When it came to accommodating people, Borthwick was well up to the job. The wings of the castle serve not to flank the entrance, but to provide more rooms for guests. This is quite apparent to anyone who pays a visit to Borthwick today; the castle now functions as a hotel. Inside the castle, the walls, which may once have been plastered or painted, now stand stark and bare. This reveals the outstanding quality of the castle’s construction. Inside and out it is finished with blocks of top-quality ashlar, each piece laboriously cut and shaped by a stonemason before being assembled. This is good evidence of how wealthy William Borthwick must have been, but the stonework also provides other clues about the nature of Borthwick Castle.
In the Middle Ages, stonemasons would leave a mark on every block they cut – not as any mysterious sign, just as a useful way for workmen and their employers to keep tabs on productivity. Mason’s marks are normally visible to some degree on almost any castle you care to visit. I don’t think, however, I have ever visited a castle with so many marks on display as Borthwick. The only obstacle to comparing them is the castle’s present décor – most of the wall-space is covered with pictures, swords and suits of armour – but if you persist, the results are very illuminating. Painstaking investigation of the castle has revealed over sixty different masons’ marks, which
means
that sixty different masons were working on the project (not counting carpenters, glaziers, smiths, quarriers, general labourers and other assorted skivvies). Interestingly, identical marks are found on fireplaces, lintels, curved blocks and flat ones, which suggests that the masons didn’t specialize – each one was actually very versatile. Most importantly, however, comparing the marks reveals identical sets spread right throughout the building, from the basement to the rooftop. The workforce, then, was the same for the whole building project – individuals might come and go, but by and large the men who started the project were also present when the final blocks were heaved into place.
The conclusions drawn from the masons’ marks, the design of the castle, the wording of the licence and the position of William Borthwick invite us to reflect on Borthwick castle as a whole. For a start, as the grandest tower house in Scotland, it cannot have been built in a hurry. Even with sixty masons on the job, it would have taken at least a decade, and possibly a lot longer, to complete. The quality of its construction, as well as its scale, indicate a huge investment of capital over a long period. The castle is far more preoccupied with ornamentation and display than it is with defence. Now, it may sound obvious, but people do not normally pour money into building undefended houses unless they can be reasonably certain that they will get a return on their investment. Borthwick was part of a major building boom, and building booms rarely occur in war-zones. Sir William’s tower house is an expression of confidence – a project prompted not by feelings of insecurity, but by the expectation of a secure future ahead.
So it seems that at mighty Borthwick, as at Threave, first appearances can be deceptive. Both buildings, when subjected to close scrutiny, start to tell a different story about late medieval Scotland. Tower houses did not always stand alone, and were not built in opposition to the Crown. They could stand at the centre of communities during peacetime, and could be built with the king’s permission. As
much
ornate status symbols as fortresses, they must have required many years of peace and stability to construct in the first place.
So where, you may be wondering, does this leave the dastardly Stewart kings or, for that matter, their good-for-nothing nobles? The history books tell us that they were always at each others’ throats, stabbing each other to death and getting killed by exploding cannons. Surely we can’t explain them away so easily?
All Scottish castles have to have at least one legend (apparently the Tourist Board is very strict about this). Ghosts are an obvious favourite for pulling in the punters; bloody battles and grisly murders come a close second. Borthwick is blessed with two such tall tales. Its ghost story is remarkably humdrum (local girl, pregnant by laird, killed with sword, still wails at night, and so on – the only true mystery is why she was never mentioned before the late twentieth century). The other legend, however, is wonderfully inventive, and makes cunning use of the castle’s unusual architecture. In the Middle Ages (that is, the Bad Old Days), the lords of Borthwick Castle were a contemptible bunch. When they were not out getting the locals lasses in trouble, and felt unable to face
another
game of backgammon, they would amuse themselves by playing with their prisoners. These poor wretches, held captive in the bowels of the castle for reasons that history does not relate, were from time to time led to the top of the tower. Once up on the roof, allowed a taste and a view of liberty, they were offered a cruel choice by their gloating captors. They could, if they wished, leap across the gap between the two wings of the castle – a yawning chasm some twelve feet wide, and once apparently complemented by a set of iron spikes at the bottom (with a drop of over a hundred feet, this seems a trifle unnecessary; no doubt the Borthwicks reasoned that, if you’re going to be villainous, you may as well go the whole hog). Since the prisoners had their hands tied behind their backs, the odds were stacked heavily against
success
and strongly in favour of a major cleaning job. If, however, they succeeded in making this death-defying leap, they were rewarded with that prize most treasured by legendary medieval Scots – their freedom!
It must have been fun to be the kind of mischievous Victorian grandfather who made up stories like this (I for one certainly look forward to the day when I can inflict lasting trauma on my own grandchildren with such gruesome tales). When such yarns are presented to us, freed from the constraints of evidence and probability, we are able to recognize them as the work of inspired inventors, and distinguish them from the narrative of proper history. Or are we? What if such tales are woven into the history of a nation, and have become so ingrained, so well known and so self-evident, that questioning their authenticity seems tantamount to heresy?
In actual fact, many of the stories told about the Stewart kings belong to the same category of old wives’ tales. Only recently have historians started to unpick the strands of truth from the rich tapestry of history and legend. For example, the idea that for centuries on end, the Stewarts were locked in an epic struggle for supremacy with their leading subjects has been shown to be false. How, then, you may ask, did we end up with the idea that it ever happened in the first place? Step forward, if you please, storytelling grandfather extraordinaire, Sir Walter Scott.
Walter Scott is rightly revered as Scotland’s most famous literary son. Born in 1771, he overcame a host of personal misfortunes (polio, insolvency and romantic rejection among them) to become the most prolific and popular writer of his age. Esteemed in his own day (he was created a baronet in 1820), he was commemorated after his death by the great monument that still stands on Prince’s Street in his home town of Edinburgh. As a writer, his speciality was making history dramatic. As well as a clutch of historical novels, he also wrote a popular history of Scotland entitled
Tales of a Grandfather
. Like any granddad
trying
to hold the attention of his young audience, Scott packed his history with lots of exciting detail: dramatic reported speech, feats of derring-do, and struggles against impossible odds. The only drawback was that much of this detail was made up. To be fair to Scott, this was not entirely his fault; for the most part, he was just skilfully reworking tales that had been in circulation for centuries. Most of them were first told in the sixteenth century, by writers with very definite political agendas, who had good reason to pour scorn on the rulers of the not-too-distant past. Walter Scott’s unique contribution was to take these biased histories and make them digestible, memorable and hugely popular. Countless editions of the
Tales
were churned out, including specially abridged versions for use in schools. Just as for generations of English people Shakespeare was the only history they ever read, so Walter Scott provided Scotland with a gripping and dramatic version of its medieval and early modern past. Neither author, however, got even remotely close to what had really happened.
So how can we find out ‘what really happened’? The problem facing historians of late medieval Scotland is the appalling state of contemporary written evidence. For Walter Scott, the lack of chronicle material was in itself sufficient proof of his basic point: ‘Everybody was too busy fighting to write anything down’, he reasoned. There is, however, enough evidence to nip the more outrageous myths in the bud. Take, for example, the struggle between James II and the Black Douglases. Walter Scott would have us believe that the Douglases at one point raised forty thousand men against the king; the contemporary Auchinleck chronicle puts the size of the earl’s force at Stirling at just six hundred. Such information has led to a drastically revised picture of the realities of power in late medieval Scotland. The Walter Scott version suggests a king in danger of being eclipsed by his turbulent nobility. The reality was a king who, in spite of his violent and plainly unjust methods, enjoyed wide-ranging support from the political community as he set out to destroy one of his great noble
families
. But kings teetering on the edge of destruction make for more gripping reading than kings doing just fine. Grisly stories always make the front pages and help keep the grandchildren quiet. The reality of the matter was that the Stewart kings worked in partnership with their nobles in the business of governing Scotland.
Indeed, the kings of Scotland would have been hard pushed to rule in any other way. To a large degree, the extent of their power was limited by the Scottish landscape. A country crossed with mountains and lochs is far harder to govern directly than a land of rolling hills and fields. Communication and travel was arduous, not just for the king and his armies but also for his ministers. Even the most energetic monarchs found it difficult to make their presence felt across the kingdom. In addition, Scottish kings had no regular tax base; on the rare occasions that they did try to mulct their subjects, they encountered hostility. As a result, despite their deepest desires to cut a dash on the European stage, the Stewarts were poor cousins in the international family of princes. To take an obvious example, the kings of England in the fifteenth century could count on at least £50,000 a year from taxes and customs. A Stewart king would count himself extremely lucky if he managed to raise a tenth of this sum.
So, geography and poverty limited the extent of the Stewarts’ power. It obliged them to work with their nobles, not against them. It meant that they had to rule through consensus and co-operation, and accept the fact that large chunks of their authority had to be delegated for others to exercise.
Nowhere was this more true than on the northern and western fringes of the kingdom – the point where the lowlands met the highlands. Nowadays, of course, the highlands provide the corporate identity for all of Scotland: the image of the tartan-clad clansman is the predominant motif of the Scottish heritage industry. It will hardly come as ground-breaking news that this is invented history – surely
everyone
now knows that the modern kilt was invented by a nineteenth-century factory owner? The Heritage Highlands are almost entirely the work of nineteenth-century enthusiasts, and once again the chief culprit is Walter Scott. Through his romantic novels (especially
Rob Roy
), and also in his other capacities (he was, for example, Master of Ceremonies during the royal visit of George IV to Edinburgh, an occasion which demanded the rapid invention of a lot of ‘traditional’ festivities and costumes), Scott helped to devise and perpetuate the image of the highlander as a ‘noble savage’. Under the weight of these fantasies, the true identity of the medieval highlands was buried.
There is, however, more than enough evidence to resurrect the real highlanders of the late Middle Ages. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, power in the north and west of Scotland rested with the Lords of the Isles – the Clan MacDonald. They governed these areas as independent rulers in all but name, occasionally paying lip-service to the Stewart kings. Descended from ancient Gaelic and Scandinavian tribes, their power was on the increase from the middle of the fourteenth century. At the height of their power in the fifteenth century, they could muster an army of ten thousand men.
There was much more to these clans, however, than just fighting, as even a cursory examination of their culture will reveal. The extent of their literacy can be appreciated by the large number of written documents that have survived, drawn up in both Gaelic and Latin. The men of the Isles used their great galley-ships more often for trading, especially with their Gaelic relatives in Ireland, than they did for raiding. Highland society took unchecked violence and disorder seriously, and attempted to combat it through a network of local courts. In other words, the Lords of the Isles in the fifteenth century had a reputation for good government.
‘In thair time,’ wrote one sixteenth-century Scottish historian, ‘thair was great peace and welth in the Iles throw the ministration of justice.’
The men and women of the Isles were not savages, but rather the eventual losers in a clash of cultures – a clash that had been on the cards for some time. By the end of the fourteenth century, lowland chronicler John of Fordun acknowledged the culture gap when he described the northerners as ‘wild Scots’.
The highlanders, for their part, had come to regard their southern neighbours as weak and effeminate, and hardly worth taking seriously. They had, for example, started to drink a rather effete new draught called ‘whisky’, rather than drinking red wine like real men. But despite occasionally trading punches, the gloves only really came off at the end of the fifteenth century. The seeds of trouble were sown in 1462, when the Lord of the Isles, John MacDonald, entered into a secret treaty with the exiled Earl of Douglas and the King of England – an agreement in which they conspired to carve up the kingdom of Scotland between them.