There was a national outcry in Scotland yesterday after it emerged that the statue and rotunda commemorating Robert the Bruce near the site of the Battle of Bannockburn had been vandalised. The culprits (although there has been much speculation on this) are ostensibly activists for the Black Lives Matter movement. The graffiti on the base of the statue reads “racist king” and on the rotunda reads “robert was a racist bring down the statue”.
The response on social media was immediate with many people stating views along the lines of:
As you can see, the reaction has been to dismiss the accusation on the basis that 14th century Scotland was an entirely white place and therefore any racism was impossible. My specific questions based on the above are:
Fully expecting these questions to get treated with the contempt they deserve, I would also like to understand, how ethnically diverse were Scotland and Britain during the Middle Ages? How did people in medieval Scotland/Britain react when they encountered travellers of different ethnicities and races? How often would this have been? For example, would we expect Robert to receive regular trade delegations or was Scotland a particularly isolated part of Europe at the time? Would the reaction to new people be different based on the wealth or educational level of either party?
Edit: I should have been clearer on what I meant by ethnically diverse. I didn’t simply mean this in terms of the number of BAME people who lived in the Scotland/Britain at that time - although that is part of. I also meant how homogeneous the various historic communities of Scotland/Britain (such as Picts, Scots, Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Normans, Danes/Norwegians, Welsh etc) would have been and how much integration or discrimination there would have been between these communities.
Link to an article on this story: https://news.stv.tv/east-central/robert-the-bruce-statue-at-bannockburn-covered-in-graffiti
Did he know that black people existed? Almost certainly. Did he care? Probably not. Whilst it is not possible to explore Robert the Bruce's own attitudes, because it just doesn't come up in source material as far as I'm aware, some things can be said about the wider aristocracy at that time.
For much of the Middle Ages, especially in northern Europe where there was very little contact with Africa, blackness (which in this case refers simply to skin tone, not racial identity) was associated with exoticism. They were people from the edges of the known world; from the part of the map labelled 'here there be monsters.' I mean that pretty literally, as medieval maps often illustrated these regions with depictions of humanoid monsters. The mappa mundi, which was not meant to be an accurate map for navigation but was absolutely packed with symbolism so includes lots of pictures, demonstrates this pretty clearly. If you look at the bottom-right corner you'll find many mythical creatures - an Egyptian god, headless men with faces on their chest (a trope inherited from antiquity), a Cyclops king, and a four-eyed man. People knew these were fantastical though, and there were more grounded depictions of African peoples. These things did not portray blackness as something bad, but as something strange. For example, in The Romance of Fouke Fitz Waryn, the hero tries to rescue an ally from King John who has been imprisoned. To gain access to John's castle, the hero impersonates a musician, and colours his skin black to pique the king's interest and let him in. As a plot device, it relies on the audience's familiarity with blackness as exotic and interesting. Later in the story, they encounter one of the more mythical Africans; a black giant who had somehow found its way to Ireland just so the heroes could showcase their fighting skills.
There also seems to have been some understanding among some people that Jesus would have had dark skin - Bernard of Clairvaux, a renowned theologian and preacher of the 12th century, states in sermon 25 on the Song of Songs that Jesus was 'obviously black... but beautiful', though it's not entirely clear why he goes on about this. The 'but beautiful' is where the beginnings of modern racial attitudes can be found. Sure, these people were viewed as interesting and exotic, but also as ugly and demonic, especially in religious literature.
There was a growing idea that white=good and black=bad. Beginning in 12th and 13th century Iberia, and exploding in later discourses regarding Saracens (a common term used by Latin Christians for Muslims), skin colour became a major indicator of moral quality. u/sunagainstgold has written a fantastic earlier answer on that specific topic.
When it comes to secular aristocracy of the 14th century, it's harder to work out what their attitudes to blackness were. It's strange that although skin colour as an indicator of moral fibre was prevalent in religiously charged literature, it was also surprisingly absent from chivalric literature. There were many pieces of literature produced by knights, for knights, that argued against the moralising of the religious literature. Among the more famous of these was the Order of Chivalry, a poem on the chivalric qualities of the sultan Saladin. The poem's message is that chivalry was not confined to western Christians, but a form of moral nobility that anyone could possess. There was also a mixed-race Arthurian character - Feirfiz. He originates in Parzival, a 13th century story, in which one of the knights falls in love with a black noblewoman whilst fighting in Iberia, and they have a son. It makes a point that, despite the knights being initially uncomfortable with the dark skin of locals, they get over it pretty quickly. In later continuations of this story, they eventually go back to support her bid to be queen of her people. It can be said that there was a lot of discourse on the moral inferiority of blackness, but also a lot of pushback against this, especially among literature by and for the aristocracy themselves.
It's also worth noting that there were diplomatic relations with Ethiopia, which you can read about in an answer here. There seems to have been little to no racism toward them, mainly because they were majority Christian, unlike Saracens. In modern America, the central pillar of racial identity is generally colour, but in the Middle Ages it was religion.
What I'm saying with all of this is that, although there was a growing idea that blackness was a sign of inferiority, this seems to have been a distinctly intellectual and moral phenomenon that took a long time to trickle down to the attitudes of aristocrats and their subjects, and not without resistance.
It's almost certain that, as today, there were those who thought blackness was a mark of inferiority (at least in a moral and aesthetic sense) and those who didn't give a damn. It's not possible to say where Robert the Bruce's attitudes sat on this spectrum. If you want to learn more about medieval attitudes toward race, we have many discussions of it in our FAQ on Racism and Slavery.
Sources and Further Reading:
Forde, Simon, Lesley Johnson, and Alan V. Murray, eds. Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages. University of Leeds, 1995.
Hahn, Thomas. "The difference the Middle Ages makes: Color and race before the modern world." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31.1 (2001): 1-37.
Heng, Geraldine. "The invention of race in the European middle ages I: race studies, modernity, and the middle ages 1." Literature compass 8.5 (2011): 315-331.
Heng, Geraldine. The invention of race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Nirenberg, David. "Race and the middle ages." Rereading the Black Legend: the discourses of religious and racial difference in the Renaissance empires (2007).
