Letter: History lesson

It sets my birse up when people who know nothing of history except the phrase "Anglo-Norman" use it as if it were a club that could demolish all opposition.

By The Newsroom

Published 28th Feb 2019, 14:03 BST

Will John McTernan (Comment, 23 November) please try to understand that by the time of the Declaration of Arbroath, even the English nobility had nothing "Norman" about them; to apply the phrase "Anglo-Norman" to the Scottish nobility is simply wrong.

I suspect the mighty shadow of Sir Walter Scott lies behind this absurdity. Even those who have never read Ivanhoe have a conception of a Saxon-versus-Norman dichotomy formed by that wonderful novel. Yet all historians agree that Scott's presentation is fundamentally mistaken: the gulf between the Cedrics and the De Bracys of actual history was based on social status, not on any notion of ethnic or territorial origin.

Scott was writing of a period a century before the Declaration of Arbroath; and of England, where the relationships between the classes was unlike that of Scotland. A garbled misinterpretation of events of the 14th century does not strengthen a garbled misinterpretation of events of the 21st.

Derrick McClure

Rosehill Terrace

Aberdeen