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Schotte and Schottland.
Besides the name Schott or
Schotte, which came to signify throughout the German Empire a pedlar, and
its derivations as "Schottenkram," "Schottenhandel," "Schottenpfaffe," "Schottenfrau,"
we have quite a number of traces of the old immigrants in local
topography. There is village called "Schottland" in the district of
Lauenburg, in Pomerania, with eighty-four inhabitants and ten houses;
another Schottland in the Danzig lowlands in Western Prussia, numbering
some 200 souls; a kirchdorf (village with a church), "Schottland," in the
district of Bromberg in Posen, also numbering about 200 inhabitants. A
so-called Schottenkolonie exists near Neuhausen, in district of Konigsberg,
Eastern Prussia. There are besides three so-called "Schottenkruge" =
Scotch inns, one four miles distant from Marienburg, in the Danzig
district, another in the district of Marienwerder, a third near the city
of Culm, in Western Prussia. What the precise connection of these inns
with the Scots was, whether they were at one time in possession of
Scotsmen, or because they were placed in a district where many Scots
lived, or finally, because they were much frequented by the Scots—and who
would deny the latter eventuality?—it would be difficult to say. They are
there, at any rate, witnesses of a dim past, when the county was flooded
by Scottish traders.
There was also a "Schottengang
"= "Scottish lane," at Danzig,’ which already boasted of an Alt-and
Neu-Schottland, as we have seen.
The small town of "Schotten,"
in Hesse, however, has nothing to do with the Caledonian Scot or the
Scottish trader of the XVIth and XVIIth Centuries. It was originally
called "Zu den Schotten" = "at the Scots," and owes its existence and
church to the labours of Scoto-Irish missionaries. There were no less than
nine such "Schottenkirchen"in Mayence and Upper Hessia, all of them
founded in the ninth or tenth century, and dependent on Straszburg, where
Florens, an Irish hermit, had been elected a bishop in the year 679.
The church at "Schotten" is
traditionally connected with two Irish royal ladies, daughters of Brian
Boru, whose names are variously given as Alcmudis and Dicmudis, or
Rosamund and Dicmudis. After the disastrous battle of Clontarf in 1014
they fled and devoted themselves, like so many royal ladies at the time,
to church and missionary work on the Continent.
This tradition receives a
support from two very ancient gilt busts which are to this day preserved
in the vestry of the church at Schotten. They represent two ladies with
flowing hair; one of them has a crown on her head, the other a wreath of
flowers. The work is attributed by archaeologists to the eleventh century.
There was also a document found in the ball on the church spire, dating
from the latter half of the fourteenth century. It says: "In the year of
our Lord 1015, in the reign of the king called the Lame, [Henry II,
Emperor of Germany, 1002-1024.] two sisters, natives of
Scotland, one of whom was called Rosamunda, the other Dicmudis, commenced
the building of this town and of our first Schotten kirche." In
connection with this question it must always be remembered that the
Teutonic word Scot occurs in Germany as a man’s name long before surnames
derived from nationalities were thought of. At least so Foerstemann in his
"Altdeutsche Namensbuch" assures us when speaking of the occurrence of
that name in the Book of the Brotherhood of St Peter at Salzburg. [See R.
Ferguson, Surnames as a Science, p. 7.] |
