An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707). Robert S. Rait
upon these new institutions came the spread of English commerce, carrying with it the English tongue along the coast, and bringing an infusion of English blood into the towns.[9] In the reign of David I, the son of Malcolm Canmore and St. Margaret, these purely Saxon influences were succeeded by the Anglo-Norman tendencies of the king's favourites. Grants of land[10] to English and Norman courtiers account for the occurrence of English and Norman family and place-names. The men who lived in immediate dependence upon a lord, giving him their services and receiving his protection, owing him their homage and living under his sole jurisdiction, took the name of the lord whose men they were.
A more important question arises with regard to the system of land tenure, and the change from clan ownership to feudal possession. How was the tribal system suppressed? An outline of the process by which Scotland became a feudalized country will be found in the Appendix, where we shall also have an opportunity of referring, for purposes of comparison, to the methods by which clan-feeling was destroyed after the last Jacobite insurrection. Here, it must suffice to give a brief summary of the case there presented. It is important to bear in mind that the tribes of 1066 were not the clans of 1746. The clan system in the Highlands underwent considerable development between the days of Malcolm Canmore and those of the Stuarts. Too much stress must not be laid upon the unwillingness of the people to give up tribal ownership, for it is clear from our early records that the rights of joint-occupancy were confined to the immediate kin of the head of the clan. "The limit of the immediate kindred", says Mr. E.W. Robertson,[11] "extended to the third generation, all who were fourth in descent from a Senior passing from amongst the joint-proprietary, and receiving, apparently, a final allotment; which seems to have been separated permanently from the remainder of the joint-property by certain ceremonies usual on such occasions." To such holders of individual property the charter offered by David I gave additional security of tenure. We know from the documents entitled "Quoniam attachiamenta", printed in the first volume of the Acts of the Parliament of Scotland, that the tribal system included large numbers of bondmen, to whom the change to feudalism meant little or nothing. But even when all due allowance has been made for this, the difficulty is not completely solved. There must have been some owners of clan property whom the changes affected in an adverse way, and we should expect to hear of them. We do hear of them, for the reigns of the successors of Malcolm Canmore are largely occupied with revolts in Galloway and in Morayshire. The most notable of these was the rebellion of MacHeth, Mormaor of Moray, about 1134. On its suppression, David I confiscated the earldom of Moray, and granted it, by charters, to his own favourites, and especially to the Anglo-Normans, from Yorkshire and Northumberland, whom he had invited to aid him in dealing with the reactionary forces of Moray; but such grants of land in no way dispossessed the lesser tenants, who simply held of new lords and by new titles. Fordun, who wrote two centuries later, ascribes to David's successor, Malcolm IV, an invasion of Moray, and says that the king scattered the inhabitants throughout the rest of Scotland, and replaced them by "his own peaceful people".[12] There is no further evidence in support of this statement, and almost the whole of Malcolm's short reign was occupied with the settlement of Galloway. We know that he followed his grandfather's policy of making grants of land in Moray, and this is probably the germ of truth in Fordun's statement. Moray, however, occupied rather an exceptional position. "As the power of the sovereign extended over the west," says Mr. E.W. Robertson, "it was his policy, not to eradicate the old ruling families, but to retain them in their native provinces, rendering them more or less responsible for all that portion of their respective districts which was not placed under the immediate authority of the royal sheriffs or baillies." As this policy was carried out even in Galloway, Argyll, and Ross, where there were occasional rebellions, and was successful in its results, we have no reason for believing that it was abandoned in dealing with the rest of the Lowlands. As, from time to time, instances occurred in which this plan was unsuccessful, and as other causes for forfeiture arose, the lands were granted to strangers, and by the end of the thirteenth century the Scottish nobility was largely Anglo-Norman. The vestiges of the clan system which remained may be part of the explanation of the place of the great Houses in Scottish History. The unique importance of such families as the Douglasses or the Gordons may thus be a portion of the Celtic heritage of the Lowlands.
If, then, it was not by a displacement of race, but through the subtle influences of religion, feudalism, and commerce that the Scottish Lowlands came to be English in speech and in civilization, if the farmers of Fife and some, at least, of the burghers of Dundee or of Aberdeen were really Scots who had been subjected to English influences, we should expect to find no strong racial feeling in mediæval Scotland. Such racial antagonism as existed would, in this case, be owing to the large admixture of Scandinavian blood in Caithness and in the Isles, rather than to any difference between the true Scots and "the English of the Lowlands". Do we, then, find any racial antagonism between the Highlands and the Lowlands? If Mr. Freeman is right in laying down the general rule that "the true Scots, out of hatred to the 'Saxons' nearest to them, leagued with the 'Saxons' farther off", if Mr. Hill Burton is correct in describing the red Harlaw as a battle between foes who could have no feeling of common nationality, there is nothing to be said in support of the theory we have ventured to suggest. We may fairly expect some signs of ill-will between those who maintained the Celtic civilization and their brethren who had abandoned the ancient customs and the ancient tongue; we may naturally look for attempts to produce a conservative or Celtic reaction, but anything more than this will be fatal to our case. The facts do not seem to us to bear out Mr. Freeman's generalization. When the independence of Scotland is really at stake, we shall find the "true Scots" on the patriotic side. Highlanders and Islesmen fought under the banner of David I at Northallerton; they took their place along with the men of Carrick in the Bruce's own division at Bannockburn, and they bore their part in the stubborn ring that encircled James IV at Flodden. At other times, indeed, we do find the Lords of the Isles involved in treacherous intrigues with the kings of England, but just in the same way as we see the Earls of Douglas engaged in traitorous schemes against the Scottish kings. In both cases alike we are dealing with the revolt of a powerful vassal against a weak king. Such an incident is sufficiently frequent in the annals of Scotland to render it unnecessary to call in racial considerations to afford an explanation. One of the most notable of these intrigues occurred in the year 1408, when Donald of the Isles, who chanced to be engaged in a personal quarrel about the heritage which he claimed in right of his Lowland relatives, made a treacherous agreement with Henry IV; and the quarrel ended in the battle of Harlaw in 1411. The real importance of Harlaw is that it ended in the defeat of a Scotsman who, like some other Scotsmen in the South, was acting in the English interest; any further significance that it may possess arises from the consideration that it is the last of a series of efforts directed against the predominance, not of the English race, but of Saxon speech and civilization. It was just because Highlanders and Lowlanders did represent a common nationality that the battle was fought, and the blood spilt on the field of Harlaw was not shed in any racial struggle, but in the cause of the real English conquest of Scotland, the conquest of civilization and of speech.
Our argument derives considerable support from the references to the Highlands of Scotland which we find in mediæval literature. Racial distinctions were not always understood in the Middle Ages; but readers of Giraldus Cambrensis are familiar with the strong racial feeling that existed between the English and the Welsh, and between the English and the Irish. If the Lowlanders of Scotland felt towards the Highlanders as Mr. Hill Burton asserts that they did feel, we should expect to find references to the difference between Celts and Saxons. But, on the contrary, we meet with statement after statement to the effect that the Highlanders are only Scotsmen who have maintained the ancient Scottish language and literature, while the Lowlanders have adopted English customs and a foreign tongue. The words "Scots" and "Scotland" are never used to designate the Highlanders as distinct from other inhabitants of Scotland, yet the phrase "Lingua Scotica" means, up to the end of the fifteenth century, the Gaelic tongue.[13] In the beginning of the sixteenth century John Major speaks of "the wild Scots and Islanders" as using Irish,