As the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn approaches, what does it mean to us today?
How can some men hitting each other with sharp objects in a muddy field a long time ago possibly be relevant in this day and age? This happened at a time when commoners and infantry asserted themselves all across Europe to challenge the claims of declining mounted feudal elites.
Scots faced what was perhaps the most effective and best-resourced military machine in Europe at the time. How could this have been defeated? I suspect the answer lies in what forces could be mobilised and motivated for the struggle against it. The adoption of feudal institutions of rank, status, and privilege had not been as complete in Scotland as elsewhere and their erosion was more advanced at the time. Everyone knew what they stood to gain or lose as a result of the decision reached on the day of battle. At Bannockburn, a professional army was beaten by a people's army, and it was "not for honour, glory or riches" that they fought, "but for freedom, and that alone, which no honest man gives up but with his life".
Today, we can still see the opponents of Scottish independence defending a UK that is an obsolete, delinquent, post-imperial anachronism being used by declining elites as a means of self-aggrandisement through bank bail-outs, artificial austerity, demonisation of the poor, creeping privatisation of public infrastructure that took generations to build, like the NHS, and illegal wars conducted in the shadow of weapons of mass destruction based on the Clyde.
Against them we see arrayed an unprecedented grassroots movement putting boots on the ground, and a new Scotland being built by them from the bottom up, through a historic level of political engagement that is transforming our country. This New Scotland is guided by values of peace, justice, inclusion, tolerance and solidarity, not by the values of the rat race and the fast buck that steer the quill in Whitehall. This engagement is happening in places the elites rarely visit, in the schemes where great schiltrons of support for Scottish independence are gathering. And the decision delivered on September 18, 700 years and some few months after Bannockburn, will be their victory.
Dr Peter Clive
Glasgow
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