Introduction

In the years around 1620, Sir Robert Gordon (1580–1656), tutor to the Earl of Sutherland, advocated a brutal approach to education in his part of the Highlands. He instructed his nephew, a future heir to the earldom, to ‘take away the reliques of the Irishe barbaritie which as yet remains in your countrey, to wit, the Irishe langage, and the habit’ by establishing ‘schooles in ewerie corner’ that would ‘instruct the youth to speak Inglishe’. By ‘Irishe’, Gordon meant ‘Scots Gaelic’, and, indeed, during James Fraser's lifetime, a Highland educational world revolving around hereditary bards, historians, medics and other scholars was put under threat from such attitudes and actions: Gordon's proposed ‘seminary of wertue [virtue]’ in Dornoch can be viewed as an aggressive local expression of anti-Gaelic educational measures fostered by the Scottish government, and outlined most clearly via national-level statutes created or ratified in 1609, 1616, 1633 and 1646.

Yet, most seventeenth-century contemporaries concerned with everyday schooling in the region –a mix of, often, bilingual Gaelic-and Scots-speaking representatives of the Protestant churches –did not have access to the kind of capital or influence enjoyed by the likes of the Gordons of Sutherland. Rather than any attempt to root out their prospective ministers’ and parishioners’ native language, voices from the kirk reported and acted on a more basic concern: how to build new schools and recruit the necessary schoolmasters required for them at parish level. Put another way, a more visible preoccupation than how to limit the use of Gaelic by the kirk's local representatives was finding the required funding from heritors (landholders) that would pay for, and meet demand for, parochial educational provision, within what became, from 1638, a civil war situation. As for James Fraser, one sees an engagement with schooling that began and ended with Gaelic, in that the initial provision at parish level that he received as a child, and later arranged and supported as a minister, was delivered, in part, in his first language, in opposition to crown-level instructions. Without doubt, nonetheless, national-level constraints of policy, finance and war would combine to disrupt his elementary education, and, to some extent, affect his experience even of Inverness Grammar School, which he attended in the 1640s, and King's College, Aberdeen, where he studied from 1651 to 1655.