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.Boswell’s Life of Johnson would become the most famous biography in English letters—again, in English, not Scottish letters.And of course Adam Smith would compose the founding text of modern economics— Inquiry Concerning the Wealth of Nations—in a language that was, it is all too easy to forget, a foreign tongue to him.By 1758, Horace Walpole, the son of the former prime minister, had to admit “Scotland is the most accomplished nation in Europe.” Voltaire agreed: “It is to Scotland that we look for our idea of civilization.” A central European observer stated that “it is now an incontestable fact that the principal authors who have adorned the British literature in these latter times, or do honour to it in the present days, have received their birth and education in Scotland.” It was as neat an example of reverse cultural imperialism as one can find, and David Hume expressed his pleasure with it in the form of a paradox:Is it not strange that at a time when we have lost our Princes, our Parliament, our independent Government.are unhappy in our accent and.speak a very corrupt Dialect of the Tongue which we make use of, is it not strange, I say, that in these Circumstances, we shou’d really be the People most distinguished for Literature in Europe?All the same, it was a rash man who could have predicted all this before 1745.At that date, Scottish Whigs knew that life even in Edinburgh was still pretty primitive compared with what was going on south of the Tweed.But they understood that change was under way, and that the changes were for the better—that the institutions and habits that still held Scotland back, such as the intolerance of the Kirk and the old feudal customs that made rural tenants so dependent on their lairds, were slowly improving.So it came as a shock when so much of Scotland lashed out violently against these changes in 1745, and the deepest, darkest aspects of Scotland’s past suddenly rose up to blot out the future.IIMany myths abound about the Highland clans.The oldest, and most persistent, is that the rising of Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745 symbolized a cultural clash between a Celtic “Jacobite” Highlands, steeped in primeval tribal loyalties, and a modernizing, proto-industrial “Whig” Lowlands.Scottish Whigs actually encouraged this view.It implied that they and their English allies were engaged in a virtual crusade for civilization, a war against an anachronistic social order left over from Scotland’s barbarous history.The clans were an anachronism, all right, except that they were a holdover from Scotland’s feudal, not tribal, past.The bonds that held the clan together were land and landholding.Their origins had as much to do with French-speaking Normans as with ancient Celts.If we want to identify the true prototypes of the Highland warriors who fought for the Earl of Mar at Sheriffmuir or Prince Charlie at Culloden, we should look not to the ancient Picts or Britons, but to the followers of William the Conqueror.The term clan, of course, comes from the Gaelic clann, meaning “children.” It implied a kinship group of four or five generations, all claiming descent from a common ancestor.And clan chieftains encouraged their followers to believe that they were indeed bound together like family.Men such as the Duke of Argyll of the Campbells or Lord Lovat of the Frasers routinely demanded a loyalty from their tenants not unlike that of children for a father.But it was entirely a fiction.The average clan—and there were more than fifty of them in 1745—was no more a family than is a Mafia “family.” The only important blood ties were those between the chieftain and his various caporegimes, the so-called tacksmen who collected his rents and bore the same name.Below them were a large, nondescript, and constantly changing population of tenants and peasants, who worked the land and owed the chieftain service in war and peacetime.Whether they considered themselves Campbells or MacPhersons or Mackinnons was a matter of indifference, and no clan genealogist or bard, the seanachaidh, ever wasted breath keeping track of them.What mattered was that they were on clan land, and called it home.“In that sense,” says one prominent authority on the history of the Highlands, “one cannot really talk about a ‘clan system,’ only about specific clans.” Those clans that appear in the first written sources were all extinct by the beginning of the sixteenth century.The ones that dominated the landscape in 1745—Fraser, Cameron, Mackenzie, Stewart of Appin, and the most famous of all, the Campbells and the MacDonalds—mostly date from the thirteenth or fourteenth century, after Norman mercenaries had come to Scotland at royal invitation and established a pattern of feudal landholding across both the Highlands and Lowlands.Norman feudalism intermingled with Celtic tribal tradition, creating a hybrid: the clan, headed by a chief with his tenants living on a wartime footing.Many of these Norman knights and their descendants, such as Fraser, Drummond, Montgomery, Grant, and Sinclair, became heads of clans.Secured in their power by royal decree and tribal superstition, they became the power brokers of medieval Scotland and a law unto themselves, just like their feudal magnate counterparts in England or France.The only difference was that while the John of Gaunts and Charles the Bolds disappeared across the rest of Europe, and eventually even from Lowland Scotland, men such as the Lords Lovat of Fraser and MacDonnells of Keppoch lived on, a source of Highland pride and legend, but also of disunity and strife.Scottish feudal law gave the chiefs land and peasants, as well as tenants-in-chief, the tacksmen, to run things.It also gave them formal jurisdiction over persons living in the clan area, including the power of life and death.They did not hesitate to use it [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]