Why Scots Should Rule Scotland. Alasdair Gray
every other European land a great mixture of folk has poured into this irregularly shaped national container, a mixture to which people still add themselves. I am partly writing to persuade incomers to think of themselves as Scots by explaining why earlier incomers came to think so. The force that pressed or stirred a mixture of races here into a self-governing nation was often trying to shake it apart. That force was so often English that I cannot start my argument without saying how the English came to south Britain and Scotland to the north.
PUBLISHER: But in this size of pamphlet the result will be a kind of children’s history!
AUTHOR: I hear that nowadays many children and adults too have been taught little or nothing of history. It is adults I want to teach so here goes.
When the Romans left south Britain it was almost immediately raided by Scots from the west, Picts from the north and pirates from the east. The pirates were pagans from north Germany where they had farmed land in forest clearings, defended their crops with their swords and worshipped Thor and Woden. Pressure or example of the nomad invasions was moving them westward, so Britons invited them in to help expel the Picts and Scots. They expelled them so completely that in two centuries the natives of Albion had also been killed, enslaved or expelled into Cornwall, Wales and Strathclyde. These settlers eventually called themselves English, and the completeness of their conquest is astonishing if we recall that the folk they conquered were descended from builders of Stonehenge and tribes the Romans had not easily defeated. The explanation is that by finally submitting to the Romans (who historians consider a civilizing people despite their use of torture and massacre as public entertainments) the Britons grew too weak to preserve their own culture.
The English had little use for the Roman towns and military strongholds, thinking them causes of slavery. They lived in self-supporting farm communities ruled by councils of elders. When a warlord was needed for defence the elders joined neighbouring councils to elect a king. Kings were continually needed. As the settlers drained marshes and cleared forests the land attracted more Germans and Scandinavian invaders. Soon England contained six warlike pagan kingdoms with Northumbria one of the greatest. It spread up the east coast from the Humber, and the fewness of natural barriers made it possible for Northumbrians to occupy the most fertile part of Pictland up to the Firth of Forth. That is how the English language entered Caledonia.
While Britain was being Anglicized from the east some Scots sailed from the top right-hand corner of Hibernia and made a kingdom in the western islands and peninsula of Argyll. This new Scottish kingdom had Christian priests who read, wrote and built upon Iona the first British monastery outside Ireland. For five centuries Scottish, Irish and Norwegian kings were buried there. Priests trained in Iona brought Christianity to Picts in the east, Strathclyde Britons to the south, thus helping the Scots kingdom to spread through all these lands, though conquest, intermarriage, alliances against English and Scandinavian invaders also helped. In 846 a Scot ruled all Caledonia except the Northumberland part south of the Forth. Gaelic speakers called the Firth of Forth the English Sea because it separated them from Sassenachs.
It is good to know that language difference did not stop Scottish missionaries entering England and Christianizing it through Northumbria while the missionaries of Pope Gregory were doing that from Canterbury. The first vernacular poem in English literature, Caedmon’s Genesis, was dictated in a Northumbrian monastery founded by Gaelic monks. Which proves that different cultures can combine creatively.
PUBLISHER: Fascinating, perhaps. Is it relevant?
AUTHOR: Yes, because I can now explain why the English north of the Tweed became Scottish. They were driven to it by an oppressive new government centred on London. This turned them into defenders of a frontier which again separated different governments though not different languages. These English helped to make Edinburgh a Scottish capital city.
PUBLISHER: Do you hope that the English who have recently settled in Scotland will help to do the same?
AUTHOR: Yes. Scotland needs all the help she can get, The though London rule has not quite reduced her to the Ground state of Britain under Rome.
2
FEUDAL & CLAN SYSTEMS
WILLIAM, BOSS OF NORMANDY, belonged to a fourth or fifth generation of Scandinavian pirates who had made themselves overlords of western Europe. He had a claim to the English crown which the English council of local leaders ignored. They elected Harold, one of their own nation who had been ruling England wisely and well as the previous king’s minister. William decided to take the nation by force. He got the other Norman lords on his side by promising to double their French estates by the addition of estates across the channel. They believed him because at land grabbing he had already proved himself deadly efficient. In a Europe with a very primitive money market he borrowed enough to hire mercenary soldiers from French neighbours who would otherwise have attacked Normandy when he left it. Then he left it and added England to his other possessions.
The job was not easy. Though his soldiers were all professionals who lived by warfare the English were mostly farmers fighting for their land. For five years William fought uprisings in the south and east and west (where the English were helped by their old enemies, the Welsh) but resistance was strongest in the north. Here two other former enemies, Scots and Danes, helped the English. William paid the Danes to go away then burned homes, crops, farms and farming tools. His massacres drove English survivors into Scotland. Famine stopped them returning – shires north of York were deserted for half a century.
The north never bothered William again. After six and a half centuries south Britain was again owned by a military empire on both sides of the English Channel. Nearly all England’s gentry were killed or exiled by William, so now he could give his poorest mercenary soldier land with a village or two on it, his barons estates of a hundred manors or more. On these they built great strongholds from which England was ruled for the next three centuries. It was now the most thoroughly feudal state in Europe, under the permanent martial law of fighting landlords whose commander conferred with them in the House of Lords. When not fighting the landlords liked to hunt.
England still had forests where the pigs of commoners could forage and the English catch deer or smaller game when poor crops reduced their diets. William was an excellent man-killer because he disliked most people, but he loved the deer he hunted and was merciless to others who did so. In Hampshire he fenced off a private hunting ground by clearing farms, villages and religious houses from between the woodlands and his landlords followed his example on a smaller scale. The English natives were excluded from a source of cheap meat by game laws threatening them with death, though seven centuries later this penalty was changed to transportation for life. In the nineteenth century Norman property laws were used to evict hundreds of Scottish communities from their land, and even nowadays the remaining natives can be arrested for taking a bird or fish from the land where they live.
Along with other natural rights the English were robbed of a language. Their original speech and splendid literature were gradually forgotten as the commoners improvised a new speech that made sense to their bosses. Meanwhile wealthier folk sent their children to schools where they learned Norman French, which had no great literature but gave them a chance of defending themselves in the conquerors’ law courts.
PUBLISHER: You seem obsessed with the Norman Conquest.
AUTHOR: I am! It enrages me more than earlier robberies with violence because power-loving historians and teachers used it – perhaps still use it – to warp children’s minds. They praised Roman invaders because they brought a kind of peace and spread Christianity. They praised English invaders because their way of choosing aldermen and kings was a kind of democracy. They could only praise the Normans for their efficient feudal system, so they romanticized it. The English were taught to be PROUD of having been conquered because – though painful at the time – it gave them a tougher class of managers who, centuries later, led them to thrash the French at Agincourt and seize the British empire.
PUBLISHER: Maybe