[QUOTE=Frylock]
I’m just wondering how much fact there is to the claims in the first paragraph. Did the Scottish people come from Scythia? (That’s in present day Russia or thereabouts, isn’t it? But then how did they get from there to Scotland “by way of the Pillars of Hurcules”?) Did they reside in Spain? Do tell.
Also, as regards both paragraphs, I am wondering what the source for these stories was.
[/QUOTE]
By 1320 these ideas were something of a polemical cliché as they had regularly been used by the Scots against the English over the previous thirty years, most notably in the processus compiled by Baldred Bisset in 1301 as an earlier attempt by the Scots to appeal to the pope.
[QUOTE=aldiboronti]
This type of rhetoric was common among the nations of that time. England had its own legend, that Britain was founded by the Trojan Brutus and his followers, fleeing Troy after the Greeks sacked it in the Trojan War. (London was styled Troynovant, New Troy, by many writers.)
[/QUOTE]
A point which is even more germane than that. It is not just that the Brutus legend is the obvious parallel example of such an origin legend. No, it was that the Brutus legend was the central plank of the English claims to overlordship over Scotland and so had to be countered by the Scots with their own alternative origin legend.
Indeed, there has long been a debate about how far one might argue that the Scottish version had been invented in this period specifically to counter those English arguments. Not that anyone denies that parts of what the Scots were claiming drew on earlier sources. The idea of a Scythian origin (and of a descent from Scota) dates back in Irish traditions at least to the eighth century as it can be found in the Lebor Gabála. But it may well be that it is only with the threat from Edward I that this became centrally important to the Scots. The point about John of Fordun is that, writing a generation later, he then becomes the first historian to incorporate this line of argument into a grand narrative account of Scottish history.
It should also be noted that the later influence of the Declaration is very uneven. That it had ever existed was soon entirely forgotten and it was only rediscovered when a version of it was published by Sir George Mackenzie in 1680. It then becomes enormously influencial, but not really as an expression of nationalism but as support for those Scottish writers who wished to curtail royal power and who, just as importantly, wished to do so using non-English historical arguments. Paradoxically, these writers were often those most committed to defending this ultra-ancient origin for the Scottish monarchy (a reflection of the continuing influence of George Buchanan) and it was a royalist Jacobite exile, Thomas Innes, who in the 1720s, in order to defend the idea of strict hereditary succession, first debunked John of Fordun and, with him, the entire origin myth up to Kenneth MacAlpin.
It was only later, with the rise of romantic nationalism, that the Declaration of Arbroath came to be seen in purely nationalistic terms. And even then there is a further paradox, as nationalist sentiment in nineteenth-century Scotland was often combined with strong support for the Union. Many Victorians Scots saw no contradiction between thinking that the Wars of Independence had been a Good Things, while thinking exactly the same about the Union. In fact, the assertions of Scottish independence before 1603 and 1707 could be viewed as the necessary preconditions for what was seen as a Union between equals based on agreement rather than conquest. For some academic historians (most obviously Colin Kidd), the real question is actually not why nationalism develops so early in Scotland but rather why it develops so late.