all Scotland under the same condemnation when he tells us how David “did his utmost to draw on that rough and boorish people towards quiet and chastened manners".[15] The reference to “their own nation” shows, too, that Fordun did not understand that the Highlanders were a different people; and when he called them hostile to the English, he was evidently unaware that their custom was “out of hatred to the Saxons nearest them” to league with the English.  John Major, writing in the reign of James IV (1489-1513), mentions the differences between Highlander and Lowlander.  The wild Scots speak Irish; the civilized Scots use English.  “But”, he adds, “most of us spoke Irish a short time ago."[16] His contemporary, Hector Boece, who made the Tour to the Hebrides, says:  “Those of us who live on the borders of England have forsaken our own tongue and learned English, being driven thereto by wars and commerce.  But the Highlanders remain just as they were in the time of Malcolm Canmore, in whose days we began to adopt English manners."[17] When Bishop Elphinstone applied, in 1493, for Papal permission to found a university in Old Aberdeen, in proximity to the barbarian Highlanders, he made no suggestion of any racial difference between the English-speaking population of Aberdeen and their Gaelic-speaking neighbours.[18] Late in the sixteenth century, John Lesley, the defender of Queen Mary, who had been bishop of Ross, and came of a northern family, wrote in a strain similar to that of Major and Boece.  “Foreign nations look on the Gaelic-speaking Scots as wild barbarians because they maintain the customs and the language of their ancestors; but we call them Highlanders."[19]

Even in connexion with the battle of Harlaw, we find that Scottish historians do not use such terms in speaking of the Highland forces as Mr. Hill Burton would lead us to expect.  Of the two contemporary authorities, one, the Book of Pluscarden, was probably written by a Highlander, while the continuation of Fordun’s Scoti-chronicon, in which we have a more detailed account of the battle, was the work of Bower, a Lowlander who shared Fordun’s antipathy to Highland customs.  The Liber Pluscardensis mentions the battle in a very casual manner.  It was fought between Donald of the Isles and the Earl of Mar; there was great slaughter:  and it so happened that the town of Cupar chanced to be burned in the same year.[20] Bower assigns a greater importance to the affair;[21] he tells us that Donald wished to spoil Aberdeen and then to add to his own possessions all Scotland up to the Tay.  It is as if he were writing of the ambition of the House of Douglas.  But there is no hint of racial antipathy; the abuse applied to Donald and his followers would suit equally well for the Borderers who shouted the Douglas battle-cry.  John Major tells us that it was a civil war fought for the spoil of the famous city of Aberdeen, and he cannot say who won—­only the Islanders lost more men than the civilized Scots.  For him, its chief interest lay in the ferocity of the contest; rarely, even in struggles with a foreign foe, had the fighting been so keen.[22] The fierceness with which Harlaw was fought impressed the country so much that, some sixty years later, when Major was a boy, he and his playmates at the Grammar School of Haddington used to amuse themselves by mock fights in which they re-enacted the red Harlaw.