10. The People—Race, Language, Population.
The blood of the people of Aberdeenshire, though in the main Teutonic, has combined with Celtic and other elements, and has evolved a distinctive type, somewhat different in appearance and character from what is found in other parts of Scotland. How this amalgamation came about must be explained at some length.
The earliest inhabitants of Britain must have crossed from Europe when as yet there was no dividing North Sea. They used rough stone weapons (see p. 114) and were hunters living upon the products of the chase, the mammoth, reindeer and other animals that roamed the country. Such werepalaeolithic(ancient stone) men. Perhaps they never reached Scotland: at least there is no trace of them in Aberdeenshire. They were followed byneolithic(new stone) men, who used more delicately carved weapons, stone axes, and flint arrows. Traces of these are to be found in Aberdeenshire. A few short cists containing skeletal remains have been found in various parts of the county. In the last forty years some fifteen of these have been unearthed. From these anthropologists conclude that neolithic men lived here at the end of the stone age, men of a muscular type, of short stature and with broad short faces. They were mighty hunters hunting the wild ox, the wolf and the bear in the dense forests which, after the Ice Age passed, overspread the north-east. They clothed themselves againstthe cold in the skins of the animals which they made their prey and were a rude, savage, hardy race toughened by their mode of life and their fierce struggle for existence. They did not live by hunting alone; they possessed herds of cattle, swine and sheep and cultivated the ground but probably only to a slight extent. Their weapons were rude arrow-heads, flint knives and flint axes; and a considerable number of these primitive weapons as well as the bones of red-deer and the primeval ox—bos primigenius—have been recovered from peat-mosses and elsewhere throughout the district. Such have been found at Barra, at Inverurie and at Alford.
Besides these remains, have been found urns made of boulder clay, burned by fire and rudely ornamented. These were very likely their original drinking vessels, afterwards somewhat modified as food vessels, and were, it is supposed, deposited in graves with a religious motive in accordance with the belief common among primitive peoples that paradise is a happy hunting-ground in which the activities of the present life will continue under more favourable conditions.
In addition to these relics the county has a great number of stone circles, circles of large upright boulders set up not at hap-hazard but evidently with some definite object in view. These will be dealt with in a later chapter. The probability is that the so-called Pictish houses, the earth or Eirde houses found on Donside and the lake dwellings at Kinnord already referred to, were the homes of these people. But the whole subject is by no means clear. The general opinion is that the north-eastwas first inhabited by Picts, who may or may not have been Iberians, and that after the Picts came the Celts; but some critics hold that the Picts were only earlier Celts. In any case the Stone Age was succeeded by the Bronze Age, when Bronze took the place of Stone in the formation of weapons. The Celts made their way through Central France to Britain and ultimately to Scotland. Unlike the people they found in possession of Scotland, they were tall (5 ft. 9 in.) These are the ancestors of the Gaelic speaking people of Scotland. They are supposed to have amalgamated to some extent with the Neolithic men whom they found on the spot, and it is certain that they were christianised at an early period. Later on Teutonic tribes, tall, longheaded and fairhaired men crossed from the Baltic to Britain and in due course they too reached Aberdeenshire. But up to the time of David I (1124-1153) the population and institutions of the north-east were entirely Celtic. The Saxon or Teutonic element was introduced by way of the coast and the trading towns. From the towns it spread to the country districts. When Henry II expelled the Flemish traders from England many migrated to the north and formed settlements in many parts of the country, establishing trade and handicraft, particularly weaving, and reclaiming waste land. The defeat of Comyn, the Earl of Buchan, by Bruce in 1308, when Bruce harried Buchan from end to end and spared none, opened the way for lowland immigrants and not only gave an impetus to Teutonic settlements, but helped to kill out the Celtic language and the Celtic ways. These immigrants are really theancestors of the present Aberdeenshire people, but they have been greatly modified by absorbing the Celtic population and mixing with it, for though reduced by slaughter, and by an exodus to the hills, it had not entirely disappeared. Scandinavians from Norway and Denmark also found a footing at various periods in this north-eastern region and these elements are all blended in the modern Aberdonian. Celt, Saxon, Fleming and Scandinavian came in one after the other and possessed the land, forming a new people in which all these elements were fused.
Aberdonians are credited with a distinct individuality, partly the result of race, partly due to environment. The strain of practicality in the Teuton toned down the Celtic imagination and warmth of feeling, and added a certain tincture of the phlegmatic such as is so prominent in the Dutchman. Hence the cautious “canny” nature of the typical Aberdonian, dreading innovations, resisting agricultural novelties, and disliking ecclesiastical changes. They have been described as people
Who are not fond of innovations,Nor covet much new reformations;They are not for new paths but ratherEach one jogs after his old father.
Who are not fond of innovations,Nor covet much new reformations;They are not for new paths but ratherEach one jogs after his old father.
Who are not fond of innovations,Nor covet much new reformations;They are not for new paths but ratherEach one jogs after his old father.
Who are not fond of innovations,
Nor covet much new reformations;
They are not for new paths but rather
Each one jogs after his old father.
This requires some elucidation. They are far from slothful or indifferent. They will uphold with zeal the cause they think right, but they must first reach assured conviction that it _is_ right. They are not swift nor slow to change, but firm.
The Celtic population was in fact absorbed, as we have said, but a certain contingent betook themselves tothe mountains and for long kept up a warfare of reprisals upon those who had dispossessed them. This caused no end of trouble in Aberdeenshire but not without its uses for it braced the occupants in the arts of defence and made them alert and courageous.
No less potent a factor in the evolution of the Aberdonian has been his struggle with a well-nigh irreclaimable soil. The county is without mineral wealth, and the only outlet for his energy was found in attacking the boulder-strewn moors and in clearing them for the plough. To this he set his mind in the eighteenth century with grim determination. Small farmers and crofters by dint of great personal toil and life-long self-sacrifice transformed stony tracts of poor and apparently worthless land into smiling and productive fields. It is this struggle with a malignant soil, more than anything else, that has made the Aberdonian; one triumph led on to another, and to-day the spirit of enterprise in farming is nowhere more pronounced than in this difficult county.
The place names are almost entirely Celtic, and even when they appear to be Saxon they are only Gaelic mispronounced or assimilated to something better known. The parish of King Edward might very plausibly be referred to the northern visits paid by the Hammer of the Scots, but it is really Kinedar, with the GaelicKin(seen in Kinnaird, Kintore and Malcolm Canmore), meaning a head.
The county has a distinctive dialect, really imported and originally uniform with the dialect of the Mearns, and of Northumbria, the dialect spoken at one time allthe way from Forth to Humber. To-day it is called the Buchan Doric and though varying somewhat in different parts of the county and hardly intelligible in the Highlands of Braemar, where Gaelic still survives, it is a Teutonic speech with a thin tincture of Gaelic words such asbourach,closach,clachan,brochan, etc.
The dialect contains many vocables not found in literary English, such asbyousandondeemisfor extraordinary, but where the words are English, they are greatly altered. It is characterised by broad, open vowels; “boots” is pronounced “beets,” “cart” is “cairt,” “good” is “gweed.” The finallis dropped; “pull” is “pu,” “fall” is “fa.” Finalolbecomesow; “roll” is made “row,” and “poll” is “pow.”Whis alwaysf: “white” is “fite” and “who?” (interrogative) is “fa?” It is rich in diminutives like the Dutch—a lassie,a basketie. The finest embodiment of this striking dialect, giving permanent life to its wealth of pathos and expressiveness, is Dr William Alexander’sJohnny Gibb of Gushetneuk.
Scots wha hae, which is supposed to be a characteristic phrase common to all the dialects, would be in Buchan—Scots at hiz, which is largely Norse. “The quynie coudna be ongrutten” is Buchan for “The little girl could not help crying.”
The population of the county which a hundred years before was 121,065 in 1901 was 304,439. Since the county contains 1970 square miles this brings out an average of 154 to the square mile—just a little over the average of Scotland as a whole, but as Aberdeen city accounts for more than half of the total, and towns likePeterhead and Fraserburgh between them represent 25,000, the figure is greatly reduced for the rural districts. The country districts are but thinly peopled, especially on the Highland line, and the tendency is for the rural population to dwindle. They either emigrate to Canada, which is a regular lodestone for Aberdonians, or they betake themselves to the towns, chiefly to Aberdeen itself. Except in and around the principal town, the county has hardly any industries that employ many hands. Agriculture is the main employment, and modern appliances enable the farmer to do his work with fewer helps than formerly: hence the depopulation of the rural districts. The towns tend to grow, the rural parishes to become more sparsely inhabited.