Scotland the Brief

Part 1: The Community of the Realm
4 Auld Alliance and New Learning

In 1359-60 vast impersonal forces struck again when the bubonic plague swept across Europe, cutting populations down by about a third. Scotland seems to have got off fairly lightly, because its people were thinly distributed. Against four million English, there were then about half a million of them: perhaps a quarter died. This may have meant that an older social order persisted longer than elsewhere in Europe, where the Black Death led to economic rationalism and the early development of proto-industrialisation a capitalism based on agricultural settlements and domestic industrial production.

In Scotland the alliance with France, which plague hit as badly as England, would continue until 1560. It wasnt as positive as later nationalists made out. The country's economic decline was steep after the English market shrank, and by 1500 the currency had fallen to 15% of its 1295 value. The only times that French troops were stationed in Scotland, in the late fourteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries, they were resented almost as much as the English, in the latter case even more. But the alliance gave the Scots another mode of advance: as mercenaries and scholars in the service of the French king. It was from the Universities of Paris and the French Popes at Avignon (1309-1378) that careers were possible which were unthinkable in Scotland, and in due course these bred innovations in Scotland in the Universities of St Andrews (1411), Glasgow (1451) and Aberdeen (1495). In 1485 the Scots Church was finally given metropolitan status, although in fact this opened it to the predatory activities of the royal family and the greater nobles.

The style of the French came north, in the fashions and food of the court particularly a taste for Bordeaux wine, the sophisticated design of Scots buildings, such as the royal palaces of Linlithgow, Falkland and Holyrood, and a Scots awareness of European intellectual advance. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when post-Chaucerian England was a cultural desert because of persistent and degrading civil war culminating in the Wars of the Roses, 1455-1487, Scottish literature and poetry in particular personified by King James I, William Dunbar, Robert Henryson, Bishop Gavin Douglas and later Alexander Montgomerie was among the most advanced in Europe in terms of content, language and rhyme-scheme.

This probably did little for the ordinary Scots folk, still over 80% of them living on the land in townships of 12-15 families, cultivating their strip-fields with cumbersome ox-ploughs, but it seems thriving on diets which included a lot of meat and fish: not something that would last. But the structures of obligation were changing. 'Feudal' stopped meaning military obligations and now became a cash transaction where a family leased its rights for an annual rent while retaining title. 'Bonds of manrent' became a means of purchasing security in a society under pressure of social change and attack from England. In both, the 'notion' of a covenant, a personal treaty, became important.

Trade had been inhibited by the hostile country that now lay between Scotland and Europe, but urban life now started to develop a dynamic of its own, based on exporting wool, salted salmon and animal skins (the basis of leather), and importing metal and luxury goods. Wooden houses gave way to stone 'lands', and Edinburgh in particular rose as the royal family settled on it as their most favoured capital. In the Low Countries the Scottish staple (the trading centre of Scots citizens observing Scots Law) moved in 1540 from Bruges to Dutch Veere, in Zealand, where it would stay until 1799.

The Stewarts the name suggests their origin as court officials succeeded the ailing grandson of the Bruce in 1406. The five successive Jameses proved an intelligent dynasty, and through hard-fought military campaigns gradually freed themselves from over-mighty nobles like the Douglases or the MacDonald Lords of the Isles who ruled large tracts of the country as if they were personal property.

But overall their pretensions frequently ended in disaster. How grand these pretensions were can still be seen in the crown spires of St Giles, Edinburgh Linlithgow Kirk and the University of Aberdeen: imperial crowns which underlined the dynastys intention of cutting a dash in Europe. This was easier than taking on the English directly: the north of England was far poorer than the Scottish borders, and most Scottish invasions ended in defeat, often catastrophic. Once England withdrew from France, in 1453, and turned to sorting out the politics of the archipelago, Scotland would be under sustained threat.

This coincided with zenith of the Stewarts under James IV (1488-1513), intelligent and progressive, cultivated and arrogant: the would-be founder of a Scottish navy. He was initially diplomatic enough to get power over the Church into his own hands, and to conclude a treaty of perpetual peace with the new and uneasy King of England, Henry Tudor, Henry VII last man standing at the end of the Wars of the Roses, 1485. In 1502 he married Henrys daughter Margaret in the 'Union of Hearts'. The Scots court historian John Maier was inspired to write a wish-fulfilling History of Great Britain. But a recrudescence of Anglo-French hostilities after the accession of Henry VIII led to a rash royal raid into Northumberland in 1513 which ended in disaster on Flodden Field.

echnology again favoured the English: artillery and musketry cut down James and his Scots nobility. As with Edward I, a defeat led again to a systematic attempt to entrench English advantage which rebounded on itself. The Scots people resisted and forced the English back from this time dates the enduring local patriotism of the Border Common Ridings at Hawick and Selkirk but James Vs attempt at a further invasion ended in disaster at Solway Moss in 1541. He died only a few days later, leaving a baby daughter, Mary.