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Home An Early Great Britain and its Failure The Makings of Scotland; Part 1 |
The Makings of Scotland; Part 1The beginnings of Scotland are in a way like the beginnings of England, though they are even less familiar than the story of the rivalry between the kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia, and Wessex. Four separate districts have gone to make up Scotland as it is now: the land of the Picts, which included all Scotland north of the Forth and Clyde, except Argyllshire; the kingdom of the Scots (originally an Irish people), in Argyllshire; the kingdom called Strathclyde, which stretched originally from the Clyde to the Ribble, inhabited by Britons - of this, however, only the northern part came into Scotch hands; and, last, the district called Lothian, inhabited by Angles. This included the east coast of Britain from the Forth to the Tees; but here, as in the case of Strathclyde, the southern part has fallen to England and not to Scotland.We remark a resemblance to English history, and yet a difference. Each kingdom was made out of a junction of smaller kingdoms; but while in England the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes were all of the same Teutonic stock, speaking the same language, in Scotland there was a fusion of two different stocks, the Celtic and the Teutonic, and a contest of language. This contest was unknown in England, from which the British Celt was almost driven out; even in districts where he survived he proved for many years to be a very unimportant factor. Union began with Kenneth MacAlpin, King of the Scots, who made himself ruler over the Picts also. This joined the two Celtic peoples; and though Kenneth's power was certainly very slight in the far north, and only reached in the south to the Forth and Clyde, we have here the beginnings of Scotland, or Alban as it was then called. The next step on the part of the kings of Scotland was to spread their authority over the kingdom of Strathclyde. These Strathclyde Britons were, however, also attacked by the English in the south. Hence English and Scots came into conflict, each claiming to be rulers over Strathclyde. At last Edmund of Wessex found it wiser to make friends with the Scots than to wage war against them, as well as against the Danes, so he made an alliance with Malcolm I and gave up to him Strathclyde. It was not very clear that it had ever been his to give, for the English authority had never been firmly established there; but in any case the northern part of Strathclyde was joined to the Scottish dominions, and by 1018 the King of Scotland was also king there. |
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