Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 The effect of Scandinavian raiders on the English and Irish churches: a preliminary reassessment
- 2 The changing economy of the Irish Sea province
- 3 Cults of Irish, Scottish and Welsh saints in twelfth-century England
- 4 Sea-divided Gaels? Constructing relationships between Irish and Scots c. 800–1169
- 5 The 1169 invasion as a turning-point in Irish-Welsh relations
- 6 Killing and mutilating political enemies in the British Isles from the late twelfth to the early fourteenth century: a comparative study
- 7 Anglo-French acculturation and the Irish element in Scottish identity
- 8 John de Courcy, the first Ulster plantation and Irish church men
- 9 Coming in from the margins: the descendants of Somerled and cultural accommodation in the Hebrides, 1164–1317
- 10 Nobility and identity in medieval Britain and Ireland: The de Vescy family, c. 1120–1314
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - Anglo-French acculturation and the Irish element in Scottish identity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 The effect of Scandinavian raiders on the English and Irish churches: a preliminary reassessment
- 2 The changing economy of the Irish Sea province
- 3 Cults of Irish, Scottish and Welsh saints in twelfth-century England
- 4 Sea-divided Gaels? Constructing relationships between Irish and Scots c. 800–1169
- 5 The 1169 invasion as a turning-point in Irish-Welsh relations
- 6 Killing and mutilating political enemies in the British Isles from the late twelfth to the early fourteenth century: a comparative study
- 7 Anglo-French acculturation and the Irish element in Scottish identity
- 8 John de Courcy, the first Ulster plantation and Irish church men
- 9 Coming in from the margins: the descendants of Somerled and cultural accommodation in the Hebrides, 1164–1317
- 10 Nobility and identity in medieval Britain and Ireland: The de Vescy family, c. 1120–1314
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
It is well known that in the central Middle Ages the native populations of Ireland and most of Scotland shared the same language, ‘high culture’ and major saints' cults. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that they formed a single people – identified in their own language as Gáedil – who stretched from Munster in the south to Moray in the north, and whose élite interacted with each other culturally and politically irrespective of any division into Ireland and Scotland. We should not be surprised, for instance, that the first record of a mormaer of Mar (a region straddling the rivers Dee and Don in Aberdeenshire) is as a casualty fighting for Brian Bóruma at the battle of Clontarf (1014). Another example of this pan-Gaelic vision is King Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair's famous endowment, in 1169, of funds to assist the fer léginn (lector) of Armagh in the instruction of students from Ireland and Scotland. And when Robert Bruce faced his destiny in 1306–7, he asked Irish kings to support him because ‘we come from the seed of one nation’.
By the time Robert Bruce dispatched his words of pan-Gaelic fraternity to Ireland, however, what being Scoti was understood to mean – at least as articulated by the kingdom's literati – had taken a new form.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Britain and Ireland, 900–1300Insular Responses to Medieval European Change, pp. 135 - 153Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999
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