BOOKS

John Highlandman

By NEAL ASCHERSON rr HE West Highlands of Scotland are immut-

able. Ever since the human race settled there they have looked the same, and they have forced the same strict conditions of life on all genera- tions: a sameness which has made them into a land of signs. To the visitor these signs are at first the magnificent and broad symbols which any dramatic landscape provides. He looks up at the hills and reflects on the excitement of the world's great antiquity; he looks down at the sea and is drowned by the same sense. But then he moves to an experience which the Alps cannot give as he discovers that people have lived in the Highland environment for 10,000 years and used every wild plant and beach pebble of it with such intensity that every natural object in the landscape now carries a sign for humanity.

The Highlands and the Isles are human ground —never mere nature. The scrub birch is a sign of acid soil and of the grief of those who had to till it. The marks on the rocks signify the passage of glaciers which wore down the hills to a good height for summer cattle and made cultivation possible in flat-bottomed glens. Sea shells and heather and bracken speak not only of themselves but of lime- wash, bedding, and the clearance of people before sheep-grazing. Even now the geology and ecology of the region govern the crofter almost as force- fully as they did his Neolithic predecessor and drive him also to live a 'Highland life.' One enters there a continuum with the past and an intimacy with the inanimate world which is rare.

What was the Highland life like in its prime? A rocket range stands in the midst of one of the best remaining answers to this question, in the com- munity of lochdar in South Uist, but setting your back to the Atlantic and the range you can still be aware that you are looking at a strangely un- familiar form of human association. The houses stand neither together in a village nor individually separate like peasant farms, but at a middling dis- tance, each about four or five hundred yards from the next one, mysteriously but obviously connected in some common purpose. This ancient unit is the township or bade, and the purpose is common agri- culture, for lochdar still holds both its plough land and its grazing in common and each householder ballots every spring for strips in the common arable.

The township was the basic unit of Gaelic society; co-operative, ingenious, and nourished by innumerable songs, stories of the Fenians, and Proverbs, Even at this level the habit of imagery was strong, and expressed itself in the brilliantly coloured epithets which sophisticated Gaelic Poetry uses. Hector MacLean found a small girl in Islay who knew riddles like these :

A black horse and a brown horse sole to sole; Swifter is the black horse than the brown,

(the answer being 'water and the mill-wheel'): 'A brown stag on the hill with his car on fire' (a gun), and The son on the housetop and the father unborn' (smoke before flame).

But how important was the clan? Did culture, law and relationships in this very well-versed world centre upon the clan leadership and organ- isation? Many have wished to see the clan as a

proper technical 'clan' and as the anthropological unit of Gaelic society in the Highlands, but all the evidence shows that they are wrong and that the clan was never more than a crude form of political leadership which arose in the Middle Ages and collapsed in the late eighteenth century without ever having completely absorbed the township culture out of which it suddenly arose. No doubt the bade as an Iron Age institution did form part of some recognisably tribal group, as in Ireland, and no doubt the families of a township hid be- tween them many complex bonds of intimate obligation and relationship. But nothing is known of them now.

A new clan history, The MacLeods,* makes very clear this instability : the transitional nature of the Highland clans. As the Norse occupation of the Hebrides waned, individual leaders arose in the confusion and asserted their lordship over areas which neither 'belonged' to them nor were peopled by their kinsmen. But they set up court, distributed conquered land to their brothers and allies, and after a few generations were elevated by the in- habitants to a position of fictitious senior ancestry. Allies, clients and subjects in the lands of Skye, Lewis, Harris, Glenelg and elsewhere which Leod and his descendants secured were soon defined as 'children of Leod' : the MacLeod. Up to very late, when the clan organisation was well crystallised, it was not unusual for families from other ancestry clans to become MacLeods simply by being con- quered. The frailty of this position seems to have been consolidated by use of the custom of foster- age, by which children of the chiefly family were given out to junior families, accompanied by a gift of cattle to be repaid to the child at its majority.

Justice never quite became the monopoly of the clan. In some ways the chief was absolute : inter- ference with a chief's daughters brought a feast of massacre and mutilation on the countryside, and there used to be a notice over the door of a castle in Coll which read : 'A MacElonich is wel- come here, even if he come with a man's head in his hand.' (One reputedly did, and had a wonder- ful time.) But often the chiefs left the judging to a hereditary official of the people called the 'brieve,' who decided disputes rather than enforced sentences.

Perpetual fighting soaked the Highland Middle Ages in futile but nobly spilled gore, as the clans tried to carve out larger patrimonies for the in- creasing number of younger sons. The Lordship of the Isles, which lasted from 1346 to 1493, almost succeeded in ending it by establishing what ought to have developed into a Gaelic princedom, and it is interesting that the Lords of the Isles tried to make the brieves into paid judges dependent upon themselves. But the natural hostility of the Kings of Scotland frustrated and finally destroyed the Lordship, throwing the Highlands back into worse anarchy than before.

The vision of kilted clans charging downhill to the music of the pipes was born out of the hell of the Highland sixteenth century. The population rose and fretted against the limits of rock and sea,

* THE M ACLEODS THE HISTORY or A CLAN. 1200-

1956. By I. F. Grant. (Faber, 42s.) and the introduction of written feudal tenures had created a baleful John Highlandman class of work-shy swordsmen within the clan and of armed bandits outside it. fames VI identified three classes : the chief, the chief's kinsmen who. lived for war and worked no land, and the ordi- nary people of the land. He tried to limit the powers of the first class and to destroy the second in the interest of the third, and his work through the Statute of Icolmkill might have lasted if it had not been for the vindictiveness of the few chiefs who had taken the King's tint already.

By the seventeenth century the chiefs were, for the most part, men of some education, usually with a sense of responsibility towards their clans- men. But the introduction of money into the High- lands, ably abetted by men like the Dukes of Argyll who bought up their debts, eventually destroyed both the chiefs' position and their sense. of responsibility. By the eighteenth century, the chiefs were much more concerned about their solvency than about politics, and they rose in rebellion as much to defend themselves against any regime which might help Argyll to foreclose as for any love for Jacobitism itself. The Mac- Leods were no exception. Wise and moderate as many of them were, Dr. Grant's Magnificent work in the DunVegan archives discloses how desperate was the financial state of the MacLeods in the eighteenth century, dependent for revenue en- tirely on a tenantry often too famine-stricken to. pay rent, and dunned by tradesmen and creditors. Not long before, the MacNeil of Barra had been so thunderstruck by the audacity of tradesmen from Glasgow arriving with bills on his doorstep that he had retired to his castle roof and opened fire on them. The chiefs used money freely but did not wish, until too late, to understand how it worked.

The death of the clans was imminent : even as. mutual protection organisations they were mori- bund by 1745, for the loyalty of those who fol- lowed their chiefs into the Jacobite army or into. the Independent Companies was not repaid. With one or two lapses, the MacLeods behaved more honourably than many of their neighbours, avoid- ing the forced mass emigration which struck so many areas in the nineteenth century and ruining themselves finally by expenditure on relief during the potato famine. At the end of the famine MacLeod of MacLeod had to let his castle and go to work in London as a junior government clerk at £105 a year.

Other clans left their people in the lurch or cleared them away for sheep farms, showing finally and clearly the failure of the clan leaders and the Gaelic township to make one coherent social unit. This fragile superstructure of rulers upon ruled, which might have been buttressed by the amalgamation of the clans into one Highland principality, was kept precarious by kings in Edin- burgh and London, and then broken down for ever by the coming of a' cash economy. Highland life separated into the sentiment of clanship and the reality of the township. On the one hand, the mistress of Dunvegan carries on her nostalgic rite of memory with thousands of lost MacLeods in the Dominions, while, on the other, the Western Isles continues to vote steadily Labour. The Clan is now the Clan Society, or the John Highlandmen who bellow to puzzled late-night drinkers, 'My fathers were kings when yours were bare-buttocked thieves!' Meanwhile the township still lives an equally proud but less aggressive life as the rea) environment into which a Highlander is born : the environment whose 'tangled generations' Norman MacCaig saw on a Celtic Cross, 'ravelled out'

In links of song whose sweet strong choruses

Arc these stone involutions to the eyes.