As the Scots commoners broke away it gradually became clear that the Scots barons would lose their Scottish property unless they joined them.
Today many Scots MPs (chiefly Labour ones) have enjoyed good salaries for years by their attachment to Westminster Palace (sometimes called “the best club in Europe”) in jobs which allow them cosy adjacent apartments. By supporting a Great British Political System they have had to exercise their brains less than English MPs who are pestered, bullied and bribed to work for English constituents, deputations and the City of London. Scots MPs now know most of their electorate want home rule – they can no longer ignore it. Their problem is now to keep their seats in the best club in Europe without losing ground in Scotland. For nearly twenty years Scottish barons hung around Edward’s court at Westminster with a similar problem, and Bruce was one of these hangers-on.
4
A KIND OF FREEDOM
THE KINGDOMS OF EUROPE belonged to a few great families who gained territory through marriage, inheritance and warfare, making the continent a political patchwork whose joins ignored the common sense of geological, linguistic and cultural frontiers. Owners of this patchwork stopped Germany and Italy getting territorial unity until well into the nineteenth century. The Bannockburn victory of 1314 made Scotland the first European state to have territorial unity under one ruler chosen by his subjects.
The novelty of this is shown in the Declaration of Arbroath, a letter to the pope. In 1320 he was a Frenchman from Guyenne, then an English territory, and excommunicated everyone in Scotland who would not take Edward II as their overlord. The Abbot of Arbroath wrote a reply on behalf of the “barons and freeholders and the whole community of the realm of Scotland”. It was signed on behalf of the community by the noble families who had signed oaths of allegiance to Edward I, and by highland chiefs and Scandinavian Earls of Orkney and Caithness who had never signed.
The Declaration said that since ancient times the Scots had been free to choose their own kings; that this freedom, like all freedoms, was a gift of God; that if Robert Bruce were ever weak enough to swear allegiance to the English king they would dismiss him and choose someone else. It also said the pope would weaken his authority if he disagreed – “which God forbid”.
It is easy to sentimentalize over the Declaration of Arbroath, but as a legal document signed by representatives of the Scottish community it is as revolutionary as the American Declaration of Independence. Note that King Robert the Bruce did not sign it. Those who did declared that he, the feudal owner of all Scotland, was a replaceable magistrate chosen by all Scots to protect their freedom. This meant that the ultimate owners of the Scottish land were the people living there.
PUBLISHER: Are you suggesting the Declaration legalizes land nationalization?
AUTHOR: The Scottish commoners had nationalized their landowners by making them abandon property in England and France. This was as far as nationalization could go in those days. It is not nationalization as the British government practises it when it compulsorily purchases Scottish land for use as nuclear weapons bases; but if the Declaration of Arbroath was retained as the founding charter of a restored Scottish nation then a democratically elected parliament could surely use it to give crofters and tenants more rights to the land and property they use.
PUBLISHER: Keep to the fourteenth century! Did the new, free Scotland become peaceful and prosperous again?
AUTHOR: No. England still claimed to rule it so raids and counter-raids continued between the two lands for many generations and most hurt the economy of the smaller nation. Scottish raids never touched the fertile plains around London but Scotland’s most fertile ground was just south of Edinburgh where English raids kept wasting it again and again. The Scots often destroyed their own crops to stop them feeding invaders.
PUBLISHER: Very noble! The ravaging of the people, by the people, for the people.
AUTHOR: What else could they do?
PUBLISHER: If they had submitted to living in Scotlandshire ruled from London their lives would certainly have been more peaceful and probably better-off. You’ve admitted their kings were as selfish as England’s. What good did the Scottish commoners get out of their nation’s independence? Did it make them more independent?
AUTHOR: Yes. They had the right to openly scratch where they itched. Froissart, French chronicler of European chivalry, came to Scotland in the fourteenth century and was struck by the bad manners of the peasants. If a nobleman rode over a field the men who worked it screamed and yelled at him to get off, unlike the peasants of England and France whose lords had every right, in custom and law, to ride rough-shod and hawk and hunt over peasants’ land without let or hindrance. This does not prove Scotland was democratic: it shows the Scots lairds and nobility respected the fact that commoners supported them out of crops which barely kept the commoners alive.
English imperialism forced Scotland and France into frequent alliances so French troops sometimes visited Scotland to attack England from the north. Few of them liked their uncouth allies. In the statutes of the French nobility there was a “Right of Plunder” allowing the military class, when short of money, to grab poultry, pigs, grain et cetera from peasants without paying for it. Two hundred hungry French soldiers from one such expedition tried to plunder a district of Scottish farmers who counter-attacked and killed some of them. In other lands this would have been treated as a peasants’ revolt. The Scottish government ignored the complaints of their French allies who were given food and lodging in Edinburgh, but not allowed back to France before paying heavily for them. This persuades me that the common people also enjoyed some of the freedom asserted in the Declaration of Arbroath. There is another reason.
Good writing withers under tyrannies, as Russia under Stalin and Germany under Hitler proved. A comparison of English and Scottish literature shows the same thing.
The Norman conquest destroyed early English literature and a new one was impossible before rulers and ruled started talking the same language. This happened between 1330 and 1370 when the Black Death killed between a third and a half of the population. People of every rank died but in England the deaths of the poorer sort caused the biggest upheaval. Workers struck for higher wages and got them. Warfare and the building of cathedrals and palaces halted. Widespread debates began as labourers, gentry, clergy and traders jockeyed for power from positions of something like equality, and English literature was reborn. The great works of the English middle period were written between 1360 and 1400: The Cloud of Unknowing, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Langland’s Piers Plowman, the poems and tales of Chaucer, Wyclif’s English translation of the Bible, were written within forty years. So was The Bruce, the first epic poem in Scottish vernacular. This great period of writing was ended in England by censorship following the peasants’ revolt, a rising of commoners against a poll tax created to finance warfare with France. It was partly led by worker priests and students from Oxford. After being bloodily suppressed a law was passed forbidding the teaching of reading and writing to children of labourers. All who preached in public had to be licensed by bishops. Owning Wyclif’s English Bible became a crime for anyone not a bishop or nobleman and Piers Plowman, a poem describing corruption in Church and state while lamenting the plight of the poor, was banned by act of parliament.
