Scottish Independence and British Identity: An Unusual Late-medieval Perspective

John Mair is regarded as the first unionist thinker because of his advocacy of dynastic union between Scotland and England in his ‘History of Greater Britain’ (1521). In this article his ‘History’ is reread in a new context as part of a late-medieval Scottish identification of Britain as Scottish. The idea of England as Britain is more than a millennium old; identifying Britain as an extension of the Scottish kingdom, and of Scottish independence as compatible with British identity, is much less familiar. It is traced in this article in John of Fordun's work (written in the mid-1380s), Thomas Barry's poem on the Battle of Otterburn (1388), and in an unpublished compendium of king-list, chronicle and origin-legend material in a recently discovered booklet from the early sixteenth century. It is proposed that, rather than ‘banal unionism’, there was ‘banal Britishness’ based ultimately on sharing the same island. Not only does this suggest that there was even less of an inherent contradiction between Scottish independence and being British than is apparent within the spectrum of unionism delineated by Colin Kidd; it also raises the question of whether there are only Scottish, English and Welsh British identities, each with their own spectrum which have only occasionally intersected as a common Britishness.