of blood renders necessary some account of the racial relationship. It
has been a favourite theme of the English historians of the nineteenth
century that the portions of Scotland where the Gaelic tongue has ceased
to be spoken are not really Scottish, but English. "The Scots who
resisted Edward", wrote Mr. Freeman, "were the English of Lothian. The
true Scots, out of hatred to the 'Saxons' nearest to them, leagued with
the 'Saxons' farther off."[2] Mr. Green, writing of the time of Edward
I, says: "The farmer of Fife or the Lowlands, and the artisan of the
towns, remained stout-hearted Northumbrian Englishmen", and he adds that
"The coast districts north of the Tay were inhabited by a population of
the same blood as that of the Lowlands".[3] The theory has been, at all
events verbally, accepted by Mr. Lang, who describes the history of
Scotland as "the record of the long resistance of the English of
Scotland to England, of the long resistance of the Celts of Scotland to
the English of Scotland".[4] Above all, the conception has been firmly
planted in the imagination by the poet of the _Lady of the Lake_.

"These fertile plains, that soften'd vale,
Were once the birthright of the Gael;
The stranger came with iron hand,
And from our fathers reft the land."

While holding in profound respect these illustrious names, the writer
ventures to ask for a modification of this verdict. That the Scottish
Lowlanders (among whom we include the inhabitants of the coast
districts from the Tay to the Moray Firth) were, in the end of the
thirteenth century, "English in speech and manners" (as Mr. Oman[5]
guardedly describes them) is beyond doubt. Were they also English in
blood? The evidence upon which the accepted theory is founded is
twofold. In the course of the sixth century the Angles made a descent