IN EARLY MODERN SCOTLAND, the religious doctrine of Calvinism permeated everyday life through the regulation of personal behaviour. From the Reformation in 1560 until the turn of the nineteenth century, Scotland's network of church courts – the kirk sessions – policed the manners and morals of their parish congregations, punishing purse and person in the name of a godly society. The kirk sessions operated with and alongside a sophisticated network of secular courts at local level. Individuals were also governed by codes of honour, shame and reputation, like their contemporaries on the European continent. Recorded detail from ecclesiastical and secular court cases involving neighbourhood disputes, the supernatural, violence, gossip, slander and sexual misconduct, have proved a valuable source for the historical investigation of ordinary folk and the ways in which their everyday lives were shaped by the values and strictures of reformed religion.

In a society where church and state championed marriage and the godly household, this meant that divisions were drawn not just between the sexes but also within them. The existence of a gendered double standard when it came to regulating popular behaviour has long been debated, but real divisions existed amongst men of different ages, economic power and status. This chapter will draw on the experiences and representations of some individual men and boys in the legal process to examine the workings of patriarchy and masculinity during the early modern period. It will show how social status, economic power, and age combined to inform and influence the experience of authority within these two paradigms.

While the history of Scotland's Reformation has been well documented, the study of ordinary folk has only received attention in recent decades. Furthermore, historians have tended to focus on the actions of the kirk sessions when investigating the implications of Reformation for popular behaviour, thanks in part to the wealth of qualitative detail contained in these records. Rosalind Mitchison and Leah Leneman were early pioneers of such historical investigation, concluding that the experience of the official regulation of behaviour in both rural and urban areas was dependent on gender and social status up until around 1780.

ON A WINTER's NIGHT in 1875, in Glasgow's insalubrious Saltmarket district in the city's East End, two separate female acts began a two-week run at the Whitebait music hall. First to perform was the Francis Parisian Ballet Troupe, a four-girl dance act performing their can-can for the first time in Scotland. Next were the Sisters Ridgway, a pair of female dancers and duettists making their debut appearance of the season. These two ‘turns’ were to precipitate a media furore that filled the columns of Scotland's newspapers for a month and prompted a number of the city's influential male citizens to launch a vigorous campaign against the immorality of music hall. Indeed, according to one outraged observer, ‘A dance of Satyrs and Bacchantes’, with words and actions arranged by the notorious female Restoration playwright Aphra Behn, would probably have caused less offence.

Like all scandals, it provides an exceptionally useful starting point for historical investigation. Prompted by the transgression of a perceived borderline of acceptable social behaviour, it produced a proliferation of evidence detailing the multifaceted views of nineteenth-century Glasgow's ‘fractured, heterogeneous public sphere’. Yet an analysis of the articles and letters from the variously appalled, defensive and bemused inhabitants of the city, suggests more than just another middleclass attempt at the embourgeoisement of a working-class leisure form, an increasingly common occurrence from the 1870s and already noted and debated in the historiography. Instead, the scandal caused by the acts at the Whitebait indicates the existence in Victorian Glasgow of an intra-gender competition, in which three conceptualisations of masculinity vied for cultural dominance, each asserting the right to define the meaning, and therefore ultimately the management, of the city's music halls.

INTRODUCTION: KINGS, MASCULINITY AND SIGILLOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE

IN A TREATISE CELEBRATING the illustrious rulers of ancient Britain the northern English historian Aelred of Rievaulx narrated the tale of an encounter between the Scottish king, Malcolm III (1057–93), and a would-be assassin. Informed of a plot to kill him, Aelred wrote, Malcolm staged a dramatic confrontation with the treacherous knight, where he fearlessly placed his life in the hands of the killer. The king demanded, however, that the knight promise to commit his abominable deed neither by resort to poison (for ‘who does not know that that is womanish?’), nor by stealth at night in the royal bedchamber – for that was the way of ‘adulteresses’ – but rather ‘like a man’, that is, in open combat, with drawn sword. The chronicler had him utter his challenge with the bold words ‘[d]o rather what becomes a soldier; act like a man; fight me while alone with me alone, so that your betrayal, which cannot be free of perfidy, will at least be free of disgrace’. Aelred's story is almost certainly fictitious, but it offers historians valuable insight into twelfth-century understandings of idealised manhood, and a useful basis from which to explore the ways in which the high medieval kings of Scots drew on contemporary British and European mores in their efforts to fashion for themselves widely accepted images of masculine authority.

In the Europe of Aelred's day the figure of the king occupied a position at the apex of several different hierarchies and a central place in a host of imagined communities. He was at once the source of all political authority in his realm, more powerful than even the greatest of his magnates; the fount of all justice in the kingdom, yet generous with his mercy; the divinely appointed protector of his clerical subjects, from the humblest clerk to the most exalted prelate. He was also husband to his queen; father to his royal children and more generally to all his people; the truest of knights; the most devout of God's servants.

GLASGOW HAS LONG HAD a reputation as a ‘hard city’ with a particularly masculine image. While this image of rugged masculinities was forged in the context of working-class labour amid the potent mixture of industrialism, migration and urbanisation that founded modern Glasgow, it has also often been associated with social problems such as male interpersonal violence, ill health and high mortality. In cultural representations, these forms of masculinity are frequently combined in the figure of the ‘hard man’ or ‘gemmie’, a working-class figure who displays an attitude of fearlessness, of violent defiance, and of fighting his corner against all odds. Nowhere is this manifestation of Glasgow masculinity more apparent than in representations of the youth ‘gang’. From H. Kingsley Long's rewriting of Alexander McArthur's Gorbals notebooks as No Mean City (1935), through to Peter Mullan's semi-autobiographical film NEDS: Non-Educated Delinquents (2010), images of Glaswegian masculinity have been interwoven with images of the gang, oscillating between fact and fiction, past and present. As the historian Andrew Davies has pointed out, No Mean City ‘cemented’ Glasgow's reputation as the gang city of Britain, while the ghost of its main protagonist, the fictional ‘Razor King’ Johnnie Stark, arguably continues to haunt it. Like the ‘urban legends’ that surround Glasgow youth gangs more generally, depictions of the city frequently collapse representation and reality.

This chapter seeks to unite historical and sociological perspectives in excavating the lived experiences of everyday masculinities and violence that lie behind this persistent image, while interrogating popular representations of the ‘hard city’. Investigating the historical relationship between gangs and masculinities in Glasgow has the potential to illuminate understandings not only of this specific context, but the contingent relationships between history, culture and geography in the patterning of Scottish masculinities more broadly.

MUCH OF THE WRITING about twentieth-century Scottish masculinities has focused upon the changing definitions of ‘manliness’ and its links to social, economic and domestic shifts, which have resulted in a renegotiation of men's roles. Yet despite considerable scholarship focusing on the emergence of queer masculinities in England during the interwar period, there is a paucity of research from a Scottish perspective. The notion that a solid, inflexible form of Scottish masculinity has existed relatively unchanged has rightly been challenged, but largely from a heterosexual position. Just where are Scotland's queer masculinities? This chapter will demonstrate that deviant, subversive and oppositional forms of masculinity did exist in twentieth-century Scotland, with the interwar period featuring centrally in the history of queer men and queer masculinities.

The emergence of the resolute British male has its links to Empire, where a culture of ‘otherness’ disassociated the British man from his effeminate subordinates in the colonies. Empire-driven masculinities also shunned expressive sexuality, viewing it as a dangerous threat to order and control and likely, if unrestrained, to lead to dangerous and deviant behaviours. The concept of the British soldier in World War One was built upon Edwardian notions of masculinity, which promoted self-control, emotional restraint and physical toughness. The inability of some men to adhere to these principles, as a result of either mental trauma or a failure to reassert their place within the breadwinner family model, led to considerable concerns over the shape of British manhood. Further, the queer man had come to represent an unacceptable version of masculinity, both deviant and dangerous. Noel Pemberton Billing, publisher, aviator and Member of Parliament, infamously saw within the homosexual the potential for perfidiousness, through his claim in The Imperialist magazine that Germany was infiltrating British society through the use of male and female homosexuals during World War One. German spies had allegedly formed intimate relationships with British subjects with the intention of blackmailing them for sensitive information. The homosexual was just a nudge away from treachery.

TO THE MODERN READER, begging appears an unmanly act. The association of modern manliness, and indeed the modern individual, with independence, self-sufficiency, ‘breadwinning’ or ‘provision’, and equality and fraternity locates the dependency of the beggar in unmasculine, even feminine, territory. Relying on another, the beggar is placed as unable to help himself, affirming his ‘lack’ and his subordinate place in the social hierarchy. Such a positioning of the self is challenging for modern historians who, as individuals, resist dependency, seeing it as a threat to autonomous selfhood. While feminist and postmodernist scholars challenge such discourses of autonomy, celebrating the benefits of embracing the other to our sense of identity and to understanding historical selves, we still find it difficult to apply such analysis to deeply hierarchical relationships, where one self appears so vulnerable, so reliant on the benevolence – the exercise of power – of the powerful. As feminists, we resist the implication that dependency (so closely tied to femininity) is ‘negative’, that reliance on the other makes us less; yet we seem drawn to place more emphasis on agency, on resistance, on negotiation, than on the ways in which dependency shapes the self.

Reflecting this, the history of beggars has not viewed them as entirely helpless. Begging has been located amongst a range of strategies that men and women used to make ends meet, to survive in times of economic downturn, or to further their families’ social mobility. As Tim Hitchcock notes, begging in the eighteenth century was an acknowledged social practice that located beggars within the community and endowed them with particular rights. In this framework, begging was less a form of debasement of the self than a method of negotiation within particular power structures.

Understanding begging as a social practice is useful for a study of early modern and modernising Britain, where social and political equality was far from the idealised social structure.

SHIFTING IDEALS OF BEHAVIOUR and sentiment served to assert manhood amongst different groups of men in eighteenth-century Scotland, and men could adopt different manly personas depending on locale and time of day. Take, for instance, James Boswell, who embodied polite and libertine manhood. His days in Edinburgh often progressed from heterosocial suppers and visits to the theatre with his wife and other women, to homosocial meetings of the Freemasons, Faculty of Advocates or intellectual societies, followed by drinking in a tavern or coffeehouse and sometimes sexual intercourse with women, including prostitutes.

Rather than a binary opposition, Georgian archetypes of the polite gentleman and the libertine stood at two ends of a continuum of possible masculinities, and landed and professional men could perform characteristics of these identities depending on the specific context. Boswell wished to achieve an ideal of refined, virtuous manhood but from his time as a young man visiting London through to married, professional life as a lawyer in Edinburgh, his behaviour displayed adherence to a libertinism of convivial tavern-based sociability and extramarital sex. Boswell was not necessarily atypical, and this chapter will explore the fluidity of manhood in his and other elite men's lives in eighteenth-century urban Scotland.

Recent studies of English masculinities during this period have explored libertine, impolite, polite and domestic manhood. These histories highlight significant differences in the performance of ideal manhood manifested by the masculinities of the libertines and bohemians of London, and landed gentlemen and merchants displaying self-control through economic management of household and estate, and fatherly leadership. These and other studies demonstrate that multiple masculinities were available to landed, professional and middling men. This was as true for Scotland as for England, and this chapter will explore the continuum of polite and libertine expressions of manhood in eighteenth-century Scotland through an examination of violence, independence, sexuality and friendship. To do so it will draw on a variety of sources with a focus on men's life writing, a source that offers an entree into their articulation and negotiation of gender identity.

ARCHIBALD CAMPBELL, 1ST MARQUESS of Argyll, wrote these words to his children as he awaited execution for treason in 1661. The position of the powerful Clan Campbell was threatened due to Argyll's political failings during Cromwell's occupation of Scotland, beginning in 1651 and lasting until the 1660 Restoration. His thirty-two-year-old son, Archibald, was the family's hope for sociopolitical salvation. In his advice on how to resurrect the family's legacy, the marquess began with religion, ‘[t]his being your greatest concernment the director of all your actions’. He went on to argue that devoutness, zeal, and piety in the practice of religion were critical in being respected as a man, ‘remember this, that he that is not truly religious, will hardly be esteemed’, and indeed if one is hypocritical in their faith, this will be poorly reflected in ‘your greatness and honour’. For his son to earn his way back into the ranks of noble society and salvage the future of Clan Campbell, the marquess believed that piety would lead the way, offering him the metaphor, ‘like the Diamond out-shines the lustre of all other Jewels. A religious heart and a clear conscience will make you truly conspicuous’. The Marquess of Argyll penned these words just over one hundred years after the Reformation Parliament met and adopted the Scots Confession of Faith. During the intervening years, being a strong, powerful, and successful man became inextricably linked to being a devout reformed Christian.

As this collection attests, Scottish masculinity has meant many different things in different contexts, and it has been a powerful force in shaping the culture and institutions of the country. Within the early modern context there were a plurality of gender experiences and expectations for men. Scholars of early modern British masculinity have largely focused on how manhood both shaped, and was shaped by, the social, economic, and political order.

HISTORIANS GENERALLY ACCEPT THAT interpersonal violence was a common feature of relationships between men in the past and that the contexts in which violence was perpetrated can reveal something about the mentalities and social roles of men in past societies. Nevertheless, it is also agreed that the modes of and occasions for violence vary according to their context, and thus there is a need to understand precisely the conditions that facilitate and legitimate interpersonal violence between men in different locales and time periods. While male violence appears to be ubiquitous – men form the overwhelming majority of perpetrators and victims of violent behaviour – its meaning is historically specific.

This chapter examines a type of modernising society – the Scottish Highlands in the period 1760–1840 – in which a code of violence governed by an indigenous culture of manhood was gradually superseded by a new culture with a new code concerning violence. This was in part the consequence of changing economic and social conditions in the Highlands as well as the imposition of a judiciary and law enforcers serving the aspirant bourgeois ideology of local elites and the demands of a distant state. It argues that violence against the (male) person was regarded as commonplace and to some degree legitimate in the rural Highland counties until at least the 1820s, that men of the rural labouring classes regarded violence as a means to protect or affirm their status, to restore honour or to avenge a wrong, and that this had previously been accepted or tolerated by Highland elites. But this association between a certain model of manhood and interpersonal violence was challenged increasingly from around 1800 by those who advocated civility and restraint amongst men, especially in the growing Highland town of Inverness, the centre of an emerging middle-class culture with changing social sensibilities. The borderline between acceptable and unacceptable, legitimate and illegitimate male violence shifted as a new conception of what constituted respectable manhood was disseminated. In the wake of the Jacobite risings and the repressive measures aimed at taming the Highlands, there was a more subtle and longer-term taming of everyday Highland manhood.

IN DECEMBER 1944, SIX months into his period of military service in the Caribbean, George Johnstone Brown made his feelings for his wife explicit. Only with her could he find emotional satisfaction and fulfilment. Wartime service represented an interruption to their life together, a necessary, dutiful but irritating interlude before they could resume their married love affair. In this chapter a neglected facet of Scottish men's sense of self is under scrutiny. Emotional openness, vulnerability, affection, devotion, romantic love and desire – these are not qualities commonly identified in the accounts of masculinity in Scotland in the twentieth century, a history populated by the so-called hard men of the shipyards and coalmines, the heavy drinkers, the gang members of city streets and the political heroes, some of whom appear elsewhere in this book. Historians have tended to portray work, and the leisure activities contingent upon that work, as the key to masculine identity despite evidence that romantic love and its expression in the couple relationship was a key characteristic of the modern age. The emotional turn that is shifting historical attention and interpretation away from publicly articulated standards and cultural discourses towards subjectivity is beginning to recast the historical landscape and has the potential to complicate and expand understandings of male identities. By recovering articulations of selfhood and emotion, by bringing ‘subjectivity and emotion back into view’, historians have begun to write an alternative history of men and masculinity that privileges subjectivity and the self.

VIOLENCE IS OFTEN GIVEN a central place in accounts of male behaviour and identity in early modern Britain. The majority of violent crime was carried out by and against men, and violent behaviour served a variety of social functions related to gender identity. Violence was a resource that could be used by men of all social ranks across the lifecycle and in a variety of private and public contexts to assert status and to defend their honour. It was, therefore, one of the main props of patriarchy. For young men, violence was a component of coming of age and a means of demonstrating physical courage and strength, and it remained a tool of patriarchal power throughout men's lifecycles. Those who became independent heads of households (though achievement of this status was by no means universal) were expected to exert control over their dependents. Aggressive language and physical punishments could help them to maintain superior positions over women and servants. For those in subordinate positions, violence could be a means of claiming agency and resisting authority.

According to standard narratives, violent masculinity was tamed in the eighteenth century. Though its timing and reach in Scotland is debated, a ‘civilising process’ occurred here as throughout Europe. Conduct literature advocated the replacement of an outdated honour culture with new codes of politeness that emphasised self-restraint and problematised male aggression and the legal system was increasingly used to enforce new codes of male behaviour. Respectable men were expected to turn to legal mechanisms rather than to their fists or their swords to resolve disputes. Alongside the law, modernisation narratives afford commerce a central role in the acculturation of new codes of male behaviour. Indeed, Adam Smith's final phase of civilisation was ‘commercial society’. Modern commercial culture required new behavioural ideals and these ideals were adhered to, especially by an ‘upwardly mobile, modestly middle class’. For middling men, commercialism refined and polished individual passions and manners, and came to define new forms of prudential masculinity.

THIS CHAPTER EXAMINES THE multiple representation, evolution and opposition of masculine constructions in John Barbour's Bruce (c. 1375). The text displays multi-layered visions of masculinity, favouring those that are more flexible. The two main heroes, Robert Bruce and James Douglas, represent this kind of fluid masculinity, able to adapt to the ever-changing social and political circumstances of late medieval Scotland. Their masculinity contrasts with the negative masculine models of Edward I, King of England, and Robert's brother, Edward, whose inability to evolve as a man and knight causes his downfall. After a brief historical contextualisation, the chapter will argue that the absence of proper leaders, including Robert Bruce himself, to rule the country, propitiates Edward I's successful invasion of Scotland. Second, it will examine the evolution of Robert I and James Douglas as they become the ideal king and knight respectively to liberate Scotland. Third, the lack of interactions with women will be discussed. Finally, the end of the narrative will be assessed as a perfect culmination of a sovereign's life, securing progeny, peace and a profoundly Christian departure from this world.

CONTEXT

In the forty years previous to the composition of John Barbour's Bruce, the hostilities of the First War of Independence (1296–1328) between England and Scotland had been renewed, leading to several English victories under the rule of Edward III. David II of Scotland had been captured at the Battle of Neville's Cross (1346), although he was released in 1357, bringing the Second War of Independence to an end. Robert I's military success in the first quarter of the fourteenth century was a distant memory. At a time of political instability within the realm itself, King Robert II (1316–90), who had succeeded David in 1371 but had difficulties fully establishing his authority, commissioned Barbour, archdeacon of Aberdeen, to write a romance based on the life and deeds of Robert Bruce, the king's grandfather. The verse romance was finished around 1375. Robert II endeavoured to underpin his political authority, using the example of Bruce and his heroic comrades at arms as a model of the ideal relationship between a monarch and his nobles.