their established positions of privilege. Although I am not religious, I do appreciate the spiritual aspects of existence. Willie Shakespeare got it spot on when he wrote ‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in thy philosophy, Jimmy’. The past is a different country, as the cliché says, but it is a country for which we have no map. Part of the problem of modern Western history, predicated on that spurious notion of eternal progress, is that all too often people of the past have been seen like foreigners denied the ‘benefits’ of European civilisation, as essentially cruder, more stupid and more primitive than we are, and thus essentially unenlightened. Perhaps the apogee of such thinking came from the pen of Lord Macaulay when he wrote, for the British Parliament, inA Minute on Education(1835):

I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.1

Hopefully many of us now know better than to dismiss other cultures, simply because they are different. Not all of us have moved on, however. In a world where recently in America insults have been thrown that people are using ‘fact-based arguments’, we can surely see how dangerous blinkered thinking can be.

The idea that those who do not learn from the mistakes of the past are bound to repeat them is self-evidently true.

After a lifetime of reading, debating, lecturing and writing on my country’s past, I have come to the conclusion that far too much of what is presented as the history of my native land has been distorted, suppressed or ignored. It is not that it does not make sense. It is that it makes a sinister kind of sense. What has become obvious to me, as to many others, is that what is created as history for general consumption under the overall title of ‘British history’ is a deliberate fabrication intended to hide the realities of Scottish history. Why? Because the reality of Scottish history is simply that it is not English history. British history is English history with a few sops to the ‘peripheral nations’ thrown in. Thus we have a situation where the wars fought by Wallace and Bruce are referred to as the Scottish Wars of Independence. It cannot be stated too loudly or too often: Scotland was a nation state before England and was never part of England. It still isn’t. So how in the name o some big hoose could we have ever fought a War of Scottish Independence? The details of that will be discussed later, but suffice to say this is a blatant example of how our history has been traduced. It has been going on for so long that people don’t even notice it. When people believe a lie, the truth is invisible. The role of British history has been to legitimise the relatively recent political Union, which was pushed through against the wishes of the majority of Scots and was foisted upon us through corruption. Burns put it rather succinctly in ‘A Parcel of Rogues in a Nation’ (1791):

What force or guile could not subdue

Though many warlike ages

Is wrought now by a traitor few

For hireling traitors’ wages.

That ‘traitor few’ have been followed by generations of native-born Scots happy to continue taking their pieces of silver and to maintain their own privilege by ensuring that our education system has avoided dealing with the realities of who we are and where we come from; happy to see themselves as part of a bigger gang. With our own parliament in place, it is time that we dealt with the reality that our history has been distorted for political reasons, and to ensure that future generations have a truer idea of their own history, whether or not the Scots decide to go it alone. It is time to move past the propaganda requirements of a British state whose ruling elite cling desperately to any trappings of their Imperial past, an Imperial past in which the Scots’ place was all too often seen in a similar fashion to that of General Wolfe at the Heights of Abraham, when told that the Highland regiments were taking dreadful casualties, said ‘It is no great mischief if they fall’.

This book is a series of essays on different aspects, and periods, of Scotland’s past, that will hopefully open up debate. By exposing the extent of the distortion and suppression of Scottish history, I hope not to make too many value judgements. All history is speculative and no historian writes without a clear idea of what they want the reader to think. Whether this makes all history propaganda is a moot point, but all I can do is present what I think are the realities that need considering and ask you to think about them. It is important to realise that ideas can change – mine certainly have. My ­original impression of Prince Charles Edward Stuart was utterly unfavourable. I still believe him to have been a spoiled, arrogant and foolhardy young man (an occupational hazard of princes, it would seem), but what I have learned from looking closer at contemporary sources is that he was also charismatic, courageous and tough. That he had little or no interest in Scotland other than as a launching pad to fulfil his ambition of regaining the British throne for his father does not change that.

Knowledge also changes. The recent discoveries at Ness of Brodgar in Orkney are having a profound effect on the understanding of prehistoric Britain, and the role of what we think of as Scotland, the ramifications of which it will be interesting to see unfold.2