Talk:Scotland in the Middle Ages

Two Englands
Came across this recently: It was as if, in the words of James Campbell, the leading historian of the Anglo-Saxon state, “there are two Englands and one of them is called Scotland.”

What he meant is that both medieval kingdoms had a Norman aristocracy, a predominantly Anglo-Saxon 'English' population and a Celtic fringe (the Welsh and the Cornish in England and the Highlanders, the original ethnic Scots, in Scotland).

One of the oddest features of this period of Scottish history is that the people who originally called themselves English began to call themselves Scots, and began calling the actual Scots of the Highlands 'Irish'.

The observation that lowland Scots are in the main of Anglo-Saxon rather than Celtic descent seems to be commonly downplayed today. Cassandra


 * The quote isn't really about ethnic essentialism, he means that the Scottish state came to resemble England so much in terms of institutions that it can be called a second England. The idea is not downplayed at all, the trajectory of Scottish historiography since the 1740s has been to present Scottish history in English terms, and indeed the careers of many of the most prominent recent medievalists of Scotland like Geoffrey Barrow and Sandy Grant have been dedicated to writing about medieval, post-1100 Scotland, as if it were a second England (albeit one with leftover 'Celtic' quirks). Deacon of Pndapetzim ( Talk ) 22:50, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

Well, I can't be certain exactly what James Campbell intended to mean. The point I was making however is that whilst England takes its name from being the 'land of the Angles' Scotland wasn't the 'land of the Scots' in the same way at all. The name is more an accident of history, and a permanent source of confusion. The pivotal moment came at the time of King David who was nominally King of the Scots but whose kingdom was in reality based not in 'Scotland proper' i.e.the Highlands but in the English lands of what later became known as the 'Scottish ' Lowlands. David's writ barely ran in 'Scotland Proper'. In effect the Kingdom of the King of the Scots was and remained a northern English kingdom - only later did the whole become known as Scotland. Cassandra Cassandrathesceptic (talk) 14:05, 25 November 2016 (UTC)

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