Published in Scotland Magazine Issue 30 on 01/12/2006.

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Written in the blood (Auld Alliance)

The Auld Alliance was an ancient series of treaties that allied Scotland and France against their mutual enemy. James Irvine Robertson reports

‘Gardy loo’ was the famous shout from the upper floors of the Edinburgh tenements. It behoved the pedestrian to be quick on their feet, as it presaged a shower of effluent from a chamber pot onto the street below.

In the taverns they burned brown paper to counter the stench. The shout was actually gardez l’eau – “beware the water” in French.

A Scots cook still puts a gigot on an ashet; if English she would place a leg of lamb on a serving plate. Such words came to Scotland during the centuries that the French were our partners in the Auld Alliance against the Auld Enemy. For England, the old enemy was France, but for Scots, it was England.

It did not begin that way. Britain emerged from the Dark Ages split into a myriad of little kingdoms squabbling amongst themselves for power and territory. As centuries passed, some were swallowed up by larger neighbours or united through marriage. Three nations were left on the mainland: Scotland, Wales and England and, aside from the ever-tendentious question of the border between England and Scotland, relationships were generally amicable. The ruling elites of both countries (for the most part of Norman origin) held land and estates in France as well as in each other’s territory. Perhaps the greatest of the early medieval kings of Scotland David I (c1084-1153) was also Earl of Huntingdon, and spent much of his early life at the English Court where his sister was the Queen.

He installed a largely Anglo-Norman aristocracy in Scotland w.....

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By James Irvine Robertson

Section : Scottish History

Page number : 42