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Less than a thousand years ago we saw the beginnings of the British Empire, with the Norman invasion of 1066 (and all that). Here was a step change in society. Before this time, in the “Dark Ages” families, villages and districts assembling at the Viking “tings” or the Anglo-Saxon “folkmoot” for collective government, facilitated by sophisticated “laws” about procedure and decision-making. Now there was to be a rigid hierarchy backed up by ruthless martial law.

The Normans were particularly brutal with their subjugation of the areas around York, Bradford and other northern towns. Villages and crops were burned and the local population slaughtered. As part of this “ethnic cleansing” strategy, the stronger of the Viking chieftains were paid to leave. Vast areas of land were given over to powerful Norman families, who based themselves in wooden forts at first, then later in stone castles which were to dominate the physical and political landscape of the north of England for hundreds of years.

The Scots, by virtue of of their difficult territory (and some would say their difficult temperament), refused to submit to the Normans. They were, of course, assisted by logistics, as they had been against the Romans - the further north the would-be conquerors went, the more their supply lines became stretched and the less hospitable was the climate and the landscape.However, the threat from their southern neighbours was to push them towards a similarly baronial and nationalist future.

Scotland was a part of Norway before it ever achieved nation status in its own right. Indeed for a short period Norway was ruled from Orkney. Around the 1000AD Scotland came into being as a recognised country. Malcolm Canmore made definite attempts to extend and consolidate land under his control. This brought the Scots into conflict with the English for the first time as the Border was pushed South from the Forth to the Tweed and beyond.
After nearly 200 years of harassment and counter-attack, the Scots were finally able to assert their independence as a nation by defeating the army of King Edward 1 of England at the battle of Bannockburn in 1314. This was followed in 1320 by the Declaration of Arbroath: a document comparable to the Magna Carta in establishing ideas of freedom and democracy within a nation state. The declaration also contains a reference to the celtic origins of the Scots that agrees very well with recent evidence about the early settlers.