An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) | Page 3

confined to
the Highlands in the eleventh century. Nor have we any hint of a racial
displacement after the Norman conquest, even though it is

unquestionable that a considerable number of exiles followed Queen
Margaret to Scotland, and that William's harrying of the north of
England drove others over the border. It is easy to lay too much stress
upon the effect of the latter event. The northern counties cannot have
been very thickly populated, and if Mr. Freeman is right in his
description of "that fearful deed, half of policy, half of vengeance,
which has stamped the name of William with infamy", not very many
of the victims of his cruelty can have made good their flight, for we are
told that the bodies of the inhabitants of Yorkshire "were rotting in the
streets, in the highways, or on their own hearthstones". Stone dead left
no fellow to colonize Scotland. We find, therefore, only the results and
not the process of this racial displacement. These results were the
adoption of English manners and the English tongue, and the growth of
English names, and we wish to suggest that they may find an historical
explanation which does not involve the total disappearance of the
Scottish farmer from Fife, or of the Scottish artisan from Aberdeen.
Before proceeding to a statement of the explanation to which we desire
to direct the reader's attention, it may be useful to deal briefly with the
questions relating to the spoken language of Lowland Scotland and to
its place-names. The fact that the language of the Angles and Saxons
completely superseded, in England, the tongue of the conquered
Britons, is admitted to be a powerful argument for the view that the
Anglo-Saxon conquest of England resulted in a racial displacement.
But the argument cannot be transferred to the case of the Scottish
Lowlands, where, also, the English language has completely
superseded a Celtic tongue. For, in the first case, the victory is that of
the language of a savage people, known to be in a state of actual
warfare, and it is a victory which follows as an immediate result of
conquest. In Scotland, the victory of the English tongue (outside the
Lothians) dates from a relatively advanced period of civilization, and it
is a victory won, not by conquest or bloodshed, but by peaceful means.
Even in a case of conquest, change of speech is not conclusive evidence
of change of race (_e.g._ the adoption of a Romance tongue by the
Gauls); much less is it decisive in such an instance as the adoption of
English by the Lowlanders of Scotland. In striking contrast to the case
of England, the victory of the Anglo-Saxon speech in Scotland did not

include the adoption of English place-names. The reader will find the
subject fully discussed in the valuable work by the Reverend J.B.
Johnston, entitled _Place-Names of Scotland_. "It is impossible", says
Mr. Johnston, "to speak with strict accuracy on the point, but Celtic
names in Scotland must outnumber all the rest by nearly ten to one."
Even in counties where the Gaelic tongue is now quite obsolete (_e.g._
in Fife, in Forfar, in the Mearns, and in parts of Aberdeenshire), the
place-names are almost entirely Celtic. The region where English
place-names abound is, of course, the Lothians; but scarcely an English
place-name is definitely known to have existed, even in the Lothians,
before the Norman Conquest, and, even in the Lothians, the English
tongue never affected the names of rivers and mountains. In many
instances, the existence of a place-name which has now assumed an
English form is no proof of English race. As the Gaelic tongue died out,
Gaelic place-names were either translated or corrupted into English
forms; Englishmen, receiving grants of land from Malcolm Canmore
and his successors, called these lands after their own names, with the
addition of the suffix-ham or-tun; the influence of English ecclesiastics
introduced many new names; and as English commerce opened up new
seaports, some of these became known by the names which
Englishmen had given them.[7] On the whole, the evidence of the
place-names corroborates our view that the changes were changes in
civilization, and not in racial distribution.
We now proceed to indicate the method by which these changes were
effected, apart from any displacement of race. Our explanation finds a
parallel in the process which has changed the face of the Scottish
Highlands within the last hundred and fifty years, and which produced
very important results within the "sixty years" to which Sir Walter
Scott referred in the second title of Waverley.[8] There has been no
racial displacement; but the English language and English civilization
have gradually been superseding the ancient tongue and the ancient
customs of the Scottish Highlands. The difference between Skye and
Fife is