Anti-Scottish sentiment is disdain for, discrimination against or hatred of Scotland, Scottish people or Scottish culture. It may also include the persecution or oppression of the Scottish people as an ethnic group or nation. It can also be referred to as Scotophobia or Albaphobia.
Middle Ages Much of the anti-Scottish literature of the Middle Ages drew heavily on the writings from Greek and Roman antiquity. The writings of Ptolemy in the 2nd century AD in particular dominated concepts of Scotland till the Late Middle Ages and drew on stereotypes perpetuating fictitious, as well as satirical accounts of the Kingdom of the Scots. The English Church and the propaganda of royal writs from 1337 to 1453 encouraged a barbarous image of the kingdom as it allied with England's enemy, the Kingdom of France, during the Hundred Years' War.The Hundred Years' War. W. R. Jones (1979). Journal of British Studies Medieval authors seldom visited Scotland but called on such accounts as "common knowledge", influencing the works of Hector Boece's "Scotorum Historiae" (Paris 1527) and William Camden's "Brittania" (London 1586) plagiarising and perpetuating negative attitudes. In the 16th century Scotland—particularly the Scottish Gaelic-speaking Highlands—was characterised as lawless, savage and filled with wild Scots. As seen in Camden's account to promote an image of the nation as a wild and barbarous people: They drank the bloud [blood] out of wounds of the slain: they establish themselves, by drinking one anothers bloud [blood] and suppose the great number of slaughters they commit, the more honour they winne [win] and so did the Scythians in old time. To this we adde [add] that these wild Scots, like as the Scythians, had for their principall weapons, bowes and arrows. Camden (1586)W. Camden, Britannia, or, A Chorographical description of the most flourishing kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland. (London 1610), p114-127
Camden's accounts were modified to compare the Highland Scots to the inhabitants of Ireland.Travels to Terra Incognita: The Scottish Highlands and Hebrides in Early Modern Travellers' Accounts c. 1600 to 1800. Martin Rackwitz. Waxmann Verlag 2007. p33, p94 Negative stereotypes flourished, and by 1634 the German author Martin Zeiler linked the origins of the Scots to the Scythians and in particular the Highlander to the Goths based on their wild and Gothic-like appearance.Zeiller, Martin, Itinerarium Magnae Britanniae, 2nd ed. (1674) Zeiller's account is based on the travels of an anonymous Count of the Holy Roman Empire in 1609, p. 232. Quoting the 4th-century Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus,Travels to Terra Incognita: The Scottish Highlands and Hebrides in Early Modern Travellers' Accounts c. 1600 to 1800. Martin Rackwitz. Waxmann Verlag 2007. p34 Ibid.p123 he describes the Scots as descendants of the tribes of the British Isles who were unruly troublemakers. With a limited amount of information, the medieval geographer embellished such tales, including, less favourable assertions that the ancestors of Scottish people were cannibals. A spurious accusation proposed by Jerome's tales of Scythian atrocities was adapted to lay claims as evidence of cannibalism in Scotland. Despite the fact that there is no evidence of the ancestors of the Scots in ancient Gaul,Travels to Terra Incognita: The Scottish Highlands and Hebrides in Early Modern Travellers' Accounts c. 1600 to 1800. Martin Rackwitz. Waxmann Verlag 2007. p38, p39 moreover Jerome's text was a mistranslation of Attacotti,Camden Britain part i, p. 127 another tribe in Roman Britain, the myth of cannibalism was attributed to the people of Scotland:
What shall I [St. Jerome] say of other nations – how when I was in Gaul as a youth I saw the Scots, a British race, eating human flesh, and how, when these men came upon the forests upon herds of swine and sheep, and cattle, they would cut off the buttocks of the shepherds and paps of the woman and hold these for their greatest delicasy.
Accepted as fact with no evidence, such ideas were encouraged and printed as seen in De Situ Britanniae a fictitious account of the peoples and places of Roman Britain. It was published in 1757, after having been made available in London in 1749. Accepted as genuine for more than one hundred years, it was virtually the only source of information for northern Britain (i.e., modern Scotland) for the time period, and historians eagerly incorporated its spurious information into their own accounts of history. The Attacotti's homeland was specified as just north of the Firth of Clyde, near southern Loch Lomond, in the region of Dunbartonshire. (English) (Latin) This information was combined with legitimate historical mentions of the Attacotti to produce inaccurate histories and to make baseless conjectures. For example, Edward Gibbon combined De Situ Britanniae with St. Jerome's description of the Attacotti by musing on the possibility that a 'race of cannibals' had once dwelt in the neighbourhood of Glasgow.
These views were echoed in the works of Dutch, French and German authors. Nicolaus Hieronymus Gundling proposed that the exotic appearance and cannibalism of the Scottish people made them akin to the "savages" of Madagascar. Even as late as the mid-18th century, German authors likened Scotland and its ancient population to the exotic tribes of the South Seas.Travels to Terra Incognita: The Scottish Highlands and Hebrides in Early Modern Travellers' Accounts c. 1600 to 1800. Martin Rackwitz. Waxmann Verlag 2007. p40 With the close political ties of the Franco-Scottish alliance in the late Medieval period, before William Shakespeare's Macbeth, English Elizabethan theatre dramatised the Scots and Scottish culture as comical, alien, dangerous and uncivilised. In comparison to the manner of Frenchmen who spoke a form of English,Macbeth by William Shakespeare. A. R. Braunmuller p9 Cambridge University Press, 1997 Scots were used in material for comedies; including Robert Greene's James IV in a fictitious English invasion of Scotland satirising the long Medieval wars with Scotland. English fears and hatred were deeply rooted in the contemporary fabric of society, drawing upon stereotypes as seen in Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles" and politically edged material such as George Chapman's Eastward Hoe in 1605, offended King James with its anti-Scottish satire, resulting in the imprisonment of the playwright.Eastward Ho! by Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, Royal Shakespeare Company Despite this, the play was never banned or suppressed. Authors such as Claude Jordan de Colombier in 1697 plagiarised earlier works,C. Jordan de Colombier, Voyages Historique de l'Europe, 8 vols, (Paris, 1693–1697) Counter-Reformation propaganda associated the Scots and particularly Highland Gaelic-speakers as barbarians from the northWilliamson Scots, indians and Empire, pp 50–55 who wore nothing but animal skins. Confirming old stereotypes relating back to Roman and Greek philosophers in the idea that "dark forces" from northern Europe (soldiers from Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands, France and Scotland) acquired a reputation as fierce warriors.The Volois Tapestries a barbaric northerner is depicted ibid., p. 55Jean Bodin's Les Six Livres de la Républic (Paris 1576)"Early Modern Representations of the far North. The 1670 Voyage of la Martinére", AVR Nordic Yearbook of Folklore, vol lviii(Stockholm 2002), pp. 19–42. With Lowland soldiers along the North Sea and Baltic Sea, as well as Highland mercenaries wearing the distinctive Scottish kilt, became synonymous with that of wild, rough and fierce fighting men.Travels to Terra Incognita: The Scottish Highlands and Hebrides in Early Modern Travellers' Accounts c. 1600 to 1800. Martin Rackwitz. Waxmann Verlag 2007.
However, the fact that Scots had married into every royal house in Europe who had also married into the Scottish royal house indicates that the supposed anti-Scottish sentiment there has been exaggerated as opposed to in England where the wars and raids in Northern England increased anti-Scottish sentiment. An increase in the English anti-Scottish sentiments after the Jacobite uprisings and the anti-Scottish bills of the parliament are clearly shown in comments by leaders in English such as Samuel Johnson, whose anti-Scottish remarks such as that "in those times nothing had been written in the Earse [i.e. Scots Gaelic] language" is well known.
Anti-Highlander and anti-Jacobite sentiment
Stereotypes of Highland cannibalism lasted till the mid-18th century and were embraced by Lowland Scots Presbyterian and English political and anti-Jacobite propaganda, in reaction to a series of Jacobite uprisings and rebellions, in the British Isles between 1688 and 1746. The Jacobite uprisings themselves in reaction to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, were aimed at returning James VII of Scotland and II of England, and later his descendants of the House of Stuart. Anti-Jacobite predominantly anti-Highland propaganda of the 1720s includes publications such as the London Newgate Calendar a popular monthly bulletin of executions, produced by the keeper of Newgate Prison in London. One Newgate publication created the legend of Sawney Bean, the head of a forty-eight strong clan of incestual, lawless and cannibalistic family in Galloway. Although based on fiction, the family was reported by the Calendar to have murdered and cannibalised over one thousand victims. Along with the Bible and John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, the Calendar was famously in the top three works most likely to be found in the average home and the Calendar's title was appropriated by other publications, who put out biographical chapbooks. With the intent to create a work of fiction to demonstrate the superiority of the Protestant mercantile establishment in contrast to the 'savage pro-Jacobite uncivilised Highland Gaels'.Travels to Terra Incognita: The Scottish Highlands and Hebrides in Early Modern Travellers' Accounts c. 1600 to 1800. Martin Rackwitz. Waxmann Verlag 2007.p39"A Taste of Scotlands Historical Fictions of sawney bean and his Family", in E. Cowan and D. Gilford (eds), The Polar Twins. 200 Edinburgh
From 1701 to 1720 a sustained Whig single party state campaign of anti-Jacobite pamphleteering across Britain and Ireland sought to halt Jacobitism as a political force and undermine the claim of James II and VII to the British throne. In 1705 Lowland Scots Protestant Whig politicians in the Scottish parliament voted to maintain a status quo and to award financial incentives of £4,800 to each writer having served the interests of the nation.Steele. M. (1981) Anti-Jacobite Pamphleteering, 1701 – 1720Acts of the Parliament of Scotland, xi, 221, 224 cited in Steele. M. (1981) Anti-Jacobite Pamphleteering, 1701 – 1720 Such measures had the opposite effect and furthered the Scots towards the cause, enabling Jacobitism to flourish as a sustained political presence in Scotland. Pro-Jacobite writings and pamphleteers, e.g. Walter Harries and William Sexton, were liable to imprisonment for producing seditious or scurrilous tracts; all works were seized or destroyed.Steele. M. (1981) Anti-Jacobite Pamphleteering, as an example An Address to All True Englishmen,http://www.nls.uk/collections/rare-books/acquisitions/popup/jacobite1701 – 1720 routed a sustained propaganda war with Scotland's pro-Stuart supporters. British Whig campaigners pushed pro-Saxon and anti-Highlander Williamite satire,Poetry and Jacobite politics in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland by Murray Pittock p33 resulting in a backlash by pro-Jacobite pamphleteers.