Scotland

Scotland is one of the imagined stations in the secret Templar succession that Casaubon and his colleagues build from the alleged Provins message. In their reconstruction, a group fleeing the suppression of the order takes refuge with Robert the Bruce, helps him win at Bannockburn, and receives a new institutional identity in return. The country’s role is therefore both geographical and interpretive: it is a proposed place of refuge, but it also becomes a link produced by the Plan’s habit of turning names, customs, and coincidences into mutual confirmation.

Scotland in the proposed succession

The message is treated as a sequence of six destinations, each separated by twenty years, and one of its cryptic descriptions refers to the group “who ate the bread.” When Casaubon considers Scotland as the possible destination, he does so conditionally: if the knights in the “wain” fled there, he asks, why would they have gone to Scotland in particular to eat the bread? The question marks a shift from simply receiving the supposed message to actively searching for a place that will make its language fit.

The reconstruction gives Scotland a place between Portugal and the later stages of the imagined chain. Diotallevi’s diagram lists Portugal, England, France, Germany, Bulgaria, and Jerusalem against the dates 1344, 1464, 1584, 1704, 1824, and 1944. Scotland does not appear as a separate entry in that diagram; Casaubon instead identifies it with the message’s bread-eating group and with the supposed English branch. That difference matters: Scotland’s position is not laid out directly by the sequence but inferred through a story about the knights’ flight and a later wordplay.

The Bannockburn association

Casaubon’s association develops through a string of references rather than through a single historical document. Scotland leads him to the Highlands, Druidic rites, the night of Saint John, the summer solstice, and Saint John’s Fire, a rite he recalls from Frazer’s The Golden Bough. He asks Lia to check the book; she quickly finds the relevant chapter and reports that the observance was practiced in many European countries and celebrated when the sun was at its peak. Its Christian name, she explains, had been added to an older rite.

The bread provides the next link. Lia finds that the cakes made from flour and oats and toasted on embers were called bannock cakes. Casaubon then consults an English dictionary: it gives related forms of the word, including bannok in Middle English, bannuc in Anglo-Saxon, and bannach in Gaelic, and describes a grain cake cooked on a griddle or slab. Combining this with the claim that burn means a stream, he reads Bannockburn as something like “the stream of the cake” or “the stream of the bread.” The group named in the message as those who ate the bread can then be identified, in his chain of reasoning, with those who won at Bannockburn.

The supposed history attached to that identification is that the secret group took refuge in Scotland with Robert the Bruce and helped him win the battle of Bannockburn. In reward, the king is said to have established them as a new Order of the Knights of Saint Andrew of Scotland. The novel presents this as Casaubon’s reconstruction of a legend, not as independently established history. Within the Plan, however, the story seems to supply both a destination for the fugitives and an explanation for the message’s unusual phrase.

Scotland as a product of the Plan

Casaubon’s reasoning makes the method of the Plan visible. A seasonal rite supplies a bread custom; the name of that bread is connected to the name Bannockburn; the battle is then connected to the supposed Templar refuge. Each step appears to strengthen the next, even though the chain depends on associative interpretation rather than direct proof that the message refers to Scotland. Casaubon acknowledges his new facility with such connections, observing that one could start anywhere. The method makes Scotland persuasive within the reconstruction precisely because it can be reached from several different directions.

The appeal of this result is also practical. Casaubon judges the imagined route from Portugal to England shorter than Colonel Ardenti’s route from Pole to Palestine. The comparison gives the Scotland hypothesis a seeming advantage of geographical economy, but it does not resolve the evidentiary problem: a shorter route is not proof of a secret succession. Scotland thus becomes an example of how the Plan converts a plausible location and a cluster of resonant associations into an apparently coherent account. Its significance in the novel rests on that double status—as a possible refuge in the story Casaubon tells, and as a destination whose apparent certainty is made by the act of interpretation.