In researching this video I very quickly learned a valuable lesson about how little the Scots mess around.
"Okay", I thought "the Scots in the English hate each other, sure, but it can't be THAT bad, honestly."
So I took a little peruse to see how many times the two actually fought each other and SWEET MOTHER MARY!
That is a lot of stabbing!
Scotland...who hurt you? Trick question. England!
So be warned, the Scots throughout history are every bit as bonkers as they come across on Twitter.
To find out why, let's do some history
*In Scottish accent* This video is brought to you by audible, which is a wee bit Ironic
see'en as the Scottish language is damn near IN-audible.
Around 2,000 years ago, Scotland was inhabited by various tribes of Pictish Celts living up north herding and minding their own business.
So when the Roman Empire swaggered up to try and conquer them
They gave those Romans a walloping so bad that Emperor Hadrian built a wall just to make sure that nobody ever tried to conquer them, again.
Essentially...*Random man* "I just don't think you can do this one."
*Hadrian* "I've been an assassin for a while now. What makes you think-Oooh, get that sh*t outta here, you're right!"
So even though these original Celts weren't anything like modern Scots
It is refreshing to see the national character demonstrated so well at such an early stage.
Rome eventually collapsed, but Europe reintroduced itself to Scotland via Christianity and Anglo-Saxon migrations.
Which coalesced through the seventh century into a few main groups.
For our purposes the most relevant two are the Picts and the Scoti
where we get the name Scotia, aka Scotland.
In 843, Kenneth MacAlpin united the Scots and Picts
in order to create the Kingdom of Alba. The early kingdom had to deal with the Vikings and the English
in the 8 and 9 hundreds as land from every corner was getting yoinked. But beyond outside threats
there were also constant internal fisticuffs over the crown.
The quintessential example of the early Scottish King is Macbeth, whom hereafter shall be referred to
Exclusively as Macboy because that play is haunted and I'm not looking for trouble.
Trouble is...nearly everything you might know about him from Shakespeare is wrong.
Here's why. See, the Scottish crown didn't follow a strict succession
But claimants came to debate who was best fit to rule, and this caused constant disputes that escalated into wars.
So, Macboy actually killed King Duncan in a battle in the year 1040 and ruled for the next 17 years peacefully, generously and successfully.
In 1057 he died in another battle against Duncan's son Malcolm Kenmore who then assumed the throne.
All that stuff about murder conspiracies
got added by Scottish historian centuries later, but civil wars over
the throne were already a matter of protocol since the kingdom had gotten started. Macboy's real-life path was actually quite standard.
But speaking of wonky royal succession crises, the next decade brought the Norman conquest of England and William
the Conqueror's second son Henry married King Malcolm's daughter.
The family relations are confusing now and they stay that way for the next thousand years
So, I'm gonna try to avoid specifics where I can for the sake of my sanity, but the bottom line
is that the King of Scotland exchanged notes with his sister, the Queen of England, about culture and statecraft.
So, in the following two centuries, Scotland picked up some Norman tricks, like a central bureaucracy,
a church hierarchy and a curious new language derived from the Norman French, called Scots
The native Gaelic was still the dominant language in the highlands, especially
but the lowlands trended slowly towards the customs of their anglicized southern neighbors.
The eleven and twelve hundreds saw a steady back and forth between
Scotland and England along the borders in Northumbria
But not a whole lot of drama.
Until, however, the king of Scotlands died in 1286 without a clear heir and rather than have all
13 possible cousins duke it out the old-fashioned way,
they called in the English King to mediate the dispute, which...I don't know seems like...kind of a short-sighted and terrible idea.
Unsurprisingly, King Edward installed the weakest, most
pliable puppet who would let him treat Scotland like a vassal state, and when even that
pushover got fed up with forfeiting Scottish land, paying tribute and kneeling to English
superiority, King Edward invaded Scotlands, dethroned the king and yoinked the Scottish coronation stone back to Westminster,
dragging Scotland firmly under the English heel. This was frankly terrible
so the Scots duly rebelled against England under the command of the famous William Wallace, who won a victory the Battle of Stirling Bridge in
1297 but lost horrendously at Falkirk the next year and was later executed by England and paraded around Scotland in
pieces. Quick fun fact: Of the many, many reasons that the movie Braveheart sucks
The blue war paint that everybody's wearing is about a thousand years out of style for the Scots
I mean, come on, that kind of anachronism is like dressing the cast of The Godfather in togas.
It was after Wallace died that Robert the Bruce took up the mantle of guardian of Scotland.
He had to kill a rival claimants to earn his title
but he also earned an excommunication from the Pope because apparently murdering somebody in a church is
"impolite" and "a mortal sin."
*Dismissive noise*
Whatever. He was defeated early by Edward and 1306 and went into hiding for a year before returning to win the battle of Loudoun Hill.
From there, he stomped out local rivalries and united Scotland fully against the English at the decisive Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. though
Though, the treaties weren't signed for another 15 years, Robert the Bruce won Scotland three centuries of independence in that battle.
Quick OSPro-tip
Skip Braveheart, but watch the Outlaw King. It's better and way more accurate. So having fulfilled his dreams for his kingdom
Robert died the next year,
but this was exceptionally poor timing
and really unfortunate in the long run because the throne passed to a series of
useless kings from the House of Stuart for the next several decades.
Through the thirteen and fourteen hundreds, Scotland had no real leadership.
So, the local Lords started throwing hands, or more accurately, Glamis.
In this case, the warring states were actually the dozens of clans scattered across the lowlands and highlands.
Mercifully, England had just gotten sucked into the Hundred Years War with France,
so Scotland was free to be its own antagonist, the way God intended.
And although the Stuart clan still held the crown other families like the Douglas clan were regularly
challenging them for land and power. Some progress came with King James the First in
1406, who sent twelve thousand Scotsman to fight with France against England in the Hundred Years War
Winning big and returning home in a strong position to consolidate many of the clans under his crown and reformed the Kingdom
Unfortunately, he got assassinated and it was right back to the seesawing balance of power between kings
regents, lords, and clans.
Even after James, the Highlanders still largely spoke Gaelic and paid little heed to the culture or politics of the anglicized
royal court in lowlands. The king could say whatever he wants down in Edinburgh,
but unless he personally marches up to Inverness to tell Clan Fraser, in person, to pay their taxes
It's not gonna happen and one king even tried that, but still nothing happened.
It's just all very Game of Thrones-y for a couple centuries and, I mean heck, it's at this time that the War of the
Roses is raging on just down the street. And you know what? Since it's just a big mess
anyway, I'm gonna speed round through the next 300 years. So, bear with me and let's get ready for a game of
*air horns sounding* Monarchy is Volatile!
Let's meet our players.
One king was really cool and helped reform the government to work for more of Scotland while making Edinburgh into a renaissance-capital of learning and
Culture. One queen got the short end of the stick when Scotland's Parliament voted to convert to Protestantism
while she was on vacation in France.
And then she got the shorter end of the stick when England imprisoned her for two decades and then
executed her. Her son played his cards just right and inherited the throne of England from his cousin, the childless Elizabeth, and then became King
of England and Scotland. His son was so inconceivably bad at being King,
that his abuses of power brought England and Scotland into open rebellion for entirely
separate reasons, and his reign ended with the British Isles locked in twelve years of civil war before everybody called a do-over and gave the
Crown back to his son. One king became king because Parliament literally invited him from the Netherlands to replace their current monarch
and then he proceeded to strangle Scottish trading rights. And the last Queen on our list tried to be a pal by offering Scotland a
National Union with England's to open up trade avenues in exchange for the bargain price of nearly all of their sovereignty.
I had originally gone WAY in depth about how all of this stuff went down in my first draft
But then I realized...you know what?
Royal politics is dumb and confusing and I kind of hate it more than anything else in history.
So I'm gonna skip through it
Yeah
So I did. One standout event from the mid 1500s is when the King of England tried to drive a wedge between a long-standing alliance
between Scotland and France, in the hopes to endear Scotland to their southern English neighbors.
They did this by pillaging the lowlands and burning Edinburgh to the ground.
You may find that this is a bad way to make new friends.
The Scots came to call the seven-year campaign the "Rough Wooing" as they did not appreciate being
bullied into love. And this sentiment persisted for centuries, way up until the Act of Union in 1707.
Scotland was suspicious of the Queen's offer of
Partnership and while they'd get one metric British Empire out of the deal in the long run,
the immediate result was England deciding they now had a constitutional right to treat Scotland like a colony.
*Forboding horns play*
As you can see, this is kind of a recurring problem and it led to two revolts for Scottish independence in 1715 and in 1745.
Both failed, but the second one spooked England into being slightly less despicable about everything.
In the next century and a half following the rebellions, things turned remarkably for the better as the Enlightenment came north.
Writers like Walter Scott and Robert Burns helped rekindle the Scottish identity.
And thinkers like Adam Smith and David Hume
radically changed European perspectives on rational thought in economics.
Hume claims that reason was the core of human thought and Smith described the benefits of
letting people act in their own self-interest. This all sounds very profound, but don't be fooled.
The clear Scottish subtext to these ideas are
"The English don't make a damn lick of sense" and
"We'd be better off making our own decisions."
And you can't expect a Scottish enlightenment thinker to NOT bury snide comments at England under two tons of hard academic theory.
Though Scotland had long been an educational powerhouse, in the following two centuries
they also became the industrial heart of the British Empire
Producing such famous doodads as the steam engine, the telephone, radar, a mechanical television and also most of the ships in the Imperial Royal Navy.
Nice. Other happy beneficiaries of the 18th and 19th centuries were the cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh
Which built up substantially in the Georgian neoclassical style, and it just looked really damn pretty.
Funny thing about the Edinburgh Castle is instead of firing off 12 cannon shots to mark
the passing of noon like the English do they just wait one hour and save 11 rounds.
That is... so Scottish.
Quickly approaching the modern day, now,
Scottish attitudes towards the Union grew more suspicious
as England seems to care less and less by the decade about what happened up north and the hard forged British identity
faded with time and the decline of the British Empire. After years of campaigning
Skotland gained greater autonomy and the right to hold their own Parliament in 1999.
And the first words spoken there were -quote-
"the Scottish Parliament, adjourned on the 25th of March 1707 is hereby reconvened"
and if that is not some big *bagpipes start playing*
Scotland energy right there, *Scottish accent begins* then wrap me in a tartan plaid and throw me in Loch Ness because I dunnae I know what is.
*Bagpipes and accent end*
Now, if you want to jump into the tumultuous world of medieval Scottish murder Kings
then you've got to go for Shakespeare's Macbeth and one of the best ways to do that is with today's sponsor
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Red and I do a lot of research on this channel,
so it's great for me to be able to listen to history while I'm taking a walk or just making dinner.
And, of course, I've got to mention my absolute favorite feature: speed control.
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Audible members who sign up get a credit for any audio book completely free every month, as well as additional
discounts in the store. If you're feeling jazzed about Scottish history, I would highly recommend this audiobook production of Macbeth.
Not only is it some of Shakespeare's finest work in my opinion, but it's voiced by a full cast,
which is really great to listen to and audible is offering all of you a 30 day trial and one audio book along with two
free Audible originals to get you started if you sign up with our link on audible.com/overlysarcastic
Or text overlysarcastic to 500-500. If you do you'll be supporting the channel and getting a good audiobook in the process. Again,
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*In Scottish accent with bagpipes playing* Thank you for watching. Now. You should know that the temptation to do this entire video in a thick Scottish brogue was too high.
I cannae tell you how close I was. Seeing as I am half Scottish, it's only fair that I should sound the part.
So I hope you enjoyed this look into the history of Scotland and I'll see you in the next video.
*Bagpipes fade*