Tuesday 12 February 2008

The Berwick question

Fellow bloggers have been covering this story:
English politicians have vowed to repel a cross-border raid to take Berwick-upon-Tweed back into Scotland. Calls to redraw the border and return the town to Edinburgh control would cause major upheaval and require "massive negotiation", it was warned.

Nationalist MSP Christine Grahame has lodged a motion in the Scottish Parliament calling for Berwick to return to "Scottish nationhood".

It calls on Scottish ministers to begin negotiations with Westminster to secure Berwick-upon-Tweed's "restoration" as part of Scotland.

I think that people are missing something here.

First, it's clear from the view from the East Coast Mainline as one enters Berwick that the town looks as if it is in Scotland. The architecture is Scottish and the river is the natural boundary.

But there's something far more significant.

Look at the map. If the River Tweed became the boundary a huge chunk of the North Sea and its oil reserves would become Scottish...

3 comments:

David Farrer said...

Comments made on previous template:

Gordon
Is Christine Advocating handing Shetland back to it's previous owners too? Or does that not fit with the oil plan?

8 April 2008, 13:21:59 GMT+01:00
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dearieme
"Robert the Bruce (Robert de Bruis) was a gaelic-speaking chieftain?": he very possibly was - no-one knows which languages he spoke but the likeliest combination is Norman French and Gaelic. His mother was Countess of Carrick.

23 February 2008, 22:30:10 GMT
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Sahib Mahmood
No problem, Mr Wildgoose and I hope any trips you take north of Berwick - which I believe to be part of England and hope it will remain so - are pleasant ones.

21 February 2008, 16:24:59 GMT
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David B. Wildgoose
Sahib, reading your last post I now realise that I misunderstood the meaning behind your first comment, and so I would like to offer my apologies for my responses. 
 
Anti-Englishness seems to be so much in vogue nowadays that it becomes too easy to see it even when it isn't present.

20 February 2008, 23:15:49 GMT
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Sahib Mahmood
"Sahib: "after the royal court was moved to the English speaking Lothians"... 
 
Glad to see you now agree that the Lothians were English-speaking - and hence originally English." 
 
I haven't changed my mind, I merely disputed the Etymology of the name ‘Edinburgh’, although some do believe it derives from ‘Edwin’s Burgh’ it actually predates that particular king and is derived from the Brythonic Fort of Eidyn (Din Eidyn), I was not referring to dark age politics, the Lothians were "originally English" in that the King of Wessex once claimed them as part of Northumbria but gave them up in 970‘s, although they were never part of modern England, but were part of Anglo-Saxon England if you consider that to be one and the same. The 13th century monk Adam of Dryburgh described the Lothians as "The land of the English in the Kingdom of the Scots", I wouldn't say Stirling was once Welsh on the basis that it was once part of the Gododdin kingdom, but if you wanted to argue that England had a territorial claim to the Lothians some sort of case could be made on the basis of the above facts, although nobody is actually going to this. 
 
"I must say it is to your credit that you appear to have adopted a (civic) Scottish Nationalist outlook."  
 
With all due respect Mr Wildgoose, from what I have written I fail to see how you can have sufficient information to form that view, I have thus far merely corrected a few historical inaccuracies.  
 
"It's just a shame that you also appear to have adopted the typical anti-English attitudes of so many Scottish Nationalists." 
 
Perhaps Mr Wildgoose you would be so kind as to indicate exactly what I have written that has led you to believe that I hold the above attitudes.

20 February 2008, 20:12:45 GMT
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David Farrer said...

Sahib Mahmood
"Sahib, 
 
There are places in England that have Celtic-derived place names. 
 
This obviously proves...?" 
 
Like in Scotland it depends on when they date from, if you look at what I wrote in context you will see that I was challenging the notion that the lowlands always spoke English and the Highlands Gaelic. To give an example, in the Lothians near Edinburgh (which was predominantly English speaking), there is a place called Balantradoch which is a Gaelic name. This dates from the middle ages and it is therefore logical to assume in that time that there was a significant Gaelic speaking section of the population, that is to say the notion that the lowlands always spoke Gaelic does fit with the evidence we have available.

20 February 2008, 18:56:15 GMT
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David B. Wildgoose
Sahib: "after the royal court was moved to the English speaking Lothians"... 
 
Glad to see you now agree that the Lothians were English-speaking - and hence originally English. 
 
I must say it is to your credit that you appear to have adopted a (civic) Scottish Nationalist outlook. It's just a shame that you also appear to have adopted the typical anti-English attitudes of so many Scottish Nationalists. 
 
I had my honeymoon in Scotland in 1993. We visited Gretna Green where we met many lovely people. We also went further into Scotland and to the Isle of Skye. 
 
Unfortunately, I was somewhat taken aback at one point to be subject to a tirade of abuse by a 50+ year old woman when she heard my English accent. 
 
I was lucky, because that was the only such incident I encountered. My cousin and her husband moved to Scotland to live. When she became pregnant they decided that they had had enough of the abuse, regular car tyre slashings and the like and moved back to England. 
 
I am an English Patriot - I love my country and its people. I am not a Nationalist who defines myself by dislike or even hatred of the people of another country. 
 
Unfortunately, Scotland, Northern Ireland and increasingly Wales as well, are full of such Nationalists. 
 
This is why the Union would be better broken up. It would hopefully result in more civilised attitudes towards those of us who are English.

20 February 2008, 12:26:12 GMT
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Simon Jester
Sahib, 
 
There are places in England that have Celtic-derived place names. 
 
This obviously proves...?

20 February 2008, 09:59:43 GMT
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Sahib Mahmood
You brought up Braveheart Mr W, not me, I have never seen it and have no wish to do so. That your grasp of history is poor is confirmed by the above post even discounting the rather silly Braveheart comment. 
 
I can give you a straightforward answer to your question, after the royal court was moved to the English speaking Lothians the language of that region, which more significantly was the language of commerce, became dominant and spread over the rest of the country, mainly via the burghs.  
 
You claimed "lowland Scots have always spoken English", this is a common misconception and that is how I recognised that your knowledge of history was poor. As I stated earlier Gaelic was spoken over much of the lowlands and even in the Lothians Gaelic place names can be found which must logically mean that the language was spoken by a section of the population, otherwise the name would never have taken root and remained.

18 February 2008, 17:46:04 GMT
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David Farrer said...

Comments made on previous template:

David B. Wildgoose
Sahib, if my history is poor, yours is even poorer. Perhaps you'd care to explain why so much of Scotland solely spoke English well before the Act of Union - and despite also being ruled by French-speaking Normans? 
 
Or are you now going to start and claim that Robert the Bruce (Robert de Bruis) was a gaelic-speaking chieftain? 
 
And just for the record, the film "Braveheart" is a work of fiction - that's not how it actually happened.

18 February 2008, 07:56:18 GMT
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Sahib Mahmood
David B. Wildgoose, your history is poor, firstly that Edinburgh was "Edwin's Burgh" is not certain and not even probable, secondly that "lowland Scots have always spoken English" is also patently wrong, much of it was Gaelic speaking, and before that Welsh speaking.

17 February 2008, 13:52:06 GMT
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David B. Wildgoose
Berwick has always looked English to me when I've visited it - the architecture is no different to that elsewhere in Northumberland, or even Durham for that matter. 
 
And it's been exclusively English since 1482, and English for the majority of the millenium prior to that. 
 
But if we're going to resurrect ancient territorial claims, then perhaps Scotland should return Edinburgh, "Edwin's Burgh", founded when it was part of the ancient *English* kingdom of Northumbria? 
 
After all, there's a reason why lowland Scots have always spoken English - they originally *were* English, part of England broken away in the upheavals of the Norman Conquest and Scottish territorial aggression. Hmmm, somethings never change...

16 February 2008, 16:53:01 GMT
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Cleanthes
DAMN. 
 
I was going to make exactly this post. 
 
With a title "It's all about Oil", just to the iraq war google hits...

14 February 2008, 13:22:30 GMT
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Simon Jester
I'm an Englishman and I think it's in England. 
 
Of course, I also believe in the principle of self-determination, so if the residents want it to be part of Scotland, then so be it. 
 
Obviously, the same principle also applies to the inhabitants of the Orkneys and the Shetlands...

14 February 2008, 13:14:04 GMT
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jameshigham
I'm an Englishman and I think it's in Scotland.