Independence. Alasdair Gray

of South Britain which were like the original North German homeland they had left. Stone buildings reminded them of the legions they had fought with, so their homes and the halls of their kings were built with wood at first outside Roman towns whose names ended in Caster or Chester. There is a verse by an Anglo-Saxon poet who was fascinated by the Roman temple to Hygiea at Bath. It says the builders must have been giants, because common men could not handle stone like that.

      The legions had brought Christianity to Britain after emperor Constantine made it an official Roman religion. Before they were pulled out, bishops from Albion attended a Synod of the Catholic Church in Arles, a French city now. But the Anglo-Saxons wiped out South British Christianity so completely that days of our week are now called after their gods: Wodensday, Thorsday, Friggsday.

      From agriculture, pottery and well-cut clothes to ship-building and air flight, every useful art and science has been achieved peacefully, without deliberate bloodshed. Without bloodshed they would have spread, perhaps more slowly but taking deeper root, where they were not imposed by force. The same is true of great ideas. Jesus took the commandment “Thou shall not kill” (which Moses had only meant Jews to practise between themselves) and told all people to practise it, choosing to die rather than kill. That is why his teaching spread first among slaves, women, and others too weak to resist masculine domination. It is why the first Christians refused to be soldiers. When the Emperor Constantine made Christianity legal, Catholic theologians said God had established the Empire before the birth of Jesus so that Christianity would be spread by armed might where peaceful persuasion failed. Though Christianity brought to South Britain by the Romans was eradicated by the Anglo-Saxon pagans, it took root in Hibernia which the legions had never attacked.

      In 400 AD the nine Irish kingdoms were chiefly pastoral, had no towns, but many monks in small cell clusters. They taught the gospel from Saint Jerome’s Latin Bible and copied out pages, often decorating them with beautiful, intricate colour designs. In their own Gaelic speech they wrote some of Europe’s earliest surviving vernacular poems. The warlike Irish kings left these monks in to promote their religion in peace. The Irish missionary Columba brought Christianity to the Scottish kingdom of Dalriada in 563 AD, thirty-four years before the Italian missionary Augustine brought it to the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Kent. In those days Hadrian’s Wall, though an artificial rather than natural barrier, still separated warring Pictish kingdoms in North Britain from equally belligerent ones in the South. Confusingly for us, the Irish in those days were called Scots, so Dalriada was called the Kingdom of the Scots. By the 9th century Dalriada, through alliances and conquests, had given the Scottish name to the whole of Pictland, as a similar process was uniting Anglo-Saxons of South Britain in what they finally agreed to call England.

      These two nations had radically different cultures. Their separate governments lasted into the present day

      with a hiatus between 1707 and 1999.

      This is worth discussing.

      4: Anglo-Scots Differences

      ARECENT POLITICIAN supported what is now called the United Kingdom by saying that the wish for an independent Scottish government derived from nostalgia, not geography. Patrick Geddes, that practical pioneer of sociology, disagreed, for he said that all national cultures grew from the grounds where they flourished.