UNDERPINNING the transformation of the Scottish countryside during the seventeenth–nineteenth centuries, and forming a vital precondition for the Improving Movement, were far-reaching changes in the structure and layout of farms and in the nature of the farm community. Initial discussion of these changes played on the contrasting experience of the Highlands and Lowlands. In the former, change was seen as achieved via the clearances, with traditional runrig touns1 and their multiple tenants being swept away to form large sheep farms, whilst in the latter, traditional runrig touns were seen as transformed via a reorganization of runrig holdings into separate farms, with some claiming a significant role for the 1695 act anent lands lying runrig. Subsequent research has greatly modified this picture. On the one hand, it has uncovered a greater diversity of means by which the traditional toun gave way to what essentially formed the modern farm landscape whilst, on the other, it revealed that what we can bundle together under the heading of this diversity played a role in all areas.
The cornerstone for this shift in perspective has been our better understanding of the term ‘clearances’. When first coined as a description of the changes that swept across the Highlands and Islands over the second half of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century, the meaning, chronology, and distribution of the clearances were all clearly defined. It was seen as a term that best captured the sudden and socially disruptive way in which many traditional runrig communities in the Highlands were swept aside to make way for sheep. Yet too easily, we allowed the headline story to smother the detail and variety of change that actually took place. More recent research has revised our reading of what happened in two significant ways.
First, whilst the wholesale clearance of touns to make way for sheep is still rightly seen as the prime means by which many highland touns were restructured, it is clear that a significant number of touns did not experience a clearance. We have long known that many along the western seaboard were tidied up into newly configured crofting townships rather than cleared. Others experienced a clearance but via a gradual reduction of tenant numbers. Still others were reorganized or divided out into small consolidated farms. Finally, a sizeable number of highland touns did not undergo any form of fundamental structural change, other than enclosure, in their transition to modern forms since, even by the time they first appear in late seventeenth-century rentals, they were held and worked as single tenancies.
Second, there is now a case for seeing the clearances as a process that affected all parts of Scotland. This revision turns on how we interpret the abundant evidence that has been uncovered showing that many traditional runrig touns in the Lowlands were transformed through a gradual, drawn-out process of tenant reduction. The scale and rapidity of this reduction was generally more restrained when compared to the big clearance events of the Highlands, but the eventual outcome of even a gradual process of tenant reduction was still one of toun clearance. Alternative forms of reorganization, such as the restructuring of multiple-tenant touns through their division or reorganization into small consolidated farms, also had a role to play in the Lowlands but their overall contribution now needs a more measured view.
The fact that the same bundle of processes were at work across Scotland, transforming old toun structures into modern farm layouts, does not mean that a geographical approach to such change no longer has value. A key driver of change in the Scottish countryside over the seventeenth–nineteenth centuries was the shift towards more market-responsive and specialized systems of farm production. When seen at the outset of the seventeenth century, the field economy of pre-improvement touns everywhere would have shared much in common in that most were organized around a mixed output of grain and livestock. At this point, their guiding strategy and the reason why there would have been a degree of sameness about their field economy was their overriding need to secure basic subsistence plus rent and seed. These defined horizons of basic need limited their direct market engagement. This is not to say that grain and stock were not being marketed, but what we see being marketed largely comprised the surplus rents in kind gathered in by landlords. What most ordinary farmers traded on their own account at this point would have been modest.
Over the mid-late seventeenth century, this situation began slowly to change. Foremost amongst the changes that we can detect was the way in which growing urban demand and improvements in grain output combined to enable touns in the more fertile parts of the Lowlands, as well as those along the east coast whose access to the sea enabled produce to be traded at a distance, to market an increasing amount of grain.2 Part of this increase undoubtedly represented the landlord’s take on the increasing output of touns. However, there remain questions about how much of it can be attributed to a growing surplus left in the hands of those tenants who commanded larger and larger holdings and who engaged in costly land improvements (i.e. liming). Establishing the build-up of market responsiveness is important when we come to look at the restructuring of touns. Different farming systems had different thresholds as regards the holding size at which they became viable, thresholds that factored in the capital needed to equip or stock them, their labour needs, the scale at which particular husbandries were most effective, etcetera. As areal specialization developed, we can expect the restructuring of touns and the farm sizes produced by it to have had these thresholds in mind. It is for this reason that any review of restructuring still benefits from a geographical approach, one sensitive to the interrelated factors of resource endowment, market advantage, and emerging areal specialization. With this in mind, I want to arrange the discussion under the standard headings of the Lowlands, Southern Uplands, and Highlands and Islands.
Early studies of how the pre-improvement touns of the Lowlands were transformed tended to deal with the problem in terms of how surveyors remapped the landscape so as to produce a layout pattern of consolidated, regularly enclosed farms. Few delved into the question of whether it was in any way rooted in processes that had long been under way, though John Lebon’s early work on Ayrshire clearly highlighted some of the deeper processes that may have been at work, with the planned, regular forms created by eighteenth-century improvers being contrasted with an older (pre-1700) piecemeal process of transformation, one that reincorporated the lineaments of the old touns and their furlongs in the new farm structure.3 Likewise, whilst some early studies referred to the importance of tenant reduction as a process for restructuring,4 they did not expand on what it involved. Some discussions even complicated matters by referring to the division of touns, making blanket references to the general importance of the 1695 act anent lands lying runrig,5 but what such divisions involved was not specified. Yet once these questions are confronted, our perspective on how farm structures changed in the Lowlands alters.
We can approach this change in perspective by looking first at what late seventeenth century data can tell us about the structure of the toun community in the Lowlands prior to the Improving Movement. As well as tenants, and subtenants who held land off the former, there also existed crofters and cottars. The crofters mostly held service crofts, such as those attached to mills, brewseats, or ferries, or given to ploughmen. They could be quite sizeable holdings (5–10 acres) but their prime characteristic, and what ensured the continued use of the term into the modern age, was the fact that they were held as separate, consolidated smallholdings and not enmeshed within a toun’s runrig. Cottars were a more diverse category. They provided essential labour for tenants (i.e. ploughing, sowing, harvesting, herding, shearing, etcetera) in return for what might have been a garden attached to a cot or a few rigs within the toun’s runrig, plus the right to graze a cow or a few sheep. It was the fact that their contract was based on labour in return for housing and subsistence that helps distinguish them from subtenants, the latter simply being lessees of land from the main tenant or tenants. Frequently, those cottars less endowed broadened their subsistence base by also practising a craft or trade, like that of wheelwright or carter.
Looking at the way touns were structured around such groups, analyses of poll-tax data for the 1690s show that a significant number of lowland touns were already in the hands of single tenants even by this point, with the rest of the toun community being made up of cottars of various descriptions and, in the larger touns, crofters. Thus, using 1696 data for Aberdeenshire, Ian Whyte found that in the fertile low-ground arable areas (such as around Aberdeen itself, the Garioch, and in the valleys of the Ythan and Deveron), over 70 per cent of touns were already in the hands of single tenants. By comparison, less progress had been made in hillier, more pastoral areas like Buchan. The distinction was sufficiently clear for Whyte to conclude that ‘there seems to have been a relationship between farm structure and the orientation of the economy towards arable or pastoral farming’.6 This analysis of the poll-tax lists was subsequently broadened by Tom Devine. Again, his analysis revealed that in fertile counties like West Lothian, Midlothian, and Berwickshire, the proportion of single-tenant touns was already between 60 and 75 per cent, whilst high levels could also be found in Fife and Ayrshire but only in local pockets.7 Whether long established or the product of recent changes, single tenancy was clearly well established by the 1690s. When we cross match the proportion of farms in the hands of single tenants at this point with their size, we are clearly dealing with some holdings whose output must have exceeded their subsistence needs plus rent and seed. However, across the region as a whole, the larger number of tenants present in multiple-tenant touns compared to single-tenant touns meant that the majority of tenants still farmed within multiple-tenant touns. Further, the fact that multiple tenants were more numerous meant that overall average holding size per tenant was still only modest, so that the majority would still have been bound in both their thinking and practice by the pressing needs of subsistence.8
When we use rentals to probe more closely into the balance between multiple and single tenancy, it becomes clear that the shift from one to the other was achieved by means of a process of tenant reduction, a process which, if sustained, ultimately led to single tenancy and the removal of runrig. As a process of restructuring, it differed from that underpinning the Highland clearances only in its rate of tenant reduction, representing, as Devine put it, a ‘clearance by stealth’.9 That tenant reduction was in progress before the 1690s is supported by analyses of rental sequences for the second half of the seventeenth century.10 How much change took place over the first half of the seventeenth century is less clear but it would be wrong to think that if we could push our perspective back still further, we would ultimately reach a point at which all touns were held by multiple tenants, thereby providing us with a terminus post quem for the start of the switch into single tenancy. Single-tenant touns had probably always had a presence. What happened from the 1690s onwards is more clearly defined. Tenant numbers shrank quickly over the first half of the eighteenth century, with any remaining multiple tenancies finally disappearing during the early decades of the Improving Movement. The scale of this shrinkage can be seen through rental data sampled by Devine from estates across the Lowlands. Two estates from those sampled illustrate the chronology and speed with which the rump of multiple tenancies disappeared over the first half of the century. On the Morton estate in Fife, 43 per cent of holdings were still held within multiple tenancies in the 1710s but only 3 per cent by the 1740s. Likewise, on the Douglas estate in Lanarkshire, 64 per cent were still held within multiple-tenant touns in the 1730s but this had fallen to 16 per cent by the 1750s.11 However, unlike in Aberdeenshire, where the shift into single tenancy on the higher ground lagged behind its progress on the lower, there is a case for arguing that single tenancy may have developed sooner on the higher ground that fringed the central Lowlands or which lay in blocks across it (i.e. the Pentland Hills) than on the more fertile ground, due to the early spread of commercial sheep production.12
Patently, the eventual outcome of any sustained reduction in tenant numbers was a substantial increase in holding size per tenant and, ultimately, single tenancy. Where tenant reduction acted as the prime process for restructuring, it also meant that the traditional toun would have formed the basis for the farm structures that we see in the modern landscape. Admittedly, later adjustments tweaked the size of some farms either upwards through amalgamations or downwards via the detachment of blocks, so as to achieve a better size or balance of land qualities within a farm. Otherwise, amongst the larger farms that came to dominate farm structures in areas like the Merse and Lothians (2–300 acres) and Fife (1–200 acres)13 were traditional touns recast in a modern guise, a carry-over that explains why some of the regional differences in holding size from the pre-improvement period were carried over into the post-improvement period.14 As well as involving significant increases in farm size per tenant, the spread of single tenancy probably led to efficiency gains through the greater freedom that it afforded over decision making, especially when we add the increased private rate of return on investments in land improvement and better husbandry.
What is less clear is how the spread of single tenancy may have altered the relationship between farming and the marketplace. Prior to c.1700, many lowland tenants would have had some degree of insulation from the direct demands of the market since they paid the bulk of their rents in kind, including substantial quantities of meal, wheat, and bere (or barley). They would have been involved in the mechanics of marketing in so far as many were required to deliver their grain rents directly to a market specified by the estate,15 and would have appreciated its price-fixing functions, but it does not follow that they were also engaged in marketing for their own profit. Devine has suggested that not only was their direct engagement with markets still modest by c.1700, but because the majority of holdings would still have been small, the typical farmer would have approached his day-to-day routines and decision making with a peasant mentality rather than as someone looking to seize market opportunities.16 In effect, their behaviour would have been rent-responsive rather than market-responsive. His reading is persuasive, but we should keep in mind that it relies on the assumption that, beyond what was taken up for rent, used as seed or consumed as subsistence, few tenants would have had sufficient surplus left to engage in much direct marketing themselves. However, quite apart from the role played by householding, or selling what they had in surplus for what they were deficient in, we need to ask whether those tenants who were reported to have taken on significantly larger holdings, extended their arable, and borne the heavy cost of improving land with lime during the seventeenth century, would have had the incentive to do so if they did not reap some private gain from having a marketable surplus left in their own hands. That said, the low margins meant that there was still a debit side for many tenants. Even as some were breaking out of the trinity of one to eat, one to saw, and one to pay the laird with by now adding ‘and one to market’, events turned against them, the poor harvests of the 1690s and early 1700s leaving many with insufficient grain for rent and subsistence, let alone profit.17
Whatever the degree of tenant marketing by c.1700, what is not in doubt is that this point saw the start of a critical shift, with lowland rents in kind undergoing a steady conversion into cash during the opening four or five decades of the eighteenth century.18 What had previously been paid as rent in kind now had to be marketed by tenants, exposing them directly to market prices. The speed with which the shift took place suggests that it was linked to very specific changes in how landlords perceived the benefits of collecting and marketing rents in kind. One explanation may lie in the impact of poor harvests on rents during the closing years of the seventeenth and early years of the eighteenth century, harvests that left many tenants in heavy arrears. The repeated dearths that characterized the 1690s and early 1700s were as much crises of rent as they were crises of subsistence.19 Levying rents in cash rather than kind may have been a way in which landlords could hold onto the book value of rents, at a time when harvests were low and prices high. For comparison, when prices fell sharply in the decade or so following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, some lowland landlords faced a reversed situation and responded by reintroducing grain rents.20
The removal of multiple-tenant or runrig touns through a division of the various shares into separate farms has always been part of the debate, but its precise role and significance has lacked definition. In the first place, the fact that so much multiple tenancy disappeared before the 1690s should, in itself, make us wary about the part played by the 1695 act. When we look closely at documented instances of its application, it is clear that its intended purpose was to facilitate the removal of examples involving heritors, enabling them to be divided at the instigation of any one of those involved. It had no bearing on other forms of runrig.21 Scattered examples of these proprietary runrig touns existed across the Lowlands. The majority were organized around feu tenure, a heritable tenure held in return for the payment of an annual feu-duty. Many originated through the feuing-out of land by the abbeys, such as those created by Paisley, Scone, Kinloss, and Inchaffray abbeys in the sixteenth century, or by border abbeys like Melrose.22 At their foundation, some feuars agreed amongst themselves to divide these feu-touns out into separate holdings, but others elected for a runrig layout probably as a carry-over of earlier pre-feuing arrangements. Yet whether based on feuing or other forms of hereditary possession, we can find some proprietary runrig touns agreeing to a redivision out of runrig long before the 1695 act. At Crail (Fife), the three proprietors of the farm of Boarhills, tired of the ‘loss and inconvenience’ of their runrig, decided in 1577 to redivide their land into consolidated shares,23 though such early agreements were not always so straightforward.24 The examples that survived down into the eighteenth century are likely to have been those whose occupiers could not agree over a division. Because they were executed through the local sheriff courts, those divided under the act are well documented.25 However, we must not let this better documentation deceive us. When we compare the number of proprietary runrig touns to those based solely around tenants, they were a relatively minor subtype.
Discounting the role of the 1695 act in the removal of runrig touns based solely around tenants does not mean that the latter were never removed by a division. It is just that the runrig intermixture of land between tenants did not require any legal process to change either the number of tenants involved or the layout of shares on the ground. Landlords were required to give notice of a tenant’s removal via a summons in the local sheriff’s court but, in most cases, this was merely a procedural step at the end of a tenant’s tack (lease), or where they had fallen into arrears.26 When a tenancy agreement expired, it was in the hands of the landlord to decide whether there should be a change in how a toun was laid out, though the choice over whether shares were to be divided out as runrig or as consolidated holdings was usually left to tenants.27 In the same way, any decision to reduce tenant numbers was also in the hands of landlords. For most tenant touns, the process was bound up with normal routines for the resetting of touns. Few would even have had the pretence of ceremony that we see at Lichtnie (Angus), where the two tenants were required to choose between a fiddle and its bow in a simple lottery to decide who was to have the farm as a single tenancy.28
Yet whilst the 1695 act played no role in the process, we can find examples of tenant runrig being removed by a division, but they were not processed through the local sheriff’s court. Instead, the surveying, mapping, and evaluation of each tenant’s runrig holding was carried out by the estate, though such rig-by-rig surveys of tenant runrig were relatively rare.29 Those instances where it led to a division based on what tenants had earlier held in runrig probably involved tenants or families whose occupation had been long-standing and whose runrig shares had ceased to be subject to reallocation, the latter perhaps being in acknowledgement of the former. We know that some tenants claimed the enduring occupation of their holdings on the basis of kindly tenure, but few made such claims by the late seventeenth century. Margaret Sanderson’s study of tenures during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries found families in possession of the same holding for over a century,30 but a tenant finding favour because ‘his father, grandfather, and forbears have been their [sic] since memory of man’31 is more difficult to find by the latter part of the seventeenth century. A detailed study of tenant stability on the Panmure estate (Angus) during the second half of the seventeenth century showed that only 18 per cent of tenants had possession of their land for more than eighteen years.32 Of course, some divisions of tenant runrig may have stemmed from the fact that wadsets (grants of land as security for a debt) were involved or, as on the Stobhall estate in Perthshire where runrig survived late into 1780s, parts may have been life-rented,33 so that each tenant’s right of claim had to be carefully accounted for in the new order. In fact, once long leases were involved, carrying out a detailed pro rata division of runrig shares into consolidated holdings may have been seen, whatever its cost, as a means by which new farm structures could be established quickly. Even so, as a means of removing tenant runrig touns, such divisions were the exception not the rule.
Analyses of touns prior to improvement have shown that small tenant farmers dominated the Scottish countryside everywhere. The widespread role played by tenant reduction would suggest that the gradual disappearance of these small farmers was a predominant feature of the structural changes that took place in the decades prior to the Improving Movement and during its early stages. However, we must not usher the small lowland farmer offstage too quickly. Whilst the division of tenant runrig touns via a division process played only a small part in the structural changes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, estates did reorganize many such touns into small–medium consolidated farms, but with no attempt to match the number of new farms created to the number of tenants who had shared the toun in runrig or to reaccommodate those who had previously held land under runrig. It was a form of division but only in a generalized way, the details of any earlier runrig layout being ignored in the creation of new farms.34 Such generalized divisions probably took place where landlords wanted to avoid the large farm units produced by allowing entire touns to pass into the hands of a single tenant. This was especially the case in areas like the western Lowlands and north-east Scotland, where specialized cattle breeding and rearing were important and where small to medium-sized farms were deemed viable, enabling good tenants to draw on sufficient capital to stock them.35
The creation of small to medium-sized farms via the generalized reorganization of touns was similar in its effects to the laying out of small farms and smallholdings on waste ground. Low-ground muirs were common across the Lowlands. Many were small, irregular patches of moss or nutrient-poor soils that broke up the arable of most pre-improvement touns and which became a target of land-reclamation schemes (i.e. draining, liming, marling) during the early stages of improvement, as farmers tried to create more regular and uniform blocks of arable and pasture. Others were more extensive areas of waste ground that had been used as common grazings, some positioned entirely within an estate but others—the commonties—shared between different estates or landowners. Though we can find quite large farms being created out of these former grazings as estates took steps to privatize them over the second half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many landowners and their agents saw them as an opportunity to create regimented arrays of small farms or lots. Estates saw these smallholdings as a cheap form of land improvement, one that substituted labour for capital. In some cases, these schemes of muir or mossland colonization would have functioned as a form of internal social budgeting for estates, with the colonization of reclaimable land being seen as a way of absorbing some of those displaced by tenant reduction elsewhere on the estate, thereby conserving some of the estate’s social capital.
We need only look at the size and sheer number of muirs or mosses that were reclaimed across the Lowlands over the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to appreciate the extent to which they will have served to absorb some of those displaced elsewhere. The muir at Cowie in Stirlingshire was typical. When divided out of commonty in 1760, all the large proprietors who received shares laid out their newly divided portions in small lots.36 Other landlords took advantage of mossland reclamation schemes, like those who endowed the so-called ‘moss-lairds’ settled on mossland in Airth parish in Stirlingshire, most of whom possessed only a handful of acres.37 The controlled creation of smallholdings on muir ground was a particular feature of eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century farm restructuring in the north-east.38 Along with the smaller farms created by the generalized division of runrig touns, the eruption of smallholdings on muirs and mosses gave parts of the north-east as significant a presence of them as were to be found in what later became the so-called crofting counties.39 Yet though their presence in the north-east increased markedly over the second half of the eighteenth century, smallholdings did not originate at this point. During the harvest failures that characterized King William’s lean years in the 1690s and early 1700s, some tenants faced with accumulating rent arrears were said to have abandoned their holdings and to have solved their subsistence problems by squatting on muir ground. Extant surveys for the area suggest small farms or smallholdings continued to be ‘newly taken in’ from the waste ground throughout the eighteenth century.40 Against this background, we can see the surge in their creation during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as replacing earlier uncoordinated efforts at the establishment of smallholdings with their controlled top-down creation by estates.
These different approaches to the restructuring of lowland touns clearly had different social consequences. Whilst we can find touns in which tenant numbers were reduced with some of the suddenness and manifest social collapse that were a feature of the Highland clearances, many single-tenant touns in the Lowlands appear to have been the product of a gradual, step-wise process of tenant reduction, whose conversion to single tenancy can be tracked across a number of rentals. Of course, the impact of even a gradual conversion was still one of fewer tenants. Some indication of just how fewer lies in the widespread references to the amalgamation of holdings and the shrinkage of the farming community in the parish reports of the Old Statistical Account (hereafter OSA).41 However, the parish reporters were not the most reliable of witnesses to what had been happening.42 Too often, they fail to make it clear to what type of occupier (tenants, subtenants, or cottars) they were referring and whether the amalgamation being referred to was brought about by tenant reduction within multiple-tenant touns or through the amalgamation of small consolidated farms. Further, for many, the key structural changes would not have been within their living memory. In fact, what stands out about the whole process of tenant reduction within lowland areas is that despite being an ongoing feature of landholding across a century or more, there is a dearth of contemporary comment about it as opposed to retrospective comment, other than that provided by estate documentation. This dearth probably reflects the fact that as well as being only one—admittedly the most important—of a number of means by which the old order was transformed into the new, tenant reduction unfolded in a ‘relatively painless’ way,43 occurring at a pace that enabled those displaced to be absorbed back into the farming community as cottars, labourers, tradesmen, and the like, some in the newly created estate villages; as smallholders on the many lots newly carved out of muir ground; or into nearby urban centres. Arguably, it was this combination, the gradual rather than sudden release of tenants en masse coupled with the presence of local opportunities for establishing new forms of subistence, that explains why tenant reduction in the Lowlands, though socially challenging and disruptive, did not lead to unrest or any form of direct action.
Trying to explain what happened to those tenants and subtenants displaced by tenant reduction is only part of the problem. We also need to ask how processes like tenant reduction affected the cottar. If we look at the problem in the seventeenth century, when the switch into single tenancy still had some way to run, most multiple-tenant touns had cottars. The poll-tax returns for the 1690s enable us to see what was happening to them as multiple-tenant touns were reduced to single tenancy. The answer is that initially most appear to have been absorbed by the labour needs of the new single-tenant farm. In Aberdeenshire, for example, the number of cottars on single-tenant farms equalled those that had existed in multiple-tenant touns.44 Analysis of the poll-tax returns elsewhere also suggests that cottars remained widespread in those areas that had made the greatest progress in the switch to single tenancy, accounting for between a quarter and one third of the total rural community.45 In fact, given the extent to which multiple-tenant touns would have used family labour as well as that of their cottars, there is a case for arguing that single-tenant farms, with the labour of only a single family, needed more cottars. On the face of it, the shift from multiple to single tenancy does not appear, in itself, to have been sufficient to undermine the position of cottars.
If anything, the new husbandries that spread across the Lowlands from the 1750s onwards raised labour demands, adding new tasks like weeding, hoeing, hedging, and marling to farm routines and making more use of labour across the farming year. The point is well made by the fact that at the height of what one local writer called ‘high pressure farming’ in the 1840s, a farm like East Barns in east Lothian had a total on-the-farm population of 150, of whom 45 were farm servants occupying 24 cottages, making it a community as sizeable as any pre-improvement toun.46 Yet despite this enlarged need for labour, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century commentators widely reported that cottar numbers fell sharply over the second half of the eighteenth century. Estate documents bear this out, with cottars disappearing from the rental record. Devine cites the example of Inverdovart on the Tayfield estate in Fife. With as many as thirteen cottars in the early seventeenth century, all trace of them had disappeared by the early nineteenth century.47 For some, their disappearance was manifest through the way many of the cottages assigned to cottars now lay abandoned. What lay behind this apparent shrinkage were shifts in how farm labour was contracted rather than in the amount of farm labour needed. With the onset of the Improving Movement, farming increasingly relied on wage-based day labour, with the wider support traditionally provided for cottars (access to arable, grazing rights) being stripped out of the contract. At a time when innovation was changing the character of farming, the improving farmer sought close control over his arable and grass resources. Enclosure was part of that control, but removing the cottar’s interest in a rig or two of arable and his or her right to contribute to the farm herd or flock was another. These were significant savings. In one estimate, that for the Rossie estate (Fife), cottars were said to have occupied 20 per cent of infield land.48 Changes also took place in how labour was housed. The provision of cot-towns or cottages for cottars disappeared. At a time when many farmers moved out of their old ferm-toun clusters to more substantially built houses on their newly consolidated farms, shedding responsibility for the burden of cottar housing must have appealed. However, other solutions emerged. Former cottars, as well as former tenants and subtenants, were amongst those who settled in the planned estate villages that now emerged across the Lowlands.49 The trade or servicing functions that lay behind their foundation made them attractive to cottars who had previously practised a trade or craft and who could still provide farm labour at peak times of the year. Some farms, however, clung to on-the-farm provision but in a way that reduced the scale of their obligation, as with the chaumer and bothy systems in Fife and Angus and the bothy system in the north-east. The former developed across both Fife and Angus and involved a separate accommodation block alongside the farm for unmarried male farm servants, with meals being provided within the farmhouse. The bothy system developed across the north-east and was based around an on-the-farm dormitory block, but the farm servants housed under it ate separately from the farmer and his family. Further, though the bothy system involved unmarried servants, married men were also present but forced to live away from their families.50
Like many toun economies elsewhere in Scotland prior to the mid-eighteenth century, those of the Southern Uplands were essentially mixed farm economies but, compared to the highly integrated farm economies that emerged later with the adoption of turnips and sown grasses, the arable and livestock sectors of the pre-improvement toun were only loosely coupled. Animals provided manure for arable but not on the scale that became possible with turnips and sown grasses. Likewise, from an arable perspective, no fodder crops were grown but autumn fodder was provided through stubble grazing. Figures compiled by the Buccleuch estate relating to touns in the central part of the Southern Uplands provide a glimpse of this mixed economy. The data was compiled to show farm losses following the bad harvests of the early 1680s. Revealingly, they show grain losses to be as much a factor as stock losses, even for areas like Ettrick and Teviotdalehead. Yet what also comes across from the data is the scale of the sheep-farming enterprises that had been established by the 1680s, with quite a number maintaining flocks of over five hundred sheep and some having over one thousand. As with contemporary rentals, the listings show around 50 per cent of farms as in the hands of single tenants.51 The presence of large flocks and single tenancies measure how far the Southern Uplands had responded to growing market demand even by the 1680s. It was well primed to make such a response. Even whilst being maintained as a royal forest back in the sixteenth century, ‘stedes’ in Ettrick were used for farm stock alongside hunting.52 Given this early involvement in stock farming, it is hardly surprising that following its deforestation and the setting of these ‘stedes’ to single tenants for a cash rent, specialist stock production was seen as the means for raising such cash. When we find Edinburgh lawyers buying local farms in the wake of the bankruptcies that followed the 1680s losses and then reorganizing them into specialist sheep-producing units,53 it would not be unreasonable to suppose that they were following an example that had already been set by then. That said, the decades following the crises of the early 1680s undoubtedly saw a rising demand for sheep and wool from the area, and may have set off a new round of toun restructuring in response.
The rise of commercial sheep farming on the higher ground of southern Scotland can be matched by the rise of commercial cattle farming in the south-west. Initially, the flow of cattle across the border to English markets was as much about Irish cattle as about locally reared stock. Following the restrictions placed on Irish cattle imports in the 1680s, farmers in the south-west, from Carrick round to Galloway, appeared to have taken up the slack in supply. By the closing years of the seventeenth century, many were heavily involved in supplying cattle fattened for the English market, especially in Galloway. Two features stand out about involvement in this trade. The first was the involvement of landowners in the development of the trade, including major landowners like the Earl of Galloway. The second was the way it was developed around the establishment of large enclosures or parks. Some were simply the parks around mansions given an extra purpose. Others were custom-made. The park established by Sir David Dunbar at Baldone in 1682, what one seventeenth-century source described as ‘the mother of all the rest’, extended to over 1,800 acres.54 This was cattle farming on a ranch-like scale, one that must have led to the dispossession of many tenants and cottars. In time, the development of cattle rearing in the area encouraged landowners and their tenants also to enclose what had been open or common grazing ground. The clearance of touns to create grazing farms, along with the growing restriction on what could be grazed, fed into the violence of 1723–4, when ‘levellers’ in Galloway pulled down some of the dykes that had been built in parishes like Keltony Buittle, Rerrick, Twynholm, and Tongland.55 Order was quickly restored, but this direct action against dykes and farm restructuring raises questions about why such violent opposition to restructuring erupted here. In comparison, there are no signs of unrest occurring to the east, in the main body of the Southern Uplands, during the wave of tenant reductions and restructuring that occurred over the closing decades of the seventeenth century. Admittedly, there had been a significant presence of single tenancy since the deforestation of Ettrick whilst the tenant reductions that followed the storms and financial losses of the early 1680s, when single tenancies became even more widespread, were probably met with resignation over their misfortune rather than opposition to a landlord-driven process of dispossession. Further, by c.1700, the growth of domestic industry in counties like Selkirkshire helped to ease some communities through the transition. By comparison, if we are looking for those local factors that helped to separate out the plight of the Levellers, then three stand out. First, prominent amongst those who imparked land and who farmed the parks created were landlords. Second, quite apart from the symbolism attached to the physical enclosure of land at a time when enclosure was still a rarity, some of the cattle parks created took in what had been common grazing lands, so that the resource base of local farms was squeezed by their creation. Third, many of the local farmers who stood to lose vital access to such grazings were small cattle farmers or drovers whose stock would have involved considerable financial outlay and risk. Somewhere amidst the interplay between these three factors probably lay the trigger for the destruction of the Galloway park dykes.
Whilst the Highlands no longer has exclusive claim to the clearances as the means by which traditional pre-improvement touns were transformed into what became the foundations of the modern farm layout, it still remains the part of Scotland where they had their most dramatic impact. Even here though, there are qualifications to be made. Some highland touns were already in the hands of single tenants by c.1700, long before specialized sheep farms developed.56 Admittedly, in the Hebrides and along the western seaboard especially, a substantial proportion of touns were held by tacksmen, many of whom sublet the bulk of their holding to subtenants so that, on the ground, these appeared as typical multiple-tenant touns.57 However, some touns were kept in hand by tacksmen and farmed using cottars. Change for these touns was simply about deciding when to switch to sheep, a relatively straightforward switch if they were already treated as ‘grass rooms’, or farms specializing in cattle.58 Elsewhere, when restructuring was carried out, a clearance was the prime means used but, as Margaret Storrie demonstrated in her work on Islay, other forms of restructuring were also employed.59 Further, as her work also demonstrated, restructuring was not always a singular point or moment of change. Many touns or farms passed through successive phases of restructuring as conditions and expectations changed.
Amongst those touns that were set directly to multiple tenants, the prime—if not the only—strategy chosen by estates was to reduce them to single tenancy via a clearance event, or what one writer has called an ‘expulsive clearance’,60 so as to make way for sheep. The earliest of such clearances took place in the 1750s in the southern Highlands. They can be seen as the northwards extension of a process that had already been running for a century or more in the Southern Uplands, with the expansion of market demand for sheep now drawing in yet more suppliers. Seeing it as the continuation of an expansion that had earlier swept across the Southern Uplands is given added support by the fact that whilst some local tenants, especially in the south-east Highlands, did make the transition from being runrig tenants to sheep farmers, many of those who pioneered the spread of sheep farming in the Highlands were drawn from southern Scotland. John Campbell, the farmer who replaced four runrig tenants in the Dunbartonshire toun of Glenovoe in 1754 and who was reputed to be the first large-scale sheep farmer in the area, previously farmed in Annandale in Dumfries-shire.61 His background was comparable to many others from the Southern Uplands who took sheep farms over the second half of the eighteenth century. In short, it was not just the demand for sheep that drove expansion, but also, the demand for land from would-be tenants whose experience in the Southern Uplands made them acutely aware of the burgeoning market opportunities. Their vision of the economic possibilities contrasted with that of commentators like Andrew Wight, who, in 1775, argued that ‘very probably after doing mischief to themselves’, those who converted the Highlands to sheep ‘will return to black cattle’.62
Unlike the gradual reduction in tenant numbers that we see in many lowland touns, the Highland clearances generally involved a sudden collapse of tenant numbers and of the community fashioned around them, with touns being cleared and reset in a single act of restructuring. Heightening this sense of social collapse was the fact that many highland touns were fairly crowded affairs, developed around a bustling mix of tenants, subtenants, and cottars. A 1775 survey of Cromarty referred to ‘a considerable Number of Sub-tennants, Maillers & Cottagers on this Estate and particularly in the Barony of Coigach’,63 but it was the same everywhere. Some were larger than their low-ground counterparts, as Ian Whyte found when he compared tenant numbers in touns in the upper part of Glen Muick (Aberdeenshire) with those in the lower part.64 In addition, many appear pressed hard against their arable resources. Some highland landowners had long been happy to pack their estates with would-be followers, clansmen, and potential military recruits. For their part, highland communities had a tendency to consume rather than trade their surpluses, adding extra mouths rather than extra profit. In time, this became a critical factor in northern and north-western coastal areas where the extra subsistence per acre yielded by the spread of the potato, the extra income provided by the development of kelp manufacture, and the extra income and subsistence provided by fishing meant that many communities grew rapidly over the late eighteenth century and opening decades of the nineteenth. Even inland, use of the potato and the rising price of stock helped to release some of the constraints that had bound traditional toun economies, though growth was less than in coastal communities. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the collapse of the kelp trade plunged many coastal touns into crisis. In addition, falls in the price of stock and grain, poor harvests, and the first signs of the potato’s vulnerability to disease not only deepened the subsistence problems of coastal areas but also spread the problems inland.65 Given the growth of extra numbers and development of acute subsistence problems ahead of the main wave of clearances, it is not surprising that what took place in the far north and north-west, much more so than what happened in the southern Highlands, came to define the clearances as a large-scale and draconian removal of tenants.
We can highlight some of these differences by comparing what happened in the southern Highlands, where the clearances were mostly concentrated before 1800, with what happened in the north and north-west Highlands, where the main clearances were largely if not entirely a post-1800 event. In the former, most multiple-tenant touns were modestly sized. Only the more favourably endowed could boast more than 30–40 acres plus access to more than 500 acres of hill ground. When cleared, these formed only small to medium-sized sheep farms and it is not surprising that we find estates joining farms together, not just to have a better balance between wintering and summering ground, but also so as to achieve a larger, more viable size. As runrig communities, most averaged no more than four to six tenants, plus subtenants and cottagers or cottars, though locally, we can find much larger communities.66 In some cases, we can recover exact figures for groups that normally lie hidden, like cottars. Listing for Netherlorn in Argyll, for instance, reveals seventeen out of the twenty-five touns had cottars, averaging 2.78 per toun.67 Yet even when we take the number of cottars present into account, they appear fewer in number when compared to those in touns to the north and north-west. Further, when we look at those that experienced a clearance event, the impact of change was lessened in one of three ways. First, some estates responded to the early opportunities for sheep farming by detaching hill pasture or shieling ground from touns and creating sheep farms out of them rather than by clearing the core of touns.68 Second, we find some of the conversions to commercial sheep farms were initially held as a joint tenancy.69 This ongoing presence of tenant partnerships probably reflected the considerable start-up costs involved in stocking such farms. Third, not only did some sheep farms maintain sizeable arable sectors, but many in the southern and central Highlands continued to maintain a fold of cattle (= herd of c.20 cows) down to the 1840–50s, when an increase in sheep and wool prices led to a renewed surge in sheep numbers.70
When we look at the experience of the northern and north-west Highlands, we can draw out a number of differences. Toun size here was more varied, but locally there were some very large toun communities. The presence of these larger touns had two consequences. It meant that when large-scale sheep production began to spread rapidly through the area in the 1800s, the clearances that ran ahead of it displaced large numbers of people. This can be illustrated by the ‘several thousand’ cleared, 1814–16, from the interior straths of Sutherland, including Strathnaver, followed by the 3,331 people removed from touns in the parishes of Kildonan, Lairg, and Rogart in 1819.71 The organization of sheep farming in these northern Highlands emphasized this gap between what existed before and after. The sheep farms created were physically much larger than elsewhere. Many of the pre-clearance touns on which sheep farms were based were physically more extensive than those in the southern Highlands. Also, not only did they start off with larger base units, the sheep holdings created often embraced groups of former pre-clearance touns so as to create vast working units. Donald and William Mackay, for instance, built a holding of over 150,000 acres from an initial base at Melness in Sutherland. Others captured their sheer scale by computing them in ways that were thought more striking, so that Greig of Tulloch was described as having ‘100 square miles under sheep’ whilst the Cameron of Corychvilly’s holdings annually clipped 37,000 sheep.72 As a list of shepherds and hirsels for part of the Sutherland estate makes clear, the organization of these vast multi-farm enterprises emphasized the depopulation brought about by sheep farming, since former touns were now grouped together into single continuous sheep farms; each one was subdivided into a small number of hirsels, with each hirsel being managed by a single shepherd and made up of an area of pasture to which a flock was attached, or hefted.73 Where multiple tenancies were reduced to single tenancies in lowland touns, ongoing labour needs still meant that the farm community could be quite large. On the vast sheep holdings that emerged in the far north of the Highlands, however, whole touns could be replaced simply by a single shepherd and his family, except at shearing time. Without doubt, the scale and starkness of this social transition, with large thriving communities giving way to the solitude of the shepherd, helped to fuel the social tensions and confrontations that underpinned some of the clearances.
The events surrounding the clearances in Strathnaver were especially significant in publicizing what was happening and their social cost to a much wider audience. Though the Sutherland estate orchestrated its clearances in a planned way, with tenants offered crofts that had been newly laid out along the coast, most with facilities added to provide supplementary sources of income from fishing and other activities, the heavy-handed and brutal way in which some clearances in Strathnaver were executed in 1814 led one of the duke’s agents or under-factors, Patrick Sellar, to be charged with culpable homicide.74 He was, in the event, cleared of the charge, but the evidence presented, and the wider debate surrounding the trial, changed perceptions not just within the mind of the highland community but also within that of the public at large. As well as being an agent for the estate, responsible for collecting rents from the tenants in Strathnaver, Sellar was also the person who had bid successfully to convert the Strathnaver touns into a sheep farm. He was therefore, the person charged with issuing the orders of eviction when the tacks in placed expired in 1814 as well as being the beneficiary of those evictions. Though a self-interested man, he acted cautiously over the evictions, negotiating different times of removal for those who were to be given new lots on the coast according to their circumstances. In practice, the different arrangements put in place led to confusion over what precisely was happening. When we add in the estate’s policy of excluding from new lots those whom it deemed to be troublesome, we can understand why some removals became moments of tension and confrontation. To those reading contemporary newspaper reports of the trial in Edinburgh and London, references to houses being pulled down would have seemed to confirm the brutality that surrounded the Strathnaver removals, even though tenants in the region had themselves routinely stripped out the roof timbers and doors on their removal from a tenancy.75 The problem for Sellar was that the heavy-handedness with which some clearances in Strathnaver were carried out led to the death of an elderly woman. Yet arguably, what propelled Strathnaver into the headlines was the way in which this personal tragedy and the drama of a trial for a duke’s agent were combined with circumstances that encapsulated the extremes of the clearances as a process, with a significant number of busy, well-settled touns being replaced by a single extensive sheep farm, the tack for which lay in the hands of the very person charged with managing their clearance!
Whilst the wholesale clearance of touns was the prime means by which highland touns were restructured, and certainly the means that generated most reaction and controversy, it was not the only means. As in the Lowlands, some highland touns were reorganized into small, compact farms using a generalized form of division. These had favour during the early stages of change in the Highlands. There was a good reason for this. When highland estates, including the commissioners for the forfeited estates, first began to address the problem of how to restructure traditional touns in the mid-eighteenth century, excess numbers were not yet considered a pressing issue and small to medium-sized farms were still considered viable holdings when laid out as consolidated holdings. Such schemes produced farms that were much smaller than sheep farms.76 In time, as market conditions changed and as numbers grew, their size proved their undoing. Some estates responded by carrying out a subsequent round of amalgamations, as happened on the Perthshire section of the Breadalbane estate in the 1830s.77 The Argyll estate responded differently, at least as regards its Mull and Tiree farms. Its initial attempt to reorganize runrig touns into medium-sized, consolidated farms of a standard size, its so-called four-mail land policy, was designed to keep a reasonable number of tenants (roughly, four per toun) on the land.78 However, increasing population, the growing problem of what the estate called its supernumeries, soon made the holdings created inadequate for the growing numbers on the estate, and a new reorganization was deemed necessary. Through this second reorganization, what emerged were smaller croft-sized holdings based on crofting townships. In effect, the initial reorganization had served as a stepping stone to the emergence of crofting townships.79 Second thoughts on restructuring were also a feature of change in Morar in Inverness-shire. After the Earl of Moray, its owner, came of age in 1827, its various touns were quickly restructured into a graded mix of small and medium-sized farms as well as large sheep farms, the guiding principle being that such a grading enabled tenants with modest capital to progress up the farming ladder. In fact, this initial reorganization proved unsuccessful and the estate responded by carrying out a new restructuring in 1879, downsizing some and enlarging others so as to create a simple bimodal pattern of small crofts, as at Mallaig, and large sheep farms, like Kinlochmorar,80 a pattern ultimately repeated throughout the western and northern Highlands.
Instances where estates carried out a full division of runrig, reallocating runrig shares into consolidated holdings on a pro rata basis, were not common in the Highlands and Islands. Even in the mid-eighteenth century, most of the smaller holdings, especially along the western seaboard and in the Hebrides, were still held on a year-to-year basis. If we add the fact that many touns still carried out an annual reallocation of runrig shares, then we can understand why formal divisions of tenant runrig were deemed unnecessary when estates came to restructure them. Those subjected to formal divisions, including quite a number on the Gordon estate in Inverness-shire and the Lovat estate in Inverness-shire and Ross and Cromarty, were the exception.81 In normal circumstances, such divisions were carried out only where runrig had been underpinned by a long-term stability of layout, such as where it was based on feuars or heritors, like those to be found along the eastern side of the Highlands, for example, at Dingwall (Ross and Cromarty).82 Taking the Highlands and Islands as a whole, most examples of proprietary runrig divided by legal process were in the Northern Isles, especially Shetland. They involved heritors of different sorts, including some who held their land heritably by odal or udal tenure, the law introduced by the Norse. Most were not divided until the nineteenth century and, in a few cases, not until the twentieth century.83
Crofts were an old-established unit of landholding, the term long being used to describe small, consolidated holdings that functioned as service holdings attached to mills, alehouses, etcetera, or as holdings assigned to high-status farm servants like ploughmen. Their renewed creation from the late eighteenth century onwards did not alter their definition as a small, consolidated arable holding, with defined grazing rights, but it did rework the concept into a plural form by creating what became the crofting township. These township clusters were laid out in a planned grid-like fashion, some as narrow rectangular ladder farms and others in a square, block-like shape. During the closing decades of the eighteenth century, we can see three key strands being slowly intertwined in their evolving DNA.
The first was the widespread emergence of smallholdings on waste ground that from the outset were labelled as crofts. Initially, they were a prominent feature along the eastern edges of the Highlands, where many were established on extensive areas of marginal waste ground, including many on the privatized blocks of former commonty land created by mid-late eighteenth-century divisions, like that at Millbuie in the Black Isle.84 Others were established by squatters, including many by tenants dispossessed by the clearances and tenant reductions now being implemented further west.85 Second, and a point already noted, some small to medium-sized farms were created out of the restructuring of multiple-tenant touns. Examples of this can be found across the region. Those created on the Breadalbane and Argyll estates before 1800 have already been mentioned, but other examples can be cited for areas both south and north of the Great Glen.86 Third, during the 1780s, the British Fisheries Society added a vital strand when it laid out a number of planned villages on the west coast (i.e. Ullapool, Tobermory) as fishing stations. As well as providing the facilities needed for fishing (i.e. curing stations, boat building, cooperage), a prime feature of these villages was the fact that they were laid out around small crofts, whose occupiers were expected to balance fishing or related trades with small-scale farming. There were some areas where ad hoc forms of dual economy had long been evolving, such as on the Assynt coast, but the British Fisheries Society now set it down within a planned framework based on the croft.87
By the 1790s, these different inputs had become fused together in the concept of the crofting township. However, by this point, critical price changes precipitated by the Napoleonic Wars from 1793 onwards had also begun to play a part in their formation. On the one hand, the sharp inflation of sheep and wool prices added a still more powerful incentive to the clearance of those touns that possessed extensive grazing grounds. On the other, a sharp rise in kelp prices and the labour demands created by the production of kelp gave landlords a vested interest in packing their coastal touns. They were helped by the fact that by the closing decades of the eighteenth century, most highland touns were experiencing rapid population growth. They were also helped by the potential boost to subsistence now afforded by fishing and the growing use of the potato, both of which enabled more to live off less land.88 In fact, where combined, kelp, fishing, and the potato, along with the willingness of crofters and cottars to spade difficult land, redefined the lower threshold of what was deemed a viable croft, leading some estates to distinguish between full and half-crofts, depending on whether supplementary income or subsistence was available in addition to arable.89 In the north, the Sutherland estate provides a well-documented example of how the coming together of these various trends in restructuring and market conditions was used to develop a regional approach to restructuring, with the interior straths being depopulated and those displaced being resettled in new crofting settlements established along the coast, like Brora and Helmsdale.90 The contrast that was created is captured by two statistics from James Macdonald’s 1880 essay on the county of Sutherland: 95 per cent of farms there were by 1870 under 20 acres, the vast majority of which were on the coast, with the interior given over simply to 30–40 large sheep farms.91 As elsewhere, the crofting townships planted on the coast were based on dual economies, with crofting being combined with fishing or even activities like mining or glass-working. On Skye, Lewis, Harris, and the Uists, the same contrast was played out at a finer scale, with areas of sheep farming being locally interdigitated with areas given over to sheep and others to crofting townships, even along the coast. The creation of the latter on these islands during the early nineteenth century, many between 1810 and 1815, formed one of the most concentrated acts of toun restructuring anywhere in Scotland.92 Some were laid out across part of the former multiple-tenant touns that they replaced, but others involved displacement, either from a site nearby or from a more distant part of the estate, so that crofters had to reclaim their arable afresh, a task made all the more demanding given that many of these displaced townships were on poorer land compared to the original toun, such as was the case with those settled in the bays areas of east Harris.
The conditions under which these crofting townships developed proved far from stable. When we read how John Blackadder, the surveyor charged with laying out crofts on the Macdonald estate both in Skye and North Uist in 1810–11, laid out crofts at a size that ‘may answer for enclosures … should it be thought proper at any future period to let any of them [townships] to single tenants’, it is clear that this temporariness was in mind from the out-set.93 As the Napoleonic Wars drew to a close in 1815, the price of kelp, along with that of stock and grain, fell. Poor harvests and the first signs of the potato’s vulnerability to disease in 1816–17 added to the problems.94 Whereas market conditions recovered for sheep and wool, they only worsened for the smallholder and crofter. As the problems of the latter deepened, a shift in attitude took place amongst landowners. So long as there was profit in kelp, landlords had not only been tolerant of the large, crowded communities to be found on the coast but had encouraged them. As income from kelp declined, as subsistence problems emerged and rents arrears accumulated, what had earlier been planned out as a solution, the crofting township, now came to be seen as a burden. From a landowner’s perspective, declining income meant it was no longer about trying to keep a balance between the needs of their smallholders and those of the large sheep farmer, but about trying to maximize their returns from land. The sale of so many highland estates over the first half of the nineteenth century emphasized this shift in attitude.95 With a background in commerce, banking, and industry, many of those now buying into the region were unencumbered by obligations to their smaller tenants, though even the attitude of traditional landlords tended to shift at this point. A. I. Allan Macinnes saw this shift from trying to accommodate smallholders in some numbers to a policy of rent maximization at all costs as so significant that he distinguished what happened before the 1820s and 1830s as constituting a first phase of clearance and what happened afterwards as a second phase.96 His distinction is an important one, though there is a case for breaking down his first phase, separating out its initial stages, when estates thought that small to medium-sized farms might still be viable, from that which had unfolded by the 1790s, when laying out crofts and so-called fisher-crofts, or half-crofts, became the norm.
The diminished regard for the small tenant by the 1820s, whether those in surviving multiple-tenant touns or in newly founded crofting townships, manifested itself in different ways. To start with, we find less and less provision made for those still being cleared to make way for sheep. Whilst estates like the Sutherland estate continued to offer newly created lots on the coast for those displaced, we find an increasing number of instances, especially in the Hebrides, in which the absolute minimum or even no provision was made. Tenants and cottars affected by the comprehensive clearance of Rum in 1826 and 1827 and, later, the succession of removals from South Uist and Barra that culminated in the large-scale clearances of 1851, for example, were provided only with free passage to North America, a common solution at this point as landlords resorted to exporting their problems.97 Those with long memories might have argued that whole touns of tenants and cottars had emigrated before, led en masse by their tacksmen during the crises of the 1740s and 1770s,98 but there was a difference between an emigration of choice and the coercion that underpinned some of the removals from South Uist and Barra in the late 1840s and in 1851.
For those tenants and cottars who remained, conditions were not necessarily any better. Despite their planned, regulated appearance, crofting townships were not fixed, immutable affairs. Many were subject to an ongoing process of restructuring, as their resident numbers initially increased through further population growth, as more were moved into them from newly created sheep farms, and as the collapse of kelp production after 1815 left many who had depended wholly on kelp without adequate means of subsistence.99 These problems reached crisis point during the 1840s potato famine.100 Yet at a time when communities needed support, some landowners chose to restructure their property afresh. Not only were many of the surviving multiple-tenant touns swept away in the 1840s and 1850s with little or no provision for resettlement, but some estates—as John Blackadder had foreseen—now began to clear even their crofting townships to make way for sheep, a clear sign of how thinking had moved on. The island of Ulva was typical of these shifts in estate policy. As elsewhere, it was underpinned by a change in ownership. Those who occupied the lots or crofts into which its touns were divided c.1810 were described in an 1825 sale advertisement for the island as engaged in cattle rearing and fishing, and to have made ‘a very handsome profit’ from the making of kelp. By the late 1840s, though, the new owner had already started clearing them for what, for him, was the greater profit of sheep.101 The mid-late nineteenth-century surge in the creation of deer forests added still further pressure on the crofter, with some crofting townships (i.e. in the Park district of Lewis) no less than sheep farms (i.e. that on Rum) being emptied to make way for them.102
Those crofting townships that survived these late clearances faced their own problems, with new pressures that slowly squeezed their resource base. The growth in numbers alone meant that crofts were now routinely subdivided or split into smaller crofts, either because crofters themselves split their crofts between children (a practice that many estates tried to prevent) or because estates crowded more into the township as they continued to resettle some of those cleared from new sheep farms and deer forests.103 The evidence submitted to the Crofters Commission provides many examples of this more crowded crofting landscape. For example, at Balemore in North Uist, the original eighteen crofts laid out in 1814 eventually became thirty-five; this also happened in most of the large townships that lay along the north-west coast of Lewis, like Upper Carloway, where what started out as nineteen crofts became forty-five, eighteen of which were new crofts created out of its common grazings and occupied by people ‘who for the most part were from districts that were cleared in order to make way for sheep’.104 In some cases, the numbers involved were such that estates eventually re-lotted the township, tidying up the effects of growth but making the new lots smaller.105 A source of real grievance in a significant number of townships was the fact that blocks of vital common grazings were detached from them and annexed to adjacent sheep farms, deer forests, or sporting grounds,106 or, as at Upper Carloway, were used to create new crofts.107 To compound their resource problems, what also comes across from the evidence presented to the Crofters Commission is the number of cottars and others labelled as squatters and landless who were reported as still present in crofting townships, especially in the Hebrides. Thus, between them, the 11 townships in the parish of Knock (Lewis) had 173 individuals listed as cottars, or 15.7 per township.108
Whilst the shocks created by the potato famines of 1815–16 and the 1840s had exposed the endemic weakness of a subsistence farm economy now heavily reliant on potatoes, the different ways in which the resource base of crofting townships were progressively squeezed (i.e. splitting of crofts, addition of new ones, reduction of grazings) weakened the crofting economy still further. Yet when the hill grazings previously attached to townships in the Braes district on Skye were detached in 1865 and incorporated into sheep farms without any adjustment of rent for the crofters, few could have foreseen how it would help to trigger far-reaching change. How the change affected crofters’ rights was never clarified and they continued to make use of the grazings. However, in 1881, when the tack of the sheep farm expired, they appealed to the estate for an adjustment of rent in lieu of what they had lost. After their case was rejected, they declared a rent strike in spring 1882. When the inevitable eviction notices were ignored, the authorities responded by sending in a force of Glasgow police, a deployment that led to a violent confrontation, the so-called Battle of the Braes.109 This was not the first confrontation involving crofters to make the national press: those in Strathnaver in 1814 and on Barra in 1851 had received publicity far beyond the townships involved. However, neither provided the catalyst for wider change in the position of the small tenant or crofter. What was different about the confrontation at the Braes was the reinforcement that its impact quickly received from other events at this point. Before the year had ended, a rent strike by tenants in Glendale in north-western Skye over the way they were still burdened by old exactions, such as labour days on the landlord’s farm, had also prompted tenants and cottars into direct confrontation with the authorities, though the police involved were always fewer than at the Braes.110 On the wider political stage, the publicity surrounding these events offered powerful support to those who were working at this point to politicize the crofter’s cause and to bring about highland land reform. Timely cross-connections were also made to a parallel debate, with the enactment of Irish land reform in Gladstone’s Land Bill of 1881 providing powerful encouragement for those campaigning for a similar bill for the Highlands. The government response to such demands was to set up the Napier Commission in 1883 to look into the Condition of the Crofters and Cottars in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Informed by the Commission’s collected evidence, which symbolically began with that for the Braes,111 and by its published report (1884),112 and pressed by the newly founded Highland Land Law Reform Association (1883),113 the government somewhat tardily put together a Crofters Act that was eventually enacted in 1886. The Act formally defined what it saw as the Crofting Counties114 and, within them, gave crofters security over tenure, enabled them to bequeath their holding to a person, provided compensation for improvements, established a procedure for the enlargement of crofts, and set up a permanent Commission to adjudicate on fair rents. Perhaps surprisingly, those MPs who now represented the crofters did not vote for it because, like the Highland Land Law Reform Association, they also wanted greater provision for the allocation of extra land for crofts and, bound up with that, some provision for cottars.115 In time, provision for extra land and new crofts, including crofts for cottars and those who were landless, did come with the setting up of the Congested Districts Board by the Congested Districts (Scotland) Act of 1897, powers that the Board acted on quickly.116 Between them, we can see these two legislative responses to the grievances of the crofters and cottars as effectively bringing to an end that phase of the region’s history that can be labelled under ‘the clearances’.
The transformation of the pre-improvement toun into the consolidated farms of the modern Scottish countryside was a primary requisite for the Improving Movement and the spread of new husbandries, a change that, by its very nature, profoundly altered farm structures and the appearance of the rural landscape. It also had the less visible but no less vital effect of replacing the shared or negotiated space of the pre-improvement toun with the private space of the consolidated farm, thereby altering the context of decision making and releasing a new potential for how husbandry should develop, not least because it raised the rate of private returns on investment. Yet however beneficial it was to the progress of the Improving Movement, 1760–1815, the restructuring of touns must not be shoehorned into the same chronology. Restructuring was as much a feature of the century or so prior to 1760, and the three or four decades after 1815, as of the years between. Just as the chronology of restructuring has been extended, so also have the means by which it was accomplished. We now know that in one form or another many touns across the Lowlands no less than the Highlands were restructured via a process of tenant reduction, a process that could be fast-tracked or unfold slowly. Either way, the sum effect, often the violent effect, was that of a clearance. In many instances, such clearances fossilized an outline of the old toun structures within the modern landscape, recasting them as medium-large farms. Yet whilst a clearance was the prime means of restructuring across the whole of Scotland, other means were also used. Some runrig touns were divided out into small, consolidated farms. Different processes were employed here, but each had the effect of recreating in the modern landscape the pattern of small working units that had prevailed under runrig in the pre-improvement landscape. When we add the many small farms created de novo out of reclamation and drainage schemes and the crofts created out of highland and Hebridean touns over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we can better appreciate how restructuring not only produced a landscape of consolidated holdings, but also reconfigured the farming ladder, leaving many areas with a pattern dichotomized between large and small farms.
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—— The Transformation of Rural Scotland: Social Change and the Agrarian Economy 1660–1815 (Edinburgh, 1994).
—— Clearance and Improvement: Land, Power and People in Scotland 1700–1900 (Edinburgh, 2006).
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Orr, W., Deer Forests, Landlords and Crofters: The Western Highlands in Victorian and Edwardian Times (Edinburgh, 1982).
Richards, E. S., A History of the Highland Clearances: Agrarian Transformation and the Evictions 1746–1886 (London, 1982).
—— The Highland Clearances (Edinburgh, 2009).
Storrie, M. C., ‘Landholdings and Settlement Evolution in West Highland Scotland’, Geografiska Annaler, 43 (1965), 138–61.
Turnock, D., Patterns of Highland Development (London, 1970).
Whyte, I. D., Agriculture and Society in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1979).