1 The term toun was used throughout Scotland to describe the standard farm unit, or unit of set, prior to improvement. Some were set to more than one tenant, or multiple tenants, whose different shares were laid out in the form of intermixed strips, that is, as a runrig toun.
2 State of Certain Parishes in Scotland M.D.C.XXV11 (Edinburgh, 1835), 133–5; T. C. Smout and A. Fenton, ‘Scottish Agriculture before the Improvers—An Exploration’, Agricultural History Review, xiii (1965), 75–7 and 82–4; I. D. Whyte, Agriculture and Society in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1979), 178–94, 223–34, and 246–7.
3 J. H. G. Lebon, ‘The Process of Enclosure in the Western Lowlands’, Scottish Geographical Magazine, 62 (1946), 103–5.
4 Ibid., 9; J. Tivy, ‘Easter Ross: A Residual Crofting Area’, Scottish Studies, 9, no. 1 (1965), 69; Smout and Fenton, ‘Scottish Agriculture’, 80.
5 Acts of Parliament of Scotland, ix, 421; J. E. Handley, The Agricultural Revolution in Scotland (Glasgow, 1963), 17.
6 Whyte, Agriculture and Society, 142.
7 T. M. Devine, The Transformation of Rural Scotland: Social Change and the Agrarian Economy 1660–1815 (Edinburgh, 1994), 9–11.
8 Devine, Transformation of Rural Scotland, 7 and 11.
9 Ibid., 122.
10 Whyte, Agriculture and Society, 151–2.
11 Devine, Transformation of Rural Scotland, 25; R. A. Dodgshon, ‘The Removal of Runrig in Roxburghshire and Berwickshire 1680–1766’, Scottish Studies, 16 (1972), 123–7.
12 Sir John Clerk, for instance, talked about his ‘wild sheep rooms’ in the Penthills being in the hands of only one or two tenants from the late seventeenth century onwards, B. M. W. Third, ‘The Significance of Scottish Estate Plans and Associated Documents’, Scottish Studies, 1 (1957), 50. See also R. A. Dodgshon, ‘Agricultural Change and its Social Consequences in the Southern Uplands of Scotland 1600–1780’, in T. M. Devine and R. Mitchison, eds., Ireland and Scotland 1600–1850 (Edinburgh, 1983), 46–59.
13 J. Sinclair, General Report of the Agricultural State, And Political Circumstances, of Scotland, 5 vols. (Edinburgh, 1814), vol. i, 179–80.
14 Devine, Transformation of Rural Scotland, 125.
15 E.g. SRO, GD124/17/130/1, tack for oxgate land in Upper Dramalachie, 1725.
16 Devine, Transformation of Rural Scotland, 15–16.
17 K. J. Cullen, Famine in Scotland—The ‘ill years’ of the 1690s (Edinburgh, 2010), esp. 31–92.
18 Devine, Transformation of Rural Scotland, 23–4; M. Johnstone, ‘Farm Rents and Improvement: East Lothian and Lanarkshire, 1670–1830’, Agricultural History Review, 57, Part I (2009), 45–6.
19 K. J. Cullen, C. A. Whatley, and M. Young, ‘King William’s Ill Years: New Evidence on the Impact of Scarcity and Harvest Failure during the Crisis of the 1690s on Tayside’, Scottish Historical Review, lxxxv, no. 2 (2006), 250–76.
20 Farmers Magazine, xcv (1833), 365; C. Stevenson, ‘On the Agriculture of the County of East Lothian’, Transactions of the Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland, xiv (1853), 275–324; R. S. Skirving, ‘On the Agriculture of the County of East Lothian’, Transactions of the Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland, 4th series, vol. v (1873), 11.
21 H. Hamilton, An Economic History of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1963), 57; Dodgshon, ‘Removal of Runrig’, 127–8; M. Gray, The Highland Economy 1750–1850 (Edinburgh, 1957), vol. i, 66; Devine, Transformation of Rural Scotland, 122.
22 M. H. B. Sanderson, Scottish Rural Society in the 16th Century (Edinburgh, 1973), 117; J. H. Romanes, ‘The Kindly Tenants of the Abbey of Melrose’, Juridical Review, li (1939), 201–16; Dodgshon, ‘Removal of Runrig’, 128–33.
23 J. E. L. Murray, ‘The Agriculture of Crail, 1550–1600’, Scottish Studies, 8 (1964), 86.
24 Whyte, Agriculture and Society, 149; B. M. W. Third, ‘Changing Landscape and Social Structure in the Scottish Lowlands as Revealed by Eighteenth-Century Estate Plans’, Scottish Geographical Magazine, 71 (1955), 83–93.
25 Dodgshon, ‘Removal of Runrig’, 128–33.
26 Devine, Transformation of Rural Scotland, 113.
27 Whyte, Agriculture and Society, 149–50.
28 F. Cruickshank, Navar and Lethnot (Brechin, 1899), 290. In fact, many farms around Lichtnie had been in the hands of single tenants since at least the 1720s, ibid., 338–40. For other examples, see C. Rogers, ed., Register of Coupar Abbey, 2 vols. (London, 1880), vol. i, 144, 188, and 200; NAS, GD225/269; Dodgshon, ‘Removal of Runrig’, 123 and 125.
29 For Dalmahoy, see SRO, RHP1021; Third, ‘The Significance of Scottish Estate Plans’, 51–3. For divisions, see Hamilton, Economic History of Scotland, 62–3.
30 Sanderson, Scottish Rural Society, 131.
31 A. Miller, ed., The Glamis Book of Record, 1st series, xi (Edinburgh, 1890), 98–9.
32 D. Whyte and K. A. Whyte, ‘Continuity and Change in a Seventeenth-Century Scottish Farming Community’, Agricultural History Review, 32 (1984), 162.
33 A. Wight, Present State of Husbandry in Scotland, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1778), vol. i, 24–9.
34 References to ‘divisions’ of tenant runrig are mostly generalized divisions, e.g. A. Geddes, ‘Changes in Rural Life and Landscape, 1500–1950’, in Scientific Survey of South-Eastern Scotland (Edinburgh, 1961), 127; I. H. Adams, The Mapping of a Scottish Estate (Edinburgh, 1971), 15–19.
35 Old Statistical Account of Scotland [hereafter OSA], viii, 490; see also 263 and 403.
36 J. Macdonald, ‘On the Agriculture of the Counties of Forfar and Kincardine’, Transactions of the Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland, 4th series, xiii (1881), 11.
37 J. Tait, ‘The Agriculture of the County of Stirling’, Transactions of the Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland, 4th series, xvi (1884), 150 and 172.
38 Devine, Transformation of Rural Scotland, 133–4.
39 D. Turnock, ‘Small Farms in North Scotland: An Exploration in Historical Geography’, Scottish Geographical Magazine, 91, no. 3 (1975), 164–81.
40 G. S. Keith, A General View of the Agriculture of Aberdeenshire (Aberdeen, 1811), 143, 151–2, and 154; J. G. Mitchie, ed., The Records of Invercauld (Aberdeen: New Spalding club, 1901), 138; V. Gaffney, The Lordship of Strathavon (Aberdeen: Third Spalding club, 1960), 99, 130; NAS, RHP1824.
41 Typical OSA references to farm amalgamations can be found in OSA, i, 1791, 163, 319–20; iii, 1792, 468 and 547; 1793, viii, 112–13.
42 Devine, Transformation of Rural Scotland, 112.
43 Ibid., 113–14.
44 Whyte, Agriculture and Society, 139 and 145; Dodgshon, ‘Agricultural Change and its Social Consequences’, 56–7.
45 Devine, Transformation of Rural Scotland, 13–14 and 140.
46 H. M. Jenkins, ‘Report on Some Features of Scottish Agriculture’, Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, 2nd series, vii (1871), 164.
47 Devine, Transformation of Rural Scotland, 140–1.
48 Wight, Present State, vol. i, 356.
49 T. C. Smout, ‘The Landowners and the Planned Village’, in N. T. Philipson and R. Mitchison, Scotland in the Age of Improvement (Edinburgh, 1970), 73–106: D. G. Lockhart, ‘The Planned Villages’, in M. L. Parry and T. R. Slater, eds., The Making of the Scottish Countryside (London, 1980), 249–70.
50 Keith, General View of the Agriculture of Aberdeenshire, 515; I. Carter, Farm Life in Northeast Scotland, 1840–1914 (Edinburgh, 1979), 98–136.
51 NAS, GD 224/243/7; GD224/283/1; GD224/937/15.
52 J. M. Gilbert, Hunting and Hunting Reserves in Medieval Scotland (Edinburgh, 1979), 267.
53 E. S. Richards, A History of the Highland Clearances: Agrarian Transformation and the Evictions 1746–1886 (London, 1982), 165.
54 W. Macfarlane, Geographical Collections Relating to Scotland. Made by W. Macfarlane, part ii (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1907), lii, 107.
55 T. MacLelland, ‘On the Agriculture of the Stewartry of Kirkudbright and Wigtownshire, Transactions of the Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland, 4th series, xvii (1975), 33; Whyte, Agriculture and Society, 125; I. L. Donnachie and I. MacLeod, eds., Old Galloway (Newton Abbott, 1974), 48–60.
56 R. A. Dodgshon, From Chiefs to Landlords: Social and Economic Change in the Western Highlands and Islands c.1493–1820 (Edinburgh, 1998), 128–30 and 135.
57 Ibid., 93–5; E. R. Cregeen, ‘Tacksmen and their Successors: A Study of Tenurial Reorganization in Mull, Morvern and Tiree in the Early Eighteenth Century’, Scottish Studies, 13 (1969), 94–102; F. J. Shaw, The Northern and Western Islands of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1980), 48–57.
58 Examples of ‘rooms’ can be found in NAS, GD1129/1/3/45, a commentary on the set of farms in Netherlorn compiled in the 1730s.
59 M. C. Storrie, ‘Landholdings and Settlement Evolution in West Highland Scotland’, Geografiska Annaler, 43 (1965), 138–61.
60 F. McKichan, ‘Lord Seaforth and Highland Estate Management in the First Phase of Clearance 1783–1815’, Scottish Historical Review, 1, vol. lxxxvi (2007), 50.
61 J. A. S. Watson, ‘The Rise and Development of the Sheep Industry in the Highlands and North of Scotland’, Transactions of the Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland, 5th series, xliv (1932), 6–8.
62 Wight, Present State, vol. ii, 40.
63 NAS, E746/73; V. Wills, ed., Statistics of the Annexed Estates 1755–1756 (Edinburgh, 1973), 30–75.
64 Whyte, Agriculture and Society, 143.
65 Gray, Highland Economy 1750–1850, 181–90.
66 Dodgshon, From Chiefs to Landlords, 128–30.
67 GD112/9/1/3/48; Dodgshon, From Chiefs to Landlords, 138 and 155. At the other extreme, Davoch of Clachan in Strathglass was reported to have eleven farmers plus twelve cottars when it was cleared in 1801–3; see Evidence Taken by the Royal Commissioners of Inquiry on the Condition of Crofters and Cottars in the Highlands of Scotland, Irish University Press, Parliamentary Series [hereafter IUP, PS], vol. 22 (1969; 1884), vol. 25, 2,768.
68 D. Turnock, Patterns of Highland Development (London, 1970), 25; Gaffney, Lordship of Strathavon, 29–31.
69 E.g. NAS, GD112/12/1/3/26. There was in fact a variant to this joint occupation of sheep farms. Some estates created sheep farms but set them to joint or multiple tenants who had previously held then in runrig. This happened in Glenshiel when the Seaforth estate created six sheep farms in 1801 and set them to former runrig tenants, grouping between two to four tenants back in each new farm, McKickan (2007), 53–4. See also P. Gaskell, Morvern Transformed: A Highland Parish in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1968), 51–2, 235–6.
70 R. A. Dodgshon, ‘Livestock Production in the Scottish Highlands Before and After the Clearances’, Rural History, Part I, 9 (1998), 30 and 32.
71 E. S. Richards, ‘Structural Change in a Regional Economy: Sutherland and the Industrial Revolution, 1780–1830’, Economic History Review, xxvi (1973), 71.
72 J. Macdonald, ‘On the Agriculture of the County of Sutherland’, Transactions of the Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland, 4th series, xii (1880), 24 and 63; M. Bangor-Jones, ‘Sheep Farming in Sutherland in the Eighteenth Century’, Agricultural History Review, 50 (2002), 181–202. A good illustration of how former runrig touns were combined into a single working unit is provided by the Valamoss in Lochs parish, the first sheep farm on Lewis. It was created in 1803 by combining six former touns together; see McKickan (AQ), ‘Lord Seaforth and Highland Estate Management’, 60.
73 NLS, Sutherland MSS, 313/993; NSA, xiv, 1845, 504.
74 E. S. Richards, The Highland Clearances (Edinburgh, 2009), 178–89.
75 See, for example, R. A. Dodgshon, ‘West Highland and Hebridean Settlement Prior to Crofting and the Clearances: A Study in Stability or Change?’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 123 (1993), 423.
76 M. Gray, ‘The Abolition of Runrig in the Highlands of Scotland’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, v (1952–3), 51; Gaffney, Lordship of Strathavon, 19; A. H. Millar, ed., A Selection of Scottish Forfeited Estates Papers 1715:1745 (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1909), lvii, 236; NAS, GD112/12/1/2/36 and 37; NAS, GD112/12/1/2/14; NAS, RHP972/2 and 5.
77 Gray, ‘Abolition of Runrig’, 52. See also M. C. Storrie, ‘Landholdings and Population in Arran from the Late Eighteenth Century’, Scottish Studies, 11 (1967), 61.
78 E. R. Cregeen, Argyll Estate Instructions: Mull, Morvern, Tiree 1771–1805, 4th series, i (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society), 1964), 23, 58–9, 197–8.
79 Ibid., xxxi, 67–9 and esp. 73–4.
80 D. Turnock, ‘North Morar—The Improving Movement on a West Highland Estate’, Scottish Geographical Magazine, 85 (1969), 17–30.
81 G. Kay, ‘The Landscape of Improvement: A Case Study of Agricultural Change in North East Scotland’, Scottish Geographical Magazine, no. 2, 78 (1962), 100–11; SRO, RHP1783. See also Millar, ed., A Selection of Scottish Forfeited Estates Papers 1715: 1745, lxvii, 71; V. Wills, ed., Reports on the Annexed Estates 1755–1769 (Edinburgh, 1973), 89–90.
82 NAS, RHP 1474.
83 W. P. L. Thomson, ‘Township, House and Tenant-Holding: The Structure of Runrig Agriculture in Shetland’, in V. Turner, ed., The Shaping of Shetland (Lerwick, 1998), 107–27, 333–4; A. Fenton, The Northern Isles: Orkney and Shetland (Edinburgh, 1978), 42–3.
84 Tivy, ‘Easter Ross’, 72–3; see also Evidence… Condition of Crofters and Cottars, IUP, PS, vol. 25, 2,639–40.
85 Tivy, ‘Easter Ross’, 69 and 72; Gaffney, Lordship of Strathavon, 99.
86 Tivy, ‘Easter Ross’, 69.
87 H. Home, ed., Home’s Survey of Assynt, 3rd series, lii (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1960), 11, 14, 15, 17, and 19.
88 Gray, Highland Economy 1750–1850, 105–41.
89 R. J. Adam (ed.), Papers on Sutherland Estate Management 1802–1816, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1972), 27. Skye examples on the MacLeod of MacLeod estate are provided by Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the Condition of the Crofters and Cottars in the Highlands and Islands (Edinburgh, 1884), 25.
90 Richards, ‘Structural Change’, 68.
91 Macdonald, ‘Agriculture of the County of Sutherland’, 49.
92 Gray, ‘Abolition of Runrig’, 50.
93 NAS, GD221/116.
94 J. Hunter, The Making of the Crofting Community (Edinburgh, 1976), 34–49.
95 Gaskell, Morvern Transformed, 28–46; T. M. Devine, Clearance and Improvement: Land, Power and People in Scotland 1700–1900 (Edinburgh, 2006), 187–217; T. M. Devine, Clanship to Crofters’ War: The Social Transformation of the Scottish Highlands (Manchester, 1994), 63–83.
96 A. I. Macinnes, ‘Scottish Gaeldom’, in T. M. Devine and R. Mitchison, eds., People and Society in Scotland, vol. I, 1760–1830 (Edinburgh, 1988), 70–90; A. I. Macinnes, ‘Commercial Landlordism and Clearance in the Scottish Highlands: The Case of Arichonan’, in J. Pan-Montojo and K. Pedersen, eds., Communities in European History (Pisa, 2007), 49.
97 Probably because no crofters were present, the Napier Commission did not gather evidence for Rum. Most of its inhabitants were reportedly ‘united in [a] general emigration to America’ in 1826, New Statistical Account of Scotland, County of Inverness, 1834–45, vol. 14, 152–3. In his own ‘commission’, Mackenzie talked about the island’s ‘most melancholy cycle’. Its touns were cleared for a sheep farm, but when that enterprise failed, the island was put under deer; A. Mackenzie, The History of the Highland Clearances (Glasgow, 1883), 222–6. For North Uist and Barra, see Richards, Highland Clearances, 265–88; Evidence … Condition of Crofters and Cottars, IUP, PS, 22, 643–98 and 785–836.
98 Dodgshon, From Chiefs to Landlords, 116.
99 Gray, Highland Economy 1750–1850, 130–8.
100 Report … Condition of the Crofters and Cottars, 143 and 162; Hunter, Making of the Crofting Community, 50–72; T. M. Devine, The Great Highland Famine: Hunger, Emigration and the Scottish Highlands in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh, 1988), 33–56.
101 NLS, Plan of the Islands of Ulva, Gometra, Colonsay, Inch Kenneth, Staffa, etc., by John Leslie, 1812; NAS, GD174/1087/1, Particulars of the Estate of Ulva, 1825; Mackenzie, History of the Highland Clearances, 228–9. See also Richards, Highland Clearances, 162 and 303–8; Evidence taken by the Royal Commission, IUP, PS, vol. 22, 708–9; Report… by the Crofters Commission on the Social Condition of the People of Lewis in 1901, As Compared with Twenty Years Ago (Glasgow, 1902), lxx.
102 The Park evictions are discussed in Evidence … Condition of Crofters and Cottars, IUP, PS, vol. 23, 1,150. The switch from sheep to deer on Rum is detailed in Mackenzie, The History of the Highland Clearances, 222–6. For a review of deer forests generally at this point, see also W. Orr, Deer Forests, Landlords and Crofters: The Western Highlands in Victorian and Edwardian Times (Edinburgh, 1982), 28–70.
103 The way crofters subdivided crofts between children is illustrated by evidence for the Bays area of Harris by Evidence … Condition of Crofters and Cottars, IUP, PS, vol. 23, 861. The way landlords used existing crofting townships as dumping grounds for those who had been dispossessed elsewhere on their estates during the mid-nineteenth century, without adding extra land, is illustrated by the actions of Sir James Matheson on Lewis, e.g. Evidence … Condition of Crofters and Cottars, IUP PS, vol. 23, 997.
104 Evidence … Condition of Crofters and Cottars, IUP, PS, vol. 22, 832; vol. 23, 954–5. See also ibid., 977, 989, 991, 1,026, and 1,133.
105 One of the more detailed examples of overcrowding and re-lotting is provided by that of Coll township on Lewis. Initially lotted out into twenty-two crofts, more were added in a piecemeal way until, about 1850, the entire township was formally re-lotted into forty-seven crofts. Between then and the point at which the Napier Commission collected its evidence, twenty more crofters were moved in; Evidence … Condition of Crofters and Cottars, IUP, PS, vol. 23, 1,026.
106 For examples, see Report … Condition of the Crofters and Cottars (1884), 117; Evidence … Condition of Crofters and Cottars, IUP, PS, vol. 23, 1,133.
107 Ibid., 955.
108 Report … Condition of the Crofters and Cottars (1884), 143.
109 Hunter, Making of the Crofting Community, 133–7; Devine, Clanship to Crofters’ War, 209–27; Evidence … Condition of Crofters and Cottars, IUP, PS, vol. 22, 1–37.
110 Hunter, Making of the Crofting Community, 137–41; Evidence … Condition of Crofters and Cottars, IUP, PS, vol. 22, 362–438.
111 The submitted evidence was published separately from the report: Evidence Taken by the Royal Commissioners of Inquiry on the Condition of Crofters and Cottars in the Highlands of Scotland, IUP, PS, vols. 22–25.
112 Report … Condition of the Crofters and Cottars (1884).
113 Hunter, Making of the Crofting Community, 143–5.
114 Crofters Holdings (Scotland) Act (1886), 49 and 50 Vict. C.29; Crofters Common Grazings Regulation Act (1891), 54 and 55, Vict. C.41; H. A. Moisley, ‘The Highlands and Islands—A Crofting Region?’, Transactions and Papers. Institute of British Geographers, 321 (1962), 83–95.
115 Hunter, Making of the Crofting Community, 163. The disappointment over the lack of any provision for cottars was justified not just because of how many were still present, but because the Napier Commission was charged with enquiring into the ‘Condition of Crofters and Cottars’.
116 First report of the Congested Districts Board for Scotland, 1st October 1897 to 31st December 1898, to the Secretary for Scotland, 1899 [C. 9165].