Travellers' Tales of Scotland

The following is from Travellers' Tales of Scotland by R. H. Coats:

I - The Early Travellers

SCOTSMEN have no reason to complain that they have ever lacked opportunities to "see themselves as ithers see them." From the earliest times their country has attracted a goodly stream of visitors from every land, who have fully recorded their impressions of its scenes, its customs, its inhabitants. These writers have included monarchs, poets, statesmen, soldiers, and philosophers. They have been men and women who have brought with them great powers of observation and wide experience, and who have seen all parts of Scotland at different times. It is proposed, in the following series of sketches, to give a brief, readable account of some of these travellers and their impressions. Their vivid personal narratives may present a clearer picture of some aspects of the past than many a more learned and pretentious history.

We begin with the travellers who visited Scotland during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. This period extends roughly from Bruce to the Reformation, from the Battle of Bannockburn to the Union of the Crowns, and includes the great struggle for national independence. It was a time when the Scottish kings were busily occupied, not only in warding off the attacks of the English on the south and the Highlanders on the north, but also in asserting and maintaining their royal supremacy over the turbulent nobles and reivers within their own borders. Not till the reign of James IV was this unquestioned supremacy assured. An age of such fighting within and fears without was naturally unfavourable to commerce and the arts of peace. Yet Scotland in those three centuries was by no means without the refinements of culture and civilization. James I was an accomplished poet and musician; James IV ruled over an influential and brilliant court. It was the age of Barbour, Henry son, D unbar, and Sir David Lyndsay. Indeed, everything combined to make it picturesque in the extreme. The day of mediaeval feudalism was not yet over, and men still fought gloriously in jousts and tournaments. On the other hand, the new world of Renaissance, Reformation, and a divided Church was already at the door. Politically, Scotland leaned more to France than it did to England, and it occupied a position of great importance on the chess-board of European diplomacy and intrigue.

The travellers who have left us their impressions of Scotland during this period include the famous French chronicler, JEAN FROISSART, who ambled through Scotland on a pony, accompanied by a greyhound, in 1385; JOHN HARDYNG, poet and antiquary, who spent three years in Scotland in the fifteenth century, searching for documents that should establish the supremacy of England ÆNEAS SYLVIUS, an Italian humanist, who was one day to become the Pope of Rome, and whose business took him to the court of King James I; JAQUES DE LALAIN, a chivalrous knight from the train of Charles the Bold of Burgundy, who visited Scotland for the express purpose of breaking a lance in tournament with the redoubtable James Douglas in 1448; DON PEDRO DE AYALA, ambassador to the Scottish court from Ferdinand and Isabella in 1498, who would fain have arranged a marriage between King James IV and a Spanish princess; PEDER SWAVE, a Dane, and envoy from Christian II in 1535; FYNES MORYSON, a lawyer and Fellow of Peterhouse, together with some others. A more cosmopolitan company it would scarcely have been possible to bring together, and we are fortunate in having their candid opinions on what they saw and heard.

No one of these writers, it is to be noted, seems to have taken the slightest interest in Scottish scenery. They had come on the much more urgent errands of diplomacy, and chiefly with the design of spying out the resources of Scotland in the event of war. Thus Hardyng, the Englishman, makes it his business to jot down carefully for his royal master "the distance and miles of the tounes in Scotland, and the waye to conveigh an armie as well by lande as by water into the chiefest partes thereof." Dumbarton Castle, it seems, somewhat daunted him, and he was of the opinion that it could not be brought into subjection except by famine.

"Upon a rocke so hye the same dothe stande,
That yf the walles were beaten to the rocke,
Yet were it full harde to clymbe with foot or hand,
And so to wynne, yf any to them approche,
So strong it is to get without reproche;
That without honger and cruell famyshemente,
Yt cannot be taken to my judgemente."

Estienne Perlin, on the other hand, who was a French ecclesiastic of the time of Edward VI, visited Scotland for a purpose altogether different, though hardly more disinterested. His aim was to promote a rapprochement between France and Scotland, on the ground that these two nations were natural and hereditary allies. "How happy oughtest thou to esteem thyself, O kingdom of Scotland, to be favoured, fed, and maintained, like an infant, on the breast of the most puissant and magnanimous King of France, the greatest lord in the whole world, and future monarch of that round machine, for without him thou would'st have been laid in ashes, thy country wasted and ruined by the English, utterly accursed by God!" With respect to this alliance, some strange ideas of history seem to have prevailed. Thus Henri, Due de Rohan, a soldier of fortune and the personal friend of Elizabeth and King James, was of opinion that "the two nations, the French and the Scottish, had stood by each other since the treaty made between Scotland and Charlemagne a period of eight hundred and seventy-two years during which time it had ever held firm, never had been violated, and never been altered." On the subject of geography the ignorance was equally amazing. It should be remembered, of course, that maps are modern inventions, and that Mercator's Atlas was not given to the world till 1595. Yet it is scarcely credible that even in the sixteenth century intelligent men should have believed that Scotland was an island, larger than England, and that it lay not north and south but east and west, in the direction of Norway. Even Ayala, writing in 1498, could inform Ferdinand and Isabella, whose ambassador he was, that "Scotland was nearer Spain than London was," arid that it was "surrounded by Brittany, France, Flanders, Germany, Norway, and Ireland."

But if the geography of those early writers was vague and tentative, they spoke without any uncertainty on the subject of the climate. "Scotland," says one traveller, "is cold and septentrional. The cold in those kingdoms would even split a stone." Another complains bitterly that in Berwick there should be such blustering and wintry storms, whereas "two months before the pleasant spring had smiled on him in London." A third explains the ebb and flow of the ocean to account for the fact that the atmosphere of Scotland is "for the most part misty." And a fourth, lamenting his enforced exile far from the sunny fields of Italy, shivers through winter months in which "the day is not above four hours long."

And a poor climate necessarily means poor soil and a poor people. There were many ecclesiastics to be found in Scotland, it was true, who were richer than some nobles, but the houses of the commonality were covered with roofs of turf, and the door, in many cases, was an ox's hide. It was this which rendered Scotland so indifferent to invasion. "If the English do burn our houses," said one to Froissart, "what consequence is it to us? We can rebuild them cheap enough, for we only require three days to do so, provided we have five or six poles and boughs to cover them." Æneas Silvius has informed us that the peasantry of southern Scotland gathered round him with every token of astonishment when he produced a measure of wine and a piece of white bread. Scotland in the middle ages knew little or nothing of wheat, save as it was imported from England by the wealthier classes. But the common people were already partial to the use of oatcake. Froissart tells us that it was the mainstay of the soldiers in the campaign of 1385.

"Under the flaps of his saddle each man carries a broad plate of metal; behind the saddle a little bag of oatmeal. When they have eaten too much of the sodden flesh, and their stomach appears weak and empty, they place this plate over the fire, mix with water their oatmeal, and when the plate is heated, they put a little of the paste upon it and make a, thin cake, like a cracknel or biscuit, which they eat to warm their stomachs. It is therefore no wonder that they perform a longer day's march than other soldiers."

Other travellers remarked not the poverty of the country but its fertility and wealth. Ayala devotes many pages to the glories of the reign of James IV, his large revenues and splendid equipage, his kingdom of fifteen earls, thirty-five great barons, two archbishops, sixty-three rich abbeys, and seventy sea-ports. It is true that he was constrained to remark the absence of olives, oranges, and figs in Scotland, but he found in it rich fields, innumerable flocks, and such vast quantities of fish as could easily supply the wants of England, France, Italy, and Flanders. An object of great interest to travellers was the coal of Scotland, which had been dug out of the Lothians as early as the thirteenth century. “In this country," writes Æneas Silvius, "I saw the poor, who, almost in a state of nakedness, begged at the church doors, depart with joy in their facefe on receiving stones as alms. This stone, whether by reason of sulphurous or some fatter matter which it contains, is burned instead of wood, of which the country is destitute."

Yes, in its own characteristic products, Scotland was rich enough. Only capital was lacking to encourage trade. In the words of Estienne Perlin, "nothing is scarce here but money." The chief exports, we learn, were hides, wool, herrings, coal, pearls, and aqua vitae, the imports being yarn, salt, iron, pitch, and wines. Of the drinking customs of the people in the sixteenth century we have a full account in the journal of Fynes Morison. "The Scots drinke pure wines, not with sugar as the English, yet at feasts they put comfits in the wine, after the French manner, but they have not our vinteners' fraud to mixe their wines... When passengers goe to bed, their custome was to present them with a sleeping cappe of wine at parting. The country people and merchants used to drinke largely, the gentlemen somewhat more sparingly, yet the very courtiers, at feasts, by night meetings, and entertaining any stranger, used to drinke healths not without excesse, and (to speake the truth without offence) the excesse of drinking was then farre greater in generall among the Scots than the English." Whisky, of course, was a drink unknown to the lowland Scot of the Middle Ages, that being a beverage introduced, together with tea, in the eighteenth century.

The impression which our visitors formed of the Scottish people themselves was partly favourable and partly unfavourable. Ayala found them bold, hardy, agile, inured to war, the kind of men who did not seem to know what danger was. Froissart, on the other hand, could see nothing in the Scots but a boorish rudeness. "In Scotland you will never find a man of worth; they are like savages, who wish not to be acquainted with anyone, and are too envious of the good fortune of others, and suspicious of losing anything themselves, for their country is very poor." Froissart complains elsewhere that the Scots are extortionate, ill-intentioned, and difficult to be acquainted with, "asking, for what was worth only ten florins, sixty or a hundred." The truth is that the peasantry of Scotland showed a rougher spirit of independence than the French knights were accustomed to at home, and when they saw their lordly visitors trampling disdainfully over their sparsely planted corn, they naturally demanded an indemnity, and refused to let the French admiral leave the country till the sum was fully paid. Æneas Silvius was chiefly impressed with the rude manners of the people. They stared at him "as in Italy people stare at an Ethiopian or an Indian." Ayala, on the other hand, thought the Scottish people most cordial and affable to strangers. "They like foreigners so much that they dispute with one another who shall have and treat a foreigner in his house." A papal legate who visited Scotland in 1543 was so pleased with his reception that "wherever he went afterwards, he spoke of the magnificent civilities of the Scottish nation." One writer thought that Scotsmen were "vain and ostentatious by nature and envious to excess. They spend all they have to keep up appearances. They are as well dressed as it is possible to be in such a country as that in which they live." Several speak of their warlike pride and hatred of the English, a people whom they boasted of having "always repulsed," while even thus early it was noted that they made good philosophers. The women were considered to be fair and comely, but inclined to wantonness, "giving their kisses more readily than Italian women their hands." Ayala admired the Scottish fair sex enthusiastically, and surely, being a Spaniard, he was one who ought to know. "The women are courteous in the extreme. I mention this because they are really honest though very bold. They are absolute mistresses of their houses, and even of their husbands, in all things concerning the administration of their property, income as well as expenditure. They are very graceful and handsome women. They dress much better than the English, especially as regards their head-dress, which is, I think, the handsomest in the world."

We read such descriptive notes with the more interest because it was during those three eventful centuries that the Scottish national character was chiefly formed. The poverty of the country, the rigour of its climate, its scanty uncertain harvests, its dark and troubled history of internecine feuds and incessant wars, all combined to instil into the people a spirit of sturdy independence and intense pride of race. The same influences fostered their religious susceptibilities and prepared the way for the somewhat gloomy fanaticism of the Reformation, as well as for the nation's subsequent intellectual and industrial development. But the beginnings of all these things were in the far-off centuries of the Middle Ages, the years of protracted struggle against the severities of nature and the threat of an invading foe, when curious and languid visitors from France and Italy and Spain could be not a little amazed at a Scotman's dourness, his grit, his stubborn pride.

II - Hector Boece (1527)