Reddit reviews SCOTLAND: A NEW HISTORY

Hi! This sounds super interesting! Which game are you modding, sounds like something like Total War? I used to love that back in the day, I would definitely play a mod with some more realistic Scottish historical context!

You're right that this is a difficult area to research - the thing about this era is that the sources for Scotland are very sketchy - very few written records from this period survive, and a lot of it is translated through later witnesses. A lot of it is also apocryphal and not all of it ends up in the history books (though I added some links at the bottom to some good books if that's useful!).

That being said, there are definitely some colourful events that you could draw on in this period, one of huge upheaval and change in Scotland. And using a bit of license is totally OK - as long as you don't just make things up! - some of the best films about Medieval Scotland, like Braveheart, aren't 100% accurate.

So here are a couple of events off the top of my head you might be able to use, adapt, refer to etc. Hopefully other people in the sub can add details if I've forgotten any or got something incorrect!

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1. The Fànne v. Dòbber Wars
   
   The Fànne - Dòbber Wars was a period of major conflict and violence between two tribes (the clans came a bit later) in Scottish history that marked an important early phase in the rise of Kenneth MacAlpin, sometimes seen as the first King of Scots. He was also a member of the Fànne tribe, and in fact is thought to have become Chief of the Fànnes while still quite young due to his military skill. At some point however, before Kenneth was born, the Fànne tribe split due to a dispute over heritage (very important in those days!), which saw one faction claiming rightful heritage of the lineage - known as the Pure Fànnes - whereas a second faction claimed feudal overlordship over all of the tribe. They have come to be known by historians as the Total Fànnes because of the breadth of their claim. Eventually the Pure Fànnes were successful in driving out their rivals, and so the Total Fànnes left the tribe and founded a new one, the Dòbbers (from the old Pictish words Dòb and Ur - 'glorious' and 'exile'). Because they never gave up their claims to their kinship, they came to be called the 'kin Dòbbers'.
   
   If we jump back to Kenneth MacAlpin, by the time he assumed leadership of the tribe these two tribes were basically at war. The 830s saw repeated, bloodthirsty clashes between the Pure Fànnes and the Kin Dòbbers without any resolution, until finally both sides, exhausted, decided to make peace. This was done at the foot of a mountain called Cúl Beag in the northwest Highlands, near modern-day Ullapool. You might have heard of a medieval tradition called the Kiss of Peace. Well Scotland had its own version of that, which was used at this occasion, called the 'Té' in Gaelic, so bearing in mind the location, the peace treaty between the Pure Fànnes and the Kin Dòbbers was known as the Tè Beag.
   
   Because the sources are very unclear we don't know exactly what this looked like, but it involved King Kenneth and the Chief of the Dòbbers, Avon Four Sail (a moniker which evidently refers to his maritime skills and mercantile wealth). The Té Beag is described in much later sources as 'an intimate gesture' (so perhaps not unlike the Kiss of Peace) that was 'performed in a squatting position close to the fundament'. It was followed by both sides breaking open several ritual casks of whisky (booze features in a lot of this history!) known as B'aw, from the Gaelic 'special' and 'drink'. Although we don't know exactly when this event took place, it's still said that 'B'aws were tasted that day'.
   
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2. The Pumping of the Maws
   
   This isn't really a historical event per se, more of a kind of cultural anecdote that you might be able to use - hope it's still useful!
   
   So I'm sure you've heard the word 'maw' before, which usually refers to something like an opening, e.g. the mouth of a cave, but in Scotland it has several meanings. One of these is a kind of container or skin with a narrow opening (so a bit like the other definitions). It was mainly used to store alcohol - especially whisky, back in the day (told you there was a lot of booze! We Scots sure love to drink!). To give you an idea, the modern bagpipe is also built using a maw, so you can see the kind of dimensions I mean.
   
   Now you'll know already that although whisky has been made in Scotland for hundreds of years, it wasn't always done legally. Back in Medieval Scotland, the Crown used to try and tax whisky production in every household, so a lot of people used to make it secretly using their own equipment rather than a big, central still. And it was stored in maws - because they're flexible, they were easier to hide away than a big barrel or cask. This is a much later source, but it gives you an idea: illicit distilling.
   
   OK so in Medieval Scotland, a lot of villages were very remote, so the Royal Tax Collector used to visit only once a year - and as soon as he was gone, they knew they were in the clear for another 12 months! This led to a custom where everyone in the village would gather after the Royal Tax Collector had gone, put the whisky into casks (important for the maturing process) and clean out the maws with rudimentary pumping devices, ready for next time. This was a collective activity and became known as The Pumping of the Maws - basically, everyone in the village would bring their maw to the common grazing lands, see that each maw was properly pumped, and there would be inspections to make sure it was done correctly. Often clansmen would pump each others' maws for a measure of accountability, but it was common enough to pump one's own maw, too. Really skilful clansmen could actually pump numerous maws in one session - in some villages the one who got through the most would be ritually crowned the 'Méad Shaggháir' (from the Gaelic words Méad and Sheág, meaning 'enthusiastic' and 'efficient'). After all this, there would be a giant party where some of the whisky from the previous year would be cracked open and drunk while the freshly-pumped maws would dry out in the sun - great stuff!
   
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   Sorry if that's a bit much detail, I can get a bit carried away with my enthusiasm for history sometimes! I hope it's useful anyway and that you might be able to use one or two details, even if the whole stories don't make it in.
   
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   Finally some literature that you might find useful if you want to do some more research!
   
   Scotland: A New History by Michael Lynch - quite an old book now but it holds up well
   
   Scotland: The Story of a Nation by Magnus Magnusson
   
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   I'd love to see some of these details make it into the mod - keep us posted!

For a good general overview of Scotland's history you can't go far wrong with Michael Lynch's Scotland: A New History and my dad says that Neil Oliver's book A History of Scotland is good as well. I've not read it myself, but given that it's aimed at a general audience instead of historians it's possibly more readable than Lynch's book.

For modern Scottish history Tam Devine's book The Scottish Nation: 1700-2007 is a pretty good start. I find him quite readable, but it's more of a social history than a dates and facts history. I've taken against him a bit lately as he keeps sticking his oar in whenever there's a social issue on the go (Rangers going into administration was the latest), but I can't fault him for his knowledge and research work. I've a lot of respect for him as a historian.

The articles on Scottish History on Wikipedia tend to be quite well written, researched and sourced so you might find more specific books and information from their footnotes.

I really enjoyed Scotland: A New History, you can get it on Amazon for pennies.

It goes from the Scottish Wars of Independence to modern day Scotland.

The wikipedia articles have citations. You are refusing to accept them, and your only counter argument to the parts I cite are claims that these estimates are not accurate. You have not cited any reason to believe these estimates are inaccurate, other than your belief. I don't mean to be rude, but this sounds like a conspiracy.

But, I digress. I'll do the manual labor of copying the citations from more reputable sources.

First claim

> Clergy entered the country secretly and although services were illegal they were maintained.

You can find this in this book on page 289.


> The Roman Catholic hierarchies were restored in England and Wales in 1850 and in
> Scotland in 1878, and from this point greater effort seems to have been made to
gather statistics in a more systematic fashion, albeit with minimal standardization and
quality control.

Second claim:

> Another estimate for 1764 is of 13,166 Catholics in the Highlands, perhaps a quarter of whom had emigrated by 1790,[27] and another source estimates Catholics as perhaps 10% of the population

This can be found in this book on page 387.

Because it is an estimate, let's see if we can find other sources.

Here are some maps from the mid 19th-century which estimate that Scotland was mostly protestant, and seems to corroborate the 10% claim (it's hard to interpret the exact numbers, but it's definitely a minority).

> In 1923, the Church of Scotland produced a pamphlet calling for a racially pure Scotland and demanding the removal of Catholics. The pamphlet was titled, "The Menace of the Irish Race to our Scottish Nationality". This again goes against your claim that Catholicism could have been a dominant religion in Scotland.

The existence of this pamphlet is corroborated by this source and a copy of its text.

> Church of Scotland is part of the government of the United Kingdom

The Church of Scotland points out that it was only granted freedom from the UK parliament in 1921, although I will admit, it seems to function more independently today, than I claimed.