"They are unworthy of freedom who expect it from other hands than their own" - the Calton Weavers, 1787

(image above from this blog)

In Burns-era Ulster and Scotland there were tremors of social revolution emerging from weavers' looms, shuttles and pens. Our own 'Weaver Poets' captured the mood of the country of the 1798 Rebellion and some of them were personally involved. In our modern day land-locked mentality we forget that, just across the water, the simultaneous 'United Scotsmen' movement and the weavers of Scotland had similar experiences and convictions.

Calton today is part of Glasgow but in the 1780s it was a small weaving village. The Calton Weavers went on strike in 1787 and on 2nd September six of the weavers were killed by soldiers of the 39th Regiment who opened fire on a crowd of several hundred. Three of them - John Page, Alexander Miller and James Ainsley, were killed instantly. Three more died later of their wounds. A crowd of around 6000 people attended the funerals.

Fifty years later, a memorial at Abercromby Street in Bridgeton was erected, with the inscriptions:

"They are unworthy of freedom who expect it from other hands than their own"

"They Though Dead Still Liveth. Emulate Them." 

(Given what day it is, this post is not a Brexit-related metaphor, but Brexit will not be the last of the changes ‘these islands’ will experience...)

Alexander Ales / Alane / Alesius and the Bible in the 'Scotish Language', 1500s

I have posted about Edinburgh-born Alexander Ales / Alane / Alesius (1500–65) before (see 2016 article here) an early Scottish reformation convert who sought refuge in Luther's Germany in 1530, where he changed his surname and where he is still today remembered through a street name in Leipzig. From Germany he wrote to the then King of Scotland –

"in two eloquent Latin epistles, indited and printed in Wittenberg itself, in behalf of liberty to his Scottish countrymen, to read and to teach the Word of God in their mother tongue" – Peter Lorimer, Precursors of Knox, p168 (1857) 

Interestingly he addressed the King as "To the renowned King of Scots, James the Fifth, Duke of Albany, Prince of Ireland and the Orkneys". These two letters were entitled Alexandri Alesii Epistola contra Decretum quoddam Episcoporum in Scotia quod prohibet legere Novi Testamenti libros lingua vernacula (1533) and Alexandri Alesii Scott Responsio ad Cochlaei Calummas (1534). This chapter on Archive.org seems to include translations of each; his aim seems to be to bypass the bishops and appeal directly to the King to campaign for religious liberty for the people of Scotland.

Alesius' great opponent Johann Cochlaeus, claimed that Alesius was about to produce a bible in the 'Scotish language', to be translated from Luther's German edition, but Alesius pointed out to the King in one of the letters that 'I do not know the German' (p 460 in this book).

I do wonder if, someday in an archive somewhere in Germany, an unpublished manuscript of an Alexander Alesius Scots language Bible translation might be found.

• Dictionary of National Biography entry here
• 62 original Alesius manuscripts are listed here
• 98 original Alesius manuscripts are listed here
• This biography by the Tudor Society is succinct
• A chapter about him in The Scots in Germany (1902) is online here
• This short reference is also interesting:

Robert Burns and Portaferry - the friendship of James McManus and James Shanks

Patrick McManus (1863–1886) was a poet from Kearney, a small coastal clachan between Cloughey and Portaferry, shown in the pics above. It is now owned by the National Trust.

He had attended Ballyphilip National School on the outskirts of Portaferry. Politically speaking was an Irish Nationalist. His poems appeared under the pseudonym 'Slieve Donard', the highest mountain of the Mournes. Culturally though he had a strong Ulster-Scots influence from living in the Upper Ards. His father James McManus was described as 'the staunchest of Catholics' but was also huge Robert Burns fan, who once said that ‘had Burns been a Catholic, he would have been a saint’. This cultural overlap and intermingling is very reminiscent of the Lynn C Doyle story I posted here recently. Patrick arrived in Philadelphia in April 1886 but tragically he died there just a few months later in August of that same year, aged just 23.

This story was written down by another Portaferry man, John McGrath (1864–1956) in an 1890 article in The Irish Monthly of March 1890 (see below). McGrath was the literary editor of the Irish National Land League publication called United Ireland from 1891–1902 and a friend of WB Yeats.

Their contemporary, the Portaferry Presbyterian farmer, botanist, geologist and antiquarian James Shanks (1854–1912), was a close friend of James McManus. Shanks attended Portaferry National School in the village opposite the Presbyterian church (which in recent years has been refurbished and rebranded as Portico Ards). Like McManus and McGrath, Shanks was also in favour of land reform and he became a leading light in the local Tenant Right Association. In a biography written by James C Rutherford, this scene is recalled –

"... one day I spent several hours behind the quay were James McManus was repairing a boat, listening to his talk. He ranged over the whole gamut of knowledge from navigation to Bobby Burns; but he left on my mind the impression that if anything in the world were compared to Burns, it would be 'as moonlight unto sunlight and as water unto wine'... Burns threw light upon navigation, mathematics, classics, religion, everything. No matter what formed the body of a subject, Burns formed the tail, and the tail always wagged the body... in my boyish enthusiasm I believed that Burns was the short cut to everything, and the open sesame to the doors of knowledge..." 

James Shanks and James McManus were of different religious backgrounds but yet were in many ways cut from the same cloth, with similar convictions and interests. They are described in the Rutherford biography as "literary comrades", a David and Jonathan combination, who would spend hours talking to each other in the streets of Portaferry. When McManus died "Shanks was left for a time companionless and disconsolate". Rutherford quoted a verse of a poem that Shanks wrote for McManus, which was written in the 'standard habbie' format made famous by Burns.

• McGrath's entire article 'An Ulster Poet' on the life and writings of Patrick McManus can be read here

................

PS – In the weeks before 'Ulster Day' on Monday 9 September 1912, Portaferry witnessed a torch-lit procession through the town (featuring the Carraig-Ulaidh Flute Band from Portaferry, St Mary’s Band from Shrigley and five Highland pipers) to St Patrick's Hall where the prominent Nationalist and antiquarian F.J. Bigger spoke on the ‘Work and Progress of the Gael’. Though very much in favour of Home Rule, the meeting is reported to have attracted ‘a good few Protestants’ and to have been conducted in an amicable spirit. On the previous New Year’s Eve the Carraig-Ulaidh Flute Band and Portaferry Accordion Band jointly paraded the town, concluding by cheering each other and playing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ together.

Mr & Mrs Hall's account of the people of County Down, 1843

(Intro - in 1844 Mr & Mrs Hall visited Ayr to experience and record the events of the major Burns Festival which was held on 6 August - see their account and illustrations here from the Illustrated London News)

"...The people of the county Down as a whole are of Scotch origin. There are of course numerous exceptions but so small a proportion do they bear to the whole that the lowland or Ayrshire dialect was commonly spoken all over the county till about the middle or towards the end of the last century.

At this moment a sort of mongrel Scotch is spoken in and near Ballynahinch, Dromara, Saintfield, Comber, Killinchy, Holywood, Bangor, Newtownards, Donaghadee, Kirkcubbin, Portaferry &c. The nearness of this county to the Mull of Galloway has made the districts on the two sides scarcely distinguishable and the stream of Scottish population can be traced most distinctly from Donaghadee and Bangor upwards to the interior.

In the eastern part of the parish of Hillsborough the Scottish dialect and religion are still preserved its western extremity is among the colonists of James I where the dialect is much more interesting being a mixture of pure English with that of the olden time.

The eastern district of the county about Ardglass lies opposite to the Isle of Man and is one of the nearest points to any English sea port. Hence the settlers there at an early period as well as at present were English as its castles and towers amply prove. The remains of three or four are still in existence and it appears from Harris that they formed part of a long range of booths for the sale of merchandise open towards the land for the purposes of trade and having loopholes towards the sea with a view to defence. The English settlers spread to a little distance round hence in Downpatrick as well as in various other towns of Ireland the three leading streets are the English, Irish and Scotch quarters respectively.

Until about a century ago an extensive Irish speaking population existed near Downpatrick but they have all disappeared and the only traces of the language are to be found in the mountainous districts where the people are almost exclusively Irish or in the neighbourhood of Carlingford Bay at the south.

The English settlers under the various Knights of the Plantation of Ulster spread up the valley of the Lagan meeting the Scotch and Irish on the banks of the Lagan from Belfast to Lisburn then by Hillsborough formerly called Crommelin or the village of the crooked stream and changed by Sir Moyses Hill to Hillsborough, Druibh Mor Dromore, and the bridge of the Bann, Bannbridge.

At various points of this line the people are as distinct in religion dialect habits wealth and other characteristics as their respective nations are on the opposite sides of the border. It is even said that a Down farmer Scotch can be known from an Antrim one English in a fair or market by his hardness in driving a bargain..."

- from Ireland: Its Scenery, Character, &c, Volume 3, 1843

'The Irish Border as a Cultural Divide' - Max Heslinga (1962)

With all the clamour about Brexit's hard border, soft border, technological border, blah blah blah, I've heard nobody talking meaningfully about the cultural differences within the island of Ireland. It's all jurisdictions, administrations, bureaucracy, talks, parties, elections, border polls and politics.

But without an understanding of cultural values, traditions and their holistic expression within communities, all that politics and elections do is give those communities some little say once every four years or so as to who rules them and how they are ruled. Democracy isn't always empowering, or stabilising, for the demos.

The late Dutch academic geographer Dr Marcus Willem (Max) Heslinga's book was once well-known, but is hardly ever mentioned today. He travelled around Ireland from 1959–1961 - even the structure of the contents pages show a mastery of the subject. He saw the concept of the border as a reflection of cultural difference, a 1920s outworking of many centuries of cultural formation, but one which had broken the British Isles and not just Ireland.

He talks about the 'land boundary' and the 'sea boundary' - from the back cover blurb '...the Irish land boundary could be interpreted as a cross-channel extension of the Scottish border...'.

The foreword by Estyn Evans' is about as concise and clear as it's possible to be, and even though it's an academic publication this is 210 pages of accessible, well-reasoned and highly recommended reading, a fascinating pre-Troubles cultural study. And he uses the term Ulster Scots with ease.

Whatever the political future might be, culture and community matters more.

The legends of Robert Burns in Ulster

Many years ago the Director of a local museum recounted to me an oral tradition story which had been passed on to him by the late librarian Jack McCoy (1950–1987) of Ballynahinch. [ Jack McCoy was a renowned Local History Librarian and a collector of local folklore on a wide variety of subjects with a specific interest in County Down - his investigations into the Betsy Gray traditions, published in 1989 as Ulster's Joan of Arc, are exemplary]. The version I heard was of a Robert Burns visit to Donaghadee, via Portpatrick. I have now come across a very similar version of the same story in a book called Burns and Tradition by Mary Ellen Brown (Macmillan, 1984) which was evidently collected in Scotland.

From memory, the version I heard was:

I can tell by your claes

And the cut o your hair

You're the fam'd Rabbie Burns
Frae the auld toon o Ayr.

Sadly I can't remember the wording of the response, but it was very similar to the above.

Richard Hayward 'Border Foray' – green, blue and tartan

The famous cover of this 1957 book by Ulster author and broadcaster Richard Hayward is packed with details and stories. The book itself is a single narrative, not broken down into chapters. The front endpaper says that 'this book is written from the human, historical and topographical viewpoint rather than from the political angle, and for the most part it sheds a friendly and liberal-minded light on a highly controversial problem'. As Brexit looms, the border is more of an issue than ever, and it even has its own Twitter account with over 100,000 followers (click here). 

Hayward observed our three-stranded linguistic heritage, which he describes on page 97 as '... a piece of Irish tweed, woven of three predominant coloured strands – green, blue and tartan... green for Irish, blue for English and tartan for Scottish...'. He goes on to then describe how various regions within Ulster have differing proportions of these three, for example 'the southern Ulster dialect has more of the green and the blue than the tartan,', and so on. He understands our inherent complexity and variety.

A friend often comments to me about our tragic lack of a Seamus Heaney figure, someone who can see and articulate beyond the stereotypes, a vision that we badly need today. We also lack a Sam Hanna Bell, and we also lack a Richard Hayward.