The account given by Fordun of the distribution of the population in his day entirely corresponds with this. He says—‘The manners and customs of the Scots vary with the diversity of their speech, for two languages are spoken amongst them, the Scottish and the Teutonic, the latter of which is the language of those who occupy the seaboard and plains, while the race of Scottish speech inhabits the highlands and outlying islands. The people of the coast are of domestic and civilised habits, trusty, patient, and urbane, decent in their attire, affable and peaceful, devout in divine worship, yet always prone to resist a wrong at the hands of their enemies. The highlanders and people of the islands, on the other hand, are a savage and untamed nation, rude and independent, given to rapine, ease-loving, of a docile and warm disposition, comely in person but unsightly in dress, hostile to the English people and language, and, owing to diversity of speech, even to their own nation, and exceedingly cruel. They are, however, faithful and obedient to their king and country, and easily made to submit to law if properly governed.’[38] This description is no doubt to some extent coloured by the predilections of one who himself belonged to the low-country population, but it is not greatly unlike the prejudiced view taken of the characteristics of the Celtic population by late historians, and the struggle between the prejudices of the old historian against the Highland population and his reluctant admission of their better qualities is apparent enough. We thus find a Gaelic-speaking people in the Highlands and a Teutonic-speaking people in the Lowlands. The language of the former is at an earlier period termed Albanic, and afterwards Scotch, the language of the latter is by the native writers prior to the sixteenth century usually termed Inglis; but in the sixteenth the progress of a literature in the latter tongue led to those who used it calling it Scotch, while they applied to the Celtic dialect, formerly called Scotch, the epithet of Irish corrupted into Erse. The Celtic part of the population has never given any other name to their language than Gaelic, and term the language of the Lowlanders _Beurla Sassannach_, or the Saxon tongue. It is the social history and position of this portion of the population with which we have now to do. CHAPTER II. THE SEVEN PROVINCES OF SCOTLAND. [Sidenote: Old division of Scotia into provinces.]