THE SCOT IN ULSTER
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vivors of that Scottish army which helped so much to win back for France the rich plains of Gascony and Poitou, which the English had held long and firmly; and in the annals of the Scots Brigade, who did such honest, hard fighting among the Dutch dykes against that splendid Spanish infantry which Parma and Spinola led. Often, too, in the chronicles of these centuries, one gets a peep at the Scottish emigrants who had sought their fortune in trade, at Middleburg or Campvere, at Amsterdam or Lubeck, or even among the Tartars in the far-off Baltic Sea. The emigrants who lived out the fighting and the toiling, and settled in these foreign lands, founded families, in whose names may still be traced some faint record of their Scottish origin.
This is, however, the story of a different kind of emigration. These Scots who had flocked from Leith, or Crail, or Berwick to seek fortune, in peace or war, on the continent of Europe, were mostly the young and adventurous, for whom the old home life had become too narrow. They took with them little save their own stout hearts and their national long heads. If they remained permanently in France, or the Low Countries, or Sweden, they married from the people of their adopted land, and the blood of their descendants became less and less Scottish as the generations followed each other. The time arrived at last, however, when war with England. ceased, and internal strife became less bloody, and Scotland began to be too small for her rapidly grow-...continue reading »
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The Scot in Ulster:
Sketch of the History of the Scottish Population of Ulster
by John Harrison
1888