[Political Interest]

Is it true that among lowland Scots a few descend from Britons/Brythonic people? Did such people come as refugees around the time of the Roman or Anglo-Saxon invasions, or were they always there long before?

Would people descended from Britons/Brythonic people be considered as true Scots?

[The Clockwork Rat]

The concept of a true Scotsman is so vague as to be used as a term for a type of fallacy. The Scots are ethnically diverse, so it's more a case of whether one identifies as Scottish or not.

As for your question, whilst I don't really know the dates of migration patterns you should remember that before Robert the Bruce (a vicious, rampaging feudal warlord who gave huge swathes of Scotland to his French friends - he is a shite stain on the history of Scotland), the lower reaches were pretty much indistinguishable from Northern England. If there were Britons in Northern England between the Romans and Anglo-Saxon invasions, then there would have been some in Lowland Scotland as well.

[Potemkin]

the lower reaches were pretty much indistinguishable from Northern England. If there were Britons in Northern England between the Romans and Anglo-Saxon invasions, then there would have been some in Lowland Scotland as well.

Neither the native Britons nor the later invaders and settlers of the Age of Migration paid any attention to some abstract border some feudal nob drew on a map. Besides, before Alfred the Great there was no such place as 'England', and before Kenneth MacAlpine there was no such place as 'Scotland'. And to my ears, a Northumbrian accent sounds pretty much the same as a Lowland Scots accent.

[Prosthetic Conscience]

The Lowland Scots were predominantly Brythonic, as the 'original' (as far back as anyone can trace, anyway) inhabitants. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Strathclyde
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galloway#Early_Galloway
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brython

or, if you don't trust Wikipedia
http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/sco ... /index.asp
http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/sco ... /index.asp
http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/sco ... /index.asp

[Thunderhawk]

... before Kenneth MacAlpine there was no such place as 'Scotland'.

What about 'Caledonia'?

[Potemkin]

What about 'Caledonia'?

The Romans referred to a place called 'Caledonia', by which they meant 'that desolate shithole beyond Hadrian's wall'. The 'Caledonians' themselves, however, did not regard themselves as a nation, and certainly had no state institutions which controlled or governed the territory we now call 'Scotland'. In fact, Scottish kings were still trying unsuccessfully to exert control over large parts of Scotland as late as the 16th century. Some feudal lords (eg, the Lord of the Isles) simply refused to accept the Scottish monarch's authority over them, and had no wish to be part of a Scottish 'nation'.

[Thunderhawk]

^Does that mean that for parts of Scotland, there is a longer history of being part of a British state then being part of a Scottish state?

[The Immortal Goon]

The concept of a state itself is hardly set in stone in regards to Scotland. Hell, it's mentioned frequently that the Scottish were invaded by the Irish. Of course, the Irish were called Scots at the time, being from Scotia Major, and moving to Scotia Minor (Scotland). And then there's even the royal families switching around their kids like it was going out of style between the islands. The dominant house of Ard Ris could see present day Scotland on clear days.

And a nation was whatever...Philip II made pretty much all of the known world, "a nation," with the exception of France...whom he was too busy trying to put under heel to get his wife, Mary Queen of England, pregnant; she dies, Phillip loses claim to England and tries to marry Elizabeth who proudly marries nobody and has to face Philip's armada; England remains independent from Philip as his "state" unravels; she dies and James, king of Scotland, becomes the first king of the UK to rule under the Union Jack. Some English bristle at the thought of England losing its independence to Scotland, gunpowder plots become a sign of Englishness to oppose foreigners; civil war and Calvinism further skew what it means to be Scottish or Irish or English; and you don't really get a notion of the beginnings of nationality at all until civil war ravages Scotland-now called Ireland, uniting all the heaps of royalists, old Celtic whatnot (itself problematic), Norse, catholic, and Protestant to die at Cromwell's feet and the aristocracy is removed with the Flight of the Earls leaving a mismash of divergent people that identify with each other because they don't identify with anyone else any more. Even then it takes a century or two for that to begin to spark into nationality there; Scotland doesn't spark that way-as a nation instead of the lines of a treaties kingdom-until, hell, arguably today.

[Political Interest]

To be honest England was also not a unified kingdom at the beginning. There existed independent kingdoms like Mercia, Northumbria etc. Later they became one English state. Scotland seems to have been similar in that it was initially a small group of states and unified into one. In my opinion England and Scotland are both historically multi-ethnic countries made up of several different peoples, i.e. Anglo-Saxons, Celts etc.

[Thompson_NCL]

The Scottish state did not exist prior to MacAlpine, agreed. But I'd say the Scottish nation can be traced to Roman times. Prior to this there was perhaps very little distinction between the English and the Scots, but after the walls went up, the two diverged.

I still recognise a British nation as existing, but the Scottish, English, Irish and Well nations that make it up are reasonably distinct.

[Prosthetic Conscience]

^Does that mean that for parts of Scotland, there is a longer history of being part of a British state then being part of a Scottish state?

Yes, and it's not just about effective control, as in the position with the Lord of the Isles mentioned above, where there was a dispute about whether he owed any allegiance to the King of Scotland; Orkney and Shetland belonged to the King of Norway until 1468, when he promised them as security for the dowry for his daughter, who married James III. Since he didn't pay up, Scotland got the islands instead. So they were in the independent Kingdom of Scotland less than 250 years (measuring up to the 1707 Act of Union), but have been in the UK for over 300.

[Political Interest]

How can we speak of them having a longer history as part of a British state when the British state did not exist until late in history? A British state is a new idea.

[Thompson_NCL]

How can we speak of them having a longer history as part of a British state when the British state did not exist until late in history? A British state is a new idea.

He means that the Scottish state existed as a united and independent entity for a shorter period of time than the British state. Which is although true from some perspectives, is not really the generally accepted view of things. A state or nation need not have occupied all of it's present territory in order to consider it to have existed... if that makes sense.

There can be no doubt the Scottish state began in the ninth century. We can debate if a Scottish 'nation' existed prior to this.

The concept of a state itself is hardly set in stone in regards to Scotland. Hell, it's mentioned frequently that the Scottish were invaded by the Irish. Of course, the Irish were called Scots at the time, being from Scotia Major, and moving to Scotia Minor (Scotland). And then there's even the royal families switching around their kids like it was going out of style between the islands. The dominant house of Ard Ris could see present day Scotland on clear days.

The Kingdom of Dál Riata is no longer believed to have been founded by Irish invaders, so although there can be no doubt there was a great deal of contact and exchange between Ireland and Scotland, there is little evidence of an invasion of conquest.

It doesn't much matter to me either way, because as you say we're talking about a region which was in very close proximity. There was probably a fair but of movement either way.

[The Immortal Goon]

Oh, I agree. The whole idea that there had to have been raiders that founded a state in close geographic proximity simply because we recognize them as seperate states today is poor history. Though par for the cours in the 19th century where it was politically advantageous to make it seem you had had some golden age if you were an Irish nationalist; and that you were simply writing a past wrong if you were a Briton in Ireland. Both are abuses and simplifications of facts, though it is something oft cited.

[Political Interest]

To me it seems like there is a possibility that a person living in the region which comprises the former Kingdom of Strathclyde could have a good chance of being descended from Britons. Hence lowlanders would not only descend from Anglo-Saxons but also from Brythonic elements, especially in the west of Scotland.

[geb]

There is also an endemical hypothesis:

http://historum.com/medieval-byzantine-history/24917-lothian-question.html

[Potemkin]

There is also an endemical hypothesis:

http://historum.com/medieval-byzantine- ... stion.html

The Saxon Shore Forts were just bonded warehouses and all about trade with the Continent. Pirates by their very nature attack ships not forts and pirates have been around since man found wood floated.

The picture as I see it is of small groups of people coming to Britain from all along the Continental seaboard with the purpose of trade, raid or settle all through the Roman Period and beyond. The Viking raid on Lindisfarne in 793 was not a new occurrence. You don’t perfect ocean-going vessels sailing up and down the fiords. What makes that event memorable is that the Church recorded when and what happened and the Vikings found easily obtainable movable wealth; most people wore their wealth in those days.

First of all, pirates do and have attacked forts and even towns. The English pirates of the Elizabethan era used to frequently attack and loot Spanish towns in the New World. In the 18th century, Blackbeard even blockaded a British colony town for several weeks once.

Furthermore, the Viking raid on Lindisfarne was a new occurrence. The chroniclers described their shock at this raid, which seemed to come like a bolt out of the blue. The modern scholarly consensus is that the Scandinavians possessed the military and naval technology to launch their raids several generations before they actually did so, but were deterred by the resurgent Frankish empire of Charles Martel and his heirs. Only once the Carolingian Empire began having problems of its own did the Vikings make their move.

In summary, the author seems to have a simplistic and stereotyped view of history, and is merely stringing together some badly-understood 'facts' in order to construct a flimsy narrative 'proving' that the Scots language predates the Roman invasions. In other words, it's nonsense.

[ThirdTerm]

A DNA marker indicative of Pictish origin is L1335, a branch of haplogroup Rb1 that is the most predominant haplogroup in Scotland. R1b's frequency reaches as high as 80% in Western Europe and it originated in Cameroon where its frequency is the highest (95.5%). The second major haplogroup in Scotland is I1 and haplogroup I is a Scandinavian haplogroup that has been noted at significant frequencies at Viking burial sites (13.79%) and it's considered to be an ancient Southern Scandinavian type diluted by later immigration events (Hofreiter 2010). Recent DNA research found that more than 1% of all Scotsmen are direct descendants of the Berber and Tuareg tribesmen of the Sahara who belong to haplogroup E1b1b1. It's thought that a significant number of North Africans had migrated to Scotland because of the slave trade in the 18th century. Haplogroup E1b1b1 is the African haplogroup that is predominant in Africa but it can also be found at high frequencies in southern Greece (40-50%). The Picts had been pushed north of the Clyde estuary and the Firth of Forth as a result of the Roman conquest and it's known that the Lowlanders are descended from either the ancient Britons or the Angles in the east.

[geb]

"I remember seeing two gamekeepers in a railway carriage running from Inverness to Lairey. They were tall, athletic, fair men, evidently belonging to the Scandinavian type, which, as Dr. Beddoc says, is so common in the extreme north of Scotland but both in colouring and in general aspect they were utterly different from the tall, fair Highlanders whom I had Seen in Perth-shire."

http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/mlcr/mlcr01.htm