Since the beginning of the eighteenth century, it
has been customary to
speak of the Scottish Highlanders as "Celts". The name is singularly
inappropriate. The word "Celt" was used by Caesar to
describe the peoples of
Middle Gaul, and it thence became almost synonymous with "Gallic".
The ancient inhabitants of Gaul were far from being
closely akin to the
ancient inhabitants of Scotland, although they belong to the same
general family. The latter were Picts and Goidels;
the former, Brythonsor
Britons, of the same race as those who settled in England and were
driven by the Saxon conquerors into Wales, as their
kinsmen were driveninto
Brittany by successive conquests of Gaul. In the south of Scotland,
Goidels and Brythons must at one period have met;
but the result of the
meeting was to drive the Goidels into the Highlands, where the Goidelic
or Gaelic form of speech still remains different
from the Welsh of the
descendants of the Britons. Thus the only reason for calling the
Scottish Highlanders "Celts" is that Caesar used
that name to describe a
race cognate with another race from which the Highlanders ought to be
carefully distinguished. In none of our ancient
records is the term "Celt"
ever employed to describe the Highlanders of Scotland. They never
called themselves Celtic; their neighbours never
gave them such a name; nor
would the term have possessed any significance, as applied to them,
before the eighteenth century. In 1703, a French
historian and Biblical
antiquary, Paul Yves Pezron, wrote a book about the people of Brittany,
entitled "Antiquite de la Nation et de la Langue des
Celtes autrement appellez
Gaulois". It was translated into English almost immediately,
and philologists soon discovered that the language
of Caesar's Celts was
related to the Gaelic of the Scottish Highlanders. On this ground
progressed the extension of the name, and the
Highlanders became
identified with, instead of being distinguished from, the Celts of Gaul.
The word Celt was used to describe both the whole
family (including Brythons
and Goidels), and also the special branch of the family to
which Caesar applied the term. It is as if the word
"Teutonic" had been used
to describe the whole Aryan Family, and had been specially employed
in speaking of the Romance peoples. The word
"Celtic" has, however,
become a technical term as opposed to "Saxon" or "English", and it is
impossible to avoid its use.
Besides the Goidels, or so-called Celts, and the
Brythonic Celts or
Britons, we find traces in Scotland of an earlier race who are known as
"Picts", a few fragments of whose language survive.
About the identity of
these Picts another controversy has been waged. Some look upon the
Pictish tongue as closely allied to Scottish Gaelic;
others regard it as
Brythonic rather than Goidelic; and Dr. Rhys surmises that it is really
an older form of speech, neither Goidelic nor
Brythonic, and probably
not allied to either, although, in the form in which its fragments have
come down to us, it has been deeply affected by
Brythonic forms. Be all
this as it may, it is important for us to remember that, at the dawn of
history, modern Scotland was populated entirely by
people now known as
"Celts", of whom the Brythonic portion were the later to appear, driving
the Goidels into the more mountainous districts. The
Picts, whatever their
origin, had become practically amalgamated with the "Celts", and
the Roman historians do not distinguish between
different kinds of
northern barbarians.
In the end of the fifth century and the beginning of
the sixth, a new
settlement of Goidels was made. These were the Scots, who founded the
kingdom of Dalriada, corresponding roughly to the
Modern Argyllshire. Some
fifty years later (_c._ 547) came the Angles under Ida, and
established a dominion along the coast from Tweed to
Forth, covering the modern
counties of Roxburgh, Berwick, Haddington, and Midlothian. Its
outlying fort was the castle of Edinburgh, the name
of which, in theform in
which we have it, has certainly been influenced by association
with the Northumbrian king, Edwin.[30] This district
remained a portion of the
kingdom of Northumbria till the tenth century, and it is of this
district alone that the word "English" can fairly be
used. Even here, however,
there must have been a considerable infusion of Celtic blood,
and such Celtic place-names as "Dunbar" still remain
even in the counties where
English place-names predominate. A distinguished Celtic
scholar tells us: "In all our ancient literature,
the inhabitants of ancient
Lothian are known as Saix-Brit, "i.e." Saxo-Britons, because
they were a Cymric people, governed by the Saxons of
Northumbria".[31] A
further non-Celtic influence was that of the Norse invaders, who
attacked the country from the ninth to the
eighteenth century, and
profoundly modified the racial character of the population on the south
and west coasts, in the islands, and along the east
coast as far south as the
Moray Firth.
Such, then, was the racial distribution of Scotland.
Picts, Goidelic Celts,
Brythonic Celts, Scots, and Anglo-Saxons were in possession of
the country. In the year 844, Kenneth MacAlpine,
King of the Scots of
Dalriada, united under his rule the ancient kingdoms of the Picts and
Scots, including the whole of Scotland from the
Pentland Firth to the
Forth. In 908, a brother of the King of Scots became King of the Britons
of Strathclyde, while Lothian, with the rest of
Northumbria, passed under
the overlordship of the House of Wessex. We have now arrived at
the commencement of the long dispute about the "overlordship".
We shall attempt to state
the main outlines as clearly as possible.
The foundation of the whole controversy lies in a
statement, "in the honest
English of the Winchester Chronicle", that, in 924, "was Eadward
king chosen to father and to lord of the Scots king
and of the Scots ,and of
Regnold king, and of all the Northumbrians", and also of the
Strathclyde, Brythons or Welsh. Mr. E.W. Robertson
has argued that noreal
weight can be given to this statement, for (1) "Regnold king" had
died in 921; (2) in 924, Edward the Elder was
striving to suppress the
Danes south of the Humber, and had no claims to overlordship of any kind
over the Northumbrian Danes and English; and (3) the
place assigned, Bakewell,
in Derbyshire, is improbable, and the recorded building of a
fort there is irrelevant. The reassertion of this
homage, under Aethelstan,
in 926, which occurs in one MS. of the Chronicle, is open to
the objection that it describes the King of Scots as
giving up idolatry, more
than three hundred and fifty years after the conversion of the
country; but as the entry under the year 924 is
probably in a contemporary
hand, considerable weight must be attached to the double
statement. In the reign of Edmund the Magnificent,
an event occurred which
has given fresh occasion for dispute. A famous passage in the
"Chronicle" (945 A.D.) tells how Edmund and Malcolm
I of Scotland conquered
Cumbria, which the English king gave to Malcolm on
condition that Malcolm should be his "midwyrtha" or
fellow-worker by sea and
land. Mr. Freeman interpreted this as a feudal grant, reading the
sense of "fealty" into "midwyrtha", and regarded the
district described as
"Cumbria" as including the whole of Strathclyde. It is somewhat
difficult to justify this position, especially as we
have no reason for
supposing that Edmund did invade Strathclyde, and since, in point of
fact, Strathclyde remained hostile to the kingdom of
Scotland long after this
date. In 946 the statement of the Chronicle is reasserted in
connection with the accession of Eadred, and in
somewhat stronger
words:--"the Scots gave him oaths, that they would all that he would".
Such are the main facts relating to the first two
divisions of the threefold
claim to overlordship, and their value will probably continue
to be estimated in accordance with the personal
feelings of the reader. It
is scarcely possible to claim that they are in any way decisive. Nor
can any further light be gained from the story of
what Mr. Lang has happily
termed the apocryphal eight which the King of Scots stroked on
the Dee in the reign of Edgar. In connection with
this "Great Commendation"
of 973, the Chronicle mentions only six kings as rowing
Edgar at Chester, and it wisely names no names. The
number eight, andthe
mention of Kenneth, King of Scots, as one of the oarsmen, have been
transferred to Mr. Freeman's pages from those of the
twelfth-century
chronicler, Florence of Worcester.
We pass now to the third section of the supremacy
argument. The district to
which we have referred as Lothian was, unquestionably, largely
inhabited by men of English race, and it formed part
of the Northumbrian
kingdom. Within the first quarter of the eleventh century it had passed
under the dominion of the Celtic kings of Scotland.
When and how this happened
is a mystery. The tract _De Northynbrorum Comitibus_ which used
to be attributed to Simeon of Durham, asserts that
it was ceded by Edgar to
Kenneth and that Kenneth did homage, and this story, elaborated by
John of Wallingford, has been frequently given as
the historical
explanation. But Simeon of Durham in his "History"[32] asserts that
Malcolm II, about 1016, wrested Lothian from the
Earl of Northumbria, and
there is internal evidence that the story of Edgar and Kenneth has
been constructed out of the known facts of Malcolm's
reign. It is, at all
events, certain that the Scottish kings in no sense governed Lothian
till after the battle of Carham in 1018, when
Malcolm and the
Strathclyde monarch Owen, defeated the Earl of Northumbria and added
Lothian to his dominions. This conquest was
confirmed by Canute in 1031,
and, in connection with the confirmation, the
Chronicle again speaks of
a doubtful homage which the Scots king "not long held", and, again, the
Chronicle, or one version of it, adds an impossible
statement--this time about
Macbeth, who had not yet appeared on the stage of history. The
year 1018 is also marked by the succession of
Malcolm's grandson,
Duncan, to the throne of his kinsman, Owen of Strathclyde, and on
Malcolm's death in 1034 the whole of Scotland was
nominally united under
Duncan I.[33] The consolidation of the kingdom was as yet in the future,
but from the end of the reign of Malcolm II there
was but one Kingdom of
Scotland. From this united kingdom we must exclude the islands, which
were largely inhabited by Norsemen. Both the
Hebrides and the islands of
Orkney and Shetland were outside the realm of
Scotland.
The names of Macbeth and "the gentle Duncan" suggest
the great drama which the
genius of Shakespeare constructed from the magic tale of
Hector Boece; but our path does not lie by the moor
near Forres, nor past
Birnam Wood or Dunsinane. Nor does the historian of the relations
between England and Scotland have anything to tell
about the English
expedition to restore Malcolm. All such tales emanate from Florence of
Worcester, and we know only that Siward of
Northumbria made a fruitless
invasion of Scotland, and that Macbeth reigned for
three years afterwards.
We have now traced, in outline, the connections
between the northern and
the southern portions of this island up to the date of the Norman
Conquest of England. We have found in Scotland a
population composed of
Pict, Scot, Goidel, Brython, Dane, and Angle, and we have seen how the
country came to be, in some sense, united under a
single monarch. It is not
possible to speak dogmatically of either of the two great problems
of the period--the racial distribution of the
country, and the Edwardian
claims to overlordship. But it is clear that no
portion of Scotland was,
in 1066, in any sense English, except the Lothians, of which Angles and
Danes had taken possession. From the Lothians, the
English influences must
have spread slightly into Strathclyde; but the fact that the Celtic
Kings of Scotland were strong enough to annex and
rule the Lothians as part
of a Celtic kingdom implies a limit to English colonization. As to
the feudal supremacy, it may be fairly said that
there is no portion of the
English claim that cannot be reasonably doubted, and whatever force
it retains must be of the nature of a cumulative
argument. It must, of
course, be recollected that Anglo-Norman chroniclers of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, like English historians of a
later date, regarded
themselves as holding a brief for the English claim, while, on the other
hand, Scottish writers would be the last to assert,
in their own case, a
complete absence of bias.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 30: Johnston: _Place-Names of Scotland_,
p. 102.]
[Footnote 31: Rev. Duncan MacGregor in _Scottish
Church Society
Conferences_. Second Series, Vol. II, p. 23.]
[Footnote 32: _Hist. Dun._ Rolls Series, i. 218.]
[Footnote 33: Duncan was the grandson of Malcolm,
and, by Pictish custom,
should not have succeeded. The "rightful" heir, an un-named
cousin of Malcolm, was murdered, and his sister,
Gruoch, who married the
Mormaor of Moray, left a son, Lulach, who thus represented a rival line,
whose claims may be connected with some of the
Highland risings against
the descendants of Duncan.]
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