A Small Amusement: The 'Kingdom' of Fife
As a child, whenever we visited my grandparents, we would drive past road signs bidding us welcome to the ‘Kingdom of Fife.’ Now that I live here, it feels quite grand to be living in a veritable ‘kingdom’. Yes, I also live in the UK, but this is a bit more fun because it’s a local sort of kingdom, an ancient one long predating the Union and even Scotland as a nation.
Or is it? Turns out Fife never was such a realm, as a brief glance at the ‘kingdom’s’ Wikipedia entry tells me:
The Pictish king list and De Situ Albanie documents of the Poppleton manuscript mention the division of the Pictish realm into seven sub-kingdoms or provinces, one being Fife, though this is now regarded as a medieval invention. The earliest known reference to the common epithet The Kingdom of Fife dates from only 1678, in a proposition that the term derives from the quasi-regal privileges of the Earl of Fife. The notion of a kingdom may derive from a misinterpretation of an extract from Wyntoun.
Alas! And yet road signs tell me I’m in the ‘Kingdom of Fife’ even now. I live in a non-existent place, conjured up by the imaginations of medieval scribes but still attested to by signs and in common parlance. Well, that’s persistence: making up a royal history for yourself and sticking to it for a millennium, the facts be blown. A quiet and enduring victory for invented tradition, as old Hobsbawm might have put it. (I suppose it helps that Dunfermline was once the capital of Scotland.)
So, in Rushdian terms, Fife is an imaginary homeland of sorts, a place made up (like nations of course) in the minds of its inhabitants. In this vein, let me speculate that those medieval scribes were trying to bring some sort of order to the diverse inhabitants of the Kingdom of Scotland, which emerged in the 10th century and only started looking like the modern-day nation in the 13th century. The Poppleton manuscript was written in the 14th century, so perhaps the scribe was trying to bind the young, fragmented, ethnically and culturally diverse, migrant-heavy nation together: if every part of it was once a kingdom, then every part of it should have pride in coming together as a larger kingdom. All the old kingdoms might be gone, but if every part of the country came forth from such grand beginnings, then every part of the country is an equal partner in the new over-kingdom, and has dignity within it (and if we have to make some ancient kingdoms up to make the scheme work, so be it).1
But irony lurks here. To this day, long after the Kingdom of Scotland was replaced by the United Kingdom, the Kingdom of Fife remains, and regionalism is on the march again in the land of Adam Smith and the Forth Rail Bridge. I doubt the kingdom-building scribes would have liked this twist: a Rosyth man named George Morton wants to set up a Fife Independence Party! The never-existent kingdom wants to go beyond mere nostalgia for its non-existent history and create itself! It’s alive! It wants to go! In a distortion of ancient mythology, the medieval Pygmalions, in their attempt to build a Scottish kingdom, have made their sculpture, their Kingdom of Fife, fall in love with itself!
Okay, okay. It’ll never happen and it would be silly if it did. But then, we Fifers insisting on living in an imaginary kingdom is also very silly, so who knows? And, as Morton says, Fife’s population is bigger than some UN states. The Kingdom comes!
Thumbnail picture mine.
A thought, added on December 10, 2022:
Or perhaps the Fifers were being intransigent to the project of building the new over-kingdom, and so the honour of Fife supposedly having been a kingdom in itself was made up to caress their egos, while other regions, requiring no such reassurance, were not told similar lies. I suppose it might help, in assimilating yourself into a larger polity, to be told you were once a mighty kingdom and are now joining, and playing an essential role in, a new and mightier over-kingdom. Though such flattery can backfire, as the existence of George Morton (and other and previous regional self-assertions in Scotland, the UK, and beyond) might attest.