Kilts are traditional garb from Scotland, right? Well, that’s not quite the whole story. In an article from 1858, William Pinkerton noted that ancient Highlanders and Irishmen, both Celts, generally went bare-legged and wore a long, baggy shirt dyed yellow with autumnal saffron. Over this, they wore an untailored woollen cloth which also served as a sleeping blanket. The cloth wrapped around and gathered into folds which stopped somewhere below the knee. Sometimes they also wore animal skin, especially deerskin. So how did the tailored, pleated kilt come to signify Scotland? And why do so many men, Highlanders or not, wear it these days—either to formal events like Christmas and New Year parties, or even daily?
I love this. (And how adorable are these children?!) How appropriate their response is, as well, to take advantage of this as a learning experience. In the U.S., our children are completely losing touch with history, thanks to the Common Core, which has effectively cut history in favor of teaching only ELA and Math, with other subjects (in theory but not practice) embedded within the two core subjects. Not to mention the likelihood that if this had happened in a New York area school yard, hundreds of parents would be instructing the nannies to rush their special snowflakes to therapists for counseling. 😉
Laura Thomson, John Lawson and Victoria Primary pupils with a picture of the mystery man. Picture: Lisa Ferguson
“This new discovery is a really good learning opportunity for the children. It’s very interesting that things have had to be re-examined based on the new evidence.
“We are the oldest still-working primary school in Edinburgh and the children are all very proud of the history and heritage in Newhaven. They have a sense of the history all around them. This is another chapter in that.”
Read more: http://www.scotsman.com
Yews in churchyards may point to pre-Christian beliefs in the sacred. Photograph: Matthew L. Tagney
It might be thought that when Thomas Hardy stepped aside from his narrative in Jude The Obscure to describe Shaston, or Shaftesbury, “on the summit of a steep and imposing scarp, rising … out of the deep alluvial vale of Blackmoor” as “one of the queerest and quaintest spots in England”, he was being unduly fanciful.
But if, today, you turn aside from St John’s Hill, close to that summit, in to a small enclosed space beside the road and take in the sight of the ancient yew before you, its limbs spreading out wide and close to the ground above scattered headstones, then look ahead towards the sheer drop into the expanse of the vale, you do catch a sense of the local magic and feel you are indeed in a special place.
Before John Knox returned home from exile to become a hero of the Scottish Reformation, he penned a shocking polemic against women in roles of authority: The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. The diatribe, which he planned to follow with a second and third blast, set the stage for a tumultuous relationship with four ruling queens: Mary of Guise (1515-1560), Mary Tudor (1516-1558), Mary Stuart (1542-1587), and Elizabeth Tudor (1533-1603).
Knox used “monstrous” and “regiment” in an archaic sense to mean “unnatural” and “rule,” arguing that female dominion over men was against God and nature. He lamented that the future of the Protestant faith lay solely in the hands of a female monarchy largely hostile to its precepts. Echoing the era’s widespread assumption that women were inferior to men, capable only of domestic acts such as bearing children, Knox placed blame on the “abominable empire of wicked women” for the trials and tribulations of the Reformation.
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