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Chookie;1115614 wrote: Besides all that, it's much easier (and it causes a lot less damage) to extract the Michael.

The only problem is that the PBE (and Oscar) are such easy targets...............


There i was as well..... just warming to you auld yin

gmc;1114983 wrote: It's only new labour shitting itself that the scots might vote SNP instead of labour and they would kiss goodbye to ever governing again.


:yh_drool:yh_drool:yh_drool:yh_drool:yh_drool

oscar;1115616 wrote: There i was as well..... just warming to you auld yin


Oh you silly Oscarness, that's gmc, myself is the sporran fiddler (do you know what a sporran costs these days?)

Seriously we should have a competition to see which home country has the worst frickin banks, I think Scotland is in the lead at the moment (RBS, oh my lord what were they thinking?), but we are not far behind (Anglo-Irish, a bank for wealthy scumbags, run by slightly less wealthy scumbags), however, the English are coming in close behind with wheelbarrows full of soon to be useless Sterling though.



WHAT ABOUT WALES? WHERE ARE YOU WALES? WHY HAVE YOU NO DODGY BANKS OF YOUR OWN? COME ON AND JOIN THE BONFIRE, ITS GREAT FUN. :-5

Actually, come to think of it, perhaps with everyone else broke, the Welsh can set a bank and lend to the rest of us?

Chookie;1115626 wrote: Oh you silly Oscarness, that's gmc, myself is the sporran fiddler (do you know what a sporran costs these days?)


I have no idea of what a sporran costs or which vegetables to serve with it young yin :D

Galbally;1115630 wrote: Seriously we should have a competition to see which home country has the worst frickin banks, I think Scotland is in the lead at the moment (RBS, oh my lord what were they thinking?), but we are not far behind (Anglo-Irish, a bank for wealthy scumbags, run by slightly less wealthy scumbags), however, the English are coming in close behind with wheelbarrows full of soon to be useless Sterling though.



WHAT ABOUT WALES? WHERE ARE YOU WALES? WHY HAVE YOU NO DODGY BANKS OF YOUR OWN? COME ON AND JOIN THE BONFIRE, ITS GREAT FUN. :-5

Actually, come to think of it, perhaps with everyone else broke, the Welsh can set a bank and lend to the rest of us?


Perhaps when you finish scientisting old bits of wool and cheese to make gas... you can buy out the RBS. I'll go halves and send you my £1 in the post :yh_rotfl

gmc: I thought some proto-Scot allied with the Vikings and ?Picts? as well to fight off ?Athelstan? in a bloody draw near Liverpool (Brunanburgh?) and some (Neil Oliver on the BBC for one) date Scotland's existence from this time?

But yeah - the Normans were a pretty aggressive bunch.

Clodhopper;1115704 wrote: gmc: I thought some proto-Scot allied with the Vikings and ?Picts? as well to fight off ?Athelstan? in a bloody draw near Liverpool (Brunanburgh?) and some (Neil Oliver on the BBC for one) date Scotland's existence from this time?

But yeah - the Normans were a pretty aggressive bunch.


My understanding is that the picts and saxons fought each others to a standstill and the scots were able to come in and fill the resulting power vacuum. sassenach is gaelic for saxon not english-although not being a native speaker I don't claim to be a linguistic expert. There was clear divide between highland and lowland both physically and culturally. There is a celtic tradition of elected kings rather than hereditary, which is why you see references to king of scots rather than king of scotland. It wasn't until the 16th century that the power of the likes of the lord of the isles was broken as wealth and technology and access to them started to make a real difference and give the king the military power to impose his will. Really imo it was the wars of independence in the 14th century with wallace and bruce to the fore that helped forge a scottish identity and specifically the sheer brutality of edward the first that unified people against a common enemy-hence my comment about if you had said norman.

There is a celtic tradition of elected kings rather than hereditary


The Saxon kings were "King of the West Saxons" or "King of the English" - same sort of thing: Ruler of a migrant people, not of land as such; and also theoretically chosen, though custom dictated that the eldest son was the usual choice unless there was a damn good reason otherwise. In England it was Feudalism which tied the people to the land, and made them property.

Took three or four hundred years for the Anglo-Saxons to assimilate the Normans and become the English. The Welsh and Scottish wars were both part of that process and a result or expression of it.

btw, I'm sure I heard of a King of the Scots who was messing around with an army in Saxon times and marched as far south as Dover.

Athelstan (c.895 - 939)



Athelstan was the first king of all England, and Alfred the Great's grandson. He reigned between 925 and 939. A distinguished and courageous soldier, he pushed the boundaries of the kingdom to the furthest extent they had yet reached.

In 927 he took York from the Danes, and forced the submission of King Constantine of Scotland and of the northern kings. All five of the Welsh kings agreed to pay a huge annual tribute. He also eliminated opposition in Cornwall. In 937, at the battle of Brunanburh, Athelstan led a force drawn from Britain, and defeated an invasion made by the king of Scotland, in alliance with the Welsh and Danes, from Dublin.


Taken from BBC History.

Athelstan defeated the invasion, yes, but the invasion was a pre-emptive strike organised by Constantine and it left the Anglo-Saxons militarily exhausted for a generation or two.

What made Edward Longshanks so terrifying was not his brutality, which was nothing outrageous by the standards of the time; but his efficiency, which was.



Don't think the Bruce could be described as a gentle man. Wasn't it him who had his rivals murdered, including smashing out the brains of a babe less than a year old on the market cross of some town, to make the point good and publicly? It was a brutal age.



Constantine mac Áed (Constantine II), the grandson of Kenneth MacAlpin, began his life as an exile. In 878 AD his father, Áed, had been slain by a Giric, son of Dungal, and Constantine, a young boy at the time, fled to Ireland where he was brought up by monks surrounded in Gaelic culture.

In 889 AD he returned with his cousin Donald to wreak revenge on Giric. Donald took the kingship of the Picts initially, but shortly afterwards was slain by the Vikings - Dark Age kingships were often painfully short! So it was that in his early twenties, Constantine mac Áed became King of Pictland.

The kingdom had been nearly destroyed by the Vikings, but its peoples, Picts and Gael, faced with the prospect of Viking conquest, had drawn together. In 902 AD, the Vikings, under Ivar the Younger of Dublin, returned to seize Dunkeld, where St Columba's relics were kept, and the rich farmlands around the River Tay. Constantine caught up with Ivar at Strathcarron in 904 AD, and, in a bitter struggle, Ivar and his Viking army were massacred.

With the defeat of the Vikings, regeneration of the kingdom was Constantine's top priority. He remodelled the church along Gaelic lines and brought in a system of mormaers (earls) to defend the kingdom more efficiently. He also renamed the territory, Alba, which is actually means Britain in Gaelic. Pictland was remade in a Gaelic image and the Scottish nation was launched.

Constantine continued to extend Alba's influence across Scotland. The east coast, south of the river Forth and modern-day Edinburgh, was Angle territory and often very hostile at that, until 918 AD, when Constantine led his army into Northumbria. At the Battle of Corbridge, he forced Ragnall, the Viking King of York, to withdraw from the Angle earldom of Northumbria that stretched from Lothian to the Tyne.

In return the restored earl, Eadred, recognised Constantine as his overlord. For the first time much of the land in modern-day Scotland was either under the direct kingship of the King of Alba or was under his rule as overlord.

The power of the pagan Vikings began to wane in the early 10th century as Christian kings like Constantine and the Kings of Wessex allied against them. In 928 AD, Aethelstan, the Anglo-Saxon King of Wessex, conquered the Viking Kingdom of York. Not content to stop there, he aimed for nothing less than subduing the whole of Britain to his will.

In 934 AD Aethelstan marched north, forcing the Earls of Northumbria and the Kings of Strathclyde to acknowledge him as overlord. Alba had never seen so vast an army: Aethelstan had brought with him three Welsh kings and six Viking chieftains.

Constantine was forced into retreat and was besieged, it is thought, at the rock fortress of Dunnottar. The fortress was too strong for Aethelstan to take, however Constantine must have been forced into some form of recognition of Aethelstan's claims.

Constantine's response to Aethelstan came in the form of cunning diplomacy. He married his daughter to Olaf Guthfrithsson, the pagan king of Viking Dublin and persuaded Owein of Strathclyde, his relative, to support his cause.

In 937 AD they invaded Aethelstan's England. At the Battle of Brunanburh, at an unknown location deep in England, they fought one of the largest and bloodiest battles of the Dark Ages. Aethelstan was victorious, Owein of Strathclyde was killed and the Anglo Saxon Chronicle revelled in Constantine's defeat.

"The hoary man of war had no cause to exult in the clash of blades; he was shorn of his kinsmen, deprived of friends, on the meeting place of peoples, cut off in strife, and left his son on the place of slaughter, mangled by wounds, young in battle. The grey-haired warrior, old crafty one, had no cause to boast"

Despite defeat, Aethelstan was weakened and Constantine's diplomacy and network of allies had freed Alba and Strathclyde from the southern threat. Olaf Guthfrithsson restored Viking rule to York and Aethelstan's grand schemes lay in ruins.

In 943 AD, after reigning for 43 years, Constantine retired from the kingship and for the final nine years of his life became a monk at St Andrews.

He was Scotland's most successful Dark Age king, a success won through a combination of strength in battle and diplomacy. His combined forces approximated something very close to a northern powerblock, one which pitted itself against another powerblock to the south - a story which was to repeat itself many times throughout the next millennium.


Taken from the BBC - History of Scotland.

I was just going to quote a small bit, but the story is amazing and worth quoting in full, I thought.

posted by clodhopper

I was just going to quote a small bit, but the story is amazing and worth quoting in full, I thought.




I agree. I've always found real events more interesting/brutal/bizarre than anything in fiction. Some of the events if you read them in a fictional story you would dismiss as being too incredible to believe.

I think if you'd asked any on the combatants on either side what nationality they were they wouldn't have said scots or english as in they were fighting as part of a national army. Loyalty was to the immediate overlord rather than a concept of fighting for one's country. That sense of nationhood came later although it's a moot point that I don't think you can prove either way.

BBC - Scotland's History - The Lords of the Isles

Dunnottar Castle

If you want a real sense of the difference to military power a few hundred years of technology can make if you get the chance have a look at a hanverian fort.

Fort George Feature Page on Undiscovered Scotland

I've always wondered if the troops with Harold hardrada hadn't fought a battle at stamford bridge and then run down to hastings to meet the normans if the out come would have been any different.

I've always wondered if the troops with Harold hardrada hadn't fought a battle at stamford bridge and then run down to hastings to meet the normans if the out come would have been any different.


Yes, me too on that one. One of the most tantalising what-ifs of all history, that one...