bought the Scots and the right to tax them?” demanded the Speaker of the House of Commons in 1714. “We have catch’d the Scots and will hold them fast.” The latest clear breaking of the Treaty of Union was by Margaret Thatcher in her imposition of her notorious Poll Tax (called Community Charge by her Government) in Scotland a year before its imposition in England. Yet the British Parliament still pretends the Treaty of Union runs in Scotland, allowing Scotland its own judicial system and, until recently, its own educational system. But the Westminster Parliament breaks the terms of the treaty with apparent impunity. The legal position of Scotland within the state of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is no longer clear.

Scots

In early medieval Latin, the term Scottus was applied to the Irish. This created confusion when, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the kingdom of Alba began to be referred to as “Scotland.” The confusion is demonstrated by the story of the Würzburg Schottenklöster, which was an Irish Benedictine foundation until 1497. By that time the linguistic change had been made and the terms “Scottus,” “Scotia,” and “Scot” applied to Alba. Scottish clerics demanded that the pope expel the Irish from Würzburg on the grounds that it was, by name, a Scottish foundation. The pope did so and Würzburg became a Scottish monastery until as late as 1803. However, Johannes Scottus Eriugena, Sedulius Scottus, Marianus Scottus, and Clemens Scottus were all Irish and not from Scotland.

Scottish Gaelic

The language of Alba. It began to diverge from Old Irish before the ninth century. The first written differences between Old Irish and Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig) occurs in the ninth century Book of Deer, now in Cambridge. Scottish Gaelic achieved its greatest territorial expansion around 1018 when Alba annexed most of the tiny kingdom of the Angles established at the mouth of the Tweed. According to Dr. John Watson, “in consequence of this the whole of Scotland became for a time Gaelic in speech.” The language did not begin to recede from the “Lowlands” until the fourteenth century. The last native speakers of Galloway did not die out until the late eighteenth century. Today only 1.6 percent of the people of Scotland speak Gaelic as a first language (according to the