farms, villages and religious houses from between the woodlands and his landlords followed his example on a smaller scale. The English natives were excluded from a source of cheap meat by game laws threatening them with death, though seven centuries later this penalty was changed to transportation for life. In the nineteenth century Norman property laws were used to evict hundreds of Scottish communities from their land, and even nowadays the remaining natives can be arrested for taking a bird or fish from the land where they live.
Along with other natural rights the English were robbed of a language. Their original speech and splendid literature were gradually forgotten as the commoners improvised a new speech that made sense to their bosses. Meanwhile wealthier folk sent their children to schools where they learned Norman French, which had no great literature but gave them a chance of defending themselves in the conquerors’ law courts.
PUBLISHER: You seem obsessed with the Norman Conquest.
AUTHOR: I am! It enrages me more than earlier robberies with violence because power-loving historians and teachers used it – perhaps still use it – to warp children’s minds. They praised Roman invaders because they brought a kind of peace and spread Christianity. They praised English invaders because their way of choosing aldermen and kings was a kind of democracy. They could only praise the Normans for their efficient feudal system, so they romanticized it. The English were taught to be PROUD of having been conquered because – though painful at the time – it gave them a tougher class of managers who, centuries later, led them to thrash the French at Agincourt and seize the British empire.
PUBLISHER: Maybe it did.
AUTHOR: (wildly) Agincourt and the British empire were ALSO robberies with violence! Children should be taught it is WRONG to take riches from foreign lands by military force, COWARDLY to gun down spear-throwing natives, VICIOUS to mass bomb civilians and grounded soldiers in Kuwait and Iraq!
PUBLISHER: Calm down – you’ll make some readers fling the book away. I admit Duke William was not a nice man but were Scottish kings better?
AUTHOR: No better. Malcolm Canmore, son of the Duncan killed by Macbeth, ruled Scotland from 1069 to 1093 and raided England five times, attempting in the north what William was doing in the south. He lacked troops to hold the land he invaded so could only keep looting it and retreating. When English kings counter-attacked Scotland he avoided battle by apologizing and swearing allegiance to them, then broke his promise. On his fifth raid he was trapped and killed. Compared with Duke William the Scottish king was a coward, liar and failure, but his power to hurt was limited by the number of people he ruled and by Scottish geology.
The population of eleventh-century Scotland was about 300,000 to England’s 1,750,000. It had few towns and the peopled parts were isolated from each other by more or less mountainous wilderness. Even the plain between Forth and Clyde was divided between Gaels with Irish relations in the west, English with Northumbrian relatives in the east, so everywhere the social organization was in clans who could only fight clannishly. Clans were extended families where everyone had the surname of their chief who sometimes inherited the job from his mother’s side of the family. As in African and north American tribes the agricultural work was often done by women while men hunted and fished. Hunting weapons are as efficient against people as against deer and wild cattle – one reason why Normans forbade hunting to the English. Clan chiefs showed their efficiency by leading raids upon their neighbours so Scotland, though not feudal, was often feuding. Regard Scotland as a cluster of small nations, each with good reason to fear its neighbours, each with a chief who supported the king because, with the king’s help, no neighbour could finally conquer him. That was the clan system. Its essential difference from England was in the king’s title – he was King of Scots, not King of Scotland. England’s king was also a warlord but owned the whole land by right of conquest. He had given his barons counties in return for the oath of allegiance – their promise of military service. The counties were divided into estates of knights who held them in return for their oath of allegiance. That was feudalism. Neither system was perfect. Feuds were as chronic between Scots clans as civil wars between Anglo-Norman nobles.
PUBLISHER: Why describe these two systems? Modern readers will think them then equally nasty.
AUTHOR: Because the struggle between them turned this Scotland of squabbling chiefdoms into a new kind of European nation – one whose king only ruled because he had proved his fitness to the Scottish commoners – despite the fact that he was a greedy murderer who began by betraying the Scots to their enemies.
PUBLISHER: Oh dear. Am I about to hear the story of Bruce again?
AUTHOR: (firmly) The story of WALLACE and Bruce. All who write about Scotland come to it.
3
NATIONAL THEFT & RECOVERY
or,John and William go to Westminster
WHEN FEUDAL INVADERS had subdued the native peasants they could only fight each other, so France had Europe’s richest soil, poorest peasants, grandest nobility and endless warfare. In 1095 Pope Urban directed this belligerence into the first crusade. As French lords mustered their troops they were surprised to be joined by soldiers in outlandish armour. These were Scots who no lord had summoned or expected, because Scotland was still outside feudalism.
It was brought there thirty years later by David I, a Scots king who had helped Anglo-Norman barons in one of their civil wars. He saw how feudal law could be used to subdue unruly clans, so declared himself not just ruler but owner of Scotland, and in return for their oaths of allegiance, gave his chieftains title-deeds to their clan territories. This altered nothing until he invited in some Norman barons and gave them Scottish estates in return for their oath of allegiance. The estates were in fertile plains and valleys often raided by highlanders. These barons (Baliol, Bruce, Comyn and others) still owned English estates in return for their allegiance to the Sassenach king. English speech now spread steadily through the Scottish lowlands, though proximity and intermarriage made most Scots bilingual. The Scottish court had two poet laureates, one for each language. But no king could have held Scotland together without the Church.
Before the sixteenth century Scotland’s population was about half a million – less in time of plague. There were no towns in the highlands and those in the lowlands were too small to support a secular middle class of the sort developing in England with nearly eight times as many people. The Scottish middle class was its clergy. They had religious houses throughout highlands and lowlands. Their preachers lent the king a broadcasting network that spoke to places his heralds could not reach. David I bought their support with larger grants of land than he gave his Anglo-Normans. The Church repaid him with two fifths of the royal revenue, for the abbeys farmed good land by the newest methods, growing more grain and wool than other communities. The earliest recorded coal mining and whisky distilling in Scotland was by monks of Dunfermline. The Church kept schools, hostels, hospitals and funds for relief of the poor. Only through the Church could the clever son of a labourer achieve the social power of a lord.
For nearly a century the nation thrived for a while under kings who kept peace by negotiation more than warfare, and by marrying the princesses of Scotland’s potential enemies, English and Norwegian. Their courts moved in a yearly circuit between Edinburgh in the main approach to the English border, Stirling in the gateway to the highlands, Dunfermline north of the Forth. In 1286 Alexander III died leaving no heir and peaceful growth gradually stopped. Thirteen nobles claimed the throne but the claims of Baliol, Comyn, Bruce were strongest and equally so. A strong, impartial adjudicator was needed to prevent civil war – Edward I of England.
