3 - The Peoples of Stewart Scotland

Summary

When Robert Sibbald became the king's Geographer in Scotland in 1682, Charles II charged him to publish the ‘Description of the Scotia Antiqua & Scotia Moderna, and the Natural History of the Products of His Ancient Kingdom’. From his digs in Edinburgh, Sibbald collected maps and manuscripts and assembled the reports of local informants who responded to the detailed questionnaires he circulated for this ‘Scottish Atlas’. He was the natural choice for Bishop Edmund Gibson's commission to revise the Scottish chapters for a new edition of Camden's Britannia (1695). Gibson required Sibbald to identify additional books and manuscripts for interested readers. He listed a clutch of local descriptions, some tracts on specialized topics like minerals or the seats of the nobility, but just three descriptions of Scotland as a whole. Sibbald's own Scotia Illustrata joined Petruccio Ubaldini's description of Scotland lifted from Hector Boece's Scotorum Historia and John Lesley's description of the Scots from his De Origine, Moribus & Rebus Gestis Scotorum.

The list does not look impressive after almost two centuries of travel and discovery across Britain. There are several explanations, including Sibbald's own eccentricities and a vibrant manuscript culture among ‘local’ travellers. For, now, two matters shaped the sixteenth-century encounter with Scotland. Quite simply, no one Scottish traveller compiled a mass of first-hand observations comparable to Leland's in England. Perhaps Scottish topography and language communities (with a multitude of local dialects) presented unique challenges, especially for a traveller who journeyed into the Gaedhealtacht or an uplander who sought to traverse the cultural boundaries and prejudices of lowland Scotland. Intellectual traditions played an equally important role. The examples of John of Fordun and Walter Bower cemented the connection between descriptions of Scotland's peoples and writing the country's history. Admiration for classical historians and geographers – Herodotus, Livy, Tacitus, Ptolemy, Xenophon – who wrote with an ethnographic eye further encouraged John Mair and Hector Boece when they began new histories of Scotland.

Two kingdoms shared Britain, despite the best efforts of first Norman, and then English, conquerors. They waged what James Goldstein termed a ‘war of historiography’, with Scots determined to control the history and ethnographic identity of their country.