Image and Identity

Making and Re-making of Scotland Through the Ages

Dauvit Brown, Dauvit Brown

• Publisher: John Donald
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781788853965
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume looks at the way that perceptions of Scottish identity have changed through the centuries, from early medieval to modern times. 'The idea of Scotland as a single country, corresponding to the realm of the king of Scots, and of the Scots as all the kingdom's inhabitants, may only have taken root during the 13th century.' – Dauvit Broun 'The 18th century is marked by a period of often competing Scottish identities, and the emergence of the British state as a complicating factor in the equation.' – R. J. Finlay 'Scottish identity has never been a fixed, immutable idea, whether held in the head or in the gut... some of the most enduring myths of Scotland's Protestant identity were, like Ireland's Catholic identity, creations of the 19th century: they included Jenny Geddes as a Protestant Dame Scotia, throwing a stool into the works of an Anglican-style church, and the Magdalen Chapel in Edinburgh, the home of a staunchly Catholic graft guild throughout much of the 1560s becoming the "workshop of the Reformation" in John Knox's time.' – Michael Lynch

CHAPTER ONE

Defining Scotland and the Scots Before the Wars of Independence¹

Dauvit Broun

However strange past images of Scotland and the Scots may seem to today’s eyes, some basic features have remained recognisable for centuries. In particular, the idea that Scotland is defined territorially by the geographical limits of the kingdom, and the notion that the Scots are the people of Scotland, appear so obvious that they barely seem to justify comment. Before the mid-thirteenth century, however, even these fundamentals would not have been familiar. For those living within the kingdom’s bounds at that time ‘Scotland’ and ‘Scots’ usually meant something quite different. To make matters even more confusing from a modern viewpoint, there was no agreement—even among the literate few—about where they thought Scotland was. The most dramatic illustration of this is that it was possible in 1214 for someone to refer to ‘Scotland’ as limited to the area north of the Forth and south of Moray,² but for someone else in 1216 to write unambiguously of ‘Scotland’ as including Galloway in the south-west and the Merse in the extreme southeast.³

It might seem tempting to dismiss such variation as something awkward, rather like the miriad unstandardised weights and measures of the pre-industrial age, which need only concern the specialist. This would be a mistake. If contemporary definitions of ‘Scotland’ and ‘Scots’ are taken into account it is possible to gain new perspectives on Scotland’s early development, as well as achieve a more general appreciation of how even such basic terms can be flexible and adaptable.

It must be admitted that defining Scotland and the Scots hardly seems to be much of a problem according to the generally established contours of how Scotland first took shape in this period. From the beginning, we are told, there were Scots (originating from Ireland) who settled in Argyll around the year 500 AD as a branch of the Ulster kingdom of Dál Riata. Around the year 843 Cinaed mac Alpin (‘Kenneth I’), king of Dál Riata, became king of the Picts and so formed the kingdom of Scotland by uniting Picts and Scots. Scotland’s kings are therefore numbered from Cinaed (Kenneth) onwards. In the process the Scots overwhelmed the Picts, who subsequently vanished. The kingdom expanded southwards, taking Edinburgh in the reign of Illulb mac Constantin (954–62), and incorporating ‘Strathclyde’ after its last king died (probably) in 1018. The Scottish king at that time, Mael Coluim mac Cinaeda (‘Malcolm II’) (1005–34), therefore, sometimes vies with Cinaed mac Alpin as the first king of a ‘united’ Scotland.⁴ Throughout such an account ‘Scotland’ is defined as the Scotland of today, progressively ‘unified’ first of all when ‘Kenneth I’ overran the Picts and (allegedly) began to rule most of Scotland, and then finally when his successors gained control over what remained of mainland Scotland. The Scots, in turn, are ultimately the people whose kings conquered the Picts and expanded their realm into southern Scotland. Bede referred to them (while they were still confined to Argyll) as Scoti, so any quibble about the matter would apparently seem unnecessary. In short, Scotland is seen first-and-foremost as a concrete reality—the medieval kingdom and, ultimately, the present-day country.

No-one would deny that the early development of the Scottish kingdom is a fundamental part of Scottish history. There is an important distinction to be made, however, between the kingdom on the one hand and, on the other hand, the ‘Scotland’ understood by contemporaries before the wars of independence. As noted already, it was possible for someone nearly two-hundred years after 1018 to see ‘Scotland’ as only part of the area ruled by the king of Scots. If contemporaries did not automatically equate ‘Scotland’ with the kingdom, it must be asked whether by doing so ourselves we may be losing sight of an important aspect of Scotland’s history in this period. Moreover, giving insufficient weight to contemporary definitions can lead to distortion. The use of ‘Scots’ by modern historians to refer both to the kingdom’s inhabitants in the time of Wallace as well as the people from Argyll who (we are told) overwhelmed the Picts, threatens to obscure how the meaning of Scoti changed fundamentally in this period, and actually meant ‘Irish/Gaels’ in Bede’s day. Indeed, ‘Scots’ as a general term for the kingdom’s inhabitants does not appear to have gained universal acceptance in written sources until the late thirteenth century.⁵ Neither does the generally accepted view of Scotland’s origins do justice to the insistence of contemporary record that the Picts were the people of the kingdom for at least a generation after ‘Kenneth I’.⁶ Because the usual outline of Scotland’s early history is not sensitive to how people in the Scottish kingdom at the time defined themselves and defined Scotland territorially, it actually fails to address the early development of ‘Scotland’—as distinct from the kingdom. It therefore risks giving insufficient attention to a significant dimension of Scotland’s formative period as a society. The question of how contemporaries in the Scottish kingdom defined ‘Scotland’ and ‘Scots’ in this period can not, however, be given a simple answer, and this essay will not attempt to cover all aspects of the subject. Also, the issue of how the kingdom itself was identified will not be discussed fully. It may be noted, however, that in charters from the 1160s onwards the entire realm of David I’s successors was increasingly referred to as ‘kingdom of Scots’ or ‘kingdom of Scotland’,⁷ which brings us back to the question of how ‘Scotland’ and ‘Scots’ were defined in this period.

Everyone who studies Scottish history in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries is accustomed to referring to the country north of the Forth as ‘Scotia’. This is justified by an abundance of contemporary references. Before the mid-thirteenth century, however, Scotia could be understood as the area north of the Forth, south of Moray and east of the central highlands. A topographical description of Scotland (dating to sometime between 1202 and 1214) referred to the mountain-range running north from Ben Lomond and Breadalbane as ‘the mountains which divide Scotia from Argyll’;⁸ a charter of David I relating to Urquhart Priory addressed the ‘worthy men of Moray and Scotia’;⁹ and, in a section of Gesta Annalia (attributed to John of Fordun) which probably reflected the words of a contemporary source, William I is described as returning ‘from Moray to Scotia’ in 1214.¹⁰ Scotia was not always the preferred term in Latin; another term, Albania, is also found in writings of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.¹¹ Albania was simply a Latinised version of Gaelic Alba, ‘Scotland’. It is noteworthy, therefore, that Alba itself was once applied to the area between the Forth, Moray and the central highlands.¹²

Now, Gaelic Alba and Latin Scotia, if used today, would normally be translated ‘Scotland’. There has been an unwillingness, however, to translate them so unless they referred to an area more or less equivalent to modern Scotland. Instead, the Scotia (or Alba) of the twelfth century tends to be called simply ‘Scotia’ or ‘Alba’—no doubt with the aim of avoiding confusion. In writing about this period in English a distinction has therefore been drawn which reserves ‘Scotland’ for what is recognisable in today’s terms as Scotland. Such a distinction, however, is impossible in medieval Latin or in Gaelic (the native language of the great majority of medieval Scots before the wars of independence): Alba, of course, is the only term available in Gaelic, and Scotia (or Albania) is all that is available in Latin. The best way to reflect contemporary terminology, therefore, would be to translate Alba or ScotialAlbania as ‘Scotland’, even if it denoted only part of what is now Scotland. In this way it would be easier to appreciate that, from the perspective of contemporary usage, ‘Scotland’ already existed as a territorial term before it was redefined during the course of the thirteenth century to include most of modern Scotland.

It would be too simple, however, to say that ‘Scotland’ meant one thing before the early thirteenth century, and then changed into something else. It is important to emphasise that before this change occurred there was, in fact, a striking variety in what ‘Scotland’ could mean. The region between the Forth, Moray and the central highlands was only the most restricted definition of ‘Scotland’: indeed, in the contemporary ‘Scottish’ section of the Holyrood chronicle (1150–89) it is possible that ‘Scotland’ was used in a rather general way which included the area south of the Forth.¹³ Such variation in meaning is even apparent in a single text. In the topographical tract referred to earlier (datable to 1202×1214), ‘Scotland’ is described in detail as either the entire mainland north of the Forth and Clyde (though not Caithness), or the mainland north of the Forth, but not including either Argyll or the Lennox.¹⁴

This is not to say that the variety was endless. For most of the period before the wars of independence there were, however, at least two ‘Scotlands’: a ‘lesser Scotland’ (the area between the Forth, Moray and the central highlands) and a ‘greater Scotland’, which imprecisely included most of the mainland north of the Rivers Forth and Clyde. The equation of ‘Scotland’ with the whole area ruled by the king of Scots was, at best, only embryonic before the thirteenth century. Although no specific examples of the idea of ‘lesser Scotland’ can be cited later than 1214, it may be noted that chroniclers at Melrose, in a passage relating to Scoto-Norwegian diplomacy of 1265, referred to the Hebrides as ‘the tiny islands lying around the full kingdom (ampla regio) of the Scots’.¹⁵ This equation of mainland Scotland with the kingdom at it fullest extent seems to echo the idea of ‘greater Scotland’ as distinct from ‘lesser Scotland’.

The most difficult of these ‘Scotlands’ to grasp is doubtless ‘lesser Scotland’. How could it happen that ‘Scotland’ once referred to an area approximately only a quarter of the landmass of Scotland today? The most likely answer is that this was probably the original extent of ‘Scotland’ when this term was first coined in Gaelic as Alba. This sits uneasily with the long-accepted view that Alba simply denoted the kingdom created as a consequence of a ‘union between Picts and ‘Scots’ under Cinaed mac Alpin ca 843. In the only sources likely to reflect contemporary usage, however, it was not until 900 that Alba replaced ‘Pictland’.¹⁶ Two texts, moreover, suggest that one way in which Alba ...