Instead, they came to see themselves as every bit as Scottish as the people they found there on their arrival, and Scotland and Scottishness—the Scots identity—adapted itself to make room for them. Hence, for instance, the Irish wrote a famous Remonstrance to the Pope in saying that they were so different from the English of Ireland in language and customs that there could never be peace between them, whereas three years later the Scots sent to the Pope their famous Declaration of Arbroath in which they boasted of their ancestral triumphs over the Britons, the Picts, the Angles, the Norwegians and the Danes, and yet many of the men who signed this letter were the grandsons and great-grandsons of men who had migrated, usually via England, from Normandy, Brittany and Flanders, and only settled in Scotland in the quite recent past!
The fact that they now believed that they were Scots, part of a nation that had inhabited the northern part of Britain since the dawn of history, only goes to prove that, unlike Irishness, Scottishness was not an exclusive club; membership was wide open, and it was that openness, that receptiveness, that adaptability, which contributed to the emergence of Scotland as a well-respected monarchy on the western European model, from the twelfth century onwards.
Thus, medieval Scotland was, as Ireland was not, a multi-ethnic society, with a very heterogeneous mix long before a single Anglo-Norman set foot in it. In Caithness, Argyll, and the Western Isles there was a strong Scandinavian input as a result of settlement in the Viking era.
Stretching south from Dumbarton on the Firth of Clyde to the Lake District in north-west England were the people of the ancient kingdom of Cumbria or Strathclyde, who were predominantly Brittonic or British, related, in other words, to the people of Wales. They were matched on the east coast by the northern part of the Anglian kingdom of Northumbria, usually called Lothian, which provides the very important English element in the mix.
Early eleventh-century Scotland. Matthew Stout. To the north, lay people descended from the Picts, but now fully subsumed into the Gaelic social order, which had been imposed on northern Britain as a result of the Dalriadic invasion from Ireland. By the time that Scotland truly emerges into the pages of history, that Gaelic culture was supreme and gave the land its very name, Scotia, the land of the Scotti, the original preferred Latin name for the Irish.
So, whilst there may be quite stark differences between Scotland and Ireland in the Middle Ages, there is no escaping this one overriding link. They were, taken to its logical extreme, of the same nation. With few exceptions, historians of medieval Scotland have paid little more than lip-service to this most fundamental of facts.
What is worse, they have even ignored it. To take one example: in , the great Scottish medievalist Geoffrey. Barrow produced his classic biography of Robert Bruce, which contains his translation of a Latin letter probably sent by Robert Bruce to Ireland:.
The king sends greetings to all the kings of Ireland, to the prelates and clergy, and to the inhabitants of all Ireland, his friends. And yet, this is something which we must accept, and is indeed happening: a younger generation of Scottish historians has emerged who are much more open to the Irish dimension in Scottish history, and are reminding us that medieval Scots, and their kings, were indeed conscious of their Irish links, whether in a strictly ethnic sense in the form of genealogies and king-lists which linked them into the Irish chain of descent, or in the broader cultural, social, and ecclesiastical sense with which we are more familiar.
This has been a very positive development, because it has helped to a certain extent to free us from the shackles of hindsight. Because Scotland has had a constitutional link with England for the last four centuries, there is something of a tendency to write its history as if that had always been the case, or had always been inevitable, and to focus historical writing on examining how it came to be.
This is useful to the extent that part of the purpose of history is to help us understand how things came to be the way they are. It is not helpful, and is rather disingenuous, if it involves airbrushing the picture to remove those images which might have suggested a different story. If the story that is to be told is of the emergence of a distinct kingdom of the Scots, the development of the Scottish monarchy and parliament, and eventual union of both crown and parliament with England, then there are going to be a lot of red herrings lying around.
And Ireland will be one of them. A similar situation pertains in Ireland, where the historiography of the country from the twelfth century onwards is dominated by discussion of Anglo-Irish relations. This is not because there is very little to say on the subject, and neither can it be because it was not viewed as important in its own day. The shelves remain empty and the story remains untold, because we do not regard it as important. Another example of this springs to mind.
Again, it involves Robert Bruce and Geoffrey Barrow, though it is by no means intended as a criticism of the latter, whose work one cannot but admire. Bruce died in but did not find himself a biographer as such for another half-century, when John Barbour, archdeacon of Aberdeen, wrote his epic poem The Bruce.
As it has come down to us, this fourteenth-century metrical biography has 13, lines. It was unnecessary for me to remind the Dublin audience of the history of oppression of the people of Ireland by English sovereigns and governments, and by colonists put on the island to maintain British control of it. Having suffered hundreds of years of conquest and oppression, Ireland then spent the first half of the twentieth century establishing itself as a fully autonomous republic.
The fact that this would also discomfort the Ulster Unionists, who derive from the seventeenth century Protestant plantations enacted to civilize and Anglicise the north of Ireland, was an extra bonus. On a clear day it is possible to see across the channel between Scotland and Ireland. September 18 was misty but even so it is easy to imagine figures on either side looking out and recalling that as well as being the day of the Scottish referendum it was also the centenary of the Irish Home Rule law that was immediately suspended because of the First World War.
Had it been implemented, John Redmond would likely have become the head of an Irish Government in Dublin, the Easter Uprising might not have occurred, and nor perhaps the Irish Civil War. Redmond had persuaded the English Prime Minister Herbert Asquith of the case for home rule just as Salmond had persuaded David Cameron of the legitimacy of an independence referendum. To the Irish of the present day the possibility available to the Scots of self-determined independence seemed a ripe fruit waiting to be picked which were it not might then rot away.
F irst, the experience of the two countries and their relationship to England is only superficially similar. Scotland was never a colony, nor was it subject to lengthy English conquest. The Kingdom of Scotland came into being in the tenth century with the Scottish Parliament existing from the early thirteenth. An English invasion in led to the Wars of Scottish Independence, and in at the Abbey of Arbroath the Scots declared their sovereignty and called upon the Pope to acknowledge it, which he John XXII did, followed by European principalities and kingdoms.
In the next century the universities of St. Andrews, Glasgow, and Aberdeen were created adding a system of higher education to a separate legal system. In the period between the two World Wars, a Scottish Home rule movement was established and in the Scottish National Party was born, but it was only in the last thirty years that the appetite for political autonomy grew to the point where a devolved Parliament was created in and met for the first time the following year.
The drafters of the voting system for its election tried to ensure that no party would ever have an overall majority, though it was assumed that unionist parties would be dominant. It was a shock, therefore, when the SNP secured a clear overall majority in the Scottish general election, and it was not long before it agreed with London on a determinative referendum on the issue of complete independence.
A further aspect of Irish interest was due to the large scale immigration from there to Scotland that began in the eighteenth century and has continued intermittently even to the present. With the near destruction of the Catholic Faith in the centuries following the Reformation the subsequent growth of the Scottish Church in the nineteenth and twentieth was due largely to immigrants, those from Italy, Poland and Lithuania supplementing the Irish population.
Commenting on The Irish Times has changed. To comment you must now be an Irish Times subscriber. The account details entered are not currently associated with an Irish Times subscription. Please subscribe to sign in to comment. You should receive instructions for resetting your password. When you have reset your password, you can Sign In.
Please choose a screen name. This name will appear beside any comments you post. Your screen name should follow the standards set out in our community standards. Screen Name Selection. Only letters, numbers, periods and hyphens are allowed in screen names. Please enter your email address so we can send you a link to reset your password. Your Comments. Sign In Sign Out. We reserve the right to remove any content at any time from this Community, including without limitation if it violates the Community Standards.
We ask that you report content that you in good faith believe violates the above rules by clicking the Flag link next to the offending comment or by filling out this form. New comments are only accepted for 3 days from the date of publication.
Subscriber Only. Why did the Aviva crowd boo Cristiano Ronaldo? To be part of his world. Keith Duggan: Ireland now look like more than a passing fancy.
0コメント