This topic is one of the Cinderella themes of Scottish history. Lodged between the rich historiographies of the Reformation, Union, and Enlightenment, it has tended not only to suffer neglect in research terms but also from an unduly negative stereotyping of social and economic experience over the period of one hundred and fifty years. As one perceptive commentator has put it:
Lack of concern meant lack of sustained investigation, and in the absence of evidence to the contrary the image of Scottish society in the early modern period became dominated by a stereotype which is only now breaking down. Among those few scholars who seriously addressed these issues prior to the late 1970s the dominant interpretative tone established was a distinctly negative variant of Scottish exceptionalism. Early modern Scotland was different all right; and the difference was held to lie in Scotland’s poverty and backwardness; in the peripheral, archaic, largely static nature of Scotland’s economy and society prior to the eighteenth century.1
The reasons for this pessimistic characterization were many. The comments of contemporary travellers, notably those from the south of England and invariably highly critical of Scottish conditions, were sometimes used incautiously by later historians. These reporters were forcibly struck by dire poverty, squalid housing conditions, and backwardness of agriculture. As late as 1705, Joseph Taylor Esq., ‘Late of the Inner Temple’, concluded as he headed north, after leaving Berwick, that he was ‘going into the most barbarous country in the world’. He reported that ‘everyone reckoned our journey extremely dangerous’ and was warned that ‘twoud be difficult to escape with our lives, much less without the distemper of the country’.2 A hundred years before, after the Union of Crowns (1603), the fear of closer relationships with Scotland under a Scottish-born king, James I and VI, unleashed a venomous wave of Scotophobia in the Westminster Parliament. Sir Christopher Piggot, Knight, was one of several who entered into ‘matter of invective against the Scotts’, denouncing their country as ‘the barrenest land in existence’.3
Scottish historians during the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century also contributed to the making of the caricature, for virtually all regarded pre-Union Scotland as a society mired in poverty, feudal backwardness, and intellectual intolerance.4 The Improving writers of the same era were unequivocal in their condemnation of the archaic and wasteful nature of early modern agriculture. It was depicted as rigid in structure, primitive in technique, and uneconomic in both land cultivation and the employment of labour. These publicists were almost evangelical in their uncritical propagandizing on behalf of the emerging agrarian capitalist system. It was, therefore, inevitable that the old order, in which most families still produced for their own immediate needs within a broadly subsistence culture, would suffer by comparison with one increasingly geared to massively expanding market demand. The Improving writers also enthusiastically favoured the separate, single holding under one master as the only means to liberate individual energies and initiative. Communalism, which was often at the root of many older practices, was despised as the enemy of progress and the irrational perpetuation of custom and conservatism.5
As Chapter 15 demonstrates, much work has now been done to partially rehabilitate the Scottish economy in the decades immediately before the Union of 1707. No longer can that period be simply dismissed as an era of profound darkness before the post-Union dawn. Ironically, however, this focus on the decades after c.1660 has suggested, often by implication, sometimes explicitly, that the period before was the real ‘dark age’, which had only started to come to an end by the later seventeenth century.6 It is also ironical, therefore, that pessimistic perceptions of the early modern economy may have been buttressed rather than qualified by this important development in Scottish historical research into the post c.1660 era. The bias was likely to be fortified by the incidence of civil war, military occupation, and material distress in the years immediately before c.1660, which, nevertheless, were not at all typical of pre-Restoration society, especially before 1640. In addition, both contemporaries and some modern scholars tended too often to look to England as the external comparison against which the Scottish economy should be judged. But seventeenth-century England (like the Low Countries) was exceptional in Europe in the nature of its advanced economy, burgeoning trade, and the maturity of financial institutions.7 More meaningful and typical analogies were with the Scandinavian countries, France, and the states of central and eastern Europe. In an era when regional differences, because of poorer transport, were more pronounced than in modern times, the question of Anglo-Scottish comparison itself becomes problematic. There were many Englands and many Scotlands, and generalization at the national level often becomes not only difficult but pointless. The Scottish population is sometimes described in this period as under-nourished and vulnerable to serious food shortage. However, in the sixteenth century perhaps a third of English peasantry are reckoned to have lived in extreme poverty and another third only in marginally better circumstances. As late as the 1620s, northern areas of England experienced widespread dearth. In this respect, any difference in the experience of Scotland and the north of England was one of degree rather than of kind.8
When all is said and done, nonetheless, there is no denying the fact that Scotland did face formidable climatic and environmental constraints in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Though as Christopher Smout has noted (see Chapter 1), there were extensive tracts of fertile low arable land, notably in the east, but also in significant pockets elsewhere, much of Scotland was hill country suited only to rough grazing. Even at the present day, after many generations of reclamation and improvement, some two-thirds of the total area of the country remains under rough grazing. At lower altitudes, clay soils and schists in the glaciated valleys meant that cultivation here was often inhibited by marsh, moss, and bog. The number of Scottish place names with ‘-bog’ or ‘-moss’ attached to them has long been noted,9 and, as one writer has put it with memorable eloquence:
Much of Scotland’s soil is shallow and acid. The rock pokes through the worn sleeve of the turf; erosion gullies fan downwards from the ridges; the deciduous trees have short trunks and low, crouching canopies. This has been a hard country to live in … Scottish earth is in most places—even in the fertile south and east—a skin over bone, and like any taut face it never loses a line once acquired. Seen from the air, every trench dug and every dyke raised, every hut footing and post hole, fort bank and cattle path, tractor mark and chariot rut seems to have inscribed its trace.10
Climatic factors added to the challenges. The country’s northerly position meant that it endured more wind and rain and shorter growing seasons than most of the rest of the British archipelago. These adverse influences were experienced especially acutely in the early modern period because of the impact of the Little Ice Age, a sequence of particularly cold phases occurring between the late thirteenth and the end of the nineteenth centuries. Winter and summer mean temperatures fell to low levels in Britain between 1430 and 1480 and again from 1645 to 1715. In both cases, temperatures in Scotland were a degree or two lower than in the counties of central England.11 These disadvantages were compounded by scarcity of wood resources. Woodland cover was reckoned to have fallen to 10 per cent of the available land area in 1500 and to 5 per cent by the Union of Parliaments in 1707. This did mark out Scotland from the other peasant societies of Scandinavia and northern Europe where extensive forests were a plentiful source of timber, tar, turpentine, and other woodland products.12 It was hardly surprising then that doors, posts, and roof timbers were so prized in Scotland that they were written into tenurial agreements.13 The country had to rely on imports from Norway for building and construction, with a consequent drain on scarce resources and balance of payments.14
The environmental dice were therefore heavily loaded against Scotland in this period. In 1682 one contemporary, who urged the London-based Hudson’s Bay Company to recruit Scots, noted ‘that countrie is a hard country to live in, and the poore-mens wages is cheap, they are hardy people both to endure hunger and cold … I am sure they will serve for six pound pr. yeare and be better content with their diet than Englishmen will be.’15 The writer was saying in effect that Scots were so fashioned by the challenges of their natural environment that they would provide good servants in the wilds of North America. Against this background, it is not surprising to learn that dearth, shortage, and even famine were often experienced by the Scottish population, so seeming to confirm the lugubrious observations of travellers and the views of some later scholars. Scottish food supply was undoubtedly finely poised and bare sufficiency could easily become acute shortage when climatic conditions worsened. Thus between 1560 and 1600 there was perhaps harvest shortfall in some parts of Scotland in two years out of five. But really serious famines, such as that of 1623, which caused significant increases in mortality, were much less frequent.16 We need to note also that in most years between 1500 and 1660 there was sufficiency and sometimes surplus. In the decades before the Reformation of 1560 food supply in most areas seemed reasonable. There were good years thereafter in the late 1560s and from 1573 to 1585, despite the general deterioration of the period before 1600. After the subsistence crisis of the mid-1590s food supply stabilized during the first twenty years of the seventeenth century.17 Thereafter, there were mortality crises in the 1640s and at a regional level in the Northern Isles in 1634 and parts of western Scotland in 1634–5.18 On the whole, therefore, the later sixteenth century stands out as the time of real difficulty (though not in every year). But for the remainder of the period Scotland enjoyed for the most part more favourable conditions.
Some perspective is also needed here. As already indicated, Scotland’s main comparators are with Scandinavia and countries in central, southern, and eastern Europe. When set alongside these, the Scottish record of fluctuating food supply does not appear to be in any way exceptional. Those countries on the maritime periphery of north-west Europe were equally vulnerable to climatic deterioration. Indeed, both France and Scandinavia retained their vulnerability much longer than Scotland well into the eighteenth century.19 In addition, it has been noted that the seven northern counties of England, the poorest south of the Border, while being better off than some parts of Scotland, were not so by much.20 In that sense the Scottish rural economy can be considered typical rather than exceptional in the broader European context: ‘A Scottish farmer would have found many differences in detail between the life he was accustomed to and that which existed in Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, Ireland, Northern England or Norway … these would often have been differences of degree rather than kind and he would possibly have found more overall similarity in the basic character of agriculture, the techniques employed and the season-to-season preoccupations of the rural year’.21
Though exact figures cannot of course be cited, Scottish population, like England’s, started to grow from the later fifteenth century, continuing for much of the sixteenth century and only stabilizing again in the 1630s and 1640s. Estimates vary from 500,000 to 700,000 around 1500, while a figure of just over one million has been most favoured by historians for the later seventeenth century.22 There is evidence that even modest increases in the numbers to be fed could put pressure on a fragile economy. One indicator was the expansion of settlement and cultivation area into more marginal land. Another was the evidence of splitting of townships as some reached greater sizes because of population growth, thus making the working of field systems less manageable. This helps to explain the number of farms on modern maps distinguished by such prefixes as Easter, Mid, Wester, Over, and Nether.23 Perhaps the most compelling proof of a labour surplus comes from the contemporary state’s obsession with the problem of vagrancy and its potential threat to social order. The concern was a key factor in the passing of statutes in 1574, 1579, and 1592 designed to provide for those in need but also to control vagrancy. They laid down savage penalties for able-bodied masterful beggars, declaring that only ‘cruikit folk seik impotent folk and waik folk’ be allowed to beg. The impression was sometimes given, indeed, that the Scottish countryside was overrun by vagrants who menaced some settled communities.24
These demographic and economic pressures resulted in strategies to manage risk and reduce the impact of overpopulation on poor communities. By far the most significant of these was the remarkable scale and increase of emigration, which is considered in detail in Chapters 7 and 16. Throughout the seventeenth century the rate of movement out of Scotland may well have been the highest in Europe, at times in the 1630s and 1640s reaching perhaps one in five adult males. Again, precise figures cannot be known and recent research on emigrant communities in Poland-Lithuania and Scandinavia has qualified some of the wilder claims. Recent scholarship on Scottish migration to Scandinavia and Poland-Lithuania has considerably reduced the high estimated figures to be found in older writings (see Chapter 15).25 But even the lower bounds of the estimates are impressive, with a suggested 70,000 to 85,000 Scots leaving primarily to trade across Europe and fight in Continental armies between 1600 and 1650. Equally remarkable was the geographical range of the exodus, into central and eastern Europe, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, the Low Countries, England, and increasingly to the north of Ireland as the axis of emigration started to swing to the west in the seventeenth century.26 All in all, the diaspora must have helped to reduce resource pressures in several parts of the homeland, perhaps not so much in terms of scale (which modern scholarship is now recalibrating downwards) but because of the continuous nature of the exodus and the spread of its territorial origins in Scotland. The north-eastern counties were the main source areas of the European migrations, closely followed by Tayside, the Forth Valley, and the Lothians. In contrast, most Scots who sailed for Ulster were natives of the far south-west, western Renfrewshire, Lanarkshire, and southern Argyll. The movement to northern England and London still awaits its historian, but if the seventeenth century replicated the marginally better-document eighteenth then most of those who went south had probably come from the country districts and small towns of the Border region (see Chapters 7 and 16).
Another response was radical changes in the pattern of food consumption. In the later Middle Ages, meat, cheese, butter, and milk were commonly eaten. By the end of the sixteenth century, the Scots had adopted a new diet, principally founded on oatmeal and bere. The elites and middling sorts still had a great range of choice but for the majority a food revolution had taken place. People in more straitened times were going for a much more humble diet. On the face of it, it seemed to reflect increased poverty as pressure on food resources intensified. Scotland became ‘The Land o’ (Oat) Cakes’ and occasionally invited the scorn of observers in the eighteenth century like Samuel Johnson with his famous remark that a food eaten by horses in England was the diet of the commonality of Scotland.27 Ironically, however, since oatmeal is rich in vitamins, full of roughage, and contains calcium, together with a number of trace elements, it provided very healthy fare and ensured that the Scots suffered less from chronic malnutrition than others in the early modern world. Indeed, the diet has been hailed by modern nutritionists as much superior to that of the present day.28 Recent work on recruits to the British Army in America in the middle decades of the eighteenth century show that those of Scottish birth stood almost an average of an inch and a half taller in height than their English-born counterparts. Scholars reckon that this differential can be mainly accounted for by better standards of nutrition, based on a monotonous but essentially healthy meal-based diet.29
This was but one confirmation of the early modern rural economy’s capacity for change and rational response to long-term threat. There were others, several of which were designed to reduce risk in a country of uncertain climate and poor natural endowment. As one authoritative commentator has it, ‘there are some clear parallels in the English and the Scottish experience of socio-economic change … more than enough to render absurd the old assertion that Scotland existed in a condition of virtual social and economic stasis’.30 One crucial response was to exploit the comparative advantage in pastoral husbandry as opposed to arable farming where Scotland was, in most areas, at an obvious disadvantage. A clear trend has been identified in the course of the seventeenth century away from the old commerce in skins and hides towards a trade in live cattle to lowland towns and English cities. The peak export period for skins were the middle decades of the sixteenth century. By the 1660s, however, up to forty-eight thousand cattle were crossing the Border, a figure that continued to rise in subsequent decades: ‘It must be presumed in the earlier period the Scots ate the original contents of the hides, but in the later one the animals were digested in English stomachs while the Scots ate something else.’31 It was an economic change that ran in parallel with the transformation in national diet already described.
A vital influence on this development was the growth of greater stability from the early seventeenth century in the Scottish Borders and, to a lesser extent, in the Western Highlands. The Border countryside was in 1603 still a frontier zone that had truculently resisted full incorporation into either England or Scotland. Indeed, the very week that King James travelled south to London, the Armstrongs, a leading Borders family, also moved into England bent on plundering the countryside as far as Penrith in Cumbria. The Regal Union was, however, a decisive watershed. The old problems of recalcitrance could now be dealt with by a single executive, especially after the establishment of a joint Anglo-Scottish Commission under the Earl of Dunbar in 1605–6. It was said that it quickly hung over 140 of ‘the nimblest and most powerful thieves in all the borders’ and (as the report continued ominously) ‘fully reduced the other inhabitants to obedience’.32 Members of the most lawless families were shipped to the Plantation of Ulster while others were exiled to service in the Dutch armies. The peel towers, architectural symbols of family military independence, were demolished in large numbers.33 By the 1620s, therefore, though there may not yet have been a final solution to the Border problem, the territory had become more stable than at any period in its recent history. The time was ripe for the further development of sheep-farming in these more peaceful conditions.
Even before this, however, pastoral husbandry was already big business. In 1578 Bishop Leslie could write of Tweeddale that ‘in this countrie … evin as with thaw nychbouris, that sum of thame ar knawen to have a fow or five hundir, utheris agane aucht or nyne hundir, and sum tyme thay ar knawen to have a thousind scheip’.34 But the scale of the activity expanded further in the decades after 1603, with specialization growing in the export of mutton for the coalfields of north-east England as well as the traditional output of wool for the textile manufactures. By the 1640s, money rentals had become dominant on most Border estates, confirming the market orientation of the big sheep farms of the region.35
As in the Borders, the most successful and decisive initiatives by the Scottish state in Gaeldom took place after the Regal Union because the clans were then confronted by the awesome naval and military power of a unified and expansionist British state, which could coordinate strategy much more effectively against the two Gaelic societies of the Highlands and Ireland. The ruthlessly efficient annexation of native lands in the six counties of Ulster and the establishment of the colonial plantation there in the early seventeenth century forcibly brought home to the chiefs in the Western Highlands, who had strong kinship links with Irish landed families, the new overt danger of resisting the authority of the state. More directly, the end of rebellion in Ulster after c.1610 markedly reduced the opportunities for mercenary service by the highland buannachan, or household men, the warrior class who had long survived on the opportunities of booty and military employment across the Irish Sea.
The government of James VI and I did not undertake the draconian policy of wholesale annexation in the Highlands that it had initiated in Ireland. Instead, a variety of strategies were executed and partial expropriation of those clans that were considered to be especially delinquent was driven forward. The main victims were ClanDonald South, the ClanLeod of Lewis, the MacIains of Ardnamurchan, and ClanGregor. A policy of colonization was designed to drive a further wedge between Gaelic Ireland and Scotland, and plans were made to establish colonies of ‘answerable inlands subjects’ in Lewis, Lochaber, and Kintyre, although only the last settlement was even partially successful. Much more effective was the launching of military and naval expeditions along the western seaboard in 1596, 1599, 1605, 1607, and 1608. This direct intervention was paralleled by the award of judicial commissions to lieutenants, drawn mainly from ‘trustworthy’ magnate families on the highland–lowland frontier, such as the Gordon earls of Huntly and the Campbell earls of Argyll, to demand bands of surety from lawless clans.
These, however, were all traditional techniques that had long been employed in the Borders. The state also embarked on a novel attempt to produce a final solution to the highland problem by tackling what were seen as the social roots of disorder, the strategy of ‘planting civilitie’, which James himself had outlined in his Basilikon Doran and that was laid out in 1609 in the Statutes of Iona to which all the major chiefs in the Hebrides gave their consent. The nine statutes ranged from the suppression of beggars and vagabonds to the control of wine and whisky, from the limitation of the chief’s retinue to the strengthening of the reformed Church, from sending the heirs of men of substance to the Lowlands for education to the prohibition of ordinary clansmen from carrying arms. Not only were the chiefs bound to observe the statutes but they were also enjoined to appear personally before the Privy Council at stated intervals. The statutes were a comprehensive attempt to impose lowland values on Gaeldom, destroy the basis of lawlessness, and control the perceived excesses of clanship.
There has been considerable historical debate about the actual impact of these initiatives. Whatever their effects as a whole, it is plain that they did have a powerful influence on clan elites. The chiefs were expected to become partners with the state in the maintenance of order and were also held to account for the conduct of their clansmen. This was achieved through the exaction of substantial sureties and the demand from 1616 that chiefs appear annually before the Privy Council. Attendance at Edinburgh was rigorously enforced from then until the outbreak of the Scottish Revolution in 1638.
These strategies of political control resulted in substantial changes within clanship.36 Heavy economic burdens were placed on the fine (clan gentry). For example, the sureties recommended in the Statutes of Iona varied in the 1610s from £3,000 to £18,000 sterling. The expenses of appearing before the Privy Council in Edinburgh on an annual basis were also considerable and those who attended could be detained for up to six months. Sir Rory MacLeod of Dunvegan complained to James VI in 1622 that his annual appearances meant that he was away from his estates for more than half the year, making it difficult for him to manage them effectively. Sojourns in Edinburgh also led to expenditure on lawyers and agents and an increased appetite for the more sophisticated lifestyle of the capital. The accounts of seventeenth-century highland families, such as the MacDonalds of Clanranald and the MacLeods of Dunvegan, indicate significant and growing outlays on expensive clothing, furniture, and exotic foods. They were becoming more assimilated into the mainstream of Scottish landed society. A vital consequence was that rentals in kind, formerly dispensed to ensure the social cohesion of clanship through communal feasting and collective hospitality, were increasingly marketed outside the Highlands to maximize elite incomes. Chiefs were still tribal leaders but were also now looking more to their lands as assets, a transition that would finally be completed in the eighteenth century. The droving trade in live cattle to the south now became ever more important to the economies of the north and west.
Recent scholarship has also shown how early modern rural society developed techniques and practices to reduce the threshold of risk at times of climatic threat and increasing demographic pressure.37 The old world, contrary to the opinion of the Improving propagandists of later years, was inherently rational and pragmatic in attempts to preserve food supplies. Thus, bere, the drink crop of Scottish agriculture, was preferred to barley because it was better suited to acidic soil and, while it could be sown later, still ripened up to three weeks earlier than barley. The dominance of oats as Scotland’s main food crop was easily explicable as, again, they ripened earlier than other grains, tolerated conditions of wind and rain, and produced reasonable yields even on poor soils.
Robert Dodgshon has demonstrated in detail how the Highlands and Islands coped with the perennial risks of cold, wet, flood, storm, and wind during the Little Ice Age.38 The distribution of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ land among cultivators in the runrig system (perennially denounced by the eighteenth-century Improvers) was one approach. The widespread use of ‘lazy beds’ or raised sandwiches of earth, facilitated drainage and, at the same time, enabled grain to be sown on thin soils. It was also a custom of the region, and other parts of Scotland, for landowners to provide discounts (or ‘eases’) of rental in times of crisis, and ‘rests’ with rents being deferred to the following year. Since a major proportion of rental at this period was still often paid in grain, these adjustments allowed much-needed food supplies to be channelled back into the peasant economy. Labour-intensive spade husbandry was also employed to raise grain yields, often to a surprising extent. In Islay, for instance, grain yields increased sevenfold, from 324 bolls of meal in 1542 to 2,193 bolls in 1614.39 In the Lowlands, the increasing and lavish use of lime also helped much marginal land into more regular cultivation. An effective treatment for Scotland’s vast acreages of acidic soils, it was regarded as ‘the principal way of gooding the soil’ in the seventeenth century.40
This rise in farm output not only helped to sustain the rise in national population but also the expansion of the non-food-producing urban areas of Scotland. If growing urbanism is an indicator of greater levels of economic sophistication and exchange, then the period c.1590 to c.1640 was one of impressive advance in Scotland. The proportion of population living in the five largest towns nearly doubled between 1500 and 1600, and doubled again by 1700. At the beginning of the sixteenth century one estimate suggests that under 2 per cent of the population lived in towns with more than ten thousand inhabitants. Manifestly, by this measure, Scotland was far behind highly urbanized countries like the Low Countries, England, and northern Italy. But that pattern began to change in the later sixteenth century, as Tables 11.1 to 11.3 reveal.
Table 11.1 Urbanization in Scotland, England, and Wales, 1500–1700–percentage of total population in towns with over 10,000 inhabitants
Table 11.2 Population in towns with over 10,000 inhabitants (thousands)
Table 11.3 Percentage increase in urban population from previous date
Thus, by the later seventeenth century, parts of the Lowlands were quite heavily urbanized compared to the European norm, although the Highlands were almost devoid of towns. The process seems to have been one of thickening in certain areas and much less activity in others where, for instance, much of the far south-west, Borders, and north-east had only a scattering of small burghs, essentially large villages rather than towns.41 But the area around the Firth of Forth was, even by the standards of advanced European countries, highly urbanized. One calculation has it that over 40 per cent of the population of that region lived in towns near the end of the seventeenth century. It was a figure higher than East Anglia and close to that of the Low Countries at the time.42
The vibrancy of some towns reflects the health of Scottish overseas trade in the 1590s to the 1620s, especially in the traditional exports of fish, grain, hides, and woollen cloth. The towns were commercial rather than industrial centres, nodal points for imports, internal trade, and the export of produce from the landed estates.43 In 1611–14, for instance, over half of Scottish exports by value were agricultural. Here two positive trends can be identified. First, as noted earlier, skins, a major staple of Scottish trade for centuries, fell dramatically in volume in the course of the seventeenth century. Some two hundred thousand skins were shipped to the Baltic yearly in the early 1600s. By 1660, this had fallen by more than half, indicating the attempt by landowners and farmers to trade up to the more valuable droving economy in live cattle. Second, salt and coal exports, previously negligible, boomed in this period. One authority suggests a tenfold increase in coal exports from the 1550s to the 1630s, though that estimate remains somewhat speculative. Despite these developments, however, the range of burghal exports was still uncomfortably narrow and, because they were so tied into the rural economy, were likely to experience dramatic fluctuation as climatic conditions changed over time and affected outputs in the countryside.
In assessing the triggers of urban expansion, we should not forget the important insight from the distinguished Irish historian Louis Cullen. Conventional accounts tend to stress Scotland’s peripheral geographic status on the edge of Europe, only marginally connected to the main arteries of international commerce. Not so Cullen; for him the Scots were at the centre of things:
Scotland’s location seems vital and beneficial for its history. Scotland not only had easy access to Ireland but shared a common land frontier with England, and had a long coastline on the North Sea. Thus Scotland faced three ways. Its long North Sea coastline gave it the benefit of access to what was in effect Europe’s inland sea, at the heart of economic development in northern Europe well into the seventeenth century. The sea journey from Scotland to Scandinavia and the Baltic was shorter than from any of the more developed parts of eastern England. As a consequence, Scots were not only to the fore in the penetration from their islands of this region and its north German, Polish and Russian hinterland, but they assumed a dominant position in the English-speaking colonies there which they continued to hold in the seventeenth century. … All this helped to give an impetus to economic changes in the eastern Lowlands of Scotland. The small coastal towns of Fife were already well developed and numerous in the sixteenth century, and Scottish merchants, pedlars and mercenaries, though their numbers appear exaggerated in some contemporary accounts, had created a very real and far-flung establishment across the north of Europe.44
Throughout the period considered here the east-coast centre and especially Edinburgh–Leith retained their old dominance. Between 1460 and 1600, around 80 per cent of the Exchequer customs revenue was generated by Edinburgh, Dundee, and Aberdeen. The capital tightened its grip even further over these decades. By the last years of the sixteenth century, Edinburgh had virtually developed a monopoly over the nation’s export trade. From Leith, for instance, 83 per cent of all skins and 73 per cent of all cloth left the country. Research into the merchant community that controlled this commerce is also revealing.45 Rather than the traditional picture of a class hidebound by guild regulation and conservative practice, Edinburgh’s elites were found to be energetic, entrepreneurial, and progressive, developing joint partnerships, ship ownership, pushing into new markets in Europe, and spending their capital on a remarkable series of domestic investments, including coal and lead mining, cloth-making, herring-curing, and small-scale manufactories.46
Equally significant is the evidence at the same period of increased vibrancy in Glasgow, the principal burgh of the west. The town tripled in population between 1560 and 1660 to 14,700, and moved from sixth place in the list of tax paid by the leading Scottish burghs in 1583 to third, just marginally behind Dundee and Aberdeen. The origins of one of the most momentous developments in Scottish commercial history, the change in the economic axis from the east to the west of the country, can be traced back to this period. It was not, however, the transatlantic factor that was the motor at this stage but rather the growth of trade across the North Channel to the newly established Scottish settlements in Ulster, ‘Scotland’s first colony’, and the trafficking in linen cloth across the more stable Borders by a new breed of ‘English merchants’ in the western burgh. The platform was being built for the emergence of Glasgow in later decades as ‘the boom town of the seventeenth century’.47
The record therefore confirms that at least down to the 1620s the Scottish burghal and commercial economy was on an upward curve sustained in part by a more responsive system of food supply and a run of good harvests (pace 1623–4). Thereafter, as far as the 1640s, our knowledge became much more hazy. There is a pressing need for the scholarly gap to be addressed between the end date of c.1625 in S. G. E. Lythe’s pioneering work and the years of revolution and English conquest from the late 1630s onwards. At the moment the consensus is that if the Scottish economy was indeed on the move in the early seventeenth century, the momentum came to an abrupt halt in the 1640s:
… the outbreak of the Covenanting wars in 1638 heralded the start of a 15-year period of disaster for the Scottish economy. Both town and countryside suffered from attack, plundering, military occupation, heavy taxation, and the casual levying of additional funds. Trade was disrupted and vessels were seized.48
The great towns of Aberdeen and Dundee were both sacked and pillaged. The bloodiest fighting occurred in the central and south-western Highlands, with districts despoiled and townships laid waste by the marching and counter-marching of royalist and Covenanting armies.49
Scholars disagree, however, on the extent and speed of the recovery during the Cromwellian Union that followed. Some argue that it was patchy and lengthy. Another perspective, based on Clyde and Aberdeen trade and shipping data, indicates a quicker response in the south-west and north-east regions. It is yet another confirmation that the Scottish economy was a veritable mosaic in this period, with widely varied experiences in different localities over time.50
In the last generation or so, important reappraisals of the early modern Scottish economy have been published. The intrinsic rationality of much pre-modern agricultural practices and their capacity to evolve and adapt in order to attempt to reduce the threshold of risk in a country of uncertain climate and poor natural endowment is now well established. With that new awareness has come the need to compare Scotland not with precociously advanced nations but rather with the western and central European norm. Scotland was not simply a land of uniform and endemic backwardness. Phases of relative prosperity have been identified in addition to the more familiar bleaker times. The architectural glories of such gems as Fyvie Castle, Craigievar, the Bruce House at Culross, and Gladstone’s Land in Edinburgh suggest that some members of the landed and urban elites not only had impressive aesthetic taste but also possessed the capital to fund attractive architecture and pleasing internal decoration. Indeed, some scholars have seen Scotland as ‘a dynamic and expansive society’ before c.1640, developing trading communities in ports from Bergen in Norway to Gdansk in Poland and along the great river valleys of central Europe; then moving into Ulster; a growing town life; a developing system of schooling at the parish level able to support four universities, compared with one in Ireland and two in England. Nevertheless, the economy never achieved structural change: the advances were made within given parameters and stalled for a time in the maelstrom of the conflicts of the 1640s.
There remains much for new research to explore in this fascinating period. But two issues in particular stand out. The years from the 1630s to c.1660 have been worked over by historians of politics and religion. But, despite some glimmers, these three decades remain something of a dark age in terms of economic history. Then there is the intriguing question of the likely impact of the ‘Greater Scotland’ of emigration to Europe and the Scottish merchant communities there on the homeland itself.51 Were the two mainly insulated from one another or was the connection so close that emigration need no longer simply be seen as a reflection of dire poverty but perhaps also at the commercial level as a route to national expansion in the manner of imperial adventuring in the eighteenth century and beyond. The answer to that question might well result in a further reappraisal of the early modern economy of Scotland at some point in the future.
Dodgshon, R. A., Land and Society in Early Scotland (Oxford, 1981).
—— From Chiefs to Landlords: Society and Economy in the Western Highlands and Islands c. 1493–1820 (Edinburgh, 1998).
Gibson, A. J. S., and Smout, T. C., Prices, Food and Wages in Scotland 1550–1780 (Cambridge, 1995).
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