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O Caledonia! stern and
wild,
Meet nurse for a poetic child!
Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,
Land of the mountain and the flood,
Land of my sires! what mortal hand
Can e’er untie the filial band,
That knits me to thy rugged strand?
- Scott
Caledonia! thou land of
the mountain and rock,
Of the ocean, the mist, and the wind –
Thou land of the torrent, the pine and the oak,
Of the roebuck, the hart, and the hind;
Though bare are thy cliffs, and though barren thy glens,
Though bleak thy dun islands appear,
Yet kind are the hearts and undaunted the clans,
That roam in the mountains so drear!
- James Hogg
The two little islands
which stand forth in bold relief from the North Atlantic, as outposts of
European civilization, have exerted a beneficial influence upon the
entire world, exceedingly disproportionate to the figure they make upon
the map, or their numerical and fighting strength. The cradle of the
English-speaking race, they have reared and sent forth over the globe a
vast progeny of sturdy sons and daughters to conquer nature and to
elevate the race of man. In the spirit of prophecy which the bard in
Cowper mistakenly addressed to Boadicea, it may be vaunted now with
still more significance, after the event -
"Regions Caesar never
knew,
Thy posterity shall sway,
Where his eagles never flew,
None invincible as they."
It is with the northern
part of Great Britain - the rugged and stern Caledonia - the least
promising part of the mother-land - that we are immediately concerned.
Scotland is the smallest of this group of nations, contains a smaller
aggregate of natural advantages than her sisters, and has improved those
advantages under circumstances far less encouraging and hopeful. And yet
no country of its size and intrinsic importance can show a more glorious
record. Ancient Greece, Switzerland, Holland and Denmark, naturally
occur to the student as furnishing analogies to the unique history and
influence of Scotland; yet they furnish no parallel. The first was
small, rocky and barren, but it possessed the vantage ground of position
in the great southern inland sea. Greece was a naval and colonizing
country and, as the rival powers of Egypt and Phoenicia waned, she stood
unrivalled until the rod of empire was stretched forth from the banks of
the Tiber. She had her foes from the east and north, but valiantly held
her own so long as she was true to herself, and the intellectual legacy
she bequeathed to mankind remains an everlasting possession. Scotland,
during a millennium and more, had no outlet for her energy; beset by
foes on every side, and yet more than a match for them all; without a
navy, without cities, with rude agriculture and a precarious commerce,
she has yet accomplished the mightiest results. Switzerland achieved
freedom, but remained isolated; Holland passed through the fire and
quenched it with her dykes; the Danes, or rather the Scandinavian stock,
of which they only formed a small section, were early sea-rovers, who
preyed upon every land within their reach. In all these cases, where the
colonizing, raiding, or merely voyaging, spirit has been the earliest
characteristic of a small country, it has been sure to leave a broad
mark upon human history. Scotland alone was the victim in its youth and
early manhood; there was always enough to do there at home, and not over
much to get. The greater part of the small territory must have always
been hopelessly barren; and even the fertile straths, haughs and plains
of the east and south, were so constantly under the harrow, not of
tillage, but of rapine and invasion, that progress, wealth and culture
were out of the question for centuries.
Scotland contains about
30,000 square miles, or 19,496,132 acres, about one-third, or slightly
over, of the entire area of Britain; but of these less than four
millions and a half are cultivated. The population, at the time of
Bruce, was about 300,000; when James VI. ascended the Throne it was
about 900,000, and at the union, in 1707, not much more than a million.
In 1801, the census gave 1,678,452; in 1821, 2,137,325; in 1861,
3,096,808; and at the latest enumeration (1871), it stood 3,360,018, as
against 22,712,266 in England and Wales, and 5,411,416 in Ireland.
Adding the population of the Islands, the soldiers and sailors at home
and abroad, Scotland contributes but one-ninth to the total number of
inhabitants in the United Kingdom. The country, as it lies before us on
the map, is in the main rocky, the land of mountain, frith and flood;
the land of hardy shepherds and fishermen; of stout fighters and frugal
husbandmen. The thin-soiled glens of the Highlands, the straths and
carses of Perthshire, the haughs and dales of the Lowlands, generally
form but a comparatively small portion of the surface, and, for the most
part, life is sustained throughout Scotland under hard conditions. The
east and north, on the coasts of the North Sea, are fertile, and it is
on the former side that the large streams are found - the Tweed, Forth,
Tay and Dee. On the west side, the Clyde, although certainly of high
renown, is the only river of considerable size. Scotland, then, presents
an uncouth and not altogether alluring prospect to the eye of the
superficial observer; if so, it is merely because of his superficiality.
That western coast, and the stern ribs of rock which strike towards it,
is, for the most part, the home of the Celt; but, as we go northward, to
where the Western Isles glitter in the Atlantic, like the crest on
Minerva's helmet, the blood of the Norseman begins to tell, as it does
over the entire North of Scotland. The Highlands will always maintain
their place in the feelings and imagination of more than Scotsmen. It is
the custom, in the practical vein of Anglo-Saxondom, to sneer at the
Gael, as a cateran, a dreamer, or something worse; but there never was a
greater mistake conceived in the unreasoning prejudice of race. The
grandeur of Highland scenery, the precarious labours of peace, and a
long, sad history of suffering and sorrow, culminating in the massacre
of Glencoe, have all made men frugal, imaginative, pensive, and poetical
in that
"Land of proud hearts
and mountains grey,
Where Fingal fought and Ossian sung."
Mr. Lecky, in his History,* insists upon
a fact which the Lowland Scot is apt to forget in contempt for his
Gaelic countrymen: "It would be a great mistake to suppose that the
Highlands contributed nothing beneficial to the Scotch character. The
distinctive beauty and the great philosophic interest of that character
sprang from the very singular combination it displays of a romantic and
chivalrous with a practical and industrial spirit. In no other nation do
we find the enthusiasm of loyalty blended so happily with the enthusiasm
for liberty, and so strong a vein of poetic sensibility and romantic
feeling qualifying a type that is essentially industrial. It is not
difficult to trace the Highland source of this spirit."
There are in Scotland, as
every one knows, two races, recognisable by certain broad
characteristics, the Gaelic Celt and the Lowland Scot, the latter
somewhat loosely termed Anglo-Saxon, whenever he speaks a language which
is not Gaelic. But in the school days of most people not yet past middle
age, there were two giants, who met them on the threshold of British
history – the Pict and the Scot. These ogres were always doing
something that had better have been left undone, especially during the
Roman time. To unsophisticated youth, unlearned in modern ethnology, the
Scots were, of course, the people of Scotland proper. That, at any rate,
seemed to admit of no dispute; but the Picts, who were they? Did any
body then know, or does anybody know even now, when men appear to know
all but everything? The Scots were certainly a branch of the Irish
Celts, who took their caracoles and rowed over the narrow North Channel
to the Scottish coast. That there was an interchange of rough civility
between the islands we know, because there is geological evidence of it
in the basaltic columns of Fingal's Cave at Staffa, and Giant's Causeway
in Antrim. If the courtesy of Fian Mac Coull, the Irish giant, did not
spread those stepping-stones originally to accommodate his Scottish
antagonist, how came they there on both sides of the channel? The Mull
of Cantire is only twelve miles from the Irish coast, and, although
legend may be safely dismissed, it is certain that the Scots of the
Irish Dalriada, crossed over and established a footing for themselves on
the isles and mainland of Argyleshire, early in the Christian era. They
were not addicted like the Norsemen to long sea-trips, which may
probably account for Mac Coull's politeness in providing a rude viaduct
for his antagonist; but they were an active, impetuous, warlike race,
and they wandered over their new-found territory until some of them
returned, and but for the battle of Moyra, the Albanian Scots bade fair
to make Ireland a vassal of Scotland. That battle, as Mr. Burton
remarks, although little known, was the Bannockburn of early Ireland.
The historian, whose sympathies are evidently not with the Celts, hints
that the difference between them and their Saxon rivals thereafter, may
be stated as a case of peat versus coal. "They were an indolent
race," he says, "to whom the elements of value are not the
resources capable of development but those which offer the readiest
supply of the necessaries of life." "It is a curious
coincidence, worth remembering, that those very lands in Northern
Ireland, which the ancestors of the Scottish Highlanders abandoned, were
afterwards eagerly sought and occupied by Scottish Lowlanders as a
promising field of industrial enterprise."** - a comparison which
strikes one as rather unfair to the Celts both of Ireland and Scotland.
Whatever they may
afterwards have effected in the way of conquest, the Irish Scots held
sway, in St. Columba's time, no further north than the latitude of Iona
- that is, over the moiety of Argyleshire and perhaps all the isles off
the coast. In the new histories, notably those of Mr. Green, they occupy
a somewhat larger figure on the map; but all the rest of northern
Scotland down to the Firths of Forth and Clyde, - the boundary of the
old Roman Province, was under the rule of the mysterious Picts. What
were they, Celt, Norse, or Saxon? If Celtic, they evidently sprang from
the Cymric or Welsh branch, or they would have been indistinguishable
from the Irish Scoti. Tacitus, in his life of Agricola, writing of a
period long antecedent to the establishment of the Dalriadic kingdom in
Argyleshire, contrasts them with the old Britons of the Cymric stock. He
traces an affinity between them and the Germans, because, unlike the
Britons of the south, the Caledonians were fair-haired and large-boned.
Columba, it is said, made conversions to Christianity in Pictland, but
his intercourse with the people was through the medium of an
interpreter. Bede, early in the eighth century, relates that the New
Testament had been translated into four native languages, the English,
the British or Welsh, the Scots (or Irish), and the Pictish. Philology
has tried its hand in vain; the names of rivers and other forms of local
nomenclature are made Celtic, Norse or Saxon, according to the bias of
the philologist. On the whole, we may give up the matter in despair,
unless we accept the rational view that the east and north of Scotland,
like England, were subject to long and overpowering incursions of
Scandinavians and Saxons, and that the people known as Picts was a
conglomerate made up of the three races or subraces rather, Celt, Norse
and Teutonic. The Pictish controversy, says Mr. Burton, "leaves
nothing but a melancholy record of wasted labour and defeated
ambition;" and that being so, we may be content to let it alone.
There was also the kingdom of Strathclyde. It formed part of that Cymric
territory which, in 600, extended down the entire west coast of Britain
from the Clyde to Land's End; was bounded on the east by the Saxon
kingdoms of Northumbria, North Anglia, Mercia and Wessex. The Saxon
kingdom of Northumbria consisted of Bernicia, from the Forth to the Tees
in England, and Deira which met North Anglia at the Humber. In process
of time the Cymric Celts were cut in two and the Scottish portion became
isolated by the Anglian conquest of Cumbria. But not only have we the
Cymric Celts and the Saxons in Scotland to deal with, but the
Scandinavian element, through the entire Lowlands, up the entire east,
north and north-west coasts. Through some of its numerous branches,
Norse, Icelandic or Danish, it has left too broad a stamp upon the
language, especially in the names of places, to be accounted for by mere
temporary inroads of the "sea-kings." Whatever the Picts may
have been, their kingdom never was, except nominally, and by the
imposition of a monarch from Dalriada, a Celtic country within the
historic period. Mr. Burton makes this clear enough in his work.*** It
was no mere stampede of Saxons under Edgar Atheling, at the conquest,
that made eastern Scotland Teutonic, modified by Scandinavian. Indeed,
many of the conquering bands that pass under the generic name of Norse
were, like the Angles of Northumbria, from that debateable territory
known as Schleswick.
Whether, however, the
people were more or less tinged with Norse blood, their language was
Saxon, more entirely so than the English has been since the Norman
conquest. In the regions of the early Norman Kings and under the
Plantagenets, "the pure well of English undefiled" was
adulterated with the French of the conquering race, and the literature
of England, as we find it in Chaucer, is more difficult for a modern
reader than that of John Barbour, Archdeacon of Aberdeen, and chaplain
of David Bruce, who was Chaucer’s contemporary. Take this passage from
Barbour’s "Bruce," for example, and let any one compare it
with a passage taken at random from "Canterbury Tales." It is
just before Bannockburn: -
"When this was said
–
The Scottismen commonally
Kneelt all doun, to God to pray,
And a short prayer, there made they,
To God to help them in that ficht.
And when the English king had sicht
Of them kneeland, he said in hy:
‘Yon folk kneel to ask mercy.’
Sir Ingram said: ‘Ye say sooth now,
They ask mercy, but not of you;
For their trespass to God they cry:
I tell you a thing sickerly,
That yon men will win or die;
For doubt of deid (fear of death) they sall not flee."
Barbour lived from 1316 to 1396, and
Chaucer from 1328 to 1400; and yet the Scottish poet, a few archaisms
excepted, speaks something like modern English, whilst the great
"father of English poetry" abounds in the Normanized dialect
of the court and literature of the fourteenth century London. There
evidently is no greater mistake made by historians than to attribute the
Saxon element all up the east coast, at St. Andrews’, Montrose or
Aberdeen, and round by Moray Firth to Inverness, as either the effect of
Anglian rule in Bernicia, or of immigration, on a large scale, after the
conquest in England. One might as well believe that all the Britons were
driven into the Welsh mountains, as folks used to say, or that the
Norsemen, who obtained so strong a hold in the north-western Highlands,
perished after their victory over the Gaels, instead of being absorbed,
and lost sight of, in the superior civilization, such as it was, of the
ancient Celt. If there were four tongues, what were they? Certainly
Pictish was not one of them. In Macbeth or Malcolm’s time it is
possible that four languages may have been spoken; if so, they must have
been Norse in Ross and the North-west, Gaelic in the west and centre,
Cymric in Strathclyde, and Saxon all over the east from the border, and
all the way round to Inverness. The Scots’ kings, in fact, ruled over
but a small portion of the Lowlands, even after Bannockburn, and there
were petty jarls or earls in Ross and Caithness long after Kenneth or
Duncan. These last were Norse rulers; but concerning Scandinavian
inroads more will be said in the next chapter. It is sufficient here to
note that the Saxon character of the entire east and north was of much
older date than most historians suppose, and that neither the conquest
of the Lowlands, the transfer of the government to Edinburgh, nor the
marriage of Malcolm Canmore with St. Margaret, whatever these have done
for the dynasty, effected any more than a superficial change upon the
people.
*A History of England in the Eighteenth
Century. By E.H. Lecky. (Amer. Ed.) Vol. II. p. 99.
** Burton; His. of Scot., Vol. I, 213.
***Mr. Burton's remarks
are worth quoting: "Overlying the little that we absolutely know of
the Picts, there is a great fact, that at a very early period -
whenever, indeed, the inhabitants of Scotland come forward in European
history - the territory of old assigned to the Picts was occupied by a
people thoroughly Gothic or Teutonic, whether they were the descendants
of the large limbed and red-haired Caledonians of Tacitus, or
subsequently found their way into the country. To the southward of the
Frith, we know pretty well that they were Saxons of Deira and Bernicia,
superseding the Romanized Britons; but all along northward the Lowlands
were people of the same origin. Those who see their descendants of the
present day, acknowledge the Teutonic type to be purer in them than in
the people of England. How far Celtic blood may have mingled with the
race we cannot tell, but it was the nature of the language obstinately
to resist all admixture with the Gaelic. The broadest and purest Lowland
Scots is spoken on the edge of the Highland line. It ought, one would
think, to be a curious and instructive topic for philosophy to deal
with, that while the established language of our country - of England
and Scotland - borrows at all hands - from the Greek, from Latin, from
French, it takes nothing whatever, either in its structure or
vocabulary, from the Celtic race, who have lived for centuries in the
same island with the Saxon-speaking races, English and Scots." History
of Scotland, Vo1. i. pp. 206. 207. |
