ON 25 July 2009 roughly eight thousand people from Scotland and its diaspora marched up Edinburgh’s Royal Mile in ‘The Parade of the Clans’, a signature event of Scotland’s ‘Year of Homecoming’. Each group strode behind a banner bearing the name of the family or clan to which they claimed ancestral links. Although one can question the relevance of such images to modern Scotland, there was no denying the overwhelming pride and sense of belonging that such links gave participants. Indeed, clan and family ties are among the most recognized aspects of ‘Scottishness’ around the world.
But what do we know about the historic Scottish family, as opposed to images largely based on nineteenth-century traditions. Perhaps because of the popularity of clan roots among modern diaspora Scots and the resulting association with ‘tartanism’, most historians have tended to focus their research elsewhere. While family history has flourished in those other areas since the 1980s, Scottish studies, especially of the pre-modern family, have only recently begun to appear, despite earlier calls for such work.1
The importance of studying the family lies not just in itself but in what it can reveal about society as a whole. The family is often seen as essentially private in contrast to the public world of politics, economics, religion, and culture. However, this sharp public–private divide does not work in practice. Families were critical in shaping people who participated in public life, as well as those with lives less visible to historians. It was in families that ‘values were taught, learning initiated, spiritual well-being nourished, bodily health cared for and social order established’.2
This chapter surveys recent work, examines the current state of knowledge and some central debates, and suggests directions for future research. In the early modern period, most families were part of a larger household of co-residents, including parents, children, servants, apprentices, and sometimes other kin. The major focus here is on the nuclear family unit of parents and children, but the chapter will explore briefly the family’s place in the wider context of kinship and society.
Although Scottish family history is a fairly new field, the tradition of histories of individual families goes back to medieval times. Genealogical histories have been an important source for the history of highland families in particular. Histories of noble families proliferated in the seventeenth century; the nineteenth century saw the lavish family histories produced by Sir William Fraser. Fraser’s volumes, containing many primary sources, continue to be a rich mine for historians. Recently, studies of families such as the Campbells have placed them firmly in their contemporary context, while studies of monarchs have illuminated the workings of families at the very highest echelons of power.3
Much impetus for European family history came from the rise of social history. Studies of population and family reconstitution encouraged research into family history in the 1970s and 1980s. Demographic work in Scotland resulted in the 1977 Scottish Population History, still essential for early modern historians, although it begins in the seventeenth century.4 One topic arising out of this work was illegitimacy. A description of Scotland as ‘the classic country of illegitimacy’ spurred research by Rosalind Mitchison and Leah Leneman, who pioneered the use of kirk-session records for such studies. Their work focused on the period after 1660, but recently earlier records have been used extensively for both quantitative and qualitative research.5
Related to illegitimacy studies were explorations of Scottish forms of marriage, including the prevalence of irregular marriage.6 The darker aspects of illegitimacy were explored in studies of infanticide, although mainly after 1690.7 Other aspects included divorce, marriage litigation, and domestic abuse. There has been debate over how much the Protestant Reformation of 1559–60 changed marriage practices and the extent to which Reformed Church teachings were accepted by the general population.
The 1980s saw a growing interest in women’s history, with Rosalind Marshall’s survey of women’s lives, Virgins and Viragos, and Christina Larner’s study of the witch-hunt, Enemies of God, which began the flourishing field of witch-hunt studies in Scotland.8 Marshall’s work, especially, had much to say about the family. The relationship between women’s history and family history has sometimes been awkward as many early historians of women resisted the idea that women were primarily defined by their familial roles and focused on women’s lives outside the family. However, recent work has recognized the significance of the patriarchal structure of the early modern family for both women’s and men’s lives and for the formation of gender identity, while work on the ‘marital economy’ has brought together insights into gender and family history.9 Recognizing the family’s importance to political life has further broken down barriers between the study of ‘public’ and ‘private’ life. The most extensive recent studies have been of the elite, but there has also been increasing interest in those comprising the majority of the population, both rural and urban.10
As the site of the most intimate of human relationships, the family leaves few written records. Rising to this challenge, historians have used a wide variety of traditional and less traditional sources, especially to learn more about non-elite families, people less likely to produce the documents and correspondence that have proven such a fertile source for the elite. Such sources include archaeological sources, ballads, material culture, tombstones, architecture, and literary works.11
In medieval Scotland, marriage was a sacrament, the only one always conferred by the laity rather than the clergy (baptism of infants by laypeople being allowed if death was imminent). The central element was the free consent of the parties involved. Marriage was created by the partners exchanging vows in the present tense (‘I marry you’), or words in the future tense, if the relationship was later consummated. Although the Reformation ended the sacramental nature of marriage, the centrality of consent remained and many characteristics of medieval marriage continued. Partners could marry without a clergyman and without witnesses; although such marriages were considered irregular, and discouraged by the Kirk, they were recognized as valid until 1939. Problems arose if one partner contested the validity and there were no witnesses to swear to the marriage. In 1516 Jonet Mur attempted to block the marriage of Laurence Scot and Isabella Montgomery by arguing that she had already contracted with Laurence.12
Girls could legally marry at twelve, boys at fourteen. Many elite children, especially girls, married in their teens. Parents often arranged future marriages for underage children, especially in royal families. Recent work in Europe has suggested that actual child marriages were not as common as once thought, and were largely restricted to elite families, where marriages commonly sealed political or economic alliances. Although more research is needed, it appears most lowland Scots followed the north-west European family model of life-cycle service, relatively late marriage in the twenties, fairly close age of bride and groom, and the formation of nuclear households. Highland girls may have married earlier, and possibly more women remained unmarried, a reminder that demographic regimes could vary within Scotland.13
To marry legally, partners could not be already married or contracted and, in the pre-Reformation period, they could not be related within four or fewer degrees of consanguinity, that is, share a common great-great grandparent. The medieval Church also included relationships through affinity (marriage), spiritual affinity (godparentship), and previous sexual relationships, making it likely that potential partners would be related, especially among the small Scottish elite. Wealthy families purchased dispensations from Rome; an added advantage was that if a marriage was unsuccessful, it was often possible to discover a ‘previously unrecognized’ degree of consanguinity and have the marriage annulled. The Reformed Church reduced the forbidden degrees so that even first cousins could marry; however, incest laws were criminalized in 1567, and confusion over what precisely constituted ‘incest’ meant several people paid with their lives before the law was clarified in 1709.14
There is debate about the role of parents in making marriages. In Scotland, unlike many other countries, parental consent never became a legal requirement. In elite families, however, where property and political power were closely tied to marriage alliances, parents usually played a crucial role in arranging children’s matches. If an elite child was orphaned, the king could grant wardship and right of marriage to a guardian. Some children rejected the choices of their parents or guardians. Margaret, daughter of Lord Ruthven, refused to marry John Oliphant, to whom her parents had betrothed her as a child, ‘because she had no carnal affection for him’.15 There may have been increasing freedom of choice by the later seventeenth century. The role of parents in other families is less clear; studies elsewhere have suggested that young people of the middling and lower social groups, who often left for work in their teens, exercised more independent choice as they were away from home, had accumulated goods of their own, and had a wider range of possible partners. Ballads show young people exercising such choice, although some tales emphasize the tragic consequences.16 Not everyone took advantage of this freedom. In 1527 Alexander Black sold his right to choose a marriage partner to David Wedderburn in return for £20 and said he would accept any woman David chose, so long as she was free from disease, especially syphilis, and of honourable character, no matter how blind or lame she was.17
Regular marriage involved several steps. The first was betrothal, or handfasting. Often betrothal followed hard negotiations between the couple’s parents (or sometimes the couple themselves) over the marriage contract. Although most common among the elite, where extensive property was involved, contracts were used quite far down the social scale. They stipulated the contribution made by the bride’s family in goods and property, which constituted her tocher (dowry); many also set out the groom’s contribution, which formed the wife’s terce (dower) if she was widowed. If no provision was made for her, a widow was entitled to a third of her husband’s goods. More study is needed, but work on noble marriages suggests that, as elsewhere in Europe, tochers were rising in this period, and that the relative value of the terce to the tocher was decreasing, implying that power lay increasingly with the groom’s family.18
There has been controversy about handfasting, with some arguing it was a form of trial marriage. This idea is generally rejected, although some have argued for the existence of a form of trial marriage, at least in the highland areas.19 Following betrothal, banns were proclaimed on three successive Sundays to ensure there were no known impediments. Before 1560 the wedding took place at the church door, after which the party entered the church for a nuptial Mass. After the Reformation, the wedding took place within the church. In both cases, the conclusion of the wedding ceremony was the signal for community celebration and feasting. Both Kirk and Parliament tried to limit these celebrations, but such attempts were generally unsuccessful.20
Most marriages ended with the death of one spouse. Under medieval Church law, marriages were indissoluble. They could only be annulled as invalid from the start. Some historians have argued that attitudes to the permanence of marriage were more relaxed in Scotland than elsewhere, perhaps as a result of Celtic influences, and that annulment was used more commonly than in many countries, but more research is needed.21 Separation of bed and board was allowed in certain instances, primarily adultery, but neither partner could remarry until the death of the other spouse. Following the Reformation, divorce was allowed on the grounds of adultery or desertion (Scotland being one of the earliest countries to allow the latter as a ground for divorce); a new study reveals how the early commissary court dealt with such cases.22 In Scotland, unlike England where formal divorce was the preserve of the elite, couples quite far down the social scale instigated divorce proceedings. Some spouses were quite determined. Margaret Millok of St Andrews attempted to have her marriage to John Gyb annulled on the ground of his impotency in April 1562; when this failed, she reversed her claims of impotency and successfully divorced him for adultery.23 It is likely more informal divorces also occurred.
Upon marriage, a woman’s legal status changed although a man’s did not.24 Although she kept her own surname, a wife lost her independent legal persona and came under her husband’s authority. He decided where they lived. Under the jus mariti, he gained most of the moveable property a woman brought to marriage, except for her paraphernalia that included her personal clothing and jewellery. The jus mariti had both advantages and disadvantages for him, for he also became responsible for any debts his wife contracted before marriage.
A wife’s heritable estate came under her husband’s administration by the jus administrationis, although he did not own it. At her death it passed to her heir, although if she predeceased her husband but had borne a living child, even if it died shortly afterwards, her husband enjoyed the courtesy, rights to the rents of the property for life. Although he was not supposed to alienate such property without his wife’s consent, if he did she could not reclaim it until after his death. A wife could not make a will without her husband’s consent. However, contemporary jurists expected husbands to give consent and in practice many wives bequeathed the property that would have come to them as a widow. While wives’ rights appear very limited, recent studies have stressed the difference between theory and practice, demonstrating how legal restrictions were frequently circumvented. It has also been argued that the courts, particularly the kirk-sessions, were regarded as allies by wives attempting to resolve domestic disputes, although the extent to which such courts were ‘gender-blind’ has been debated.25
The law supported the existence of a patriarchal household, but how did patriarchy work in practice? As elsewhere in Europe, advice literature and role models such as the virgin martyrs and Mary stressed that wives should be chaste and obedient and unquestioningly accept their husbands’ authority.26 The extent to which women followed this advice is debatable and the issue of power relations within the family requires further research. Literary sources suggest that assertive wives were well known, even if many figures have to be treated with caution as the creations of male authors. Travellers commented on the strong characters of Scottish wives, the Spanish ambassador to James IV’s court stating that they were ‘absolute mistresses of their houses, and even of their husbands’.27 Moreover, patriarchy imposed restrictions on husbands as well as wives. An adult man’s masculinity was defined by his ability to properly govern and provide for a household; a marriage contract for John Murray and Marion Loutfit in 1539 stated that it was John’s responsibility ‘to entertain her at board, bed and rightful requisites as becomes a husband to a wife’. The honour and reputation of both sexes were tied to family.28
Sometimes the household head’s power of correction over family members was abused. As Alison Calland complained in 1561, her husband should ‘not bear empire above me as a tyrant’.29 The seventeenth-century Privy Council records included several complaints by women of domestic abuse, and kirk-sessions often mediated in such cases. Domestic abuse was often hidden behind the walls of the family home, and authorities were reluctant to interfere with a husband’s authority within his own family; cases of abuse and discord appear in the records mainly when private behaviour became public, and disturbed the community beyond the household’s walls, such as when a Stirling couple kept their neighbours awake all night with their quarrelling.30
Gauging affection between spouses is difficult, but there is evidence of real trust and affection in marriages. Some beautiful Gaelic women’s verse spoke of the poet’s love for her husband. Aithbhreac Inghean Coirceadaill lamented her husband’s death: ‘Oh rosary that woke my tears,/beloved the finger that on you did lie,/beloved the kindly generous heart/that you belonged to until tonight.’31 Letters often included terms of endearment, as did even some more formal documents such as property transactions and testaments. In pre-Reformation Scotland, it was common to arrange prayers to be said for one’s soul after death to decrease time in Purgatory, and these obit foundations often specified others, especially spouses, whom the donor wished to benefit as well. John Crummy, an Edinburgh burgess who had taken his family to Linlithgow in 1530 to escape the plague, paid £5 to arrange Masses for the souls of his wife and children, all of whom had succumbed.32 The specification of burial place might also indicate affection for a spouse, especially if the person had married more than once. From the seventeenth century there are increasing numbers of surviving gravestone epitaphs; many indicate the attributes that spouses valued in each other.
A wife could not sell property, sue in courts, or make contracts without her husband’s consent. She was only entitled to take independent actions where these involved providing necessities for the family, as manager of the household. However, women’s frequent appearance in court and their active role in the economy suggest the husband’s consent was usually forthcoming, not surprising as the wife’s actions were generally for the spouses’ joint benefit. Most marriages were very much partnerships. A family was crucial to supporting men’s position in society. This was especially true in economic terms. Wives’ economic contributions are obscured in records that identify only the male household head, but the emergence of widows carrying on their husband’s occupations after their death suggests the role they played as wives. Wives were frequently executors for their husbands. In landowning families, wives managed estates while husbands were involved in politics, in exile, or at war. In merchant families, the wife’s role was sometimes visible when a husband was absent.33 As Bartholomew Glendunwyne said before going overseas, ‘the goods that I have and the debts that are owing to me, the said Margaret [Gordon] my spouse knows’.34 In peasant families, the gendered division of labour was suggested by the poem, ‘The Wife of Auchtermuchty’, in which the husband proved totally incapable in his efforts to take on his wife’s tasks when the couple swapped duties, but the work of both was crucial to the household’s survival.
By law, a husband was responsible for his wife’s debts, but court records often cite the names of both spouses in debt cases, suggesting the debt was the woman’s. In Aberdeen in the 1680s, the wife’s name is sometimes recorded first. The practice of identifying wives helps elucidate the active role of married women in commerce, a role obscured in countries such as England where a wife’s debt is almost always recorded under her husband’s name.35
A late seventeenth-century Edinburgh gravestone recounts how Marjorie Brodie ‘kept her shop’ and ‘did for her Husband’s credit’; the latter perhaps referred to his reputation as much as his financial well-being, but the two are connected.36 Urban women often acted as shopkeepers, looking after the retail part of the business. They were also involved in the production process in crafts such as bonnet-making. Many craft guilds recognized the role of wives and daughters in the craft and protected the employment of female family members, even when discriminating against other women in the trade.37
Women also contributed to the marital economy by undertaking supplementary work. Many jobs were related to skills learned in preparation for running a household, such as brewing ale, renting rooms, moneylending, wet-nursing, and providing child-care.38 In some English towns, wives were legally able to carry on separate businesses from their husbands under ‘femme sole’ status. Although the term was apparently not used in Scotland, evidence exists of wives carrying on separate occupations from their husbands.
There is debate over the extent to which women’s paid work was an extension of domestic duties. Possibly most wives carried on different work from their husbands in towns such as Edinburgh by the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and their input should be seen as mutual rather than supplementary, but further research is needed, especially for the earlier period.39 Women’s training possibly suited them more than men to undertaking different activities, as they were less likely to have been trained through a specialized apprenticeship. Although a few were apprenticed, most spent their teenage years in domestic service and possibly learned something of the skills of various crafts, skills later used for a variety of wage-earning occupations. The marital economy relied on the work of all members of a household, married couple, servants, and children.
Both the Catholic and the Reformed Church taught that a primary purpose of marriage was the procreation of children. The history of childhood is a rapidly growing field,40 although there is much to be done on Scotland. A recent study of the nobility included a section on children, and David Mullan’s publications on religious autobiography have made available those sources in which seventeenth-century adults reflect on their own experiences of childhood and those of their children.41 The seventeenth century saw the publication of several accounts of pious children, perhaps due to a religious milieu that gave unusual attention to the words of the less powerful members of society. One does wonder, though, what the playmates of the Fife child Emilia Geddie thought when she rebuked them for breaking the Sabbath and reminded them that ‘tho’ we be but bairns, yet we must die’.42
Childbirth was fraught with dangers for mother and child. The trepidation mothers felt can be glimpsed in women’s letters. Lilias Grant, writing to her mother of her pregnancy, hoped for a maternal visit before she was in danger of death.43 The period was marked by high maternal and infant mortality. The law of courtesy encompassed the possibility of mother or child dying in childbirth, as it applied even if the child died shortly afterwards. The fact that the child had to be heard to cry suggests that men remained outside the birthing chamber and supports other evidence that childbirth was an all-female occasion, with the mother attended by a midwife and close female relatives and friends.44
A major debate has been the impact of the frequent loss of children on parent–child relations. Family historians have responded to earlier work that painted a picture of rather cold emotionless families in the medieval and early modern period, gradually giving way to more affectionate companionate marriages in the eighteenth century. The family’s emotional life is its most hidden aspect, but recent work has revealed the deep affection parents and children could feel for each other, and the grief that parents felt over the loss of their offspring. Reverend James Melville’s neighbour told him how when he was a child his father ‘would ley me down on my back, pleying with me’. In 1596 the Stirling Presbytery acknowledged the devastating loss mothers felt on a child’s death when it petitioned the General Assembly to let mothers who accidentally smothered their infants suffer a less public penalty of repentance than nurses, as it feared the mothers might ‘be swallowed up with over great heaviness’.45 Family correspondence also reveals real concern for children. Of course, not all families were happy. High levels of mortality meant it was common for children to experience the loss of at least one parent, and blended families, formed by the remarriage of a widowed parent, were perhaps as usual as today. The resulting tensions can be seen in testaments that tried to forestall any arguments over property between children of a first marriage and a second spouse and children from that marriage.
Following birth, it was common, especially in wealthier families, to employ wet-nurses, although some argued that mothers should nurse their own children. Live-in wet-nurses were commonly employed by the elite; for less wealthy families, wet-nursing might involve sending their children away to the wet-nurse’s home, although recent research has suggested that at least some families brought wet-nurses to live with them. Single women in seventeenth-century Aberdeen, for example, fined by the kirk-session for bearing illegitimate children, paid their fines through employment as live-in wet-nurses for urban families.46
Shortly after birth the baby was baptized. If the child was in danger of imminent death, baptism could be carried out by the midwife. Baptism not only welcomed the child into the Christian community, but also extended family alliances and connections through the choice of godparents.47 Mothers did not usually attend the baptism as it was so close to the birth, but there were celebrations of her first upsitting after the birth, and her churching, her first attendance at the kirk. The latter occasion especially could be the scene of much festivity and drinking, to the dismay of local kirk-sessions.
The early childhood years are the most obscure, perhaps because these were when mothers had the most responsibility for upbringing. Fathers in post-Reformation Scotland were expected to provide their offspring with religious education, leading family prayers every day, with the children being examined on religious doctrine by the kirk.48 Sometimes children were fostered or boarded out. Fostering was quite common among the highland elite; many children and foster-parents formed strong bonds, the emotions of some foster-mothers being preserved in poetry.49 It does not seem to have been so common to send children away in the Lowlands, although children might be boarded out if their own mothers were unable to care for them.
Parents’ responsibilities included providing guidance to their children. While early modern Scotland did not produce the many conduct books offering advice on proper behaviour found elsewhere, literate audiences probably had access to some of these works. Some parents and guardians, including James VI, committed their advice to paper, providing evidence on how children were regarded and how their parents and guardians thought they ought to behave (as opposed to how they actually behaved). Others weighed in with advice to the young kings who came to the throne in the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—poets and theologians offered instruction on how to become both a good man and a good monarch.50 Some writers, such as the minister James Kirkwood, author of The True Interest of Families (1690), offered advice to both parents and children.
There is debate over whether early modern individuals experienced adolescence; however, most historians recognize a period of transition between childhood and adulthood.51 For many, the early teens were marked by moving away from home, with boys being apprenticed, attending school or university, or becoming agricultural servants, and girls going into domestic service. Apprenticeship contracts were occasionally recorded in town court registers. Apprentices, servants, and employers appeared in court to settle disputes over wages or conditions of service. University records and statutes shed some light on student life. A code of behaviour issued for Marischal College students in Aberdeen prohibited abusive language, frequenting taverns, and playing card games, although a student there in the 1650s remembered his student life involving most of these activities.52
University and apprenticeship were two ways in which boys were socialized into adult masculinity. For elite boys, military training was an important part of becoming an adult, although perhaps decreasingly so as military skills became less central to aristocratic identity. Other aspects of youthful masculinity were found where exuberance boiled over into disorder and resulted in miscreants coming before the local courts. Around Christmas 1586 Adam Elphinstoun and his young cronies kept Glasgow awake all night with riotous celebrations in the street, played with a horse’s head, and were likely the culprits who placed the dead animal’s bones at the minister’s gate.53 Recent studies of masculinity have discussed its two extreme forms, aggressiveness and self-control. Young men were socialized to control their passions and become responsible heads of households. While the Reformation, with its stress on the godly household, may have intensified this moral message, similar expectations existed in the late medieval period.54
For girls, records of servant contracts and testaments provide glimpses into the world of domestic service. Probably 10 per cent of girls were employed in service in the four largest towns in the later seventeenth century. The position of domestic servants needs more investigation; some studies have stressed the negative aspects, especially their vulnerability to sexual exploitation by males in the household (servants being a high proportion of those coming before the kirk-session for bearing illegitimate children), while others have pointed out the positive aspects of service, which could give girls some independence, allow them to build up dowries, and provide choice in the selection of spouses.55
Families were not isolated units, but interacted with other parts of society. Some of their closest relationships were with kin. Scotland is traditionally seen as a country where kinship ties remained strong much later than in some other European countries (and indeed, in its modern manifestation of clan societies, remain strong, if in a more artificial form). Anthropological approaches have added much to the understanding of the role of kinship. The work of Jenny Wormald on bonds of manrent, Keith Brown on bloodfeud, and Robert Dodgshon on clanship has explored ties of blood and marriage, looking for comparisons to contemporary European as well as to anthropological evidence. Kinship ties have been explored for lairdly families in the Borders. Kinship could mean as much or as little as people wanted it to mean.56 Kinship ties below the nobility have been less explored, but sources exist; for example, notaries’ protocol books, registers of deeds, and testaments that record connections between kin have been relatively untapped.
Recent European work has pointed out that ‘kinship’ might mean different things in different aspects of life. For example, while inheritance practices may have become more patrilineal and restricted to the senior male line in the late medieval and early modern period, for political purposes kinship was often defined more broadly, bringing together all those of a surname who had normally had little practical contact with one another. The stress on ‘surname’ in documents suggests a similar pattern in Scotland. Alison Cathcart’s work has highlighted how fictive as well as ‘blood’ kinship played an important role in the strategies of highland families. Cathcart and others have also demonstrated the importance of marital alliances in the long-term strategies of families, raising questions about the strength of marriage ties compared to other types of bonds between families.57
Scattered family branches might be brought together by forging a vision of a shared past. Genealogies and family histories were important tools in reinforcing links between family members distanced by migration or marriage. The production of such histories increased in the seventeenth century, partly as a result of the need to establish status in the wider aristocratic world that focused on the Scottish king’s court in London after 1603, and also against new families coming to prominence through royal service. Families such as the Maitlands also cooperated to produce household books of poetry and other writings, which preserved their memory among their descendants.58
Was there a sense of lineage and family history below the elite? Cynthia Neville has shown how oral memory preserved medieval traditions of ancestral rights to property among even small landholders.59 A similar study for the early modern period might reveal whether the disruption to traditional landholding caused by the feuing movement of the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries resulted in a diminution of such senses of ancestry. Patterns of medieval obit foundations reveal family connections with particular altars over the generations. In some, a sense of lineage and the importance of the wider family is shown in the request that the officiating priest be chosen from among those of the founder’s surname or family.60 Requests for burials in family vaults or burial plots also suggest a sense of continuity with the past.
Families existed within communities. Regarded by secular and religious authorities as the fundamental unit of society, they were subject to supervision and interference by their neighbours, Church, and State. Although the door and walls of the home symbolized a division between a private and a public world, in practice boundaries were very permeable. The Church recognized the home as a place of private worship led by the male household head, but occasionally attempted to replace a father as the family’s leader of religious instruction if it regarded him as negligent. Kirk-sessions intervened in marital disputes and quarrels between families, while all community members were expected to maintain surveillance over their neighbours’ behaviour. Court records, especially witch-hunt documents, have revealed tensions simmering both within families and between households.61
Families responded to external pressures and events, although individuals might react in different ways. Changing economic conditions saw members migrating elsewhere for employment; recent work has emphasized the mobility of the population, both within and outside Scotland. Such migration not only affected the host community but also the families left behind.62 A family’s prosperity could vary over the life course, depending on such variables as the number of dependent children. Rosalind Mitchison’s work on poor relief has provided a basis for work on family strategies for coping with poverty. Recent studies have examined how families reacted to famine and to dislocations caused by the witch-hunt.63 The early modern period, marked by frequent visitations of plague, food shortages, and warfare, provides an excellent context in which to examine how families reacted to crises.
The family was central to people’s understandings of their world. The family was used as a metaphor in the expression of political ideas and ambitions, from the Union of the Crowns of 1603 to the idea of the monarch as father of the realm. The family itself was a little commonwealth, with the father head of state. Marriage was central to politics, forging alliances between Scotland and other countries, ending (or attempting to end) feuds between warring families, being used to reward loyal service to a monarch, and influencing court factions and loyalties in wartime. The family fostered culture in all its forms. Elite families patronized artists, musicians, writers, and architects, while families at all levels passed on stories, songs, games, and pastimes, which made up the period’s vibrant oral and traditional culture.64
Not everyone lived in families, although often substitutes for families existed. An unbalanced sex ratio in towns left many women unmarried; both secular and religious authorities attempted to ensure they entered domestic service and were included in a household. The Edinburgh authorities enacted laws against women living alone in the 1530s, and the kirk-sessions of Stirling and Glasgow similarly cracked down in the 1590s.65 More research is needed on the experience of single women, including mothers of illegitimate children after their appearance on the penitent stool. Before the Reformation, secular clergy were required to be celibate (although in practice concubinage was widely practised). Did ideas about the masculinity of the clergy change when they, like their parishioners, could marry? Medieval monks, nuns, and friars lived apart from families, although the terminology of religious houses (mother prioress, father abbot) emphasized the nature of the institution as a substitute family. Many nuns continued contact with their natal families, and succession to religious offices was often a family affair.66
Where should the study of the family go from here? As the family intersects with every aspect of early modern society, there are many different directions in which research can proceed. The following are only a few suggestions.
Although family reconstitution is difficult because of patchy records, it is possible to reconstruct a good part of those local communities that have kirk-session records, court records, protocol books, and/or testaments. Such work explores how the web of family and kin connections affected community life. It sheds light on the relative importance of agnatic and cognatic kinship. Studies of families over several generations reveal changing strategies as they face new circumstances. Such local studies reveal regional differences, and they benefit from cooperation with the ranks of enthusiastic genealogists researching their family trees.
Studies of material culture through surviving objects, archaeological evidence, literary sources, and testaments can shed light on families’ daily activities, gender roles, and standards of living. Recent work elsewhere has begun to examine the symbolic meanings of household items. How such articles were used or passed on casts light on their meaning to their owners. For example, food and its consumption often had ritualistic meaning.67 Sumptuary laws showed how clothing indicated status. The ways in which families stamped their personalities on their homes, for example through the use of marriage lintels, can also be examined. House plans reveal how families functioned and the gendered use of space. Maps and cartographic evidence combined with archaeological and documentary evidence build up a picture of settlements and the environment in which people lived. The insights of environmental history can also contribute to such studies.
Many written sources can be re-examined for evidence by asking new questions. Women’s writings, including autobiographies and biographies, commonplace books, correspondence, and poetry, could be particularly valuable.68 Research has revealed the value of witchcraft depositions for the history of the family; other local and central court records can also shed light on family roles, expectations, and networks. Such sources can be interrogated for what they say about gender roles and expected behaviour, and how these intersect with the family. For example, witness testimony and insults provide insights into honour and reputation for men and women, and show how closely connected these were with family and household.
Finally, studies of the Scottish family should continue to engage with family history research elsewhere. Two recent syntheses of the current state of research on the early modern Scottish family have appeared in studies of women in Britain.69 Both include some misconceptions about the nature of early modern Scottish society, especially about the ubiquity of clanship, but this should not detract from the value of their comparative research and the questions they raise. Scottish family history has much to contribute to the study of the early modern family throughout Europe. A good start has been made and the way forward looks promising indeed.
Brown, Keith, Noble Society in Scotland (Edinburgh, 2000).
Cathcart, Alison, Kinship and Clientage (Leiden, 2006).
Ewan, E., and Meikle, M. M., eds., Women in Scotland c.1100–c.1750 (East Linton, 1999).
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