True. It might seem strange to open this book with not one but two assaults on the book’s title. We have no problem with ‘Strange’, but ‘True’ is a difficult concept. For any event which happens there will be a different version of the event from each different individual who was there, and from every person that hears the story the version will change each time they pass it on. And on and on until someone writes it down and calls it ‘History’.
By the way, what about ‘HERstory?’ How different would our understanding of the past be if it were seen from a woman’s point of view?
There are facts, cold hard things – such and such a battle happened in such and such a place on such and such a date and so and so died, but it is the interpretation that is the problem. The experts are hardly in total accord. Archaeologists like solid things, things they can hold in their hand: bones, bullets, swords and pots, they love pots. Historians like documents; it’s their job to sort out the lies and damned lies from the merely biased and the misinformed. Neither have any claim to ‘Truth’. If a new excavation reveals new clues or if a newly unearthed document casts events in a new light, then the previous conclusions must be changed. All that can be presented is the story of best fit for the information available. If the information changes so must the story. There have been plenty of attempts to change our views, particularly of Scotland’s early times, in recent years. Revisionism is rife.
It all comes down to stories. Winston Churchill, amongst others, said, ‘History is written by the victors’. But then, Scotland is full of the stories of ‘Heroic Failures’ (the Jacobite rebellions of the eighteenth century are prime examples).
The great Ulster hero Cuchullin (educated in Scotland) was told that if he took up arms, ‘Your life will be short, but your stories will be told forever’. Cuchullin was hardly a victor, though he did get to create a fair bit of mayhem, but his stories are going strong. Perhaps to be included in the collective knowledge of the past, which history is, you don’t need a great victory, but you do need a great story.
So that is what we have tried to find – great stories from the area we now call Scotland.
The second problem is ‘Scotland’. We wrote this book in 2015. In 2014, over 400 years after the Union of the Crowns, Scotland came close to voting for independence. Nationalists narrowly failed to win a ‘yes’ vote in a referendum. In the 2015 National Election, Scotland voted in fifty-six Scottish Nationalist Party MPs out of fifty-nine seats, leaving the Labour, Liberal and Conservative parties with a single seat each – an overwhelming landslide for the SNP. Seldom has Scotland had such a united pro-independence voice.
For most of history the idea of a single Scottish identity was just that, an idea. An idea born in the medieval power shuffle between Scots, Picts and Britons. Right up to the seventeenth century Highland allegiance was much more to the Lord of the Isles than to some Edinburgh monarch with his airs, graces and trousers. The Borderers offered no allegiance to anyone but to themselves. The Scottish Earls – Hamiltons, Douglases and the like – were merely awaiting their opportunity to step into the king’s shoes.
It is not disputed that there were skirmishes with that busy neighbour to the south, but with Scots fighting Picts, clans fighting clans, earls fighting earls, Lowlanders fighting Highlanders, the state fighting Covenanters and Jacobites fighting Hanoverians, the ‘Scots’ have always been extremely good at killing ‘Scots’. This rings true right up to that most iconic of home derbies, Culloden, where the victorious ‘English’ army included four Lowland Scots battalions and even some prominent Highland clans such as the Campbells.
We have tried to unpick a little of the origins of the modern Scot, but it is a complex story and it is a story which is constantly evolving.
You may wonder why Al Capone and a student prank in the 1950s turn up in the medieval period and why Saint Columba turns up in the twenty-first century?
We originally intended the book to be a march along Scotland’s timeline from prehistory to the modern day. We’ve had to concede that the past has proved far too complicated for that, far too sinuous. Stories duck and dive and then resurface and dive again. Take, for example, the story of such a solid icon as the Stone of Scone, do we set that at the moment when Edward took it from Scone to London in 1296, or when it was repatriated in 1950 by Glasgow students, or in 1996 when it was returned to Scotland? Or do we go back to when it was moved to Scone from Argyll, or when it came to Argyll from Ireland around ad 500, or when it arrived in Ireland – possibly from the Middle East, possibly in the Bronze Age?
We didn’t want to go back to the same story in six different sections of the book. So some stories are told in all their multiplicity where they seem to lie best. Others pop up here and there. Certain themes run right through the ages, others have their particular moment. We have also tried to include recent discoveries, comments and revisions of older stories where they crop up.
A couple of issues have proved unavoidable. The first issue is Scots on the world stage. Scots have made an indelible impression across the globe from early travels in Europe and beyond, to the first footsteps in the New World, to the African National Congress.
The second issue has been the link between Scotland and Ireland. Often their histories are entwined. People have been coming and going across the North Channel since the Ice Age.
You may detect a pro-Scottish bias in the text, for which we make no apologies, but this should not be interpreted as anti-English. No reasonable person should be so crass as to fault any person on their place of birth.
However, there is no doubting that through much of Scotland’s history England has been the ‘Auld Enemy’. We have fought and the numbers tell their story. The population of Scotland has always been about 10 per cent of the population of England. The odds were against us 10/1 all the way. Yet we have held our end up. Be it rugby, football or war, we have had our victories and we celebrate them with some vigour. We also celebrate our heroic failures.
This book is designed as an entertainment: a short romp through the characters, places and events of Scotland’s past. We are certainly not academic historians. We have tried to stick, as far as possible, to some version of ‘true’, but will be as guilty as anyone else of going with a version of the story that we find most convincing – or maybe just the most pleasing.
It is our fervent hope that some of you will find the stories interesting enough to investigate further and set off on a journey, as we have, though the complexity of Scotland’s history. Take a look at the past. We can assure you that you will find that it is more complicated, and more fascinating, than you thought.