Nothing to do with me
Well, it is several weeks into the BBC series by Simon Schama on, supposedly, British history. As I feared, it is not British history at all, but wholly (and arrogantly) Anglo-centric. The first episode seemed encouraging, dealing with pre-Roman and Roman Britain. OK, the Romans did not really get far into Scotland, but this episode at least looked at some ancient Orcadian settlements. I wonder, perhaps cynically, if this would have been the case had similarly impressive settlements existed in England.
However, after the Roman period, there was a description of the period in which England began to come together under the Anglo-Saxon kings. There was no parallel description of the forging of what would become Scotland, which was contemporary (slightly earlier, in fact) and rather more impressive — Alfred the Great, after all, was king of a corner of England only, the bulk of rest of the country being under Viking hegemony.
Much time was spent on the Norman Conquest, which was not immediately relevant to Scotland but did have some long term implications for the British islands — no complaint, then, about that focus, although absolutely nothing was said about what might have been going on in Scotland at the same time.
However, after 1066 the programme became offensively Anglocentric. Henry II of England, for example: he is introduced as “one of our greatest kings” — sorry, pal, he’s nothing to do with me.
The lengthy, inevitable, discussion of Magna Carta was unleavened by any recognition that Scotland has a wholly separate legal system and history. The first mention of any king of Scots was Alexander III — the end of a dynasty!
Nothing was said about him, nor about who Alexander I or II might have been; no mention of Kenneth MacAlpin or even Macbeth, of whom even fairly ill-educated English folk have heard. The only interest in Alexander III was that his death left (after the unmentioned death of the sole, female heir — under ten years old — on the voyage from Norway) a power vacuum.
This was, of course, the period of the Wars of Independence — yet these again were wholly viewed from an English perspective. The motives of Edward Longshanks were considered at length; only Robert the Bruce had any similar treatment. The discussion of John Balliol was cursory, William Wallace was very lightly sketched. Always the consideration was how Edward’s campaign was progressing, not at any time how the Scots were organising their resistance, or how the Scots viewed themselves at the time.
It is infuriating that the BBC should perpetrate this in the wake of devolution. A history of Britain should be a history of Britain; if they want a history of England, that’s fine. But if a history of Britain does not include the stories of Scotland and of Wales (and of Ireland, though it is not technically part of Britain) then it is no history of Britain at all, but an exercise in cultural imperialism of a sort which should be binned and left to rot.
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