Artistic License History / Outlander

• Claire and Geillis Duncan are prosecuted for witchcraft. The year is 1743, and the British Parliament had abolished this crime in 1735. Under the Witchcraft Act they passed, it was made a crime to accuse someone of this. It's brought up by their attorney, but they're being tried in a church court, which is a separate jurisdiction. The last real Scottish prosecution for witchcraft was in 1727.
• Claire and Geillis are condemned on the testimony of a Catholic priest. In a Church of Scotland court. Catholicism being illegal at the time, and Catholic clergy subject to imprisonment, a priest would keep as far away from a Church of Scotland court as he could; nor would such a court accept testimony from a priest.
• Characters from the Highlands are often heard using words from the Lowland Scots language to give the English dialogue a more Scottish flavour. Historically very few Highlanders in this period would've spoken Scots, as English was considered the language of prestige and was the medium of instruction in schools, while Gaelic was the vernacular that Highlanders spoke amongst themselves. Scots was both geographically foreign and discouraged by educational and governmental authorities, so Highlanders would have had very little opportunity to learn it.
  • Most of the accents in the show bear fairly little resemblance to the way English would be spoken by a native speaker of Scottish Gaelic. Justified in that this accent would likely not be as recognisably "Scottish" to American or international viewers (it's often said to sound more like an Irish or Welsh accent).
  • In general, most of the less well-educated Highlanders, such as Angus and Rupert, would likely not have been able to speak any English at all. For obvious reasons, this is altered in the show.
• During preparations for the Battle of Culloden, a Jacobite soldier can be seen wielding a large two-handed Claymore, a sword which had not been used for around 100 years at this point.
• Claire introduces Jamie to the word "fuck", which he is initially bewildered by, the suggestion being that it wasn't a word used in Scotland, which is ironic considering that it first appears in a 16th century Scottish poem.
• The Jacobite rebellion is presented as very much an England vs Scotland conflict in the show (not helped by the fact that the terms "English" and "British" are occasionally conflated). The truth is far more complex, as there were a number of Jacobites in England, and certainly not all Scots supported the cause. Within Scotland itself, it could probably best be characterized as Catholics and Episcopalians vs Presbyterians. Still, there would have been no real reason to suspect Claire just because she happened to be English. In the 18th century in particular, Highlanders would likely have had more loyalty to their clans, and, more broadly, other Highlanders, than they would have had to the nation of Scotland.
• The difference between Highlanders and Lowlanders in the 18th century was far larger than is depicted in the show. Their languages, political systems, culture, and music were all completely separate from one another. For a modern viewer, the difference can be thought of as being roughly equivalent to that of somebody from France and somebody from Germany.
• The term "Sassenach" (literally "Saxon") was used by 18th century Highlanders to refer both to the English and the Lowland Scots—essentially a person who didn't speak Gaelic. In the show, it is presented as meaning only "English person."
• The show gives the impression that there was some settlement of Highland Scots in the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina. However, nearly all of the Scottish-origin people who settled in the Appalachians were Scots-Irish, descended mainly from lowland Scots farmers who had moved to Ireland in the 17th century, and had very little cultural overlap with the Highlanders. The location of Grandfather Mountain as the setting of the North Carolina Highland Games was chosen not because of an immigrant connection but because the real location the Highlanders had settled—the Cape Fear Valley, where Jocasta Cameron's plantation is located—was deemed not atmospheric enough (too flat). In real life, the Grandfather Mountain Highland Games take place there because the founder's family owned property on the mountain.
• When Claire mentions Germany in the third episode of Season 1, Jamie initially doesn't know what she is talking about until she uses the term "Prussia" instead. There are two problems with this: First, the Kingdom of Prussia, even at its greatest extent, never encompassed the entirety of what is now known as Germany. Second, although the various German principalities had not yet been unified into a single nation state by the time the series is set in, the word "Germany" as a general term for the geographical area where German was the dominant language had been used since the early middle ages, making Jamie's confusion an anachronism.
  • In contrast, "Italy" (which was similarly fragmented at the time) is correctly used to refer to the whereabouts of Charles Stuart.

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