Todays date was chosen for National Tartan Day because it was the date of the signing of the Declaration of Arbroath in the year of our Lord 1320.
From these countless evils, with His help who afterwards soothes and heals wounds, we are freed by our tireless leader, king, and master, Lord Robert, who like another Maccabaeus or Joshua, underwent toil and tiredness, hunger and danger with a light spirit in order to free the people and his inheritance from the hands of his enemies. And now, the divine Will, our just laws and customs, which we will defend to the death, the right of succession and the due consent and assent of all of us have made him our leader and our king. To this man, inasmuch as he saved our people, and for upholding our freedom, we are bound by right as much as by his merits, and choose to follow him in all that he does.But if he should cease from these beginnings, wishing to give us or our kingdom to the English or the king of the English, we would immediately take steps to drive him out as the enemy and the subverter of his own rights and ours, and install another King who would make good our defence. Because, while a hundred of us remain alive, we will not submit in the slightest measure, to the domination of the English. We do not fight for honour, riches, or glory, but for freedom alone, which no true man gives up but with his life.
Emphasis added.
By freedom they meant that another tribe should not rule them, which is not entirely the same as we mean now.
ReplyDeleteI say that not about the Scots in particular, but about all peoples. What they mean by freedom can be a series of obligations I would find quite unfree and/or an amount of license against others that I would consider dangerous. They were still reiving at this point in Scotland and it would increase going forward. And don't even get me started on Transylvania.
I have part of the Declaration on the wall in my classroom, beside a reproduction of the Declaration of Independence.
ReplyDeleteAVI, some of my maternal ancestors got tossed out of The Borders (and later out of the Ulster Plantations) for having the strange tendency to be followed home by other people's cattle. Apparently that also caused some rapid departures from North Carolina as well. ;)
LittleRed1
I can imagine that there’s a universal character to wishing to be free of the domination of ‘other tribes,’ although the Scottish nobility was Anglo-Scottish in the same way that the English was Anglo-Norman. They often had feudal lands and duties in both places.
ReplyDeleteStill, just as there was also a taxation dispute in 1776, there was also a particular concern here. Edward I was both a tyrant and a reformer; he did away with all the extant forms of feudalism in England and replaced them with only direct personal loyalty to the king. (This form of Feudalism is called “fee simple,” and is how we own our homes: not outright, but as partial lords of our castle provided we meet our feudal duties of paying taxes every year at whatever rate the sovereign decides to impose).
Messing around with the bargain causes problems, as frankly it ought. The feudal deal was at that time around 300 years old, or about as old as our own establishment of rights. Edward was violating freedom according to their particular understanding, not only a generalized sense.
On Feudalism and Liberty:
https://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2010/07/liberty-by-law.html?m=1