The Auld Alliance

The Auld Alliance was signed in 1295 between Scotland and France against England.

That is the history-book version.

It is true.

But it is not enough.

Because the Auld Alliance was never just a military agreement. It was not merely kings, borders, armies, and strategy. It was not a polite diplomatic arrangement between two nations looking for leverage.

It was memory under pressure.

Two peoples. Two cultures. Two histories.

Both looking at the same imperial force and understanding something the powerful always hope the small will forget:

you do not survive alone.

Scotland was not England.

France was not England.

And the point was not hatred.

The point was survival. The point was dignity. The point was refusing to let a larger power decide the future of your language, your loyalties, your children, your name, or your soul.

That is why the old promise still carries weight:

If England attacks you, we stand with you.

That sentence is not tourist fluff.

It is not tartan nostalgia. It is not a novelty tea towel in a gift shop. It is not heritage cosplay for people who want a weekend identity without the burden of memory.

It is the sound of peoples who knew what it meant to be pressured, surrounded, mocked, absorbed, renamed, and told to grow up by becoming something else.

And they refused.

That is the part I love.

Not because I need to hate England to love Scotland. That is too small. Too cheap. Too easy.

I love it because the Auld Alliance tells the truth about identity.

Identity is not purity.

Identity is fidelity.

To memory.
To story.
To language.
To place.
To inheritance.
To chosen kin.

To the people who stood with you when standing with you cost something.

Maybe that is why it still echoes here, across the Atlantic, in this strange Canadian inheritance of ours. Montreal knows something about old France living inside a new country. Catholic Canada knows something about language, memory, procession, and public witness. Some men are born in that tension and spend their lives carrying it without needing to explain every layer.

I understand that more than I used to.

I am Scottish. I am Irish. I am Canadian. I am Catholic again after crossing rivers both ways. I am a father trying to give my son an inheritance deeper than grievance.

So when I think about the Auld Alliance, I do not only think about medieval treaties.

I think about fathers and sons.

I think about names carried across oceans.

I think about people who were told to forget where they came from because forgetting would make them easier to manage.

I think about every family, every nation, every wounded person, every outsider, every underdog who survived because someone else said:

You are not alone.

That is alliance.

Not agreement.
Not branding.
Not convenience.

Alliance.

The sacred kind.

The kind that remembers. The kind that resists. The kind that says there are forces in this world that want to isolate you first so they can define you later.

And the answer is relationship.

The answer is long memory.

The answer is standing with one another before the empire arrives, not after the damage is already done.

The Auld Alliance was never only about Scotland and France.

It was about refusing isolation.

It was about survival through relationship.

It was about the old wisdom that small peoples endure when they remember who stood with them.

And some of us are still learning to live that way.