Scotland has been at war with England since the thirteenth century; but since the eighteenth, the most bitter battles have been fought between individuals wielding paper swords. The last time the Scots and the English came to physical blows en masse was at Culloden in April 1746. It was a ruthless occasion: the Highland clans were routed by the forces of the Hanoverian Duke of Cumberland, and the fanciful aspirations of the Stuarts were put to flight once and for all. Bonnie Prince Charlie himself, of course, slippery as an eel, escaped to France, where he survived until 1788—until, that is, the very eve of the French Revolution, which he may have scented (with some disgust) in his dying nostrils. After Culloden, the Highlands were fortified; the wearing of tartan was strictly forbidden; the episcopalian clergy was severely punished; and the common people suffered terrible hardships—as common people tend to do when their betters come to blows over matters of high principle.

But the humiliations suffered by the native languages of Scotland—she had two: Gaelic and lowland Scots or Lallans—began in earnest much earlier; earlier even than the uniting of the two crowns of England and Scotland in 1603. In the sixteenth century, the Geneva Bible was translated into English—but not into Scots, which until that time had been a great literary language (as readers of Henryson and Dunbar will be aware), equal in status to its more southerly cousin. Both English and Scots were, of course, dialects