Scotland in The High Middle Ages - Outsiders' Views

Outsiders' Views

The Irish thought of Scotland as a provincial place. Others thought of it as an outlandish or barbaric place. To the Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich II, Scotland was associated with having many lochs; to the Arabs, it was an uninhabited peninsula to the north of England.

"Who would deny that the Scots are barbarians?" was a rhetorical question posed by the author of the De expugnatione Lyxbonensi (i.e. "On the Conquest of Lisbon"). A century later Louis IX of France was reported to have said to his son "I would prefer that a Scot should come from Scotland and govern the people well and faithfully, than that you, my son, should be seen to govern badly".

This characterisation of the Scots was often politically motivated, and many of the most hostile writers were based in areas frequently subjected to Scottish raids. English and French accounts of the Battle of the Standard contain many accounts of Scottish atrocities. For instance, Henry of Huntingdon notes that the Scots: "cleft open pregnant women, and took out the unborn babes; they tossed children upon the spear-points, and beheaded priests on altars: they cut the head of crucifixes, and placed them on the trunks of the slain; and placed the heads of the dead upon the crucifixes. Thus wherever the Scots arrived, all was full of horror and full of savagery." A less hostile view was given by Guibert of Nogent in the First Crusade, who encountered Scots and wrote that: "You might have seen a crowd of Scots, a people savage at home but unwarlike elsewhere, descend from their marshy lands, with bare legs, shaggy cloaks, their purse hanging from their shoulders; their copious arms seemed ridiculous to us, but they offered their faith and devotion as aid."

There was also a general belief that Scotland-proper was an island, or at least a peninsula, known as Scotia, Alba or Albania. Matthew Paris, a Benedictine monk and cartographer, drew a map in this manner in the mid-thirteenth century and called the "island" Scotia ultra marina. A later medieval Italian map applies this geographical conceptualization to all of Scotland. The Arab geographer al-Idrisi, shared this view: "Scotland adjoins the island of England and is a long peninsula to the north of the larger island. It is uninhabited and has neither town nor village. Its length is 150 miles."