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Each month we present a chapter in the history of Scotland. We move forward in time each month.
Peoples of the Kingdom
Highlands and 'clans' (continued)
How violent was Highland society? By the sixteenth century - known in Gaelic poetry as the 'century of the forays' - it was notorious for its feuds, endemic lawlessness and barbarism. Yet the 'Highland problem' was largely the view of central government which had alternately ignored and exacerbated tensions in the Highlands for much of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Two Lowland perceptions of the Highlands emerged in the fourteenth century and began to merge: a new concern with a problem of lawlessness began to form in both parliament and king's council after 1369; and chroniclers, beginning with Fordun in the 1380s, began to distinguish between Highland and Lowland culture, dress, and customs, but focusing above all on language:
The manners and customs of the Scots vary with the diversity of their speech. For two languages are spoken amongst them, the Scottish [Gaelic] and the Teutonic [English]; the latter of which is the language of those who occupy the seaboard and plains, while the race of Scottish speech inhabits the Highlands and outlying islands. The people of the coast are of domestic and civilised habits ... The Highlanders and people of the islands, on the other hand, are a savage and untamed race, rude and independent.
Much the same views, stressing the differences between the two cultures, were repeated by almost every chronicler between Fordun and John Mair (or Major) writing in the 1520s.
By 1350 Gaelic was on the retreat, and between the Forth and the Moray Firth it was probably confined to upland parishes. Yet the occurrence of two sets of place, names, in Gaelic and Scots, in many parishes in the foothills of the Grampians indicates a bilingual population and a flexible linguistic frontier. The third language of medieval Scotland, Latin, which was still the main medium of the royal administration, continued to act as a bridge between the two cultures. It was the Lowland perception of Gaelic rather than the extent of its usage which was changing: by 1450 Lowlanders were calling it Erse rather than Scotice. They termed their own speech 'Inglis'; by 1500 they called it 'Scottis'. The effect was to make synonymous in the Lowland mind the Highlands and the Gaidhealtachd. Gaeldom, by contrast, held to a view which it had held since the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, of acknowledging a pan-Celtic Gaeldom stretching across the North Channel to Ireland as well as an allegiance both to the King of Scots and to Scotland. It found vivid form in a Gaelic poem written on the eve of Flodden in 1513, portraying the battle between James IV and Henry VIII's England as a clash between two cultures:
Meet it is to rise against Saxons ... ere they have taken our country from us.
Let us not yield up our native country.... Let us after the pattern of the Gael of Banbha [Ireland] watch over our fatherland ... Fight roughly. Like the Irish Gael, we will have no English Pale ... Drive the Saxons westward over the high sea, that Scotland may suffer no division.
A poem which fed on the myths of Irish history and which, like much Irish verse, separated Gael from Gall, Highlander from Lowlander, is nevertheless the most remarkable example of Scottish patriotism between the Declaration of Arbroath and the seventeenth century. In both its view of Scotland and of itself, Highland society felt little had changed.
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