George Mackenzie, 1st Earl of Cromartie, previously
Lord Tarbat and
commissioner (member of the Parliament of Scotland) for
Ross-shire, wrote a genealogy of
Clan Mackenzie before becoming a
Scottish representative peer under
Queen Anne. In a letter published in 1706 discussing debates over the
Treaty of Union, he said "Scotland is not our ancient Name; nay there is not such a Word in our ancient Language nor native Tongue .... in our Language the ancient Inhabitants of Britain were called
Britich and in Latin
Britanni", and "We call them Sassanich, in Latin Saxi or Saxoni". In
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, published in 1771, the Scottish novelist
Tobias Smollett reflected his experiences, including a recent tour of the Highlands, in fictional letters. One describes hunting the stag on the mountains of
Morvern, where the poems of
Ossian were heard "in the original Gallick" and a Highlander said he had no English, "
hu niel Sassenagh", the "very same answer I should have received from a Welchman, and almost in the same words. The Highlanders have no other name for the people of the Low-country, but Sassenagh, or Saxons; a strong presumption, that the Lowland Scots and the English are derived from the same stock". The
Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives 1771 as the date of the earliest written use of the word in English. The 1810 poem
The Lady of the Lake by
Walter Scott features tensions between Lowlanders –
James V of Scotland and
Douglases he had exiled – and a
Highland clan chief. Scott noted "The Scottish Highlander calls himself, Gael, or Gaul, and terms the Lowlanders Sassenach, or Saxons". The boat song "
Hail to the Chief", in the form of an
iorram or Gaelic rowing song, has the lines "Widow and Saxon maid, Long shall lament our raid". In
Waverley, a Highlander dismisses the suggestion that his friend is a common thief: "No - he that steals a cow from a poor widow, or a stirk from a cottar, is a thief; he that lifts a drove from a Sassenach laird is a gentleman-drover." Jamie Fraser, main character of the book and TV series
Outlander, uses Sassenach as a pet name for his English wife, Claire Fraser. A spirits brand,
Sassenach Spirits, was founded in 2021 based on Fraser's usage of the term. ==References==