Abstract
The perceived division in Scotland between Highland and Lowland dates from the fifteenth century, and was exacerbated by the Reformation of 1560. For many writers and authorities on Scotland, it has appeared a donnée, a given certainty about the country. Some of the figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, John Pinkerton (1758–1826) most notably among them, compounded this perceived alienation between Highlander and Lowlander by suggesting that Lowland Scotland was ethnically Teutonic and Saxon, as opposed to the ‘Celtic’ Highlands.1 This opposition fed into all kinds of stereotypes and assumptions about the ‘Celtic’ character of the Highlands, which in their turn re-emphasized existing views of the wildness, savagery and uncivilized indolence of the Highlander. Laziness and lack of industry were qualities associated in the Protestant mind with Catholicism (particularly Irish Catholicism), and so the Highlands were, from the seventeenth century on, often categorized as ‘Catholic’, and their language from even earlier as ‘Erse’, Irish. The idea of Protestant industriousness and the perception of Highland indolence would have appeared what they were, self-contradictory, had the extent of adherence to the Reformed confessions in the Highlands been admitted.
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Notes
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Michael Lynch, Scotland: A New History (London: Century, 1991), 59.
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Cf. Charles W. J. Withers, Urban Highlanders (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1998).
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Jonas Berg and Bo Lagercrantz, Scots in Sweden (Stockholm: The Nordiska Museet, 1962), 23, 68, 70.
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Cf. Murray G. H. Pittock, The Myth of the Jacobite Clans (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999 (1995)), 47.
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Cf. Gordon Donaldson, Scottish Church History (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985), 191–203.
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Cf. Cassell’s History of Britain (London, 1923); Pittock (1991), 27–8.
Patricia Dickson, Red John of the Battles (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1973), 34.
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© 2001 Murray G. H. Pittock
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Pittock, M.G.H. (2001). Freedom is a Noble Thing: Scottish Nationhood to 1707. In: Scottish Nationality. British History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-62906-6_2
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