“The Beatons: A Medical Kindred in the Classical Gaelic Tradition” by John Bannerman
Reviewed by Fergus Cannan-Braniff
Bannerman, John. 1998, rpr. 2015. “The Beatons: A Medical Kindred in the Classical Gaelic Tradition”, Edinburgh: Birlinn, xii + 161 pp (pb). ISBN 978-1-906566-92-0, rrp £17.99. Reviewed by Fergus Cannan-Braniff.
The Clann Meic-bethad, or Clan MacBeth or Beaton, were renowned Gaelic physicians from the 14th to 18th century – several Kings of Scots were among their patients. This is an outstanding book about the family and I was delighted to hear that a reprint had been issued. There are still only a few detailed works about the hereditary craftspeople of Ireland and the Scottish Highlands and Islands. Our knowledge of their lives, education, class status and genealogies is still meagre despite the fact that they must have been the mainstay of learning and craftsmanship in the pre-Culloden, pre-clearance Highlands. A preference for the study of urban, governmental Scotland persists among academics. The paradoxical juxtaposition of roughness and disorderliness, sophistication and courtliness, and esteem for learning and craft, which characterised life in Gaelic Scotland seem beyond the intellectual pale for many historians.
Nor do traditional brackets of time such as ‘medieval’ really fit, or help us understand, Highland history; it ran to a different historical clock, and we must deploy more inventive terms such as ‘pre-industrial’ or ‘pre-clearance’ or ‘pre-Hanoverian’ to describe that long period of time when the Highlands and Islands were governed by chiefs and their retinues of hereditary craftspeople and warrior-clansmen.
John Bannerman, who died in 2008, was an outstanding Highland (dare I say Celtic?) historian. Bannerman combined farming with university teaching. I cannot think of a better combination of crafts for an individual intent on getting the fullest possible appreciation of life in the past. This detailed, sophisticated, pioneering book is, quite simply, a first-class piece of research. Source material is handled with great confidence and subtlety, and the book remains focussed on the family in question without wasting time on too much background ‘context’. It tells the story of the Beatons and then ends. It is lean and mean, concise and to the point. It is a model for anyone seeking to further our understanding of medieval and early modern Gaelic society.
Fergus Cannan-Braniff has written studies of the hereditary blacksmiths and the mercenary ‘galloglass’ and ‘kern’ kin-groups of the pre-modern Gaeltacht.