Why Scots Should Rule Scotland

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Alasdair Gray. Why Scots Should Rule Scotland

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A CARNAPTIOUS

HISTORY OF

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AUTHOR: I hear that nowadays many children and adults too have been taught little or nothing of history. It is adults I want to teach so here goes.

When the Romans left south Britain it was almost immediately raided by Scots from the west, Picts from the north and pirates from the east. The pirates were pagans from north Germany where they had farmed land in forest clearings, defended their crops with their swords and worshipped Thor and Woden. Pressure or example of the nomad invasions was moving them westward, so Britons invited them in to help expel the Picts and Scots. They expelled them so completely that in two centuries the natives of Albion had also been killed, enslaved or expelled into Cornwall, Wales and Strathclyde. These settlers eventually called themselves English, and the completeness of their conquest is astonishing if we recall that the folk they conquered were descended from builders of Stonehenge and tribes the Romans had not easily defeated. The explanation is that by finally submitting to the Romans (who historians consider a civilizing people despite their use of torture and massacre as public entertainments) the Britons grew too weak to preserve their own culture.

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