Anti-Scottish sentiment
The writings of Ptolemy in particular dominated concepts of Scotland till the Late Middle Ages and drew on stereotypes perpetuating fictitious, as well as satirical accounts of the Kingdom of the Scots.
[3] Medieval authors seldom visited Scotland but called on such accounts as "common knowledge", influencing the works of Boece's "Scotorum Historiae" (Paris 1527) and Camden's "Brittania" (London 1586) plagiarising and perpetuating negative attitudes.
Despite the fact that there is no evidence of the ancestors of the Scots in ancient Gaul,[8] moreover St. Jerome's text was a mistranslation of Attacotti,[9] another tribe in Roman Britain, the myth of cannibalism was attributed to the people of Scotland: What shall I [St. Jerome] say of other nations – how when I was in Gaul as a youth I saw the Scots, a British race, eating human flesh, and how, when these men came upon the forests upon herds of swine and sheep, and cattle, they would cut off the buttocks of the shepherds and paps of the woman and hold these for their greatest delicasy.Accepted as fact with no evidence, such ideas were encouraged and printed as seen in De Situ Britanniae a fictitious account of the peoples and places of Roman Britain.
[12] With the close political ties of the Franco-Scottish alliance in the late Medieval period, before William Shakespeare's Macbeth, English Elizabethan theatre dramatised the Scots and Scottish culture as comical, alien, dangerous and uncivilised.
English fears and hatred were deeply rooted in the contemporary fabric of society, drawing upon stereotypes as seen in Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles" and politically edged material such as George Chapman's Eastward Hoe in 1605, offended King James with its anti-Scottish satire, resulting in the imprisonment of the playwright.
Authors such as Claude Jordan de Colombier in 1697 plagiarised earlier works,[15] Counter-Reformation propaganda associated the Scots and particularly Highland Gaelic-speakers as barbarians from the north[16] who wore nothing but animal skins.
Confirming old stereotypes relating back to Roman and Greek philosophers in the idea that "dark forces" from northern Europe (soldiers from Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands, France and Scotland) acquired a reputation as fierce warriors.
[21] Stereotypes of Highland cannibalism lasted till the mid-18th century and were embraced by Lowland Scots Presbyterian and English political and anti-Jacobite propaganda, in reaction to a series of Jacobite uprisings and rebellions, in the British Isles between 1688 and 1746.
[22][23] From 1701 to 1720 a sustained Whig single party state campaign of anti-Jacobite pamphleteering across Britain and Ireland sought to halt Jacobitism as a political force and undermine the claim of James II and VII to the British throne.
In 1705 Lowland Scots Protestant Whig politicians in the Scottish parliament voted to maintain a status quo and to award financial incentives of £4,800 to each writer having served the interests of the nation.
They were feminised as a parody of the female disguise used by Bonny Prince Charlie in his escape,[32] and as savage warriors that needed the guiding hand of the industrious Lowland Scots Protestants to render them civilised.
[48][49] Members of this group include Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling, Charles Falconer, Derry Irvine, Michael Martin and John Reid.
Panelist Paul Merton had suggested Mars bars would become the currency of a post-independence Scotland, while guest host Ray Winstone added, "To be fair the Scottish economy has its strengths – its chief exports being oil, whisky, tartan and tramps.
In July 2006, former editor of The Sun Kelvin MacKenzie ,who is of Scottish descent himself; his grandfather hailed from Stirling,[51] wrote a column referring to Scots as 'Tartan Tosspots' and mocking the fact that Scotland has a lower life expectancy than the rest of the UK.
[53]In 2015, Conservative MP Lucy Fraser was forced to apologise after criticism for her joke on the floor of the House of Commons that Scots should be sold as slaves to solve the "Lothian question.
