Scottish History

This article contributes to the reassessment of Scottish history and identity in light of the recovery of its connections with black Atlantic issues such as slavery and empire. The ‘paradox’ of the national bard seeking employment as a book-keeper on Jamaica remains an uncomfortable area for modern Scotland. This article considers Burns's biographical and textual (dis-)entanglement with the Caribbean in relation to the subsequent competition over his memory. It reads Robert Burns as a lieu de mémoire (Pierre Nora) that opens up a conflicted account of the nature of free labour ideology, slavery and abolition in the late eighteenth century.

Eighteenth-century Britain saw the emergence of a new poetic genre, the “work” poem which took various forms of labor as its subject and was often written by laborers themselves. Several of these working class poets found their lives transformed due to the success of their verse (Stephen Duck most famously), but most faded into literary obscurity. However, a substantial body of “work” poems was produced by a diverse group of poets throughout the century, each manifesting divergent concerns and attitudes about the experience of work. This chapter assesses the formal connections uniting this poetic genre, particularly the frequent use of such literary devices as ironic distancing, litotes, and mock-georgic description. Instead of solely classifying “work” poems on the basis of their subject matter, this chapter demonstrates that such poetry (indeed the genre itself) lends itself to sophisticated literary techniques often associated with other poetic genres. In this fashion the full measure of eighteenth-century working class poetry can be evaluated more fairly, particularly by analyzing the formation of a new genre designed expressly by the poets themselves. The chapter ultimately seeks to demonstrate the connectedness, rather than the alienation, of working class poetry to the eighteenth-century British poetic tradition.

What was it like to live in the medieval period? In what ways did extraordinary events affect the everyday? The first volume in the Everyday Life series answers these questions as it opens a window on medieval Scotland from 1000 to 1600. The everyday involves all that is common to humanity from the passage of birth through to the rites of death. To date the historiography of medieval Scotland has not been greatly concerned with the familiar and the day-to-day. In fact some might claim that the topic has been entirely ignored, until now. A strong international team of contributors draws upon a range of primary sources and published materials, as well as artefactual and archaeological evidence, to present as complete a picture as possible of how people experienced life and complex issues of identity, geography, language, family and subsistence over five hundred years ago.

Directed by David Mackenzie and starring Hollywood’s Chris Pine, more usually found in blockbuster franchises such as Star Trek and Wonder Woman, Outlaw King is one of a number of medieval historical dramas soon to make their way to our screens. But, just as the trailer for the upcoming Mary Queen of Scots film prompted criticism across social media for apparent historical inaccuracy after it appeared to show Mary and Elizabeth meeting face to face (an event most historians agree never took place), so too will Outlaw King find itself under similar scrutiny...

This essay is a brief summary of the facts both from and preceding the Norman conquest of Scotland which ultimately led up to the First War of Scottish Independence in the early 14th century.
The essay is in Catalan.

Este artículo es un breve resumen de los hechos tanto de la conquista normanda de Escocia como los que la precedieron, que acabaron desembocando en la Primera Guerra de Independencia Escocesa durante la primera mitad del siglo XIV.
El texto está en Catalán.

The kings of East Anglia and Northumbria both died at the hands of the Great Heathen Army in the late 860s; one became a renowned martyr saint and one a villain. The latter, the Northumbrian Ælla, also became the antagonist in legends concerning the ancestors of the Uí Ímair, principal successors of the northern Great Army and leaders of the tenth-century Insular Norse.  According to a previously neglected text, 'De Northumbria post Britannos', another of northern England’s great dynasties claimed descent from Ælla. The Eadwulfings of Bamburgh were based in northern Northumbria, and appear to have gained leadership of their political community in the late ninth or early tenth century. With the rival position held by the Uí Ímair in the south, it is possible that Ælla’s later reputation and associated legends arose as a bi-product of tenth-century political conflict.

Scottish nationalism is a powerful movement in contemporary politics, yet the goal of Scottish independence emerged surprisingly recently into public debate. The origins of Scottish nationalism lie not in the medieval battles for Scottish statehood, the Acts of Union, the Scottish Enlightenment, or any other traditional historical milestone. Instead, an influential separatist Scottish nationalism began to take shape only in the 1970s and achieved its present ideological maturity in the course of the 1980s and 1990s. The nationalism that emerged from this testing period of Scottish history was unusual in that it demanded independence not to defend a threatened ancestral culture but as the most effective way to promote the agenda of the left. This accessible and engaging account of the political thought of Scottish nationalism explores how the arguments for Scottish independence were crafted over some fifty years by intellectuals, politicians and activists, and why these ideas had such a seismic impact on Scottish and British politics in the 2014 independence referendum.

This book is about the role of writers and intellectuals in shaping constitutional change. Considering an unprecedented range of literary, political and archival materials, it explores how questions of ‘voice’, language and identity featured in debates leading to the new Scottish Parliament in 1999. Tracing both the ‘dream’ of cultural empowerment and the ‘grind’ of electoral strategy, it reconstructs the influence of magazines such as Scottish International, Radical Scotland, Cencrastus and Edinburgh Review, and sets the fiction of William McIlvanney, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, A. L. Kennedy and James Robertson within a radically altered picture of devolved Scotland.

A major contribution to our understanding of Scottish cultural politics. In a rich and perceptive study, Scott Hames examines the disjunction between the literary Dream and the political Grind over the past half century.
- Colin Kidd, University of St Andrews

Brilliant, trenchant, at times disconcerting, Scott Hames’s critical history of devolution offers an exemplary analysis of the interplay between cultural nationalism and practical politics. It’s essential reading for anyone who cares about the current state of Scotland.
- Ian Duncan, University of California

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-literary-politics-of-scottish-devolution.html

Sample chapters and discount code here: http://www.thedrouth.org/take-the-high-road-scott-hames-literary-politics-of-scottish-devolution-by-colin-kidd/

During a period when many Christian denominations throughout the United Kingdom discussed and sought to practice evangelism, the Tell Scotland Movement [1952-64] inspired the mission strategy of eight protestant churches in Scotland by attempting to focus on the contribution of the laity, the ordinary christian. Though positive appreciations can be discovered, a shadow has been cast over the memory of Tell Scotland in part because the lengthy process of church decline followed this large-scale evangelistic movement. Two stories are told of its failure. The Rev Prof James Whyte believed that the movement was “stopped in its tracks by the slick professionalism” associated with the 1955 Billy Graham All-Scotland Crusade and that it “never recovered from this colossal diversion”. Some have followed this assessment, which had its origins in the opposition to the Crusade led by the Rev George F. MacLeod, Leader of the Iona Community. Others, however, people also closely associated with Tell Scotland, wrote of a wider failure of the churches to understand its vision. This paper attempts a balanced appreciation of Tell Scotland and has benefited from access to its surviving archive.

Words used to describe the Battle of Culloden have always been written with lurid viscerality, from contemporary reports of the dramatic carnage on the moor to scholarly assessments of its enduring effects, still felt both in Scotland and amongst the global community today. To many, it was a sacred last dance that played out over hallowed ground, featuring fateful manoeuvres and noble sacrifices that conjure poignant physical and emotional reactions for those who still flock to visit the field. Some consider Cùil Lodair to have been the death knell of the Highland clan system, and to others it forged the seal on the permanence of union. 275 years later, the myths associated with Culloden are nearly indistinguishable from what we consider to be the facts. Accordingly, myth-busting by both academic and popular historians has become a full-time occupation in the wake of the interest ignited by the Outlander books and television series. Scottish tourism has enjoyed a massive swell in its coffers thanks to this phenomenon alone; Culloden, in a way, has therefore once again put Scotland back on the map and at the forefront of broader collective thoughts about the nation’s future. The battlefield and visitor centre remains a site of pilgrimage for tourists, re-enactors, annual commemorators, and those members of the global diaspora who have ‘come home’. Pitched hostilities continue to be waged to either build upon or preserve the land that formed the context of the battle. Many know the story of the action and what took place in the years afterward, but why we do we still care about the Battle of Culloden nearly three centuries on? This short talk will offer some thoughts about our memory of historical Jacobitism and why this windswept moorland still means so much to so many today.

The Scottish National Party (SNP) was elected into government in 2007, and in 2011 announced plans for an independence referendum. The SNP Government implemented substantial cultural and heritage projects-many of which showcased the long history of Scottish-English animosity. In the accompanying political rhetoric, it was clear that the SNP was utilising history for the independence campaign. The 2014 Referendum ultimately resulted in Scotland's retention of the Union, though the SNP has remained in power. The Scottish-British relationship was further tested in 2016, however, with the UK Referendum on leaving the EU. All Scottish electorates voted in favour of remaining, and the chasm between Scottish and British identities and future trajectories has since widened further. This paper will compare the SNP's promotion of nationalist historical narratives prior to the 2014 Referendum with subsequent cultural and heritage initiatives in light of Brexit. In doing so, the centrality of nationalist histories in contemporary Scottish politics will be highlighted.

This is the first comparative study of a highly unlikely group of authors: eighteenth-century women peasants in England, Scotland, and Germany, women who, as a rule, received little or no formal education and lived by manual labor, many of them in dire poverty. Among them are the English washerwoman Mary Collier, the English domestic servants Elizabeth Hands and Molly Leapor, the German cowherd Anna Louisa Karsch, the Scottish diarywoman Janet Little, the Scottish domestic servant Christian Milne, and the English milkmaid Ann Cromartie Yearsley. Their literature is here linked with one of the major eighteenth-century aesthetic trends in all three countries, the Natural Genius craze, which culminated in highland primitivism in Scotland and England, and in the Sturm und Drang in Germany. Kord's analysis of the peasant women's works and the bourgeois response enables us to find new answers to questions that have centrally influenced our thinking about what makes art Art. Kord's book provides a fresh look at some of this fascinating literature, and at the roles and attitudes of the lower classes and of women in the Art world of the day. It also advances a revolutionary thesis: that the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie established itself as the dominant cultural class not primarily, as is commonly held, in opposition to aristocratic culture, but more importantly through its dissociation from and suppression of lower-class art forms.

Dunnottar Castle and church are set upon a rocky headland on the NE coast of Aberdeenshire, about 2 miles S of Stonehaven. It has been thought that the medieval castle has disappeared, while the surviving buildings are largely of the 14 th to 17 th C. However a close inspection of the ruins that cover an area of 3½ acres suggest reality could be very different.
My earlier attempt to load this missed most of the text, so I have reloaded.

I have just written the first new history of the Gunns in over fifty years and I will progressively place the complete book on this site. 

Gunns are best thought of as the original, non-related inhabitants of northern mainland Scotland.They do not have an Orkney Islands origin.

Gunns should not be viewed as a clan as they had no founding ancestor. There was never an historic 'Clan Gunn Chief'.

The first Gunn known to history was Coroner Gunn of Caithness who died around 1450. His eldest son started the MacHamish Gunns of Killernan line. Many MacHamish Gunns of Killernan exist all around the world - the idea that the line is extinct is just wrong.

Print texts can be found at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/awgunn with sample pages.

More information about this area can be found at http://clangunn.weebly.com/ and https://clangunn1.blogspot.com/ and https://www.facebook.com/ClanGunn1/

This book examines the experiences and interconnections of the Reformations, principally in Denmark-Norway and Britain and Ireland (but with an eye to the broader Scandinavian landscape as well), and also discusses instances of similarities between the Reformations in both realms. The volume features a comprehensive introduction, and provides a broad survey of the beginnings and progress of the Catholic and Protestant Reformations in Northern Europe, while also highlighting themes of comparison that are common to all of the bloc under consideration, which will be of interest to Reformation scholars across this geographical region.

The selkie has enjoyed a revival of interest in popular culture following the release of the 2014 animated film Song of the Sea. This session will focus on David Thomson's neglected but enchanting The People of the Sea (1954), which recounts Thomson's journey around the Scottish Isles and the west of Ireland in search of selkie folklore. Travelling in the late 1940s, Thomson encounters a world in flux, with the arrival of council houses, sanitary officers, television, and, crucially, the new materials of paraffin and rubber rendering the seal-killing trade obsolete. Yet, as Thomson finds, selkie stories quietly persist. This talk examines the insights these stories might offer into economic transitions, understandings of human-nonhuman relationships, and the places of water and water creatures in myth and folklore.

University of Essex Myth Studies Group, February 2019.

Considers the participation of Scottish women in 16th-century trade as widows and daughters of merchants as well as wives of traders. Although their role was declining in the export sector during this period, it is by no means certain that their influence waned.

A pdf of a local history study of the General Strike of May 1926 as it was experienced in Aberdeen, North-east Scotland.
The work was published by Aberdeen People's Press as a 33 page pamphlet in May 1977.
Co-authored by Liz Kibblewhite and Andy Rigby

The inter-related natural and cultural heritage of Rosa spinosissima and Scots Roses.
Peter D. A. Boyd
Independent Researcher and Holder of UK National Collection of Scots Roses (Plant Heritage)

Probably, no other plant has such a little-known multiplicity of associations with human culture as Rosa spinosissima (Scots Rose, Burnet Rose, Dune Rose, Prickly Rose).
It has a natural distribution from north-west China to north-western Europe.
It is featured in British and European myths (e.g. the Towton or Battle Rose in Yorkshire, the Dunwich Rose, Ardennes folk-tales, Norwegian Trolls).
The species was included in 16th century herbals of northern Europe, used in traditional Chinese medicine and, recently, in the development of new drugs; also a food, flavouring for traditional European beverages (e.g. Klit-rose Schnapps) and a dye.
Sometimes, it was emblem of the House of York and the Jacobite cause and symbol of Scottish Nationalism.
The shrub has been grown in gardens since at least the 16th century and the first variant with a coloured flower was discovered in Scotland in the late 17th century – after which most cultivars of Rosa spinosissima became known as Scots or Scotch Roses.
A small number of ‘single’ cultivars were available by the late 18th century but the discovery and breeding of ‘double’ cultivars caused an explosion of interest in nurserymen and gardeners in the early 19th century. Over five hundred cultivars were available by 1840. They became popular in Nordic countries.
Emigration from Britain and Scandinavia in the 19th century and international nursery trade led to the dispersion of Scots Roses to North America, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere.
19th and early 20th century novels feature immigrants taking Scots Roses with them as iconic reminders of their old homes and they were often planted on ex-patriate graves.
Old cultivars and their progeny survive in old gardens and cemeteries in both hemispheres but they are a living heritage under threat.

This appendix to "Scottish Clans: Legend, Logic & Evidence" sets out to show that "Manuscript 1467" was fabricated at the behest of the Macdonalds around 1467 in an attempt to hide their Viking origins. They dragged many other clans along with them

Common sense philosophy was one of eighteenth-century Scotland's most original intellectual products. It developed as a viable alternative to modern philosophical scepticism, known as the 'Ideal Theory' or 'the way of ideas'. The nine specially written essays in this volume explore the philosophical and historical significance of common sense philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment. Thomas Reid and David Hume feature prominently as influential authors of competing ideas in the history and philosophy of common sense. The contributors recover anticipations of Reid's version of common sense in seventeenth-century Scottish scholasticism; revaluate Reid's position in the realism versus sentimentalism dichotomy; shed new light on the nature of the 'constitution' in the anatomy of the mind; identify changes in the nature of sense perception throughout Reid's published and unpublished works; examine Reid on the non-theist implications of Hume's philosophy; show how 'polite' literature shaped James Beattie's version of common sense; reveal Hume's response to common sense philosophers; explore English criticisms of the Scottish 'school', and how Dugald Stewart's refashioning of common sense responded to a new age and the British reception of German Idealism. In recovering the ways in which Scottish common sense philosophy developed during the long eighteenth century, this volume takes an important step toward a more complete understanding of 'the Scottish philosophy' and British philosophy more broadly in the age of Enlightenment.

In 1781 John Maclaurin, the Edinburgh Advocate who would later become Lord Dreghorn, matriculated Arms and was recognised by the Lord Lyon of the day as the Chief of the MacLaurins of Tiree. In this paper I show that the whole exercise was an elaborate ruse, principally a satire on the pomposity rife in the society in which he mixed but serving also to exorcise much personal bitterness arising from aspects of his personal life. There were no 'consequences' at the time, but 200 years later sadly some amateur historians may still be taken in by it-with the sort of collateral damage which only this exposure can repair.

This version 2 completes the analysis by detailing Daniel MacLaurin's family background.

Although Strathspey experienced many of the same trends-agricultural 'improvement', enclosure of commons, creation of deer forests, emigration-present elsewhere in Northern Scotland during the nineteenth century, the region was not a flashpoint for unrest. Careful management on behalf of the ruling family, the earls of Seafield, who were the hereditary chiefs of Grant, the local clan; a consistent policy preference to work with existing farming tenants, and a traditional paternalism, all contributed to social stability. The region was not exempt from protest against the impact of the considerable programme of 'improvement' pursued from 1853. There were accusations of 'depopulation' and 'clearance' in Strathspey, but the influence of those who benefitted from the changes, together with the intrinsic and pervasive authority of the Seafield estate, confined discontent to the constitutional channels opening up as the century progressed. Strong expressions of loyalty to the Seafield proprietors were also a feature of the times. Aspects of this narrative of mutual loyalty are examined, and then the spectrum of reaction to improvement and clearance, the growing lobby for land reform, and the experience of depopulation. Although the influence of the Strathspey factor, John Smith, was important in channelling public discourse, a dilution of estate authority as the century progressed is recognised. The article seeks to broaden perceptions of the history of the Highlands by considering a region of the Gaidhealtachd outwith the far North and the NorthWest .

The Stair Society, Volume 59. Edited by Olivia F Robinson, FRSE, FRHistS, kMOestAk, formerly Douglas Professor of Civil Law, University of Glasgow.

Matters Criminal was first published in 1678. It was almost completely superseded by Hume's Commentaries on the Law of Scotland respecting Crimes (1800) but Mackenzie provided the concepts and framework on which Hume built.