Manners, Customs, and History of the Highlanders of Scotland (Barnes & Noble Library of Essenti

By Walter Scott and Ewen Cameron

"Everything belonging to the Highlands of Scotland has of late become peculiarly interesting. It is not much above half a century since it was otherwise." -- Sir Walter Scott

Sir Walter Scott placed the Scottish Highlands on the map of popular tourist destinations. This timeworn work - consisting of the 1816 essay "Manners, Customs and History of the Highlanders of Scotland" and the introduction to his novel Rob Roy, "Historical Account of the Clan MacGregor" - helped transform Scottish national identity. Scott shifts the image of the Highlander from a bloodthirsty rebel to a heroic defender of the British Empire. and provides many references to leading figures Scottish history. The MacGregors serve as the epitome of the integrity of clanship.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411431348

Walter Scott

Sir Walter Scott was born in Scotland in 1771 and achieved international fame with his work. In 1813 he was offered the position of Poet Laureate, but turned it down. Scott mainly wrote poetry before trying his hand at novels. His first novel, Waverley, was published anonymously, as were many novels that he wrote later, despite the fact that his identity became widely known.

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INTRODUCTION

THIS volume contains two previously published pieces by Sir Walter Scott: Manners, Customs, and History of the Highlanders of Scotland, an 1816 essay from the Quarterly Review ; and Historical Account of the Clan MacGregor, which was the introduction to the 1829 edition of his novel Rob Roy. Together, they provide insight into Scott’s views on the history of the Scottish Highlands, territory which Scott, in his poetry and novels, romanticized, popularised, and placed on the map of popular tourist destinations. The importance of this process of transformation cannot be over-emphasized in explaining the changes in Scottish national identity in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries; an area formerly perceived as forbidding, dangerous and -- as the wellspring of Jacobitism -- politically threatening came to be seen through a more sentimental and comforting lens. Although this volume seems to have been little noticed when published in 1893, it did appear at an interesting time in the evolution of perceptions of the Scottish Highlands. During the 1880s, the Highlands had been convulsed by land agitation that induced government intervention and stimulated considerable interest in the region’s historical development.

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) was born in Edinburgh and was educated there at the High School and the University prior to taking up a legal career. His literary output in the 1790s consisted of translations of Bürger and Goethe. These were followed by The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, published in 1802-3, a collection of ballads drawn from the oral tradition of the Border country. The next stage of his career was dominated by epic poetry, notably The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), The Lady of the Lake (1810), and The Lord of the Isles (1815). It was with the publication of the historical novel Waverley in 1814 and its successors, continuing down to Castle Dangerous published in 1831, that Scott’s work achieved international popularity. Much of his writing explored episodes of Scottish history from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and Scott’s fascination with the Covenanters (Presbyterian rebels against Charles I and James VII and II) and their polar opposites, the Jacobites (supporters of the deposed James, who sought in a series of rebellions from 1689 to 1745-6 to restore the Stuarts to their kingdoms in the British Isles), is evident. Until 1827, Scott did not share openly in the repute of his work; the novels were published anonymously, the only clue being that they were by the Author of Waverley. Scott was also a noted biographer (of Swift, Dryden, and Napoleon), and a historian; his History of Scotland was published in 1829-30, and his Tales of a Grandfather (1827-30) related episodes from Scottish history. Through his directorship of the publishing house Ballantynes, Scott became liable for a debt of over £100,000, the repayment of which he devoted himself to by heroic literary endeavors in the final years of his life. Scott’s politics were of a Tory persuasion and he helped to found the Quarterly Review in 1809 as a rival to the Whig Edinburgh Review, to which he had contributed. Although Scott’s reputation faded in the second half of the nineteenth century despite the 1837 publication of a life by his son-in-law, John G. Lockhart, he returned to critical vogue in the twentieth century thanks to the Marxist critic György Lukács, who in 1969 sought to link Scott’s work with the changes in European society after the French Revolution. Today, Scott criticism is an academic industry and his works are available in many languages and editions.

Manners, Customs, and History of the Highlanders of Scotland contains a short account of the 1745 rebellion and many other references to leading figures in that rising. By 1816, the Jacobite cause had been consigned to history and was ready for the romantic fiction of which Scott became the key exponent. The sentimental view of the Jacobite cause dominates the essay and was even located in the House of Hanover. Indeed, in a letter to Margaret Clephane, a young woman from a Highland gentry family who collected Gaelic lore for Scott, Scott remarked that his feelings were Jacobitical and that as a soldier I would I am sure against the convictions of my better reason have fought for him even to the bottom of the gallows. Scott notes in the opening paragraph of the essay: Everything belonging to the Highlands of Scotland has of late become peculiarly interesting. It is not much above half a century since it was otherwise. This statement highlights one of the key themes of the essay: the Highlanders, seen as threatening figures in the 1740s, were by the Regency period perceived more positively. Their martial valor had been appropriated by the British state with the creation of Highland regiments, profitable enterprises for the landlords who raised them, both Whigs and former-Jacobites seeking rehabilitation. Their reputation was secured with courageous and brutal performances in the series of wars from 1756 to 1815. Throughout the essay, Scott refers to the martial superiority of the Highlanders over the Lowlanders and asserts that their characteristics of agility and hardihood were bred by a rough climate and a lifestyle that inured them to physical hardships. The image of the Highlander had been transformed in the course of little more than two generations from that of blood-thirsty rebel to heroic defender of the British Empire, and Scott’s work was crucial to the process.

This change was facilitated by a concerted effort to transform the culture and society of the Highlands and to eradicate the environment in which Jacobite treachery had flourished. This involved, first, an attempt to destroy the social organization of clanship, which was undertaken by legislation to disarm the clans and proscribe important symbols, and, much more important, the legal sovereignty of the clan chief was attacked with legislation of 1747 that abolished heritable jurisdictions. The nature and demise of clanship represent another important theme in the essay. By 1816, clanship could be viewed positively, even romantically, and Scott emphasizes the daring spirit of independent sovereignty and the vivifying principle inherent in clanship. Formerly, however, clanship had been identified as the key element of Highland society that provided a breeding ground for Jacobitism. An assault on the language, culture, and religion of the Highlands was the second part of the transformation process. Presbyterianism, literacy, and the English language were proselytized throughout the Highlands in an attempt to turn former rebels into good Britons. Scott, however, has little to say about this.

There was a third aspect to the changes in the Highlands: economic imperatives induced Highland landlords to abandon lingering notions of clanship and adopt a more commercial approach to estate management. Most historians now recognize that this process was underway prior to the 1745 rebellion, but the pressures intensified in the late eighteenth century and saw evictions, or clearances, of traditional small tenants from ancestral lands to make way for sheep in order to take advantage of high wool prices. Landlords also sought to profit from the gathering of seaweed, undertaken by those evicted and relocated to the seashore, with the aim of extracting alkali products for sale to the soap and glass industries. Scott’s attitude to these developments, which were much less amenable to romanticization, was, on the evidence of this essay and other sources, somewhat contradictory. In 1811, he wrote in complimentary terms to Elizabeth, Countess of Sutherland, on whose estate the most concerted and extensive clearances took place, praising her patriotic attempts to combine industry with such reliques of ancient manners, as still dignify the highlanders who have the good grace to be under your protection. Although he took care to note the education and culture of the clan chiefs, Scott also asserted that the old system of social relations in the Highlands bred overpopulation and laziness. This was a classic early nineteenth-century view of the Highlands, influenced by Malthusian thinking about resources, whereas fifty years earlier a large population was seen as a virtue, a point which Scott himself notes a few pages later. At the end of the essay Scott provides a clue to the resolution of this contradiction. Although he was critical of the unrelenting avarice, which will one day be found to have been as shortsighted as it is unjust and selfish, the thrust of his criticism was not social concern, but worry lest the hour of need should come -- and it may not, perhaps, be far distant -- the pibroch may sound through the deserted region, but the summons will remain unanswered. This proved a prescient statement, as was discovered during the Crimean war.

The only addition to the 1816 text of the essay that the 1893 edition contains is a note about the history of the Culloden estate offered by An eminent antiquary. It is possible that this was Charles Fraser Mackintosh, sometime MP for Inverness-shire and a noted collector of documents about Inverness and the genealogy of such prominent local families.

The second section of the book is an essay, here given the title Life and Exploits of Rob Roy and Historical Account of the Clan Macgregor. In the final four to five years of his life, Scott worked through his novels, adding introductions and notes prior to their republication by Robert Cadell in a multi-volume set. Rob Roy was the fourth volume to be issued in the Magnum Opus edition, and it is the introduction that Scott added in 1829 that is reprinted here. Rob Roy, which was one of Scott’s most popular novels, examined the boundary and connections between the Highlands and the Lowlands and the effect on the former of the commercial activities emanating from the rising city of Glasgow. The leading character, Frank Osbaldistone, secures his inheritance, and the hand of his sweetheart, with the help of Rob Roy Macgregor. The novel is set in the years just before the Jacobite rising of 1715, and the character of Rob Roy is based on a historical figure of the same name (1671-c.1734) whose life Scott relates in this text. Scott was not the first author to popularize the life and exploits of Rob Roy; Wordsworth did so in his 1807 poem Rob Roy’s Grave, which presented him in early nineteenth-century terms:

For Thou, although with some wild thoughts,

Wild Chieftan of a savage Clan!

Hadst this to boast of; thou didst love

The Liberty of man.

Scott takes a more skeptical view of Rob Roy than did Wordsworth, noting that Rob Roy appears to have mixed his professions of principle with a large alloy of craft and dissimulation . . .

Can the introduction be read separately from the novel itself? Modern critical opinion on the issue is divided. Ian Duncan notes that some readers may find it obtrusive, but is critical of the bad habit of some modern editions of dumping it at the back of the book or omitting it altogether, and regards it as a demystifying . . . Enlightenment historical essay. In his introduction to one of those offending editions, John Sutherland justifies his relegation of the introduction to an appendix by alleging that it obtrudes rather too massively at the head of the text. The most authoritative commentator on the Magnum Opus edition regards the introduction as an extended anthology of anecdotes about Rob Roy and his family. It is certainly the case that the introduction, with its account of the origins and vicissitudes of the Clan Macgregor and the loving parade of anecdotes about Rob Roy, does not sit easily with the trials and tribulations of Frank Osbaldistone, in which Rob Roy is not the main character. There is even some evidence that Scott did not want to give the novel the title Rob Roy and, unusually, conceded to his publisher’s awareness of marketing potential. There is some hint of this in the first paragraph of the original introduction, not reprinted here:

When the author projected this further encroachment on the patience of an indulgent public, he was at some loss for a title; a good name being nearly of as much consequence in literature as in life. The title of ROB ROY was suggested by the late Mr Constable, whose sagacity and experience foresaw the germ of popularity which it included.

Rob Roy is a shadowy figure in the written historical record, only appearing fleetingly at certain points in his life when he came into contact with the authorities, such as when he was declared bankrupt by the Court of Session (the highest civil court in Scotland) in 1712, after an allegedly fraudulent transaction in the cattle trade, from which Rob Roy drew much of his living. For much of his information Scott relied on oral tradition and he makes this explicit in the text. Scott, who reached adulthood in the late 1780s, could conceivably have drawn directly on stories of Rob Roy from people who had met him, or who led Scott to believe so. His description of Rob Roy’s physique, including the suggestion that he could without stooping, tie the garters of his Highland hose, which are placed two inches below the knee would seem to have involved exaggeration somewhere prior to reaching the text of Scott’s introduction. Given the paucity of written record concerning Rob Roy, however, Scott was left with little option but to use oral sources. Indeed, Scott’s account in this text remained probably the most authoritative account of Rob Roy until W. H. Murray’s book, first published in 1982. It was, for example, cited as a source by the author of the Dictionary of National Biography Notice of Rob Roy in the early twentieth century. Scott was alerted to the documentary sources which are printed as appendices to this text by Sir Robert Peel in 1829 at a time when the first volume of the new edition of the novel was at the printers, and they were inserted as appendices to the second volume. The alacrity with which Scott fell upon these records is evidence of the rarity value of such items and explains why later biographers have found Rob Roy such a difficult subject.

Scott wrote the two texts published here for different purposes and audiences, but they do serve to be read together, and there are links between them. It has been suggested that Scott’s interest in the Highlands which led to Rob Roy was probably fanned by his research for the Quarterly Review article of 1816. More tangibly, however, we can see the way in which Scott viewed the broken and outlawed status of the MacGregors as the epitome of the integrity of clanship, and this point is made in both essays.

A concluding point is the use to which Scott’s Highland interests were put. When called upon, at short notice, to organize the reception of the first visit of a Hanoverian to Scotland since the murderous tourism of the Duke of Cumberland in 1746, Scott turned to the Highlands and laid on a tartan pageant for George IV in August 1822: This even included the gruesome sight of the rotund monarch in a short kilt, and a Royal Command performance of Rob Roy in the Theatre Royal in Princes Street. If readers wish to understand the background to this occasion and the wider changes in perceptions of the Highlands, and in Scottish national identity of which it was evidence, the two essays by Walter Scott in this volume are an excellent starting point.

Ewen A. Cameron is senior lecturer in Scottish History at the University of Edinburgh. He holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Glasgow, and his research has focused on the history of the Scottish Highlands in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

CHAPTER I

Ignorance regarding the Highlandss—The Pretender and the Highlanders—Battle of Prestonpans—Advance into England—Retreat—Battle of Culloden.

EVERYTHING belonging to the Highlands of Scotland has of late become peculiarly interesting. It is not much above a half a century since it was otherwise. The inhabitants of the lowlands of Scotland were, indeed, aware that there existed, in the extremity of the island, amid wilder mountains and broader lakes than their own, tribes of men called clans, living each under the rule of their own chief, wearing a peculiar dress, speaking an unknown language, and going armed even in the most ordinary and peaceful vocation.

The more southern counties