SCOTTISH HISTORICAL ESSAYS.* Irs Mr. Louis Barbe's attractive new volume
the essay which will excite most attention is that which sketches the early history of coal-mining in Scotland. There can be no doubt that, just as the ultra-Prussian Toryism of eighteenth-century Scotland produced the stern, unbending Radicalism that has characterized the Scots since 1832, so the serfdom imposed on the Scottish miners until the days of Pitt left bitter memories which account for the strangely un-English temper exhibited by Scottish miners' leaders like the late Mr. Keir Hardie or Mr. Smillie. If these men have shown a closer kinship to the soured revolutionaries of Central and Eastern Europe, like Marx and Bakunin, than most British Trade Union representatives would care to own, the reason is that they have been acutely conscious of the wrongs suffered by their class in bygone days. Mr. Smillie's constant references to past history at the Coal Commission illustrated this curious mental attitude. Many English people thought that he was simply trying to confuse the issue and to mislead the innocent Chairman and other members who knew nothing about the Scottish coalfields. But it is equally probable that Mr. Smillie, like many of his countrymen, has brooded over the social evils of the past until he has become unable to realize the progress that has been made during the last century. We may add that it is not difficult for any one living in a Scottish mining district to underrate the advance of civilization in Great Britain. The intense conservatism of the Scottish people in all social usages—a conservatism which until the last General Election had included, with rare exceptions, a blind adherence to the Liberal Party, whatever its policy might be—is shown by the Scottish miner in his preference for the style of living which his forefathers practised under George III. He clings to the small and primitive house of two rooms, or even one room, partly because it is cosy and gives his wife very little domestic work to do, partly because it costs only a shilling or two weekly as in the days of his ancestors. It must be admitted that the immigration of semi-civilized Polish miners, and also of a number of untutored Irish labourers, into Lanarkshire has seriously hampered the efforts of the more intelligent Scottish miners to improve the condition of their people. But the taint of the old serfdom lingers. To acutely sensitive men like Mr. Smillic—if we judge him aright—the miners, after more than a century of freedom, may seem to be still enslaved.
It is noteworthy, according to Mr. Barb& that the serfdom from which the Scottish miners were released by the British Parliament in 1799 was not a mediaeval survival. Until the Reformation the miners were as free or unfree as other workers. But under James VI the coal trade, which was of great antiquity, began to be developed by the new men who had secured the monastic lands. King James himself visited the once famous mine at Culross, which extended for a mile under the Forth and had a wharf below high-water mark. James, after being conducted through the workings from the shore end, emerged on the wharf and found himself surrounded by the tide. The timorous King, who had had a wide experience of conspiracies, raised a cry of "Treason," and had to be taken ashore with all speed. The coal-owners in Fife, the Lothians, and Ayrshire soon found the eld supply of labour deficient. As they had absolute control over the immature Scottish Parliament, they obtained in 1606 an Act which made it a felony for any miner to change his employment without his master's leave or without the approval of a local Magistrate: The man thus offending was to be treated as a thief ; his new employer was to be liable to damages of £100. Furthermore, "power and commission was given to all owners of coal-houghs [or pits] to apprehend all vagabonds and sturdy beggars, and to put them to labour." This drastic Act was supplemented in 1641 by the Covenanting Parliament, then on the point of intervening on behalf of Constitutional liberties in England. The new measure put the pumpmen and the doorkeepers in the mines on the same footing sss the hewers. It forbade an employer "to seduce and bring coal-hewers from their masters" by offering them more than twenty marks apiece. It ordered colliers to work six days a week :hroughout the year, and to abstain from " playing " at Christmas or Easter, under penalty of a fine of twenty shillings for every idle day and corporal punishment halides. Again in • Sidelights on the History, Industries, and Social Life of Scotland. By Louis A. Bart4. London; J31ackie. [ie% Cid. net.] 1672 the Scottish Parliament, anxious to encourage the export of coal to the Low Countries, confirmed the coal-owner's right to impress vagrants for the mines, and authorized him to discipline them by "all manner of severitie and correction, by wheeping and otherwaycs, excepting torture." The Scottish Act of 1701, which corresponds to our Habeas Corpus Act, expressly excluded colliers from its purview. It was reserved for the Union Parliament to discover that the Scottish colliers "were in a state of slavery and bondage, bound to the collieries where they worked for life, transferable with the collieries when their original masters had no further use for them," and to apply a remedy. An Act of 1775 provided that men newly entering the Scottish coal-pits should retain their freedom, and that those already employed should become free after seven or ten years on application to the Sheriff, unless indeed they were guilty of striking for higher wages, in which case they would be bound for two years more. The Act, however, failed to relieve the majority, who were too poor or too ignorant to have recourse to the Sheriff Court. In 1799, therefore, the Tory Parliament led by Pitt freed all the Scottish colliers at a stroke, just as it was to abolish the slave trade a few years later. The miners have thus been free men for nearly four generations ; but it is not altogether surprising, though regrettable, that the traditions of their former bondage have been handed down among them, with a traditional suspicion of the coal-owners whose ancestims oppressed there in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Mr. Barbe's book is the work of a scholar who delights in the picturesque anecdotes that, in default of full records like those of England, make up so much of Scottish history. He is specially interested in the fifteenth century, when the " auld alliance" with France was in full vigour. He tells us of the. marriage of Princess Isabella, sister of James II., to Francis, Duke of Brittany, in 1442. She was widowed in 1450, but she refused point-blank to face the horrors of the voyage home to Scotland and spent the rest of her days in Brittany. She did not die till 1495 at earliest, when the Breton duchy had been absorbed by the French Crown. Another paper deals with "A Plot in the Scottish Guard" in 1455. The ringleader, Robin Campbell, was tried and executed on a charge of plotting with the English garrison of Caen to deliver to them the French King and his chief Ministers, who were present at the siege. The Scottish King intervened on behalf of Campbell's associates, especially one Robert Cunningham, and they were banished. Mr. Barbe recalls, too, the charter by :which Charles VII. in 1428, when his fortunes were at their lowest ebb, assigned to James I., in return for military support against the English invaders, the province of Saintonge with the port of Rochefort. The Scottish troops were not sent, and the province was not handed over. But a century later Scottish statesmen were still debating the possibility of grasping this will-o'-the-wisp. Two chapters are given to Perkin Warbeek's stay in Scotland and to "The White Rose of Gordon," Lady Catherine Gordon, whom James IV. married to Perkin. When we read, of the elaborate reception which the Scottish King gave to Perkin Warbeek, and of the very large expenditure to which be committed himself on Perkin's behalf, it becomes difficult to credit the traditional Tudor thory that Perkin was a low-born impostor. It is noteworthy that his wife, Lady Catherine, was most courteously treated at Henry VII.'s Court ; she was provided with rich clothes at the Royal expense and received considerable grants of land. It is curious, too, that from August, 1511, to May, 1513, a woman personating her was living in Scotland and attending James 1V.'s *Court ; the Lord High Treasurer's accounts show a payment of nearly £70 for one of the pseudo. Catherine's gowns. Another odd fact is that when the real "White Rose" was married to James Strangways in 1512, her lands were regranted to her and her husband subject to the condition that she should not leave England without the King's licence. Lady Catherine lived to marry two more husbands, Sir Matthew Cradock and Christopher Assheton. She had no children by any of her marriages. Perkin Warbeck, whoever he was, did not leave an heir to vex the uneasy Tudors.
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