Scottish history

“ Every fortress of strength and consequence was in possession of the English. English soldiers, English commissioners, English judges, laws, and regulations now filled and governed Scotland. The abrogation of all those ancient customs, which had descended from the Celts and Picts, and Scots, fell upon the hearts of all true Scottish men as the tearing asunder the last links of freedom, and branding them as slaves. Her principal nobles, strangely and traitorously, preferred safety and wealth, in the acknowledgment and servitude of Edward, to glory and honor in the service of their country ”

“ The heroic generation of Scotland was passing off the stage. The King was a child. The forfeiture by Bruce of the lands of hostile or treacherous lords, and his bestowal of the estates on his partisans, had made the disinherited nobles the enemies of Scotland, and had fed too full the House of Douglas. As the star of Scotland was thus clouded—she had no strong man for a King during the next ninety years—the sun of England rose red and glorious under a warrior like Edward III. The Scottish nobles in many cases ceased to be true to their proud boast that they would never submit to England. ”

“ We are Scottish men and Scottish subjects, and consequently to all the offers of England we are as if we heard not. Neither rebels nor abettors of rebels, we neither acknowledge the necessity of submitting ourselves to a tyrant's mercy, nor desire the advantage of his offered grace. Return, sir herald; we scorn the conditions proposed. We are here for Scotland and for Scotland's king, and for them we know both how to live and how to die. ”

“ As this is not intended to be even a bird's-eye view of Scottish history, we may have said enough by way of introducing the reader to one of the most noble and illustrious of the hereditary peerage of Scotland. Every schoolboy is more or less familiar with the annals of a race which has been identified through many ages with the interests—political, social, and commercial—of the West of Scotland. ”

“ The young lawyer was, indeed, unwittingly preparing for his mission to paint Scottish scenery so vividly, and Scottish character so charmingly, that he may almost be said to have created a new country which succeeding generations delight to visit. No man was ever a greater benefactor to Scotland, whose glories and beauties he was the first to reveal, showing how the most thrifty, practical, and parsimonious people may be at the same time the most poetic. ”

“ Such is a slight sketch of that important era in Scottish history; from the intrusion of the Scottish race into the Western Highlands, to the final ejectment of the Norwegians from the Scottish mainland, and the restoration of the crown to a Celtic prince at the head of a Saxon army. It is impossible to conceive of the presence of Norwegian settlers for so long a period on the mainland of Scotland without their greatly affecting the character of the native population. ”

“ The affairs of Scotland will always occupy an honourable and conspicuous place in the grand drama of national development which makes up the history of the British Empire. It has been the destiny of the Scottish people to influence the general fortunes of England in a larger degree, and more permanently, than could have been expected from their mere numbers, or their position in the north of our island. In the years which succeeded the Norman Conquest, Scotland was, in some measure, a place of refuge for the English name from foreign oppression ”

“ In education almost every classical school and colonial college in the South was established by these people. In character and abilities—trained and nourished by education, morals, and religion—the Scotch-Irish were excelled by no other people.
In our land—new birth of the ages—the names of the clans and of individuals who bear Caledonian names do not only call up scenes in Scotland’s history, but do forcibly emphasize our blessings of peace after long strife. One of the earliest Scottish stories I remember was of a Grant and a Macpherson, who met one day upon a log spanning a chasm. ”

“ The century in which Scottish prosperity received its most severe blows immediately succeeded the Union of the Crowns. If for three hundred years the civilizing influence of England can scarcely be traced in the history of Scottish progress, that of France was predominant, and Scotland cannot entirely regret the fact. Scotland, from the date of Bannockburn to that of Pinkie, will not suffer from a comparison with the England which underwent the strain of the long French wars, the civil broils of Lancaster and York, and the oppression of the Tudors. ”

“ The Scottish nobility began to find its true place at the English Court; the Scottish adventurer was irresistibly drawn to London; the Scottish Presbyterian found the English Puritan his brother in the Lord; and the Scottish Episcopalian joined forces with the English Cavalier. The history of the seventeenth century prepared the way for the acceptance of the Celtic theory in the beginning of the eighteenth, and when philologists asserted that the Scottish Highlanders were a different race from the Scottish Lowlanders, the suggestion was eagerly adopted. ”

“ A great many valuable papers connected with the ancient ecclesiastical state of Scotland were carried off to the Continent by the members of the ancient hierarchy, who retired there after the Reformation. Many have, no doubt, been destroyed by time, and in the destruction of their depositories by revolutions and otherwise. That a great many are yet in existence abroad, as well as at home, which would throw great light on Scottish history, and which have not yet been discovered, there is no doubt, notwithstanding the unceremonious manner in which many of them were treated. ”

“ In 1072 William the Conqueror compelled the Scottish King to acknowledge him as Overlord, and eventually so many Norman nobles established themselves in Scotland that they constituted the chief landed aristocracy of the country. The modern Scottish nation, though it keeps its Celtic name (Scotland) , is made up in great measure of inhabitants of English descent, the pure Scotch being confined mostly to the Highlands, and ranking in population only as about one to three of the former. ”

“ We cannot pretend within our scope to follow chronologically “the fightings and flockings of kites and crows,” in “a wolf-age, a war-age,” when the Northmen from all Scandinavian lands, and the Danes, who had acquired much of Ireland, were flying at the throat of England and hanging on the flanks of Scotland; while the Britons of Strathclyde struck in, and the Scottish kings again and again raided or sought to occupy the fertile region of Lothian between Forth and Tweed. ”

“ Situated in the heart of Scotland, and having around it tribes of different races, and subsequently the four kingdoms of the Picts, the Scots, the Angles, and the Britons, surpassing the other districts in fertility, and possessing those rich carses which are still distinguished as the finest agricultural districts of Scotland, this region was coveted as the chief prize alike by the invaders and the native tribes. The scene of the principal Roman campaigns, it appears throughout the entire course of Scottish history as the main battlefield 15of contending races and struggling influences. ”

“ Peculiarities in a people's phraseology may prove more than we are aware of, and may tend to illustrate circumstances of national history. Thus many words which would be included by Englishmen under the general term of Scotticisms, bear directly upon the question of a past intercourse with France, and prove how close at one time must have been the influence exercised upon general habits in Scotland by that intercourse. ”

“ South of the two great firths the Scottish name and the Scottish dominion were unknown. The south-west part of modern Scotland formed part of the Kingdom of the Strathclyde Welsh, which up to 924 was, like the Kingdom of the Scots, an independent Celtic principality. The south-eastern part of modern Scotland, Lothian in the wide sense of the word, was purely English or Danish, as in language it remains to this day. It was part of the Kingdom of Northumberland, and it had its share in all the revolutions of that Kingdom. ”

“ It may, however, be urged in support of its right to appear here, that it was French at a time when, as regards antipathy against England, the agreement between France and Scotland was a very close one. And, if further justification be needed, it may be found in the fact that some of the Scottish chroniclers are amongst those who supply the most valuable information concerning both the prevalence and the alleged origin of the quaint medieval belief that Englishmen had tails inflicted on them in punishment of the impiety of some of their pagan forefathers. ”

“ MOTTE-CASTLES IN SCOTLAND
The Scottish historians of the 19th century have amply recognised the Anglo-Norman occupation of Scotland, which took place in the 11th and 12th centuries, ever since its extent and importance were demonstrated by Chalmers in his Caledonia. Occupation is not too strong a word to use, although it was an occupation about which history is strangely silent, and which seems to have provoked little resistance except in the Keltic parts of the country. ”

“ It belongs to the character and antecedents of Scotsmen that the attribute of national independence should take so high a place among the objects of human effort and desire. It was because Scotland settled for all time, six hundred years ago, her place as an independent State that she proved herself capable of begetting men like John Knox, Robert Burns and Walter Scott. It is because the vigor of the Scottish race and the adaptiveness of the Scottish genius remain to-day unimpaired, that the lustre of Scottish-names shone so brilliantly during the World War. ”

“ Had our race been distinguished only for its care of the bawbees, for its indomitable perseverance, its capacity to endure hardship, its adaptiveness, and its enterprise, I trow that the passionate pilgrim would not turn so eagerly to Scotland to cull the flowers of poesy and breathe the air of romance. And remember, our Scottish people are rather what the country has made them, than the country is what it has been made by them. ”

“ Acknowledging that the Scots had suffered much, and were in fact "a very ruined nation," yet what had befallen them had introduced, he hinted, a very desirable change in the constitution of Scottish society. It had enfranchised and encouraged the middle and lower classes. "The meaner sort in Scotland," he said, "love us well, and are likely to come into as thriving a condition as when they were under their own great lords, who made them work for their living no better than the peasants of France;" ”

“ That in such circumstances so many men in Scotland, and especially so many men of the legal profession, should have maintained the obnoxious creed, and maintained it with such tenacity and mutual fidelity in spite of all temptation, is a fact of which Scotland may well be proud. As a body, the Scottish Whigs of 1802 seem to have been as courageous and pure-minded a set of men as there were in Great Britain. ”

“ Since 1745, Scotland has quadrupled her population. The commercial prosperity of Scotland, with all that this involves, dates from the same period. It is since that period that Scotland has sent forth most of that series of eminent men who have left their names memorable in the various walks of active and industrial life, at home and abroad. From that period, with some allowance for those numerous Scottish thinkers who taught philosophy in the European Universities in earlier centuries, dates the rise and development of what is known as the Scottish Philosophy. ”

“ We must not forget that the Scottish race has taken a very firm root in the New World Beyond Seas,—and that out in Canada and Australia and South Africa the memories and the traditions of home are dear to the hearts of thousands who call Scotland their mother. Surely they should be privileged to feel that in their beautiful ancestral land, the old proud spirit is still kept up,—the old legends, the old language, the old songs,—all the old associations, which—far away as they are forced to dwell—they can still hand down to their children and their children’s children. ”

“ We must advert to a peculiarity of our Scottish countrymen, which can be set down only on the credit side of their character—their sympathy with each other when they meet as wanderers in foreign countries. Scotland is just a small enough country to cause a certain unity of feeling amongst the people. Wherever they are, they feel that Scotsmen should stand, as their proverb has it, shoulder to shoulder. ”

“ Scotland, south of Forth and Clyde, along with the east coast up to the Moray Firth, had been rapidly affected by the English, French, and Norman influences, of which we have spoken. The inhabitants of the more remote Highland districts and of the western isles had remained uncorrupted by civilization of any kind, and ever since the reign of Malcolm Canmore there had been a militant reaction against the changes of St. Margaret and David I; from the eleventh century to the thirteenth, the Scottish kings were scarcely ever free from Celtic pretenders and Celtic revolts. ”

“ But though the nature of this primitive life in early Scottish days could not hinder the appearance of men of thought, and even helped their development as soon as they began to show the movements of active intellect, yet on the other hand Scotland had not reached that culture which affords such natures their due and full opportunity. ”