NB page 6 lower

For several hundred years afterwards, “freedom” would often mean swearing allegiance to the local Lord and hoping for some protection in return. For much of our history, ordinary people would keep their heads down, pay their taxes, and most men would try to avoid being forced into the military. This is not very exciting stuff, so even the invention of writing, and then the printing press, has left little record of the history of the “commoners”.

In spite of the best efforts of the Normans, “history” was left to the powerful families who ruled entire regions, slugging it out in ventures such as the Wars of the Roses to see whether they could get their hands on the nation's crown, its army and its treasury. Like the Romans before them, the Normans remained a colonial elite. They added to the English language rather than replacing it, and they hardly contributed to the English gene pool at all.

Ironically, the Scots aristocracy would increasingly look towards France for support, allowing a whiff of the other “gallic” to float around the growing cities like Edinburgh.

Meanwhile, in the wilder and more inaccessible areas of the land, powerful families ran free of state control. The rievers of the border-lands (both English and Scottish) would raid each other's territory and also otherwise calm areas, causing havoc among the villages, and this cattle-rustling and gangsterism would continue almost through to unification in 1707.