Born Fighting (4 page)

When the inhabitants of the island again revolted, he summoned the soldiers and ordered them to invade the rebels’ country, killing everybody they met; and he quoted these words:

“Let no one escape sheer destruction,

No one in our hands, not even the babe in the womb of the mother,

If it be male; let it nevertheless not escape sheer destruction.”
¹¹

These raids by the emperor Severus in
A.D
. 208 were uncommonly vicious. They did not break the spirit of the northern tribes, but they did succeed on another level. Failing to defeat the enemy that inhabited this harsh wilderness, Severus decided for once and for all to permanently seal them off. As Churchill wrote, Severus “flung his energies into the task of reorganization [along the wall, and] stability was achieved. So great had been the destruction, so massive were his repairs, that in later times he was thought to have built the Wall, which in fact he only reconstructed. He died at York in 211; but for a hundred years there was peace along the Roman Wall.”
¹²

The Romans could conduct all the punitive raids they wanted and kill all the Caledonian men, mothers, and babies that they desired, but in the context of history it did not matter. Their empire in Britain had reached its high-water mark, and there were a whole lot of people on the northern side of the wall whom they had not conquered and would never be able to conquer. And thus the peoples of the north, ragged and barbaric though they were, could forever make one important boast: they had never bent a knee to Rome.

Hundreds of years passed. Differing bloodlines mixed on both sides of the wall. Different forms of government were attempted. On the southern, English side of the wall, the Romans eventually disappeared, replaced as rulers and occupants by a continuing mix of Angles and Saxons, Jutes and Danes, and, eventually, after the 1066 Battle of Hastings, by the scions of the Norman Conquest.

And on the northern, Scottish side of the wall, a different sort of mixing and adaptation was taking place, leading to the creation of a different sort of people.

2

Tribalism Versus Feudalism:
The Celtic Tie of Kinship
                              

AS THE CENTURIES
progressed south of Hadrian’s Wall, the Romans and then the Saxons and especially the Normans who followed them developed a cultural and governmental system that would be recognizable in some form in England today. Their methods and structures are also visible when one looks at the early New England settlements, whose townships in America comprised a distant mirror. By contrast, the basic formation of society on the northern side of Hadrian’s Wall can still be identified in Scotland and to some extent in Ireland, and are clearly recognizable in the Scots-Irish cultures that dominated the making of the American South.

England became Anglo-Saxon and then Norman while Scotland remained Celtic. England became highly structured, top-down, and feudal while Scotland remained atomized, bottom-up, and in many respects tribal. The English (particularly under the Normans) built a military caste system coldly imposed from above as a sort of tax. The Celts retained a no-less-warlike tribal system, but the personal loyalties that fueled it, emanating as they did from below, made it more democratic and compelling, based on an individual’s honor in belonging to the tribe. And the implications of these distinctions, subtle as they may seem, are in fact enormous.

Below Hadrian’s Wall, in the words of Churchill, “there was law; there was order; there was peace; there was warmth; there was food and a long-established custom of life. The population was free from barbarism without being slunk into sloth or luxury. Roman habits percolated; the use of Roman utensils and even of Roman speech steadily grew. The British thought themselves as good Romans as any. . . . To be a citizen of Rome was to be a citizen of the world, raised upon a pedestal of unquestioned superiority over barbarians or slaves.”
¹³

This benefit was structural as well as material and emotional. “The gift which Roman civilization had to bestow was civic and political. Towns were planned in chessboard squares for communities dwelling under orderly government. The buildings rose in accordance with the patterns standardized throughout the Roman world.”
¹⁴
This standard held its pattern and was not dissimilar to the structure of the New England towns in the early settlements of the seventeenth century.

The most telling modification of the Roman system came after the Norman Conquest of England, when William the Conqueror crossed the English Channel from France and defeated the Saxons in the Battle of Hastings in 1066. For four years thereafter, William, the bastard son of the duke of Normandy, conducted a vicious slash-and-burn campaign throughout England, subduing the countryside, ousting the Saxon nobility, and installing French-born masters in every manor and castle. Dramatic changes were literally thrust down England’s throat. As Churchill put it, “Everywhere castles arose. These were not at first the massive stone structures of a later century; they were simply fortified military posts. . . . From these strongpoints horsemen sallied forth to rule and exploit the neighborhood; above them all, at the summit, sat William, active and ruthless, delighting in his work, requiring punctual service from his adherents and paying good spoil to all who did their duty.”
¹⁵

For a while, the ever-adaptable English paid homage to their new French masters, learning French and taking on French customs. Within a few generations, however, the French royalty had been absorbed through intermarriage and became simply another layer of ethnicity that blended in with past conquests to define what it meant to be English. The lasting impact of the Norman invasion proved to be structural, not ethnic, for it ushered in the feudal system with its heavy-handed diminution of the common man. It is grand in these modern days to think of fanciful tales of knights in shining armor with their fair maidens and their squires and their jousting fests as well as the effusive toasts to brotherhood before famous battles that are well remembered in William Shakespeare’s better plays. But this was a system that thrived on camaraderie among a band of elites and was fed by the unthinking subjugation of those below them. The lowly serf who toiled hard for his daily crust of black bread was given no toasts, and very little thanks, in feudal England.

In fact, the tie between lord and serf in England’s feudal society was clearly incidental to the stronger tie between the lord and his owned properties. Churchill termed Norman feudalism “a sudden acceleration of the drift toward the manorial system . . . even in Wessex the idea still persisted that the tie of lord and man was primarily personal, so that a free man could go from one lord to another and transfer his land with him. The essence of Norman feudalism, on the other hand, was that the land remained with the lord, whatever the man might do. Thus the landed pyramid rose up tier by tier to the King, until every acre in the country could be registered as held of somebody by some form of service.”
¹⁶
This bond of service was unbreakable to be sure, but only in the same sense as a property tax that must be paid.

North of Hadrian’s Wall the centuries passed more harshly, and yet in a way were far more just. Different migrations, severe terrain, and a primitive but insistent form of populism bred a different kind of people. The Romans and their Saxon/Norman progeny were quite used to systems based on inflexible notions of class. The Celts, by contrast, refused to be so rigidly regulated despite their penchant for following strong leaders. In addition, while Scotland’s rough topography made it difficult to conquer, it made it equally difficult to rule. This affected both the ethnic makeup of the area whose borders had been defined by Hadrian’s Wall, and the manner in which its peoples finally succeeded in “coming together” as a true nation.

Not unlike Appalachia, Scotland is a land of difficult water barriers, sharp mountains and deep hollows, soggy moors and rough pastures, and of thin, uncultivable soil that lies like a blanket over wide reaches of granite. Armies such as the Roman legions described by Cassius Dio tended literally to become bogged down as they advanced into Scotland’s interior. And (again not unlike Appalachia), a central government that wished to impose its will on the tough, weapons-wielding folks who dwelled back in the hollows would be guaranteed a hostile reception unless it had the full cooperation of local leaders.

Unlike in England, the settlements of ancient Scotland grew haphazardly and emphasized a rugged form of survival that had links neither to commerce nor to the developing world. Again we find a cultural evolution and a fundamental lifestyle very much like those that would emerge later in the Appalachian Mountains. Professor T. C. Smout, who once held a personal chair at the University of Edinburgh, described these early patterns in his seminal
A History of the Scottish People, 1560–1830
.

Virtually everyone lived by some form of agriculture. Pastoral farming, herding rough-haired cattle, goats and sheep . . . represents a survival into modern times . . . In the steep, rain-sodden, peat-covered mountains of the west, however, hunting and fishing were probably then, as they were much later, as important as agriculture. The peoples of Scotland do not in these early times seem to have lived in large nucleated villages, except in parts of Lothian. . . . More typically their houses were grouped in small settlements that were, later at least, often called baile or farmtouns. The buildings were of turf or stone, skin or brushwood, and often partly subterranean in their struggle with Scottish weather. . . . [There was] little that we would have identified as urban life—there was no coinage until the twelfth century, few sophisticated crafts and evidently no organized trade with the outside world.
¹⁷

Hadrian’s Wall had succeeded all too well, for in addition to their independence, the tribes of Scotland had also retained their primitivity. Furthermore, Scotland’s rough topography meant that invading armies of any size coming from the south were limited in their approaches to the eastern and western extremities. In the west this would later result in centuries of so-called “border wars” involving the ancestors of America’s Scots-Irish as well as a continual mixing of the blood and lifestyles between the lowland Scots and the English in the area where the English and Scottish borders were so ill-defined. But away from this narrow land border, Scotland is surrounded on three sides by the sea. And in the early centuries, the greatest and most important migrations came to her soil from Ireland.

Although some historians mention Viking invasions from Norway and possible early forays from Spain, Scotland was principally inhabited by four different early peoples, and it would take nearly a thousand years for these peoples to finally cohere into a true Scottish nation.
¹⁸
The strongest of them, and the oldest inhabitants of the land, were the Picts, a Celtic people who believed in matrilineal descent and whose origins will probably never be fully known. These were the wild, combative tribes who stood so strongly against the Romans, entering their journals as large-limbed, tattooed, red-haired madmen, which probably was not much of an exaggeration.

The most learned and diplomatic of the four peoples were the Scots, or
Scotti
, a powerful Irish tribe that had gained ascendance in Northern Ireland. By the fifth century the
Scotti
were joining a larger Irish migration across the narrow sea into western Scotland. Nora Chadwick mentions this “invasion from Ireland which, beginning in a small way, grew in importance till it imposed the Irish language on the whole of the Highlands in what is known today as Gaelic, and gradually extended its political sway over the Picts.”
¹⁹
In the southwest of Scotland were the Britons, a Celtic tribe that once had dominated England itself and now straddled the border roughly created by Hadrian’s Wall. And in the southeast, in an area below modern-day Edinburgh called the Lothians, were the Angles, a largely Germanic tribe that had swept northward from the border areas during the seventh century.

It was the
Scotti
who were principally responsible for the union of the different kingdoms, beginning in the ninth century when they defeated the Picts and united their peoples into a single kingdom called Alba.
²⁰
Over the next two centuries the Scots continued their consolidation through warfare and intermarriage, and by 1034 “the Picts, the Scots, the Lothian Angles and the Strathclyde [southwestern Scotland] Britons owed common allegiance to an Alban king.”
²¹

But the story of the rise of Scotland cannot be told through a simple enumeration of kings and royal houses, although in the ancient Celtic tradition its people continued to rally behind and fight on behalf of strong leaders. Just as the mountains and the hollows broke up the flow of peoples, so also did they contain and bind personal loyalties to more local chieftains. And these loyalties could never be demanded by some faraway prince or regent based on land ownership or on mere royal blood that by some circumstance had captured a distant throne. Loyalty, as well as the military service it entailed, was given by an individual as a matter of personal honor and kinship to the leader of one’s local tribe, which over the centuries took up the now-familiar name of “clan.” And it was up to these leaders to decide whether to join a larger cause.

As Professor Smout points out, “Celtic society was clearly tribal, based on a real or fancied kinship between every free man and the head of his tribe. The tribes occupied fairly distinct areas of the country, had reached the stage of individual ownership of land among the tribesmen, were organised [
sic
] in social strata . . . and possessed differing tribal laws that were memorised [
sic
] by hereditary wise men who handed them down unaltered to their sons. . . . Feudalism is the antithesis of tribalism.”
²²

This “Celtic tie of kinship” has survived in some form through the ages, even in America. An offshoot of this ancient concept defines the unusually strong feelings about military service held by so many Americans of Scottish and Irish descent, and helps explain why such a high percentage of American combat units in today’s volunteer military are from Scots-Irish and Irish Catholic backgrounds. From the earliest known history of the Celts, military service was viewed not simply as an obligation, but as a high honor. Fighting for—and alongside—the tribal leader (or, later, the Great Captain, or, as now, one’s branch of military service) brought one into the family. And at this level—the willingness to face danger collectively—every family member was equal regardless of rank or wealth. Fighting especially well turned one into a favored son, and in time could even allow him to evolve into a new tribal leader.

Another aspect of this notion of extended kinship was that it tended to embrace members of other ethnic groups rather than demean them. An individualistic society based on loyal service reaches to the person rather than to his or her ethnicity, although it certainly is capable of opposing an enemy on racial or national grounds if it is threatened. It was the later Norman society that attempted to break apart the Celtic notion of kinship and replace it with impersonal, territorial loyalties that pyramided their way up to the English king, a system that encouraged the more nationalist form of racism.
²³
Religious and other barriers could complicate this notion, but in the Celtic societies, if one stepped forward to serve, he was “of the kin” so long as he accepted the values and mores of the extended family.

And so when the Scottish people began to form a nation, they were already an eclectic lot, bound not so much by previous origins as by their loyalties to the tribes (or clans) that absorbed them. Again, Professor T. C. Smout comments, “‘That wicked army,’ said the English chronicler of the host advancing to the Battle of Standard in 1138, ‘was composed of Normans, Germans, English, of Northumbrians and Cumbrians, of men of Teviotdale and Lothian, of Picts who are commonly called Galwegians, and of Scots.’. . . Scotland, in fact, was much less an identifiable state than a confederacy of peoples with distinct characteristics and traditions, each prone to rebellion and to internecine war, held together only by allegiance to the person of the king.”
²⁴