Burke, the playwright and creator of  award-winning play Black Watch, opens his Diary in the Financial Times with the Scottish philosopher David Hume's quote: “Men run with great avidity to give their evidence in favour of what flatters their passions and their national prejudices,” to historian Edward Gibbon in 1776.

He has been writing a new play, starting a hare as it were, about Scottish philosopher Hume, that includes inductive reasoning, causation, comedy and a romp through the Scottish Englightenment.

He points out that next year is the 300th anniversary of (left) Hume’s birth, and warns of a  deluge, a "slew of tie-ins” from the intellectual hordes north of the border, adding that there is "no escape from the Scottish Enlightenment at the best of times, all accounts erring on the side of flattery.

"Scotland invented the modern world; Edinburgh is the world capital of ideas ... Scotland is magic, basically."

Enter the Historian
But it looks as if Burke might be at variance with the work of the University of Dundee historian, Dr Alan McDonald, who now bravely pitches a different form of Scottish enlightenment,  by concluding that voting was a Scottish import that the English then adopted whole-heartedly, following the 1603 Union of the Crown.

[Gold coins laureate bust of King James I and VI. The sound you heard, was of the metal gauntlet hitting the snow covered frozen ground!]

It is not the case that late medieval Scotland, rather than ancient Athens, was the cradle of democracy, but its terminology is claimed as closer to that of today, than that of its English neighbour.
 
Dr Alan McDonald (left) finds, while the concept of voting was widely used in the English parliament prior to the start of the C17th, the word itself did not enter the English political lexicon until James VI of Scotland took it south with him to become James I of England.
 
‘Voting in the Scottish Parliament before 1639’, is published in the most recent edition of ‘Parliaments, Estates and Representation,’ a multilingual journal examining nature and development of the world's representative governments.
 
McDonald's paper challenges theconventionally held assumptions about the power of the Scottish parliament.  Traditionally, historians dismissed the significance of voting in the Scottish parliament before the Covenanting revolution of 1638, viewing it as a largely ineffective body that passed the King’s legislative programme en bloc, without question.
 
But Dr McDonald finds detailed evidence undermining many previous assumptions aboutnature and procedure of parliament prior to 1639.
 
“What I was taught as a student was that the Scottish Parliament was not a powerful check on the monarchy,” he says. “The King was essentially able to do as he wanted, with the decision making process amounting to nothing more than the rubber stamping of a series of measures that the King put before the Parliament.
 
“What I found was, contrary to this traditional view, each individual draft contained in the programme was debated quite extensively before being voted on... There were lots of different references to voting in letters, memoirs etc.  A lot of times, these amounted to throwaway remarks which suggested that voting was quite normal, rather than being an exceptional event.
 
“It also emerged that, in England, prior to c.1600 there are no references to votes, only ‘voices’ when it came to the decision making in the English parliament. 
 
“Thereafter references to votes and voting began to appear, which is too neat a coincidence when you consider James VI became James I in 1603 and came from an environment where voting was well established as part of the political lexicon.
 
“The Oxford English Dictionary shows virtually no citations of ‘vote’ in England until after 1603, whereas it shows citations appearing in Scotland from the mid-15th century.  After 1603 we see an increasing number of references to voting in England until it replaced ‘voice’ completely to refer to the counting of opinions in a decision making process.”
 
England has long been seen as having a powerful and effective parliament that stood up to the King.  History of political power in England has been regarded as a continuous process of monarchy ceding more and more authority to parliament that incrementally increased its significance.  Dr McDonald’s research suggests the situation in Scotland may be more similar to this than previously thought.
 
Drawing upon local and national records, his article demonstrates that there is evidence for voting from as early as the fourteenth century.
 
“I’ve been carrying out research for the past few years and, along with a number of other historians, have been seeking to overturn the view that the Scottish parliament was inconsequential compared to its Westminster counterpart.
 
“Delving into a wide variety of primary sources and records told me something different to what has traditionally been thought.  The laws of Scotland were negotiated between parliament and King.
 
“This makes sense because parliament consisted of nobles, bishops, shire and burgh representatives. These were powerful people who would have been unlikely to meekly bend to the will of the King every time. Why would they have bothered to attend parliament if it was an impotent institution?”