For over two hundred years, if you were Scottish, you were also automatically French, and if you were French, you were also Scottish. It was written into law, and it began as a shield against a common enemy.
The Auld Alliance was signed in 1295 between John Balliol's Scotland and the France of Philip IV. Its logic was brutally simple. Both nations feared the ambitions of England, and they agreed that if England attacked one of them, the other would strike at England in return. For centuries this bound the two countries together through war after war, from Wallace and Bruce to the fields of France.
But it became far more than a war pact. Scottish soldiers served in the elite Garde Ecossaise, the personal bodyguard of the kings of France. Scots traded freely in French ports, studied at French universities, and brought home French words that still hum inside the Scots tongue today. A gigot of lamb, a joug at the door, a Hogmanay that echoes French roots. Scotland drank claret from Bordeaux when England could not, and the two nations swapped ideas, wine, wisdom and blood.
Extraordinarily, the alliance granted a form of dual nationality. Citizens of each country were treated as citizens of the other, a right that was said to linger in French law right up until 1906. For a small nation forever pressed by a larger neighbour, France was proof that Scotland stood on the wider stage of Europe as a kingdom in its own right.
It is called the oldest alliance in the world still remembered by both sides. Kings broke it, treaties buried it, and still it would not quite die.
Scotland was never as alone as its enemies wished. It had an auld friend across the water.๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ณ๓ ฃ๓ ด๓ ฟ๐โ๏ธ
NEW: Former Tory cabinet minister David Davis should not have 'hidden behind parliamentary privilege' when he made comments about Nicola Sturgeon in the Commons, Scotland's Deputy First Minister has said
How Nick Hancock ordered PPE manufacturers not to send supplies to Scottish care homes for the elderly in 2020 - The pandemic exposed the Union for what it is https://t.co/7rzWu3QqVV
๐งต๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ณ๓ ฃ๓ ด๓ ฟ๐ค๐ฆ๐ท From a Scottish teacher to Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi lifting the World Cup, the path of Argentine football starts with one man.
The father of Argentinian football isn't an Argentinian, he was a Scotsman - Alexander Watson Hutton.
THE BBC has revealed that it received more than 150 complaints after former Sky News host Kay Burley told a survivor of Jeffrey Epstein that she should accept that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was a โwar heroโ.
https://t.co/NIRGdFcPTA
'I just wasn't feeling it.'
James O'Brien isn't sure if Nigel Farage is either 'finished on a national level', or if he's 'the irremovable skidmark on British politics'.
Luxembourg, Norway, Spain, Malta, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Belgium, France, Netherlands, Poland and Ireland! Dear #RachelReeves, why do all of these countries have better pensions than the #UK relative to the cost of living?
Couldn't save Grangemouth with a few millions. Same with Mossmorran.
However a clapped out steel works in Scunthorpe got a ยฃ2 billion package to stay open. It's now losing ยฃ1.3 million a day. Another Union Bonus. Will we ever learn.
In 2019 Paul Sweeney stated that if a Holyrood election returned a majority of MSPs from parties that stood on a clear Indyref2 platform, it would constitute a "decisive mandate" for a second Indyref.
According to @PaulJSweeney, there is now a decisive mandate for Indyref2.
โก๏ธ Scotland has set a new renewable energy record!
๐ซฃ Yet, under Westminster control we are stuck pay some of the highest energy prices in Europe.
๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ณ๓ ฃ๓ ด๓ ฟ Scotlandโs energy must be in Scotlandโs hands, and that can only happen with #independence.
SNP buy Prestwick Airport for just ยฃ1, make ยฃ14 million profit and create 5 000 jobs in only 4 years while its sister airport in Kent goes out of business in only 6 months to become just a lorry park https://t.co/TS1TmIVE3f