Posted: Wed May 11, 2011 7:41 pm Post subject: Romance the 'Scottewatre
the excellent piece of water that is called in Scottish the 'Froth', in British the 'Werid', and in Romance the 'Scottewatre' that is, the Water of the Scots, which divides the kingdoms of the Scots and of the English, and runs near the town of Stirling.[33] ”
Here Scottish refers to the language now called the Middle Irish language, British to the Welsh language and Romance to the Old French language, which had borrowed the term Scottewatre from the Middle English language.
In this period, little of Scotland was governed by the crown. Instead, most Scots lay under the intermediate control of Gaelic and increasingly after the twelfth century, French-speaking Mormaers/Earls and Lords.
Until the thirteenth century, Scotland referred to the land to the north of the river Forth, and for this reason historians sometimes use the term "Scotland-proper". By the middle of the thirteenth century, Scotland could include all the lands ruled by the King of Scots, but the older concept of Scotland remained throughout the period.
For legal and administrative purposes, the Kingdom of the Scots was divided into three, four or five zones: Scotland-proper (north and south of the Grampians), Lothian, Galloway and, earlier, Strathclyde. Like Scotland, neither Lothian nor Galloway had its modern meaning. Lothian could refer to the entire Middle English-speaking south-east, and latterly, included much of Strathclyde. Galloway could refer to the entire Gaelic-speaking south-west. Lothian was divided from Scotland-proper by the river Forth. To quote the early thirteenth century tract, de Situ Albanie,
Neither the political nor the theoretical boundaries of Scotland in this period, as both Alba and Scotia, corresponded exactly to modern Scotland. The closest approximation came at the end of the period, when the Treaty of York (1237) and Treaty of Perth (1266) fixed the boundaries between the Kingdom of the Scots with England and Norway respectively; although in neither case did this border exactly match the modern one, Berwick and the Isle of Man being eventually lost to England, and Orkney and Shetland later being gained from Norway.
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