A little bit of history

......doing us good. And not everyone there is a grey-haired oldie!

The oldest Scottish printed book was on display in the National Library of Scotland for 2 hours today.

One of the events taking place to commemorate the Battle of Flodden, 1513. King James IV had made the decision to issue a licence to allow printing for the first time.

For those of you who have no reason to know anything about this, it was a devastating, avoidable battle between England and Scotland that ended with the death of the Scottish King James IV, a large part of the nobility and around half the army of 20,000. As there were probably substantially fewer than 1 million people in Scotland at the time, that must have been somewhere between 1% and 2% of population, roughly equivalent to 600,000 now. (Surely not - that seems impossible - the arithmetically less challenged out there please correct me).

The 18th century song by Jean Elliot, 'The Flou'ers O' the Forest', is about the loss of so many men. There are bound to be recordings of it on YouTube.