Page images
PDF
EPUB

merce and agriculture. In this respect it differs from the history of Ireland.

NOTES. The statistics of 1880 give Orkney Islands acreage 698,726, percentage under grain 4.50; Argyll acreage 2,083,126, percentage under grain, 1.1. 2 Rent was paid in wadmal cloth and butter, scat in butter and oil. See Old Lore Miscellany, vol. viii. No. 1, of O. and S. Records (Viking Society), as to this and as to penny lands and ounce lands. 3 Mackenzie's Grievances, pp. 102-103. 4 Vol. i. p. 32. 5 O.S., p. 136. 6 O.S., p. 4. 7 Records of the Earldom of Orkney,

8

by J. Storer Clouston, p. 79. Saga of Olaf the Saint (Laing), ch. 110. 9 Sverri's Saga, by J. Sephton, p. 125. 10 Saga of Olaf the Saint, ch. 153. When in the nineteenth century the discovery is made of the extraction of iodine from seaweed, the chiefs proprietors claim and use it as their individual property. 11 Scotichronicon, Book ш. ch. viii. 12 William Marshall, General View of the Agriculture of the Central Highlands of Scotland (i.e. those of Perthshire), 1794, p. 117. 13 Sinclair, Statistical Account of Scotland, vol. viii. pp. 569, 501; vol. i. p. 8. 14 Though Fordun mentions sheep one must question whether in earlier days these sheep existed, as beasts of prey lingered in the Western Highlands long after they were extinct in other parts of the islands. Speaking of the Gordon Rental of 1600 (in Kingussie and Bellie on the Spey), Innes (Scottish Legal Antiquities) says: “In all that vast estate reaching from sea to sea and across ranges of mountains, now everywhere pastured by sheep and cattle, there is no payment of wool or woollen cloth nor of hides or skins, nor any amount of sheep or cattle beyond the occasional mart or wedder for the lord's table." 15 Survey of Cromarty and Ross in 1810. 16 Observations on the Present State of the Highlands, 1806. 17 Skene, Celtic Scotland, iii. pp. 378393. 18 The Outer Hebrides, by W. E. Mackenzie, 1903. and Farms in the Hebrides, by the Duke of Argyll. 21 Statistical Account of Scotland, vol. v. p. 393. Antiquities, p. 154 et seq.

19 Crofts

20 Celtic Scotland. 22 Scottish Legal

PART VI

SCOTLAND, IRELAND, AND WALES:

A HISTORICAL RETROSPECT

(See EXPLANATION OF TECHNICAL WORDS, supra, p. xxvi)

CHAPTER XXIV

SCOTLAND AND IRELAND TO 1170

The Course of Change in Scotland.-When from England we pass to Scotland we come to one of the most troublesome parts of the subject.

The decay of communal society in England, where it was not the result of conquest from the Continent and the spread of Roman ideas, was a natural economic development due to the suitability of England for agriculture, its geographical position and consequent opportunities for commerce with Flanders and control of the wool trade. It is not necessary or profitable here to review English history, apart from the history of medieval commerce which has not been written, and which is too vast and unknown a subject to English-speaking people to be treated of in this book.

But before we pass to Scotland, the land of the mountain and the flood, some notice of political history is necessary to make plain the change and its causes at different stages and under different conditions. I shall try to begin where I left off in my First Twelve Centuries of British Story-in 1154, to confine the narrative to the events bearing on the change from communal to feudal society, and to treat the parts other than England separately as far as possible. But as soon as narrative history begins, all parts of the islands must be treated together, unless the story is to degenerate

into constitutional history. Otherwise one might lose sight of the fact, for example, that the difficulties which faced the different expeditions to Ireland from Wales and England in the years following 1169 were occasioned by the combinations of force which they met, not only of the native Irish but of the mercenary soldiers from the Isle of Man and the Western Isles of Scotland, and of the Scandinavian merchantpirates resident in the ports of Dublin, Waterford, Wexford, and Limerick. Henry's expedition had for its first object the seizure of the ports in the hands of the other pirates.

The story of the struggle in Scotland, of the very long and very hard fought battle between two systems of living, is influenced by the physical geography of the land; the persistence of the communal society is largely a matter of rainfall. It is a country having a great variety of soil and climate. It has a coast on the west like Norway, bleak and mountainous, a coast broken up into isolated districts by long fiords, making communication difficult except by water. It has many large inland lakes which serve as main arteries of traffic, and many large islands both north and west set in stormy seas. The north-west is cut off from the southeast by the Grampian ranges and the great chain of lakes which we now call the Caledonian Canal. The two great estuaries of Forth and Clyde cut off the southernmost part from the central districts. As a consequence it took a very long time before the component parts were hammered into a tolerably solid mass, and for some centuries it was a question whose hammering would be most effective.

Besides the nature of the physical formation, the amount of rainfall in the western half plays a great part by discouraging agriculture and the commerce which may have followed it (see pp. 244, 245); and the neighbourhood of the land lends a perpetually shifting chain of combinations which makes it as difficult to tell the story, as it must have been to act it in past times.

With Cantyre, Islay, and Galloway almost kissing the Irish coast and inviting an approach to the Clyde, with Man but little further away, no actors in events in the West of Scotland could be indifferent to the counterpart affecting

[graphic][subsumed][merged small][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][ocr errors][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][merged small][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed]

their kinsmen on the Ulster coast; the West to hardy seamen was but the resting place and connecting link between the Irish and Scandinavians of the Irish ports and the Orkney and Shetland Islands governed by the earls. These in their turn were as near to Bergen or Stavanger, to the land to which they owed allegiance, and by as easy a sea passage, as to the Scottish king at Perth or Edinburgh; while the English king, through Chester and Carlisle, could attack the Scot by land from east or west, and through Wales and Ireland and Man on the west by sea. So the histories of all the parts march together and intertwine in a confusing way.

Here later than anywhere else in the islands the personal tie survived in conflict with feudalism, and here more than anywhere else a high-handed feudalism was used to weld society in one.

It is the story, so far as Scotland is concerned, of gradual encroachment and absorption by the people of the district round Scone, who had submitted to Rome and taken to agriculture, of their neighbours north, west, and south of them. In the struggle for supremacy between the two forms of society, the part most suitable for agriculture becomes feudal landholding, and the pastoral districts where they do not retreat before the plough retain the personal tie.

David I. of Scotland,
died 1153.

Henry Earl of Huntingdon m. Ada, daughter of the
Earl of Warrenne and Surrey.

Malcolm IV. the Maiden,

died 1165.

William the Lion,
died 1214.

David.

When Henry II. on his accession had reduced the South of England to order, he turned his attention to the North, and had an interview in 1157 at Chester about the possession of the northern counties of England with Malcolm IV. (the Maiden), who at the age of twelve had in 1153 succeeded his grandfather David, his father Henry dying in David's lifetime.

« PreviousContinue »