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Mary Stewart became Queen of Scots aged only 6 days old after her father James V died in 1542. Her family, whose name was anglicised to Stuart in the seventeenth century, had ruled Scotland since 1371 and were to do so until the death of Queen Anne in 1714. Raised in France from 1548, she married the heir to the French throne (1558) and did not come to Scotland until after he died in 1561.

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This is an excerpt from Scotland: A Very Short Introduction by Rab Houston. Although the book was published in 2009, long before the Scottish independence referendum, the thoughts Houston expresses in the conclusion on the future of the country certainly proved relevant in the Scotland of 2014.

What are the implications of the past for Scotland’s future? First, Scots retain a deeply embedded sense of history, albeit a selective one. Like others in the Anglo-Saxon world, they understandably seek identity, empathy, and meaning for their private present by researching family or local history and they want to know about wars and history’s celebrities. They are less interested in the public past that creates the context for the social and political present, including for Scotland a separate national church, a distinctive legal code, and a very different experience of government. This detachment may be linked to any number of factors — a preoccupation with individual personal authority, disenchantment with politics, secularization, and electronic communications — but its effects are clear. Yet Scots still feel themselves touched by history and that awareness is a strong part of their identity. Modern Scotland is solidly grounded on historical foundations and the continuity this provides helps in dealing constructively with change.

One manifestation of the public past is a firm civic sense, which helps Scotland’s communities to score highly in polls of the most desirable places to live in Britain. Coupled with this is the enduring importance of locality and all the variety and the non-national solidarities it implies. An important reason Scottish devolution has worked so well is that historically Scotland had less centralized government than England and there was an effective civil society: precisely those forms of association below and outside the apparatus of the state, such as churches, communities, and families, mediating between public institutions and private lives, which now so concern the modern West. The notion of civil society empowering citizens has appeal both to the New Right and to left-leaning communitarian ideas of voluntary association, because it insists that people cannot have rights without responsibilities and that individualism has to be tempered by acknowledgement of a common good. Based on their historic experience of government, Scots felt that central authority could and should intervene for benign ends, but that most power should be diffused.

This appreciation of civil society is not rose-tinted. Scotland’s history has a dark side of greed, social inequality and injustice, the oppression of women, children, and other races, and bigotry towards different faiths, all repulsive to modern sensibilities. In the present too, there has been sleaze (notably in Labour’s ‘one-party states’ in west-central Scotland), there is a legacy of social conservatism that may encourage ignorance and intolerance, and there are problems of drug and alcohol abuse, anti-social behaviour, and crime, like anywhere in Britain. ‘The street’, once indicative of intimacy, has become a by-word for danger. Yet a vivid sense of the past, a firm national identity, and a strong civil society rooted in locality mark out both historic and modern Scotland.

History touches modern politics too, for as well as being Scottish, many Scots also feel British. The most important implication is that Scotland’s near-term future is unlikely to involve shunning community with the rest of Britain, because it has for hundreds of years been locked into a British paradigm. That does not mean Scots are always comfortable with their past or present relations with England, and they have never been slow to speak out when they perceive injustice. Less laudably, they have long played a ‘blame game’ against their neighbours. History shows they have a point, but to be a victim is to deny oneself agency. Better to accept how much has been gained from association with England, to recognize what is shared, to take justified pride in what is good about being different, and to change what is not.

The political implications of Union with England are still being played out three centuries on, albeit in a very different world. The component parts of Great Britain (and Ireland, both before and after independence in 1922) developed separately, but they also progressed together in ways that modified their experiences. In some regards, the parts have grown closer over time, but in important ways they remain different. All modern states are artifacts based on conquest and colonization, and laboriously created national solidarity (including Scottish, English, and British identity). Held together for centuries, the integrity of states everywhere is now maintained only precariously, their sovereignty and supposedly inviolable borders steadily eroded. Easy travel, immigration, trans-national crime, and global terrorism, capitalism, and environmental degradation are challenging and complicating our understandings of geography and politics. After 500 years of multi-national accretion, nation states, including Britain, are crumbling back into their component parts. Founded on centuries of uncertainty, experimentation, and compromise, the relations between Scotland and England remain open-ended.

During that time, Scotland has not been a backward version of England waiting to catch up, but something quite distinct. Politically, Scots have known what it is to be both independent and semi-detached in a way that is less true of Wales (whose institutions, if not its language, culture, and habits, were more completely assimilated) and wholly untrue of English regions since the early Middle Ages. Naturally the past should not determine the future, or we should never have shaken off the multiple oppressions of race, class, and gender. But history can liberate as well as limit and attempts to make a destiny that works with rather than against it are likely to be easier, more successful, and longer lasting. If one day Scotland did take the path of independence, it would be as much in tune with its history as would a future within the United Kingdom.

Image credit: Common Green, or ‘The Green’, Strathaven, South Lanarkshire, Scotland. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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2009 sees the 250th anniversary of the birth of Scotland’s most famous poet, Robert Burns. In the post below Professor Rab Houston of St. Andrew’s University looks at the history behind the tradition of Burns Suppers, and dispels some myths about their origin.

Rab Houston is the author of Scotland: A Very Short Introduction, and has previously written for OUPblog here and here.

Even before his death, poet Robert Burns’ cottage at Alloway, Ayrshire, had been sold to the incorporation, or guild, of shoemakers of Ayr, one of whose members turned it into an alehouse. It was here, on 29 January 1801 (they got his birthday wrong) that soldiers of the Argyll Fencibles (militia) met to hear their band play – and to use the services of his cottage in its new role.

The first recorded Burns Supper took place at Alloway in the same year, but on the anniversary of his death (21st July). It involved a speech and multiple toasts; to eat there was haggis (which was addressed) and, a mercifully lost tradition, sheep’s head; given the social status of those present, refreshment was probably wine and ale rather than whisky. Present were nine friends and patrons of Burns. Among them was a lady, though thereafter the Suppers were mostly (sometimes militantly) all-male affairs until far into the twentieth century: a curious slant on Burns’ own life as well as on the first dinner. The ‘toast to the lasses’ was traditionally thanks for the cooking and an appreciation of the women in Burns’ life, only later degenerating into a sexist (often misogynistic) rant.

Celebrations were held twice yearly until 1809 when participants settled on January (25th), because this fell in a slack period of the agricultural year. Commercialisation of his birthplace did little to honour the memory of his life and work, and in 1822 the poet John Keats complained bitterly of how both the ambience and the landlord of the Alloway inn degraded Burns’ greatness.

Any group of individuals can hold a Burns Supper. These blend sociability and conversation, keynotes of the Scottish Enlightenment, with more universal practices such as commensality and drinking. Sociability could be more consistently promoted by associations. Set up in the early 1800s, Paisley (which has the earliest extant minute book starting in 1805) and Greenock vie for the title of first Burns Club, but after 1810 these associations proliferated. Popularised in the press, Burns Suppers and Burns Clubs were widespread by 1830 not only in his native Ayrshire, but also throughout Scotland. The great Ayr Festival of 1844 enhanced international awareness of the celebration, and the creation of the Burns Federation in 1885 brought together hundreds of Clubs worldwide. There are as many as 400 affiliated clubs nowadays. The first all-female club was founded at Shotts in Lanarkshire in 1920, and the Federation, now based in Kilmarnock, had to wait until 1970 for its first woman president.

Burns died at a time of profound economic, social and political change when writers perceived that Scottish identity was being lost. Romantic and anti-modernist, they found in him a symbol of an allegedly uncorrupted Scotland. Burns became a uniquely elastic symbol over time and space, as valuable to those who did not know his language (English or Scots) as to those who did; to laissez-faire liberals (nineteenth century) as to radicals and socialists (twentieth century); to the urban middle classes as to the rural working people from which Burns and his inspiration came; to Japanese as to those of Anglo-Saxon stock; to temperance campaigners as to generous imbibers; to nationalists as to unionists. The cult surrounding him has been reshaped many times in the two centuries since his death. Identities have moulded representations of Burns as much as Burns has formed identities, but Burns has proved a uniquely enduring and accessible icon. Celebrating the centenary of his birth in 1859, the Boston, Mass. Burns Club, founded in 1850, affirmed that there had ‘never been any national, sectional, or other bar to membership’, other than a love of liberty and republicanism.

Representations of Burns mix the particular and the historically accurate with the general and the fabricated. So too with the Suppers that commemorate him. They have been appropriated to express bourgeois male solidarity and commercial needs as much as universality, though it is possible that the enduring popularity of these gatherings lies in their safely apolitical nature.

It is curious that an invented and reinvented tradition bearing Burns’ name should have become a powerful symbol of Scots at home and, even more, abroad, when another active contribution of his has been so little developed. This was his confident and skilful use of Scots. Burns was celebrated in the nineteenth century for preserving a dying language, and the use of Scots is integral with the Suppers. Yet it is another surrendered or suppressed tongue, Gaelic, which has been resuscitated in the guise of an independent ‘national’ language in modern Scotland. This is despite never having been spoken by all Scots, even in the middle ages, and being now spoken by just 1% of Scotland’s population, most of whom live in greater Glasgow.

Rab Houston is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews, and the author of Scotland: A Very Short Introduction. In the piece below he questions whether kilts are as integral to Scottish identity as some people think.

His previous OUPblog post can be found here, and remember to check back next week when Rab will be writing about Burns Suppers.

Some wag once wrote that kilts outside the Highlands were merely fancy dress. Fortunately that is no longer the case. Seeing the kilt worn with a new confidence is an inspiring sign of how far modern Scotland has come from the tartan tokenism of the 1970s.

Yet it is worth remembering that the kilt was a skirt invented by an Englishman in the 1720s. Highlanders traditionally wore bolts of cloth called ‘plaids’ that could fall off the hips or be gathered like trousers. Lowland men wore trousers. Tartan too comes not from some authentic ancient pool of Scots historic culture, but gained its importance during the eighteenth century as a national symbol of what Scotland could contribute in men and materials to British imperialism. Highland identity became firmly associated with Scottish identity in the nineteenth century, encapsulated in the romantic image of the Scot-as-Highlander that was popularised by Queen Victoria.

Scots have appropriated another ambiguous way of showing they are not English. It is surely right that the ancient Gaelic language should experience new life and be granted equal respect, for it may for a time have been Scotland’s majority tongue. However, it was never the only one. Even in the Dark Ages there was extensive English- and Scots-speaking in the south-east and Norse dialects too thrived across much of the north-west. What is truly distinctive about Scotland’s linguistic past is not Gaelic, but the remarkable diversity of tongues in so small a country.

The lobby for Gaelic shows that we appreciate diversity now more than ever and it has helped us to focus on what it means to be Scottish. Indeed there is much that is more substantial and more completely distinctive to Scottish identity than these symbols. Scots are proud to be different without always appreciating just how distinct Scotland past and present really is from the rest of Britain. What makes us Scottish is above all a sense of history that goes much deeper than the tokens of dress or even a discrete language that arguably allows us to speak more eloquently about being different.

What do we know of that history? Like others in the Anglo-Saxon world, we understandably seek identity, empathy, and meaning for our private present by researching family or local history and we want to know about wars and history’s celebrities. After all, history is experienced by individuals and to be alive is to be touched by the past.

But our social and political present is also formed by powerful forces that constitute our public past. There was a separate national church, both Catholic in the Middle Ages and Protestant from the Reformation, the latter in turn a set of religious changes far more radical than occurred in England. Add to this a distinctive legal code, rigorously grounded on principle yet at the same time flexible and potentially humane. Scots law drew on indigenous influences, but it came mostly from the Continent rather than England, as did the most important artistic, architectural and musical styles exemplified in Scotland. In turn, Scots could be found all over north-west Europe and later around the globe. Among the ideas, techniques and technologies they took with them there was an ethos of educational opportunity, fostering a belief in common humanity that flourished during the Enlightenment and after.

Top this off with a very different experience of government. From the Middle Ages ideas of political freedom and individual liberty created an egalitarian ethos that has never faded. An important reason Scottish devolution has worked so well is not just because it had its own parliament until 1707. Historic Scotland was a highly de-centralised state and there was an effective civil society: forms of association below and outside the apparatus of the state, such as churches, communities, and families, mediating between public institutions and private lives, which now so concern the modern West. Scots felt that central authority could and should intervene for benign ends, but that most power should be diffused. This internal devolution was essential because of the remarkable local and regional diversity of the country, creating a rich mixture of cultures that allowed people to forge multiple identities within Scotland.

All of these marked Scotland out from England and the legacy of this distinctive past touches us still in ways we only dimly appreciate. More tangibly, it means that Scots are no less Scottish if they do not wear kilts and they do not speak Gaelic. We should wear kilts and speak Gaelic with pride if we want to, but we do not need them nearly as much as an appreciation of the historic forces that have given us our unique identity.