Scottish Communities Abroad In The Early Modern Period (Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions, V. 107)

439 Pages·2005·2.35 MB·English

by  Alexia Grosjean

SCOTTISH COMMUNITIES ABROAD
IN THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD
STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL AND
REFORMATION TRADITIONS
History, Culture, Religion, Ideas
FOUNDED BY HEIKO A. OBERMAN †
EDITED BY
ANDREW COLIN GOW, Edmonton, Alberta
IN COOPERATION WITH
THOMAS A. BRADY, Jr., Berkeley, California
JOHANNES FRIED, Frankfurt
BRAD GREGORY, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
BERNDT HAMM, Erlangen
SUSAN C. KARANT-NUNN, Tucson, Arizona
JÜRGENMIETHKE, Heidelberg
M. E. H. NICOLETTE MOUT, Leiden
GUSTAV HENNINGSEN, Copenhagen
VOLUMECVII
ALEXIA GROSJEAN andSTEVE MURDOCH
SCOTTISH COMMUNITIES ABROAD
IN THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD
SCOTTISH COMMUNITIES ABROAD
IN THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD
EDITED BY
and
ALEXIA GROSJEAN STEVE MURDOCH
BRILL
LEIDEN•BOSTON
2005
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ISSN 1573-4188
ISBN 90 04 14306 8
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CONTENTS
Foreword .................................................................................... ix
T. C. Smout, Historiographer Royal in Scotland
Acknowledgements ...................................................................... xv
List of Contributors .................................................................... xvii
Abbreviations .............................................................................. xxi
Introduction ................................................................................ 1
SECTION I: MIGRANT DESTINATIONS, COLONIES
AND PLANTATIONS
1. Scottish Migration to Ireland in the Seventeenth
Century .................................................................................. 27
Patrick Fitzgerald
2. The Placement of Urbanised Scots in the Polish Crown
during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Waldemar Kowalski .................................................................... 53
3. Seventeenth-century Scottish Communities in the
Americas .................................................................................. 105
David Dobson
SECTION II: ‘LOCATED’ COMMUNITIES
4. Scottish Immigration to Bergen in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries ............................................................ 135
Nina Østby Pedersen
5. Scots along the Maas, c.1570–1750 ...................................... 169
Douglas Catterall
6. The Scottish Community in Seventeenth-century
Gothenburg ............................................................................ 191
Alexia Grosjean and Steve Murdoch
7. TheScottish Community in Këdainiai c.1630–c.1750 ...... 225
Rimantas ¥irgulis
8. ‘Briteannia ist mein patria’: Scotsmen and the ‘British’
Community in Hamburg ...................................................... 249
Kathrin Zickermann
viii contents
SECTION III: COMMUNITIES OF MIND
AND INTEREST
9. A Haven for Intrigue: the Scottish Exile Community
in the Netherlands, 1660–1690 .......................................... 277
Ginny Gardner
10. Scottish Students in the Netherlands, 1680–1730 ............ 301
Esther Mijers
11. A Comparative Survey of Scottish Service in the English
and Dutch Maritime Communities c.1650–1707 ............ 333
Andrew Little
Scottish Comunities Abroad: Some Concluding Remarks ...... 375
Lex Heerma van Voss, Sølvi Sogner, Thomas O’Connor
Index of Names .......................................................................... 395
Index of Places .......................................................................... 406
Index of Subjects ........................................................................ 413
FOREWORD
From at least as early as the Hundred Years War, when the Scots
in their thousands fought for pay, land and honour in French ser-
vice, to the interwar years of the twentieth century, when they flooded
out to Canada and other trans-oceanic destinations, the Scots were
a people quick to seek their fortunes abroad by temporary or per-
manent migration. It was a national propensity only checked after
1945 by the collapse of the British Empire, which ended several cen-
turies of movement by officials, soldiers and fortune hunters to Africa,
Asia and the West Indies, and by the new restrictions on immigra-
tion to the United States and the white dominions, as the wide open
spaces filled up and the better jobs in their economies were reserved
to the native-born.
The scale of the population movement relative to the size of
Scotland was extraordinary, and it resulted in a diaspora of many
millions of Scottish descent scattered across the earth, some with a
warm sentimental regard for their roots, others with barely any con-
sciousness of them. The great exodus from Scotland has received
varying degrees of attention from historians.1 Broadly speaking, the
Atlantic and Antipodean migrations of settlement have been the focus
of much attention from scholars in several countries, with analyses
of varying depth and sophistication. There has likewise been distin-
guished work, some published and some in progress, on the Scottish
contribution to the British Empire.2 But these events took place
1 Among the best are B. Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: Emigration from Britain to
America on the Eve of the Revolution (London: 1986); N. C. Landsman, Scotland and its
First American Colony, 1683–1765 (Princeton: 1985); A. W. Parker, Scottish Highlanders
in Colonial Georgia, 1735–1748 (Athens, Georgia: 1997); D. Meyer, The Highland Scots
of North Carolina, 1737–1776 (Chapel Hill: 1957); M. Harper, Emigration from North-
East Scotland, 2 vols. (Aberdeen: 1988); M. Harper, Emigration from Scotland Between
the Wars: Opportunity or Exile(Manchester: 1998); D. S. Macmillan, Scotland and Australia,
1788–1860 (Oxford: 1967); M. Roe, Australia, Britain and Migration 1915–1940: A
Study of Desperate Hopes (Cambridge: 1995).
2 T. M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire, 1600–1815 (London: 2003). A further volume
is forthcoming. M. Fry, The Scottish Empire (Edinburgh: 2001). Much of the wider
writing on empire is full of references to the Scots: see, for example, J. M. Mackenzie,
The Empire of Nature (Manchester: 1988).
x foreword
mainly after 1700. The biggest relative gap in modern scholarly effort
has lain earlier, especially in the seventeenth century, when the direc-
tion of Scottish movement was primarily to Ireland and to Europe.
This is curious, since the scale of this earlier movement was very
large, involving perhaps one young man in five of the Scottish pop-
ulation. This outmigration was paralleled in contemporary Europe
probably only by Switzerland, and in proportion to the total popu-
lation it was not seen again in Scotland, except, briefly, in the high
Victorian period.
Of course, this academic neglect has not been absolute, and a
complete bibliography of the study of seventeenth-century Scottish
migration published in the course of the twentieth century would be
quite lengthy. Its first highlights, in the years 1902–7, are the three
remarkable volumes by the German scholar, Thomas Fischer, on the
Scots in Sweden, Germany and in East and West Prussia. These
were described by his editor James Kirkpatrick, professor of history
at Edinburgh, as “primarily a contribution to Scottish genealogy”,
but in reality they are much more, an early eye-opener as to the
extent and depth of the Scottish movement abroad.3 Two important
but unhappily unpublished theses were undertaken on the Scottish
mercenaries, merchants and pedlars in Sweden, and Thomas Riis
completed a two-volume study of Scots in Denmark.4 The Scottish
History Society presented source books on Scots in Poland, and on
Scots fighting in Dutch service, while the commercial side of con-
tact with the Netherlands was served by early studies of the staple
at Veere.5 The Scottish adventurers in Russia were expertly pursued
3 T. A. Fischer, The Scots in Germany (Edinburgh: 1902); idem, The Scots in Eastern
and Western Prussia (Edinburgh: 1903); idem, The Scots in Sweden (Edinburgh: 1907).
4 James Dow tragically died before his thesis on Scots in Sweden could be pre-
sented: his focus was mainly on the sixteenth century, but see his two articles on
‘Scottish Trade with Sweden, 1512–1622’, in Scottish Historical Review, vol. 48, 1969,
64–79, 124–50; J. A. Fallon, ‘Scottish Mercenaries in the Service of Denmark and
Sweden, 1626–1632’, unpublished University of Glasgow Ph.D. thesis, 1972, was
equally pioneering. T. Riis, Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot: Scottish-Danish Relations,
c.1450–1707 (2 vols., Odense: 1988).
5 A. F. Steuart, ed., Papers Relating to the Scots in Poland, 1576–1793(Scottish History
Society, Edinburgh: 1915); J. Ferguson, ed., Papers Illustrating the History of the Scots
Brigade in the Service of the United Netherlands (Scottish History Society, Edinburgh), vol.
1,1592–1697(1898), vol. 2, 1698–1782(1899); J. Davidson and A. Gray, The Scottish
Staple at Veere: A Study in the Economic History of Scotland (London: 1909); M. P. Roose-
boom, The Scottish Staple in the Netherlands (The Hague: 1910). An engaging picture
of the Scots kirk in Rotterdam emerges in J. Morrison, Scots on the Dijk (Kirkpatrick,