Page:The dialect of the southern counties of Scotland - Murray - 1873.djvu/18

4 Sasunnach sovereign who ruled on the banks of the Forth. It was reserved for the great struggle for the independence of the Scottish crown and nation to give to the words Scottish and English the political and geographical import which they now bear, as distinct from the questions of language and race; just as it was reserved for the wars between England and France to give a political and geographical definition to the terms French and English, which, for generations after the conquest, were used in England to distinguish the French-speaking descendants of the conquerors from the English-speaking descendants of the conquered; although both alike born in England, and both, in the eyes of their French rivals, English. The War of Independence, although it created the Scottish nationality of after times, was in its essence the struggle of the last remaining bit of Anglo-Saxonism to preserve its freedom from the Norman yoke; the Celtic population of Scotland, so far as they shared in it, ranked chiefly on the side of England. The Gaelic-speaking clansmen had never been reconciled to the Scoto-Saxon line of kings, founded by Duncan and Malcolm; a sovereign on the Thames was likely to leave them more freedom than a king on the Forth; and accordingly we find them, under the Macfadyans and Macdougalls, the Lords of the Isles, of Lorn, and Galloway, implacable foes to Wallace and Bruce, and formidable enemies to the Anglo-Saxon Lowlanders in their struggle for independence. Nevertheless, it was under the Scottish name and against the English king that the combat was fought and won; and its result was to extend, we might almost say to transfer, the name of Scot from the Gael of the north and west—who thenceforth ranked rather as Erschmen than Scotsmen—to the Angles of Lothian, of Tweedside, and Annandale,—men of the same blood and the same tongue as the Angles of Northumberland, Durham, and Yorkshire.

§ 2. It is in this latter or geographical sense that the dialect which forms the subject of this paper is called Scottish. Ethnologically speaking, the Lowland Scotch dialects are Scottish only in the sense in which the brogue spoken by the descendants of Strongbow's followers, or of the Cromwellian settlers, is Irish; or