Scotland in The High Middle Ages - National Identity

National Identity

In this period, the word "Scot" was not the word used by vast majority of Scots to describe themselves, except to foreigners, amongst whom it was the most common word. The Scots called themselves Albanach or simply Gaidel. Both "Scot" and Gaidel were ethnic terms that connected them to the majority of the inhabitants of Ireland. As the author of De Situ Albanie notes at the beginning of the thirteenth century: "The name Arregathel means margin of the Scots or Irish, because all Scots and Irish are generally called 'Gattheli'."

Likewise, the inhabitants of English and Norse-speaking parts were ethnically linked with other regions of Europe. At Melrose, people could recite religious literature in the English language. In the later part of the twelfth century, the Lothian writer Adam of Dryburgh describes Lothian as "the Land of the English in the Kingdom of the Scots". In the Northern Isles the Norse language evolved into the local Norn, which lingered until the end of the eighteenth century, when it finally died out and Norse may also have survived as a spoken language until the sixteenth century in the Outer Hebrides.

Scotland came to possess a unity which transcended Gaelic, English, Norman and Norse ethnic differences and by the end of the period, the Latin, Norman-French and English word "Scot" could be used for any subject of the Scottish king. Scotland's multilingual Scoto-Norman monarchs and mixed Gaelic and Scoto-Norman aristocracy all became part of the "Community of the Realm", in which ethnic differences were less divisive than in Ireland and Wales.