An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) | Page 4

of the results that, between 1746 and 1800, were achieved in the Scottish Highlands? That they included an infusion of English blood we have no wish to deny. Anglo-Saxons, in considerable numbers, penetrated northwards, and by the end of the thirteenth century the Lowlanders were a much less pure race than, except in the Lothians, they had been in the days of Malcolm Canmore. Our contention is, that we have no evidence for the assertion that this Saxon admixture amounted to a racial change, and that, ethnically, the men of Fife and of Forfar were still Scots, not English. Such an infusion of English blood as our argument allows will not explain the adoption of the English tongue, or of English habits of life; we must look elsewhere for the full explanation. The English victory was, as we shall try to show, a victory not of blood but of civilization, and three main causes helped to bring it about. The marriage of Malcolm Canmore introduced two new influences into Scotland--an English Court and an English Church, and contemporaneously with the changes consequent upon these new institutions came the spread of English commerce, carrying with it the English tongue along the coast, and bringing an infusion of English blood into the towns.[9] In the reign of David I, the son of Malcolm Canmore and St. Margaret, these purely Saxon influences were succeeded by the Anglo-Norman tendencies of the king's favourites. Grants of land[10] to English and Norman courtiers account for the occurrence of English and Norman family and place-names. The men who lived in immediate dependence upon a lord, giving him their services and receiving his protection, owing him their homage and living under his sole jurisdiction, took the name of the lord whose men they were.
A more important question arises with regard to the system of land tenure, and the change from clan ownership to feudal possession. How was the tribal system suppressed? An outline of the process by which Scotland became a feudalized country will be found in the Appendix, where we shall also have an opportunity of referring, for purposes of comparison, to the methods by which clan-feeling was destroyed after the last Jacobite insurrection. Here, it must suffice to give a brief summary of the case there presented. It is important to bear in mind that the tribes of 1066 were not the clans of 1746. The clan system in the Highlands underwent considerable development between the days of Malcolm Canmore and those of the Stuarts. Too much stress must not be laid upon the unwillingness of the people to give up tribal ownership, for it is clear from our early records that the rights of joint-occupancy were confined to the immediate kin of the head of the clan. "The limit of the immediate kindred", says Mr. E.W. Robertson,[11] "extended to the third generation, all who were fourth in descent from a Senior passing from amongst the joint-proprietary, and receiving, apparently, a final allotment; which seems to have been separated permanently from the remainder of the joint-property by certain ceremonies usual on such occasions." To such holders of individual property the charter offered by David I gave additional security of tenure. We know from the documents entitled "Quoniam attachiamenta", printed in the first volume of the Acts of the Parliament of Scotland, that the tribal system included large numbers of bondmen, to whom the change to feudalism meant little or nothing. But even when all due allowance has been made for this, the difficulty is not completely solved. There must have been some owners of clan property whom the changes affected in an adverse way, and we should expect to hear of them. We do hear of them, for the reigns of the successors of Malcolm Canmore are largely occupied with revolts in Galloway and in Morayshire. The most notable of these was the rebellion of MacHeth, Mormaor of Moray, about 1134. On its suppression, David I confiscated the earldom of Moray, and granted it, by charters, to his own favourites, and especially to the Anglo-Normans, from Yorkshire and Northumberland, whom he had invited to aid him in dealing with the reactionary forces of Moray; but such grants of land in no way dispossessed the lesser tenants, who simply held of new lords and by new titles. Fordun, who wrote two centuries later, ascribes to David's successor, Malcolm IV, an invasion of Moray, and says that the king scattered the inhabitants throughout the rest of Scotland, and replaced them by "his own peaceful people".[12] There is no further evidence in support of this statement, and almost the whole of Malcolm's short reign was occupied with the settlement of Galloway. We know that he followed his grandfather's policy of making grants of land in Moray, and this is