The wild lands at the north-western edge of Europe. Settled for millenia, for centuries they were beyond the grasp of empires, from the Romans, to the Vikings and the mighty English to the south. Mixed with their own celtic brothers to the west, their fierce continued independence gave rise to a unique culture that has survived to this day.
And yet the irony is they later became wedded to their greatest rivals sitting on the front row of the show that saw the greatest empire in the world. In their Age of Enlightenment, they produce so many great thinkers and innovators, the world would be a very different place without them. Now, in this 21st Century, the call for independence is greater than ever.
Will they once again become their own masters? To understand this we must look at the story of the North of the British Isles, the story of Scotland. Scotland is a country within the nation state of the United Kingdom, being the most northerly part of the island of Great Britain.
It is comprised essentially of three parts - an archipelago, highlands and lowlands. It has a rich history and culture, quite distinct from that of its southern English neighbour, and such is the depth of this distinction that I chose to cover this country in a separate set of videos, despite Scotland not being a nation state per se. I do use the word “country” correctly, however, as Scotland is one of four “countries” of the United Kingdom, and is the legal term used to describe these subdivisions of the greater nation state.
In this, the first of a two part presentation, I’ll look at Scotland’s long history up to the present. In Part 2, I’ll examine its physical and human geography, its national organisation and state structure and symbols, and lastly its economy and culture. If you like these country summary videos then please be sure to hit the subscribe button so you don’t miss future episodes.
The word Scotland means land of the Scots, which is simple enough. But the word “Scot” has a more complex history. “Scoti” was the name given to Gaels, or Gaelic people that inhabited today’s Scotland and Ireland by the Romans.
But in Old English the word “Scotland” came to mean Ireland, it being inhabited still by the Gaels. By the 11th Century, however, this usage had switched to the land of the Gaels within today’s Scotland, with the Gaelic transformation of that country in the preceding centuries. The Gaels themselves call their land “Alba”, and “Albany”, “Albion” and “Albania” were also used to describe these lands during the Middle Ages.
The Romans referred to the tribes north of the River Forth as the Caledones, and Caledonia has gone on to be used as a Romantic alternative name for Scotland since then. People have lived in Scotland since the end of the last ice age. With the retreat of the ice sheet that covered these lands up until about 13,000 years ago, hunter gatherers moved into the area.
We know that the Orkney Islands, just north of the mainland, were occupied in the Neolithic period, before 2,500 BC, since there are the ruins of a settlement from this period found here at Skara Brae, older than Stonehenge and older than the pyramids. Other Neolithic sites are found dotted across the northern and western isles, and so many are so well preserved because they were built from durable stone instead of perishable wood, due to the lack of trees – more on that subject in the geography section. At some point prior to 500BC, Celtic peoples were either already present, or migrated into the north of Great Britain island.
Until quite recently, it was accepted that Celts originated in Central Europe during the Bronze Age and migrated outwards to occupy the British Isles, the area of modern-day France, or Gaul as it was known then, much of the Iberian peninsula, and even parts of modern-day Turkey. But a new theory suggests that the Celts actually originated along the Atlantic Coast of the British Isles. This controversy of Celtic origin has yet to be resolved.
Regardless, the Celts became the dominant peoples in the British Isles prior to the Roman invasion, and their languages have survived today in the form of Breton, Cornish, Welsh, Irish Gaelic and Scots Gaelic. It is the Celts that give Scotland its culture that is distinct from English. While the Romans invaded and successfully held England for centuries, they were unable to subdue Scotland, due to a combination of the fierceness of the Scottish tribes, the mountainous terrain, and the very un-Roman like climate.
The Emperor Hadrian erected a stone wall and series of forts between the Tyne and Solway rivers in the early second century to protect the settled province to the south from raiders, while the Antonine wall, erected by his successor was built from turf and extended from the Clyde to the Forth rivers. This was the furthest north the Romans ever attempted to reach anywhere in their empire in terms of a stable administration, but the wall was abandoned only a decade after its completion, with the Romans retreating to Hadrian’s Wall, which was maintained for centuries until the empire’s collapse in the 5th Century. Britain was left to fend for itself in the following centuries.
Much of what happened at that time is still debatable due to a lack of written records. But what we do know is that today’s England and eventually South-east Scotland became occupied by the Anglo-Saxons, a Germanic people, while the rest of Scotland remained dominated by Celtic tribes. The Western Coast was ruled by the Celtic Gaels that came over from Ireland, while all other parts came under the general banner of the Picts.
Who the Picts were is still not fully understood, and while we know through their artwork and other evidence that they were certainly Celtic, their language has not survived. The advance of the Irish Gaelic language, either through conquest or missionary work by Gaelic priests spreading the Christian religion led to its extinction and the firm establishment of Gaelic as the language of Scotland by the 11th Century. Meanwhile the Anglo-Saxons, in the form of the Kingdom of Northumbria, had pushed north as far as present day Edinburgh.
To further muddy the murky historical waters of this period, the Vikings arrived in Scotland in the 8th Century, initially as raiders, but later to settle, taking all of the northern and western isles for varying degrees of time. Notably, Orkney and Shetland remained in Norse hands until as late as 1472. It is understood that the threat of the Vikings enabled the uniting of many of the Pictish and Gaelic kingdoms under a single king, Kenneth McAlpin in the 9th Century that encompassed much of the country, and whose lineage all later Kings of Scotland would claim.
Under this kingdom, increased organisation and centralisation led to improvements in agriculture and the formation of the first towns. It was known to the Gaels as Alba, but in church Latin it was referred to as Scotia, and in English as the Kingdom of Scotland. With the Norman conquest of England in 1066, a mix of English and French influence permeated northwards into Scotland over the next two centuries via the Scottish royal court, through a combination of intermarriage, dependencies upon and threats made by the Norman kings to the South.
This influence spread through the “burghs” or towns, where Middle English, itself a mix of Old English and French, became increasingly spoken among the urban populations, in a heavily dialected form which comes to us today as the Scots language. Gaelic was still spoken by the vast majority, however, who still lived off the land outside the burghs. The largest of these burghs is the most famous today, the burgh that became the capital of the Scottish Nation as early as the 14th Century, Edinburgh.
This meddling of the Anglo-Normans in Scottish affairs reached its climax under the reign of the English king, Edward I “Longshanks”. When the Scottish king Alexander III died without an heir in 1286, Edward seized the opportunity to arbitrate between the various Scottish nobles over their claims to succeed the crown. In return for surrendering nominal Scottish independence to England, the Scottish noble John Balliol was given the kingship, but later he and other nobles refused to fight in England’s wars against France.
Balliol was deposed by Edward, who then took over direct control of Scotland. Thus began the Wars of Scottish Independence, with William Wallace emerging as one of the chief resistance leaders. Robert the Bruce was crowned King of Scotland in 1306, and his victory over the English at Bannockburn in 1314 is among the most famous of all battles in both English and Scottish history and cemented Scottish independence.
The border country between the two nations became a somewhat lawless place in the succeeding centuries, with raids being carried out by “reivers” (add caption) from both sides, sometimes encouraged by their respective governments, other times by just opportunitistic locals. Scotland itself progressed in terms of development during the late middle ages, with the towns becoming increasingly prosperous, but with an increasing divide in terms of way of life, culture and subsequent animosity between the Highlands and Lowlands. The Highlanders would often refer to the lowlanders as Sassenachs, a Gaelic loan word for Saxons, implying that the Scots-speaking lowlanders were just a type of Englishm an.
Meanwhile the urban lowlanders would look down upon the Highlanders as uncouth savages, and the label Teuchter emerged at some point as a perjorative term for such. The Highlanders had the clan system, whereby families within a certain area would swear loyalty to one another or sometimes a clan-chief. This system of loyalty had a large effect upon the politics of Scotland and the behaviour of the highlanders toward each other, the lowlanders, and ultimately with the English centuries later with tragic results, as we shall later see.
The Stewart dynasty ruled Scotland during this time. Mary, Queen of Scots, was such a Stewart, and her reign of the mid sixteenth century and life in general is one of the more famous tragedies in European history. A staunch Roman Catholic, she became at odds with her subjects following the Scottish Reformation in the early 16th Century that strongly leaned toward a “low-church” form of Presbyterian protestantism that put God and the Bible above the authority of earthly rulers.
After suspicion that she was involved in the murder of her first husband, she was forced to abdicate following an uprising, and fled south seeking the protection of her cousin Elizabeth I of England, leaving her one year old son James to become king – James VI. But Elizabeth, a staunch protestant, and target of various plots by the papacy and Catholic monarchs across Europe, saw Mary as a potential threat to her own rule, especially as Mary could claim lineage to the English throne through her great-grandfather, Henry VII. Elizabeth’s spymaster, Lord Walsingham entrapped her into a plot against Elizabeth, and she was executed in 1587.
But Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, died without an heir. James, Mary’s son, was in fact the closest in line to the succession of the English crown. And so it was that James VI of Scotland then also became James I of England in 1603, in what would be a Personal Union of two crowns over two sovereign nations, each maintaining their own parliaments and jurisdictions.
Throughout the 17th Century, attempts were made at different times by both parliaments to unify the two states into one, but all failed. It was actually a change in the climate that would, strangely, finally bring together England and Scotland into the Union of Great Britain. The 1690s saw cooler conditions across Europe, and is confirmed today to have been the coldest decade Scotland in 750 years.
This led to a series of failed harvests and famine that wiped out as much as 10-15% of the population. What became known as the Seven Lean Years led to many seeking an escape and emigration to other shores. Such an impulse spawned the Darien Scheme, a plan that would set up a Scottish colony upon the Isthmus of Panama that would transport goods from Europe to the East Indies across the narrow strip of land, thus saving weeks or months of journey time, and more importantly, giving the Scots some independence from the English who were otherwise dominating the trade routes to the colonies and East Asia and leaving Scotland economically isolated.
The plan received the financial backing of almost all the landowning elites of Scotland, and saw as much as 20% of the entire Scottish economy invested into it. But climate would again be the enemy of the Scots, for Panama was in a tropical climate that bred disease and the site itself was poorly chosen, being swampy and prone to mosquitoes. On top of all that, such land was claimed by the Spanish crown, and had the colony persisted would have surely led to Spain stepping in.
For all these reasons it was doomed to failure. And fail it did, with most of the colonists dying of disease between 1699 and 1700. Its failure brought the country to economic ruin, and desperate, the Scottish elites sought help from England to stabilise the situation and pay off the crippling national debt.
Additionally, many of the elites now saw that the only way to partake in the great wealth of the expansion of European trade with Asia was in a union with England. In 1707, after both parliaments of England and Scotland ratified terms in their respective Acts of Union, the Scottish Parliament dissolved itself, with Scottish MPs henceforward sitting with English MPs in Westminster, London. The two nations became one.
Great Britain was born. The Scottish elites got what they wanted. Debts were paid off in the short term, but more importantly, in the long term, they were able to take full advantage under equal terms of the English, now British, trade network, and the economy flourished.
And in this, the 18th Century, the Age of Enlightenment of new ideas in philosophy, science, engineering, architecture and the arts was spreading across Europe. When it reached Scotland, its flame burned \very brightly with the advent of the Scottish Enlightenment. So many ideas and inventions came out of this period that have affected the greater world today, that to list them all would be beyond the scope of this presentation.
Adam Smith’s treatise on economics The Wealth of Nations, is considered to be the foundation work on the subject of free trade and free-market economics in a world that hitherto had been locked in mercantilism, guilds and protected markets. The Encyclopaedia Britannica was conceived of and first published in Edinburgh. The Scot James Watt developed the first compact, viable steam engine that would power the Industrial Revolution and is one of the most important inventions in global history, changing the world forever.
The Scottish Enlightenment was centred around Edinburgh, and the development of the “New Town” of Georgian and Neo-Classical buildings to the north of the overcrowded old town that had been crammed onto the Royal Mile, a narrow hill that rises gently to its peak at Edinburgh castle. With this combination of architecture and ideas, the city earned the nickname “Athens of the North”. But not everyone was happy with this new arrangement with England, particularly the highlanders, who saw little in common with the lowlanders, not to mention the true Sassenachs of England.
Such sentiments came to head when Charles Edward Stuart, aka Bonnie Prince Charlie, landed in Scotland in 1745. He was the descendent of King James II, last of the originally Scottish Stuart dynasty, who’d been ousted in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 for his staunch Catholic views in a nation now largely protestant. Charles gathered an army in Scotland with the intent of marching on London and seizing the crown.
He successfully united both Highlanders and Lowlanders dissatisfied with what they saw as rule from London, in what became known as the Jacobite Rising of 1745. The army met with initial success, defeating British forces at Prestonpans just outside Edinburgh, then marched on England, reaching as far as Derby, since most of the British Army was abroad fighting colonial wars. But lack of support among the French and English for a restoration of the Stuart Dynasty forced Charles to retreat with his army to Scotland.
Retribution by the British came next year, with forces hurriedly shipped back from various parts of the Empire. Charles was finally defeated at Culloden in April 1746, a place marked forever in Scottish and English history, as the last land battle ever fought in Great Britain, and the day that saw Scottish, and particularly Highlander independence firmly crushed. The Highland Clearances that occurred in the following decades saw much of the Highlander way of life disrupted, as tenants were forced off their land, and the clan system purposefully weakened in a series of laws.
Scotland was front and centre in the Industrial Revolution that had begun in England. Glasgow became a hive of industry, particularly in shipbuilding centered on the River Clyde, and was regarded as the “Second City of Empire”. So many ships of historical importance were built here, including the Cutty Sark, one of the fastest large commercial sailing ships, the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth liners, of which the latter was the largest at that time, HMS Hood, the largest battleship built at that time, tragically sunk in 1941 with almost all hands lost and the Royal Yacht Britannia, that served as the Royal Family’s official ship for the latter half of the twentieth century.
But a combination of a rapidly expanding population combined with the highland clearances, and other changes to the ownership of agricultural land, led to a swollen population of urban poor, especially in Glasgow, that at one time had the largest slums in Europe. Emigration was seen as a way out of this hell, and between 1841 and 1931 up to two million Scots left for North America, Australia and New Zealand, while almost another million relocated to England. Centuries earlier, during the Irish wars of the 17th Century many presbytarian Scots were offered land in Northern Ireland, in what was known as the Ulster Plantation.
Their descendants form the bulk of the protestant population of that part of Ireland today, and without their strong Unionist ties to Great Britain, Northern Ireland would not be part of the United Kingdom today. The Union with England continued to flourish in the British Empire that reached its height in the latter half of the 19th Century, ruling a quarter of the world’s population. Scottish regiments within the British army saw action in most colonial wars and in both World Wars.
Scots were considered to have equal opportunities within this system, with many Scots rising to top of the ladder within the British Empire, including seven prime ministers, and a number of army chiefs, including Field Marshal Douglas Haig, who some called “Butcher Haig” for sending so many British infantry to their deaths in the trenches of World War I. Scotland’s extensive coastline, in combination with its prodigious shipbuilding industry proved to be vital components in the naval warfare during both world wars, and even today, Scotland is host to the base for Britain’s submarine nuclear arsenal on the River Clyde. But in the 20th Century, all was not well on the domestic front.
The urban poor faced dreadful conditions in a climate of economic stagnation. The extensive slums of Glasgow were ultimately cleared, being replaced by sterile government-run housing estates on a scale not seen in any other British city. Scottish coal mines were facing exhaustion after more than a century of exploitation.
Declining real-wages in the inflation-scourged era of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as a decline in orders for steel and shipbuilding through increasing competition from abroad led to mass lay-offs and an endless number of industrial disputes. These issues, among others such as the discovery of oil in the North Sea east of Scotland, led to a revival of Scottish Nationalism in the 1970s, with the Scottish National Party winning seats in Parliament in London, giving a political voice to an increasing large number of Scots who sought independence, or at least some form of greater autonomy for Scotland. After a 1997 referendum, Scotland was given more powers for self-governance with the 1999 return of the Scottish Parliament, after a hiatus of 292 years.
A referendum for full independence from Britain as a Nation State was held in 2014 but was defeated by a margin of 55 to 45%. Polling up to the current day remains close and the issue of whether the country should remain a partner within the United Kingdom, or become, once more, an independent Scotland is one of the key subjects of British politics today. Coming up in Part 2… the beauty of Scotland’s highlands, islands and lowlands, its unique cities and castles that are testaments to its rich past, the Scottish people and their languages today, whiskey and oil, haggis and Nessie and… Sean Connery… You don’t want to miss this whirlwind tour of the vibrant Scotland of today.
So I’ll see you there! I hope you enjoyed this presentation of its Scotland’s history. Please like and share this video if you enjoyed it or found it useful, and please let me know your thoughts in the comments, especially if you’re from this country, and if I missed out anything you feel is important.
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