Scottish History: Strange but True E-Book

John and Noreen Hamilton

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

This book contains hundreds of 'strange but true' stories about Scottish history. Arranged into a miniature history of Scotland, and with bizarre and hilarious true tales for every era, it will delight anyone with an interest in Scotland's past.

Leseprobe

Drawings by Clare Buttrick

Digital images by John Hamilton

Contents

Title

Dedication

Prologue

Who Do We Think We Are?

From Bones to Books

In the Middle of Things

‘It Will Pass With a Lass’

‘A Stony Couch for a Deep Feather Bed’

‘Yer Fauts I Maun Proclaim’

An Age of Change

Freedom!

‘A Dangerous Master’

Recommended Reading

Copyright

Prologue

True. It might seem strange to open this book with not one but two assaults on the book’s title. We have no problem with ‘Strange’, but ‘True’ is a difficult concept. For any event which happens there will be a different version of the event from each different individual who was there, and from every person that hears the story the version will change each time they pass it on. And on and on until someone writes it down and calls it ‘History’.

By the way, what about ‘HERstory?’ How different would our understanding of the past be if it were seen from a woman’s point of view?

There are facts, cold hard things – such and such a battle happened in such and such a place on such and such a date and so and so died, but it is the interpretation that is the problem. The experts are hardly in total accord. Archaeologists like solid things, things they can hold in their hand: bones, bullets, swords and pots, they love pots. Historians like documents; it’s their job to sort out the lies and damned lies from the merely biased and the misinformed. Neither have any claim to ‘Truth’. If a new excavation reveals new clues or if a newly unearthed document casts events in a new light, then the previous conclusions must be changed. All that can be presented is the story of best fit for the information available. If the information changes so must the story. There have been plenty of attempts to change our views, particularly of Scotland’s early times, in recent years. Revisionism is rife.

It all comes down to stories. Winston Churchill, amongst others, said, ‘History is written by the victors’. But then, Scotland is full of the stories of ‘Heroic Failures’ (the Jacobite rebellions of the eighteenth century are prime examples).

The great Ulster hero Cuchullin (educated in Scotland) was told that if he took up arms, ‘Your life will be short, but your stories will be told forever’. Cuchullin was hardly a victor, though he did get to create a fair bit of mayhem, but his stories are going strong. Perhaps to be included in the collective knowledge of the past, which history is, you don’t need a great victory, but you do need a great story.

So that is what we have tried to find – great stories from the area we now call Scotland.

Scotland

The second problem is ‘Scotland’. We wrote this book in 2015. In 2014, over 400 years after the Union of the Crowns, Scotland came close to voting for independence. Nationalists narrowly failed to win a ‘yes’ vote in a referendum. In the 2015 National Election, Scotland voted in fifty-six Scottish Nationalist Party MPs out of fifty-nine seats, leaving the Labour, Liberal and Conservative parties with a single seat each – an overwhelming landslide for the SNP. Seldom has Scotland had such a united pro-independence voice.

For most of history the idea of a single Scottish identity was just that, an idea. An idea born in the medieval power shuffle between Scots, Picts and Britons. Right up to the seventeenth century Highland allegiance was much more to the Lord of the Isles than to some Edinburgh monarch with his airs, graces and trousers. The Borderers offered no allegiance to anyone but to themselves. The Scottish Earls – Hamiltons, Douglases and the like – were merely awaiting their opportunity to step into the king’s shoes.

It is not disputed that there were skirmishes with that busy neighbour to the south, but with Scots fighting Picts, clans fighting clans, earls fighting earls, Lowlanders fighting Highlanders, the state fighting Covenanters and Jacobites fighting Hanoverians, the ‘Scots’ have always been extremely good at killing ‘Scots’. This rings true right up to that most iconic of home derbies, Culloden, where the victorious ‘English’ army included four Lowland Scots battalions and even some prominent Highland clans such as the Campbells.

We have tried to unpick a little of the origins of the modern Scot, but it is a complex story and it is a story which is constantly evolving.

Timeline

You may wonder why Al Capone and a student prank in the 1950s turn up in the medieval period and why Saint Columba turns up in the twenty-first century?

We originally intended the book to be a march along Scotland’s timeline from prehistory to the modern day. We’ve had to concede that the past has proved far too complicated for that, far too sinuous. Stories duck and dive and then resurface and dive again. Take, for example, the story of such a solid icon as the Stone of Scone, do we set that at the moment when Edward took it from Scone to London in 1296, or when it was repatriated in 1950 by Glasgow students, or in 1996 when it was returned to Scotland? Or do we go back to when it was moved to Scone from Argyll, or when it came to Argyll from Ireland around ad 500, or when it arrived in Ireland – possibly from the Middle East, possibly in the Bronze Age?

We didn’t want to go back to the same story in six different sections of the book. So some stories are told in all their multiplicity where they seem to lie best. Others pop up here and there. Certain themes run right through the ages, others have their particular moment. We have also tried to include recent discoveries, comments and revisions of older stories where they crop up.

A couple of issues have proved unavoidable. The first issue is Scots on the world stage. Scots have made an indelible impression across the globe from early travels in Europe and beyond, to the first footsteps in the New World, to the African National Congress.

The second issue has been the link between Scotland and Ireland. Often their histories are entwined. People have been coming and going across the North Channel since the Ice Age.

You may detect a pro-Scottish bias in the text, for which we make no apologies, but this should not be interpreted as anti-English. No reasonable person should be so crass as to fault any person on their place of birth.

However, there is no doubting that through much of Scotland’s history England has been the ‘Auld Enemy’. We have fought and the numbers tell their story. The population of Scotland has always been about 10 per cent of the population of England. The odds were against us 10/1 all the way. Yet we have held our end up. Be it rugby, football or war, we have had our victories and we celebrate them with some vigour. We also celebrate our heroic failures.

This book is designed as an entertainment: a short romp through the characters, places and events of Scotland’s past. We are certainly not academic historians. We have tried to stick, as far as possible, to some version of ‘true’, but will be as guilty as anyone else of going with a version of the story that we find most convincing – or maybe just the most pleasing.

It is our fervent hope that some of you will find the stories interesting enough to investigate further and set off on a journey, as we have, though the complexity of Scotland’s history. Take a look at the past. We can assure you that you will find that it is more complicated, and more fascinating, than you thought.

Who Do We Think We Are?

Drifting continents

The world is said to be 4.5 billion years old. What is now Scotland and what is now England only became attached about 410 million years ago – about a tenth of the age of the Earth. Before that the two lands were on different continents.

Parts of Scotland, Greenland and North America were formed in the southern hemisphere as part of the continent of Laurentia. Laurentia drifted north, crossing the equator before starting to break up. The North Atlantic Ocean began to form, leaving North America and the Scottish fragment on opposite shores. They still continue to move farther apart. Beds of identical rock can be found on both sides of the ocean, confirming the former union.

Scotland crashed into England, forcing the seabed that lay between them upwards. This explains why the Southern Uplands are largely made up of rocks formed on the bottom of the ocean. Scotland and England became welded together.

On its travels from the south to the north, Scotland was exposed to just about any climatic condition imaginable, from polar cold to baking heat. At times only the highest peaks were above the surface, at others volcanoes poured out smoke and lava, but life still managed to take a hold. Really primitive plants and some of the earliest insects have been found in Aberdeenshire. Later, Scotland was home to numerous species of dinosaur, though fossilised bones are rarely found.

Life could not continue in an unbroken line due to the intervention of ice. Over 2.5 million years glaciers and ice sheets have invaded Scotland in at least five separate ice ages – huge forces carving the rock into landscapes we recognise today.

And it’s all still shifting now. The span of human history is but the blink of an eye in geological time, which I have tried to explain in a poem, ‘Creation’:

And let millennia tick like seconds

And watch the land, to which we tie all symbols of

Solidity and permanence, shift like the sea.

And all our maps and atlases are just snapshots of

Mere Continents which drift, collide,

Spin like so much flotsam in a planet’s eddies.

Ebb and flow, rise and fall.

The concept of Scotland

For the vast majority of 10,000 years of human history there was no concept of a single country called ‘Scotland’. The first tentative claim to the unity of the land came when Constantine was crowned ‘Ri Alban’, King of Scots in ad 889, not much more than 1,000 years ago. Before that there were several distinct peoples with distinct languages and cultures.

The last ice age gives us a convenient starting point when discussing the human part of Scotland’s story. The ice had effectively wiped the slate clean. There is a common impression that when the ice retreated the land went through a tundra phase and then it blossomed into a wonderful rich, natural wildwood. Then humans arrived and started mucking things up. Given that the melting of the ice was not an overnight event, it is likely that people were here before the forest. There were footprints in the snow.

The question is, where did these first people come from? They came from the ice-free south, but by which route? Some believe that they would have followed the coast. Movement by canoe would have been quicker and easier than travelling through the barren hinterland. Given that the North Sea and the Irish Sea were dry land (or more strictly speaking they would have been largely bog), the coastal route would have led them up the west coast of Ireland and across to the west coast of Scotland. So the first Scottish people came from Ireland. But some people believe it was the other way round. These Mesolithic people were then replaced by Neolithic farmers, though there is evidence that the two cultures existed side-by-side for some time. It is not clear whether the farmers came to Scotland via Ireland or vice versa.

Three nations

The Romans called this place Caledonia; Scotland was still several centuries away. At that time there were three distinct nations: Picts, Goidelic Celts and Bretonic Celts. The Celts are hard to disentangle from their own mythology. Sagas handed down through the oral tradition and eventually written by monks in the seventh to tenth centuries tell of a series of invasions into Ireland bringing Celtic culture with them.

It has been generally accepted that the Celts originated east of the Danube and spread west, becoming the Gauls in what is now France and the Gaels in Ireland and Scotland. They swept in, dominating the lands and imposing their language. The most widely held view is they came in fairly small numbers and took over, living as aristocratic overlords. They may have had a big advantage in the arms race as they could have been the first to have iron-working technology. Archaeologists now tell us that there is no evidence for any such invasion.

It is accepted that the Gaelic-speaking Irish and Highlanders have common cultural roots with a common language, classified as Q-Celtic. These are Goidelic Celts. Scottish Highlanders and Islanders maintained their separate identity, language and distinctive clan structure right up until deliberate attempts were made to destroy the culture after the Battle of Culloden.

By the way, in the early twentieth century it was said that the best spoken English to be found in Britain was in Inverness. This makes sense as many Highlanders at the time would have grown up in entirely Gaelic-speaking communities meaning they would have learned the English language from a textbook in school. They learnt it properly without the sloppiness which comes from centuries of daily misuse.

By the way, Scottish Highlanders were frequently called ‘Irish’ in the Lowlands, right up until the nineteenth century.

What sort of Celt?

In the south of Scotland the population was represented by an entirely different Celtic culture. These were Bretonic Celts, speaking a separate language, P-Celtic, which was the root for the Welsh, Cornish and Breton languages. These people, divided into several tribes, dominated the Lowlands and Borders. The Kings of Strathclyde ruled from Dumbarton, while the Votadini, in the east, had headquarters at Dun Eidainn, now Edinburgh.

Who were the Picts?

While the Gaels held the west and north, and the Britons held the south, much of the rest was the territory of the Picts. We all know that the Picts were ‘the painted people’, so called because of their distinctive tattoos, but how much else do we know? ‘Pict’ was a name given by the Romans – we are not sure what they called themselves.

Roman historian Herodian describes the people in his History of the Empire after Marcus Book III:

Most of the regions of (northern) Britain are marshy, since they are flooded continually by the tides of the ocean; the barbarians are accustomed to swimming or wading through these waist-deep marsh pools; since they go about naked, they are unconcerned about muddying their bodies. Strangers to clothing, they wear ornaments of iron at their waists and throats; considering iron a symbol of wealth, they value this metal as other barbarians value gold. They tattoo their bodies with coloured designs and drawings of all kinds of animals; for this reason they do not wear clothes, which would conceal the decorations on their bodies. Extremely savage and warlike, they are armed only with a spear and a narrow shield, plus a sword that hangs suspended by a belt from their otherwise naked bodies. They do not use breastplates or helmets, considering them encumbrances in crossing the marshes.

This image of the ferocious naked tattooed warrior is pretty much what the name conjures up for most people, yet they occupied much of this country for centuries. The venerable Bede in Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum thinks of them as relatively late arrivals, with this story:

Picts, putting to sea from Scythia [a vast region stretching from Ukraine to Iran] … came to Ireland and landed on its northern shores. There, finding the nation of the Scots, they begged to be allowed to settle among them ... The Scots answered that the island could not contain them both; but ‘We can give you good counsel,’ said they, ‘whereby you may know what to do; we know there is another island, not far from ours, to the eastward, which we often see at a distance, when the days are clear. If you will go thither, you can obtain settlements; or, if any should oppose you, we will help you.

We don’t know what language they spoke or much about their culture (we do know that St Columba, a Gaelic speaker, needed a translator when he visited the Picts). One thing they did leave for us was an array of fabulous carved stones. The Picts, however, have not gone away.

The Irish Scots

Scientific company ‘ScotlandDNA’ have identified a genetic marker as distinctly Pictish, indicating descent from the mysterious tribe. In a sample of over 3,000, the marker, called R1b-S530, was found in 10 percent of Scotsmen. This compares to 0.8 per cent in England and 0.5 per cent in the Republic of Ireland (there is a 3 per cent result in Northern Ireland reflecting the close links with Scotland and the seventeenth-century plantation of Ulster).

The King of Scots

The first recorded mention of ‘Scoti’ is in a Roman catalogue of the states in the empire compiled around the year AD 314. It lists them alongside Picts and Caledonians as ‘barbarian tribes’.

The next reference is by Ammianus Marcellinus in AD 367, ‘… the Scots, were ranging widely and causing great devastation ...’

There is a belief that the word Scoti or Scotti meant ‘pirate’, but it may be that the word came to have that meaning thanks to the activities of the Scots. It is widely known that these Scots were Irish. The origin goes back to the Middle East. Legend has it that a Greek named Gaythius married a Pharaoh’s daughter called Scota. They settled in Spain and later a descendant called Simon Breck brought his Scots to set up a kingdom in Ireland.

Strangely, ScotlandDNA has come up with the revelation that 1 per cent of modern-day Scots have a gene marker which is only found elsewhere in Tuareg and Berber people in the Sahara. Scota’s people, perhaps?

The name ‘Scot’ became associated with the Kingdom of Dalriada, or Dal Riata in the north of Ireland, present-day County Antrim (an area later to be ruled by the MacDonnells from Islay). Centred on Dunseverick, where the remains of a later castle can still be seen, the kingdom started encroaching on territory in Argyll. It was only a short hop across the North Channel. Towards the end of the fifth century, Fergus MacErc and his sons established a permanent settlement on the west coast and extended it to take most of the modern county. The Annals of Tighernach record around AD 500, ‘Fergus Mor mac Erc, with the nation of Dal Riada, took part of Britain, and died there’.

This has been a long understood story, but some archaeologists have been turning it on its head. They suggest that innovations in crannog and rath (fort) design first appeared in Scotland. Likewise patterns in brooch-making suggest that the movement of ideas, at least, was from Scotland to Ireland and not the other way around. Dr Ewan Campbell, of the University of Glasgow, states, ‘… if there was a mass migration from Ireland to Scotland, there should be some sign of this in the archaeological record, but there is none.’ Whichever way it was, the Scots soon became a force to be reckoned with.

In the ninth century conflict flared between the northern Picts and the southern Britons. The Dalriadan Scots entered the fray as a third contender and somehow carried the day. Dalriadan king Kenneth MacAlpin became King of the Picts. Within fifty years his grandson, Donald, became Ri nan Albanneach – the King of Scots. Scotland had arrived.

By the way, the king here was traditionally known as the King of Scots rather than the King of Scotland, reflecting an emphasis on community rather than territory.

Romans and walls

There is a popular misconception that the Romans came to Scotland where they met the Picts and were so alarmed that they built a big wall to keep these painted savages out. In fact the Romans were in Scotland for forty-three years before they started building Hadrian’s Wall.

In ad 79 Agricola planned the takeover of Caledonia. Five years later he had pushed all the way through to the north east, winning the Battle of Mons Graupius, whose location is a matter of fierce debate. Agricola was then recalled to Rome. The Romans pulled back but did establish themselves in the south of Scotland.

Roman-Britain.org lists sixty-seven sites of Roman forts located throughout Strathclyde, Dumfries and Galloway, Tayside and the Borders. There were substantial settlements, such as Trimontium, on the Eildon Hills just outside Melrose. A Roman bath house can be seen in Strathclyde Country Park, in Motherwell.

However well Hadrian’s Wall worked at keeping the Picts in, it certainly didn’t keep the Romans out. In a conspicuous effort to expand northwards they built the Antonine Wall, nearly a hundred miles further north, twenty years after Hadrian’s.

As the Roman Empire crumbled the Picts rampaged over the wall and the remaining Romano-Britons needed help in keeping them at bay.

The Anglish

We generally think that the Angles and Anglo-Saxons who created Angle Land – England, were not part of Scotland’s historical landscape, but they did play their part. These Germans were invited into England to act as mercenaries to face down the incursions from the north. Once they became established in Angleland they did try to expand their territories northward.

King Ida of Bernicia established an Anglian Kingdom north of Hadrian’s Wall in the Tweed Valley, battling the resident Britons. Angles moved into Dumfriesshire and Galloway. They met and defeated Dalriadans when they made a move into Argyll. They faced up to the Picts, who finally defeated them in ad 685.

By the way, the Gaelic word for an Englishman, a Sassenach, derives, more or less, from Saxon-ach, (Scots are Albannach, Irish are Eirannach).