The small Scottish town that is the birthplace of the dunce's hat

However, its origins lie in a small Scottish town, where a mediaeval philosopher’s penchant for sporting conical headwear which he believed helped him form ideas, became an object of ridicule.

John Duns Scotus, born in the small town of Duns in the Scottish Borders in the 13th Century, took the name of both his birthplace and his family - and ultimately gave it to the dunce’s hat.

Scotus was once mightily revered as a man of deep wisdom and bold ideas who studied theology and philosophy at Oxford and then taught at the University of Paris.

Ordained as a Franciscan priest sometime around 1266, one of his key ideas was that all life - from water to trees and animals - was holy.

Scotus wore a conical hat with legend maintaining it helped him stimulate his brain and retain his metaphysical wisdom.

His followers, the Dunsmen or Dunses, wore hats that were even more pronounced in the pointy department.

The headgear was a source of pride of the philosopher’s followers - before becoming a thing of ridicule after his ideas fell out of his fashion and deemed to be too complex and unrefined.

The style of pointy hat became associated with those unable to form coherent thoughts. Later, it morphed into the dunce’s hat which was used to ridicule schoolchildren in much of western world.

Author Joy Williams has explored the origins of the dunce’s hat in her latest book, Concerning the Future of Souls, 99 Stories of Azrael.

Williams said the philosophies of Scotus were “mocked” from the 16th Century after the Renaissance took hold in Europe and religious ideas were tested by a new style of intellectualism.

Williams wrote: “The philosophy of Scotus was mocked. Duns (the simple village of his birth in Scotland) became a word of scorn and dunce a contemptuous term for someone dabbling in sophistry and incapable of true scholarship.

“The Dunsmen’s tell-tale hats were depicted by the enemies of Scotus’ though as more and more preposterous and elongated, a witch or a wizard’s adornment.”

The Dunses later became a term for someone judged to be an opponent to progress and learning. Later, a large conical hat was forced upon the heads of pupils who misbehaved in class and became a tool of discipline and shame for less able pupils.

The term "dunce" appeared as early as 1624, and one of the earliest mentions of the dunce cap was in Charles Dickens' 1840 novel, The Old Curiosity Shop While the ideas of Scotus became derided as religious thinking was upturned in the 16th Century, some maintain he was precursor to philosophers such as Rene Descartes and Immanual Kant.

In 2016, a festival was held in Duns to celebrate the 750th anniversary of Scotus’ birth - and bring his work to a new audience. That year, school children tried to reclaim the original symbolism of the pointy hats - and took to the streets in handcrafted headwear to link it back to its roots as a statement of intelligence.

Scotus died in 1308 on November 8, the date now hailed National Dunces Day. He spent his later days in Cologne after a chaotic spell in France, from where he was expelled after siding with Pope Boniface VIII following a dispute with King Philip IV of France.

Today, a statue of him stands in Duns - but there is not a pointy hat in sight.