The Auldest Tung

Boundaries III: Numbers and Numbers

And so, with Attic and Doric once more on the time horizon we return to the burghs, in fact to a re-examination but one based not on simple hearsay but numerical reality. In total in all three iterations they number two hundred and thirty, of which, if it is accepted that the period of existence of recognisable English is from about 1450 AD and of its first influxes into Scotland as a novelty from 1550 AD, then the split before and after the latter date is 33%/67%. That is that two-thirds were created when English existed and when, if they were populated by predominantly English-speakers, they could have a vehicle for its transference arrival firstly into the burghs and then more generally.

Except there are caveats, and serious ones at that. The first is that of that 67% so some eighty-two, or more than half, one third of the total burghs, were created in the 19th and 20th Centuries so in periods when English was already implanted, by acceptance, by increasingly universal education or educational enforcement, dependent on region. Thus by implication they might have provided reinforcement but could not have been the original impetus. And in the 18th Century only a further four were created, two of them in final decade, so near enough 19th Century as well. The second is that forty-one or 18% of all the burghs were formed before 1450 AD, the bulk before 1400 AD, when English could have had no bearing on the grounds of non-existence. It means in the crucial one hundred and fifty years between 1550 AD and 1700 AD when there might have been bearing just 32% of all burghs received their grants. The third is that of all burghs, whilst seventy or thirty percent are far more prestigious and therefore economically powerful Royal variety, exactly one half, thirty-five, were again chartered in the English-free period before 1450 AD. And finally the fourth is, should Royal and non-Royal burghs be given the same importance, the same weighting, to which the answer must surely be no.   

Of course given the time that has elapsed since the founding of the first burgh and the ups and downs of life, economic life, in the interim there can be no way accurate comparative assessments can be made of the importance of one burgh or one type of burgh over another. But the mathematics can be done nevertheless and with very interesting results. On the basis of both 2:1, a Royal burgh being twice as economically productive as a non-Royal one, and 3:1, in fact on the basis of any ratio the influence of the period between 1550 AD and 1700 AD changes the impact not one iota. It remains at 32%. All that happens as the ratio is increased is the impact of the period before 1450 AD, the period with no possibility of English and English-speakers, increases to the detriment of the period after 1800 AD. In fact as a result it leads to the conclusion that for its first three hundred years far from the burgh system facilitating the spreading of English what it had done was the same but for the languages that preceded it, Anglic and Calefrisian, not just in towns, as they were added to the list and where they became de rigeur, but outward in their respective heartlands. In fact it led to the displacement through replacement and push-back by Anglic and Calefrisian, by latent Scots and Doric, amongst the peoples in the wider surrounding areas of whatever had been spoken before or was still being spoken in parallel. So in the south and west it was Brythonic, Gaelic in the centre and north and in its perhaps last enclaves in the east potentially the remnants of Pictish. Indeed in a sense the burgh system did lead to the beginning of the end for Gaelic but neither in the way or at the time assumed thus far and not before Scotland's other native languages had well and truly first been seen off.       

Which leads us finally to populations, of the burghs, of enclaves before them and in the intervening years from their posited arrival in 460 AD of potential Germanic, specifically Calefrisian, numbers with in the last case 685 AD as a reference point. That Anglic Ecgfrith used Angus as the base for his ill-fated campaign against the Picts, which that year ended in defeat at Dun Nechtain suggests that it was where he would be most welcome. And it is also a fair assumption that it was so because it had the largest not necessarily Anglic but Germanic populace north of the Forth and, if not exactly sympathy, then some tolerance towards him and his. But the population would not be large. Employing the same methodology already used for the calculation of head-counts, native and immigrant alike, and of musters of fighting-men in the Britain, England, Denmark etc. and in their regions suggests it was perhaps 600-700 in what we now call Dundee and that in the county of Angus as a whole there were between 4,500 and 5,500, so able to provide maybe 800 fighting-men locally, not enough for an army and hence the need for an imported one from the Northumbrian heartlands yet perhaps enough for a contingent. The same methods also suggest an entire population of no more than 250 in the East Neuk, an Aberdeen with some 1,600-1,700 inhabitants plus 6,600 in all of Banff and Buchan so 7,250 in the entire North-East, and a total of Germanic population of 12,000 north of Forth with 80-90,000 thought to be the population at that same time of Pictland as a whole.

It meant that the CaleAnglic and/or Calefrisian populations in and around Pictland were very much a minority but a significant one nevertheless. It also meant that it was, if the same sort of calculation is done for south of the Forth, little more than a half of the Germanic population there, producing a situation overall of more or less perfect balance. Even if the Germanic populations north and south of the Forth had combined they would still only muster forty percent of that of Pictland so taking it on would be foolish in the extreme unless Northumbria could be persuaded to join in and even then it would have been marginal. Northern Northumbria probably only had a population of 11,000, with 18,000 more in the remainder of the kingdom so 4,250 fighting men at the very maximum. Alternatively, if Germanic south-of-the-Forth attacked north then it made sense for the latter to be on the best of terms with Perth or rather Scone and have them as back-up just as if Pictland wanted peace and quiet it made sense to reciprocate. And it seems to have worked both sides, the only outside test coming with probably not arrival of first the Vikings but certainly that of the Norse of the Northern Isles, with whom it seems there might nevertheless have been an unspoken and interesting understanding that, whilst others suffered, left Pictland relatively unscathed and, until the happily brief, external interventions of the Dublin Norse and then Danes, Anglic and Calefrisian Scotland seemingly hardly bothered.

And it also meant that the Germanic and largely Calefrisian population north of Forth that was in 800 AD perhaps 15,000 numbered by the millennium 22,000 out a Scottish total of a quarter of a million, so almost 10 %, rising to 45,000-50,000 by the time of first signs of English and 75,000 by its actual arrival. By 1755 Dundee had an estimated  population of 12,000, Aberdeen much the same, Bervie in Kincardine a staggering 5,565, showing just how important it once was and perhaps had been for the best part of eight hundred and fifty years at least. Remember a substantial Saxon force had landed there or thereabouts in 934 AD. Peterhead had 2,500 in habitants and Fraserburgh 1,600. They were by the standards of the day all medium to large units, by then with, as had the region as a whole with by then a total population of 100,000 or even slightly more, approximately 1300 years of linguistic history, independence and an ability to fend for themselves that has only really been eroded since as Scotland was, shall we say, absorbed into the United Kingdom.