Lowland Scots people

Not to be confused with Scots Gaelic people or Ulster Scots people.

Lowland Scots people

Languages
Scots language, Scottish English, Scots Gaelic (small numbers historically)
Religion
largely Christian
Related ethnic groups
English people Scottish people Ulster Scots people

Lowland Scots people, also called Lowland Scottish people, Lowland Scots, or Lowlanders, are an ethnic group native to Scotland, many of whom who speak the Scots language, a West Germanic language, and share a common history, culture and ancestry. As an ethnicity, they diverged from largely the same ancestors as those of modern English people native to Northern England.^{[ unbalanced opinion? ] [1] [2] [3]}

Lowlanders largely descend from two main historical population groups – the West Germanic tribes who migrated to the southeastern part of Britain following the withdrawal of the Romans (Angles, Saxons and Jutes), and the part-Romanised Celtic Britons already settled there. ^[4] They emerged largely from the Angles, who subdued the neighbouring Celtic-speaking Cumbrians into an Anglo-Saxon kingdom, and settled the Scottish Lowlands. Later, the Anglian Kingdom of Northumbria was divided, with its northern lands and Germanic-speaking peoples becoming a part of Medieval Scotland. ^[3]

Lowland Scots people migrated and settled in parts of North America, Australia, and New Zealand, becoming the dominant ethnic group in various New World settlements. During this era, the Plantation of Ulster saw Lowlanders colonise areas of northern Ireland alongside planters from neighbouring parts of northern England to the Lowlands. Continuining with the British Empire, their diaspora demonstrated a tendency for settlement and intermarriage with the English, and their descendents; ^{[5] [6] [7]} becoming significant contributors to the cultural and ancestral background of Old Stock Americans, Old Stock Canadians and the Ulster Scots people in Northern Ireland. ^[8] Their partly shared identity with English people had tended toward support for British Unionism. ^{[9] [ when? ]}

Background

Lowlander ethnic group formation

Academics and scholars have studied the development of the Lowland Scots ethnic group, and other native Scottish ethnic groups, observing their ethnogeneses. ^{[4] [10] [11]} With varied expertise in both European culture and Scottish history, sociolinguistic Ken MacKinnon, historians Colin Kidd, ^[12] Susan Reynolds, ^[13] Felipe Fernández-Armesto, ^[2] Steven L. Danver, ^[3] and geographers, such as Barry A. Vann, ^[1] and Donald W. Meinig, ^[14] have documented the distinction between Lowland Scots people and other ethnic groups native to Scotland, such as Highlanders, ^[15] and Orcadians. ^[6]

A 1974 International Political Science Association report outlined this ethnic plurality within Scotland as: "The basic ethnic and cultural division in the British Isles has been that between the Anglo-Saxon peoples of England and the Scottish Lowlands and the Celtic peoples of Wales, Ireland and the Scottish Highlands." ^[16] In 2014, historian Steven L. Danver, who specialises in indigenous ethnic groups, stated the following, regarding Lowlands Scots and Gaelic Scots' unique ancestral backgrounds: ^[3]

The people of Scotland are divided into two groups – Lowland Scots in the southern part of the country and Highland Scots in the north – that differ from one another ethnically, culturally, and linguistically ... Lowlanders differ from Highlanders in their ethnic origin. While Highland Scots are of Celtic (Gaelic) descent, Lowland Scots are descended from people of Germanic stock. During the seventh century C.E., settlers of Germanic tribes of Angles moved from Northumbria in present-day northern England and southeastern Scotland to the area around Edinburgh. Their descendants gradually occupied all of the Lowlands.

Historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto's research suggests that Lowlanders are descended from various Anglo-Saxon peoples, and he proposes that, in contrast with "their Celtic neighbours", Lowland Scots "share a common origin, a common historic experience" with English people. ^[2] A professor of historical geography, Barry Vann has provided similar findings, pointing out that, while they are unique ethnic groups, northern English people and Lowland Scots have "almost the same ancestors". ^[1] Political geographer, Dennis Graham Pringle, suggests this common ethnogenesis (in relation to the English) applies to both Lowland Scots and Ulster Scots people. ^[8]

Historian Murray Pittock has written how the "ethnic myth or at best half-truth of the Germanic origins of Lowland Scots was also developed in the eighteenth century." ^[17] This places his views in contrast with academics Fernández-Armesto, Danver, and Vann who suggest that Lowland Scots people's, and English people's, ethnogeneses have diverged from practically the same set of ancestors. An expert in the field of Scottish history, Colin Kidd has noted that, furthermore, the settlement of Flemish people (an additional Germanic ethnic group) also significantly contributed to the ancestry of Lowlanders during the Anglo-Norman resettlement of Scotland, known as the Davidian Revolution. ^[12]

Decline of Scots Gaelic rule

Rather than Lowlanders (or their ethnic predecessors, such as Angles and, later, Northumbrians) it was Gaels who were the dominant ethnic group in, and the founders of, Scotland since the 9th-century. Historically, the Gaels emerged during the early Middle Ages, when an amalgamation of two Celtic-speaking peoples, the Picts and Gaels, created the Kingdom of Scotland (or Kingdom of Alba ) in the 9th century. However, University of Dundee's Alan MacDonald, a historian of early modern Scottish history, notes that by the late 16th century, Gaels had lost political control of Scotland, which required "propagandists", such as George Buchanan, to remove the Gaelic ethnic origin myth from the lore of the Scottish nation: ^[18]

There was a myth, included in the Declaration of Arbroath, that the Scots (by implication all of them) were descended from early medieval Irish immigrants, but by the later sixteenth century this legend of origin had been adapted to become the justification of the longevity of the separate existence of the Scottish kingdom and thus the European status of its ruling dynasty, not an ethnic national myth. This was born, at least partially, out of the fact that Scotland's political power centre lay outwith the cultural sphere of the descendants of the original Scots: in the south-east which spoke a language akin to English, rather than the north-west where Gaelic remained dominant. The ethnic national myth could not work for those in power, so it was transformed into an institutional myth ... Although it could be argued that this was ethnically exclusive, since it restricted full membership of the polity to Scots speakers rather than Gaels ... The laws were understood to apply to everyone who was a subject of the king of Scots, regardless of his ethnic group.

According to historian Susan Reynolds, obfuscation of the ethnic plurality within Scotland has been necessary to the practicalities of nation building since the Middle Ages. ^[13] By the 15th and 16th-century, constructed terms such as 'trew Scottis' were utilised by Scottish orators, such as Blind Harry, in attempts to diminish the reality that the political and economic power of Scotland was controlled by Lowland Scottish people. ^[19] A scholar of Scottish Gaelic customs, Dr Michael Newton's research suggests that into the 19th and early 20th centuries, some Scottish intellectuals, such as public lecturer Alexander Fraser, were co-opting Gaelic customs for the purposes of a constructed unitary Scottish ethnicity. Part of St. Francis Xavier University's Celtic Studies department, ^[20] Newton writes that "Scots are not a singular ethnic or racial group: the anglophones (of England and the Scottish Lowlands) had been “othering” Gaels as an inferior race for generations", continuing that "Fraser does not acknowledge or explore the Highland-Lowland divide in his anglophone texts; his agenda is to legitimate the participation of all Scots in nation-building". ^[21] North Carolina State University's Julia Rudolph has also studied this phenomenon. A historian of early modern Europe, Rudolph states that "the Lowlands constructed political and ecclesiastical myths that drew upon the history of the ancient Gaelic Scots of Dalriada while directing hostile barbs and directing reformist programs aimed at the assimilation of Highland Gaels." ^[22]

History

Middle Ages

From 1500 to 1700, The University of Auckland's sociologist Ian Carter's research into the era found that there no intermarrying between Lowland Scottish people and their Highlands neighbours, the Scots Gaels. ^[23] Nonetheless, according to University of Manitoba's Dr. Sean Byrne (an expert in ethnic conflict), while Gaels and Lowlanders remained distinct by turn of the 16th century, a "mutual respect existed between these ethnic groups". ^[24]

New World and colonial settlements

Sewanee: The University of the South's anthropologist, Celeste Ray, has noted that during the mid-1700's Scottish immigrants to the American South were distinct ethnic groups, including Scots Gaels (referred to as "Highland Scots"), as well as "Lowland Scots, and the Scots-Irish (or Ulster Scots), who had settled in Northern Ireland before immigrating to America." ^[25] Swedish ethnologist, Sigurd Erixon, has written regarding the ethnic group's migration to the north of Ireland in this period: ^[26]

Thus there need be little cause for surprise at discovering similarities in material culture in these areas when it is remembered that considerable numbers of west Lowland Scots people settled in the north of Ireland in the 17th century

With the foundations of British expansion emerging under James VI and I, scholar Mary J. Hickman suggests that, addressing the "management of national/ethnic relations", the co-national "plantation was promoted as a specifically British enterprise involving both lowland Scots and English settlers." ^[27]

In North America, Lowland Scots settled as individuals or individual family units, ^[7] rather than as a group, often alongside English people. ^[5] Lowlanders would, usually within a generation, adjust to American accents and dialects, diverging from the Scots language, in contrast to Scots Gaelic people who tended to retain the Gaelic language for several generations. ^[28] They were overrepresented among Loyalists, thus remaining loyal to the British Crown, during the American Revolutionary War. ^[29] According to geographer Donald W. Meinig, predominantly siding with the Crown may have been a result of "so many" Lowlanders being "agents of mercantile houses" involved with trade in the British empire. ^[14]

In New Zealand, historian James Belich has studied how Lowland Scots dominated the demographics of Otago and Southland as an ethnoreligious grouping. ^[30]

Late modern period

Academics John M. MacKenzie and Tom Devine (who specializes in the history of Scotland) have researched separate "Scottish migrant ethnic identities", describing how, by the 19th-century, appropriation of Gaelic symbols and customs by Lowland Scots people was increasingly common. ^[31] Colin Kidd suggests that the ethnic identity of Lowlanders progressed between 1500 and 2000 to understand their ethnicity as distinct but interchangeable with English people within the context of the British state. Kidd notes that the Lowland Scots did not see themselves as an "ethnic minority" in the United Kingdom between the 18th and 20th centuries. ^[32] University of St Andrews's historian Robert Allan Houston draws similar conclusions, noting that "Lowlanders' partly shared identity with the English" has often resulted in support for British unionism among the ethnic group. ^[9]

Knox College's Dr Stuart Macdonald, a specialist in early modern Scottish history, has published research stating that in the 18th and 19th centuries, Lowlanders was a separate ethnicity to other native Scottish groups: ^[33]

To speak of Scots as a single ethnic group is also somewhat problematic. It would be more accurate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to talk of two distinct Scottish ethnic communities divided by language and culture, and, at times, mutual antagonisms – Highlanders and Lowlanders.

See also

• History of Northern Ireland
• History of Scotland
• Immigration to the United States
• Plantation of Ulster
• Presbyterian Church in Ireland
• Ulster

References

1. Barry Vann (2004). Rediscovering the South's Celtic Heritage. Overmountain Press. p. 11. ISBN   978-1570722691. Though the northern English and Lowland Scots are uniquely different ethnic groups, they have almost the same ancestors. The Irish Gaels, however, were a stronger cultural force upon the Lowland Scots than they were upon the northern English.
2. Felipe Fernández-Armesto (1994). "English and Lowland Scots". The Times guide to the peoples of Europe. Times Books. pp. 36–43. ISBN   978-0723006244. In crucial ways the most conspicuous cultural division in British history has not been between the English and Scots but between the English and Lowland Scots on the one hand and their Celtic neighbours on the other. The peoples considered together here share a common origin, a common historic experience ... romantic and nationalistic Scots sentiment when their own highlanders were safely repressed. Even after that, the development of the British empire in the 19th century brought English and Scots together in a common imperial adventure ... In the late Middle Ages, Highlanders and Lowlanders made common cause against England
3. Steven L. Danver (2014). "Groups: Europe". Native Peoples of the World: An Encyclopedia of Groups, Cultures and Contemporary Issues. Routledge. p. 372. ISBN   978-0765682949. Lowland Scots are descended from people of Germanic stock. During the seventh century C.E., settlers of Germanic tribes of Angles moved from Northumbria in present-day northern England and southeastern Scotland to the area around Edinburgh. Their descendants gradually occupied all of the Lowlands.
4. Arthur K. Moore (2014). "The Tenant of the Garden". The Frontier Mind. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN   978-0813153636. Their original home was the Lowlands of Scotland, a region from which the Gaels had been largely expelled sometime after the arrival of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes in the fifth century. A predominantly Germanic people, the Lowlanders, like the Northumbrians, mixed freely with the Norse, who in the ninth and tenth centuries planted numerous settlements in northern England and southern Scotland, and by the end of the Viking period they were even less Celtic than before.
5. Celeste Ray (2001). "Scottish Heritage and Revival". Highland Heritage: Scottish Americans in the American South. The University of North Carolina Press. p. 46. ISBN   978-0807849132. Lowland Scots tended to settle more as individuals along the coast with the English. For reasons previously discussed, Highlanders tended to settle together
6. Jennifer S. H. Brown (1996). "Company Men with a Difference". Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country. University of Oklahoma Press. p. 31. ISBN   978-0806128139. It is clear, however, that while the Lowland Scots were not viewed as particularly distinct from the English ethnically or socially, the Orkneymen acquired considerable visibility as a separate group
7. Kathleen A. Staples; Madelyn Shaw (2013). Clothing through American History: The British Colonial Era. Greenwood Publishing. ISBN   978-0313335938. Highland Scots often settled in clusters in frontier communities, and their isolation led to subsequent generations maintaining some of that original culture and language. Lowlanders, who most often emigrated as individuals or single families, tended to assimilate into the dominant English culture.
8. Dennis Graham Pringle (1985). One Island, Two Nations?: Political Geographical Analysis of the National Conflict in Ireland. Wiley–Blackwell. ISBN   978-0838756409. Comparatively few of the Scots who migrated to Ulster would have had a strong Gaelic component in their ethnic composition. Northern Ireland Protestants, like lowland Scots, consequently are ethnically more similar to the English than they are to people living in the rest of Ireland
9. Robert Allan Houston (2009). "Society". Scotland: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. p. 95. ISBN   978-0199230792. In their ambivalence towards Highlanders in the 18th century, and to Highlanders and Irish in the 19th, Lowland Scots displayed a sense of racial identity that the English lacked... The fact that Scotland never had a single (or even a simple) ethnic background meant that efforts to create nationalism on the continental model were doomed. Lowlanders' partly shared identity with the English meant that most Scots tended enthusiastically to endorse Union
10. Roger Daniels (May 2001). "Scots". American Immigration: A Student Companion (Student Companions to American History). Oxford University Press. p. 241. The traditional American image of the Scot is confused and ignores the fact that there were two distinct ethnic groups in Scotland during the colonial period, Lowlanders and Highlanders, who shared a nationality but spoke different languages and practiced different religions. The people of eastern and southern Scotland – the Lowlands – were partly of Teutonic origin and spoke a variety of English. The people of western and northern Scotland – the Highlands – were a Celtic people who had emigrated from Ireland in the 6th century and spoke a variety of Gaelic.
11. Kenneth Christie (1998). "Introduction: The Problem with Ethnicity and 'Tribal' Politics". Ethnic Conflict, Tribal Politics. Routledge. ISBN   978-0700711185. This is least problematic in Scotland, which has long been marked by cultural or 'ethnic' cleavages, between Highlanders and Lowlanders, Gaelic, Scots and English speakers
12. Colin Kidd (1999). "The Gaelic dilemma in early modern Scotland". British Identities Before Nationalism. Cambridge University Press. p. 145. ISBN   978-1139425728. Moreover, the Saxons and Normans provided little in the way of a history of ethnic and national differentiation from England, which was vital to the patriotic assertion that the community of Scotland was distinctive and independent and had never been part of, or subject to, an English imperium. The Flemish contribution to Lowland history tended to be neglected until the work of George Chalmers at the turn of the nineteenth century. There were specific drawbacks to each particular component of the Lowland mosaic. ... Notwithstanding the influence of romantic primitivism, there remained a strong antipathy to the real Highlands. The kitsch Gaeldom of the nineteenth century would conveniently obscure the sacrifice of the Highland peasantry on the altars of political economy.
13. Atsuko Ichijo (2016). "The Uses of History: Why Europe is Good for Scotland". Scottish Nationalism and the Idea of Europe: Concepts of Europe and the Nation (British Politics and Society). Routledge. p. 127. ISBN   978-1138981492. It is interesting to note that the recognition of the Scottish nation being a mixture of many different peoples, not being racially or ethnically pure, has been around since the Middle Ages as discussed in Chapter 1. Moreover, Susan Reynolds argues that it is why the medieval Scots sought to present themselves as one people because it was the only way to claim rightful regal independence. The recognition of the racial and ethnic plurality of the Scottish nation was, according to another historian, one of the reasons why Scotland failed to develop a classical nationalist ideology in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
14. D. W. Meinig (1995). "Disruption". The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, Vol. 2: Continental America, 1800-1867. Yale University Press. ISBN   978-0300062908. On the other hand , Scottish Lowlanders were conspicuous as loyalists because so many were agents of mercantile houses ... probably exaggerates the loyalist proclivities of this ethnic group, for there were a good many other Lowlanders ... scattered through the colonies who ended up on the opposide side. In striking contrast was the fact that the Scotch-Irish were almost entirely aligned with the Americans. These Ulstermen, whose very ethnicity was a by-product of a drastic English imperial program had little reason for allegiance ... to English lords and rulers.
15. Ian Carter (1973). Scottish Studies. Vol. 17–19. University of Edinburgh. p. 58. The existence of two ethnic groups – Highlanders and Lowlanders – is characteristic of Scotland in the period with which we are concerned.
16. Round Tables: Documents de travail/Working papers. International Political Science Association. 1974.
17. Murray Pittock. Inventing and Resisting Britain: Cultural Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1685–1789 (British Studies Series, 57). Red Globe Press. pp. 140–145. ISBN   978-0333650615. The ethnic myth or at best half-truth of the Germanic origins of Lowland Scots was also developed in the eighteenth century.
18. Alan MacDonald (2005). "Statehood, Nationhood and Treason in Early Modern Scotland". In Linas Eriksonas; Leos Müller (eds.). Statehood Before and Beyond Ethnicity: Minor States in Northern and Eastern Europe, 1600-2000. Peter Lang. pp. 88–92. The turmoil of the middle of the sixteenth century saw the deposition of a monarch, Queen Mary (1542-67) ... Those who staged the coup were well aware that they would need to provide legal justification ... George Buchanan was the foremost propagandist in this effort ... This was the culmination of a process by which an essentially ethnic origin myth, firmly identifying the nation with its Gaelic past, was transformed. Part of that myth, the supposedly unbroken line of over one hundred kings stretching back into the fourth century BC, was retained but repackaged, while the emphasis on a single ethnic group disappeared.
19. Rebecca Boorsma (2011). "Women of Independence". In Edward J Cowan; Lizanne Henderson (eds.). A History of Everyday Life in Medieval Scotland (A History of Everyday Life in Scotland). Edinburgh University Press. p. 172. ISBN   978-0748621576. Harry used such phrases as ... 'trew Scottis' to display how Scotland could 'over-come the ethnic, linguistic, and political differences which had the potential to divide Scotland and make it vulnerable to English agression'.
20. Michael Newton (May 2009). "Identity and Ethnicity". Warriors of the Word: The World of the Scottish Highlanders. Birlinn. This chapter explores the dominant dimensions of identity in Gaeldom and discusses how notions of ethnicity informed relations and perceptions between Gaels and others during the course of Scottish history ... Mutual suspicions and antagonisms that persisted between Highlanders and Lowlanders ... On the other hand, there is also suggestion in Gaelic tradition that as the ethnic core of Scotland, they could form common cause with Lowlanders and regain the status they once enjoyed. Highland advocates of Jacobitism played up such aspirations.
21. Michael Newton (2020). "Gaelic Heroes of the True North: Alexander Fraser's Literary Interventions in Canadian Gaeldom". In Natasha Sumner; Aidan Doyle (eds.). North American Gaels: Speech, Story, and Song in the Diaspora. McGill-Queen's University Press. ISBN   978-0228003793.
22. Julia Rudolph (1978). History And Nation (Apercus: Histories Texts Cultures; A Bucknell Series). Bucknell University Press. ISBN   978-0405110764.
23. Scotia. Vol. 17. Old Dominion University. 1993. p. 12. In the 19th and 20th century there was not in Scotland one ethnic group: there were three and they had very different histories and interests. The Reformation changed lowland Scotland but the highlands remained feudal, Roman Catholic and Gaelic-speaking. Sociologist Ian Carter's work on the marriage patterns of leading Scottish families between 1500 and 1700 shows a very clear division at the highland line: highland families inter-married with highland families rather than with lowlanders.
24. Sean Byrne (1997). "The Historical World of Children in Belfast". Growing Up in a Divided Society: The Influence of Conflict on Belfast Schoolchildren. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. pp. 25–26. ISBN   978-0838636558. By the turn of the sixteenth century the power of the Stuart dynasty held sway in the lowlands of Scotland ... Commercial trading and contact with the rest of Europe turned the lowland Scots into sophisticated, modern, and Europeanized citizens, while their highland neighbors to the north eked out a frugal existence. However, a mutual respect existed between these ethnic groups
25. Celeste Ray (2007). "Europeans". The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Volume 6: Ethnicity (The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, 6). The University of North Carolina Press. p. 51. ISBN   978-0807858233. Scottish immigrants to the South were members of three distinct ethnic groups: Highland Scots, Lowland Scots, and the Scots-Irish (or Ulster Scots), who had settled in Northern Ireland before immigrating to America.
26. Sigurd Erixon (1970). "Volume I-II". Erixoniana: Contributions to the Study of European Ethnology in Memory of Sigurd Erixon (1970-1971). Netherlands Open Air Museum.
27. Mary J. Hickman (2005). "Ruling an empire, governing a multinational state: the impact of Britain's historical legacy on the contemporary ethno-racial regime". Ethnicity, Social Mobility and Public Policy: Comparing the USA and the UK. Cambridge University Press. pp. 21–24. ISBN   978-0521823098.
28. Rebecca Mark; Rob C. Vaughan, eds. (2004). "Ethnicity". The South: The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Regional Cultures. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 133. ISBN   978-0313327346. Highlanders often retained Gaelic for several generations, while the Lowland Broad Scots often gave way within a generation to more American, upwardly mobile accents and dialects.
29. Merril D. Smith (2004). "Economics and Work: Immigration". The World of the American Revolution [2 volumes]: A Daily Life Encyclopedia. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 125. ISBN   978-1440830273. Yet Lowland Scots, many of whom were merchants deeply involved in the British economy, were overrepresented among loyalists, and Highland Scots may have been the only ethnic group that generally supported the British.
30. James Belich (2002). "Prologue". Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders from the 1880's to the Year 2000. University of Hawaii Press. p. 20. ISBN   978-0824825423. Life in the 128 cities, towns and counties of Pakeha New Zealand in the 1880s varied according to a host of factors ... Lowland Scots Presbyterians were the leading ethnic-religious group in Otago and Southland
31. John M. MacKenzie; Tom Devine (2016). Scotland and the British Empire (Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series). Oxford University Press. p. 135. ISBN   978-0198794622. Yet, as with Highland migrants, language was an important element of the ethnic identification of some Lowland Scots. While the Gaelic language and kilts are often associated with the Highlands, developments in the nineteenth century saw the appropriation by Lowlanders of Highland symbols.
32. Colin Kidd (2008). "Narratives of Belonging". Union and Unionisms: Political Thought in Scotland, 1500–2000. Cambridge University Press. pp. 137–138. ISBN   978-0521706803. They fostered the idea that there was no serious ethnic or cultural difference between Englishmen and Lowland Scots. This meant that most Scots – Lowland Scots at least – did not come to think of themselves as an 'ethnic minority' within the British state.
33. Stuart Macdonald (2008). "Presbyterian and Reformed Christians and Ethnicity". In Paul Bramadat; David Seljak (eds.). Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada. University of Toronto Press. p. 176. ISBN   978-0802095848.