already a son named Alphonso; so they probably hoped that he would be the King of England, and that they would still have a separate prince of their own, though an Englishman. As it turned out, Alphonso died, and the young Edward of Carnarvon afterwards became King of England and Wales both. Thus Wales quite ceased to have a separate government; for the title of Prince of Wales, still borne by the eldest son of the reigning sovereign, does not give the prince any power over Wales, which is as much under the queen and the parliament as any other part of Great Britain. 1290. Banish ment of It 24. After this conquest, and before Edward turned his attention to Scotland, he performed an act which to us seems very harsh and cruel, though it was doubtless looked on both by himself and his subjects as most Christian and praiseworthy. This was, that he finally drove the Jews. all the Jews out of the country. We have already seen how cruelly the Jews were treated; how the kings extorted money out of them by all sorts of means, and how the people every now and then rose and massacred them. was generally believed that they did many cruel and wicked things that they stole Christian children and murdered them in secret, and that they tried to get mysterious poisons from foreign lands to poison all Christendom. Though the kings of England had, more or less, protected them from the time of William the Conqueror onward, as being in some sort their own property, their protection did not go far, and all sorts of hard and tyrannical laws were made against them. We may wonder why they chose to live in England at all, since they met with such bad usage; but the fact was, that in other Christian countries they were far worse treated; still more pillaged, and more massacred. 25. But now Edward and his people, in a kind of religious frenzy, ordered all the Jews out of the country. Edward, even now, did not mean to be cruel. He intended them to leave in safety, and, as some say, gave them permission to take their property with them. The people, however, treated the poor Jews most awfully in their flight; and especially the sailors who carried them in their ships. Many of them were wrecked, others were robbed and flung overboard. One instance is given by an old chronicler, who says that he learnt it from a manuscript written at the time. "Some of the richest of the Jews, being shipped in a mighty tall ship which they had hired, when the same was under sail, and had got down the Thames towards the mouth of the river, the master mariner bethought him of a wile, and caused his men to cast anchor, and so rode at the same, till the ship, by ebbing of the stream, remained on the dry sands. The master then enticed the Jews to walk out with him for recreation. And at length, when the Jews were on the sands, and he understood the tide to be coming in, he gat him back to the ship, whither he was drawn by a rope. The Jews made not so much haste, because they were not aware of the danger; but when they perceived how the matter stood they cried to the master for help. He, however, told them that they ought to cry rather upon Moses, by whose guidance their fathers had passed through the Red Sea. They cried indeed, but no succour appeared, and so they were swallowed up by the water.” 26. Edward severely punished these barbarians; but it is to be feared that very few of the 16,000 Jews who were driven away reached the mainland in safety. It was about 350 years from this time before any Jews were allowed to come back, though now, as we know, as many as like live peaceably in England some very rich, some very poor, but all protected by the laws and enjoying the same liberty, comfort, and safety as ourselves. LECTURE XXV.-EDWARD I. SCOTLAND. The inhabitants of Scotland. The old laws. Candidates for the crown. Edward claims the over-lordship. John Balliol. The first revolt. The first conquest. The stone of destiny. of Scotland. 1. We must now see how Edward prospered in his designs upon Scotland. It is evident that, unless that country submitted of its own accord, it would not be so easy to conquer as Wales had been. Though much smaller than England, it was far larger, more powerful, and more civilized than Wales. The people also were very different. We saw that the Welsh, though The people brave and fond of fighting, had not much perseverance; they were easily cowed and daunted. There were a good many of the very same race in Scotland also, the Welsh of the northern part of Strathclyde, which by this time was part of Scotland; and if the whole country had been peopled by the same, perhaps England would, after a while, have subdued them all. But Scotland contained various other races of men as well. It contained men who were by birth English, Irish, and Normans, though they were now all called Scotchmen. 2. The real Scots were in fact Irish. In very old times Ireland, or part of Ireland, was called Scotia, and the Irish people were called Scots. A great many of these had crossed over the narrow sea which divides the two countries, and had settled in the northern part of what we now call Scotland. Here they found already a great many wild people living, who were most likely a family of Celts also, called Picts, and the Romans tell us what trouble these two wild sets of men gave them. It was to keep out the Picts and Scots that Agricola had built his great wall. When they were not fighting the Romans of the Britons, no doubt they spent most of their time in fighting each other; and in some way or other, it is not very clear how, the Scots got the upper hand of the Picts; a Scot king became king over them all, and the whole country north of the Forth and the Clyde was called Scotland. The people in this kingdom were therefore nearly related to the Irish, and spoke almost the same language. The Highland Scotch still have a language of their own, called "Gaelic," but it is almost exactly like the native Irish language, and both Irish and Gaelic are more like Welsh than like English; they are all three Celtic dialects. 3. When our forefathers settled themselves in Britain they not only took possession of what is now called England, but of a good part of what we now call Scotland also. The old Anglian kingdom of Northumberland stretched all the way up from the Humber to Agricola's wall. Edwin, the first Northumbrian king who became a Christian, had built a strong fortress on the northern boundary of his dominions to keep out the wild Scots, which was called Edwin's borough, or Edinburgh. Thus all this part of Scotland, except to the west, where the Welsh lived, was part of England, and full of Englishmen; the very same people whose descendants live there now. As is well known, there is to this day a great difference between the two sets of Scotchmen, the Highlanders and the Lowlanders; the Highlanders being Celts, and speaking a Celtic language; and the Lowlanders, AngloSaxons, and speaking English, or a dialect of English. (The English language is now spreading through the whole country, and all educated Highlanders, and many of the poor also, speak it; but it can hardly be called their native tongue.) 4. After a time the Danes and Northmen came and took possession of the islands and northern parts of Scotland, and many of their descendants still live there. By degrees the Scotch kings got the mastery over more and more of the Lowlands, both of Northumberland and of Strathclyde, as far as to the river Tweed and the Solway Firth, and Edwin's borough became the capital of Scotland, which would doubtless have surprised Edwin very much. 5. After the Norman Conquest the Scotch king showed great kindness to the conquered English, and married the sister of Edgar the Etheling, who was so good that she was afterwards called St. Margaret. A great many of the English who were driven out of their possessions by the Normans took refuge in Scotland, and were kindly received. Not only that, but many Normans came there too, who were also kindly received. great Norman noblemen had large estates in Scotland, in England, and in France also; and it seems hard to say whether they were Scotchmen, Englishmen, or Frenchmen. Strangely enough, Robert Bruce, who is the very darling of the Scotch, and their type of a patriot, belonged to one of these families. Some 6. Thus, by the time at which we have now arrived, the kingdom of Scotland was in size and boundaries just what it is now; and though it contained all these different races of men, they all felt themselves, and were called, Scotchmen, and were much attached to their country. It was probably because there were so many of English race among them (who have the great quality of perseverance, and never know when they are beaten) that, instead of conquering Scotland, as he did Wales, Edward I. thoroughly lost even what he had at first. 7. It would have been much to our advantage if our friend the Archdeacon Gerald, who wrote such amusing and interesting accounts of Wales and Ireland, had travelled in Scotland also; but there does not seem to be any description of the country written at the time. Still we can learn something about the manners and habits of the people from their own old laws, as well as from the English or other writers, who saw them in England, even if they did not travel into Scotland to see them at home. 8. A great part of Scotland is very beautiful, full of mountains and lakes, and wild moors and heaths. This was the part where the wilder people, the Highlanders, lived. Many hundreds of years after this time they were still what we should call very uncivilized, and had many singular customs and ways. At this period even the Lowlands seem to have been far less civilized than England, though, at the same time, in some respects, Scotland was better off than England. The old laws. 9. Some of the old laws of Scotland, which were at this time still looked on as the law of the land, though the nation had in reality quite outgrown them, make us think that they managed matters very oddly. We saw that in the old early English times a man's life was estimated in money. Any one who killed him had to pay a certain sum of money to his family, according to his rank. A king was worth so much, an earl so much, and a plain man so much. The Scotch in the old times reckoned the value of a man not in money, but in cows. The king was worth 1000 cows; a king's son, or an earl, 150. The lowest mentioned is forty-four cows, and a little money as well. Even this man must have been descended from a thane, so we do not know what the value of a plain man, or churl," as the English would have called him, might be. After a time they left off paying in cows and substituted money instead; and in making all these arrangements the old Scotchmen thought they were making an improvement 66 |