The Auldest Tung

Boundaries II: Time and Tung

When in 1603 AD James Stuart stepped south and became king not just of Scotland but of Britain he arrived at a London court that was English-speaking, albeit only just, more of which momentarily. He also stepped between two countries, the borders of which were settled, if chronologically again not by much.

They, the borders, had been the culmination of a process begun three hundred and seventy years earlier. On the one hand as the dowry of Margaret of Denmark on marrying James III, income, and on the other to repay lesser debts owed by Scotland for its taxation of the Hebrides and the Isle of Man, it had in 1468 AD been agreed that Orkney and with it Shetland would be given to the Scottish crown in settlement of the balance. However, its implications went far beyond the purely monetary. It was an arrangement, which both pushed the northern Scots border beyond the mainland and into the sea, three hundred years after the tribulations of William I and two hundred after the Maid of Norway, and had after eight hundred years de facto re-absorbed fully into the larger Scots sphere not just the Northern Isles but also Caithness, Sutherland, Easter Ross and parts of Moray. And they, again the border, had seen completion only ninety years before the Union of the Crowns, the southern frontier between Scotland and England only becoming more or less what we know today, following Scottish defeat at the Battle of Flodden Field in 1513 AD. 

Moreover James had left a court in Edinburgh that could only have spoken Scots, albeit a form that was probably Anglicising, and had itself not long been fully embedded in terms of both location and language. The move of the Scottish seat of power from the ancient cocoon of Perth at the intersect of Gaelic and Scots, both Anglic and otherwise, to the more Anglic-Anglish Edinburgh, and made probably as a result of a shift in economic power to the Central Belt, had taken place only under James II in 1452 AD, so just six generations and five monarchs earlier. And it had happened at a very delicate time on both sides of the border. A hundred years earlier and it is also not impossible to imagine much of Scotland today speaking Gaelic in the official everyday with English as the working second language, just as much of Continental Europe does with its native languages today, or even that English was the equivalent of Welsh today with England officially speaking Anglois, its own version of French, its own Quebecois.

But in neither case would it come to pass. The re-absorption of Norse Scotland without doubt marked the beginning of the end for the Norn language on the islands and also on the mainland to the Moray Firth. A century earlier and Gaelic might then from Perth have been encouraged to overwrite it even more than it had already. However, it took place not before but sixteen years after the move to Edinburgh, leaving Anglic Scots as an alternative, indeed, because it was also Germanic, a far natural substitute. Moreover, for Gaelic itself there were as before established Germanic languages both to its south and, as posited with Calefrisian, to its east but now also a newly Scots third to its north as well. It was boxed-in in a way that had not been the case when there had been Scots-Norse antipathy and that was in itself perhaps enough in turn to sound the first faint death knell of the use of Gaelic as the language of Scotland’s ruling hierarchy, a process that was to take sixty years. The last Gaelic-speaking, Scottish king is said to have been James IV, son of that same Margaret of Denmark. But then he was a polyglot with, as his mother-tongue, Danish, as patron of the Makers, Scots, presumably later “Anglish”, perhaps Anglo-Saxion of some sort, since he married a Tudor, plus, it is said also in his armoury, French, German, Italian and Spanish. But he died at the same Flodden Field, aged only forty, leaving, amongst firstly several vacuums, a linguistic one, which Scots would fill entirely, and secondly the following indeterminates. Had he seen out his three score and ten years might Gaelic have continued in royal favour? Indeed might Edinburgh be called Dunedin today? And might even the language's long decline in the wider community have been prevented and and influences from south of the border if not avoided then mitigated.

And just as north of the border in England too fate and death in battle can also been seen perhaps to have played their parts in what those southern influences were to be. The last King of England, who had had French as his mother-tongue was probably Henry V, who had only died in 1422 AD. And it was he, too, who had almost certainly been the first to be able to write “English”, which in any form recognisable today had only really begun to emerge from Anglish and Anglo-Saxon a generation earlier, so around 1400 AD. Indeed confirmation of this can be found in Chaucer, who died that very year, aged fifty-seven and was London-born so wrote in what can only be described as semi-Saxon. Moreover, the last of the Plantagenet kings, Richard III, so the last using Norman-French, if required, would only be killed in battle in 1485 AD, aged just thirty-two, replaced by the victor, the Welsh-born, non-Norman, Anglish-speaking Henry Tudor. However, in the same way as with James in Scotland thirty years later, if Richard had been the victor Norman-French would have continued in his person until 1525 AD and by his successors might have been in use for far longer still. Indeed Shakespeare, who was born in 1564 AD, might, in order to have curried royal favour, have needed to have written not in his Midland and therefore Anglic English that was developing in the interim and we can still recognise today, but in a French derivative. 

So it seems that in 1452 AD on Edinburgh becoming Scotland's capital any form of "English" we can recognise as such would have been only about two fifths, fifty years on one hundred and twenty-five, through that journey from Chaucer to Shakespeare. It would frankly still have been novel even south of the border, the exception rather than the rule. In fact it would probably still have been novel a century later outwith England’s south, needing a generation or two after Shakespeare to travel northwards but still within the country's border and even more time to cross that border. It meant, whilst those from Scotland who had moved south with the king in 1603 AD and their children might have assimilated English by, say, 1620 AD and the younger generation with hands on the levers of power still north of the border might too have pretended to be up-to-date, Anglicising their tung, innit, the old men of the Scottish hierarchy that remained, the ones actually pulling the Caledonian levers, would still have spoken Old Scots. Only as the younger generation replaced the older one, so by 1650 AD, would their Anglicised Scots become the lingua franca, and then only of their circle. Wider circulation outwith it but still within the Lowlands would have required perhaps another fifty years, and beyond the Lowlands another fifty years more, which takes us neatly not just to the end of the 17th Century but beyond to the beginning of the era that would see the putting in place a number of the infra-structural elements, on which the Enlightenment would be based, indeed almost  to the era of Attic and Doric.