Scotland: The Story of a Nation. Magnus Magnusson
the one culture still in existence today in Scotland, and the one with the longest track record, is that of the Gaels, who have the strongest claim to being the indigenous people of Scotland.
And that raises a puzzle concerning Walter Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather: the Celts, these Irish progenitors, were given no mention at all in the opening chapter, and very little mention, indeed, throughout the whole book. Why? Alex Woolf, lecturer in Scottish and Celtic History at Edinburgh University, says:
When I first read Tales of a Grandfather, what struck me most was that Scott completely passes over the Irish origin of the Scots; he makes it look as if the Scoti were indigenous people alongside the Picts from earliest times. To understand this attitude, we have to look at the period in which Scott is writing – the beginning of the nineteenth century. He grew up in the eighteenth century, when Catholicism was outlawed in the United Kingdom. There was a great anxiety about Catholicism in Britain and Ireland, and the period in which Scott was writing saw a powerful political movement demanding Catholic emancipation, which came in 1829, towards the end of Scott’s career as a writer. There was much anxiety, particularly in Ireland, about this upswelling of political fervour of a people who were ‘not like us’ – people who were not Protestants, people who still spoke Gaelic (which was totally alien to the ruling élites of both Scotland and England and, indeed, of Ireland). I think it was this linkage of Ireland with the threat of Popery which probably led Scott to feel somewhat ashamed of his Irish antecedents himself.
Ted Cowan agrees:
Walter Scott really fudged this whole issue of the Irish origins of the Scots: it did not particularly suit a Protestant Scot to make a big deal of the fact that the Scots came from Ireland, so he tended to play it down. But it is rather surprising because, in other contexts, Scott was very interested in Scottish myth and legend (and did a good deal himself to add to that myth and legend).
It is in line with his silence over the Irish connection that Sir Walter Scott makes no mention at all of Ted Cowan’s candidate for the first real king of the embryo realm of Scotland – Constantin II.
Constantin II
Constantin II was a remarkably long-lived king who was eventually to outlive his effectiveness. In his prime he fought against the vikings encroaching from the north and the west; but he was also determined to extend the boundaries of ‘Lesser Scotland’ southwards beyond the Forth – Clyde line. In 914, and again in 918, he made inconclusive forays as far south as Corbridge; but now the position in Northumbria was changing dramatically.
The old Anglian kingdom of Northumbria had been overwhelmed by the Norsemen, and King Alfred of Wessex (Alfred the Great) had been forced to partition England in 878, yielding to the Norsemen the huge swatch of east and north England which became known as the Danelaw. Alfred’s son (Edward the Elder of Wessex, r.899–924) and grandson (Athelstan, r.924–39) succeeded in turning the tide of Norse domination. By 920, Edward the Elder had won back all the Danelaw south of the Humber. The next target was York, and in 927 the vigorous young Athelstan expelled the Norsemen from their powerbase there and assumed the overlordship of Northumbria. Seven years later, in 934, Athelstan consolidated his position in the north of England with a sweeping invasion of Alba, backed by a fleet which harried the east coast as far north as Caithness.
The growing power of Wessex posed an obvious and alarming threat to the fledgling kingdom of Alba, which was also constantly menaced by the power of the Norse earls of Orkney and Shetland. In 937 Constantin II joined a Great Alliance of the Norsemen in Ireland and the Britons of Strathclyde for a pre-emptive strike against the West Saxons. Together they sailed and marched down to the Humber, a huge host, for a trial of strength with Athelstan. The two sides met at a place called Brunanburh, somewhere on Humberside, perhaps, in a ferocious battle which would be commemorated in contemporary poetry and folk memory as the bloodiest encounter yet fought on English soil:
Athelstan the king,
lord of earls
and ring-giver to men,
his brother beside him,
Edmund the Ætheling,
won undying glory
in furious battle
with the blades of their swords
at Brunanburh:
burst through the shield-wall,
hewed at the bucklers
with well-forged swords,
the sons of Edward …
FROM THE BATTLE OF BRUNANBURH,
IN THE ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE (937)
It was a decisive victory for Athelstan. Among the dead was one of Constantin’s sons. The defeat of all his hopes for his kingdom, and the death of his son, seem to have drained the spirit out of Constantin, and in 943 he abdicated and withdrew to monastic life in St Andrews. It was his successors who began to stem the seemingly irresistible Wessex advance. One of his sons, Indulph (r.954–62), managed to capture the formidable stronghold of Edinburgh and gain temporary control of Lothian. But it was not until the next century that the Scots, under the leadership of the forceful and ambitious Malcolm II (Mael Coluim mac Cinaeda, r.1005–34), finally succeeded in wresting control of the Lothians from Northumbria.
The decisive showdown occurred in 1018. Malcolm had already annexed the kingdom of Strathclyde and had shown his mettle with some merciless raids deep into Northumbria, including a siege of Durham on one occasion. The Northumbrians were outraged. They raised a huge army commanded by warrior prelates pledged to recover the Church lands (and revenues) of Lothian. Malcolm met them with his forces at Carham, just south of the Tweed. It was another fierce encounter, but this time the Scots won the day. Many of the English fell, including a score of Northumbrian nobles and eighteen leading churchmen.
One of the casualties on the Scottish side was Owain, who ruled Strathclyde as a vassal of the Scots. He was the last of his family line, and Malcolm now added the kingdom of Strathclyde (the Britons) to the Scottish realm.1
The significance of the Battle of Carham in 1018 was only to emerge later. It was the last battle for Scottish control of the Lothians. Carham marked the first firm delineation of a settled frontier between Scots and English along the line of the River Tweed; but it would be a very long time before this line was to emerge as an accepted final boundary. With the hindsight of history, we can see Carham as a real watershed in the evolution of the shape of ‘Scotland’ as we know it today.
What happened to the Picts?
The Scots and the Picts, after they had been driven back behind the Roman wall, quarrelled and fought between themselves; and at last, after a great many battles, the Scots got completely the better of the Picts. The common people say that the Scots destroyed them entirely; but I think it is not likely that they could kill such great numbers of people.
TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER I
The fate of the Picts has become the great enigma, the great puzzle of Scottish history; and as a result they are probably the most written about of all the Dark Age peoples, simply because they apparently disappeared, and disappeared very suddenly. Scholars used to write darkly of a terrible chapter of genocide.
It is now accepted that there was no wholesale massacre or enslavement of the people known as the Picts; they simply ceased to exist in the historical record as a separate political and ethnic entity. The old Pictish language was swamped by the Gaelic of the Scots, all the Pictish written records perished over time, and the use of the characteristic Pictish symbols on monumental sculptured stones fell into