Celtic Scotland

by W. F. Skene

Critical examination of authorities necessary.

Before the early history of any country can be correctly ascertained, there is a preliminary process which must be gone through, and which is quite essential to a sound treatment of the subject; and that is a critical examination of the authorities upon which that history is based. This is especially necessary with regard to the early history of Scotland. The whole of the existing materials for her early history must be collected together and subjected to a critical examination. Those which seem to contain fragments of genuine history must be disentangled from the less trustworthy chronicles which have been tampered with for ecclesiastical or national purposes, and great discrimination exercised in the use of the latter. The purely spurious matter must be entirely rejected. It is by such a process only that we can hope to dispel the fabulous atmosphere which surrounds this period of Scottish history, and attempt to base it upon anything like a genuine foundation.

The first to attempt this task was Thomas Innes, a priest of the Scots College in Paris, who published in 1729 his admirable Essay on the ancient inhabitants of Scotland. In this essay he assailed the fabulous history first put into shape by John of Fordun and elaborated by Hector Boece, and effectually demolished its authority; but he attempted little in the way of reconstruction, and merely printed a few of the short chronicles, upon which he founded, in an appendix.

Lord Hailes, who in 1776 published his Annals of Scotland, from the Accession of Malcolm III., surnamed Canmore, to the Accession of Robert I., abandons this period of Scottish history altogether, with the remark that his Annals ‘commence with the accession of Malcolm Canmore, because the history of Scotland previous to that period is involved in obscurity and fable.’

The first to attempt a reconstruction of this early history was John Pinkerton, who published in 1789 An Enquiry into the History of Scotland preceding the reign of Malcolm III., or the year 1056, including the authentic history of that period. It is unquestionably an essay of much originality and acuteness; and Pinkerton saw the necessity of founding the history of that period upon more trustworthy documents, but they were to a very limited extent accessible to him. The value of the work is greatly impaired by the adoption, to an excessive extent, of a theory of early Teutonic settlements in the country and of the Teutonic origin of the early population, and by an unreasoning prejudice against everything Celtic, which colours and biasses his argument throughout.

Pinkerton was followed in 1807 by George Chalmers, with his more elaborate and systematic work, the Caledonia, based, however, to a great extent upon the less trustworthy class of the early historical documents, which had been tampered with and manipulated for a purpose. He, too, was possessed by a theory which influences his views of the earlier portion of the history throughout; and where John Pinkerton could find nothing but Gothic and the Goths, George Chalmers was equally unable to see anything but Welsh and the Cymry.

In 1828 the first volume of a History of Scotland by Patrick Fraser Tytler appeared, which he continued to the accession of James VI. to the throne of England; but Tytler not only abandons this early part of the history as hopelessly obscure, but also a great part of the field occupied by Hailes in his Annals, and commences his history with the accession of Alexander the Third in 1249.

In 1862 a very valuable contribution to the early history of Scotland was made by the late lamented Mr. E. William Robertson in his Scotland under her Early Kings, in which the attempt is once more made to fill up the early period left untouched by Hailes and Tytler. It is a work of great merit, and exhibits much accurate research and sound judgment.[^[10]]

Such is a short sketch of the attempts which have been made to place the early history of Scotland upon a sound basis, and to substitute a more trustworthy statement of it for the carefully manipulated fictions of Fordun, and the still more fabulous narrative of Hector Boece and his followers, prior to the appearance of Mr. Burton’s elaborate History of Scotland, from Agricola’s Invasion to the Extinction of the last Jacobite Insurrection, the first edition of which appeared in 1867, and the second, in which the early part is revised and much altered, in 1873.

These works, however, are all more or less tainted by the same defect, that they have not been founded upon that complete and comprehensive examination of all the existing materials for the history of this early period, and that critical discrimination of their relative value and analysis of their contents, without which any view of this period of the annals of the country must be partial and inexact. They labour, in short, under the twofold defect, first, of an uncritical use of the materials which are authentic; and second, of the combination with these materials of others which are undoubtedly spurious. The early chronicles are referred to as of equal authority, and without reference to the period or circumstances of their production. The text of Fordun’s Chronicle, upon which the history, at least prior to the fourteenth century, must always to a considerable extent be based, is quoted as an original authority, without adverting to the materials he made use of and the mode in which he has adapted them to a fictitious scheme of history; and the additions and alterations of his interpolator Bower are not only founded upon as the statements of Fordun himself, but quoted under his name in preference to his original version of the events.