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WS 2005 British History: Scotland Pätzold
A) Programme
WS 2005 British History: Scotland Pätzold
5 – 16 September 2005
Numbered (and titled) page references are to the READER, titled references
only are to the “Additional Materials”
No Date Topic
1 Monday
5 September
9-10.30
Roll call, 2nd
subjects of students
Programme: delete old 5.2. Law; new 5.2 Literature (week
2); Reader and Additional Materials for this class
Student Presentations (SP)
Part 2. Geography and History
a) Mitchison and Mackie, pp. 5-7
2 10.45-12.15 b) Lynch, “regional identities”, pp. 8-10; “Borders, to 1603”,
p. 83
c) Highlands and Islands: SP: Johnson and Boswell’s
journals
d) Borders, p. 83
3 13.30-15.00 e) Worksheet: Place names
f) Worksheet on: “A Sense of Place “, Writing Scotland ,
BBC 2004
4 Tuesday
6 September
9-10.30
Part 3: Scotland in the 20th
century: D. Ross, pp. 37-49
5 10.45-12.15 Interview with Jack McConnell, The Observer; January
2005; "McLeish Makes a difference", Economist, January
2001;
SP: McIlvanney, Docherty
6 13.30-15.00 Part 4. Scottish Nationalism
a) Early tribes/nations; see Survey article “Scotland”;
Reader pp. 12-3
b) Documents: Wars of Independence, pp. 50-56
SP: 1) John Barbour, The Bruce; 2) Blind Harry, Wallace
“Independence, Wars of”, Lynch pp. 84-7
7 Wednesday
7 September
9-10.30
d) “Anglo-Scottish relations”, pp. 78-81
e) “Union of the Crowns”, p. 91
f) Union of 1707: Corke, pp. 61-2; Lynch, pp. 89—90;
SP: Scott, Rob Roy
8 10.45-12.15 g) Post-1707: “Scotland” , survey article; Corke, pp. 63-9
h) Local Government Reform 1975 (in “Scotland”, survey
article)
i) Devolution : Davies, pp. 111-3; "A nation once again?",
Economist April 1999; "The New Scottish Parliament",
Punch on Scotland (1977) [handout]
9 13.30-15.00 k) “national identity; nationalism”, pp. 70-75; " What makes
a good citizen?" (Scotsman 2005)
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SP Finlayson, The Scots
Thursday
8 September
9-10.30
Schama, “Britannia Incorporated”, from British History
Schools and Scottish History. Materials: "The School
History Curriculum in Scotland and Issues of National
Identity" (IJHLTR 2003); Prof. Tom Devine; editorial from the
Scotsman (February 2005)
Prepare the panel discussion: 4 panel members + chair
11 10.45-12.15 Part 5 Culture
18th
century: “The Scottish Enlightenment” in “Scotland”,
survey article;
SP Encyclopaedia Britannica; Lynch, “bookselling”, p. 83
SP Ossian; Galt, Annals of the Parish
19th
century: SP The Edinburgh Review
12 13.30-15.00 Part 4: “Should Scottish History be Taught?”; panel
discussion with questions from the floor; 2 speakers each
for and against, one chairperson
13 Friday
9 September
9-10.30
Part 5 Culture ctd
Early 20th
ct: “The Scottish Renaissance”:
SP. MacDiarmid, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle
Corke, pp. 114-8
14 10.45-12.15 5.1. Language
a) Gaelic: Lynch, pp. 119-20; Scotsman article, Feb 2005
b) Scots: Lynch, pp. 127-8; Murison, pp. 121-6
Interview with Pauline Speitel, “Dictionaries”;
“Scots and German”, Gardner, pp. 132-4
Worksheet on “The Words we Use”, Writing Scotland no 8
15 13.30-15.00 “Local Hero”
B) Additional Materials
"Scotland", Survey article, from Encyclopedia
Britannica 2001
Interview with Jack McConnell
McLeish makes a difference
Refitting on the Clyde
Raising the standard
Game on
Schools and Scottish History: editorial from The Scotsman;
Tom Devine; Sydney Wood, “The School History Curriculum in
Scotland & Issues of National Identity“
Gaelic – Scotsman article Feb 2005
What makes a good citizen?
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The Skye Bridge Saga
North Sea Oil
A nation once again?
Scottish Writing
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Encyclopedia Britannica 2001
Scotland,
the most northerly of the four parts of the United Kingdom, occupies about one-third
of the island of Great Britain. It is bounded by England in the south and on the other
three sides by sea: by the Atlantic Ocean on the west and north and by the North
Sea on the east. Its mainland area is 28,269 square miles (73,217 square
kilometres); including inhabited islands, it has an area of 30,418 square miles. The
west coast is fringed by deep indentations (sea lochs or fjords) and by numerous
islands, varying in size from mere rocks to the relatively large landmasses of Lewis
and Harris, Skye, and Mull. The island clusters of the Orkneys and the Shetlands lie
to the north. At its greatest length, measured from Cape Wrath to the Mull of
Galloway, the mainland of Scotland extends to 274 miles (441 kilometres), while the
maximum breadth, measured from Applecross, in the western Highland region, to
Buchan Ness, in the eastern Grampian region, is 154 miles. But, because of the
deep penetration of the sea in the sea lochs and firths (estuaries), most places are
within 40 to 50 miles of the sea, and only 30 miles of land separate the Firth of Clyde
and the Firth of Forth, the two great estuarine inlets on the west and east coasts,
respectively.
The name Scotland (in Latin, Scotia) derives from the Scots, a Celtic people from
Ireland who settled on the west coast in about the 5th century. The name Caledonia
has often been applied to Scotland, especially in poetry. It is derived from the Roman
name, Caledonii, of a tribe in the northern part of what is now Scotland. The kingdom
of the Scots gradually gained control over neighbouring peoples until, by the 11th
century, they ruled over roughly the country's modern mainland area. Medieval
struggles for independence from England were successful, but in 1603 the king of
Scots became king also of England, and in 1707 Scotland's parliament was joined to
that of England. Thus Scotland no longer has a separate legislature or executive, nor
diplomatic or consular representation abroad, and its economy is integrated into that
of the rest of Britain. It does, however, have a separate administration, and certain
important aspects of national life were preserved at the Union of 1707, notably its
radically different legal and educational systems and its Presbyterian national church.
Above all, Scotland has retained much of its cultural identity. Superficially, the
external perception of this may descend to an image of whiskey-swilling, tartan-clad
Highlanders in mist-enshrouded castles, looking backward to bloody battles and
romantic tales. But the tenacity of native culture has a deeper reality: in political and
social attitudes distinct from those south of the border, in the strength of Scottish
literature (still flourishing in three languages--English, Gaelic, and Scots), and in a
musical and folktale tradition that survives to the present day. Though Scotland's
population is only about five million, many millions abroad proudly claim Scottish
descent and keep some of these traditions alive after many generations.
Physical and human geography
THE LAND
Relief.
Scotland is traditionally divided into three geographic areas: the Highlands in the
north, the Central Lowlands, and the Southern Uplands. A glance at a map will show
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that lowland areas are not confined to the central belt and indeed extend along the
greater part of the eastern seaboard. The east coast also contrasts with the west in
its smoother outline, thus creating an east-west distinction in topography as well as a
north-south one. The Highlands are bisected by the fault line of the Great Glen,
which is occupied by a series of lochs (lakes), the largest of which is Loch Ness,
famous for its probably mythical monster. North of the Great Glen is an ancient
plateau, which, through long erosion, has been cut into a series of peaks of fairly
uniform height separated by glens (valleys) carved out by glaciers. The northwestern
fringe of the mainland is particularly barren, the Lewisian gneisses having been worn
down by severe glaciation to produce a hummocky landscape, dotted by small lochs
and rocks protruding from thin, acidic soil. The landscape is varied by spectacular
Torridonian sandstone mountains, weathered into sheer cliffs, rock terraces, and
pinnacles. Southeast of the Great Glen are the Grampian Mountains, which were
also formed by glaciation, though there are intrusions such as the granitic masses of
the Cairngorm Mountains. The Grampians are on the whole less rocky and rugged
than the mountains of the northwest, being more rounded and grassy with wider
areas of plateau. But many have cliffs and pinnacles that provide challenges for the
mountaineer, and the area contains Britain's highest mountains, including Ben Nevis
(4,406 feet; 1,343 metres) at the southern end of the Great Glen. There are some
flatter areas, the most striking being the Moor of Rannoch, a bleak expanse of bogs
and granitic rocks, with narrow, deep lochs, such as Loch Rannoch and Loch Ericht.
The southeastern margin of the Highlands is clearly marked by the Highland
Boundary Fault, running northeast to southwest from Stonehaven, just south of
Aberdeen, to Helensburgh on the River Clyde, and passing through Loch Lomond,
Scotland's largest stretch of inland water. The southern boundary of the Central
Lowlands is not such a continuous escarpment, but the fault beginning in the
northeast with the Lammermuir and Moorfoot hills and extending to Glen App, in the
southwest, is a distinct dividing line. In some ways the label Lowlands is a misnomer,
for, although this part of Scotland is low by comparison with adjoining areas, it is by
no means flat. The landscape includes hills such as the Sidlaws, the Ochils, the
Campsies, and the Pentlands, composed of volcanic rocks rising as high as 1,898
feet (579 metres). The Southern Uplands are not so high as the Highlands.
Glaciation has resulted in narrow, flat valleys separating rolling mountains. To the
east of Nithsdale the hills are rounded, gently sloping, and grass-covered, providing
excellent grazing for sheep, and they open out along the valley of the lower Tweed
into the rich farming land of the Merse. To the west of Nithsdale the landscape is
rougher, with granitic intrusions around Loch Doon, and the soil is more peaty and
wet. The high moorlands and hills, of which Merrick (2,766 feet) is the highest, are
also suitable for sheep farming. The uplands slope toward the coastal plains along
the Solway Firth in the south and to The Machars and the Mull of Galloway farther
west.
Soil and drainage.
With Scotland's diversity in geologic structure, relief, and weather, the character of
the soil varies greatly. In the northwest, the Hebrides, the Shetlands, and other
areas, where the geologic substratum is ancient rock, resistant to weather, the soil is
poor and cultivation is possible only at river mouths, glens, and coastal strips. On the
west coast of some Hebridean Islands, however, there are stretches of calcareous
sand (the machair) suitable for farming. On moors and hills there is widespread peat.
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Where there is good soil for arable farming, as in the Orkneys, the eastern Highland
region, the northeastern coastal plain, and the Lowlands, it has largely been derived
from old red sandstone and younger rocks. Upward and eastward tilting of the
Highlands some 50 million years ago formed a watershed near the west coast.
Eastward drainage is dominant, but deeply glaciated rock basins in the northern
Highlands have led to the presence of numerous large lochs. There are fewer lochs
in the Grampian Mountains, although the large lochs of Ericht, Rannoch, and Tay are
in the area. Well-graded rivers such as the Dee, the Don, and the Spey meander
eastward and northeastward to the North Sea. The Tay and Forth emerge from the
southern Grampians to flow out of the eastern Lowlands in two large estuaries. The
Clyde and the Tweed both rise in the Southern Uplands, the one flowing to the west
into the Firth of Clyde and the other to the east into the North Sea, while the Nith, the
Annan, and a few other rivers run south into the Solway Firth. Lochs are numerous in
the Highlands, ranging from moraine-dammed lochans (pools) in mountain corries
(cirques) to large and deep lochs filling rock basins. In the Lowlands and Southern
Uplands, lochs are shallower and less numerous.
Climate.
Scotland has a temperate oceanic climate, milder than might be expected from its
latitude. Despite its small area, there are considerable variations. Rainfall is greatest
in the mountainous areas of the west, as prevailing winds blow from the southwest
and come laden with moisture from the Atlantic. East winds are common only in
winter and spring, when cold, dry continental air masses envelop the east coast.
Hence, the west tends to be milder in winter, with less frost and with snow seldom
lying long at lower altitudes, but it is damper and cloudier than the east in summer.
Tiree, in the Inner Hebrides off the west coast, has a mean temperature in winter of
41 F (5 C) in the coldest month (as high as southeastern England), whereas Dundee,
on the east coast, has 37 F (2.8 C). Dundee's mean temperature in the warmest
month is 59 F (15 C) and Tiree's 57 F (13.9 C). There is a smaller range of
temperatures over the year in Scotland than in southern England. Rainfall varies
remarkably. Some two-thirds of Scotland exceeds 40 inches (1,000 millimetres)
annually, the average for Britain, with 142 inches in the Ben Nevis area and
somewhat more near Loch Quoich farther to the northwest. In the flat Outer
Hebrides, rainfall is lower, as are annual averages in the east, the Moray Firth having
less than 25 inches and Dundee less than 32 inches. A significant amount of snow
falls above 1,500 feet in the Highlands in winter.
Plant and animal life.
Lower ground, up to about 1,500 feet, was once covered with natural forests, which
have been cleared in the course of centuries and replaced in some areas by
introduced trees, plants, and crops. Survivals of the original forest are found
sporadically throughout the Highlands, for example in the pinewoods of
Rothiemurchus in the Spey Valley. Grass and heather cover most of the Grampians
and Southern Uplands, where the soil is not so wet and dank as in the northwestern
Highlands. On peaty soil, shrubs such as bearberry, crowberry, and blaeberry
(bilberry) grow, as does bog cotton. Alpine and Arctic species flourish on the highest
slopes and plateaus of the Grampians, including saxifrages, creeping azalea, and
dwarf willows. Ben Lawers is noted for the wealth of its mountain flora.
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For its size, Scotland is rich in animal life. Herds of red deer graze in the corries and
remote glens, and their population is estimated at about 300,000. Although formerly a
woodland species, they are now found mainly on higher ground, but roe deer still
inhabit the woods, along with sika and fallow deer, both introduced species, in some
areas. Foxes and badgers are widespread, and the number of wildcats is thought to
be increasing. Rabbits were earlier decimated by the disease of myxomatosis but are
now recovering to earlier numbers. Pine marten, otters, and mountain and brown
hares are among other wild mammals. A few ospreys nest in Scotland, and golden
eagles, buzzards, peregrine falcons, and kestrels are the most notable of resident
birds of prey. The red grouse, the Scottish subspecies of the willow grouse, has long
been hunted for sport. Other species of grouse include the ptarmigan, found only at
higher altitudes, and the large capercaillie, reintroduced into Scottish pinewoods.
Large numbers of seabirds, such as gannets, fulmars, guillemots, and various types
of gull, breed on cliffs
and on the isolated rocks known as stacks around the magnificent coasts. Almost
half the world's Atlantic, or gray, seals breed in Scottish waters, especially around the
Northern and Western Isles, as do numerous common seals; dolphins and porpoises
are regularly seen and whales occasionally, especially on the west coast.
Settlement patterns.
In early times, mountains, rivers, and seas divided the people into self-sufficient
communities, which developed a strong sense of identity. This sense has been
eroded by social mobility, modern transport, broadcasting, and other standardizing
influences, and by a general move from a rural to an urban way of life. Yet vestiges
of regional consciousness linger. The Shetland islanders speak of Scotland with
detachment. The Galloway area in the southwest, cut off by hills from the rest of the
country, has a vigorous regional patriotism. The Gaelic-speaking people of the
Hebrides and western Highlands find their language a bond of community. The
northeast has its own local traditions, embodied especially in a still vigorous Scots
dialect, and Borderers celebrate their local festivals with fervour. The most thickly
populated rural areas are those with the best farming land, such as in
Lothian region and in the northeast. The Highlands once nourished a large
population, but continuous emigration since the 18th century has caused it to
dwindle. Now settlements in the Highlands are mostly crofting townships; that is,
small farms of a few acres grouped together in an irregular manner. The old pattern
of crofting was one of communities practicing a kind of cooperative farming, with
strips of common land allotted annually to individuals. Examples of the old system
survive, but now crofters have their own arable land fenced in, while they share the
common grazing land. In Lothian region and other areas of high farming, the
communal farm has long been replaced by single farms with steadings (farmsteads)
and workers' houses. Scotland is noticeably lacking in those old villages that evolved
in England from medieval hamlets of joint tenants. Some planned villages were built
by enterprising landowners in the 18th century. Burghs, often little bigger than
villages, were mostly set up as trading centres, ports, or river crossings or to
command entrances to mountain passes. Around the east and northeast coast, there
are many surviving small towns that were once obliged to be self-contained in
consumer industries and burghal institutions because of poor land transport. Growth
of industry and transport has produced urbanization. Edinburgh, Dundee, and
Aberdeen are centres of administration, commerce, and industry for their areas, but
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only central Clydeside, including Glasgow with its satellite towns, is large enough to
deserve the official title of conurbation.
THE PEOPLE
For many centuries there was continual strife between the Celtic Scots of the
Highlands and the western islands and the Anglo-Saxons of the Lowlands. Only in
the 20th century has the mixture been widely seen as a basis for a rich unified
Scottish culture; the people of Shetland and Orkney have tended to remain apart
from both of these elements and to look to Scandinavia as the mirror of their Norse
heritage. Important immigrant groups have arrived, most notably Irish labour; there
have also been significant groups of Jews, Lithuanians, Italians, and, after World War
II, Poles and others, as well as a more recent influx of Asians, especially from
Pakistan.
Scotland is remarkably free from racial and religious strife. The Church of Scotland is
the established religion and largest communion, though membership has been
steadily declining. It is presbyterian in structure and evangelical in doctrine. It is
controlled by a hierarchy of church courts, from the kirk session (governing the affairs
of a congregation), through the presbytery (covering a group of parishes) and the
synod, to the General Assembly, at which clergy and lay representatives meet
annually in Edinburgh. The Roman Catholic church is organized into two
archdioceses and six dioceses. Roman Catholics have their own schools, built and
staffed from public funds on the same terms as the state schools. The Scottish
Episcopal Church is also significant, and there are congregations of other
denominations, such as the Free Church of Scotland, Baptists, Congregationalists,
Methodists, and Unitarians. In addition, immigrants have brought their diverse
religions; Glasgow, for instance, now has several synagogues and mosques and a
Buddhist centre.
Language.
Scotland's linguistic heritage is complex. Though the vast majority now speak
English, two other languages, Gaelic and Scots, still have wide influence. Gaelic, the
Celtic language brought from Ireland by the Scots, is now spoken by a small minority
mainly in the Western Isles and western Highlands, with pockets elsewhere,
especially in Glasgow. Although it now faces a strong possibility of extinction, interest
in Gaelic has increased in recent years, and its literature flourishes as never before.
Scots was originally a form of Old English that diverged from southern forms of the
language in the Middle Ages, becoming a separate national tongue by the 15th
century; political and other factors, notably union with England, caused English
gradually to be adopted as the official and standard language, but Scots survives in
the dialects of the Lowland areas, in a vigorous tradition of poetry and drama and in
aspects of the English spoken by most Scots. Both Gaelic and Scots are recorded
and supported by major works of scholarship, the Linguistic Survey of Scotland
(1975-86); The Scottish National Dictionary (1931-76); A Dictionary of the Older
Scottish Tongue (1931); and The Historical Dictionary of Scottish Gaelic, begun in
1966.
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Demographic trends.
While the land area of Scotland makes up about a third of that of the United
Kingdom, its population constitutes only 9 percent, with the greatest concentration in
the central belt. Since the mid-1960s there has been a significant shift in age
structure, with an increase in the older age groups (65 and over) and an even more
marked decrease in the young (aged 15 and under). North Sea oil has brought many
people to the northeast and north, not only from other parts of Scotland and the
United Kingdom but also from other countries, notably the United States. Large-scale
emigration of Scots to countries such as Canada, the United States, and Australia
has dwindled.
THE ECONOMY
Scotland's economy has in recent times shared in acute form the problems besetting
many European countries, brought about by rapid changes that include the move
away from heavy industries. Unemployment is a serious problem, especially in those
areas where major industries have declined, and it is consistently higher than in the
rest of the United Kingdom. Successive governments have made efforts to improve
these conditions by a variety of measures. Chief among these is the Scottish
Development Agency, which was set up in 1975 to encourage industry. The
Highlands and Islands Development Board had been established 10 years earlier to
carry out similar functions in the more remote regions.
Resources.
Until recently, Scotland's chief mineral resource was coal. The industry reached its
peak production of 43 million tons in 1913 but has since declined drastically. In
particular, deep mining has become largely uneconomical, and by the late 1980s
numbers employed had dwindled to a few thousand. Other minerals that have been
worked intermittently include gold, silver, chromite, diatomite, and dolomite, but none
has been successfully exploited. Though peat is available to a depth of two feet or
more over some 1.7 million acres (688,000 hectares), its economic value is limited. It
is still burned for fuel in the Highlands, but the time and labour involved in cutting and
drying in an uncertain climate have led to decreasing use.
During the 1970s a new Scottish resource, North Sea oil, was developed. The oil
fields lie mostly in Scottish waters, but the British government holds their ownership
and receives all the revenue yield. The oil has been located and extracted by large
companies, most with the aid of U.S. technology. Aberdeen is the centre of the oil
industry, and the Shetlands have also benefited from discoveries in adjacent waters.
Tens of thousands of jobs were created in Scotland by onshore oil-related
enterprises, such as building oil production platforms and servicing North Sea
operators, though the new-found prosperity fell back when oil revenues were
severely reduced in 1986. Natural gas from North Sea wells has replaced
manufactured gas in
Scotland.
Water is a valuable resource, especially for generating electricity. The North of
Scotland Hydro-Electric Board (NSHEB) was set up in 1943 to build dams and power
stations. It operates several hydroelectric stations and has pumped storage schemes
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by which electricity generated in off-peak periods may be used to pump water to a
higher dam, from which it descends at peak periods to operate the turbogenerators.
The NSHEB has also coal- and oil-fired stations. The South of Scotland Electricity
Board (SSEB) has reduced its use of coal as a source of primary fuel, and nuclear
generation, with the commissioning of the nuclear station at Torness, east of
Edinburgh, now accounts for the major portion of Scotland's output of electricity. At
Dounreay, in the Highland region, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority has
been carrying out experiments with a fast breeder-reactor since 1959.
Agriculture, forestry, and fishing.
As an economic resource wild animals, birds, and river fishes are of minor
importance, though deer stalking, grouse shooting, and fishing
ex: Laxford River
provide employment in parts of the Highlands in which other activities are hardly
possible. Venison is exported to the European mainland, and deer farming produces
an increasing amount of meat.
Fishing.
The seafood industry continues to play a vital role in Scotland's economy. More than
two-thirds of the total British fish and shellfish catch is now landed into Scottish ports.
Peterhead ranks as the European Communities' top whitefish-landing port, and the
Grampian region is one of the United Kingdom's main centres of fish processing.
Haddock, cod, herring, sole, and
mackerel are the main species landed. Nephrops (langoustine) is the most important
shellfish, though scallop, queen scallop, lobster, and several crab varieties are also
important. There is some commercial salmon fishing on the west coast, and in recent
years fish farming has been developed, especially of salmon and shellfish along the
coast and trout in the inland lochs.
opp > sea loch
Agriculture.
In terms of productivity, no industry has made greater progress than agriculture in
postwar years. Owing to mechanization, the labour force has fallen from about
88,000 in 1951 to barely a third of that number, though some casual and part-time
workers are also employed. Most of Scotland is hilly or marginal land, with hill-sheep
farming predominating, particularly in the Southern Uplands and in the Highlands; in
the northeast livestock raising is dominant. In the southwest dairy farming suits the
wetter, milder climate and has a convenient market in the central Clydeside
conurbation. Arable cropping is mainly found along the eastern seaboard. Barley and
wheat are the main cereals; the acreage devoted to potatoes, though substantial, has
declined. New crops, such as rapeseed, have increased considerably, while oat
production has fallen and been replaced by barley as the main cereal for livestock
feed. Raspberry growing is mainly concentrated in the Tayside region. Tomatoes are
still grown in greenhouses in the Clyde Valley, but the business has declined. The
output of turnips and hay for livestock feeding has fallen, being replaced by an
increase in grass silage. In animal production, the most striking feature has been the
rise in the number of cattle and, to a lesser extent, sheep; there has also been
expansion in pig and poultry production. Crofting is a special section of the
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agricultural scene that has to be supplemented by other work, such as forestry, road
work, catering for tourists, and weaving. Though there are thousands of crofts in the
northern area, many of them are no longer cultivated.
Forestry.
Forestry is an expanding industry, which has helped retain the population in rural
areas. It is managed by the Forestry Commission, a public body, and by private
landowners, including forestry companies. Although the Forestry Commission plants
throughout the country, it plays a particularly important role in Highland development.
The trees it grows are mainly conifers, including Sitka spruce, Norway spruce, Scotch
pine, European larch, and Douglas fir.
Industry.
In its industrial heyday Scotland's prosperity was based on such heavy industries as
coal, steel, shipbuilding, and engineering. In more recent times these have been the
industries most exposed to foreign competition and to changes of demand. The task
of correcting Scotland's industrial balance by reducing dependence on heavy
industries and replacing them with high-technology enterprises and those making
consumer goods has been slow and laborious, but considerable progress has been
made in diversifying the structure of industry and in modernizing it. As with coal, the
history of steel and shipbuilding is one of a reduction in the number of plants and
employees. The sale of the nationalized British Shipbuilders to the private sector
resulted in a continued reduction in the number of major shipyards in Scotland.
Throughout the 1980s the special facilities built to provide rigs and platforms for
exploiting the North Sea oil and gas reserves experienced fluctuating demand, and
some of them closed. Severe cuts in capacity were also made in the steel industry as
the state-owned British Steel Corporation strove to meet the government's financial
targets as a prelude to privatization. Though not matching the older manufactures in
terms of employment, the computer, office equipment, and electronic industries have
expanded, notably in the Fife, Lothian, and Strathclyde regions. Much of this
investment has come from overseas, particularly the United States.
Printing and brewing formerly were well-established industries in Edinburgh and
Glasgow but are now in decline. Distilleries in the Highlands and the northeast
produce the whiskey for which Scotland is internationally famous. Despite crushing
taxation on home consumption, whiskey sales have continued to increase, and its
appeal in foreign countries remains high. Separate records of Scotland's exports are
not kept, but it is known that whiskey's contribution to the British overseas trade is
substantial. In the 1980s its total was exceeded by office machinery and data-
processing equipment, and petroleum products are also important. Mechanical,
electrical, and electronic engineering industries export much of their output, and the
textile industries of the Borders region and the Harris tweed in the Hebrides also
have a considerable, though reduced, export business. Since the mid-1960s there
has been a marked shift in employment from manufacturing to service industries,
including tourism. The majority of tourists come from other parts of Scotland or the
United Kingdom, but considerably more than a million annually come from abroad.
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Finance.
Scotland had eight joint-stock banks until the 1950s, but, as a result of mergers, the
number was reduced to three: the Bank of Scotland, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and
the Clydesdale Bank, which retain the right to issue their own notes. Since the
mid-1960s, there has been a substantial expansion of financial and business
services, with Edinburgh becoming second only to London in this field. The banking
sector has grown and has now expanded into North America and Europe. It has also
pioneered new applications of technology. Merchant banking facilities are more
widely available, and the services historically associated with Scotland, such as the
management of unit and investment trusts and life funds, have expanded. One-third
of Britain's investment trusts are managed in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Dundee. They
have large investments in North America and specialized knowledge of conditions
there. Unit trusts are represented in Edinburgh, where some leading British insurance
companies also have their headquarters.
Transportation.
Public transport was formerly largely state-owned, but there has been a considerable
move toward the private sector. Deregulation of bus services in the 1980s led to
greater competition, and the Scottish Transport Group, formed in 1968 to control bus
and steamer services on the west coast, was largely privatized. Proliferation of
automobiles has made it difficult for omnibus companies to maintain profitable
services in rural areas, where they are being either subsidized by local authorities
and the government or withdrawn. Ship services from mainland ports to island towns
have been curtailed and replaced by car ferries using short crossings; such ferries
operate from several west coast towns to the Hebrides and other islands and from
north and east coast ports to the Orkneys and Shetlands.
Recent decades have seen considerable improvement in the Scottish road and
bridge network, with some main routes being brought up to motorway standard and
many single-lane roads in the Highlands widened. Improvements in the east and
north were speeded up to cope with increased traffic generated by North Sea oil
production, and bridges have been built over the Cromarty and Moray firths.
Railway services have been severely reduced since 1948, when more than 3,000
miles of track were open to passenger and freight traffic. Many branch lines and
stations have been closed, and the route mileage has shrunk to less than two-thirds
of the former total. Diesel engines have replaced steam locomotives. Suburban lines
from Glasgow on both sides of the Clyde and to
Airdrie in the east have been electrified, as has the main line from London (Euston)
to Glasgow, and further electrification is planned.
Scottish ports handle many more imports than exports, a large proportion of which is
sent abroad via English ports. Glasgow, the largest port, is under the administration
of the Clyde Port Authority. The Forth ports, including Grangemouth and Leith, are
grouped under the Forth Ports Authority, while Dundee and Aberdeen are
independent. There are also important oil ports in Shetland (Sullom Voe), Orkney
(Flotta), and on the east coast. Greenock and Grangemouth are equipped for
container traffic, and extensive improvement schemes have been carried out at Leith
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and other ports. Coastal trade has dwindled because of the competition of motor
transport, and inland waterways have never been a commercial success.
There has been a marked increase in air travel, with some direct services to Europe,
including a large number of charter flights. Scotland has major airports at Glasgow,
Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and Prestwick on the west coast, the latter of which, being
remarkably fog-free, is used for transatlantic flights.
ADMINISTRATION AND SOCIAL CONDITIONS
Government.
Scotland is represented by 72 MPs in the United Kingdom House of Commons, and
all Scottish peers are now entitled to sit in the House of Lords. The secretary of state
for Scotland is responsible to Parliament for departments under his jurisdiction.
These consist of the departments of Home and Health, Education, Agriculture and
Fisheries, Industry, and Development. In his multifarious functions the secretary of
state is assisted by a team of four ministers, one of whom is in the House of Lords. In
the House of Commons, bills relating solely to Scotland are referred to the Scottish
Grand Committee, which consists of all Scottish MPs. The Grand Committee has a
general debate on a bill and usually sends it for detailed examination to the Scottish
Standing Committee, a smaller body of Scottish MPs. The Select Committee on
Scottish Affairs was discontinued by the government in 1988 because there were
insufficient Scottish MPs to ensure a majority on the committee. Opposition parties
set up an unofficial, extra-parliamentary committee to take its place.
The major British parties have separate organizations in Scotland, hold annual
conferences, and take notice of Scottish problems and grievances. They hardly have
distinctive policies for Scotland but rather adapt general proposals to Scottish
purposes. Devolution, or self-government, became a lively issue during the late 20th
century, though the question had agitated
the political scene in earlier years. The Scottish National Party advocates complete
independence, but since the 1970s devolution in the form of an assembly in
Edinburgh has been a key political issue for all parties. A referendum in 1979 on the
creation of such an assembly to govern domestic affairs but without full financial
control failed to gain the support that the
government demanded. The nonparty Campaign for a Scottish Assembly, however,
has kept the issue alive.
The local government structure of Scotland was reorganized in 1975. The number of
local authorities was reduced and a two-tier system created. In place of the rather
complex pattern of cities, burghs, and counties, the country was divided into nine
regions: Borders, Central, Dumfries and Galloway, Fife, Grampian, Highland, Lothian,
Strathclyde, and Tayside. Three island authorities--Orkney Islands, Shetland Islands,
and Western Isles--have separate status. Power is distributed among the regions and
the 53 districts into which they are divided. The regional authorities are responsible
for social work, transport, education, police, and fire services, while the districts deal
with such matters as housing, sanitation, libraries, and recreation facilities. Planning
is shared by district and regional councils. Elections to these authorities are held
every four years; most local contests are fought on party lines. Labour controls
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Strathclyde, the largest region, and is the predominant party in local as in
parliamentary politics. Regional and district councils are financed partly by
government grants and partly by local taxation. This was formerly levied by a system
of rates on householders, commercial properties, and industrial plants, but in 1989
the household rates were replaced by a poll tax paid at a flat rate by every adult
resident. Government grants, subject to annual negotiations, cover a proportion of
the spending of local authorities.
Justice.
In law Scotland has preserved its own system and courts. The lord advocate and the
solicitor general for Scotland are the ministers responsible for justice; they advise the
government on legal affairs and help to draft legislation. The country is divided into
six sheriffdoms, each with a sheriff principal (chief judge) and a varying number of
sheriffs. The most serious offenses triable by jury are reserved for the High Court of
Justiciary, the supreme court for criminal cases. The judges are the same as those of
the Court of Session, the supreme court for civil cases. An appeal may be directed to
the House of Lords from the Court of Session, but not from the High Court of
Justiciary. The Court of Session, consisting of the lord president, the lord justice
clerk, and 22 other judges, sits in Edinburgh and is divided into Inner and Outer
houses. The Outer House judges hear cases at first instance. The Inner House, of
which there are two divisions, each of four judges, hears appeals from the Outer
House and from inferior courts. The sheriff courts have a wide jurisdiction in civil
cases, but certain actions, such as challenging government
decisions, are reserved for the Court of Session. They also deal with most criminal
offenses, with serious cases tried by jury. The police investigate cases of crime
discovered by or made known to them, but the decision whether or not to prosecute
is made by the lord advocate in the High Court and by procurator fiscals in the sheriff
courts. District courts, presided over by lay judges, deal with minor criminal offenses.
In 1971 a system of children's hearings was set up to deal with children in difficulties,
whether from lack of parental control, criminal behaviour, or other cause.
Police forces.
Since the secretary of state has a general responsibility for law and order, he shares
control of the police forces with local authorities. The police committees provide the
buildings and equipment needed by the forces. The secretary of state, assisted by
the chief inspector of constabulary, is concerned with efficiency and discipline; he
approves the appointment of chief constables and can make regulations on
conditions of service.
Military services and defense.
Scotland is the site of several key defense installations, including several belonging
to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and a naval base for American
nuclear submarines on the Holy Loch in the Firth of Clyde. The Royal Navy has a
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base at Rosyth on the Firth of Forth, and the Royal Air Force has stations at Kinloss,
in Grampian region, and at Leuchars, in Fife region. Scottish infantry regiments of the
army are still distinguished by their tartans, kilts for the Highland and trousers for the
Lowland regiments. Recent amalgamations have reduced the number to seven, of
which the Royal Scots has the distinction of being the oldest infantry regiment in the
British army.
Education.
In Scotland, education is supervised by the Scottish Education Department and
administered by the education committees of the regional authorities. Unlike the
English system, fee-charging, independent "public schools" play only a minor role in
Scottish education. The number of state nursery schools, though increasing, remains
insufficient; private schools and play groups help to fill the gap. School is compulsory
to age 16. Teachers receive their professional training in colleges of education.
Since 1960 the number of universities has increased from four to eight. Of the
original four, St. Andrews, Glasgow, and Aberdeen were all founded in the 15th
century and Edinburgh in 1583. In the early 1960s, the University of Strathclyde in
Glasgow and the Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, formerly technological
colleges, were upgraded to universities, retaining their scientific and technological
emphasis. The University of Dundee was separated from the University of St.
Andrews, which had some departments in Dundee. The University of Stirling, the only
completely new foundation, was opened in 1967. The new universities do not teach
law and divinity but place most emphasis on science and technology and have close
links with science-based industries in their neighbourhoods.
Health and welfare.
Health and welfare services and housing are the joint responsibility of government
departments and local authorities. The National Health Service is administered in
Scotland by several Health Boards and the Common Services Agency; social work is
administered mainly by local authorities. Scotland has a poor record in terms of
certain diseases, with one of the highest incidences in Europe of heart disease and
lung cancer.
CULTURAL LIFE
In spite of the threat of dominance by its more powerful partner, Scottish culture has
remained remarkably vigorous in the 20th century. Its strength springs in part from
the diverse strands which make up its background, in particular the sharp contacts
with the European mainstream cultures. It has also been enriched by contacts with
the European mainstream brought about by the mobility of the Scottish people from
the Middle Ages on. All of the arts receive support from the Scottish Arts Council,
which has a large measure of autonomy from the Arts Council of Great Britain.
Scottish writers have the choice of three languages--English, Scots, and Gaelic.
Hugh MacDiarmid, the poet, nationalist, and Marxist, gained an international
reputation for his Scottish poetry, and others, such as Robert Garioch, followed his
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lead. Gaelic poets such as Sorley Maclean and Derick Thompson are highly
esteemed, as is Iain Crichton Smith, also known for his novels in English. Painting
and sculpture flourish, as evidenced not only in official exhibitions but also in the
burgeoning of many small galleries. In music the Scottish National Orchestra,
Scottish Opera, and Scottish Ballet have achieved international standing. The annual
Edinburgh International Festival, with its Fringe, has become one of the world's
largest cultural events. Scotland has an unparalleled wealth of surviving traditional
music, ranging from the work songs of the Hebrides to the ballads of the northeast.
There has also been renewed interest in Scotland's traditional instruments, the
bagpipe, the fiddle, and the clarsach (the small Celtic harp). All aspects of traditional
culture are researched, archived, and taught in the School of Scottish Studies in the
University of Edinburgh.
Edinburgh also houses cultural institutions such as the National Library of Scotland,
which has a statutory right to receive copies of all books published in the United
Kingdom and Ireland. The National Gallery of Scotland has paintings by many
famous European artists in addition to works by Allan Ramsay, Sir Henry Raeburn,
and other Scottish painters. The Scottish National Portrait Gallery portrays the
principal personages in Scotland's history, and the Scottish National Gallery of
Modern Art has works by contemporary European painters and sculptors, as well as
those of native artists. The National Museums of Scotland contain archaeological and
later evidence for the development of the material and domestic aspects of Scottish
society and have extensive collections in their departments of art and archaeology,
natural history, technology, and geology. These galleries and museums are the
responsibility of the secretary of state and are maintained by public funds.
The press.
Edinburgh was once one of the centres of the United Kingdom's publishing industry,
but Scottish publishing declined drastically, especially in the postwar years, with the
move of many major houses to London. Since the early 1970s, however, there has
been a revival. Like the British press as a whole, the Scottish press has expanded as
technological advance has cut costs. The Scotsman, published in Edinburgh, and the
Glasgow Herald rank highest of the daily newspapers in antiquity and influence,
though both are owned by multinational corporations with headquarters outside
Scotland. Scottish Field and Scots Magazine are two well-established monthly
magazines covering traditional, leisure, and historical interests.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has Scottish news and other programs,
including some in Gaelic. Most broadcasting in that language is on radio. Radio
Scotland has largely locally produced programs. There are three independent
television companies and several independent radio companies.
Sports and recreation.
Sports plays an important part in the life of Scotland. Association football (soccer) still
has a wide following and is dominated by the Glasgow clubs, Rangers and Celtic.
Rugby Union football (amateur) is played especially by private schools and by their
former pupils, but in the towns of the Borders region it draws players and spectators
from a wider social range. In the Highlands, shinty, a hockeylike game, is popular,
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Curling is another traditional sport, though temperatures are seldom low enough for it
to be other than an indoor sport played on man-made ice. Golf, which originated in
Scotland, is accessible not merely to the affluent through private clubs as in many
countries but to most Scots through widespread public facilities. The Old Course at
St. Andrews in Fife is the most famous of many excellent seaside courses. For hill-
walking, rock-climbing, sailing, and canoeing, Scotland has outstanding natural
advantages. Skiing facilities have been developed in the Cairngorms and other
areas. Hunting, shooting, and fishing are traditionally the sports of the rich, but the
last is popular with all classes. Other outdoor sports, such as tossing the caber (a
heavy pole) and throwing the hammer are integral to the Highland games, at which
pipe bands and Highland dancers (usually solo) also perform. Many Scots find these
games and other traditions, such as Burns suppers (honouring Robert Burns) and
eating haggis (a delicacy consisting of offal boiled in a sheep's stomach), a self-
conscious parade of legendary characteristics that have little to do with ordinary
Scottish life--a show put on, like national costumes, to gratify the expectations of
tourists (encouraged by the royal family's annual appearance at the Braemar
Gathering near Balmoral Castle). Scottish country dancing, however, is a pastime
whose popularity has spread far beyond Scotland.
History
ANCIENT TIMES
Evidence of human settlement in the area later known as Scotland dates from the 3rd
millennium BC. The earliest people, Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) hunters and
fishermen who probably reached Scotland via an ancient land-bridge from the
continent, were to be found on the west coast, near Oban, and as far south as
Kirkcudbright, where their settlements are marked by large deposits of discarded
mollusk shells. Remains suggest that settlers at the Forth estuary, in the area of
modern Stirling, obtained meat from stranded whales. By early in the 2nd millennium
BC, Neolithic (New Stone Age) farmers had begun cultivating cereals and keeping
cattle and sheep. They made settlements on the west coast and as far north as
Shetland. Many built collective chamber tombs, the example at Maeshowe in Orkney
being the finest in Britain. A settlement of such people at Skara Brae in Orkney
consists of a cluster of seven self-contained huts connected by covered galleries or
alleys. The " Beaker folk," so called from the shape of their drinking vessels, came to
eastern Scotland from northern Europe, probably beginning about 1800 BC. They
buried their dead in individual graves and were pioneers in bronze working. The most
impressive monuments of Bronze Age Scotland are the stone circles, presumably for
religious ceremonies, such as those at Callanish in Lewis and Brodgar in Orkney, the
latter being more than 300 feet (91 metres) in diameter.
From about 700 BC onward there was a distinct final period in Scottish prehistory.
This period is the subject of current archaeological controversy, with somewhat less
stress than in the past being placed on the importance of the introduction of iron
fabrication or on the impact of large new groups of iron-using settlers. One key
occurrence in the middle of the 1st millennium was the change from a relatively warm
and dry climate to one that was cooler and wetter. In terms of technology, this period
was marked by the appearance of hill forts, defensive structures having stone
ramparts with an internal frame of timber; a good example is at Abernethy near the
Tay. Some of these forts have been dated to the 7th and 6th centuries BC, which
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might suggest that they were adopted by already established tribes rather than
introduced by incomers. Massive decorated bronze armlets with Celtic
ornamentation, found in northeastern Scotland and dated to the period AD 50-150,
suggest that chieftains from outside may have come to these tribes at this period,
displaced from farther south by fresh settlers from the Continent and then by the
advent of the Romans in AD 43. From 100 BC the "brochs" appeared in the extreme
north of Scotland and the northern isles. These were high, round towers, which at
Mousa in Shetland stand almost 50 feet (15 metres) in height. The broch dwellers
may have carried on intermittent warfare with the fort builders of farther south. On the
other hand, the two types of structures may not represent two wholly distinct cultures,
and the two peoples may have together constituted the ancestors of the people later
known as the Picts.
The houses of this people were circular, sometimes standing alone, sometimes in
groups of 15 or more, as at Hayhope Knowe in the Cheviot Hills on the border
between modern Scotland and England. Some single steadings, set in bogs or on
lakesides, are called crannogs. Corn growing was probably of minor importance in
the economy; the people were pastoralists and food gatherers. They were ruled by a
warrior aristocracy whose bronze and iron parade equipment has, in a few instances,
survived.
Roman penetration and the Dark Age peoples.
Gnaeus Julius Agricola, the Roman governor of Britain (AD 77-84), was the first
Roman general to operate extensively in Scotland. He defeated the natives at Mons
Graupius, possibly in Banffshire, probably in AD 84. In the following year he was
recalled, and his policy of containing the hostile tribes within the Highland zone,
which he had marked by building a legionary fortress at Inchtuthil in Strathmore, was
not continued. His tactics were logical, if Scotland was to be subdued, but probably
required the commitment of more troops than the overall strategy of the Roman
Empire could afford. The only other period in which a forward policy was attempted
was between about 144 and about 190, when a turf wall, the Antonine Wall (named
after the emperor Antoninus Pius), was manned between the Forth and the Clyde.
The still-impressive stone structure known as Hadrian's Wall had been built between
the Tyne and Solway Firth in the years 122-128, and it was to be the permanent
northern frontier of Roman Britain. After a northern rising, the emperor Severus
supervised the restoring of the Hadrianic line in the years 209-211, and thereafter
southeastern Scotland seems to have enjoyed almost a century of peace. In the 4th
century there were successive raids from north of the Wall and periodic withdrawals
of Roman troops to the Continent. Despite increasing use of native buffer-states in
front of the Wall, the Romans found their frontier indefensible by the end of the 4th
century.
At Housesteads, at about the midpoint of Hadrian's Wall, archaeologists have
uncovered a market where northern natives exchanged cattle and hides for Roman
products: in this way some Roman wares, and possibly more general cultural
influences, found their way north, but the scale of this commerce was probably small.
Roman civilization, typified by the towns and villas, or country houses, of southern
Britain, was unknown in Scotland, which as a whole was never dominated by the
Romans, or even strongly influenced by them.
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From about AD 400 there was a long period for which written evidence is scanty.
Four peoples--the Picts, the Scots, the Britons, and the Angles--were eventually to
merge and thus form the kingdom of Scots.
The Picts occupied Scotland north of the Forth. Their identity has been much
debated, but they possessed a distinctive culture, seen particularly in their carved
symbol stones. Their original language, presumably non-Indo-European, has
disappeared; some Picts probably spoke a Brythonic Celtic language. Pictish unity
may have been impaired by their apparent tradition of matrilineal succession to the
throne.
The Scots, from Dalriada in northern Ireland, colonized the Argyll area, probably in
the late 5th century. Their continuing connection with Ireland was a source of
strength to them, and Scots and Irish Gaelic (Goidelic Celtic languages) did not
become distinct from one another until the late Middle Ages. Scottish Dalriada soon
extended its cultural as well as its military sway east and south, though one of its
greatest kings, Aidan, was, in 603, defeated by the Angles at Degsastan near the
later Scottish border.
The Britons, speaking a Brythonic Celtic language, colonized Scotland from farther
south, probably from the first century BC onward. They lost control of southeastern
Scotland to the Angles in the early 7th century AD. The British heroic poem
Gododdin describes a stage in this process. The British kingdom of Strathclyde in
southwestern Scotland remained, with its capital at Dumbarton.
The Angles were Teutonic-speaking invaders from across the North Sea. Settling
from the 5th century, they had by the early 7th century created the kingdom of
Northumbria, stretching from the Humber to the Forth. A decisive check to their
northward advance was administered in 685 by the Picts at the Battle of
Nechtansmere in Angus.
Christianity.
Christianity was introduced to Scotland in late Roman times, and traditions of St.
Ninian's evangelizing in the southwest have survived. He is a shadowy figure, and it
is doubtful that his work extended very far north.
Christianity was firmly established throughout Scotland by the Celtic clergy, coming
with the Scots settlers from Ireland, and possibly giving the Scots a decisive cultural
advantage in the early unification of kingdoms. The Celtic church lacked a territorial
organization of parishes and dioceses and a division between secular and regular
clergy: its communities of missionary monks were ideal agents of conversion. The
best-known figure, possibly the greatest, is St. Columba, who founded his monastery
at Iona, an island of the Inner Hebrides, in 565; his life was written by Adamnan,
abbot of Iona, within a century of his death. Columba is believed to have been
influential in converting the Picts, and he did much to support the Scots king Aidan
politically.
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St. Aidan brought the Celtic church to Northumbria in the 630s, establishing his
monastery at Lindisfarne. At the Synod of Whitby in 664 the king of Northumbria had
to decide between the Celtic and the Roman styles of Christianity: he chose the
latter. There had been differences over such observances as the dating of Easter,
but there was no question of the Celtic monks' being regarded as schismatics. The
Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Bede, a monk of Jarrow in
Northumbria (died 735), is a first-rate source for the history of Dark Age Scotland and
shows remarkable sympathy with the Celtic clergy, though Bede was a Roman monk.
In the early 8th century the church among the Picts and Scots accepted Roman
usages on such questions as Easter. Nevertheless, the church in Scotland remained
Celtic in many ways until the 11th century. Still dominated by its communities of
clergy (who were called Célidé or Culdees), it clearly corresponded well to the tribal
nature of society.
The Norse influence.
Viking raids on the coasts of Britain began at the end of the 8th century, Lindisfarne
and Iona being pillaged in the 790s. By the mid-9th century, Norse settlement of the
western and northern isles and of Caithness and Sutherland had begun, probably
owing largely to overpopulation on the west coast of Norway. During the 10th
century, Orkney and Shetland were ruled by Norse earls nominally subject to
Norway. In 1098 Magnus II Barefoot, king of Norway, successfully asserted his
authority in the northern and western isles and made an agreement with the king of
Scots on their respective spheres of influence. A mid-12th-century earl of Orkney,
Ragnvald, built the great cathedral at Kirkwall in honour of his martyred uncle St.
Magnus.
The Norse legacy to Scotland was long-lasting. In the mid-12th century there was a
rising against the Norse in the west under a native leader, Somerled, who drove them
from the greater part of mainland Argyll. A Norwegian expedition of 1263 under King
Haakon IV failed to maintain the Norse presence in the Hebrides, and three years
later they were ceded to Scotland by the Treaty of Perth. In 1468-69 the northern
isles of Orkney and Shetland were pawned to Scotland as part of a marriage
settlement with the crown of Denmark-Norway. A Scandinavian language, the Norn,
was spoken in these Viking possessions, and some Norse linguistic influence is
discernible in Shetland to the present day.
THE UNIFICATION OF THE KINGDOM
In 843 Kenneth I MacAlpin, king of Scots, also became king of the Picts and crushed
resistance to his assuming the throne. Kenneth may have had a claim on the Pictish
throne through the matrilineal law of succession; probably the Picts, too, had been
weakened by Norse attacks. The Norse threat helped to weld together the new
kingdom of Alba and to cause its heartlands to be located in eastern Scotland, the
former Pictland, with Dunkeld becoming its religious capital. But within Alba it was the
Scots who established a cultural and linguistic supremacy, no doubt merely
confirming a tendency seen before 843.
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As the English kingdom was consolidated, its kings, in the face of Norse attacks,
found it useful to have an understanding with Alba. In 945 Edmund of England is said
to have leased to Malcolm I of Alba the whole of Cumbria, probably an area including
land on both sides of the western half of the later Anglo-Scottish border. In the late
10th century a similar arrangement seems to have been made for Lothian, the
corresponding territory to the east. The Scots confirmed their hold on Lothian, from
the Forth to the Tweed, when, about 1016, Malcolm II defeated a Northumbrian army
at Carham. About the same time, Malcolm II placed his grandson Duncan I upon the
throne of the British kingdom of Strathclyde. Duncan succeeded Malcolm in 1034 and
brought Strathclyde into the kingdom of Scots. During the next two centuries the
Scots kings pushed their effective power north and west--William I was successful in
the north and Alexander II in the west--until mainland Scotland became one political
unit. Less discernible but as important was the way the various peoples grew
together, though significant linguistic and other differences remained.
According to the Celtic system of succession, known as tanistry, a king could be
succeeded by any male member of the derbfine, a family group of four
generations: members of collateral branches seem to have been preferred to
descendants, and the successor, or tanist, might be named in his predecessor's
lifetime. This system, in practice, led to many successions by the killing of one's
predecessor. Thus Duncan I was killed by his cousin Macbeth in 1040, and Macbeth
was killed by Malcolm III Canmore, Duncan I's son, in 1057. Shakespeare freely
adapted the story of Macbeth, who historically seems to have been a successful king
and who may have gone on pilgrimage to Rome.
Up to the 11th century the unification was the work of a Scots Gaelic-speaking
dynasty, and there is place-name evidence of the penetration of Gaelic south of the
Forth. But from then on, the Teutonic English speech that had come to Scotland from
the kingdom of Northumbria began to attain mastery, and Gaelic began its slow
retreat north and west. This is not obscured by the fact that, from the 12th century
onward, Anglo-Norman was for a time the speech of the leaders of society in
England and Scotland alike. By the later Middle Ages, the language known to
modern scholars as Old English had evolved into two separate languages, now
called Middle English and Middle Scots, the latter with the court of the Stewart
(Stuart) kings of Scots as its focus. After 1603, the increasing political and cultural
assimilation of Scotland to England checked the further development of Scots as a
separate language.
The persistence of distinctively Celtic institutions in post-12th-century Scotland is a
more complex question, as will be seen from the way in which primogeniture
replaced tanistry as the system of royal succession. It can be argued, however, that a
Celtic stress on the family bond in society persisted throughout the Middle Ages and
beyond--and not only in the Highlands, with its clan organization of society.
The development of the monarchy.
Malcolm III Canmore (1058-93) came to the throne by disposing of his rivals and
thereafter sought, in five unsuccessful raids, to extend his kingdom into northern
England. Whereas his first wife, Ingibjorg, was the daughter of a Norse earl of
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Orkney, his second, Margaret, came from the Saxon royal house of England. With
Margaret and her sons, Scotland entered a phase of being particularly receptive to
cultural influence from the south. Margaret was a great patroness of the church but
without altering its organization as her sons were to do.
On the death of Malcolm III on his last English raid, sustained attempts were made to
prevent the application of the southern custom of succession by primogeniture. Both
Malcolm's brother and Malcolm's son by his first marriage held the throne for short
periods: but it was the three sons of Malcolm and Margaret who eventually
established themselves-- Edgar (1097-1107), Alexander I (1107-24), and David I
(1124-53). Such was the force of Celtic reaction against southern influence that
Edgar and Alexander I could be said to owe their thrones solely to English aid and
were feudally subject to the English king. The descendants of Malcolm III's first
marriage continued to trouble the ruling dynasty until the early 13th century, but the
descendants of his second retained the throne. It happened that, until the late 13th
century, the heir to the throne by primogeniture was always the obvious candidate. It
is noteworthy that in charters of about 1145, David I's son Henry (who was to die
before his father) is described as rex designatus, very much like the tanist of the
Celtic system. It is thus very hard to date precisely the acceptance of southern
custom as exemplified by primogeniture.
David I (1124-53).
David I was by marriage a leading landowner in England and was well known at the
English court. He was, nevertheless, an independent monarch, making Scotland
strong by drawing on English cultural and organizational influences. Under him and
his successors many Anglo-Norman families came to Scotland, and their members
were rewarded with lands and offices. Among the most important were the Bruces in
Annandale, the de Morvilles in Ayrshire and Lauderdale, and the Fitzalans, who
became hereditary High Stewards and who, as the Stewart dynasty, were to inherit
the throne, in Renfrewshire. (After the 16th century the Stewart dynasty was known
by its French spelling, "Stuart.") Such men were often given large estates in outlying
areas to bolster the king's authority where it was weak.
The decentralized form of government and society that resulted was one of the many
variants of what is known as feudalism, with tenants in chief holding lands, with
jurisdiction over their inhabitants, from the king, in return for the performance of
military and other services. An essentially new element in Scottish society was the
written charter, setting out the rights and obligations involved in landholding. But the
way in which the Anglo-Norman families, in their position as tenants in chief, were
successfully grafted onto the existing society suggests that the Celtic and feudal
social systems, although one stressed family bonds and the other legal contracts,
were by no means mutually incompatible. The clan system of Highland Scotland
became tinged with feudal influences, whereas Lowland Scottish feudalism retained
a strong emphasis on the family.
David began to spread direct royal influence through the kingdom by the creation of
the office of sheriff (vicecomes), a royal judge and administrator ruling an area of the
kingdom from one of the royal castles. Centrally, a nucleus of government officials,
such as the chancellor, the chamberlain, and the justiciar, was created by David and
Page 23
his successors; these officials, with other tenants in chief called to give advice, made
up the royal court ( Curia Regis). This body became formalized in various ways: by
the mid-13th century it might meet as the king's council to discuss various types of
business; and before the Wars of Independence (see below) the royal court in its
capacity as the Supreme Court of Law was already being described as a Parliament.
The almost total loss of all of the Scottish governmental records from before the early
14th century should not lead one to underestimate the efficiency of the Scottish kings'
government in this period; historians have now done much to assemble the surviving
royal documents from scattered sources.
Medieval economy and society.
From David's time onward, the burghs, or incorporated towns, were created as
centres of trade and small-scale manufacture in an overwhelmingly agrarian
economy. At first, all burghs probably had equal rights. Later, however, royal burghs
had, by their charters, the exclusive right of overseas trade, though tenants in chief
could create burghs with local trade privileges. Burghs evolved their own law to
govern trading transactions, and disputes could be referred to the Court of the Four
Burghs (originally Berwick, Edinburgh, Roxburgh, and Stirling). Many of the original
townspeople, or burgesses, were newcomers to Scotland. At Berwick, the great
trading town of the 13th century, exporting the wool of the border monasteries,
Flemish merchants had their own Red Hall, which they defended to the death against
English attack in 1296. Besides commercial contacts with England, there is evidence
of Scottish trading with the Low Countries and with Norway in the period before the
Wars of Independence.
The church was decisively remodeled by David I and his successors. A clear division
emerged between secular and regular clergy according to the normal western
European pattern. A complete system of parishes and dioceses was established. But
the system of "appropriating" the revenue of parish churches to central religious
institutions meant that the top-heaviness in wealth and resources of the church in
Scotland was a built-in feature of its existence until the Reformation. Kings and other
great men vied in setting up monasteries. Alexander I had founded houses of
Augustinian canons at Scone and Inchcolm, while among David's foundations were
the Cistercian houses of Melrose and Newbattle and the Augustinian houses of
Cambuskenneth and Holyrood. Augustinian canons might also serve as the clergy of
a cathedral, as they did at St. Andrews. Prominent foundations by the magnates
included Walter Fitzalan's Cluniac house at Paisley and Hugh de Morville's
Premonstratensian house at Dryburgh. Later royal foundations included the
Benedictine house at Arbroath, established by William I.
From the standpoint of a later age, when the monasteries had lost their spiritual
force, the piety of David I especially seemed a misapplication of royal resources. But
the original monasteries, with their supply of trained manpower for royal service, their
hospitality, and their learning, epitomized that stability which it was royal policy to
achieve.
From at least 1072, the English church, particularly the archbishop of York, sought
some control over the Scottish church; the Scottish church was weakened in the face
of such a threat through having no metropolitan see. But, probably in 1192, the pope
Page 24
by the bull Cum Universi declared the Scottish church to be subject only to Rome;
and in 1225 the bull Quidam Vestrum permitted the Scottish church, lacking a
metropolitan see, to hold provincial councils by authority of Rome. Such councils,
which might have served to check abuses, were, however, seldom held.
It has been argued that the cultural developments encouraged by the church in pre-
Reformation Scotland were not as great as might be expected, but this may be a
false impression created because the manuscript evidence has failed to survive. The
monasteries of Melrose and Holyrood had each a chronicle, and Adam of Dryburgh
was an able theologian of the late 12th
century. Surviving Romanesque churches show that Scotland partook of the common
European architectural tradition of the time: good small examples are at Dalmeny,
near Edinburgh, and at Leuchars, in Fife. Glasgow and Elgin cathedrals are
noteworthy, and St. Andrews Cathedral is impressive even in its ruined state. There
are also distinguished examples of castle architecture, such as Bothwell in
Lanarkshire; and the castles of Argyll may reflect a distinctive mixture of influences,
including Norse ones.
David I's successors.
Malcolm IV (1153-65) was a fairly successful king, defeating Somerled when the
latter, who had been triumphant over the Scandinavians in Argyll, turned against the
kingdom of Scots. Malcolm's brother, William I the Lion (1165-1214), subdued much
of the north and established royal castles there. After his capture on a raid into
England, he was forced to become feudally subject to the English king by the Treaty
of Falaise (1174); he was able, however, to buy back his kingdom's independence by
the Quitclaim of Canterbury in 1189, though it should be emphasized that this
document disposed of the Treaty of Falaise and not of the less precise claims of
superiority over Scotland that English kings had put forward over the previous
century. William's son, Alexander II (1214-49), subdued Argyll and was about to
proceed against the Hebrides at the time of his death. His son, Alexander III
(1249-86), brought these islands within the Scottish kingdom in 1266, adroitly fended
off English claims to overlordship, and brought to Scotland the peace and prosperity
typified by the commercial growth of Berwick. In the perspective of the subsequent
Wars of Independence, it was inevitable that Scots should look back on his reign as a
golden age.
THE WARS OF INDEPENDENCE
Competition for the throne.
With the death, in 1286, of Alexander III and of his young granddaughter Margaret,
the "Maid of Norway," four years later, almost two centuries of relatively amicable
Anglo-Scottish relations came to an end. A complete uncertainty as to the proper
succession to the throne provided Edward I of England and his successors with a
chance to intervene in and then to assimilate Scotland. Though the two countries
were feudal monarchies of a largely similar type, the English attempt was, in practice,
too tactless to have any hope of success. Besides, the struggle for independence
disclosed that a marked degree of national unity had arisen among the different
peoples of Scotland. The Anglo-Scottish conflict thus begun gave Scotland a basic
Page 25
tendency--to seek self-sufficiency and at the same time to look to continental Europe
for alliances and inspiration--that persisted at least until 1560.
Before the death of the Maid of Norway, the Scottish interim government of
"guardians" had agreed (by the Treaty of Birgham, 1290) that she should marry the
heir of Edward I of England, though Scotland was to be preserved as a separate
kingdom. After her death, 13 claimants for the Scottish crown emerged, most of them
Scottish magnates. The Scots had initially no reason to suspect the motives of
Edward I in undertaking to judge the various claims. It emerged, however, that
Edward saw himself not as an outside arbitrator but as the feudal superior of the
Scottish monarch and, therefore, able to dispose of Scotland as a fief. That Edward's
interpretation was disingenuous is suggested by the fact that he had not invoked the
old and vague English claims to superiority over Scotland while the Maid of Norway
was still alive and had made a treaty with Scotland on a basis of equality, not as a
feudal superior claiming rights of wardship and marriage over the Maid.
The claimants to the throne, who had much to lose by antagonizing Edward,
generally agreed to acknowledge his superior lordship over Scotland. But a different
answer to his claim to lordship was given by the "community of the realm" (the
important laymen and churchmen of Scotland as a group), who declined to commit
whoever was to be king of Scots on this issue and thus displayed a sophisticated
sense of national unity.
Robert Bruce and John Balliol, descendants of a younger brother of Malcolm IV and
William, emerged as the leading competitors, and in 1292 Edward I named the latter
as king. When Edward sought to exert his overlordship by taking law cases on
appeal from Scotland and by summoning Balliol to do military service for him in
France, the Scots determined to resist. In 1295 they concluded an alliance with
France, and in 1296 Edward's army marched north, sacking Berwick on its way.
Edward forced the submission of Balliol and of Scotland with ease. National
resistance to English government of Scotland grew slowly thereafter and was led by
William Wallace, a knight's son, in the absence of a leader from the magnates.
Wallace defeated the English at Stirling Bridge in 1297 but lost at Falkirk the next
year. He was executed in London in 1305, having shown that heroic leadership
without social status was not enough. When Robert Bruce, grandson of the
competitor, rose in revolt in 1306 and had himself crowned Robert I, he supplied the
focus necessary for the considerable potential of national resistance.
Robert I the Bruce (1306-29).
In several years of mixed fortunes thereafter, Robert had both the English and his
opponents within Scotland to contend with. Edward I's death, in 1307, and the
dissension in England under Edward II were assets that Bruce took full advantage of.
He excelled as a statesman and as a military leader specializing in harrying tactics; it
is ironic that he should be remembered best for the atypical set-piece battle that he
incurred and won at Bannockburn in 1314. The Declaration of Arbroath of 1320 is
perhaps more informative about his methods. Ostensibly a letter from the magnates
of Scotland to the pope, pledging their support for King Robert, it seems in reality to
have been framed by Bernard de Linton, Robert's chancellor. In committing Robert to
Page 26
see the independence struggle through, it likewise committed those who set their
seals to it. Some of them were waverers in the national cause, whether or not Robert
had proof of this at the time, and his hand was now strengthened against them.
Robert I secured from England a recognition of Scotland's independence by the
Treaty of Northampton in 1328; the following year the pope granted to the
independent kings of Scots the right to be anointed with holy oil, but that year also
Robert died. By the appropriate standards of medieval kingship his success had
been total; but by the nature of medieval kingship, his successor was left with the
same struggle to wage all over again.
David II (1329-71).
Robert I's son, David II, has perhaps received unfair treatment from historians
through having been contrasted with his illustrious father. Just over five years of age
at his accession, he was soon confronted with a renewal of the Anglo-Scottish war,
exacerbated by the ambitions of those Scots who had been deprived of their property
by Robert I or otherwise disaffected. In the 1330s Edward Balliol, pursuing the claim
to the throne of his father John, overran southern Scotland. In return for English help,
he gave away to England southern lands and strongpoints not recaptured fully by the
Scots for a century. After the Scottish defeat at Halidon Hill near Berwick in 1333,
David was forced to flee to France in the following year. Berwick itself fell to the
English and was never again in Scottish hands except in the period 1461-82.
The Scots gradually regained the initiative, and in 1341 David was able to return to
Scotland. But in 1346 David II himself was captured at the Battle of Neville's Cross
near Durham. He was released in 1357 for a ransom of 100,000 merks. This ransom,
if paid (and three-quarters of it eventually was), would constitute a serious burden on
Scotland, and there is evidence of
Parliament's using this national emergency to establish some checks on the actions
of the crown. In addition, the representatives of the royal burghs, which were
important as an accessible source of finance, established a continuing right to sit in
Parliament with the magnates and churchmen from the 1360s on, thus constituting
the third of the "Three Estates."
Complex evidence relating to these transactions has been uniformly interpreted in a
way discreditable to David. Another interpretation is possible. That he collected
revenues more assiduously than he made ransom payments may indicate a
reasoned attempt to strengthen the crown financially; and his negotiations, especially
of 1363, whereby a member of the English royal house was to succeed him on the
Scottish throne, may have been a diplomatic charade. Whatever his faults, David left
Scotland with both its economy and its independence intact.
The long wars with England necessarily took their toll, retarding Scotland's economy
and weakening the authority of its government. The buildings that have survived from
this era are inferior to earlier work, much of which, of course, suffered damage at this
time. War was increasingly expensive, and taxation was increased drastically to pay
David II's ransom. But again, a rosier alternative picture can be painted, suggesting
that the burgesses were able to meet the increased taxation because of increased
prosperity through the still-continuing trade with England.
Page 27
SCOTLAND IN THE 15TH CENTURY
The early Stewart kings.
David was succeeded by Robert II (1371-90), previously the high steward and son of
Robert I's daughter Marjory. The next king was Robert II's son John, restyled Robert
III (1390-1406). It may be that the future Robert II's conduct was responsible for
dissension in Scotland during David II's reign, particularly during his captivity in
England. At any rate, neither Robert II nor his son Robert III were strong kings and
some nobles regarded both as upstarts, and the latter as of doubtful legitimacy.
There thus began a long period of monarchical weakness in Scotland, accentuated
by a series of royal minorities in the 15th and 16th centuries. Historians have made
much of the turbulence of these times, but there were comparable periods of
governmental weakness in contemporary England and France; and "bonds of
manrent" and other alliances made by the magnates with each other and with their
social inferiors should be seen as much as attempts to secure political stability in
their own localities as threats to the overall peace of the kingdom.
Robert III's younger brother, Robert Stewart, 1st Duke of Albany, more than once
was given powers to rule in his brother's name, and Robert's son James may have
been sent to France in 1406 in order to keep him out of Albany's clutches. But James
was captured at sea by the English, and shortly afterward Robert III died. Following
Albany's death in 1420, his son Murdac continued to misgovern the realm until 1424,
when James I, then 29, was ransomed.
The Douglas family was becoming particularly powerful at this time. They had been
rewarded with the gift of the royal forest of Selkirk and other lands in south and
southwest Scotland for loyal service to Robert I. But the growing power of the
Douglases in this vital border area posed by the end of the 14th century a growing
threat to the crown. At the same time the Lords of the Isles had attained a stature in
the western Highlands that overtopped that of the kings of Scots.
One notable event was the founding of Scotland's first university at St. Andrews. The
Wars of Independence led Scottish students to go to Paris rather than to Oxford or
Cambridge. But universities were the training grounds of the clergy, and when, in the
period 1408-18, Scotland recognized the antipope Benedict XIII after he had been
abandoned by France, it became expedient for Scotland to have its own university.
The bulls of foundation from Benedict XIII reached St. Andrews in 1414.
James I (1406-37) was an active and able king, keen to make the crown wealthy and
powerful again. Perhaps he was overeager to make up for time lost in his captivity,
and thus he prompted the opposition that led to his death. The new posts of
comptroller and treasurer were created to gather royal revenues more efficiently.
Murdac, 2nd Duke of Albany, was executed in 1425, and other powerful men were
overawed, even in the far north. The laws were to be revised, and in 1426 a court for
civil cases was set up, presaging the later Court of Session.
Possibly to balance the power of the magnates, it was enacted in 1426 that all
tenants in chief should attend Parliament in person. More realistically, they were,
Page 28
from 1428, permitted to send representatives from each shire. Even this system did
not operate until the late 16th century. If James had been inspired during his captivity
by the English House of Commons, he was unable to transplant that institution to
Scotland. The Scots Parliament, like that of many other European countries,
remained throughout the medieval period the feudal court of the kings of Scots;
lacking the distinctive development of the English Parliament, it did not differ
essentially in kind from the feudal court of any great magnate. Despite, or perhaps
because of, his innovative vigour, James made enemies for himself. His murder in
1437 was part of an attempt to seize the throne for Walter Stewart, Earl of Atholl, but
the conspirators were executed and James's young son succeeded him.
James II (1437-60) was six years old at the time of his accession. His minority was
marked by struggles between the Crichton and Livingston families. During this
minority and that of James III, James Kennedy, bishop of St. Andrews, played a
statesmanlike part in seeking to preserve peace. James II took a violent line against
overambitious subjects. In 1452 he stabbed William Douglas, 8th Earl of Douglas, to
death, and in 1455 James Douglas, 9th Earl of Douglas, was attainted. The main line
of the Douglas family never regained its position, though a younger, or cadet, branch
of the family, the earls of Angus, was important in the late 15th century. James II, like
his father, thus sought boldly to reassert royal authority, and Scotland lost an able
king when he was killed by the bursting of a cannon at the siege of Roxburgh Castle,
one of the last Scottish strongpoints in English hands. Roxburgh was subsequently
captured by the Scots. Among the cultural advances of the reign was the founding, in
1451, by Bishop William Turnbull of the University of Glasgow, Scotland's second
university.
James III (1460-88), James's son, acceded at the age of eight. During his minority he
was for a time the pawn of the Boyd family. The so-called Treaty of Westminster-
Ardtornish of 1462 showed that John, Lord of the Isles, and the exiled Douglas were
prepared to try to carve Scotland into two vassal states of England for themselves.
The alliance came to nothing, but the Lords of the Isles were a threat to the territorial
integrity of Scotland until their final forfeiture in 1493. On the other hand, the power
vacuum left by their removal was responsible for much of the unrest in the western
Highlands thereafter. It was in James III's reign that the territory of Scotland attained
its fullest extent with the acquisition of Orkney and Shetland in 1468-69.
As James III came of age, he seems to have given grave offense to his nobles by
shunning their company for that of artists. It has been suggested that his fine
sensibility did him credit, but this is probably an anachronistic view. So serious was
James's lack of authority that Berwick fell in 1482, when the nobles, led by Archibald
Douglas, 5th Earl of Angus, chose--rather than to defend the county against the
English--to seize their opportunity to hang some of James's favourites. In 1488
James was murdered while fleeing from a battle against his opponents at
Sauchieburn, though it seems that the death of the king was not intended, and he
was succeeded without trouble by his son.
15th-century society.
There is evidence of economic recovery in Scotland in this period, despite the
continuing war and unrest. Castle building and the extending of monasteries and
Page 29
cathedrals were widespread; work was done on the royal residences at Linlithgow
and Stirling. The building of collegiate churches and of fine burgh churches is
additional evidence of prosperity. Royal burghs with their share in international trade
and baronial burghs with their rights in their own locality were alike flourishing. The
craftsmen threatened to rival the merchants in the running of burgh affairs, but an act
of 1469 gave the merchants the majority on the town councils; this allowed self-
perpetuating cliques to misapply the assets of the burghs, an abuse not remedied
until the 19th century. Accompanying the prosperity general in Scotland at this time
was a tendency to inflation, and a debasement of the coinage added to the troubles
of James III's reign.
From the late 14th century onward, interesting Scottish writing, both in the vernacular
and in Latin, has survived. John Barbour (1316?-95) wrote a verse life of Robert I in
Scots. A Latin history of Scotland was compiled by John of Fordun and continued by
Walter Bower, abbot of Inchcolm, in his Scotichronicon. Andrew of Wyntoun wrote a
history of Scotland in Scots verse.
Little is left of the corpus of medieval writings in Scottish Gaelic. But the
sophistication of the west Highland stone carvings of the later Middle Ages suggests
that a strong literary culture, too, was associated with the courts of the Lords of the
Isles and other chiefs. The Book of Deer, containing the Gospels, has in its margins
an 11th-century Gaelic account of Columba's foundation of the monastery of Deer in
Aberdeenshire, as well as a series of notitiae, or lists of church rights, which provide
clues to the nature of Celtic society. The early-16th-century Book of the Dean of
Lismore (the seat of the bishop of Argyll) contains more than 60 Gaelic poems. From
the quality of the architecture that has survived from the 15th century, one can infer
the existence of paintings and other objects, such as church furnishings, that have
largely disappeared. An outstandingly intricate collegiate church is that at Roslin near
Edinburgh, founded by Sir William Sinclair, 3rd Earl of Orkney, about 1450. There are
fine burgh churches, such as St. John's in Perth and the Church of the Holy Rood in
Stirling. Perhaps the outstanding piece of evidence of royal patronage of the arts is
the altarpiece for James III's Trinity College Church in Edinburgh, which is almost
certainly the work of the great Flemish painter Hugo van der Goes.
In the 14th century the papacy had built up its claims to appoint to the higher offices
in the church; in Scotland it had established a system of "provisions," or papal
appointments, to vacant offices. This cut not merely across the rights of rulers who
used the church to provide their loyal bureaucrats with a living and the rights of other
local patrons; it also meant a drain to Rome of money in the form of the tax payable
by a cleric "provided" to a vacant post by the pope. James I resisted these
developments, and at the same time, in the Council of Basel (1431-49), the
"conciliarists" were seeking to curb papal power in the church; a distinguished
member of the Council of Basel was the Scot Thomas Livingston, one of the first St.
Andrews graduates.
James also sought to revive the monastic ideal in its early purity and established a
house of the strict Carthusians at Perth. A compromise between James I and the
pope was probably pending when James was murdered, and his successors tended
to let the popes collect their money as long as they "provided" to church offices along
lines acceptable to the monarchy. In 1487 James III was granted the concession that
Page 30
the pope would delay promotions to the higher offices for eight months so that the
king could propose his nominee.
St. Andrews was made the seat of an archbishopric in 1472, in itself a desirable step.
But the first archbishop of St. Andrews secured the honour by supporting the papacy
against the king, and there was, as a result, no welcome for the appointment in
Scotland. Glasgow also became an archbishopric in 1492.
SCOTLAND IN THE 16TH
AND EARLY 17TH CENTURIES
James IV (1488-1513) and James V (1513-42).
James IV was well equipped for kingship, being physically impressive, cultured,
generous, and active in politics and war alike. He eliminated a potential rival by
carrying out the forfeiture of the last Lord of the Isles, in 1493, and dealt severely with
unrest on the English border and elsewhere. James and Bishop William Elphinstone
of Aberdeen founded King's College, Scotland's third university, in Aberdeen in 1495.
This was the great age of Scottish poetry, and while one of the leading "makars," or
poets, Robert Henryson (1430?-1506?), author of the Testament of Cresseid, was a
burgh schoolmaster, the others were members of the court circle: Gavin Douglas
(1474-1522), bishop of Dunkeld and kinsman to the earls of Angus, translated Virgil's
Aeneid splendidly into Scots, and William Dunbar (1460?-1520), a technically brilliant
poet, showed the versatility of which Scots was capable.
After initial disharmony with England, James concluded a "treaty of perpetual peace"
with Henry VII in 1502 and married Margaret, Henry's daughter, in 1503. But Henry
VIII of England became involved in the anti-French schemes of Pope Julius II, and in
1512 France and Scotland renewed their "auld alliance" as a counterbalance. In 1513
Henry VIII invaded France. James IV, consequently, invaded England; there he died,
along with thousands of his army, in the rashly fought and calamitous Battle of
Flodden.
James's efficiency at home was thus offset by his excessive international ambitions.
And both had cost money--for artillery; for a navy whose greatest ship, the Great
Michael, cost 30,000; for embassies. The crown granted lands in feu-farm tenure,
which gave heritable possession in return for a substantial down payment and an
unchangeable annual rent thereafter. In the great European price rise of the 16th
century, this policy in the long term weakened the crown.
James V (1513-42) was in his second year at his accession. The factional struggles
of his minority were given shape by the division between those who adhered to
Scotland's pro-French alignment and those who were determined that the price
Scotland paid at Flodden should not be repeated. John Stewart, Duke of Albany, was
regent until 1524, and favoured France; Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus, then
maintained a pro-English policy until 1528 when James began his personal rule.
James now found Scotland's support in international politics being sought on all
sides. In the 1530s he obtained papal financial help in establishing a College of
Justice, and he concluded two successive French marriages, each bringing a
Page 31
substantial dowry; his second wife, Mary, daughter of the Duke de Guise, became
the mother of Mary, Queen of Scots. James's support for the papacy and France
alienated some of his subjects, however, and his rule was not simply strict and
financially vigorous but rather avaricious and vindictive. Lack of noble support seems
to have caused the rout at Solway Moss in November 1542 of a force invading
England. This and the deaths of his infant sons led to the death of James, probably
from nervous prostration, in December, a week after the birth of his daughter, Mary.
Mary (1542-67) and the Scottish Reformation.
The church in 16th-century Scotland may not have had more ignorant or immoral
priests than in previous generations, but restiveness at their shortcomings was
becoming more widespread. And the power structure of the church seemed to
preclude the possibility of reform without revolution. The church made a poor
showing at the parish level, since by 1560 the bulk of the revenues of nearly nine
parishes in every 10 was appropriated to monasteries and other central institutions.
The papacy, in return for receiving its share of this wealth, abandoned spiritual
direction of the Scottish church; from 1487, royal control over appointments to the
higher church offices grew steadily. All this, at a time when the church's annual
revenue--reckoned at 400,000 in 1560--was 10 times that of the crown, readily
explains the attraction of church office for unspiritual career-seeking nobles. Church
lands were feued to laymen, who also became collectors of church revenues and
were given abbeys as benefices. Church property, particularly monastic property,
was effectively being secularized, and if Protestantism offered to the nobles and
lairds of Scotland a more spiritually alive church--and one with lay participation--it
probably also appealed to them as a system under which they would not have to
hand back what they had grabbed.
Particular laymen were as pious as ever, endowing collegiate churches as they had
once endowed monasteries, and trenchant criticism of church abuses was expressed
in the play Ane Pleasant Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis by Sir David Lyndsay (c. 1490-c.
1555). But reform from within was probably almost impossible. Archbishop John
Hamilton, for instance, a would-be reformer who gave his name to a vernacular
catechism (1552), belonged to the family who had most to lose if the careerists were
curbed.
Mary (1542-67) began her reign as another Stewart child ruler in the hands of
factions. The pro-French party upheld the old church, while the pro-English desired
reform. By the Treaties of Greenwich (1543), Mary was to marry Edward, Henry VIII's
heir. Cardinal David Beaton and Mary of Guise, the queen mother, had this policy
rescinded, and the murder of Beaton (1546) and English punitive raids culminating in
the Scottish defeat at Pinkie (1547) did not cause Scotland to love England more.
France helped Scotland to expel the English, but only in return for such a hold over
the country that by the time of young Mary's marriage to the dauphin in 1558 it was
France that appeared to be about to absorb Scotland.
Anti-French feeling combined with Protestant preaching to bring about revolt. In 1559
the reformers took up arms to forestall Mary of Guise's action against them. Despite
the preaching of John Knox and others and the plundering of the monasteries, the
decisive issues were political and military: Queen Elizabeth of England sent troops to
Page 32
check French plans in Scotland. Mary of Guise died in June 1560, and by the Treaty
of Edinburgh in July, both France and England undertook to withdraw their troops.
With Scotland thus neutralized, England had the important advantage over France of
relative nearness.
The Scots Parliament in August 1560 abolished papal authority and adopted a
reformed Confession of Faith, but Mary, still in France, did not ratify this legislation.
Still, the organization of local congregations, which had been going on for some
years, continued, and the General Assembly emerged as the central legislative body
for the church. In the First Book of Discipline (1560), John Knox and other ministers
proposed for the church a striking social program, providing education and poor
relief. But laymen had not despoiled the old church to enrich the new, and, as an
interim settlement secured by Mary's government in 1562, the church and crown
were together to share but one-third of the old church's revenue.
Mary's husband died in 1560, and in 1561 she returned to Scotland. As a Roman
Catholic in a Protestant land and as nearest heir, by descent from Henry VII's
daughter, to Elizabeth of England, she had many enemies. Her personal reign was
brief and dramatic--she married her cousin Darnley (1565); their son James was born
(1566); Darnley was murdered (1567); Mary married the adventurer James Hepburn,
4th Earl of Bothwell; was imprisoned and forced to abdicate (1567); and subequently
escaped and fled to England (1568). Her task as a ruler was hard, and the harder for
her own errors of judgment, but she essayed it bravely and was a truly tragic rather
than a pathetic figure.
Mary, Queen of Scots (EB 2001)
b. Dec. 8, 1542, Linlithgow Palace, Lothian, Scot.d. Feb. 8, 1587, Fotheringhay Castle,
Northamptonshire, Eng. byname MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS, original name MARY STUART, OR
STEWART; queen of Scotland (1542-67) and queen consort of France (1559-60). Her unwise marital
and political actions provoked rebellion among the Scottish nobles, forcing her to flee to England,
where she was eventually beheaded as a Roman Catholic threat to the English throne.
Early life.
Mary Stuart was the only child of King James V of Scotland and his French wife, Mary of Guise. The
death of her father six days after her birth left Mary as queen of Scotland in her own right. Although
Mary's great-uncle King Henry VIII of England made an unsuccessful effort to secure control of her
(Mary inherited Tudor blood through her grandmother, a sister of Henry VIII of England), the regency
of the kingdom was settled in favour of her mother.
Her mother saw to it that Mary was sent to France at the age of five. There she was brought up at the
court of King Henry II and his queen Catherine de Médicis with their own large family, assisted by
relations on her mother's side, the powerful Guises. Despite a charmed childhood of much luxury,
including frequent hunting and dancing (at both of which she excelled), Mary's education was not
neglected, and she was taught Latin, Italian, Spanish, and some Greek. French now became her first
language, and indeed in every other way Mary grew into a Frenchwoman rather than a Scot.
By her remarkable beauty, with her tall, slender figure (she was about 5 feet 11 inches), her red-gold
hair and amber-coloured eyes, and her taste for music and poetry, Mary summed up the contemporary
ideal of the Renaissance princess at the time of her marriage to Francis, eldest son of Henry and
Catherine, in April 1558. Although it was a political match aimed at the union of France and Scotland,
Mary was sincerely fond of her boy husband, though the marriage was probably never consummated.
The accession of Elizabeth Tudor to the throne of England in November 1558 meant that Mary was,
by virtue of her Tudor blood, next in line to the English throne. Those Catholics who considered
Elizabeth illegitimate because they regarded Henry VIII's divorce from Catherine of Aragon and his
marriage to Anne Boleyn invalid even looked upon Mary as the lawful queen. Mary's father-in-law,
Henry II of France, thus claimed the English throne on her behalf. The death of Henry in 1559 brought
Francis to the French throne and made Mary a glittering queen consort of France, until Francis'
premature death in December 1560 made her a widow at the age of 18.
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Queen of Scotland.
Returning to Scotland in August 1561, Mary discovered that her sheltered French upbringing had
made her ill-equipped to cope with the series of problems now facing her. Mary's former pretensions to
the English throne had incurred Elizabeth's hostility. She refused to acknowledge Mary as her heiress,
however much Mary, nothing if not royal by temperament, prized her English rights. While Mary herself
was a Roman Catholic, the official religion of Scotland had been reformed to Protestantism in her
absence, and she thus represented to many, including the leading Calvinist preacher John Knox, a
foreign queen of an alien religion. Most difficult of all were the Scottish nobles; factious and turbulent
after a series of royal minorities, they cared more for private feuds and self-aggrandizement than
support of the crown. Nevertheless, for the first years of her rule, Mary managed well, with the aid of
her bastard half-brother James, earl of Moray, and helped in particular by her policy of religious
tolerance. Nor were all the Scots averse to the spectacle of a pretty young queen creating a graceful
court life and enjoying her progresses round the country.
It was Mary's second marriage in July 1565 to her cousin Henry Stewart (Stuart), earl of Darnley, son
of Matthew Stewart, 4th earl of Lennox, that started the fatal train of events culminating in her
destruction. Mary married the handsome Darnley recklessly for love. It was a disastrous choice
because by her marriage she antagonized all the elements interested in the power structure of
Scotland, including Elizabeth, who disapproved of Mary marrying another Tudor descendant, and her
halfbrother James, who, jealous of the Lennox family's rise to power, promptly rebelled. Nor did
Darnley's character measure up to the promise of his appearance--he was weak, vicious, and yet
ambitious. The callous butchery of her secretary and confidant, David Riccio (Rizzio), in front of her
own eyes, in March 1566, by Darnley and a group of nobles, convinced Mary that her husband had
aimed at her own life. The birth of their son James in June did nothing to reconcile the couple, and
Mary, armed now with the heir she had craved, looked for some means to relieve an intolerable
situation.
The next eight months constitute the most tangled and controversial period of Mary's career.
According to Mary's detractors, it was during this period that she developed an adulterous liaison with
James Hepburn, 4th earl of Bothwell, and planned with him the death of Darnley and their own
following marriage. There is, however, no contemporary evidence of this love affair, before Darnley's
death, except the highly dubious so-called Casket Letters, poems and letters supposedly written by
Mary to Bothwell but now generally considered to be inadmissible evidence by historians. But Mary did
undoubtedly consider the question of a divorce from Darnley, after a serious illness in October 1566,
which left her health wrecked and her spirits low. On the night of Feb. 9, 1567, the house at Kirk o'
Field on the outskirts of Edinburgh where Darnley lay recovering from illness was blown up, and
Darnley himself was strangled while trying to escape. Many theories have been put forward to explain
conflicting accounts of the crime, including the possibility that Darnley, plotting to blow up Mary, was
caught in his own trap. Nevertheless, the most obvious explanation--that those responsible were the
nobles who hated Darnley--is the most likely one.
Whatever Mary's foreknowledge of the crime, her conduct thereafter was fatally unwise and showed
how much she lacked wise counsellors in Scotland. After three months, she allowed herself to be
married off to Bothwell, the chief suspect, after he abducted and ravished her. If passion is rejected as
the motive, Mary's behaviour can be ascribed to her increasing despair, exacerbated by ill health, at
her inability to manage the affairs of tempestuous Scotland without a strong arm to support her. But in
fact Bothwell as a consort proved no more acceptable to the jealous Scottish nobility than Darnley had
been. Mary and Bothwell were parted forever at Carberry Hill on June 15, 1567, Bothwell to exile and
imprisonment where he died in 1578, and Mary to incarceration on the tiny island of Loch Leven,
where she was formally deposed in favour of her one-year-old son James. After a brief fling of liberty
the following year, defeat of her supporters at a battle at Langside put her once more to flight.
Impulsively, Mary sought refuge in England with her cousin Elizabeth. But Elizabeth, with all the
political cunning Mary lacked, employed a series of excuses connected with the murder of Darnley to
hold Mary in English captivity in a series of prisons for the next 18 years of her life. In the meantime,
Mary's brother Moray flourished as regent of Scotland.
Captivity in England.
Mary's captivity was long and wearisome, only partly allayed by the consolations of religion and, on a
more mundane level, her skill at embroidery and her love of such little pets as lap dogs and singing
birds. Her health suffered from the lack of physical exercise, her figure thickened, and her beauty
diminished, as can be seen in the best known pictures of her in black velvet and white veil, dating from
1578. Naturally, she concentrated her energies on procuring release from an imprisonment she
considered unjustified, at first by pleas, and later by conspiracy. Unfortunately for her survival, Mary as
Page 34
a Catholic was the natural focus for the hopes of those English Catholics who wished to replace the
Protestant queen Elizabeth on the throne. It was the discovery in 1586 of a plot to assassinate
Elizabeth and bring about a Roman Catholic uprising that convinced Queen Elizabeth that, while she
lived, Mary would always constitute too dangerous a threat to her own position.
Despite the fact that she was the sovereign queen of another country, Mary was tried by an English
court and condemned; her son, James, who had not seen his mother since infancy and now had his
sights fixed on succeeding to the English throne, raised no objections. Mary was executed in 1587 in
the great hall at Fotheringhay Castle, near Peterborough; she was 44 years old. It was a chilling
scene, redeemed by the great personal dignity with which Mary met her fate. Her body ultimately
came to rest in Westminster Abbey in a magnificent monument James I raised to his mother, after he
finally ascended the throne of England.
A romantic and tragic figure to her supporters, a scheming adulteress if not murderess to her political
enemies, Mary aroused furious controversy in her own lifetime, during which her cousin Queen
Elizabeth aptly termed her "the daughter of debate." Her dramatic story has continued to provoke
argument among historians ever since, while the public interest in this 16th-century femme fatale
remains unabated.
(A. Fr. = Antonia Fraser; author of a biography of Mary Stuart)
Note: For the most recent biography see John Guy, My Heart is My Own. The Life of
Mary, Queen of Scots. London 2004; Harper Perennial
James VI (1567-1625).
James lived through the usual disrupted minority to become one of Scotland's most
successful kings. In a civil war between his own and his mother's followers, laird
(landed proprietor) and merchant support for James may have been decisive in his
eventual victory. Elizabeth detained Mary in England and assisted James Douglas,
4th Earl of Morton, regent from 1572, to
achieve stability in Scotland.
James's government ratified the reformed church settlement, and more permanent
measures of church endowment were taken. The Concordat of Leith (1572) allowed
the crown to appoint bishops with the church's approval. As in Mary's reign, the
crown was intervening to prevent the wealth of the old church from being entirely
laicized. And if the bishopric revenues were saved from going the same way as the
monastic wealth, the crown expected a share in them for its services.
A new presbyterian party in the church, whose members wanted parity of all
ministers and freedom from state control, rejected this compromise. Led by Andrew
Melville, a rigid academic theorist, they demanded, in the Second Book of Discipline
(1578), that the new church receive all the wealth of the old, that it be run by a
hierarchy of courts, not one of bishops, and that the state leave the church alone but
be prepared to take advice from it. Many historians have seen these demands, as
James undoubtedly did, as an attempt to achieve full-blown theocracy. James was
not strong enough for out-and-out resistance immediately, and he sometimes made
concessions, as in the Golden Act of 1592, which gave parliamentary sanction to the
system of presbyterian courts. But he gradually showed his determination to run the
church his own way, through the agency of his bishops, who were brought into
Parliament in 1600. From 1606 Melville was detained in London and later banished.
By 1610 the civil and ecclesiastical status of the bishops was secure. The continued
existence of church courts--kirk sessions, presbyteries, synods, and the General
Assembly--show James's readiness for compromise; and he showed a wise
cautiousness toward liturgical reform after encountering hostility over his Five Articles
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of Perth (1618), which imposed kneeling at communion, observance of holy days,
confirmation, infant baptism, and other practices.
In the 1580s James, as he became personally responsible for royal policy, faced the
need to control unruly subjects at home, nobles and kirkmen alike, and to win friends
abroad. He concluded a league with England in 1586, and when Elizabeth executed
his mother in the following year as a Roman Catholic threat to the English throne, he
acquiesced in what he could not prevent. He thus inherited his mother's claim, and
his efforts thereafter to keep in the good graces of Elizabeth and her minister William
Cecil were successful. He succeeded peacefully to the English throne in 1603,
though his two monarchies, despite his own personal inclinations, remained distinct
from one another.
His policy was one of overall insurance; he avoided giving offense to Catholic
continental rulers, and, while he dealt effectively with lawbreakers on the border and
elsewhere, he showed marked leniency to his Catholic nobles, even when the
discovery of letters and blank documents (the "Spanish Blanks" affair, 1592) showed
that several of them were in treasonable conspiracy with a foreign power. Neither a
heroic king, like James IV, nor the pedantic and cowardly buffoon depicted in Sir
Walter Scott's The Fortunes of Nigel, James VI was a supple and able politician. His
theories of divine-right monarchy were a scholar-king's response to an age when the
practice and theory of regicide were fashionable. Except perhaps at the very end of
his life, James was too realistic to let his theories entirely govern his conduct.
James excelled in picking good servants from among the lairds and burgesses; they
were his judges and privy councillors and sat on the Committee of Articles, with
which he dominated Parliament. After 1603 they governed Scotland smoothly in his
absence. From 1587 Parliament was made more representative by the admission of
shire commissioners to speak for the lairds, thus realizing the program of James I.
The privy council had judicial as well as legislative and administrative functions; there
were, in addition, the Court of Session for civil cases (it had evolved from the council
in the early 16th century and, as the College of Justice, had been endowed with
church funds in the 1530s) and justice courts for criminal cases. Local justice and
administration continued, however, despite James VI's efforts, to be largely the
prerogative of the landowners.
Scotland still had a subsistence economy, exporting raw materials and importing
finished goods, including luxuries. But such luxury imports showed that the greater
landowners and merchants were gaining in prosperity. Despite the absence of
adequate endowment, the reformed church began to create a network of parish
schools, and there was advance in the universities. Melville brought discipline and
the latest scholarship to Glasgow and St. Andrews in turn, and there were new
foundations at Edinburgh (the Town's College, 1582) and Aberdeen (Marischal
College, 1593).
Scotland and England were drawing closer together, as the period of continual strife
between them receded in time. Though the two national churches were not identical
in structure, they shared a common desire to protect and preserve the Reformation.
James VI's accession to the English throne in 1603 as James I encouraged further
cultural and economic assimilation. It was far from guaranteeing further political
assimilation, but a century of the barely workable personal union of the crowns was
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increasingly to sharpen for the Scots the dilemma of choosing between complete
union and complete separation.
THE AGE OF REVOLUTION (1625-89)
Charles I (1625-49).
James VI's son, Charles I, grew up in England, lacking any understanding of his
Scottish subjects and their institutions. He soon fell foul of a nobility restless in a
Scotland that lacked the natural focal point of a royal court. The king also caused
widespread anger by high taxation, by the special demands made on Edinburgh to
build a Parliament House and to provide a cathedral for the bishopric founded there
in 1633, and by a Spanish and a French war that were intended to further English
diplomacy but also disrupted Scottish trading ties. The aristocratic leaders of the
opposition found ideal material on which to build clerical and popular support.
Charles and his Scottish bishops were fond enough of ritual and splendour in church
services to make plausible the (wholly incorrect) suggestion that they were ready for
compromise with Rome. The new Book of Canons (1635-36) and Liturgy (1637)
therefore offended by their content, as well as by being authorized by royal
prerogative alone. The National Covenant (1638) astutely collected national support
for the opposition's pledge to resist Charles's innovations. Condemnation of popery
was written into it for the benefit of those who feared that Charles might be a crypto-
Catholic; others, more sophisticated, welcomed its implicit condemnation of a royal
arbitrariness with religion and private rights that was contrary to all Scottish
precedent.
The Covenanters humbled Charles in two almost bloodless campaigns, the Bishops'
Wars (1639-40), and left him with no alternative to asking for money from an English
Parliament in which his opponents were strongly represented. Charles had
authorized a general assembly of the Scottish church (1638) and a Scottish
Parliament (1639); the Covenanters packed these meetings, scrapped all the king's
innovations, and abolished episcopacy. There was, therefore, by 1641 a
revolutionary situation in both kingdoms, and in August 1642 war broke out between
Charles and his English opponents. Both sides sought Scottish help, which was soon
accorded to the English parliamentary opposition. By the Solemn League and
Covenant (1643) the English promised, in return for military aid, to help preserve
government by the Presbyterian church in Scotland and, so at least the Scots
believed, to set it up in England. James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose, and
others who then left the Covenanting side argued that by this second Covenant, and
by certain constitutional constraints they had placed upon the crown, the Scots had
gone unwarrantably far beyond the aims of the first Covenant. But those of the Scots
who were prepared to make common cause with the English opposition, even if the
English did have a more deep-seated quarrel with their king than the Scots, had
reasoned justification; for it was realistic to expect that Charles, as soon as it proved
possible, would withdraw concessions made to men whom he regarded as his
enemies. Personal antipathies also helped to split the ranks of the original
Covenanters--notably the antipathy between Montrose and Archibald Campbell, 1st
Marquess of Argyll, sincerely devoted to the cause but equally devoted to the
advancement of his family. Montrose's military efforts for Charles in Scotland were
crushed in 1645, and by 1646 Charles had lost the war in England, too. When
Page 37
Charles surrendered to the Scottish army in England, the Scots failed to reach
agreement with him and handed him over to the English. The Scottish contribution to
the English war effort had been substantial, but not spectacular enough to leave a
sense of obligation; and the English army under Oliver Cromwell, now eclipsing
Parliament in English politics, preferred independency to presbyterianism in the
church and did
not propose to honour the Solemn League and Covenant. A conservative element
among the Covenanters in 1647 reached a compromise, or "Engagement," with
Charles by which they promised him help in return for the establishment of
Presbyterianism in both kingdoms for three years and went to war on his behalf; their
ill-planned campaign was crushed at Preston in 1648. The clerics, who had bitterly
opposed this compromise, were now able, under the leadership of a few nobles such
as Argyll, to purge the Scottish Parliament and army of all those tainted with
collaboration with the king. The execution of Charles by the English in 1649
genuinely shocked most Scots, who were prepared to fight for his son, Charles II,
once he had been constrained to accept the Covenants and once Montrose had
been executed (1650). Cromwell's victory over the Scots at Dunbar (1650) gave
more moderate Scots the ascendancy again, but this brought no better military result.
Another, and decisive, defeat at Cromwell's hands came to a Scottish royalist army at
Worcester in 1651.
Cromwell.
Cromwell imposed on Scotland a full and incorporating parliamentary union with
England (1652). This could not enjoy the popularity of a union by consent,
maintained as it was by an army of occupation, but Cromwell's administration of
Scotland was efficient, and his judges, some of them Englishmen, achieved an
admired impartiality. Public order was well maintained, even in the Highlands after
the collapse of royalist resistance in 1654. Cromwell did not overturn Presbyterianism
but ensured toleration
for others, save Roman Catholics and Episcopalians.
The Restoration monarchy.
The restoration in 1660 of Charles II (1660-85) was welcomed by many moderate
men of both his kingdoms. Charles had learned much from his father's fate and was
prepared to forget many injuries, though his government executed some Scots,
including the Marquess of Argyll.
In 1662 Charles formally restored church government by bishops, but they were to
act in association with synods and presbyteries, much as under James VI's
compromise. Charles seems not to have been moved by rancour toward the
Covenanters, who had bullied him in the early 1650s, but merely by a desire to
achieve the system that satisfied most people. Many laymen accepted his system,
and few nobles opposed it. Approximately 270 ministers, however--just over a
quarter of the total--were deprived of their parishes for noncompliance. The Pentland
Rising (1666) was easily put down and was countered by an experimental period of
tolerance by the government. Persons who still persisted in attending conventicles
were strong only in the southwest and to some extent in Fife and among the small
lairds and common people. These men adhered to the "Protester" position, regarding
Scotland as still bound by the Covenants. In another trial of strength with the
Page 38
government, they were defeated at Bothwell Bridge (1679). The remnant of
Cameronians (from Richard Cameron, a leading Covenanter) remained in being,
meeting governmental violence with further violence, and in 1690 refused to join a
Presbyterian but uncovenanted Church of Scotland. Their brave and fanatical
"thrawnness" (recalcitrance) endeared them to later generations of Scots.
When Charles's brother succeeded as James VII of Scots and James II of Great
Britain and Ireland (1685-88), most Scots showed that they were prepared to support
him despite his Roman Catholicism. But he showed his ineptitude by requesting
Parliament to grant toleration to Catholics (1686); this stirred up unprecedented
opposition to royal wishes in the Scottish Parliament. Nevertheless, although many
exiled Scots were at the court of William of Orange in Holland, the collapse (1688-89)
of James's regime in Scotland was entirely a result of the Revolution of 1688 in
England and the landing there of William.
THE ERA OF UNION
The Revolution settlement.
James VII having fled to France, a Convention of Estates (really the same assembly
as Parliament but meeting less formally) gave the crown jointly to the Protestant
William of Orange (William III of Great Britain, 1689-1702) and his wife Mary (II of
Great Britain; 1689-94), James's daughter. William's first major decision was a
moderate one: episcopacy was abolished in 1689 and presbyterianism reestablished
the following year. A series of crises throughout William's reign, however, exposed
his total lack of interest in Scotland and placed a strain on the system that had
developed whereby the Scottish ministry took orders not only from the monarch but
also from the English ministry.
The Act of Union and its results.
William fought one war against France (1689-97) and on his death in 1702
bequeathed another (1701-13) to his successor, his wife's sister Anne (1702-14).
These circumstances made a union of Scotland and England seem strategically as
well as economically desirable. That union was achieved in 1707 is at first sight
surprising, since intervening sessions of the Scots Parliament had been in a mood to
break the English connection altogether. But by 1707 England's appreciation of its
own strategic interests, and of the nuisance value of the Scots Parliament, was lively
enough for it to offer statesmanlike concessions to Scotland and material
inducements to Scots parliamentarians to accept union.
EB 2001:
Since 1603 England and Scotland had been under the same monarchs. After the Revolution of 1688
and again in 1702-03, projects for a closer union miscarried, and in 1703-04 international tension
provoked a dangerous legislative warfare between the separate parliaments of England and Scotland.
On both sides of the border, however, statesmen were beginning to realize that an incorporating union
offered the only mutually acceptable solution to a problem that had suddenly become urgent:
Scotland's need for economic security and material assistance and England's need for political
safeguards against French attacks and a possible Jacobite restoration, for which Scotland might serve
as a conveniently open back door. England's bargaining card was freedom of trade; Scotland's was
Page 39
acquiescence in the Hanoverian succession. Both points were quickly accepted by the commissioners
appointed by Queen Anne to discuss union, and within three months they had agreed on a detailed
treaty (April-July 1706).The two kingdoms were to be united, the Protestant succession was adopted,
and trade was to be free and equal throughout Great Britain and its dominions. Subject to certain
temporary concessions, taxation, direct and indirect, would also be uniform; and England
compensated Scotland for undertaking to share responsibility for England's national debt by payment
of an equivalent of 398,085 10 shillings. Scots law and the law courts were to be preserved. In the
united Parliament Scotland, because of its relative poverty, was given the inadequate representation
of 45 commoners and 16 lords. By separate statutes annexed to the treaty, the Presbyterian Church of
Scotland and the Episcopal Church of England were secured against change.With only minor
amendments the Scottish Parliament passed the treaty in January 1707, and the English passed it
soon after. The royal assent was given on March 6, and the union went into effect on May 1, 1707.
The union was an incorporating one--the Scots Parliament was ended and the
Westminster Parliament increased by 45 commoners and 16 peers representing
Scotland. Scotland benefited by gaining free trade with England and its colonies, by
the grant of a money "Equivalent" of the share of the English national debt that
Scotland would assume, and by the explicit safeguarding of its national church and
legal system. After Queen Anne's death in 1714, when the Jacobites missed their
best opportunity, the worst crises of the union were past.
Jacobitism: the Highlands.
The Jacobites were seldom more than a nuisance in Britain. An expedition from
France in 1708 and a West Highland rising with aid from Spain in 1719 were
abortive; bad leadership in the rebellion in 1715 (known as "the Fifteen") of James
VII's son, James Edward, the Old Pretender, and divided counsels in that of 1745
("the Forty-five") led by the Old Pretender's son Charles Edward, the Young
Pretender, crippled invasions originating in France which had in any case less than
an even chance of success. The government was not always sufficiently prepared
against invasions, but the generalship of John Campbell, 2nd Duke of Argyll, at
Sheriffmuir in 1715 sufficed to check, and that of William Augustus, Duke of
Cumberland, at Culloden in 1746 to deal the coup de grace to, a Jacobite army. The
Jacobites never had full French naval and military assistance, and support in
Scotland itself was limited; not many more Lowland Scots than Englishmen loved the
Stuarts enough to die for them. Many politicians, especially before 1714,
corresponded with the royal exiles simply as a matter of insurance against their
return, and in the dying days of Stuart hopes there were fewer people than there
have been since who were struck by the romantic aura surrounding Prince Charles
Edward, the "bonny Prince Charlie." In the main the Stuarts had to rely on the clans
of the Gaelic-speaking regions, and Highland support in itself alienated Lowlanders.
Not all Highlanders were "out" in the Fifteen or the Forty-five; such clans as the
Campbells and Munros, Macleods, and Macdonalds of Sleat were Hanoverian
because Presbyterian, or through their chiefs' personal inclinations. Many clans were,
however, Roman Catholic or Episcopalian and favoured a Catholic monarch; they
were legitimists and reasonably so, since both James VII and his son James Edward,
the Old Pretender, appreciated Highland problems. These were the problems of an
infertile land, overpopulated with fighting men who owed personal allegiance to their
chiefs and were partly dependent on plunder to maintain their standard of living. It is
hard to see what in the end could have happened to this society, other than what did
happen: a series of attempts by the chiefs in the late 18th, and particularly in the
early 19th, century to emulate the new capitalist agriculture of the Lowlands, thus
Page 40
creating an impersonal cash relationship with their tenants and leaving those who
were redundant in the new economy no alternative to moving south or overseas. But
the catastrophe of the Fifteen and Forty-five made this process more rapid and more
painful. This is the central fact of the situation, even though the atrocities of
government soldiers and the repressiveness of government legislation did very much
less than economic and social forces to usher in the new order.
The Scottish Enlightenment.
No straightforward connection can be drawn between the union and the exceptional
18th-century flowering of intellectual life known as the "Scottish Enlightenment."
Absence of civil strife, however, permitted the best minds to turn, if they chose, from
politics and its 17th-century twin, religion; and few of the best minds from 1707
onward were in fact directly concerned with politics. Philosophy, in which 18th-
century Scotland excelled, was a proper concern for a country where for generations
minds had been sharpened by theological debate. Scottish culture remained
distinctive, and distinctively European in orientation. The historian and philosopher
David Hume sought to remove Scotticisms from his speech, and the architect Robert
Adam gained extra experience as well as income from being able to design buildings
in London as well as in Edinburgh. Nevertheless, Adam drew most of his stylistic
inspiration from the classical architecture he had studied in Italy, and Hume, "le bon
David," was an honoured member of continental polite and intellectual society.
Hume's The History of England (1754-62) made his literary reputation in his lifetime;
but it is his philosophical works, such as his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40),
which have caused the continuous growth of his reputation since his death. Adam
Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations (1776), was the philosopher of political
economy. Henry Home, Lord Kames, may be singled out from a number of other
significant figures to illustrate the versatility characteristic of the times. He was a
judge, interested in legal theory and history; an agricultural reformer in theory and
practice; a Commissioner of the Forfeited Estates (of the rebels of 1745); and a
member of the Board of Trustees for Manufactures (which encouraged Scottish
industries, notably linen). In poetry there was a reaction, possibly against union, and
certainly against assimilation, with England; revived interest in Scots vernacular
poetry of the past was the herald of a spate of new vernacular poetry, which
culminated in the satires of Robert Fergusson and the lyrics of Robert Burns. Some
of the greatest Gaelic poets, such as Alexander MacDonald, were also writing at this
time.
The Scots educational system, its foundations so securely laid throughout the
previous century, made possible, though neither it nor any other single factor could
be held to explain, this extraordinary cultural outpouring. The Scottish universities
enjoyed their heyday, with Edinburgh notable for medicine and preeminent in most
other subjects. Gradually the regents who taught students throughout their university
course were replaced by professors specializing in single subjects. That students
seldom troubled to graduate was little disadvantage in an age when appointments
depended on patronage; and, not being bound by a rigid curriculum, they were able
to indulge the Scot's traditionally wide intellectual curiosity by attending lectures in a
variety of subjects. Scientific study was encouraged, and practical application of
discoveries given due place. Francis Home, professor of Materia Medica at
Edinburgh, studied bleaching processes and plant nutrition; and James Watt,
Page 41
instrument maker to the University of Glasgow for a time, was there encouraged to
work on the steam engine, to which he was to make crucial improvements.
19TH-CENTURY SCOTLAND
Agitation for constitutional change was considered treasonable by many during the
years (1793-1815) when Britain was fighting revolutionary France. Several advocates
of universal suffrage, including a young Glasgow lawyer, Thomas Muir of Huntershill,
were sentenced to transportation in 1793. After repression had broken this first
radical wave, postwar industrial depression produced another--the "Radical War" of
1820, an abortive rising of workers in the Glasgow area. Intellectual campaigning of a
more moderate sort had greater short-term success. The Edinburgh Review, founded
in 1802 by a group of young lawyers led by Francis Jeffrey and Henry Brougham,
was influential in radical politics and in literature. Edinburgh life was particularly
brilliant during the war years, when students unable to study abroad found the
University of Edinburgh more attractive than ever. Outstanding in this period was Sir
Walter Scott, although not until 1827 was he known to be the author of the Waverley
novels. Scott's greatness as a novelist lay in the way he took Scottish society as a
whole for his main character; and his best books are a lament for an era that he knew
was dying, the organic society of preindustrial Scotland.
The Industrial Revolution.
The Scottish Industrial Revolution was in full swing from the 1820s. Linked with this,
in a way historians have not altogether disentangled, was a dramatic upsurge of
population. There were perhaps one million people in Scotland in 1700. By 1800
there were more than 1.5 million and by 1900 nearly 4.5 million. The manufacturing
towns showed spectacular increases. Hundreds of thousands of Irish emigrants went
to Scotland in the 19th century, notably during the Irish potato famine of 1846-50. In
some country regions there was a population decrease as people moved to the
towns, to England, or overseas. Part of the overall increase was the result of
improved medical care that had lessened the ravages of epidemic diseases by the
mid-19th century. Much of the food for the increased population was supplied by
progressive Scottish agriculture. Farming in the southeast was celebrated for its
efficiency in the early 19th century, and the northeast became famous for its beef
cattle and Ayrshire for its milking herds.
But the key advance was in heavy industry, which from about 1830 took the industrial
primacy from textiles, at a time when industry as a whole had replaced agriculture as
the nation's chief concern. Coal production rose as did that of iron, with James
Beaumont Neilson's hot-blast process (1828) making Scottish ores cheaper to work.
Major canals, such as the Forth and Clyde, completed in 1790, enjoyed a short boom
before being rendered obsolescent by the railways, of which the Glasgow-to-Garnkirk
(1831) was noteworthy for using steam locomotives (rather than horses) from the
start. Above all, Scottish international trade was catered to, and Clydeside's
reputation made, by the building of ships. Robert Napier was the greatest of many
great Scots marine engineers.
Politics.
Page 42
An installment of parliamentary (1832) and burgh (1833) reform ended fictitious
county votes and corrupt burgh caucuses but disillusioned the working classes by
failing to give them the vote. As in England, they had to await the 1867 and
subsequent Reform Acts. But the great bulk of the Scottish middle classes were
delighted with the Whigs, who had brought the reforms. The Whig Party, or Liberal
Party (as it became known in the 1860s), dominated Scottish mid-19th-century
politics; and William Ewart Gladstone, of Scottish parentage, was the great Liberal
hero, whose moral dynamism and fire far outweighed in Scottish eyes his High
Church Episcopalianism.
Trade unions of skilled workers had had an uninterrupted existence since the early
19th century. By the 1880s unskilled workers were being organized. Various factors
delayed the permanent organization of the miners until there emerged from their
ranks a major leader, James Keir Hardie. Failing to engage the Liberals sufficiently in
support of organized labour, he helped form the Scottish Labour Party in 1888. In
1893 he created the Independent Labour Party for Britain as a whole, and this body
in 1900 federated with the trade unions for the purpose of running the Labour Party
(given its present name in 1906). Scottish political opinion was with the left in the
years before 1914, with Liberal fortunes reviving--partly due to the leadership
(1899-1908) of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, a Scot--and three Labour MPs
elected.
The Highlands.
By 1800 the Highlands has become overpopulated relative to the means of
subsistence. Many lairds, seeking to support their tenantry through the kelp industry,
were ruined when it collapsed in the decade 1815-25. Other landowners introduced
sheep, sometimes violently removing their tenants in the "Highland Clearances," as
agents of the Sutherland family did in Strathnaver, Sutherland, about 1810-20. The
potato famine of the mid-1840s caused distress. By the 1880s Highland tenants, or
"crofters," faced a new problem. Deer forests had replaced sheep runs as the most
immediately profitable land use open to landowners; and high rents were asked for
the land that was still worked as crofts, though common grazings might at the same
time be taken away. Parliamentary agitation by the crofters, who voted for the first
time in 1885, and by their Lowland sympathizers, as well as sporadic outbursts of
violence beginning in 1882 (the "Crofters' War"), secured an act of 1886 that gave
the crofters security of tenure and empowered a Crofters' Commission to fix fair
rents. Unlike their Irish counterparts, the Highlanders sought not ownership of their
land but the imposition of certain standards of conduct and responsibility upon their
landlords. The crofting agitation of the 1880s was a key stage in the forging of a
modern Scottish consciousness in that Highlanders and Lowlanders had been united
in the struggle.
MODERN SCOTLAND
World War I and after.
The war of 1914-18 had a great impact on Scottish society, with 74,000 lives lost and
industry mobilized as never before in a coordinated national effort. Clyde shipbuilding
Page 43
and engineering were crucial, and Clydeside was the key munitions centre in Britain.
This expansion of heavy industry, however, seemed in the 1920s to have been an
overexpansion. The collapse of the wartime boom in 1920 began a period of
economic depression in Britain, in which Scotland was one of the worst-affected
regions.
Economic distress bred political radicalism. The Liberals were eclipsed, and in most
seats the real contest was between the Unionists and Labour, which became
Scotland's biggest single party for the first time in the election of 1922. Willie
Gallacher, Scotland's only notable communist member of Parliament and an able
political theorist strongly influenced by Lenin, was at the same time a radical
belonging to a revered Scots tradition. The death (1930) of John Wheatley, who had
been minister of health in the first Labour government (1924) and the author of an
important housing act, deprived left-wingers in the Labour Party of a skilled leader,
and counsels of moderation in the party prevented its taking any distinctive initiative
on the economic crisis. Ramsay MacDonald, a Scot who had led two minority Labour
governments, agreed to form a national government in 1931. The Labour Party
refused to participate, disowned MacDonald, and was heavily defeated at the polls in
Scotland as elsewhere.
Another political development that resulted partly from economic distress was the
formation in 1934 of the Scottish National Party (SNP), a merger of two previous
parties. It had some distinguished supporters, especially literary men, but it was
suspected, sometimes unfairly, of political extremism and made little electoral impact
before World War II. The national government of the 1930s was dominated by the
conservatives. While opposed to an independent Scottish legislature, this
government furthered the extension of the Scottish administrative system in 1939,
installing it in St. Andrew's House in Edinburgh.
World War II and after.
During World War II Scotland sustained some 34,000 deaths in action and 6,000
civilians killed, many in air attacks on Clydeside. The outstanding Scot on the home
front was Tom Johnston, a Labour member of Parliament who acted as secretary of
state for Scotland in the wartime national government. He was active in setting up the
North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board in 1943.
The postwar Labour governments contained no Scots of the calibre of Wheatley or
Johnston. The SNP enjoyed a short-lived electoral success in the 1970s, when the
flow of North Sea oil excited dreams of Scottish sovereignty. In an effort to stave off
militant nationalism, the Labour government called a referendum to approve its
devolution legislation, designed to grant Scotland its own assembly with limited
legislative and executive powers. In the polling on March 1, 1979, the majority of
Scots
who voted favoured the scheme, but, because so few went to the polls, the total vote
in favour did not amount to the required 40 percent of eligible voters. The Labour
government fell, and in the general election the SNP lost nine of its 11 seats in
Parliament.
Page 44
During the early 1980s the world recession, coinciding with a collapse in oil prices
and a series of closures of large industrial plants, contributed to rising unemployment
in Scotland as throughout the United Kingdom in general. In response to this
situation, Scotland turned to new directions in order to revitalize its economy. Special
government agencies were created to attract new investment, most notably American
electronics companies, with the result that Scotland has since become one of
Europe's major electronics manufacturing centres. The decline in shipbuilding and
the traditional heavy industries, however, has meant that Scotland has had to
confront the associated social problems of worker retraining. Scotland's resource
industries--farming, fishing, and forestry--continue to play an important role in its
economy.
Page 45
Bibliography (from the EB 2001 article, with my own additions)
Historical documents:
>George Donaldson, Scottish Historical Documents. Edinburgh 1970
>Anthony Corke, Ina Donnachie, Ann Macsween, and C.A. Whatley eds., Modern
Scottish History. 5 vols. vol. 1: 1707-1850, 1998; vol. 2, 1850-the present, 2nd
edn
2003; vol 3 +4 essays; vol.5 Documents. East Linton; Tuckwell Press [Open
University course book]
General histories include ROSALIND MITCHISON, A History of Scotland, 2nd
ed. (1982); idem, Life in Scotland. London 1978; MICHAEL JENNER, Scotland
Through the Ages (1987); and GORDON DONALDSON, Scotland: the Shaping of a
Nation, 2nd rev. ed. (1980). Early periods are studied in W. CROFT DICKINSON,
Scotland from the Earliest Times to 1603, 3rd rev. ed., edited by ARCHIBALD A.M.
DUNCAN (1977); and DERICK S. THOMSON, The Companion to Gaelic Scotland
(1983). The following are more specialized histories: R.A. HOUSTON and I.D.
WHYTE (eds.), Scottish Society, 1500-1800 (1988); T.C. SMOUT, A History of the
Scottish People, 1560-1830 (1969, reprinted 1985), and A Century of the Scottish
People, 1830-1950 (1986); R.H. CAMPBELL, The Rise and Fall of Scottish Industry,
1707-1939 (1980); and I.G.C. HUTCHISON, A Political History of Scotland,
1832-1924: Parties, Elections, and Issues (1986).
More recent works include:
>T.M. Devine, Scotland's Empire 1600-1815 . London 2004
idem, The Scottish Nation, 1680-2000. Edinburgh 1999
>T.M. Devine (Editor), J. Finlay (Editor), Scotland in the Twentieth Century
Edinburgh University Press 1996
>Edward J. Cowan (Editor), Richard J. Finlay (Editor), Scottish History: The Power of
the Past . Edinburgh 2002
>Colin Bell, Collins Scotland’s Century- An Autobiography of the Nation (the 20th
ct;
interviews)
>David Ross, Scotland. History of a Nation. Revised edition. New Lanark 2004;
Lomond Books
>The Oxford Companion to Scottish History. OUP 2001
< FB 15 > ND199.00 O9C7S Mediennr.: 158 / 4090646
>Christopher Harvie, Scotland. A short history. Cambridge 2002
>Michael Lynch, Scotland: A New History . 1992
>The New Penguin History of Scotland
< FB 15 > ND199.00 N5P3S Mediennr.: 158 / 4090644
>J. Black, A History of the British Isles. 2nd
edn. Basingstoke 2003; Palgrave
MacMillan
>Louise Yeoman, Reportage Scotland. Edinburgh 2000
>Davic McCrone, Understanding Scotland. 1985
series: Historic Scotland (the national charity); Scotland’s Past in Action
(published by the National Museums of Scotland);
>Cowan, Edward J. Scotland since 1688. London 2000
Page 46
< FB 15 > ND199.00 C874 Mediennr.: 158 / 4027503
The Scottish Enlightenment
< FB 16 > BJ400.GB S4E5 Mediennr.: 168 / 4051349
Travel
R.W. Chapman ed., Johnson and Boswell, A Journey to the Western Islands of
Scotland...Oxford UP 1970
Theodor Fontane, Jenseits des Tweed (1860; Across the Tweed: A Tour of Mid-
Victorian
Religion
Mullan, David George Scottish puritanism . OUP 2000
Standort: < FB 14 > DT558 M958 Mediennr.: 148 / 4044513
Politics
Journals: Scottish Government Yearbook
>Scottish Law Commission, The Legal System of Scotland, 3rd ed. (1981)
>Scotland and Europe 1986
< FB 14 > DT910 S4E8 Mediennr.: 148 / 397925
>Being Scottish: Personal Reflections on Scottish Identity Today
>Tom Devine (Editor), Paddy Logue (Editor). Edinburgh University Press
July 29, 2002
>Hutchison, I. G. C, Scottish politics in the twentieth century /
Basingstoke : Palgrave, 2001.
>Lindsay Paterson, The Autonomy of Modern Scotland. Edinburgh University Press,
1995.
>Ninian Dunnett, Out on the Edge [interviews probing the SCO identity]
>Lindsay Paterson, et al, New Scotland, New Politics? Edinburgh 2001
>James G. Kellas, Modern Scotland. The Nation since 1870. London 1968
>Murray Watson, Being English in Scotland. EUP 2003
Education
Scots at School. An anthology. Edited by David Northcroft. EUP Edinburgh 2003.
Folklore, Myths, Legends
>Margaret Bennett, Scottish Customs from the Cradle to the Grave [oral history]
>Michael Brander, Tales of the Borders [retold 19th
ct Border tales, with historical
comments]
Neil Philip ed, The Penguin Book of Scottish Folk Tales
Nigel Tranter, Tales and Traditions of Scottish Castles
Literature
Journals: Chapman; Saltire Review
Text collections:
The Picador Book of Scottish Fiction
Scottish Anthology; Bloomsbury
Ian Murray ed., The New Penguin Book of Scottish Short Stories. Harmondsworth
1983
Douglas Dunn ed., The Oxford Book of Scottish Short Stories, Oxford: OUP 1995
Series: Scottish Language and Literature, ed by Douglas Gifford
Page 47
Secondary literature:
*S. Dunning and D. Gifford, Scottish Literature in English and Scots Edinburgh 2002;
EUP [comprehensive, up-to-date]
>Cairns Craig (ed.), A Literary History of Scotland. 4 vol.Aberdeen 1988-90
>John Corbett, Language and Scottish Literature. Edinburgh 1997
>Marshall Walker, Scottish Literature since 1707. Harlow 1997; Longman
>Scottish Literature: A Study Guide, ed by D. Gifford and B. Dickson
>Teaching Scottish Literature: Curriculum and Classroom Applications, ed by A.
MacGillivray
>Trevor Royle, The Macmillan Companion to Scottish Literature. London 1983
>Maurice Lindsay, History of Scottish Literature. London 1977; 2nd
edn
>Douglas Gifford and Dorothy Macmillan eds, A History of Scottish Women's Writing.
Edinburgh 1997
Crime and Mystery: www.twbooks.co.uk/authors
(info on e.g. Rankin, McDermid, Jardine , Brookmyre)
The British Council has a site on contemporary British writers, see
www.contemporarywriters.com/authors
author.co.uk, offers potted bios, review of books, both of fiction and non-fiction
books
Language
Scots
*John Corbett, J.D. McClure and Jane Stuart-Smith eds., The Edinburgh Companion
to Scots. Edinburgh 2003; EUP [popular]
>C. Jones ed., The Edinburgh History of the Scots Language. Edinburgh 1997; EUP
[academic]
>Scotspeak, vol. 1: Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen. By Christine Robinson
and Carol Ann Crawford. SLRC : Scots Language Resource Centre. Published by AK
Bell Library. Perth 2001.
>M. Görlach, A Textual history of Scots. 2002
>Scots. the Scots Language in education in Scotland
Mercator education, Ljouwert/Leeuwarden 2002; ISSN: 1570-1239
The pamphlet can be downloaded from this site: www.mercator-education.org
>Suzanne Romain, "The English Language in Scotland", in R.W. Bailey and M.
Görlach eds, English as a World Language, Cambridge UP 1984, pp. 56-83
>A.J. Aitken and Tom McArthur eds, Languages of Scotland. 1978
>D. Murison, The Guid Scots Tongue
>Caroline Macafee and Iseabail Macleod eds, the Nuttis Shell. Essays on the Scots
language. Aberdeen UP 1987
>W.R.W. Gardner, Guid Scots-gutes Deutsch. From: Lallans 12(1979)
>John Hodgart, The Scots Language in the Schuil, in A. MacGillivray ed., Teaching
Scottish Literature : Curriculum and Classroom Applications. Edinburgh 1997
>W.L. Lorimer, The New Testament in Scots (1983)
Dictionaries:
*The Concise Scots Dictionary. Ed. by Mairi Robinson. Aberdeen UP 1985 [a 2nd
edn
is in preparation]
Macleod, I. (ed.) (1990)The Scots Thesaurus, Aberdeen: Aberdeen UP
Page 48
James A.C. Stevenson and I. Macleod, Scoor Out. A dictionary off Scots words and
phrases in current use. London 1989; Athlone Press
Page 49
'It will be a nastier country if we politicians can't pick
our friends'
The First Minister talks for the first time since the Wark storm broke about his private
life - and he stands by his decisions. By Lorna Martin and Ruaridh Nicoll
Sunday January 9, 2005
The Observer
Fresh from his holidays, Jack McConnell walked into the drawing room of Bute House and gazed
despairingly at a guest long past its sell-by date. 'Is that still here?' he asked. It was the 13th day of
Christmas, and the tree, a partied-out pine, did not exude the fresh purpose with which the First
Minister wanted to approach the new year.
A year, according to McConnell, of 'unprecedented opportunity', and 'the year for Scotland to be
noticed'. At last, it seems, we have a First Minister settled into the role. Elected under his own
leadership, he is the devolutionary leader who has had to work out what it means to be a
devolutionary leader in the new United Kingdom. 'I can be cautious and careful, but I can also be bold
and radical, without having to look over my shoulder or asking anybody,' he said.
He is the man who will ban smoking in public places: 'I believe this is right for Scotland.' He is the man
who will fight sectarianism: 'I represent one of the most working-class constituencies in Scotland, with
some of the worst religious divides and some of the heaviest smoking and unhealthiest communities,
but I'm prepared to say "You need to change", and I think they respect me for being clear about that.'
He is the man who will bring in foreign migrants to reverse the population decline many believe to be a
prosperous Scotland's greatest foe: 'The message is that this is a big, modern, multicultural society
that's cosmopolitan, welcoming and friendly.'
He will also go on holiday with whomever he wants. Here he leant forward, rested his elbows on his
knees, the famous twinkle, with a touch of chill, in his eyes. 'I think Scotland will be a meaner, nastier,
far worse country if politicians stop their friendships because of some people in the media who want to
run political agendas and try to run them down.'
After a lengthy and robust defence of his close relationship with the family of BBC broadcaster Kirsty
Wark, he leant back into the overstuffed sofa, wind whistling a January tune through the trees in
Charlotte Square. He looked comfortable in the light from the vast Georgian windows. On Tuesday,
McConnell takes forward his Fresh Talent Initiative. He will launch the Relocation Advice Service, a
bureau based in Glasgow where those who want to move to Scotland can get the advice they need
from staff seconded from the Home Office and the Immigration Service. Hopefully, such meetings will
lead to UK work permits. Like almost everything the Executive is doing in social policy, this initiative
appears to come from his genuine instinct to make Scotland more tolerant, healthier and
cosmopolitan. 'Right across Europe there is a backlash against immigration,' he said. 'In every country
in Western Europe politicians are emphasising the controls on immigration rather than the positive
benefits of a multicultural society and to that extent we in Scotland are standing out.' On Tuesday he
will reveal his plans to stop foreign students becoming satellite groups at the universities, to bring
them into the body of the kirk, as it were. He hopes to extend the two-year work visas for graduates to
those seeking Higher National Diplomas. He wants to make it easier for businesses to receive work
permits for foreign employees. In his way, McConnell has appeared both brave and a visionary; his
plan is to change the very culture of the country. Yet there is enough of the backroom dealer still there
for this to be pursued as a search for the possible, and it gave a fascinating glimpse into the nature of
devolution. 'I took a very conscious decision during the first 18 months I was in the job, that what was
needed was stability and consistency and firm leadership,' he said. 'I took the view that I needed my
own mandate and I got it in 2003. Since then, on Fresh Talent, on promoting Scotland abroad, on
smoking, on sectarianism, on issues that really matter, I think I've been able to take the radical steps
that having a mandate enables you to.'
Page 50
It seems McConnell is being forced to the edges by devolution. He has to come up with what his critics
might describe as 'imaginative ways' of solving problems unique to Scotland because of his inability to
venture into the reserved powers, such as the ability to issue permits. He places a gloss on this which,
at times, looks thin: 'Because I'm not involved in the nuts and bolts of managing immigration and
difficulties of legislation for and policing an immigration system, I've been able to concentrate on the
message.'
Asked if he truly prefers this, his smile lost its heat. 'It would be absolutely ridiculous to have sepa rate
immigration systems and passports and border controls within the UK. That leads to a whole system of
Scottish passports and immigration visas and ultimately border controls, anything but a sign of a
welcoming country.'
He goes further. 'It's going to be increasingly hard to run separate immigration systems inside a
European Union that has free flows within its borders.'
Here he pointed to an internationalism where he seems to be seeking the stature taken from him by
the reserved powers. He is proud of his recent 12-month appointment as president of the net work of
European Regions with Legislative Powers. He plans to return to Africa and China to talk aid, and
looks forward to the G8 summit at Gleneagles in July.
While it will be tricky for him to avoid looking small in comparison to visiting leaders, he recognises
this. 'Obviously the summit itself will be the eight leaders, but the Scottish guy will be there.'
Even so, McConnell's claims to boldness have suffered. With hospital closures, responsibility has
been handed to the regional health boards, their decisions overruled only with serious public outcry.
With culture, responsibility has gone to James Boyle, former head of the Scottish Arts Council, where
the talk is of 'cultural rights' while Scottish Opera falls dark and dies.
'We recognise that we can't run everything from the centre,' said McConnell. 'Whatever the Cultural
Commission comes forward with will very certainly inform our decisions but not necessarily be our
decisions... We do need to have health boards who can run services at a local level. We can't do all
that from an office in Edinburgh, and politicians certainly shouldn't try and do it all from their desks in
government.'
The greatest accusations of tinkering come from those within the Labour Party who see a lack of
commitment to economic growth and creating wealth. Speaking to the Institute of Directors in 2002,
McConnell apologised for talking relentlessly about public services rather than job creation. He then
made economic growth his 'number one priority' at the election. Yet when McConnell's legacy is
studied, it's likely that the glow will rise from those assaults on Scotland's social ills.
His response tore straight into the heart of his experience of devolution: 'Economic growth has to be a
top priority. The things I do contribute to that. So the work we're doing on fresh talent, on promoting
Scotland, on improving public services and so on, are about that central objective - even the smoking
ban, and the improvements in productivity that would come from a healthier lifestyle. I'm quite clear on
what the top priority is.'
Page 51
McLeish makes a difference
Jan 4th 2001 | EDINBURGH
From The Economist print edition
The Scottish Executive wants to make Scotland still more different from the rest
of Britain. In doing so, it may expose the limits of devolution, and so play into
the hands of the Scottish National Party
PA
HENRY McLEISH, first minister of the Scottish Executive, which has run Scotland’s affairs
since devolution, hopes that this January will be a big month for his administration. He
wants to make a splash with two announcements that show just how different his
Labour/Liberal Democrat government is from Tony Blair’s government, thus neatly
spiking the guns of his main political opponents, the Scottish National Party (SNP). The
first is a whopping increase in teachers’ pay. Scottish teachers’ pay has lagged behind
that in England, but this rise should make them richer than their southern counterparts.
The second, Mr McLeish hopes, is that the Scottish Executive will go further than Mr Blair
in paying for care for old people.
Mr McLeish’s predecessor, Donald Dewar, was wary of diverging too far from what Tony
Blair’s government was doing. That way, neither government could be embarrassed by
comparison with the other. But it also left the Scottish Executive open to attack from the
SNP that it was meekly toeing a line laid down in London.
Mr McLeish, by contrast, is determined to be different. “What is the point of having
devolution if you cannot do things differently?” he asks. Scotland, with its distinctive
education system and a legal system quite separate from the rest of Britain, has always
been more distinct from England than most people south of the border suppose.
Now it is getting more different still. University students in Scotland, for example, no
longer pay tuition fees when they start their courses, as students in the rest of Britain
have to do: they pay the fees back once they leave university and start earning.
Pensioners and social-housing tenants in Scotland who do not have central heating in
their homes will get it installed free by the government. The controversial section 28
legislation, which forbids local councils from “promoting” homosexuality, has been
abolished north of the border but remains intact in England and Wales. And Jim Wallace,
the Liberal Democrat justice minister, will press on with laws to allow for quick divorces
where the husband and wife agree that no one is to blame for the marriage breakdown.
Lord Irvine, the Lord Chancellor, has baulked at introducing a similar change in the law
south of the border.
In recent parliamentary by-elections in Glasgow Anniesland and Falkirk East, the Labour
Party held off strong SNP challenges, which seems to suggest that Scottish voters
approve. And in recent opinion polls, Labour’s lead over all the other parties is almost as
good as it was in the 1997 general election.
There is, however, a potential snag implicit in the growing difference between Scotland
and the rest of Britain. While some changes, such as the new divorce law, do not cost
much, others are expensive. Abolishing students’ tuition fees has cost £50m this year,
and the free-central-heating pledge may cost about £20m a year.
So far, these costs have been absorbed fairly painlessly in the Scottish Executive’s £18.3
billion budget, but the bigger changes ahead are going to test the limits of devolution.
The bill for the teachers’ pay deal, to be announced on January 8th, and involving
increases of 20-25% over three years, will be about £350m by 2003-04. And it is likely
to lead to demands from other public-sector workers for more pay.
Page 52
There may be little spare cash left over from the teachers’ bill to pay for Mr McLeish’s
wish to cover the personal care needs of old people in residential care. The British
government reckons this handout, recommended by the recent Sutherland committee
report, is a poor use of taxpayers’ cash since it will benefit a lot of well-off pensioners.
The bill for it will also rise steeply from the £110m a year the Scottish Executive thinks it
would cost now as the pensioner population grows.
How will you find the money, Henry?
Mr McLeish’s problem is that, in the short term, he has to manoeuvre within a budget
fixed by the Treasury. He can afford small measures of generosity because he inherits
historically high levels of public spending; the average Scot has about 22% more spent
on him than does the average Englishman (see table). This enables, for example, the
health service in Scotland to employ 52 consultants per 100,000 Scots, compared with
41 consultants per 100,000 people south of the border.
When Tony Blair decides, say, to spend more on health services in England, the Scottish
Executive gets a percentage of that increase based on the Scottish share of Britain’s
population. But if Mr McLeish decides to do something which Mr Blair is not doing, he has
to find the finance for it himself. This will get progressively harder to do over the next
few years. While Scotland will get the same public-spending cash increase per head that
England gets, it will translate into a smaller percentage increase because the additional
amount is being added to a larger basic sum.
David Bell, an economics professor at Stirling University, calculates that if English public
spending grows at a rate of 5.25% a year, Scotland’s spending advantage will dwindle to
13% in 12 years. From the point of view of the government in London, this looks fine. It
means that English public spending will gradually catch up with Scottish levels. For
Scotland’s Labour Party it does not look so good, because the SNP portrays it as reducing
Scottish spending to English levels.
There is already pressure for a reform of the way that public spending is allocated
between the British regions. But until the system is changed, as it is bound to be, Mr
McLeish has two ways round this problem if he wants to continue being a big spender.
The first is to decide which public services deserve most funding and concentrate on
them while reducing spending on others. To some extent this is already happening. The
Scottish Executive is urging local councils to transfer their housing stock to tenant-
controlled housing associations, which can raise private finance for improvements and
building new houses.
Mr McLeish’s other option is riskier—using the Scottish Executive’s power to levy up to an
additional 3p on basic-rate income tax. Each extra penny would raise about £200m.
Labour has promised not to use the power until after the next Scottish elections in 2003.
But if Mr McLeish is serious about his agenda, it is hard to see how he can avoid raising
tax eventually. Then he will find out just how different the Scots want to be.
Page 53
Refitting on the Clyde
Aug 20th 1998
From The Economist print edition
Scotland’s one big city has done a good job of regeneration. But it is in danger
of becoming a political orphan
SOME cities form such a strong impression in the mind’s eye that it takes a generation
before outsiders see how much they have changed. The unprepared visitor to Glasgow
looks in vain for teeming tenements blackened still by grime and soot, and searches an
empty skyline for the thicket of cranes that rimmed the cacophonous shipyards. On the
south side of the Clyde you half hope to find some true remnant of the Gorbals, the
filthy, tightly packed, big-hearted, crime-and disease-ridden warren of slums and pubs
that housed Glasgow’s army of industrial workers.
That Glasgow has gone—along with most of the ship-building and steelmaking that once
made the city rich. The filthy river that delivered prosperity is clean and listless.
Tenements have been thinned down and tarted up. In the city centre, thick-walled banks
have been converted into corner bars and clubs. As for the Gorbals, the place has been
knocked down—twice over. No more back lanes and “middens”: the tenements were
razed during the 1960s, and the gruesome tower blocks that took their place were
demolished in their turn when broken-backed communities could not make a life in them.
And yet today’s Glasgow is no Victorian shell mourning the passing of its industrial glory.
Manufacturing may be imprinted somewhere in the Clydeside soul—and the city council
continues its fruitless efforts to attract new factories—but from the city centre Glasgow
looks and feels like a successful post-industrial centre for tourism, services and shopping.
Though small by international standards, with just over 600,000 people, this is, after all,
“the” big city of Scotland (Glaswegians are professional disparagers of the smaller and
snootier Edinburgh) and the hub of the Strathclyde area. Planners put the population of
the real city, as opposed to the political city, at about 1.4m.
Compared with cities such as Manchester and Liverpool, the middle of Glasgow contains a
large area that has escaped the developers’ bulldozers. The square mile or so that makes
up the centre is a network of attractive streets dominated by confident Victorian
buildings. On a sunny day Royal Exchange Square feels almost like a Roman piazza, with
pavement cafés, ritzy shops, monumental buildings and a wonderful Gallery of Modern
Art, housed in the mansion of an 18th-century tobacco baron and—this is a famously
left-wing council—open, for free, seven days a week. If you want a £60 ($97) shirt you
will find it at Pinks, a stone’s throw from the imposing old kirk that dominates Nelson
Mandela Place off Buchanan Street. If you want to eat in a Michelin-starred restaurant
you will find one a short cab-ride away.
The quality and variety of shops is already impressive. But the scale of the investment
under way is staggering. The town centre is the scene of feverish building, especially
around the Z-shape formed by its main shopping streets: Argyle, Buchanan and
Sauchiehall. In Buchanan Street a vast new mall, the Buchanan Galleries, is springing up
and will be “anchored”, in the jargon, by a John Lewis department store. Close by, many
other big-name shops either are already open or soon will be. And the old post office that
was the scene of the “red Clydeside” rebellion, which brought tanks to the streets in
1919, may become home to a branch of Harvey Nichols, one of London’s poshest stores.
Few cities can flourish on shopping alone. But a strong retail industry and a brisk tourist
trade can combine to make each other stronger. Glasgow is not only a magnet for the
region’s shoppers (there are few big out-of-town shopping areas) but also for tourists on
their way north. With enough good architecture for the city to have been designated
Britain’s “City of Architecture and Design” next year, and enough good stores and
Page 54
galleries to make the tourists linger, the service economy looks robust. Financial-service
firms have been lured by low costs and slow staff turnover. So have call centres:
companies such as the computer maker, Compaq, seem to find the city cheap and solid
Scottish accents well suited to taking calls from customers and suppliers.
The trouble is, you cannot take the measure of Glasgow by the vibrant square mile at its
centre, nor by its grand universities, nor by its operas and orchestras and software
houses, nor yet by the handful of affluent inner-city neighbourhoods such as the West
End. Cross the river from the city centre and you find, where the Gorbals used to be, a
vista of bleak open spaces broken up by isolated little housing projects and grim
community centres. Many Gorbals families were displaced in the 1960s into peripheral
housing estates (“the schemes”) such as Castlemilk, Drumchapel, Pollok and
Easterhouse, where physical conditions were better but which provided no answer to the
wider problems of deprivation.
These places are not especially ugly. Most consist of uniform low-rise building, some of it
perched on pleasant hills with fine views over the city. But they house the sort of people
who would a generation ago have made their living by the skill of their hands or the
strength of their backs and can find such work no longer. Some of the schemes contain
pockets of unemployment of well over 50%, with high levels of crime and drugtaking.
One indicator of Glasgow’s problems is the proportion of children eligible for free school
meals. In Glasgow it is more than 40%—and in some neighbourhoods nearly
70%—compared with 20% for Scotland as a whole.
One reason for such statistics is that Glasgow has lost its middle class. Skilled people
began to leave the city in the 1960s, drawn to towns such as East Kilbride by new jobs
and amenities. The policies of the city council contributed to this creaming off. In its
haste to demolish inner-city slums and move people into the schemes, the council
permitted little private housebuilding within the city. Councils outside took a different
view, giving richer people another reason to decamp.
Of course the middle classes of most cities live in a penumbra of affluent suburbs. But
until 1996 Glasgow avoided the worst fiscal effects of this because it was part of the
Strathclyde authority which both gave political voice to the west of Scotland and brought
together the city and its hinterland. That year, the Conservatives abolished Strathclyde.
Now the city council is a unitary authority, responsible for services such as housing and
education, but pressed into its tight 19th-century corset, with the richer suburbs outside
its boundaries. What remains, says Stuart Gulliver, chief executive of the Glasgow
Development Agency, is in effect “a city without its suburbs”.
This means that well-to-do people commute to Glasgow for work—or to use its museums,
colleges, galleries and shops—but do not contribute to its tax revenues. On one estimate,
2m people make use of the facilities of a city in which fewer than 200,000 pay council
tax.
It is difficult to stop the exodus of better-off people in such circumstances. A shrinking
tax base, under-performing schools and an inadequate stock of private housing join
hands in a self-perpetuating circle. Inevitably, many young parents leave the city for
upmarket residential areas, and many parents in the socially disadvantaged peripheral
housing schemes opt to send their children to schools in the richer suburbs just outside
the city boundary.
Glasgow is doing what it can to reverse these trends. It is embarking on a big overhaul of
its schools and encouraging private housebuilding. Council leaders have proposed the
transfer of public housing to a private trust. But it is hard to see how Glasgow can afford
to tackle its deeper social problems without help from outside. The difficulty here is that
the city lacks friends.
When the Conservatives held power in London, the city came to be seen as a place that
soaked up public money and showed its ingratitude by voting Labour. Few Glaswegians
Page 55
doubt that the Tories replaced the sympathetic Scottish Development Agency with a
feebler Glasgow Development Agency out of a desire to divert resources to less needy
but politically more amenable parts of Scotland. The advent of a Labour government will
not necessarily help: over the past two years the (New) Labour Party has been locked in
a feud with the (Old) Labour ruling group in Glasgow. At one point the party suspended
the Lord Provost, Pat Lally, only to have that decision overturned by a Scottish court.
Now Glasgow faces an uneasy future in a Scotland whose Parliament will be in
Edinburgh, the city’s perennial rival. On top of fearing that the new legislature will draw
away media and financial-services firms, some Glaswegians wonder whether devolution
will see the emergence of a rest-of-Scotland coalition antagonistic to their city’s money-
gulping needs. Glasgow, locals say, is the only “real” city in Scotland, one that has more
in common with England’s great provincial cities than with anything else north of the
border. Will the Scottish Parliament understand its special needs?
Page 56
Raising the standard
Jun 22nd 2000 | EDINBURGH
From The Economist print edition
The financial industry in Scotland is enjoying a quiet boom
STANDARD LIFE, a 175-year-old Scottish insurer, has presided as regally and solidly over
Edinburgh’s financial industry as the capital’s castle has over the streets below. So when
a group of disgruntled life-insurance policyholders demanded that it stop being mutually
owned by its policyholders and sell shares on the stockmarket, it caused a big shock. But
like Edinburgh’s financial sector as a whole, it may find that much-feared change actually
rather suits it.
Standard Life manages about £70 billion of investments, for 4m customers. Its board has
waged a ferocious campaign to stay mutual. In a ballot on June 27th, the demutualising
“carpetbaggers” will need to win 75% of the votes to force the company to go public.
That would generate windfall payments to qualifying policyholders averaging an
estimated £6,000 ($9,000). Even if they fall short of the 75%, the demutualisers may
get enough votes to force the directors to swallow their mutual pride and float the firm,
reckoned to be worth £15 billion-16 billion.
The performance of other Scottish insurers that have gone public suggests that the
company might do better under the glare of shareholder scrutiny. For example, funds
managed by Scottish Equitable, which went public in 1994 and was bought by Aegon, a
Dutch insurer, have risen from £7 billion then to £33 billion now. Last year, its premium
income jumped by 26% and profits by 61%. Scottish Mutual, now owned by Abbey
National, a bank, and Scottish Amicable, now owned by Prudential, an insurance firm,
have done almost as well since they were taken over in the 1990s.
Scots have long fretted that such loss of independence would mean corporate power and
jobs moving out of Scotland. In fact, the reverse often seems to be true. The numbers
employed by Equitable, Mutual and Amicable have together risen by about 4,500 since
they went public. And since Lloyds TSB, a British bank, bought Scottish Widows, the
doyenne of Edinburgh insurers, last year, it has shifted £46 billion of funds from London
to its Edinburgh managers. The expectation in Edinburgh is that, if it goes public,
Standard Life will be a buyer of other insurers rather than a prey to takeover.
This is all in marked contrast to the early 1990s. Then, funds moved out of Scotland after
General Accident, an insurance company based in Perth, north of Edinburgh, merged with
Commercial Union. Ray Perman, chief executive of Scottish Financial Enterprise, the
industry’s lobbying body, says that the turnaround came when insurers spun off their
investment arms into subsidiary companies, thereby allowing them to compete for the
management of other funds.
Indeed, the total funds managed in Scotland have risen steadily to $252.7 billion in 1999
(see chart), making Edinburgh the sixth-biggest fund-management centre in Europe.
After the Lloyds TSB move, Edinburgh may even come close to overtaking Frankfurt
($310.9 billion managed in 1999). Not surprisingly, this activity is attracting attention. In
recent years, big international banks such as Deutsche, State Street and Chase
Manhattan have set up investment-administration offices in Edinburgh, mainly by buying
the administration departments of established local firms.
As these outsiders have moved in, Scottish bankers are looking out. Starting with Bank
of Scotland’s operation of payment cards for Marks and Spencer, a retail chain, they have
shattered the old convention that English and Scottish banks did not compete on each
other’s turf. Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) seems to be making steady cost-cutting
progress at NatWest, the British bank that it took over in March. And Bank of Scotland,
the loser in that auction, is expanding in Europe, having launched successful telephone
mortgage-banking operations in Ireland, Belgium and the Netherlands.
Page 57
The stiffest competition for these old banks may come not from established foreigners
but from young Scottish upstarts. In 1997, Jim Spowart moved from running RBS’s
telephone banking to Standard Life, to start a new telephone bank, which had after 18
months taken in £3 billion in savings and lent £2 billion in mortgages.
Standard Life expects the bank to make a profit in 2002, but Mr Spowart has already
moved on to Halifax bank, for which he is next month starting a new telephone and
Internet bank, Intelligent Finance. This bank is advertising an innovative “all-in-one”
account (savings, current account, mortgage, credit card, etc). Its target is relatively
modest—to lure 2m customers by 2005. But such is Mr Spowart’s reputation as a
financial entrepreneur that Halifax agreed to his demand to locate the new bank in
Edinburgh.
This is not as obvious a move as it sounds. The growth in financial services has been so
rapid that companies now have problems recruiting people with the right skills. With only
8,000 of Edinburgh’s 450,000 people unemployed, Bank of Scotland is offering a car to
the people it wants for jobs in call centres that pay just £13,500 a year.
House prices, especially at the plusher end of the market, have also started to climb.
With financial firms forecast to need another 15,000 people in the next decade, the
Edinburgh economy is in danger of overheating. Local property and retail markets look
likely to get a short-term boost in August, when employees and policyholders of Scottish
Widows get their share of the £5.8m windfall pay-out due from that firm’s
demutualisation and takeover. For some at least, life is good up north.
Page 58
Game on
Jan 2nd 2003 | DUNDEE
From The Economist print edition
Lessons in game theory from Scotland's new cluster
SO, LIKE lots of people in economic development agencies across the world, you've been
spending festive leisure time playing the latest computer action strategy game—“Grand
Economy Boost 3: Cluster City”—and can't seem to make it work? The object, of course,
is to pick a city with a foothold in some business that looks like a good bet for the future
and make the businesses and the city's prosperity grow. Fail, and you get ridiculed and
fired. So here's a humiliation-avoidance guide.
You have snazzy tools such as Scottish Enterprise, the main economic development
agency north of the border, with about £40m ($64m) a year to spend on promoting
clusters in such exciting businesses as energy and biotechnology. You have cluster
theory: firms in the same line of business grouped in an area with the right networking
and support services will prosper if the market is good. And you have government
ministers to make big announcements and perhaps open the Treasury vaults.
Tip One is to ignore them all at the first level: getting something started. In the 1980s,
Scottish Enterprise thought the declining shipbuilding and light engineering trades in the
Scottish city of Dundee could be turned to making car engines. It offered Ford pots of
money to build an engine assembly plant. The car-maker eagerly agreed, but then rival
trade unions started fighting. Blatt! Lives gone.
So Tip Two: look for the unexpected in the unlikely place. Around the same time as the
Ford debacle, Timex had turned over its Dundee watch-making factory to churning out
Sinclair ZX Spectrum computers. Unlike other computers of the time, you could program
the Spectrum. Kids discovered it was great for making up computer games. A lot of
Spectrums fell off the backs of lorries. Thus a generation of computer-games designers
was born. Brrrm! Energy levels up.
Getting to the second level of this game—having a working company—is tricky. The hero
entrepreneur is not provided, but has to be talent-spotted from a herd of nerdy
youngsters. Tip Three: spot the one with some money and the will to make lots more.
The twist in this game is that he is unemployed—David Jones, a hardware engineer, took
a redundancy pay-off from Timex because he thought software design was more
promising.
A couple of years into a programming course at the Dundee College of Technology (which
soon after became Abertay University), and he was earning £20,000-30,000 a year
writing programs and employing most of his fellow students. He put studying on hold, set
up a company—DMA Design—and after a few tolerably successful games, hit the jackpot
in 1991 with a game called “Lemmings”. His company swelled to 120 employees. Bing!
Gain a life.
But how do you get to Level Three: lots of such companies? Tip Four: make more David
Joneses. In 1994, Ian Marshall, professor of computing at the new Abertay University, hit
on the idea of tailoring his courses to offer degrees in computer games, the first such in
Britain. Apart from being an exciting, fun-sounding degree, he says, designing a game
involves all the computing essentials. Abertay now has ten applicants for every place on
the course. Between them, Abertay and Dundee universities produce about 90 computer-
games graduates a year.
“We encourage our students to be entrepreneurial and competitive,” says Mr Marshall.
For the last four years Abertay has run a competition for teams of five students to devise
a working prototype of marketable digital technology. So far, each year's winners have
Page 59
gone on to form a company, for which Abertay provides an incubator. Tarantara! Final
level.
The games
industry and
associated digital
companies
employ some
1,500 people in
and around
Dundee
Scotland now has 13 computer-games development companies, about 10% of the British
total. Just over half are in Dundee. The games industry and associated digital companies
employ some 1,500 people in and around Dundee. Scottish Enterprise's input is fairly
minimal; so far, about £1m a year mostly spent on helping games companies attend
trade fairs and encouraging networking, though it is planning to build a digital business
park. The cluster is attracting outside attention: in 2002, Arius 3D, a Canadian company,
announced that it was planning to spend £7m on an innovation centre in the city to
develop 3D scanning technology.
At this level, however, new dangers lurk. Andy Campbell, business development manager
of Visual Sciences, producer of Formula One racing games, says that producing a game
now costs £1m-5m, likely to rise to as much as £30m with the next generation of home
gaming consoles due in a few years' time. These are huge sums for small firms to risk;
typically they are borne by electronic publishing firms, which Scotland does not have.
So Tip Five: find new money sources. Noble Fund Managers of Edinburgh is raising £25m
in project finance for computer-games development. The Scots gamers have the track
record to justify a punt: Rockstar North in Edinburgh (formerly DMA Design, now owned
by Take Two, an American publisher) has produced the “Grand Theft Auto” series, and
Denki of Dundee has sold games to Sky Television's interactive service.
The rewards can be big. In February 2002, “State of Emergency”, a game produced by
Vis Interactive of Dundee, topped the selling charts. Vis took most of the development
risk and so, unusually, got 50% of the royalties. “Our revenues this year have been very
significant,” says Chris van der Kuyl, chief executive. He hopes they will be bigger still
when, with Telewest, a cable TV firm, he launches Britain's first entirely digitally-
generated TV channel, a horse-racing game on which viewers can bet. Vrrooom! New
level?
Page 60
Schools and Scottish History
Thu 3 Feb 2005
Schools 'neglecting Scottish history'
KEVIN SCHOFIELD
EDUCATION CORRESPONDENT
SCOTTISH pupils are leaving school with little knowledge of their nation’s past
because history is being squeezed out of the curriculum, the country’s foremost
historian claims today.
Professor Tom Devine says it is "an educational scandal" that overloaded timetables
and competition from other subjects have been allowed to reduce the amount of time
pupils spend studying Scottish history.
Writing in The Scotsman, he calls on ministers to address "this unacceptable neglect
of our heritage" but warns that politicians may face resistance from the educational
establishment.
Prof Devine says that, while more imaginative teaching methods have been
introduced, there has been "a significant cut" in the amount of time allocated to
history lessons. "With so little time available, it is inevitable that Scottish history,
despite the best efforts of many teachers, will be marginalised," he says.
"There may be more Scottish history taught within the history curriculum in our
secondary schools than a generation ago, but this improvement is still meagre and
patchy.
"Overloaded timetables, competition from other subjects and pupil choice mean that
the majority of young Scots have little more than the sketchiest knowledge of the
nation’s past. This is an educational scandal, especially in an age of devolution."
Prof Devine goes on: "Let us hope that ministers and civil servants listen to the
growing number of voices who are ashamed of this unacceptable neglect of our
heritage in their ongoing review of the curriculum - but one should not be too
optimistic. The powers that be in education have a firm resistance to prescribing what
should be taught in Scotland’s classrooms, although such intervention is probably
essential if more precious curriculum time is to be devoted to a study of the shaping
of the present condition of the nation through an examination of its past."
Prof Devine’s comments were welcomed yesterday by Sam Henry, the president of
the Scottish Association of Teachers of History. Mr Henry, a teacher at Lochgelly
High School in Fife, said: "Some type of minimum time being set down for the
teaching of history, and Scottish history in particular, is very important because,
without it, I think we are not doing justice to pupils and their grasp of their own
heritage and their ability to come to terms with the world."
A spokeswoman for the Scottish Executive stressed that Scottish history was taught
in schools - but that it was up to local authorities to decide how much.
Page 61
She said: "The curriculum in Scotland is non-statutory and we don’t prescribe how
much time needs to be spent on each subject.
"Scottish history is part of the history syllabus, but it is for local authorities and
schools themselves to decide how subjects are taught."
Page 62
Editorial
Time to end shameful neglect of Scottish
history
TOM DEVINE
I HAVE a confession to make. Over most of my career, I have been a professional
historian and university teacher of Scottish history. Yet I, like most of my generation
of school pupils, gave up history as a subject when I reached 14 and switched to
geography, which seemed so much more stimulating and relevant. School history at
that time, in the 1960s and early 1970s, seemed pedantic, overly concerned with
obscure factual information and focused on a narrow interpretation of political
narrative to the virtual exclusion of all other aspects of human life in the past.
For my generation at least, the subject also had the unenviable reputation in many
schools of being poorly taught. My enthusiastic conversion to the marvellous range
and intellectual excitement of history took place at university. Thank God for the
broad-based Scottish arts degree, which allowed neophyte first-year students to
explore the richness of academic subjects which had either passed them by or did
not exist at all at school level.
In one crucial sense, the situation has changed radically for the better over the past
three decades. History teaching in Scottish secondary schools has been
transformed, with more imaginative teaching techniques (which often include the use
of oral evidence and film) and a huge extension of interest, from the narrowly political
to the encompassing of national, social and economic topics. I detect a pedagogical
vibrancy in many schools, which is to be welcomed and extolled.
That is the good news. The bad news is that few Scottish pupils benefit from this
revolution and so leave our schools historically illiterate, both about their own nation’s
past and about wider issues of European and global significance.
The Scottish Association of Teachers of History (SATH) is an informed source on the
current crisis. Provision for the teaching of history in the early years of our secondary
school system, where it is compulsory, is very limited. In S1, social subjects operate
as a block, with pupils normally taking three periods a week of history, modern
studies and geography. In S2, the contact time in history is one period of 53 minutes
per week. SATH declares, with restrained understatement, that this is "far from ideal"
for a balanced course which involves local, Scottish, British, European and World
contexts.
Equally, this meagre time allocation represents a significant cut in contact hours
compared with ten years ago. The majority of pupils end even this very limited
exposure to the subject after S2. It is reckoned that, although enrolments vary from
school to school, only a third of each year group then carry on with history. This is a
situation which makes Scotland virtually unique in Europe, where provision is
compulsory to the age of 16, rather than 14 as here.
With so little time available, it is inevitable that Scottish history, despite the best
efforts of many teachers, will be marginalised. There may be more Scottish history
Page 63
taught within the history curriculum in our secondary schools than a generation ago,
but this improvement is still meagre and patchy. Overloaded timetables, competition
from other subjects and pupil choice mean that the majority of young Scots have little
more than the sketchiest knowledge of the nation’s past. This is an educational
scandal, especially in an age of devolution.
Historical study is a necessary part of the formation of citizens in modern
democracies. It is the memory of society, teaching us to understand how we came to
be the way we are. History situates the contemporary world in a much broader
perspective and context. It allows us to critically examine beliefs, prejudices and
assumptions, and promotes a more realistic approach to them. The case for Scottish
history has, therefore, never been stronger. Fascinating new research and fresh
insights are now being produced on an unprecedented scale from our universities.
The success of television history, including, most recently, the very popular, six-part
BBC Two series Scotland’s Empire, proves the widespread hunger that exists for
understanding our past.
Scottish history is not a dead subject, but one of enormous dynamism and relevance
to the nation’s place in the modern world. Scottish youngsters deserve more
exposure to an area of knowledge vital to the appreciation of culture, landscape,
architecture, literature, politics, economy and much else.
Let us hope that ministers and civil servants listen to the growing number of voices
who are ashamed of this unacceptable neglect of our heritage in their ongoing review
of the curriculum. However, one should not be too optimistic. The powers that be in
education have a firm resistance to prescribing what should be taught in Scotland’s
classrooms, although such intervention is probably essential if more precious
curriculum time is to be devoted to a study of the shaping of the present condition of
the nation through an examination of its past.
Another crucial step forward relates to the curriculum itself. Introspection and
parochialism have to be avoided at all costs, but a marriage of the particular and
general is possible, as other countries have shown, by making the national story the
academic spine which supports consideration of European and world developments.
• Tom Devine is Glucksman research professor and director of the AHRB Centre for
Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen.
Page 64
Sydney Wood, “The School History Curriculum in Scotland & Issues of National
Identity“, International Journal of Historical Teaching, Learning and Research,Volume
3 Number 1 January 2003
Sydney Wood is Honorary Teaching Fellow, University of Dundee, Scotland
Abstract This article stresses the importance of historical knowledge in shaping attitudes to
national identity. The background to the current situation for history in Scottish schools is
outlined. Evidence of pupils’ historical ignorance, and the absence of vital aspects of the
past in the curriculum, are indicated. Concern is expressed for the focus on an oppositional
identity and for the lack of a clear rationale for the selection of historical content.
Keywords National identity, Scottishness, Myth
Introduction
Politicians seek to shape the school curriculum to satisfy a number of purposes.
The future employability of pupils provides one obvious purpose: the development of
attitudes, seen as appropriate for a stable and harmonious democracy, furnishes a second.
A common response to a perceived social ill is to require some sort of educational input -
thus sex and drugs education and citizenship now feature in school courses. The diversity of
peoples who inhabit the United Kingdom has stimulated debate about the nature of national
identity in a changing society; within this debate the coming of devolution has increased
interest in the nature of the identities of the constituent parts of the United Kingdom. The
teaching of history forms a key element in the discussion about the formation of the attitudes
of future adult citizens.
The development of a national curriculum for history stirred vigorous argument in both
England and Wales, about the nature of national identity (Phillips, 1996). But the distinctive
Scottish system has stayed detached, apparently at ease with its circumstances. Schooling
in Scotland remained largely unaffected by the union of 1707, proud of its distinctive parish
schools and its universities. Nineteenth century upheavals led to the 1872 Act that created
the board schools and the London-based Scotch Education Department to oversee Scottish
education. The 1918 Education Act produced a key feature of the system - state funding for
Roman Catholic schools with guarantees for their religious character (Anderson, 1997).
Though the administration shifted to Edinburgh in 1939, the direction in which policy moved
was shaped until 1997 by the outcome of British elections. Thus, during the Thatcher years,
when Scottish politics resolutely refused to move to the right, the school system was shaped
by a succession of Conservative Secretaries of State. The devolution vote of 1997,
therefore, marks a considerable change. It is the party dominant in Scotland that now
controls educational policy making; there is little sign that this party is likely to be
Conservative in the foreseeable future.
National identity in Scotland
With national identity issues more to the fore than ever before one might have expected an
impact to have been evident on as crucial an area as the school history curriculum. Yet, so
far, this has not been the case. Scots, it is often asserted, have a clear sense of their
identity. It is the English who have problems. Certainly Scots have always been very aware
of the two distinct dimensions of being both Scottish and British and have been irritated by
the English habit of using ‘English’ and ’British’ interchangeably. One wonders what went
through the mind of the Scot from Lewis who was required to haul aloft Nelson’s pre-
Trafalgar signal of ‘England expects every man to do his duty’. At the beginning of the
twentieth century, the Convention of Scottish Burghs (1905) complained of the existence of
school books in which:
Great Britain is called England, the British throne is called the English throne … David
Livingstone is called an Englishman, James Watt and Adam Smith are called English.
Page 65
Research among 9 to 11 year olds in an Edinburgh school revealed pupils’ determination to
distinguish between being Scottish and British and, from many children (Carrington & Short,
1996) an emphasis on their Scottish identity. Evidence from polls and investigations (such
as the British Social Attitudes Survey, 2001) all point to Scots’ preference for asserting their
Scottish rather than their British identity. Yet what does this Scottish identity consist of? The
Glasgow journalist, Cliff Hanley (Hanley, 1980) has offered a parody of how Scots are
portrayed:
The Scots are tall, rugged people who live in the mountain fastness of their native
land, on a diet of oatmeal porridge and whisky. They wear kilts of a tartan weave,
play a deafening musical instrument called the bagpipes, are immediately hospitable,
but cautious with money … They are sparing with words, but when they speak they
speak the truth. They have a hard and Spartan religious faith and regard virtually any
activity on a Sunday as a grave sin. When they leave their native land, they
immediately rise to the top in other peoples’ industries and professions.
Children’s perceptions are shaped by forces other than the school curriculum.
Representations in film of the Scottish male so alarmed the Scottish journalist Jan Moir that,
writing in The Observer (29 October 1995) she felt it wise to warn English girls of a gulf
between image and reality:
Scotland, my dears, is not full of rippling hunks with biceps like footballs, men who are
romantically prepared to die for their country and who will ride their horses right into
your bedrooms because they cannot wait one second more to be in your arms …
Scotland, in fact, is full of wee guys in anoraks wondering what’s for their tea tonight.
Scotland is full of men with chapped knees and freckles eating deep fried pies and
moaning that there’s nothing good on telly.
Nor is the activity of watching such films simply external to the classroom - indeed colourful
videos are welcomed by teachers eager to hold adolescent attention and keen for history, to
triumph in the competition for older pupils’ subject choice.
The heritage industry, too, is exploited by school trips as well as by informal family outings.
Yet heritage sites provide all sorts of messages. At the Archaeolink centre near Aberdeen,
for example, a powerful introductory video portrays Pictish peoples being assaulted by
Agricola’s Roman Legions. The Picts speak in Scottish accents; the Romans in accents
derived from the English public school system. Heritage sites seeking tourist business may
well provide an uneven, even unbalanced, portrayal of the past. Conflict, Wallace, Bruce,
Mary Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie provide topics likely to be popular. Identity that is
essentially oppositional and anti-English pervades both the media and many heritage sites.
This oppositional identity is further reinforced through sport, a context in which England is
commonly called ‘the auld enemy’. Recent trouble between Glasgow Rangers and Aberdeen
football supporters, for example, was promptly attributed by the Scottish press to the
presence of English agitators (e.g. Press and Journal, 2002). In fact no evidence of this
emerged. The press had pounced on English-shirt-wearing Rangers fans.
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The development of history as a school subject in Scotland
History became a school subject in 1886. Early Scottish history was covered in Standard III
but attracted gloomy comments from the inspectorate as a ‘ghastly line of battles, feuds and
deaths … one must question the value of a school history that lands a child in the midst of
loose laws and looser passions and unquestionably helps … to maintain the sentimental
scotch antipathy to England’ (quoted in Anderson, 1995, p.214).
Autobiographies, too, bear witness to the past ability of history teachers to stir up
anti-English feelings, for example:
School in Aberdeen meant, primarily, the establishment of my identity as a Scotsman
… To this day my knowledge of Scottish history is nothing more than a vague
chauvinistic haze permeated by hostility to England (Hay, 1997).
In the years after 1945, history struggled to survive and often existed as a facet of school
English departments. Graduates who emerged to teach history came from universities
where Scottish history seemed to lack serious status. During the 1970s changes affected
both primary and secondary schools, changes that directed attention away from concern
about the rationale for selecting certain aspects of the past and concentrated, instead, on
processes. In primary schools history was sucked into integrated Environmental Studies;
pupils explored themes like Homes, Transport and Water. The distinctive attributes of
subject structures were neglected. In secondary schools the Schools Council’s skills-based
approach, though English-based, seeped into Scotland too and placed the stress on
historical topics as vehicles for skill development.
By the 1990s sufficient unease at the consequence of these developments produced
changes, yet Scottish authorities shrank from the detailed strategy exemplified by the English
national curriculum and produced, instead, guidelines for pupils aged 5-14. History found
itself within Environmental Studies guidelines, separately described as People in the Past
(SOED, 1993). These guidelines listed the attributes of the subjects that were to be
developed through the topics studied but offered brief and vague guidance on what was to
be taught. Pupils were expected to study ‘people, events and societies of significance in the
past’; what this actually meant was not explained. Pupils aged between 5-14 were expected
to give attention to local, Scottish, British, European and world dimensions, and to do so
through studies located in different periods of time.
At the time of writing, this system still operates. Pupils remain in primary schools for seven
years, working with teachers who have the whole curriculum to implement and cannot be
expected to be historical experts. The result is a history curriculum that consists of widely
scattered episodes. Once pupils have emerged from their first three (early stages) years
they might for example, study The Vikings in Primary 4, Medieval Life in Primary 5, The
Victorians in Primary 6 and the Second World War in Primary 7. Inevitably, teachers are
likely to choose topics that are well resourced with material appropriate to their pupils’ ages
and abilities. Much of this will have been produced in England.
It is not easy for secondary school history teachers to provide a coherent study of Scotland’s
past, as the amount of time available for the subject has diminished; an hour or less a week
is a common allocation and aspects of the past other than Scottish history press for attention.
Yet these two years are crucial, for history then becomes an option; nearly two thirds of
pupils abandon it as they enter the years that are still shaped by a twenty five year old report
(Munn, 1977) in which the third and fourth years of the secondary curriculum are organised
into ‘modes’, each of which pupils are required to study. History falls into the Social Subjects
mode along with Geography and Modern Studies.
Those who remain to study history up to the age of 16 follow a course whose rationale
focuses on the value of the activity of studying the past rather than consideration of the
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importance of certain areas of knowledge. The course required the study of Scottish history,
offering a choice of periods all of which are post-Union and deal primarily with changing
social, economic and political conditions within Scotland (Scottish Qualifications Authority,
1997).
The post-16 structure is complex; opportunities to study Scottish history exist in the form of
widely separated episodes from the past at the lower ‘Intermediate’ level. At the more
challenging Higher level students must explore Scotland’s past in either medieval, early or
later modern times. But numbers here are small - around 8,000 attempted Higher history in
2002, for example.
In an attempt to stir teachers’ thinking about Scottish history the Scottish Consultative
Council on the Curriculum produced recommendations urging that it be studied in a more
sustained and coherent manner. The report recognised the great upsurge in university
research and publication in this area and urged the need to find ways of bridging the gap
between the growing academic understanding of Scotland’s past and what was happening in
the classroom. But the report carried no force, its authors possessed no powers of
compulsion. Those who chose to ignore it were free to do so.
Scottish suffering/English dominance?
Given the patchy and inconsistent nature of the structure outlined above, it is hardly
surprising that the Scottish history currently experienced by pupils tends to consist of the
study of episodes whose hallmark is Scottish suffering. Having seen Agricola’s Roman
legions assault north Britain, win the battle of Mons Graupius and build forts and walls, pupils
are likely to jump to an exploration of Viking onslaughts. Assaults by Anglo-Norman
monarchs allow the deeds of Wallace and Bruce to be celebrated, yet soon the Tutors are
battering at Scotland’s lowlands, King William rules (and the massacre of Glencoe takes
place) and gallant Jacobites are crushed. The tale is rounded off with Highland suffering
amid the Clearances.
No clear rationale underpins this curious curriculum. It neglects numerous major dimensions
of Scotland’s past and leaves a residue of resentment and simplistic understanding. Scots
are commonly referred to today as a Celtic people. This label, which ignores the substantial
Anglo-Saxon settlement of the south-east, and the later Scandinavian arrivals, implies a
distinct Celtic people’s arrival. Yet Armit (2001) suggests that what mattered was the spread
of Celtic language rather than the arrival of a new people –
there is nothing in the archaeological record to suggest any significant infusion of new
ethnic groups into Scotland … during the thousand or so years before the Roman
incursion (p.14).
In addition:
Far from the coherence implied by calling Scots a Celtic people, historians have
observed ‘There is no common ancestral or genetic heritage which links the people of
Scotland (ibid, xvi).
The current curriculum is very inward looking, yet few peoples have migrated from their own
country more than the Scots. Medieval and early modern trade with and settlement in
northern Europe was substantial. The post-1707 opportunity to participate in imperial
expansion was grasped enthusiastically by enterprising Scots. A recent historian’s study of
this dimension notes:
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Nobody could sensibly claim that Scotland had been other than transformed beyond
recognition by Empire … we must regard it, with Reformation, Union and
Enlightenment as one of the great formative experiences of a nation now facing a fresh
future (Fry, 2001).
Not only does imperial history not feature in most school curricula, nor do the other aspects
identified above loom large. The development of a British identity (readily accepted by most
Scots by the late eighteenth century) is an area of intense interest to historians yet neglected
by school history. The astonishing achievements of the age of Robert Adam, David Hume,
etc. are rarely considered. Scotland has suffered attacks, but Scots too have been
aggressors. Inhabitants of northern England had good reason to fear brutal onslaughts from
the north (not least by Wallace and Bruce). Even the disaster of Flodden was triggered by
James IV’s needless march over the border, forcing the elderly Earl of Surrey to trudge
wearily north to give battle. Scots settlers in the empire were as ready to sweep away native
inhabitants as any other British emigrants.
Conclusion
It is hardly surprising that empirical research conducted on pupils’ knowledge of and attitudes
towards Scottish history has shown the impact of this rather patchy historical education. A
study of 3,000 16 year-old pupils revealed the consequences of the education they received
(Wood and Payne, 1999). Pupils conveyed little sense that they felt that Scottish history
really mattered, whilst their ignorance of events, people and circumstances in Scotland’s past
was profound. Of particular interest was what shaped pupils’ selection from a range of
possible explanations for a past event. When offered reasons as to why Scotland became
part of the United Kingdom, for example, 37% selected ‘because English forces conquered it’
and 28% ‘as the result of a referendum’. Only 24% opted for ‘the Scots Parliament voted for
it’. The Battle of Culloden was seen as a conflict between ‘wholly Scottish and wholly
English armies’ by 41%; just 25% opted for ‘many Scots fought against Prince Charles’. A
sense of conflict with England seems to shape the responses of the ignorant. The research
which focused upon 16 year-olds’ knowledge of Scottish history pointed to ignorance even of
the role of Scots inventors and engineers in the industrial revolution. Only 8% of the 3000
respondents connected James Watt with steam power; 26% thought he’d something to do
with electricity!). The Reformation and the upheavals of the seventeenth century tend to be
neglected as too complex.
The permissive curriculum of 5-14 and the narrowly conceived Standard Grade courses
provide contexts which lack rigorous concern for what it is appropriate for pupils to know. In
a paper presented in 1985 an American researcher reviewed all the available relevant data
to attempt to identify the rationale(s) behind the teaching of American history in secondary
schools (Chilcoat,1998) He set out a list of ten possible rationales and tested teachers’ work
against them. His conclusion was that teachers had no clear idea of what they were trying to
achieve. The same seems to be true in Scotland. Official justifications for history focus on
the skills developed through the subject and on the value of history as a leisure interest.
Detailed consideration of the reasons for content selection is sadly lacking. Do we want to
offer pupils an heroic view of Scotland’s past? Should we focus on widely held myths and
critically examine them? If citizenship today shapes the curriculum then the multi-cultural
origins of the country, the imperial past, Irish migration in the 19th
Century and the reasons
for the arrival of more recent migrants should be studied. Scots life is partly shaped, today,
through membership of the European Union. Yet Europe is seen almost wholly negatively,
primarily through studies of the two world wars and by repeated examination of Nazi
Germany.
With so much to study, and so little time, the current permissive curriculum needs to be re-
considered and the lack of a rationale addressed. Meanwhile the media, myth and prejudice
will fill the void left by insufficient concern for history in schools.
Page 69
References
Anderson, R.D. (1997) Scottish Education since the Reformation Dundee, The Economic
and Social History Society of Scotland.
Anderson, R. D. (1995) Education and the Scottish People, 1750-1918 OUP Oxford p.214.
Armit, I. (2001) ‘Prehistory’ in Houston R.A. & Knox W. W. J., The New Penguin History of
Scotland London, Penguin p.14.
Carrington B. & Short G. (1996) ‘Who Counts: Who Cares? Scottish Children’s Notions of
National Identity’ Educational Studies, Vol 22, No 2.
Chilcoat, G. (1998) A study of the Rationales and their implications for studying American
history in the Secondary Schools Paper presented to the American Education Research
Association, March - April 1998, Chicago.
Hanley, C. (1980) The Scots NY: New York Times Books, quoted in Houston R.A. & Knox W.
W.J. (2002) The New Penguin History of Scotland London, p.xv.
Convention of Scottish Burghs (1905) School History Books; The Representation of the
Convention of the Royal Burghs of Scotland SRO / BF257, Edinburgh, Scottish Records
Office.
Fry, M. (2001) The Scottish Empire East Linton, Edinburgh, Tuckwell Press.
Hay, D. (1997) ‘Memories of a Calvinistic Childhood’ in Lawrence W. G. (ed) Roots in a
Northern Landscape Edinburgh, Scottish Cultural Press.
Moir, J. (1995) ‘What do Braveheart and Rob Roy tell you about real Scotsmen?’ The
Observer 29 October1995.
Munn J. (1977) The Structure of the Curriculum in the 3rd
and 4th
Years of the Scottish
Secondary School HMSO Edinburgh.
Phillips R. (1996) ‘History teaching, cultural restorationism and national identity in England
and Wales in the 20th
century’ History of Education 28 (3).
Press & Journal (2002) ‘English Agitators blamed for Violence at Pittodrie’ Press & Journal
21 January 2002.
Scottish Qualifications Authority (1997) Scottish Certificate of Education: Standard Grade
Arrangements in History Glasgow, SQA.
Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum (1998) Scottish History in the Curriculum
SCCC Dundee.
SOED (1993) Environmental Studies 5-14 Edinburgh, Scottish Office Education Department.
Wood, S. & Payne, F. (1999) ‘The Scottish School history curriculum and issues of national
identity’ The Curriculum Journal, 10 (1).
Page 70
3 Feb 2005
Comedy as Holyrood tries to keep Gaelic alive
FORDYCE MAXWELL
AH WELL, chust so - a brave attempt there to get into the spirit of the proceedings,
seen too many old Para Handy films, please ignore - we might have known. A
bilingual debate at Holyrood, and guess who speaks both the English and the
Gaelic? George Reid, Presiding Officer, that’s who, and impressive it was. George
seemed to think so too, which was nice.
He wasn’t quite in the business-like Gaelic class of Alasdair Morrison; and John
Farquhar Munro, a man who can talk in his sleep, was later in a mellifluously
soporific, heartfelt, Gaelic league of his own.
But George was good enough to make his introduction of "Pater Paycock" - that’s
your actual phonetic Gaelic - sound impressive, a billing Pater tried hard to live up to
with an expansive explanation of why a language spoken by only 1.8 per cent of the
population, and declining, would be saved.
Pity he couldn’t say that in Gaelic, but it put him in the good company of (unofficial
estimate) more than 95 per cent of his colleagues.
A rum do, my friends, when a range of well-meaning speakers, from the Earl of
Selkirk to Rob Brown, from Wendy Neish Gallister (phonetic, remember), from
Seamus McGrigor to Tricia Marwick, insist that a language none of them can speak -
beyond Elinor Scott’s "walk quietly in the corridor" from her Highland teaching days -
will be saved and revived by judicious application of large amounts of Executive
money.
Still, if there are 6,000 languages in the world, and apparently there are, and one dies
every fortnight, as Tricia insisted, then let’s save Gaelic before the 58,000 Scots who
still speak it fade away to the great Gaeltacht in the sky.
Quite right, said the Earl of Selkirk, aka Lord James Douglas- Hamilton, a perfect
gentleman with, no fault of his, as glass-cutting an English accent as Holyrood can
boast. "The Gelic lenguage must be saved."
Rob Brown, intellectual Geordie with accent to match, and why not, agreed but
pointed out that saving a language was not like protecting an elephant. Quite why,
apart from it being unlikely to attract the attention of David Attenborough, was not
clear - and is there a Gaelic word for elephant? - but he eventually reached a
conclusion entirely to his own satisfaction.
Ted Brocklebank, jerked into action for the Tories after Adam Ingram for the SNP had
produced the best IM Jolly impersonation in years, began by admitting, in Gaelic: "I
was asleep and you waked me."
Good line, deserved applause, even if it was his solitary sentence in Gaelic and a
Page 71
quote from a fine old song to boot. But after this promising start he upset potential
supporters by saying that Orkney, Shetland, Fife, Lothians, Borders, Aberdeenshire,
Ayrshire and several other parts had no interest whatever in Gaelic so why bother?
Invest only in the language’s heartland, he said, undeterred by a very Stewart
Stevenson question about New Pitsligo and Alex Neil demanding to know about
Kilmarnock; nope, no idea.
Kenneth Macintosh, Murray Tosh’s mangled version of his Gaelic name defeating
even a phonetic attempt, talked movingly about his late uncle Lachie, who knew the
Gaelic songs, history and stories, how to scythe grass and how to milk a cow by
hand. A lovely man, but can memory save a language?
Page 72
2 Feb 2005
What makes a good citizen?
ANNA SMYTH , The Scotsman
WHAT does it take to be a good citizen? Helping an old lady across the road? Voting
regularly? Saving the environment? None of the above?
If you struggle to define citizenship, you’re not alone. It’s a contentious issue, and
one which this month has risen to the top of the education agenda.
In England, they have been trying for two years to educate school pupils about
citizenship. In September 2002 the statutory curriculum was broadened to include
formal instruction on issues like freedom, equality and justice. The aim was to
encourage pupils to develop sound principles in "the new ‘three R’s’: rights,
responsibilities and respect", but early results don’t look good.
An ICM poll, commissioned by Ofsted, presented a dismal picture of disengagement
among pupils. One in ten secondary school pupils did not know what a citizenship
class was, only 25 per cent accurately identified the power balance in Westminster
and 45 per cent said they didn’t think it was important to know more about each
party’s policies.
The Scottish authorities have been watching the experiment with interest - here we
have no statutory curriculum and no specified citizenship classes. Now the English
example seems to be failing, our choice perhaps looks the wiser one, but if today’s
youth are as apathetic as they are constantly portrayed, should we not at least
attempt to raise awareness of these issues by dedicating time within the school
timetable?
Fiona Booth is Director of Citizenship Education at the Hansard Society, an
educational charity responsible for promoting parliamentary democracy. The society
was behind much of the curriculum development in England.
"Citizenship classes were brought in as a result of the Crick report," says Booth,
"which highlighted the need for these issues to be covered in schools. It was pegged
to voter apathy and low electoral turnout in young people, but the curriculum now
addresses a far wider spectrum.
"A lot of people equate low voter turnout to political apathy. They think young people
are politically apathetic, but they are anything but. They might feel disengaged from
political parties, but when you ask them about the environment, or about changing
their own school policy, they are very keen to be politically active. Citizenship is
about giving them the information so that they can make an informed choice. If young
people choose not to vote, fine - so long as they know why they’re not voting."
The criticism from Ofsted has been attributed to a lack of funding and "teething
problems". Once these have been addressed, it is hoped the initiative will prove
effective. In Scotland, though, there has been a deliberate decision not to introduce
targeted citizenship classes. Although it is listed as a national priority of the
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Executive, they argue it is more beneficial to build citizenship issues into a range of
subjects, creating a whole-school philosophy.
Professor Pamela Munn of the Curriculum Research Department at Edinburgh
University chaired a review group which examined the issue of citizenship education
in Scotland.
"The approach we’ve taken in Scotland is very different to England," she says.
"We’ve deliberately tried to move away from the idea of specific classes, so instead
of having citizenship in period two on a Wednesday, we encourage more of a whole-
school approach. We were very keen to promote the idea that you learn about
citizenship by doing it. We are really encouraging schools to set up school councils
and buddy systems, which allow people to take responsibility for aspects of the
school community.
"Ofsted has been very critical of the English situation, and it might be that with such a
pressure put on pupil attainment through exam results, citizenship - which is
completely unexaminable - isn’t taken as seriously as it ought to be by pupils or
schools."
In Scotland, there are other initiatives to promote youth participation, like the MSPs
into Schools scheme recently launched by the Hansard Society. Currently being
piloted with eight MSPs it will, if successful, see elected representatives visiting
schools across the country to talk and listen to future voters.
Paul Kane is Chairman of the Scottish Youth Parliament and says these "real life"
schemes hold the key to reaching the young: "Citizenship education is an absolute
must, but if the English are trying to sit kids down and teach them about politics, they
will never succeed.
"They would do far better inviting professionals to engage with pupils. The young are
interested in political issues, you simply have to make them real."
Page 74
A scandal of secrecy and profligacy
The Skye bridge contract allowed private firms to fleece the taxpayer
George Monbiot
Tuesday December 28, 2004
The Guardian
One of the ways in which the government can avoid the freedom of information laws, which come into
force at the end of this week, is to classify public business as private business. Under the act,
information can be withheld from the public if its disclosure would "prejudice the commercial interests
of any person". Wherever the government has entered into partnership with a private company, it can
argue that it would damage the company's interests if it told us what it was doing. So unless there is a
public inquiry, we might never discover why a bridge that should have cost £25m to build has now cost
£93m.
Last week the people of the island of Skye won a remarkable victory. For nine years they had been
fighting for the removal of the tolls on the bridge to the mainland. The bridge, built at the behest of the
Conservative government, was Britain's first privately financed public project. Under the private
finance initiative (PFI), public works such as roads, bridges, schools and hospitals are built and run by
private companies, then rented back to the government. Because, the government claims, private
companies are more efficient than the public sector, PFI schemes cost less.
On the day the bridge was opened (October 16 1995), the government stopped the ferry service it ran
between Skye and the mainland, thus granting the consortium that built the bridge a monopoly; there
was no other means of getting on and off the island. The consortium was able to charge the islanders
what are believed to be the highest tolls per mile of road in the world. They rose to £5.70 each way for
a one-mile crossing. (After massive public pressure, the Labour government gave the residents a
discount, but only if they bought tickets in books of 20.) After nine years of what was to have been a
27-year contract, the companies that built the bridge have reaped £33m from motorists.
This is bad enough. But before the bridge was built, the government threw in £13m of sweeteners.
Desperate to make its showcase project work, it spent £6m on building the approach roads (a few
hundred metres of tarmac); another £3m on hiring consultants and buying land; and a further £4m as
"compensation" to the consortium for the costs of construction delays and design changes (which, if
you believe the government's claims about "risk transfer", should have been carried by the consortium
itself).
The European Investment Bank lent a further £13m to help finance the bridge. This loan breached the
bank's own investment criteria. The bank's purpose is to fund projects that boost the livelihoods of
people in the less developed parts of Europe. It is legally bound to lend money only when "funds are
not available from other sources on reasonable terms" and to support only those schemes that do not
"distort competition". The tolls have damaged people's livelihoods by discouraging tourists. Private
investors, who know a good thing when they see it, were falling over themselves to buy a stake in the
project. The closure of the ferry service on the day the bridge opened did not distort competition: it
eliminated it.
The discount for books of 20 tickets was financed by the government, not the consortium. So to help
reduce the cost of the tolls (which would not have been levied at all had the bridge been built at public
expense), the government has paid a further £7.6m. Now the tolls are being removed and the contract
is being bought back from the companies by the Scottish executive at a cost of £27m.
The bridge, in other words, appears to have cost the public £93.6m. If we accept the consortium's
account of how much it cost to build - £25m - we have paid for it 3.7 times. Even this could be an
underestimate: independent engineers suggest that it shouldn't have cost more than £15m.
So what was in the contract? I have no idea, and nor does anyone who was not involved in negotiating
it. Though it was giving away our money, though there was no possible security argument for keeping
it secret, both the Tory and Labour governments have hidden the contract behind the excuse of
"commercial confidentiality". Unless an inventive challenge can be launched, governments will
continue to do so, using the loophole in the act. The lesson of the Skye bridge fiasco is obvious. If we
are not allowed to see what's being done in our name, there's a pretty good chance we are being
ripped off.
· www.monbiot.com
Page 75
'It was ordinary people who did this'
Locals cheer as Skye bridge tolls are axed after years of protests
Kirsty Scott
Wednesday December 22, 2004
The Guardian
Toll charges on the Skye Bridge, which links the island with the Scottish mainland, have been axed. Photograph: Christopher
Furlong/Getty Images
Millie Simonini never saw herself as a lawbreaker.
But the retired administrator was so furious when tolls were imposed on the Skye road bridge that she
drove her van across it without paying.
"The man put his hand out for the money and I said: 'I'm not going to pay.' I felt nervous. I had never
broken the law in my life and I am a terrible coward about that kind of thing. But it was a just cause."
Mrs Simonini, 68, was charged, but not deterred. She did it again. And again. And again. She ended
up in court, as did scores of other Skye residents whose nine-year campaign to free themselves from
the financial burden of one of the UK's first private finance initiative projects ended yesterday with the
abolition of tolls.
"We are just over the moon really," said Mrs Simonini, from Ardvasar. "It has been a very long haul. It
was an injustice; just wrong and so damaging. We were being used as guinea pigs. I think they
thought they would not get too much opposition from a wee remote community like ours."
The project to connect Skye to the mainland with a bridge was one of the most controversial of the last
Conservative government's PFI schemes.
It was built at a cost of £39m by a group led by the Bank of America, and opened in 1995. Protests at
the tolls, which were based on previous ferry fares and were the highest in Europe - £5.70 one way for
a car over the summer - started immediately, and continued until yesterday when the first minister,
Jack McConnell, arrived on Skye to announce that the charges were scrapped with immediate effect.
The Scottish executive had signalled its intention last year to end the levy, a key priority for its junior
partner, the Scottish Liberal Democrats. It will pay around £27m to the Skye Bridge Company to buy
out the contract.
Final negotiations were carried out on Monday night between executive officials and the company.
According to the executive, if it had not bought out the bridge it would have had to provide a further
£18m in subsidy, and the tolls collected over the next eight years would have totalled £20m.
"As an islander, I am delighted that today marks the end of the discredited toll regime on the Skye
bridge," said Mr McConnell yesterday. "This is the start of a new era for Skye. Instead of the bridge
being a symbol of controversy it can now be a symbol for growth and prosperity."
John Farquhar Munro, the local Liberal Democrat MSP, who put his political career on the line over
the levy, said he was delighted.
"We have got rid of a Tory ideology that was imposed on this fragile community. It was something the
community objected to from day one, but nobody seemed to be listening to us."
Page 76
Tolls worth £27m have been collected over the years, and 130 people have been convicted for non-
payment of fines.
Andy Anderson, 66, was the first to be convicted and then jailed, for 11 days, for refusing to pay.
Yesterday he said he was not bitter.
"I am not a vindictive man. We had an objective. We fought for our objective. Some of us spent time in
prison fighting for this objective. But at the end of the day we won."
However, some campaigners insist the protest will end only when all convictions for non-payment
have been quashed and there has been a public inquiry into the PFI project.
Robbie the Pict, one of the bridge's leading opponents, was charged 131 times for non-payment,
convicted 60 times and arrested three times.
"There's not a lot to celebrate; there is only relief," he said. "But this matter is enormously corrupt. The
beginning of it is the tolls coming off. It must proceed to a refund of the £33m criminally extorted and
the quashing of convictions. We have only really reached base camp here, as far as I am concerned."
But for many on the island yesterday there was a real sense of pride.
"It was ordinary people who did this," said Dorothy Pearce, a crofter. "I remember two very old ladies
with a white Scottie dog in the back of their car going through the barrier and refusing to pay. I think
the outstanding thing is that so many people who would never break the law were prepared to do so."
Mrs Simonini, meanwhile, believes the islanders' struggle offers a lesson to all those who feel
powerless in the face of officialdom.
"It can be done. If you feel strongly about something and it is an injustice and you fight it, it can bring
about change."
Page 77
North Sea Oil
It’s England’s oil too
Jan 14th 1999 | EDINBURGH
From The Economist print edition
The idea that an independent Scotland could balance its books with the
revenues from North Sea oil has been disproved by new research
BACK in the 1970s, the Scottish National Party (SNP) burst into British politics thanks to
one simple slogan—“It’s Scotland’s Oil!” As black gold began to gush from the North Sea,
the lure of independence, financed by oil, produced a surge of nationalism. In the
October 1974 election, 30% of Scots voted for the SNP.
The SNP are now riding even higher in the polls. An ICM opinion poll published in the
Scotsman newspaper on January 12th showed that in May’s elections to the new
devolved Scottish parliament—which Labour thought would tame nationalism—36% of
Scots would vote for the SNP, only two points behind Labour. With the nationalists
promising to use devolution to take the next step to independence, North Sea oil is once
again politically crucial.
The nationalists do not use the slogan about “Scotland’s oil” these days. But the idea that
most of Britain’s offshore oil and gas fields could belong to an independent Scotland
figures heavily in their economic calculations. Opponents of Scottish independence
frequently point out that more government money is spent in Scotland than the Scots
pay in taxes. A recent government study said that this deficit was £7.1 billion ($11.6
billion), about 11% of Scottish GDP. The SNP’s main response is to argue that an
independent Scotland would receive 90% of the revenues from taxing North Sea oil and
gas—and that this would more than make up the short-fall.
Until now, the SNP calculations about oil revenue seemed reasonable. Since 1977, more
than 90% of North Sea oil has flowed from wells off the Scottish coast. But a study
commissioned by The Economist from Alex Kemp, professor of economics at Aberdeen
University, shows a serious flaw in the SNP’s claim. Somewhat startlingly, the share of
North Sea tax revenues to which Scotland could lay claim has fluctuated wildly, from as
high as 98% in 1981 to as low as 66% in 1998. Moreover, it seems that the bonanza
days are all in the past and that, in the near future, Scotland’s share could dip as low as
45% of a declining total (see chart).
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The reasons for this are complex. First, one has to draw a boundary in the sea between
Scotland and England to decide who gets which oil and gas fields. This is likely to prove
mighty difficult (see article). Nevertheless, our study chose the most plausible line.
Second, the tax revenues also come from gas fields and, on average, less than 40% of
gas production is in Scottish waters.
Third, and crucially, Mr Kemp says that the tax revenues from offshore oil and gas
production vary sharply depending on the price of crude oil, and the investment the
companies put into exploiting oilfields. Both factors affect the profits that companies
make, and hence the corporation and petroleum revenue taxes that they pay.
So in 1981, for example, when the price of oil was high ($35 a barrel), companies made
big profits and paid a lot of tax (£6.5 billion), of which Scotland would have got 98%. But
in 1998, when the price of oil was about $10 a barrel, the companies made smaller
profits and paid only £2.6 billion in tax. Scotland, however, would have received only
66% of this sum.
This is mainly because the newest Scottish oilfields are in deep, far-flung waters which
are much more expensive to exploit (and less profitable) than the oil and gas fields in
English waters. Last year £5.6 billion, a record amount, was invested offshore—86% of
which was in Scottish fields. At current low oil prices, this investment squeezes tax
revenues flat.
Mr Kemp’s research does vindicate the SNP claim that an independent Scotland would
have enjoyed about 90% of the oil taxes paid to date (£79.9 billion to Scotland; £8.2
billion to the rest of Britain). But this would still probably have left a small gap between
taxes raised in Scotland and overall government expenditure there. Moreover, the SNP
could not count on a similar tax bonanza in future years.
If oil prices stay at $10 a barrel, Scotland’s share of the £1.2 billion tax yield forecast for
2000 would only be 45%. At $18 a barrel, Mr Kemp says Scotland’s share would be
rather better—70% of £2.6 billion. But few analysts expects prices to rise so high in the
short term. A forecast by America’s Department of Energy on January 8th, for instance,
implies a North Sea oil price of $13 a barrel in 2000. And even at the relatively optimistic
forecast of $14 a barrel (which Mr Kemp reckons would yield an independent Scotland
53% of £1.5 billion in 2000), this tax-take is not enough to cover Scotland’s fiscal deficit.
Page 79
Using Treasury and Scottish Office forecasts of public spending and tax revenues, The
Economist has estimated Scotland’s fiscal deficit up to 2002. This shows that, from a
deficit of about 5.5% of GDP in 1996-97, the shortfall will fluctuate at between 3.25% and
4.75% of GDP over the next five years. That assumes both an oil price of $14 a barrel and
that three-quarters of the economic activity generated by offshore oil and gas activity is
incorporated into Scotland’s GDP.
This calculation shows that an independent Scotland might still manage to fulfil one SNP
objective, which is to meet the Maastricht criteria for membership of the European single
currency—the euro. Maastricht specifies that countries must run a budget deficit of no
more than 3% of GDP. But since SNP leaders want to show that they are responsible
people who can be trusted to run Scotland well, they might be wise to accept that
Scotland does indeed have a structural fiscal deficit. The deficit could be managed—but
only with some tough decisions about cutting spending or raising taxes.
The nationalists would also be more honest if they dropped a frequent claim: that
research by the House of Commons library has shown that the effect on GDP of gaining
the oil fields would, on independence, make Scotland the world’s seventh richest country.
In fact, the SNP instructed the librarians to assume that Scotland would gain 90% of the
North Sea’s output. Mr Kemp’s work shows that such a division is unlikely. He says that
there is no simple way of estimating the increase in GDP which might accrue to an
independent Scotland—the figure is anywhere between 75-95% of activity in the North
Sea.
In any event, this is mainly a statistical calculation. Although Scotland’s nominal GDP
might rise sharply on independence, the average Scot would not notice a jump in living
standards. There would be no more jobs or wealth generated in Scotland. Indeed, the
only real change would be that tax revenues from the North Sea would fail to make up
for the loss of public funds from the rest of Britain. And because of the need to keep
public finances within the criteria needed to join the euro, the average Scot might feel a
drop in prosperity as taxes might have to be raised or spending cut. This study shows
that a prudent Scottish chancellor could not rely on a constant gusher of money from the
North Sea.
Page 80
A nation once again?
Apr 29th 1999 | EDINBURGH
From The Economist print edition
The elections to the new Scottish Parliament on May 6th are the culmination of
a quiet revolution
ASK people in Edinburgh where the Royal Museum is, and you are liable to get puzzled
looks. To get directions to what the banners outside the building say is the Royal
Museum, it is better to ask for the National Museum of Scotland—because that is what it
really is, and is how most Edinburgh citizens think of it.
For Edinburgh is a capital city, with national galleries of art, the headquarters of big
banks and the Scottish legal system, a shiny new financial district, and a main
street—Princes Street—providing a balcony view across a green valley park to a
venerable castle. All in all, this is a city which stands comparison with most other
European capitals. And it is soon to be adorned by a new and powerful symbol of
nationhood—a Scottish Parliament.
It is not just the Parliament’s law-making and tax-raising powers which suggest that it
represents a significant step in the reinvention of a nation, but also the way in which the
Parliament will fit snugly into Scottish history and culture. It will be temporarily housed in
the assembly hall of the Church of Scotland, just across the road from the hall in which
the last Scottish Parliament voluntarily voted itself out of existence in 1707.
And when the Parliament eventually moves into its permanent home, it will go to a site
opposite Holyrood Palace—the ancient seat of Scottish monarchs—but in an
adventurously modern building designed by Enric Miralles, an architect from Barcelona.
The choice of a Catalan architect symbolises the growing Scottish desire to muscle on to
the European stage, as Catalonia has done as a powerful region within Spain, and maybe
eventually even further into the spotlight as a European nation like, say, Ireland.
If this is indeed the rebirth of a nation, it is coming about in the most extraordinary way.
Save for some odd, and hapless, individuals, there have been no underground armies or
even platoons of separatist terrorists; no campaigns of civil disobedience aimed at
unseating governments; not even any mass demonstrations by a fed-up populace, apart
from one rather genteel, well-behaved affair seven years ago.
This has been perhaps the first revolution (how else do you describe the re-establishment
of a nation’s government?) that has been conducted by pen-pushing committees of
lawyers, clergymen and accountants rather than cells of bearded radicals And, unless
someone cut themselves on a paperclip, it has been achieved without a drop of blood
being spilled.
So it is not surprising that this is also a revolution which—unlike that which divided
Czechoslovakia—falls short of achieving full nationhood for Scotland. Parliament at
Westminster, to which Scots will continue to elect mps, will control defence and foreign
affairs, macroeconomic policy, taxation and social security. The Scottish Parliament,
however, will be able to make laws over health services, education, local government,
housing, criminal and civil justice, and economic development. It also has limited tax
powers: the ability to raise or lower basic-rate income tax by no more than 3p, and it can
levy charges, such as road tolls.
A civic nationalism
Page 81
There are reasons for this semi-independent state. Unlike Québécois or Flemish
nationalism, there is no language motive to Scottish nationalism; Gaelic is spoken by
only about 80,000 of the 5.1m inhabitants of Scotland. Religion plays no discernible part;
while the Roman Catholic minority used to fear independence as being liable to result in a
Protestant hegemony, a recent mori poll for the Sunday Herald found that a higher
proportion of Catholics (39%) supported independence than did Protestants (32%).
And unlike East European or Balkan nationalism, the Scottish variety has very little to do
with ethnicity. While there have been sporadic outbreaks of anti-English behaviour—sad
stories of English families driven out of their homes, usually in small villages rather than
in big cities—the Scottish National Party (snp), which is often accused of fomenting anti-
English hatred, frowns on such behaviour and expels any member who engages in it.
Alex Salmond, the snp leader, who last wore a kilt when he was four years old, says that
his party’s nationalism is entirely civic in nature. “The Scots,” he says, “are a mongrel
nation.” There are no campaigns to oust the directors of the national galleries and
museum, both Englishmen, and while the fervour of the “tartan army”, the followers of
the national football team, is renowned, the team itself often sports players whose
English accents are more noticeable than their Scottish ancestry.
Thus in Scotland today there are none of the conditions which fomented rebellion in
Ireland and led to Irish independence in 1922, the last great rupture in the political union
of the British Isles. Scottish nationalists do look longingly at Ireland, particularly at its
phenomenal economic growth over the last decade. But for most Scots, the Irish
experience does not seem to be a particularly appealing model—perhaps because it is
associated in some minds with republican terrorism.
What does motivate Scottish nationalism, and has also been the driving force behind
demands for devolution of power from London over the past century, is the strong
Scottish attachment to the country’s civic institutions. In this respect, Scotland is very
different from Wales, which was forcibly incorporated into England over 400 years before
the Scots signed a voluntary Act of Union in 1707. Distinctive Welsh institutions, apart
from those concerned with the Welsh language, are hard to pinpoint. By contrast,
Scotland’s institutional landscape was well established by the time of political union with
England.
These institutions—schools and universities with their own curriculum and exam
structures, a legal system with its own codes and rules, a church independent of the
state, a distinctive system of local government—were left untouched by the union. But
they were unable to cope with the vast social change in the 19th century generated by
the industrial revolution. Westminster, preoccupied with the British Empire, was
unresponsive to the demands for the separate Scottish legislation needed to allow
Scottish institutions to adapt to a rapidly urbanising society.
Agitation by the fast-growing middle-classes led to the establishment in 1885 of a
government department dedicated to Scottish affairs—the Scottish Office—which has
steadily grown in size and ministerial clout ever since. Now, its 3,650 bureaucrats
manage a budget of £14 billion ($22.5 billion) and another 10,081 civil servants in other
agencies such as the Scottish Prison Service.
This administrative devolution might well have continued working happily had it not been
for significant social and political change. First, the snp, which had campaigned quite
ineffectively since it was founded in 1928, became a significant political force when it
latched on to the discovery of North Sea oil in the 1960s to argue that an independent
Scotland could escape from the economic decline caused by the collapse of traditional
heavy industry.
Second, the Tories steadily lost support in Scotland, going down from 31% of the vote
and 22 mps in 1979 to 18% and no mps in 1997—and yet ran Scotland throughout that
Page 82
period, courtesy of their majority at Westminster. Gradually, this became seen as an
affront to Scottish sensibilities, so much so that by the time of the 1997 devolution
referendum, Scotland’s political and civic leaders (apart from the defeated Tories and a
few businessmen) were pretty much united in their determination to have a Scottish
parliament to handle domestic affairs.Voters were happy to follow their lead.
Hoping for Enlightenment
The creation of a Scottish parliament should dissipate Scottish discontents, at least for
the foreseeable future. But it is also propelling British politics into a new and unfamiliar
decentralised political system. Westminster’s writ no longer runs north of the border, at
least as far as things like education and health are concerned. Equally, the Scots can no
longer blame a distant government in London for all their problems.
If it works then devolution, far from being the harbinger of the break-up of Britain,
should bring fresh vitality to national life outside London. The new confidence in
Edinburgh, which is experiencing an economic boom and basking in the media attention
of the election campaign, is self-evident. The swelling number of restaurants are busy
most nights even in the depths of winter, and chic fashion shops are opening in George
Street, tempting citizens away from traditional navy and gaberdine garbs.
The challenges of running a country may also stimulate Scottish intellectual life. Many
Scots fondly dream of a new “Scottish Enlightenment”, like the one the country enjoyed
in the 18th century when Scottish thinkers like David Hume and Adam Smith were at the
centre of the philosophical revolution which swept through Europe. The French
philosopher Voltaire remarked, only slightly sarcastically, that if one wanted to learn
anything from gardening to philosophy, one had to go to Edinburgh.
The Enlightenment was partly stimulated, some think, because political union with
England ended the Scottish preoccupation with battling against its more powerful
southern neighbour and opened northern eyes and minds to the possibilities, both
intellectual and commercial, arising in a fast-changing world in which Britain was then
playing a decisive imperial role.
Some hope that devolution, by creating a more self-reliant and confident Scotland, will
provoke another intellectual flowering. Just as the Enlightenment thinkers had a strong
practical bent, producing many advances in medicine for example, so too do today’s
Scottish scientists. The Scottish geneticists who produced Dolly, the world’s first cloned
sheep, are now using that biotechnology to devise new treatments for disorders such as
cystic fibrosis and emphysema.
Scottish entrepreneurial spirit, which appeared to have all but died in the 1970s as many
native firms succumbed to takeover or closure and as international firms closed their
factories north of the border, appears to be making a comeback. Companies such as
Stagecoach, built from nothing 15 years ago into a world-wide transport firm, or
ScottishPower, a privatised utility now expanding into the United States, are displaying a
new corporate strength and confidence. Ironically, given the vehemence of the Scottish
reaction against Thatcherism, both companies grew out of Tory-inspired privatisations.
But the politicians in the Scottish Parliament will first have more mundane matters than
Enlightenment to deal with. Although the Scottish economy has improved markedly—and
Scotland has spent much of the past decade closing the wealth gap with the rest of
Britain—the gap between rich and poor parts of the country has also increased. The
economic map of Scotland, says Jeremy Peat, chief economist at the Royal Bank of
Scotland, is severely lop-sided with the parts around the eastern cities of Edinburgh and
Aberdeen being 60% richer than the poorest parts—west and central Scotland, the
Borders and the Highlands and Islands. He says that 20 years ago the figure was only
18%.
Page 83
These disparities are provoking political tensions. Glasgow, which is reeling at the
prospect of losing one of its few remaining shipyards, Kvaerner Govan, and 1,800 jobs, is
clamouring for departments of government to be shifted west from Edinburgh; a political
party devoted only to the Highlands and Islands is contesting the elections; and
politicians in the Borders are agitating for aid to deal with recent blows to the textiles and
electronics industries.
There are plenty of social problems too. Graham Leicester, director of the Scottish
Council Foundation, a think-tank, says that Scotland has one of the highest rates of child
poverty in Europe—one in three children are growing up in households where welfare
payments are the main source of income. Despite the fact that the government spends
26% more on health per head in Scotland than in England, parts of the country still have
a dreadful health record. Average life expectancy in Bearsden, an affluent Glasgow
suburb, is about eight years longer than in nearby Drumchapel, a district of municipal
housing and high unemployment.
Tackling these matters will force Scottish politicians to admit that their traditional
solution to such problems—squeezing more taxpayers’ cash from the Treasury in
London—is not the answer. It will also mean swallowing a bit of national pride and
admitting that some prized assets, such as the widely-admired Scottish education
system, are not as good as many Scots like to think. Lindsay Paterson, professor of
educational policy at Edinburgh University, says that while Scotland is at the top of the
European league for numbers of young people with degrees and other higher
qualifications, it is towards the bottom of the league for secondary school teaching of
maths and science. Facts like these have tended to be ignored as Scots have taken
solace in the knowledge that at least their education system is generally better than
England’s. This comfort blanket should now be removed as the Scots gain control of their
domestic affairs and as responsibility for failings will not be so easily passed to
Westminster.
It is often predicted that this new political world will cause problems in England. After all,
Scottish mps will continue to vote on English domestic affairs while English mps will have
no comparable say in Scottish affairs. Just as the Scots throughout the 1980s lamented
being governed by English politicians they had not elected, so the English—in time—may
resent the Scottish say over their affairs. But this anomaly, the so-called “West Lothian
question”, may cause less irritation than is assumed, for two reasons.
First, Tony Blair’s government would still have a thumping majority even if there were no
Scottish or even Welsh mps at Westminster. True, the time may come when England
votes for a Tory government but does not get it because of Scottish Labour mps. But
then, second, it is not true that Scottish and English affairs are now completely separate.
Because of the way the Treasury’s block grant to the Scottish Parliament is determined,
when Westminster mps vote on changes to the English health and education budgets,
they will also be determining changes to the Scottish budget.
That gives English mps a say in Scottish business, and Scottish mps an acute interest in
English matters. Indeed this intertwining may eventually cause a political headache if,
say, the British government decides it wants to switch from the present tax-financed
health service to one more dependent on revenue from private health insurance, but the
Scottish Parliament stubbornly refuses to contemplate such a move.
However, such a policy change seems unlikely, at least in the medium term. And in the
meantime, both parliaments and the British taxpayer ought to benefit from greater policy
experimentation and variety of experience. The introduction, for example, of a General
Teaching Council to regulate the English teaching profession follows the experience of a
similar long-established and Scottish body which has helped to raise standards in teacher
training. More such learning and borrowing ought to be possible.
Page 84
Indeed, while some feared that the newly elected parliament in Edinburgh would spend
its time arguing for yet more power to be passed from Westminster, so far at least such
arguments have been absent from the election campaign. Even the snp, much attacked
by opponents as separatists, have concentrated on domestic policy issues. The dawn of
complete Scottish independence, far from having been brought closer, seems to be as far
away as ever. The snp remain isolated advocates of it, and until Scotland’s powerful civic
institutions see something better in independence than they currently get from the union
with England, they are unlikely to be lured into the Nationalist fold.
Instead, what seems to be arising is a different Scotland, and a different Britain. Britain’s
centralised political culture will be changed, probably irreversibly. It will be replaced by a
more diverse sort of politics, in which different regional and national identities will be
given new encouragement and expression. They may even co-operate, rather than clash.
Page 85
Scottish Writing
Scots writers spurn their neighbours
Apr 24th 1997 | EDINBURGH
From The Economist print edition
In ridding themselves of an English accent, Scottish novelists found their own
voice—or, rather, voices
CHILDRENOF ALBION ROVERS.c/.
Edited by Kevin Williamson.
Rebel In
Canon-gate; 240 pages; £8.99.
Overlook Press; $22.95
NEW SCOTTISH WRITING.
Edited by Harry Ritchie.
Bloomsbury; 256 pages; £8.99.
DEBATEABLE LAND.
By Candia McWilliam.
Picador; 224 pages; £5.99.
MORVEN CALLAR.
By Alan Warner.
Vintage; 229 pages; £5.99.
BUSTED SCOTCH.
By James Kelman.
Norton; 320 pages; $23.
SO I AM GLAD.
By A.L. Kennedy.
Vintage; 288 pages; £5.99
“GOD said to Saint Peter. Peter I’m going to make a beautiful country. Fertile lowlands,
beautiful mountains with graceful waterfalls down their sides. Sheltered glens that glow
purple in the summer. I’m going to make the people of this country strong, brave and
noble. I’m going to give them a drink that glows like gold, called whisky. This noble
country of handsome men and the prettiest girls will be called Scotland. What do you
think Peter?
Saint Peter said, Well God that’s all very well but do you not think you’re being too lavish
in the gifts you’re bestowing to this country. It sounds like heaven on earth. God replied
to this: Oh there’s no possibility of that, wait till you see who I’m going to give them as
fucking neighbours!”
This joke comes from “After the Vision”, an unpublished novel by Alan Warner, whose
“Morven Callar” is short-listed for the world’s biggest fiction prize, the £100,000
($163,000) Dublin Impact Award. The extract tells much about the Scottish writing now
pouring forth as if a dam had burst. It rips up rules of grammar and punctuation,
smashes icons of religion and taste with black humour, gives vent to gut nationalism, and
belches vile language as freely as a drunk vomiting on a pavement. Mr Warner’s joke
lacks only God popping an ecstasy tablet for it to be a miniature of contemporary
Caledonian fiction.
Page 86
Though an incomplete vignette, it is true to life alright. Even though you might never
brave the club and rave scene which has nurtured the “chemical generation”, a brief
dalliance in any Glasgow or Edinburgh pub haunted by adolescents will tell you that
“Children of Albion Rovers”, a recently published collection of short stories that includes
Mr Warner’s, is real-life writing. But it is not all Scottish literary life.
To Muriel Spark—who on March 19th received the £30,000 David Cohen British literature
prize for a lifetime’s oeuvre which has expanded far beyond her native Edinburgh—the
Leith betting shops and hallucinatory dens of Irvine Welsh, the writer of “Trainspotting”,
are as remote as the moons of Saturn. The Glasgow pubs and alleys which are James
Kelman’s lively stage in “How Late It Was, How Late”, the novel that won him the
coveted Booker prize in 1994, would be a stifling prison for the busy imagination of Allan
Massie. Candia McWilliam, who won the 1994 Guardian fiction prize for “Debateable
Land”, and Ronald Frame are as resolutely middle-class as Duncan McLean and Janice
Galloway are defiantly working-class.
Some of these and other wholly disparate talents are sampled in another anthology, the
prosaically-named “New Scottish Writing”, edited by Harry Ritchie. As is noted sharply in
a concluding essay by Angus Calder, an author and historian, the idea that there is a
definable Scottish identity is a myth. “It is given substance only in the corporealities of
those who imagine they have it,” says Mr Calder.
With their eyes on book sales and profits, publishers have engendered the mythical
identity of the modern Scottish writer as a young working-class yobbo obsessed by drink,
drugs, sex and football. Two publishers, Robin Robertson of Jonathan Cape and Peter
Kravitz formerly of Polygon, deserve credit for promoting such first-rate writers as Mr
Kelman and A.L. (Alison) Kennedy, but others are unashamedly cashing in on the fashion
for noisesome urban starkness. Alan Warner, who is adapting for BBC Television his first
novel, “Morven Callar”, a funny exploration of groping adolescent relationships in rave
culture which is set far from the city in rural Argyllshire (and has no swear words), was
outraged to discover that Jonathan Cape’s initial publicity implied, entirely wrongly, that
he was a reformed football hooligan.
The myth of the modern Scottish literary identity will not lie down easily. From April 30th
to May 6th, three of this apparent genre—Messrs Kelman, Welsh and McLean—are
undertaking a tour of four American cities, for which an American edition of some of Mr
Kelman’s previously-published short stories, “Busted Scotch”, has been produced as a
prime exemplifier.
Yet if the audiences delve into the lesser-known work of Mr McLean, who now lives in
Orkney, they will find characters of earthy mores writhing amid rural conventions of
tradition and religion. If readers find these writers a mite offensive, Ms Kennedy and Ms
Galloway offer less brutal but sometimes shockingly darker feminine perspectives on
relationships and aspirations.
But even these variegations still have common patterns. Like such established writers as
Alasdair Gray and Iain Banks, they are left-of-centre, bold with nastiness and dark with
humour. Their literary advance, which was trail-blazed by Mr Kelman, was to take into
the authorial voice the street argot tones made acceptable in characters’ speech by
writers such as William McIlvanney.
This represents a revolutionary overthrowing of received English pronunciation which has
allowed previously unpublishable writers to establish, not the Scottish identity, but an
array of Scottish identities that hitherto lacked a voice. These may have a commonality
in a vague sense of oppression by the neighbour across the border, but they also present
tools for hewing away at a new seam of literary investigation—the clash of ignored sub-
cultures with each other and within an apparently unified society.
Page 87
As Jennifer, the principal of Ms Kennedy’s novel “So I am Glad”, says: “I place something
invisible into the air, just so, give it a tangible shape and somewhere, someone, a
stranger, will get a word and the feeling in that word—both of them at once and because
of me. I can do that.”
