SCOTLAND A HISTORY This page intentionally left blank SCOTLAND A HISTORY Edited by Jenny Wormald 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Oxford University Press 2005 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0–19–820615–1 13579108642 Contents List of Colour Plates vii List of Maps ix List of Contributors xiii Introduction 1 1. Origins: Scotland to 1100 9 KATHERINE FORSYTH 2. The Emergence of a Nation-State, 1100–1300 38 KEITH STRINGER 3. Survival and Revival: Late Medieval Scotland 69 MICHAEL BROWN AND STEVE BOARDMAN 4. Renaissance and Reformation: The Sixteenth Century 93 ROGER MASON 5. Confidence and Perplexity: The Seventeenth Century 123 JENNY WORMALD 6. Scotland Transformed: The Eighteenth Century 150 RICHARD B. SHER 7. Workshop of Empire: The Nineteenth Century 176 I. G. C. HUTCHISON 8. The Turbulent Century: Scotland since 1900 201 RICHARD FINLAY 9. The Scottish Diaspora 225 DAVID ARMITAGE vi contents 10. Scotland’s Stories 250 SALLY MAPSTONE Further Reading 275 Chronology 293 List of Colour Plates This page intentionally left blank List of Maps 1. Early Medieval Scotland 2. Modern Scotland 3. Scotland in 1286 4. Scotland: Central belt, 1782 This page intentionally left blank List of Contributors david armitage is Professor of History at Harvard University. He is the author of The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000) and Greater Britain, 1516–1776: Essays in Atlantic History (2004). He also edited Theo- ries of Empire, 1450–1800 (1998), and co-edited The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (2002), among other books. steve boardman is a Senior Lecturer in Scottish History in the Uni- versity of Edinburgh, and Director of the Survey of Dedications to Saints in pre-Reformation Scotland. His major research interests lie in late medieval Scottish kingship, aristocratic lordships, particularly those of Gaelic Scotland, and the political and social aspects of saints’ cults. He is author of The Early Stewart Kings: Robert II and Robert III, 1371–1406 (1996) and The Camp- bells (forthcoming), and the co-editor of The Exercise of Power in Medieval Scotland, c.1200–1500 (2004). michael brown is Reader in Scottish History in the University of St Andrews. He works on kingship, politics, and the nobility in late medieval Scotland. His main publications are James I (1994), The Black Douglases (1998), and The Wars of Scotland (2004). richard finlay is Professor of Scottish History at Strathclyde Univer- sity. He has co-edited with Ted Cowan Scottish History: The Power of the Past (2002), and is the author of Modern Scotland, 1914–2000 (2004). He is currently working on Scottish national identity since the union of 1707. katherine forsyth is a Lecturer in the Department of Celtic, Uni- versity of Glasgow. Her research interests lie in the history and culture of the Celtic-speaking peoples in the antique and early medieval periods, with a special focus on epigraphy. She has published on aspects of language, literacy, and epigraphy in early medieval Britain and Ireland. i. g. c. hutchison is a Reader in History in the University of Stirling. A former editor of the Scottish Historical Review, he has written three books: A Political History of Scotland, 1832–1924: Parties, Elections, Issues (1986); xii list of contributors The University and the State: The Case of Aberdeen, 1860–1963 (1993); and Scottish Politics in the Twentieth Century (2000). sally mapstone is a Fellow in English at St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford. She is President of the Scottish Text Society. She has published widely on Older Scots literature, and has co-edited several books of essays on that literature. roger mason is Professor of Scottish History in the University of St Andrews. His wide-ranging publications on late medieval and early modern Scottish political culture include Kingship and the Commonweal: Political Thought in Renaissance and Reformation Scotland (1998) and an edition of the political writings of John Knox: Knox: On Rebellion (1994). His most recent publication is a critical edition and translation of George Buchanan’s celebrated political tract, A Dialogue on the Law of Kingship among the Scots (2004). richard b. sher is Distinguished Professor of History at New Jersey Institute of Technology and NJIT Chair of the Federated History Depart- ment of Rutgers University-Newark and NJIT. He has published extensively on the Scottish Enlightenment and other topics on eighteenth-century Scotland, and is the founding executive secretary of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society. keith stringer is Professor of Medieval History at Lancaster Univer- sity. He works within the related fields of state-making, noble power struc- tures, religious reform, cultural exchanges, and the construction of regional, national, and supra-national identities, His most recent publications include The Reformed Church in Medieval Galloway and Cumbria: Contrasts, Con- nections and Continuities (2003). He co-directs the Leverhulme-funded research programme ‘Border Liberties and Loyalties in North-East England, 1200–1400’, and is editor of the forthcoming Regesta Regum Scottorum, iii: The Acts of Alexander II, King of Scots, 1214–1249. jenny wormald is a Fellow in History at St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford. She was President of the Scottish History Society, 2001–4. She has published widely on late medieval and early modern Scottish history, and early modern British history. She is currently working on a book on James VI and I. Introduction ‘Stands Scotland where it did?’ asked Macduff in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. ‘Alas, poor country!’ answered Ross. ‘Almost afraid to know itself!’ This well- known quotation from that play which has given us so many quotations offers a quite remarkable number of interpretations when thinking about Scotland from the early medieval period to the modern age. Macbeth was, of course, written at one of the great pivotal times in Scottish history, shortly after the Union of the Crowns of 1603. Its author’s attempt to dramatize ‘real’ Scottish history, its sympathetic portrayal of a kingdom rent by murder, self-ambition, total failure of loyalty, on the verge of being rescued by the great Malcolm Canmore—akin, in that sense, to the similar portrayal of that darkest of peri- ods of English history, the reign of Richard III, before the advent of Henry Tudor—stands in very sharp contrast to the savage and utterly fictitious James IV by Robert Green of 1599; Green tapped into English hostility to the likely union with Scotland, Shakespeare to acceptance of it, however grudging. In other words, the English succession crisis made Scotland very centre-stage. That refers to a particular historical moment. But one might extrapolate from that the more general point that historiographically Scotland has had had to fight hard against the normal instinct of marginalization; famously, Scots are very interested in their past, real or invented, but who else is? Macbeth, for example, picks up on Scottish witchcraft, and no wonder in view of the royal demonologist who inherited the English throne in 1603. But how many col- lections of essays on witchcraft trawl through Europe, include England, which was not a major witch-persecuting society, but ignore Scotland, which was? Scottish historians, especially in the last half-century, have fought very hard to demonstrate that Scotland—Scottish history—does not stand where it did. ‘To know itself’ is not a matter of fear, but confidence. It is therefore very pleasurable to acknowledge Oxford University Press’s agreement with that; already there is an Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, but that was based on the chronological history of England, although incorporating comment on Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. This volume, however, is one of a number of recent OUP publications on Scottish history, and the editors and 2 jenny wormald contributors are very appreciative of the fact that when it devised its series of Illustrated Histories, it did not ignore Scotland. This is not all that can be picked up from Macbeth. Shakespeare’s Richard III had a message which would inform later historiography: that the fifteenth century—the end of the Middle Ages—was about to give way to the infinitely more civilized early modern world; he was writing about England, but the point can be made equally about historians of Europe, except perhaps of Italy with its precociously early renaissance.