In a spartan study on the north side of St Andrews, in the days of Margaret Thatcher’s political reign, one of the most important figures in the making of modern Scotland could be found at work at his desk in a gloomy bay window rattled by sea winds. Though he was usually dressed in jeans and trainers, his hair tousled, his expression owlishly vague, there was no mistaking the rapier mind behind the genial personality and gentle voice. Unlike the Prime Minister, this man did believe in society. He believed in it so passionately that he spent his career unearthing evidence that would illuminate the lives of people at every level of the social scale.
This man was Professor T. C. Smout, godfather of Scottish social and economic history, who in 1980 had moved from Edinburgh University to St Andrews, thereby establishing its reputation as a cradle of progressive Scottish history in the latter part of the twentieth century. There could hardly be a better location to inspire the exploration of Scotland’s past than this rocky east coast outpost. Few places are more steeped in dramatic event and blood. A short distance from Smout’s study was the spot where the mild and forgiving George Wishart was hanged and burned, after kissing his executioner on the cheek; only a few miles away was the moor where turncoat Archbishop Sharp was dragged from his coach and run through by Covenanting extremists. John Knox had taken shelter in St Andrews Castle, a short sprint from Smout’s door, while the story of golf, which found its spiritual home here under the Victorians, unfolded almost within earshot of the history department. Here too, a future king, William Windsor, came to study, leaving the town reeling in the wake of paparazzi and blonde-haired and gleaming-toothed fortune-hunters, not to mention a legacy of manholes sealed like tombs.
For a year in the early 1980s I was a student of T. C. Smout, one of only a handful studying for a degree in social and economic history, and one of only two – the other was a Scouser – who had chosen to take the course he ran on original sources for Scottish history. Here we discovered that while history has largely been written by those in positions of authority, it was possible to discover what those without power thought and how they behaved. Church and court records, for instance, offered a trove of insight into the lives of ordinary people, whether it was the servant indicted for fornication, the husband charged with his wife’s murder, or the pauper unwanted in any parish. Read between the lines of a farmer’s will, and you’d hear the farmer himself. Presented with material such as this, it’s not surprising one came away from tutorials with curiosity well and truly piqued. After taking this course, Scotland looked different.
And so it might. When, in 1969, Smout published A History of the Scottish People 1560–1830, the nature of Scottish history shifted on its axis. A groundbreaking work of deep research and reflection, it represented a turning point not only in historiography, but, as its influence percolated into the mainstream, in the way Scots viewed themselves and their heritage. Though there had been distinguished social and economic historians at work in Scotland long before Smout, none had attempted such a comprehensive recalibrating of the country’s history from a social perspective, that of trying to understand the experiences and environment of ordinary Scots rather than merely their governing elite, and of their ordinary lives, rather than only the rarefied habits of their social superiors. In this Smout was part of the new wave of historical research sweeping Europe and America, in which the little man’s history, the seemingly unimportant person’s tale, was finally to be given its place on the stage. Those who formed the bedrock of history were at last being exhumed.
In the decades since, ranks of younger historians have assiduously trawled for evidence that illuminates the social history of our nation, thereby beginning to fill in the wasteland of silence and ignorance. That it took an Englishman to effect this revolution is not the least fascinating aspect of Smout’s influence within the academic community. Since followed by an array of eminent successors, pre-eminent among them Professor Tom Devine, he and his fellow historians have arguably done more in their time for the Scots than any other discipline or establishment. History may be going out of fashion in schools, but as publishers’ lists and TV documentaries plainly show, hunger for understanding the past, especially from a social and economic perspective, cannot be satisfied. As newspaper editors are perhaps too well aware, the power of the human voice telling its own story never loses its appeal.
Before T. C. Smout, with only a few exceptions such as H. G. Graham’s magnificent The Social Life of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century, the history of Scotland used to be the history of its royalty and rulers – principally William Wallace, Mary, Queen of Scots and Bonnie Prince Charlie – of its aristocracy, its politicians, and of a handful of national disasters that affected the common people, such as the famines of the late seventeenth century, or the Highland (never the Lowland) Clearances. The subject was dominated by so-called victim history, a trend perpetuated in schools in the hope that the gorier the material, the more appealing it would be to a generation unfairly presumed to start from a point of zero interest in the past.
With the approach of Devolution, however, the telling of the past as a perpetual dirge was deemed unhelpful. People began to yearn for a rewriting of history, of the sort offered by the American historian Arthur Herman, who argued that with the flowering of the Scottish Enlightenment Scots effectively ‘made’ the modern world, offering a framework for philosophical thought, economic know-how and scientific exploration that other nations eagerly embraced. This up-beat, can-do, top-of-the-class version of events was particularly popular with nationalists: those, for instance, who like to point to the plethora of Scots today running Britain, not just Scotland. Many take justifiable delight in the fact that arguably the two most important inventions of modern times – the telephone and the television – were the brainchildren of Scots, while the first successful steps in the world-changing process of cloning took place on the outskirts of Edinburgh in a part of the country previously better known as the home of Rosslyn Chapel and the sort of religious superstition that later fuelled the Da Vinci Code.
Depending on what lens you choose, it would be possible to portray the past as nothing more than a litany of poverty and misery; or to see it as an ever-boiling stew of religious bigotry and fanaticism; to point only to the glowing roll-call of innovation, or focus more upon those who left, from explorers to novelists and entrepreneurs. One could narrow the frame to an inspiring list of intellectual genius and educational excellence, or imagine the past as a tale of unrelenting oppression and stoicism.
Scotland’s history, of course, contains all of the above. This anthology has to represent all these histories, and more besides. Indeed, to keep an already broad canvas within the frame I have had to exclude the Scottish diaspora, those who made their names once they had left the country, among them some of the world’s best-known Scots, such as environmentalist John Muir and the founder of the American Navy, John Paul Jones. The only exception is philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, whose endowment of many public libraries in his homeland has had an incalculably beneficial effect on generations of Scots. The role of Scots sent abroad on professional business, however, has not been excluded, and includes armies, explorers, plant collectors and missionaries, all of whom played a significant part in the expansion of Scotland’s international profile.
The guiding premise of this book, to show history as it happened by those who were there, allows it to present a vivid and immediate rendering of the past. Many of the accounts here were made in good faith at the time of events, or in more reflective hindsight, yet they contain inevitable biases or inaccuracies. Indeed, one of the delights of history is assessing how true or fair a representation an eyewitness account offers. Though the testimonies here don’t avoid your eye or blush on the page, the hardest ones to assess for truth are those where the teller is deliberately lying, a practised practitioner of revision rather than an inadvertent distorter. Thus you have Mary, Queen of Scots’ adviser Sir James Melville keener to record that he had cautioned her against showing such blatant favouritism towards David Riccio than to elaborate on the manner of his murder; or the unthinking jingoism of the Times’s account of the sinking of the Arandora Star, during the Second World War, when the squabbling between German and Italian POWs was claimed to have cost other passengers their lives.
Despite the awareness today of the rich history that lies buried or newly revealed in archives and records, an anthology such as this, which is driven by the need for flowing narratives of some length, can make relatively little use of these sources for the earlier periods. As a result, for several long centuries the commentators on events chosen here are those to whom historians have traditionally turned, such as the great Latin chroniclers – Ailred of Rievaulx and William of Malmesbury, Walter Bower and Matthew Paris – although where possible I have looked to them for evidence of what the commoner was experiencing in these sparsely recorded eras.
With many of the earliest official documents and with translations from Latin of the first historians, one runs into the difficulty literary critic Henry Mackenzie found with the young Robert Burns’s work – the relative impenetrability of the Scots language. To make the densest of these passages more readable, I have put them into simpler English, but for those who wish to read them in their original state, they are included in an appendix. The surprisingly modern English of some of the earliest accounts reflects a recent spate of translation from the Latin.
The original autobiography of Scotland, albeit mute, lies in its rock formations and mountain ranges, its volcanic plugs and sandstone cliffs. These are followed by the standing stones, place names, and outlines or ruins of the earliest habitations, the first places where human voices were heard. Runes scratched at Maes Howe by passing Viking pilgrims read like graffiti: ‘Hermund of the hard axe carved these runes’, ‘Ingibiord is the loveliest of the girls’, ‘Jerusalem-farers broke in here’. One can speculate endlessly about the character of the men who scratched these messages. Such snippets, however, are little more than whispers from those who passed this way before us. Like the outlines of long-lost ancient buildings, they are tantalizing, but unsatisfying.
By the time of the chroniclers, events are frequently being recorded by those drawing on the testimony of second- or third-generation relatives of witnesses. To some extent they offer nothing more than a kernel of fact, wrapped in an entertaining coating of make-believe. Sometimes an overtly unfactual medium such as poetry has almost as much historical validity. The Border Ballads, represented here by the haunting ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ – written after the Maid of Norway’s ship sank within sight of the Scottish coastline – express the intense feelings and events of their time; if nothing else can be certain, one can be pretty sure that the mood they convey accurately reflects popular opinion.
Inevitably, the chroniclers concentrated more on battles than on domestic matters which, though they would be intriguing for us, were of no importance to them. Since the history of Scotland is riddled with conflicts settled at the point of a sword or by a hangman’s noose, I have offered these accounts as sparingly as possible; otherwise the perpetual clashing of steel would be deafening. Not every significant battle or disaster, therefore, is covered. In fact, far from it.
Even so, there is a harrowing amount of bloodshed. There is no avoiding the conclusion that Scottish life, be it in the doll’s-house environment of Skara Brae, or the palace of Holyroodhouse, was often a brutal affair. Naturally, also, people have tended to record the exceptional rather than the mundane. They are far less likely to turn to their diary or write to their mother to record another quiet day of hoeing or shodding – even assuming they could write or had the time to write – than they are to unburden themselves during times of great stress or drama.
As the clergy were among the most educated (and prolix) Scots, with leisure to sit at a desk, it’s not surprising that events of religious importance have been heavily recorded, be it the trials of heretics and witches, or the Great Disruption of 1843. Indeed, few episodes have been chronicled in greater detail than the travails and triumphs of the Covenanters, when ministers picked at their consciences as if they were half-healed scabs, and used their diaries and letters almost as a form of confessional.
Since bad news is usually more colourful than good, and certainly generates far more in the way of documents, an anthology such as this has drawn heavily on the frequently grisly high points of history. Indeed, if one did not know that the majority of the population lived peaceful existences for centuries on end, with the greatest threat to life coming from starvation, disease, childbirth and overwork rather than heavily armed invaders, much of the selection here would suggest a history of almost constant warfare and conflict. That would, of course, be a gross distortion of facts. By comparison with England, for instance, medieval Scottish royalty enjoyed relatively untroubled reigns – only two were murdered in comparison with England’s five or six; and until 1939, as many wars were fought abroad by Scots as at home. But while town and country life went on in relative tranquillity for years on end, the lives of these almost invisible citizens could be as hard to survive on a day-to-day basis as if they were under constant flak attack.
At no time was this more evident than in newly industrialized Scotland. Up until this point large swathes of the population remain invisible to the historian, especially women, children and those – the majority – who could not write. Their lives are glimpsed only when championed, found in court, or mentioned by others. Thus, at the turn of the nineteenth century, when the engineer Robert Bald witnessed the conditions of women working in the mines, he wrote a level-headed yet impassioned account of what they endured. As so often in his era, his work is overlaid with a note of moralizing, but the outrage he felt at the suffering of this community is molten. Yet, when women from the mines are finally found on record, nearly thirty years later, the rawness of their voices casts Bald’s account into the shade. Even so, it was probably not these chilling first-hand accounts that moved the authorities to act, but the pen-and-ink sketches of conditions underground that were published alongside them. These showed women and children jack-knifed almost to their knees under panniers that were strapped across their foreheads, the tunnel they were navigating barely large enough to accommodate their painful passage. Sometimes words are not enough for those who would prefer to keep their imaginations in the dark, much like these virtual slaves. As Fleet Street editors learned during the Vietnam War, an image reaches the heart faster than the printed word. It’s worth noting, therefore, that it was a collaboration of pioneering Scots – Hill and Adamson – who led the field in the art of the photographic portrait.
The overriding principle behind the selection of the pieces in this book has been readability. It would be an exaggeration to say that almost as much has been read and discarded as has been included, but not much of an exaggeration. Promising avenues have frequently narrowed into blind alleys. A reference to the outspoken Protestant George Buchanan’s self-defence before the Portuguese Inquisition in Lisbon, for instance, looked hugely promising. How many had faced such an ordeal and emerged unscathed? But even though Buchanan was fighting for his life, the theological complexity of his argument proved indigestible. In tribute to his survival, I have instead included his lively description of Highlanders from his idiosyncratic history of Scotland.
Diaries, which are often one of the most immediate conduits to events, can also be disappointing. One such was the incredibly detailed journal kept by an eighteenth-century Orcadian farmer, Patrick Fea, over a period of nearly forty years. If one was interested in the shifting patterns of weather in that period, or the number of sheep he sent to market, this might be riveting: ‘19 April, 1769: A severe Rain all day nothing done to the Labg only got some dung to the potatoe ground’. As a record of Orkney life, however, it is strangely unilluminating, and people get shorter shrift than livestock. Fea’s wife, for example, merits a mention only when she is stricken with illness, and then in passing. More recently, Jimmy Boyle’s prison diaries are a little too self-conscious. His first book, A Sense of Freedom, is far more powerful.
Historical records are naturally riven with posturing. Why would they be otherwise? Who wouldn’t try to mould history in the way that presents what they have done in the best light, before others write their version? Even supposedly objective recording of facts, as in newspapers, can be wildly distorted. At their best, however, journalists’ accounts – fabled as the first draft of history – are an honourable attempt to grasp the essentials of a situation, and put it into context without prejudice. Though their currency is purportedly hard fact, one might see the best of them as a latter-day form of the Border Ballads: a succinct, colourful recording of happenings that includes emotion as well as statistics. Hence the number of newspaper accounts drawn on here for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, many of them unwittingly revealing in their tone. Total dispassion, it seems, is almost impossible, even among unsentimental news reporters. The telling of history is all the better for that.
A book such as this could not have been compiled without the help of the many previous anthologies in whose steps it follows. Of these, three are outstanding. The first, in every sense, is the late Agnes Mure Mackenzie’s Scottish Pageant, a superb four-volume record of the nation from the coming of the Romans to the start of the nineteenth century as found in a plethora of original sources, many of which she translates for those of us whose Latin is inadequate. Tribute must be paid to Scottish Voices, 1745–1960 by T. C. Smout and Sydney Wood, which picks up the Scottish story at the point where the working classes begin to take a substantially well-recorded part in it; and lastly to Louise Yeoman’s Reportage Scotland, an enthusiastic, scholarly account of Scotland’s history, from the time of Agricola’s campaigns to Devolution.
A considerable debt is owed to these, and to many other books. The aim, however, with Scotland: The Autobiography, has been to gather a sufficiently fresh range of voices and perspectives to make it feel as if Scotland’s tumultuous history were being told for the first time.
Rosemary Goring
April 2007