It must be remembered, in estimating the chronicler’s pungent remarks upon our poor ancestors, that he was not only a worshipper of rank and wealth, but thoroughly English in his partialities, magnifying the feats in arms of the great enemies of his own country. The records of the Scots Parliament of 1395 curiously confirm the inference from his narrative, that the French were oppressive purveyors, and otherwise unobservant of the people’s rights. An indenture, as it is termed—the terms of a sort of compact with the strangers—appears among the records, conspicuous among their other Latin and vernacular contents as being set forth in French, in courtesy, of course, to the strangers. It expressly lays down that no goods of any kind shall be taken by force, under pain of death, and none shall be received without being duly paid for—the dealers having free access to come and go. There are regulations, too, for suppressing broils by competent authority, and especially for settling questions between persons of unequal degrees; a remedy for the French practice, which left the settlement entirely with the superior. This document is one of many showing that, in Scotland, there were arrangements for protecting the personal freedom of the humbler classes, and their rights of property, the fulness of which is little known, because the like did not exist in other countries, and those who have written philosophical treatises on the feudal system, or on the progress of Europe from barbarism to civilisation, have generally lumped all the countries of Europe together. The sense of personal freedom seems to have been rather stronger in Scotland than in England; it was such as evidently to astound the French knights. At the end of the affair, Froissart expresses this surprise in his usual simple and expressive way. After a second or third complaint of the unreasonable condition that his countrymen should pay for the victuals they consumed, he goes on, “The Scots said the French had done them more mischief than the English;” and when asked in what manner, they replied, “By riding through the corn, oats, and barley on their march, which they trod under foot, not condescending to follow the roads, for which damage they would have a recompense before they left Scotland, and they should neither find vessel nor mariner who would dare to put to sea without their permission.”
Of the military events in the short war following the arrival of the French, an outline will be found in the ordinary histories; but it was attended by some conditions which curiously bring out the specialties of the two nations so oddly allied. One propitiatory gift the strangers had brought with them, which was far more highly appreciated than their own presence; this was a thousand stand of accoutrements for men-at-arms. They were of the highest excellence, being selected out of the store kept in the Castle of Beauté for the use of the Parisians. When these were distributed among the Scots knights, who were but poorly equipped, the chronicler, as if he had been speaking of the prizes at a Christmas-tree, tells how those who were successful and got them were greatly delighted. The Scots did their part in their own way: they brought together thirty thousand men, a force that drained the country of its available manhood. But England had at that time nothing to divert her arms elsewhere, and the policy adopted was to send northwards a force sufficient to crush Scotland for ever. It consisted of seven thousand mounted men-at-arms, and sixty thousand bow and bill men—a force from three to four times as large as the armies that gained the memorable English victories in France. Of these, Agincourt was still to come off, but Crecy and Poictiers were over, along with many other affairs that might have taught the French a lesson. The Scots, too, had suffered two great defeats—Neville’s Cross and Halidon Hill—since their great national triumph. The impression made on each country by their experiences brought out their distinct national characteristics. The French knights were all ardour and impatience; they clamoured to be at the enemy without ascertaining the amount or character of his force. The wretched internal wars of their own country had taught them to look on the battle-field as the arena of reason in personal conflict, rather than the great tribunal in which the fate of nations was to be decided, and communities come forth freed or enslaved.
To the Scots, on the other hand, the affair was one of national life or death, and they would run no risks for distinction’s sake. Picturesque accounts have often been repeated of a scene where Douglas, or some other Scots leader, brought the Admiral to an elevated spot whence he could see and estimate the mighty host of England; but the most picturesque of all the accounts is the original by Froissart, of which the others are parodies. The point in national tactics brought out by this incident is the singular recklessness with which the French must have been accustomed to do battle. In total ignorance of the force he was to oppose, and not seeking to know aught concerning it, the Frenchman’s voice was still for war. When made to see with his own eyes what he had to encounter, he was as reluctant as his companions to risk the issue of a battle, but not so fertile in expedients for carrying on the war effectively without one. The policy adopted was to clear the country before the English army as it advanced, and carry everything portable and valuable within the recesses of the mountain-ranges, whither the inhabitants not fit for military service went with their effects. A desert being thus opened for the progress of the invaders, they were left to wander in it unmolested while the Scots army went in the opposite direction, and crossed the Border southwards. Thus the English army found Scotland empty—the Scots army found England full. The one wore itself out in a fruitless march, part of it straggling, it was said, as far as Aberdeen, and returned thinned and starving, while the other was only embarrassed by the burden of its plunder. Much destruction there was, doubtless, on both sides, but it fell heaviest where there was most to destroy, and gratified at last in some measure the French, who “said among themselves they had burned in the bishoprics of Durham and Carlisle more than the value of all the towns in the kingdom of Scotland.” But havoc does not make wealth, and whether or not the Scots knew better from experience how to profit by such opportunities, the French, when they returned northward, were starving. Their object now was to get out of the country as fast as they could. Froissart, with a touch of dry humour, explains that their allies had no objection to speed the exit of the poorer knights, but resolved to hold the richer and more respectable in a sort of pawn for the damage which the expedition had inflicted on the common people. The Admiral asked his good friends the Lords Douglas and Moray to put a stop to these demands; but these good knights were unable to accommodate their brethren in this little matter, and the Admiral was obliged to give effectual pledges from his Government for the payment of the creditors. There is something in all this that seems utterly unchivalrous and even ungenerous; but it had been well for France had Froissart been able to tell a like story of her peasantry. It merely shows us that our countrymen of that day were of those who “knew their rights, and, knowing, dared maintain them;” and was but a demonstration on a humbler, and, if you will, more sordid shape, of the same spirit that had swept away the Anglo-Norman invaders. The very first act which their chronicler records concerning his knightly friends, after he has exhausted his wrath against the hard and mercenary Scot, is thoroughly suggestive. Some of the knights tried other fields of adventure, “but the greater number returned to France, and were so poor they knew not how to remount themselves, especially those from Burgundy, Champagne, Bar, and Lorraine, who seized the labouring horses wherever they found them in the fields,” so impatient were they to regain their freedom of action.
So ended this affair, with the aspect of evil auspices for the alliance. The adventurers returned “cursing Scotland, and the hour they had set foot there. They said they had never suffered so much in any expedition, and wished the King of France would make a truce with the English for two or three years, and then march to Scotland and utterly destroy it; for never had they seen such wicked people, nor such ignorant hypocrites and traitors.” But the impulsive denunciation of the disappointed adventurers was signally obliterated in the history of the next half-century. Ere many more years had passed over them, that day of awful trial was coming when France had to lean on the strong arm of her early ally; and, in fact, some of the denouncers lived to see adventurers from the sordid land of their contempt and hatred commanding the armies of France, and owning her broad lordships. It was, in fact, just after the return of Vienne’s expedition, that the remarkable absorption of Scotsmen into the aristocracy of France, referred to in our preceding paper, began to set in.
This episode of the French expedition to Scotland, small though its place is in the annals of Europe, yet merits the consideration of the thoughtful historian, in affording a significant example of the real causes of the misery and degradation of France at that time, and the wonderful victories of the English kings. Chivalry, courage, the love of enterprise, high spirit in all forms, abounded to superfluity among the knightly orders, but received no solid support from below. The mounted steel-clad knights of the period, in the highest physical condition, afraid of nothing on the earth or beyond it, and burning for triumph and fame, could perform miraculous feats of strength and daring; but all passed off in wasted effort and vain rivalry, when there was wanting the bold peasantry, who, with their buff jerkins, and their bills and bows, or short Scottish spears, were the real force by which realms were held or gained.
The next affair in which M. Michel notes his countrymen as present among us, was a very peculiar and exceptional one, with features only too like those which were such a scandal to the social condition of France. It was that great battle or tournament on the North Inch of Perth, where opposite Highland factions, called the clan Quhele and clan Chattan, were pitted against each other, thirty to thirty—an affair, the darker colours of which are lighted up by the eccentric movements of the Gow Chrom, or bandy-legged smith of Perth, who took the place of a defaulter in one of the ranks, to prevent the spectacle of the day from being spoilt. That such a contest should have been organised to take place in the presence of the king and court, under solemnities and regulations like some important ordeal, has driven historical speculators to discover what deep policy for the pacification or subjugation of the Highlands lay behind it. The feature that gives it a place in M. Michel’s book, is the briefest possible notification by one of the chroniclers, that a large number of Frenchmen and other strangers were present at the spectacle. This draws us back from the mysterious arcana of political intrigue to find a mere showy pageant, got up to enliven the hours of idle mirth—an act, in short, of royal hospitality—a show cunningly adapted to the tastes of the age, yet having withal the freshness of originality, being a renaissance kind of combination of the gladiatorial conflict of the Roman circus with the tournament of chivalry. The Highlanders were, in fact, the human raw material which a king of Scots could in that day employ, so far as their nature suited, for the use or the amusement of his guests. Them, and them only among his subjects, could he use as the Empire used the Transalpine barbarian—“butchered to make a Roman holiday.” The treatment of the Celt is the blot in that period of our history. Never in later times has the Red Indian or Australian native been more the hunted wild beast to the emigrant settler, than the Highlander was to his neighbour the Lowlander. True, he was not easily got at, and, when reached, he was found to have tusks. They were a people never permitted to be at rest from external assault; yet such was their nature that, instead of being pressed by a common cause into compact union, they were divided into communities that hated each other almost more bitterly than the common enemy. This internal animosity has suggested that the king wanted two factions to exterminate each other as it were symbolically, and accept the result of a combat between two bodies of chosen champions, as if there had been an actual stricken field, with all the able-bodied men on both sides engaged in it. It was quite safe to calculate that when the representatives of the two contending factions were set face to face on the green sward, they would fly at each other’s throats, and afford in an abundant manner to the audience whatever delectation might arise from an intensely bloody struggle. But, on the other hand, to expect the Highlanders to be fools enough to accept this sort of symbolical extinction of their quarrel was too preposterous a deduction for any practical statesman. They had no notion of leaving important issues to the event of single combat, or any of the other preposterous rules of chivalry, but slew their enemies where they could, and preferred doing so secretly, and without risk to themselves, when that was practicable.
As we read on the history of the two countries, France and Scotland, we shall find the national friendship which had arisen in their common adversity gradually and almost insensibly changing its character. The strong current of migration from Scotland which had set in during the latter period of the hundred years’ war stopped almost abruptly. Scotsmen were still hired as soldiers—sometimes got other appointments—and, generally speaking, were received with hospitality; but in Louis XI.’s reign, the time had passed when they were accepted in the mass as a valuable contribution to the aristocracy of France, and forthwith invested with titles and domains. The families that had thus settled down remembered the traditions of their origin, but had no concern with Scotland, and were thoroughly French, nationally and socially. France, too, was aggregating into a compact nationality, to which her sons could attach themselves with some thrill of patriotic pride. She made a great stride onward both in nationality and prosperity during the reign of that hard, greedy, penurious, crafty, superstitious hypocrite, Louis XI. By a sort of slow corroding process he ate out, bit by bit, the powers and tyrannies that lay between his own and the people. Blood, even the nearest, was to him nowise thicker than water, so he did not, like his predecessors, let royal relations pick up what territorial feudatories dropped; he took all to himself, and, taking it to himself, it became that French empire which was to be inherited by Francis I., Louis XIV., and even the Napoleons; for he seems to have had the principal hand in jointing and fitting in the subordinate machinery of that centralisation which proved compact enough in its details to be put together again after the smash of the Revolution, and which has proved itself as yet the only system under which France can flourish.
Scotland was, at the same time, rising under a faint sunshine of prosperity—a sort of reflection of that enjoyed by France. The connection of the poor with the rich country was becoming ever more close, but at the same time it was acquiring an unwholesome character. The two could not fuse into each other as England and Scotland did; and, for all the pride of the Scots, and their strong hold over France, as the advanced-guard mounted upon England, the connection could not but lapse into a sort of clientage—the great nation being the patron, the small nation the dependant. Whether for good or evil, France infused into Scotland her own institutions, which, being those of the Roman Empire, as practised throughout the Christian nations of the Continent, made Scotsmen free of those elements of social communion, that amitas gentium, from which England excluded herself in sulky pride. This is visible, or rather audible, at the present day, in the Greek and Latin of the Scotsmen of the old school, who can make themselves understood all over the world; while the English pronunciation, differing from that of the nations which have preserved the chief deposits of the classic languages in their own, must as assuredly differ from the way in which these were originally spoken. The Englishman disdained the universal Justinian jurisprudence, and would be a law unto himself, which he called, with an affectation of humility, “The Common Law.” It is full, no doubt, of patches taken out of the ‘Corpus Juris,’ but, far from their source being acknowledged, the civilians are never spoken of by the common lawyers but to be railed at and denounced; and when great draughts on the Roman system were found absolutely necessary to keep the machine of justice in motion, these were entirely elbowed out of the way by common law, and had to form themselves into a separate machinery of their own, called Equity. Scotland, on the other hand, received implicitly from her leader in civilisation the great body of the civil law, as collected and arranged by the most laborious of all labouring editors, Denis Godefroi. We brought over also an exact facsimile of the French system of public prosecution for crime, from the great state officer at the head of the system to the Procureurs du Roi. It is still in full practice and eminently useful; but it is an arrangement that, to be entirely beneficial, needs to be surrounded by constitutional safeguards; and though there has been much pressure of late to establish it in England, one cannot be surprised that it was looked askance at while the great struggles for fixing the constitution were in progress.
The practice of the long-forgotten States-General of France was an object of rather anxious inquiry at the reassembling of that body in 1789, after they had been some four centuries and a half in a state of adjournment or dissolution. The investigations thus occasioned brought out many peculiarities which were in practical observance in Scotland down to the Union. All the world has read of that awful crisis arising out of the question whether the Estates should vote collectively or separately. Had the question remained within the bounds of reason and regulation, instead of being virtually at the issue of the sword, much instructive precedent would have been obtained for its settlement by an examination of the proceedings of that Parliament of Scotland which adjusted the Union—an exciting matter also, yet, to the credit of our country, discussed with perfect order, and obedience to rules of practice which, derived from the custom of the old States-General of France, were rendered pliant and adaptable by such a long series of practical adaptations as the country of their nativity was not permitted to witness.
There was a very distinct adaptation of another French institution of later origin, when the Court of Session was established in 1533. Before that, the king’s justices administered the law somewhat as in England, but there was an appeal to Parliament; and as that body did its judicial work by committees, these became virtually the supreme courts of the realm. If the reader wants to have assurance that there is something really sound in this information, by receiving it in the current coin of its appropriate technicalities, let him commit to memory that the chief standing committee was named that of the Domini auditorii ad querelas. When he uses that term, nobody will question the accuracy of what he says. The Court of Session, established to supersede this kind of tribunal, was exactly a French parliament—a body exercising appellate judicial functions, along with a few others of a legislative character—few in this country, but in France sufficiently extensive to render the assembling of the proper Parliament of the land and the States-General unnecessary for all regal purposes.