Oppressions of the Sixteenth Century in the Islands of Orkney and Zetland. Various
Table of Contents
The History of Orkney and Zetland is still to be written. There is no part of the United Kingdom which possesses historical materials more ample, or more early, and none so little known as these, the last acquired of the British Isles. But where the sources of information are so scattered and inaccessible, it is perhaps easier to estimate the amount of attainable knowledge, than to fathom or fill up the depths of inevitable ignorance, and I am far from pretending to supply this desideratum. I still hope to see it in abler hands, when the same research, learning and acumen, which have done so much to elucidate the Celtic history of the North of Scotland, shall be applied to the parallel subject of these not less interesting Islands. In my essay on a theme so difficult both from its antiquity and its novelty, I shall account it a sort of success, if my statements, omissions or mistakes, shall tempt or provoke some more capable or more practised inquirer—more earnest, and more honest in the search for truth, he cannot be.
What I now propose is, to give only such brief introductory notices as may seem necessary to illustrate the Articles, Complaints and other documents, selected from the many Supplications, Petitions, Protests and Memorials of the ill-used Islanders, not merely on account of the more minute details which they contain of oppression and misrule, but for their curious glimpses of social life in the far North, and the olden time, and of the laws and customs of a day and district so near, and yet so strange.
Placed on a salient point, dividing two oceans, flanking the two weakest coasts of Britain, and confronting within a few hours’ sail, the mouths of the Baltic and the Elbe—indented with fine harbours, easily made as impregnable as any in Northern Europe, and never boomed like them by half a-year of ice—with a soil of more than ordinary fertility, and a sea-loving people, hardy, intelligent and enterprising—Orkney was well adapted to become the vanguard of northern civilization and commerce. The fostering liberality which has raised a Venice in the Baltic, might easily have made of Orkney a garden or a granary, and of any one of its score of harbours, the Valetta or Sebastapol of the Atlantic and German Oceans. Perhaps with such a position and structure, soil and population, it might even have become (under circumstances less repressive), the powerful centre of an independent Hanseatic league, the check and counterpoise of the usurped monarchy of the seas. But for nearly four centuries, it has been mediatized into an overtaxed and overshadowed dependency, and dragged in the rear of a political and commercial system, in the advantages of which it has been grudgingly permitted to share, but in whose reverses it has ever been made to suffer most unequally; and the few who have cared to trace its history, have been too much absorbed in the painful interest of its actual condition, to indulge in speculations on what it might have been.
While these Islands were Scandinavian, if not independent, they had from locality and circumstance some individual action, and a history; but since they became an item of Scotland, and Scotland of the integer of Britain, they have had no self-motion to record, but short episodes of struggle, the spasms of a feverish nationality to be crushed as rebellion against the dominant state. But their fate has been more hard than that of most small nations, merged in another larger than themselves. The ruling power had not only the usual interest in profiting by union, repressing insubordination and veiling oppression, but also (from its defective title) in suppressing its surreptitious profits, lest others should estimate too well the value of Scotland’s gain and Norway’s loss.
Since they were severed, more than three centuries ago, from the kindred rule of Norway, their history has been a continuous tale of wrong and oppression, of unscrupulous rapacity and unheeded complaint. Recepi, non Rapui, might have been the characteristic motto, as that shadowy distinction between the merits of the thief and the receiver has been the plea, of every government under which they have since been ruled or misruled. Regarded as aliens, of no value beyond the revenue or plunder which could be extorted from them, they have been granted, revoked, annexed, re-granted, confiscated and re-annexed, with wearisome monotony of torturing change. Five times have they been formally annexed to the Crown by Act of Parliament, and fourteen times committed, in defiance of such Acts, and without either protection or redress, to one needy and rapacious courtier after another. Each Donatary or Tacksman, aware of his precarious opportunity, took for granted all previous exactions, and sought farther profit in some mine of advantage hitherto unwrought, till the growing burden of extortion wrung from the Islanders a cry of oppression too loud to be smothered, and then the government sometimes disavowed or removed the indiscreet official, who could not conduct his pillage with decorum. But in general it was blind to all such profitable enormities, and deaf to all complaints, unless the complainer could give interest to his case by charges of treason, of embezzlement of royal revenues, or above all, of coquetting with the dangerous claims of Norway. In such a case the oppressor became perhaps a victim, and was forfeited, imprisoned or beheaded, not for oppressing the subject, but for alarming the Crown. But every change was to the Islanders only a change of tyrant, and their complaints served only to warn the new Donatary of the rocks and shoals on which his predecessor had made shipwreck of the thriving trade of robbery. The Crown might do justice on the oppressor, but it invariably appropriated his plunder, and adopted his profitable exactions, as prescribed rights, and precedents for farther claims. Laurence Bruce was removed—but his false Weights and Measures still prevail. Lord Robert Stewart was imprisoned—but the Doubled Teind was not reduced, nor the Escheited Land restored—both still form part of the Estate of the Crown and its Donatary—and the culprit was reponed, with higher powers, to wreak vengeance on his accusers. Earl Patrick was beheaded—but his feudal casualties and illegal exactions and decreets were still enforced for the benefit of future Donataries. The Bishopric Lands have been (in the language of the New World) annexed by the Crown, and sold to plant the parks of London—but their chartered obligation to uphold all ecclesiastical buildings has been transferred to the other landowners. The fictitious Debt and Mortgage to William Earl of Morton were cancelled—only to enhance his powers, profits and peculations, by the sanction of a surreptitious Act of the British Parliament. Other Scottish counties were relieved of the “Auld Extent” when the new Cess was imposed; Orkney and Zetland still pay both—to the Crown the British Land Tax—to its Donatary the Skat of Norway.
The very enormity of such anomalies makes it hard to believe them possible in a place and time so near our own, and harder still to persuade the nineteenth century, in its self-complacent admiration of the just and enlightened rule of Britain, that much of the evil still exists uncorrected and unredressed in this the twenty-third year of Queen Victoria.
On 8th September 1468, Christian I. of Denmark, Sweden and Norway, by the Contract of Marriage between his only daughter Margaret and James III. of Scotland (after discharging the Annual of Norway, a tribute due by Scotland for Man and the Hebrides), engaged to pay a dowry of 60,000 florins—viz. 10,000 before the young Queen’s departure, and for the balance of 50,000, to pledge the islands of Orkney, to be held by the Crown of Scotland until he or his successors, kings of Norway, should redeem them by payment of that sum. In return, Christian stipulated for certain jointure lands and terce to the Queen, if left a widow, or at her option a payment of 120,000 florins, for 50,000 of which the restitution of Orkney should be counted as a discharge. Only 2000 of the presently promised 10,000 florins being paid, Zetland was also impignorated for the balance of 8000 florins under the same conditions (20th May 1469), and both groupes were thus mortgaged sub firma hypotheca et pignore for 58,000 florins of the Rhine of 100 pence each, or about £24,166, 13s. 4d. sterling.
Such was the important transaction on which Britain founds her possession of these Islands, or, as they were generally styled, the Countries of Orkney and Zetland; and while some have found or fancied in its terms, unusual safeguards for the laws and liberties of the Islanders, others have distorted its plain meaning to impugn the right of redemption, or, with even less honesty, have feigned, forged, or uttered the forgery of a subsequent irredeemable Cession. But it was neither less nor more than an Impignoration, such as Denmark’s necessities had often forced her to make of States or dependencies which she could not mean to cede in permanency, such as Funen, Sleswig, and (more than once) the City and Castle of Copenhagen. A transaction so usual required no such extraordinary clauses or safeguards. In its very nature it implied only such a redeemable substitution of ownership as was consistent with the unchanged