Section II.
The Anglo-Saxons.—The Danes and Norwegians.—Effects of their
Expeditions.
The same want of unity and the same internal disputes which had brought ruin on the Celts in other places, prepared the way for foreign conquerors in Scotland. An indomitable fate decreed that the newer and higher civilization of Christianity should here, as in the rest of Europe, be founded and promoted by a Teutonic people. But though the Anglo-Saxons had conquered almost all England, they were not able, by their own power, to subdue the Celts in Scotland. The Anglo-Saxon kings undertook, indeed, several expeditions against that country, in which they were at times pretty successful; but they were not able to hold steady possession even of the Lowlands. Subsequently, however, the Anglo-Saxons wandered by degrees, and in a more peaceful manner, from the northernmost parts of England over the Scottish border, and established themselves both in the towns and in the rural districts. The number of these emigrants appears to have increased very considerably after the conquests of the Danes and Norwegians in the midland and northern districts of England in the ninth and tenth centuries, when a great part of the Anglo-Saxons were driven from their old dwellings, and obliged to fly towards the north. Saxon institutions may even have been introduced into the Lowlands in the tenth and eleventh centuries, after an expedition of the Anglo-Saxon king Edgar. But the rocky highlands of the interior constantly defied all conquest; and the northern and western coasts, together with the surrounding islands, could be subdued only by considerable fleets, which the Anglo-Saxons did not possess.
But what in this respect the Anglo-Saxons were obliged to leave undone, was for the most part accomplished by the warlike and shrewd men of the Scandinavian North, who were then masters of the sea. Even from the oldest times, connections, both of a warlike and peaceful nature, had existed between Scotland and the opposite shores of Scandinavia. The old Sagas, for instance, bear witness that the Danish king Frode’s daughter, Ulfhilde, was married to “the founder of the Scottish kingdom;” and that the Danish prince Amleth (Hamlet) married the Scotch queen, Hermuntrude. From Denmark, moreover, and particularly from Jutland, many colonists afterwards emigrated to the Scotch Lowlands, whose coasts were, besides, plundered by the Danish Vikings.
The Danish colonists, even in the north of England, were much mixed with Norwegians, and this was still more the case in the Scottish Lowlands. The more north the districts lay, the farther were they removed from Denmark, and the nearer did they approach Norway; whilst the features of the country much more resembled the Norwegian fiords, valleys, and rocks. Whilst, therefore, the Scandinavian colonists in the Lowlands were of Norwegian-Danish descent, the Highlands and islands farthest towards the north and west, were conquered, and in part peopled, by Norwegians only. This happened about the same time as the Danish conquests and settlements in England. The Norwegians founded kingdoms on the northern and western coasts of Scotland, which existed for centuries after the destruction of the Danish power in England. They introduced their own manners, customs, and laws, and gave Norwegian names to the places colonized by them. They appear not unfrequently to have married native Celts; at least it is often stated that Norwegian chiefs married daughters of the Celtic, or Pictish, and Scotch aristocracy, whose pure nationality and power were thus gradually broken down. The unfortunate Celts were now in a painful position. The Celtic Scots in the Lowlands were pressed upon by the Anglo-Saxons and Northmen, whilst the Pictish Highlanders were assailed both from the Lowlands and from the Norwegian kingdoms in the west and north. The most essential result of the Norwegian conquests and settlements in the Scotch Highlands was, that the Northmen, in conjunction with the Norwegian-Danish colonists in the Lowlands, and with the Anglo-Saxons who dwelt there, overthrew the Celtic dominion, and, like the Danes in England, prepared the way for the eventual triumph of the Norman spirit and Norman institutions. In the Lowlands this took place in the twelfth century, but much later in the Highlands and surrounding islands.
As a close union was thus effected between the long-separated Highlands and Lowlands, and a higher and more widely-diffused civilization introduced among the people in both, it may justly be asserted that the Norwegian conquests in the Highlands, and the Norwegian-Danish settlements in the Lowlands, were particularly fortunate for Scotland. It must always, indeed, be a subject of regret that so brave, and in many respects so noble, a people as the Caledonians and their descendants, should be exterminated. Who can observe without a feeling of sadness how the last feeble remnants of Scotland’s ancient masters, after having been expelled from the glorious Lowlands, cannot even now find rest among the barren rocks, and in the few arable valleys of the Highlands, but are obliged, year after year, in increasing numbers, to seek another home farther west, in the new world beyond the Atlantic? But, viewing the matter as it regards enlightenment and civilization, no charge can be reasonably brought against the Norwegians or Northmen, for having co-operated in Scotland to expel a people whose brethern and kinsmen had in every country which they occupied shown themselves incapable of adopting the new and milder manners of Christianity; and who, once before subdued by the Romans, had been compelled to yield to the fresher and more powerful Teutonic tribes of the Franks and Anglo-Saxon.
No small portion of the present population of Scotland, both in the Lowlands and on the remotest coasts and isles of the Highlands, is undoubtedly descended from the Northmen, and particularly from the Norwegians. Both the Norwegians and Danes, wherever they established themselves, introduced their Scandinavian customs, and preserved, in all circumstances, the fundamental traits of their national character. It becomes, therefore, probable that the Norwegian settlers in Scotland must, in certain districts at least, have exercised a vast influence on the development of the more modern life of the Scotch people, and on their national character. This is indeed actually and visibly the case. Yet, although the Norwegian kingdoms on the coasts of Scotland subsisted long after the downfall of the Danish power in England, still the effects of the Norwegian conquests in Scotland were far from being so great, or so universally felt there, as the results of the Danish conquests were in England. The Norwegian language was completely supplanted in the Hebrides by old Celtic or Gaelic; and on the Shetland Isles, the Orkneys, and the north coast of Scotland, by English. The Norwegian laws and institutions either entirely disappeared in these parts, or were formed anew after quite different models. Not even in the purely Norwegian Orkneys and Shetland Isles, though they remained united with Norway and Denmark until far in the fifteenth century, could the inhabitants maintain the ancient freedom which they had inherited from their forefathers. The free tenure of land, or right of “Udal,” was, for the most part, annihilated by the most shameful oppression. Established on many small, poor, and widely-separated islands, the Norwegians in Scotland could neither obtain such influence for their laws and institutions, nor concert so united and powerful a resistance against oppression, as their more fortunate Danish kinsmen in the open, rich, and densely-peopled plains of northern England.
In spite of the acknowledged fact that the Norwegians were the most numerous of all the Scandinavian colonists in Scotland, we constantly hear Norwegian achievements and Norwegian memorials referred to “the Danes.” Under this common appellation are also generally included, as in England, Norwegians and Swedes. The causes of this must probably be sought in the long dominion of Denmark over Norway, in the brisker and more uninterrupted communication which Scotland maintained with Denmark, in comparison with any other part of the North, and lastly, in the reciprocal marriages between the ancient Scotch and Danish royal families, which in former times contributed, in no small degree, to bind the Scotch and Danish people together. But the preponderance of the Danish name must also be attributed to the pre-eminent power of the Danes in ancient times, and in the early middle ages; and, of course, more particularly to that supreme dominion which they had so gloriously won for themselves in the neighbouring country—England.