Somewhere about 1066 Malcolm Canmore removed his court from Iona to Dunfermline and introduced the Saxon language, and about 1270 Gaelic was entirely superseded in the Lowlands. Latin was used in all publications, and there were not many who could read what few books there were. Gaelic was not printed till 1567, centuries after it had ceased to be the language of the court or of “society.” Then a book of John Knox’s was issued in Gaelic, but it was 1767 before the New Testament appeared in the Celtic tongue. When it did ten thousand copies were sold. There was, of course, a vast store of poetry and literature floating around in the minds of the people, passed down from generation to generation; but, with the exception of two small collections, one by Rev. John Farquharson of Strathglass in 1571, and the other by Alexander Mac Donald, Ardnamurchan, about eight years later, it had all to wait until 1759, when James Mac Pherson, the collector of Ossianic poetry, compiled or wrote (whether he compiled or wrote it is too delicate a matter to express a definite opinion about in this place) the classics of the Highlands. In spite of all these disadvantages, perhaps by reason of them, the Highlands remained the Highlands until the beginning of the present century. The many years of tribal warfare and of warfare with other peoples, did not destroy the individuality of the race, it was the slow civilising process of later ages that made the Highlands less a distinct nation than a province of the big British Empire. Of the circumstances in the midst of which the pipes and pipe music first got a hold on the affections of the Highland people we know but little. There were harpers before there were pipers, and probably bards before there were harpers, but these did not record contemporary history or the traditions of their age with any degree of fulness or accuracy, if indeed they can be said to have recorded anything at all who only told the next generation what they had heard from the previous. Writing in 1603 a traveller says of the Highlanders:— “They delight much in musicke, but chiefly in harps and clairschoes of their own fashion. The strings of the clairschoes are made of brass wire, and the strings of the harps of sinews, which strings they strike either with their nayles growing long, or else with an instrument appoynted for that use. They take great pleasure to deck their harps and clairschoes with silver and precious stones; the poore ones that cannot attayne hereunto decke them with christall. They sing verses prettily compound, containing (for the most part) prayses of valiant men. There is not almost any other argument whereof their rymes intreat. They speak the ancient French language, altered a little.”