Nowadays the Scottish Highlands have immense global appeal as a region of magical natural beauty. Towering peaks, remote glens and silent lochs feature in innumerable films, works of art and countless tourist brochures. In that different place the jaded traveller can hope to escape to a world which promises spiritual renewal and restful refreshment far away from the strains and stresses of modern life. Yet, in the perspective of history, that popular image of the Highlands is a modern invention which became fashionable only from the very late eighteenth century. First created during the Romantic era as a direct consequence of a revolution in aesthetics and visual taste at that time, the iconography then became shaped by new concepts of scenic beauty, the picturesque and the sublime, which transformed how humans saw and experienced their natural environment.
Before that time the conventional perception of the Highland landscape was radically different. Mist-covered mountains situated alongside vast stretches of desolate moorland stirred feelings of foreboding and melancholy rather than emotions of awe. In his famous journey of 1773 to the Western Isles across the hill country of the mainland, Dr Samuel Johnson found himself repelled and ultimately depressed by the ‘wide extent of hopeless sterility’ which he encountered on his travels.1 Nearly forty years before, the English military engineer Captain Edmund Burt saw the neighbourhood around Inverness as ‘a dismal gloomy Brown … and most of all disagreeable, when the Heath is in Bloom’. For Burt, bens and glens clothed in purple heather during the months of autumn were therefore ugly and sinister and not in any way bonnie or appealing.2 Even in 1800, by which time the aesthetic revolution was already in its early stages, the author of The General Gazetteer or Compendious Geographical Directory could report on the ‘North division of the country’ as ‘chiefly an assembly of vast dreary mountains’.3
This was the land of the Highland clans from their origins in early medieval times until their disintegration in the eighteenth century.
Scottish Gaeldom, An Gaidhealtachd, literally ‘the Place of the Gael’, lay north and west of the Highland Boundary Fault which crosses Scotland in a line from the town of Helensburgh in the south-west to Stonehaven in the north-east. The core geographical region includes the counties of Argyll, Ross and Cromarty, Sutherland and Inverness, but in earlier times ‘the Highlands’ also encompassed in linguistic and cultural terms the western and northern districts of Aberdeenshire, Angus, Perthshire and Stirlingshire. Not all the lands of the clans lay in impenetrable mountain country. Several of the inner and outer Hebridean islands, and especially the foothills of the main Highland massif to the east and south, contained districts of relatively flat and productive land. Even in the harsher landscape to the north and west, the people tended to settle mainly on the scattered pieces of arable land which could be found discontinuously across an otherwise barren terrain.
No matter where they lived, however, living conditions for the Gaels were hard and often challenging in the extreme. Only a small fraction of the land, later reckoned to be around 9 per cent of the whole, was suitable for cultivation. But even this scarce arable was often split into mere patches rather than formed in the continuous stretches characteristic of most parts of the Scottish Lowlands. Some places, such as the Kintyre peninsula, the islands of Tiree and Islay, and the western coastlands of the Outer Isles, did indeed have a reputation for fertility. But most other areas were much less favoured. It was said in Victorian times, for instance, that of four parishes in north-west Sutherland only a one-hundredth part of the soil there had ever been cultivated. Even in some more southerly districts, closer to the Lowlands, arable was often in short supply. Thus in the parish of Lochgilphead in south Argyll, nineteenth-century estimates suggest that only a tiny one-fifteenth of the land surface had ever been under the plough.
Settlement in the western Highlands and Islands was mainly confined to very limited areas because of the challenging constraints of geology, climate and geography. Therefore, when modern visitors contemplate hills and glens which are empty of people, they should not assume that they were inhabited in the past or that their present silence and loneliness were necessarily the consequence of later clearance or emigration.
A historical demographer has recently analysed General William Roy’s great map of Scotland, drawn between 1747 and 1755 and hence before the period of convulsive change. He concludes:
This [the Roy map] shows settlements as clusters of red dots reflecting small groups of houses that dominated settlement patterns before the reorganisations of the following hundred or more years.
The overwhelming impression for the whole of the land north and west of the Great Glen is vast areas of higher land with no houses at all. Lower down, even the most densely populated inland straths seldom show sets of red dots located less than about half a kilometre apart in the lower reaches; in their middle sections there are rarely less than one per kilometre; and higher up they peter out almost entirely.
Many straths and glens were much less settled than this, with just a few scattered settlements where the land allowed. Some strips of coastline had rather denser patches of settlement spread out for a few kilometres, but in the mid eighteenth century most of the coast was completely without houses or had just odd groups clustered on a headland or around the head of a small bay.fn1
Other constraints made the Highlands a risk-laden environment for the people who scratched a living from the land. Climatic conditions were among the most hazardous. A historical geographer has commented:
extreme events, including gales, storms, floods and blizzards, were all capable of devastating crops and stock in a matter of hours. On a larger or longer time-scale, poor seasons, especially when two or more ran in succession, could have equally devastating effect on a regional scale. Cold, wet summers could leave farmers with a harvest barely sufficient to match the seed used whilst long, hard winters could thin herds and flocks dramatically if little shelter was available, or could make it difficult to sow crops until well into the normal growing season.4
The western Highlands and Islands in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were likely to experience partial crop failure once in every three years. Severe shortages were recorded in 1671, 1680, 1680, 1688, 1695 and 1702. Between 1647 and 1707, one of the most intensely cold and stormy phases of the Little Ice Age afflicted many parts of Europe. The migration of Arctic sea ice southwards caused mean temperatures to fall steeply in the Highlands while districts along the western seaboard and across the Hebrides were fully exposed to increased risk of storm. Some tounships in the most vulnerable parishes were temporally abandoned altogether by their inhabitants during this period. The worst crisis came with the onset of the so-called ‘Lean Years’ in the 1690s, when successive harvest failures resulted in famine, disease and increased mortality across the whole of Scotland. The most recent estimates suggest that the population of the country as a whole fell by as much as 15 per cent as a result of sharp rises in mortality and the related mass emigration of famine refugees from south-west Scotland and the southern Highlands across the North Channel to Ulster. The available evidence also indicates that death rates were probably higher in the Highlands and Islands than elsewhere in Scotland.
The disasters of the Lean Years were triggered by an especially acute but ephemeral climatic deterioration in the later seventeenth century, which for a time also gripped Scandinavia, France, Holland and the German states. More common were the routine natural hazards of life in Gaeldom. Many communities in the Uists, Harris, Bernera, Coll and Tiree grew their grain crop on the rich machair lands of the western coastal fringes. The machair was made up of calciferous sand which the people continuously fertilized by animal manure and seaweed. But cultivating these soils increased the risks of erosion especially when severe storms struck. In the 1750s, for instance, sandstorms frequently overwhelmed both settlements and arable in the Hebrides while the low-lying nature of the coastal areas also made them vulnerable to inundation by sea storms. A similar problem of flooding in cultivated stretches was common beside rivers in the glens of the central and northern Highlands. Estate surveys of the time were replete with evidence of lands lost and peasant holdings swept away. The experience of farmers in Glen Shira (near Inveraray in Argyll) would not have been unusual. It was said that the people there were able to catch salmon where they had previously ploughed because serious flooding had altered the river channels.
These natural challenges meant that the returns on grain to the people in most parts of the north and west in medieval and early modern times were often meagre at best and seriously deficient at worst. Life for the mass of the people must have been a constant struggle to survive. It was far from the idyllic existence portrayed by later writers politically sympathetic to the Gaels during the Age of the Clearances. The endemic poverty of the western Highlands was one reason why the Scottish state took so long to impose its authority throughout the territory. If the resource base of the region had been richer and more productive, governments would probably have been tempted at a much earlier time to establish a more effective dominion over the north-west and insular districts.
Yet, while much of the terrain only provided poor crops, having some land, however tiny, was vital to the survival of each family. For this was a subsistence-based society where virtually all the necessities of life had to come directly from the land. The common food and drink crops were oats and bere (a hardy form of barley), both grown for their resilience in a harsh climate rather than because they were likely to be a source of increased yields, especially as the growing season was shorter than elsewhere in Scotland. Oats were the dietary staple throughout the Highlands, while from bere came ale and, later, whisky. The universal fuel was peat or turf, dug out from the boglands in spring, stacked and dried during the summer months as fuel for the long Highland winter.
Construction of the dwellings of the people also drew on perishable organic materials such as turf, straw, heather and ferns, not only for roofs but also for walling. The stone-built houses whose remains litter many parts of the western Highlands and Islands today came much later. Indeed, passing travellers often found it difficult to make out at a distance the settlement clusters of township huts as they merged so completely into the surrounding heath and moorland. Contemporary accounts also suggest that these habitations were rarely permanent fixtures. Thatch was recycled annually and turf walls and wattle interiors were usually taken down every three years or so, with the organic matter then used as compost and field manure. The extent and frequency with which the most basic materials used in the traditional house were renewed meant that most dwellings seem to have passed through regular cycles of construction and deconstruction.
Wool from the small sheep of the region was a primary raw material for spinning, weaving and dyeing, routine labours throughout the year. That the amount of cloth worked up was considerable is confirmed by the volume of plaid which is often documented in rental accounts. The household crafts also turned out brogues made from raw hides with leather tanned from bark. Until the sixteenth century, when some cash payments started to become more common, the rentals paid by the peasantry to their chiefs and leading gentry consisted overwhelmingly of produce extracted from the land. These payments in kind included livestock, grain, fish, poultry, cloth and whisky. As will be shown later, the distribution of land was also fundamental to the cohesion of clanship and to the prestige and power of those at the top of the social pyramid.
A few items, of course, had to be imported from elsewhere. These included salt, for preserving fish, and iron in small quantities for some farming implements and the fashioning of weapons. Most crucial, however, was wood. The evidence from Major-General William Roy’s military map of 1755 suggests that on the Highland mainland woodland cover was only a little over 3 per cent of the whole, though later figures place it slightly higher. Wood for the making of ploughs, hoes, spade handles and room partitions was therefore very highly prized. Above all in importance were the roof-couples for dwellings. They would be carried from place to place as families moved and were often passed down from one generation to another. The value of timber can be confirmed by the fact that on leaving a holding tenants were usually allowed to take both roof-couples and doors with them on their departure.
The universal unit of settlement in the pre-clearance Highlands was the township or baile. Usually consisting of around four to twenty families, and sometimes more, they were scattered across the landscape in pockets of scarce arable along the glens and coastlands of the west. Some took the form of nucleated holdings, but most were dispersed settlements reflecting the patchy nature of good land outside the richer terrain of the southern and eastern fringes of the Highlands and the more fertile lands of some of the islands. Two key aspects of these communities stand out. First was the universal social need for a stake in the land, however small. Second were the close links of kindred which meant that tenants with married children by custom divided land among them. If population only rose and fell within traditional limits, these traditions were tolerable. But when in the future numbers increased in any sustained way, this form of partible inheritance threatened demographic disaster by pulverizing holdings which were originally only ever enough to support single families.
In addition to the tenants, the bailes were also populated by people whose names did not feature in the rental books. These ‘cottars’ held even tinier plots of land because of familial ties to tenants or in return for labour services on bigger holdings. Communities were therefore held together seamlessly with all having some access to land, however minuscule, so vital was it for daily existence and subsistence. Almost all families were able to graze a few cattle, goats and sheep on the grasslands of the less fertile areas around the township and the hill country beyond. But the distribution of land also had a key social and economic purpose as the resource foundation of clan society:
Land in the Highlands … was laid out not so much to ensure an effective agricultural economy as to stabilize a class structure and to verify mutual obligations. It passed from proprietor to tacksman to small tenant, from tenant to subtenant, from subtenant to cottar or servant. At each stage some ground would be kept in immediate occupation, but the rest would be handed down, as an earnest of kinship, or to ensure rent, loyalty, service, each linked with the next in mutual obligation.5
To eighteenth-century ‘improving’ writers the weaknesses of a social system of this kind were self-evident. They took the view that it was impossible for a class of richer peasants to emerge from a society where limited land was so fragmented and the potential for capital accumulation further constricted by communal working and traditional custom. But these thinkers judged the past in terms of their own age rather than by those of the world of clanship. The effects of kinship obligation and the use of land in return for labour services meant that the precious asset had to be distributed widely rather than settled in a small number of dominant peasant families. Differences in wealth between tenants do not seem to have been thought significant and little evidence of any striving for greater social status or more material gain within the structure of clanship has come to light. Crucially, also, in the heyday of clanship chiefs had a powerful rationale to pack large numbers of warriors into their lands at a time when the building up of military power was much more important than the augmentation of rent rolls.
Nevertheless, this tribal society was not lacking in enterprise or the creative ability to adapt to the challenges of living in a harsh environment. Township land was laid out in the runrig tradition by which the shares of each tenant were scattered across the arable in intermixed strips which were often regularly subject to reallocation in order to ensure reasonably fair access to good and bad soils. Rarely, outside the southern and eastern Highlands and some other favoured areas, was the arable configured in compact blocks, as in most of the Highlands the good ground was separated out by ridges, moor, bog and waterlogged areas. The traditional township and runrig cultivation are sometimes depicted as unchanging archaic structures inherited from an antique past and frozen in time. In fact adaptation and change were integral features of the townships in the old Highlands. The most striking change was an increase in the region’s capacity to rear cattle and with that the great expansion of the droving trade to the Lowlands and England.
This was a salient example of how the comparative advantage of Gaeldom could be exploited. Deficient in arable resources, the Highlands had rough pasture in plentiful supply, enabling the region to become a specialist centre for the breeding, though not fattening, of small black cattle. Costly investment in transport infrastructure was unnecessary. Stock went on the hoof to the Lowland cattle markets of Crieff and Falkirk for onward sale. So much did their tracks become accustomed to the repeated imprint of man and beast that they came to be known in time as the ‘drove roads’. By the middle decades of the seventeenth century, the export trade in cattle embraced all the Highlands and Islands. In the 1680s, for instance, herds of 1,000 head of cattle making their way south were not an unusual sight. Indeed, clan society provided an effective business structure for the droving trade. The contract covering the whole of the land settled by a clan and its satellites was negotiated by leading families with drovers from the Lowlands. Gathering in of stock would then be organized from individual townships by the clan gentry, and the market value of the tenants’ cattle was settled and recorded as payments against their book rentals.
This major increase in cattle exports provided a novel flexibility to this subsistence-based economy and, not surprisingly, the balance of activity within the peasant holdings soon began to change as a result. The mixed economy of the townships was able to switch more land from arable to pasture and use the purchasing power released by droving to buy meal from more favoured Lowland areas on the fringes of the Highlands. Meat was rarely consumed in Gaeldom as animals were too precious a potential cash commodity for them to be sacrificed as a source of food. So sales of stock provided the purchasing power to buy in the vital supplies of meal. Indeed, by the middle decades of the eighteenth century, contemporaries observed that large parts of the central and western Highlands were only able to subsist by large importations of meal. It was said, for instance, that: ‘This country [Gairloch] and all the West coast, are supplied in the summer with meal by vessels that come from the different parts at a distance; such as Caithness, Murray [sic], Peterhead, Banff, Aberdeen, Greenock etc.’6
Nor was the arable economy inflexible. The people had learned how to respond to some of the problems of shallow soils, marginal land and regular waterlogging. The techniques which were adopted called for a great deal of labour, but that was the one resource in abundant supply in most parts of the north and west. The common method was the labour-intensive construction of lazy beds (feannagan) and then working them by the spade or foot-plough (cas-chrom). The feannagan were raised sandwiches of soil with furrows between which were built up even on rock surfaces as well as on uncultivated moorland. Animal dung, old thatch compost, seaweed and shell sand were then added to the beds to provide enrichment. When prepared by the cas-chrom, the lazy beds could produce even higher grain yields than horse-drawn ploughing, but at the cost of a very great deal of human effort. Yet in a society where labour was plentiful and arable scarce, this was a rational trade-off.
The clan, A’ Chlann, literally means ‘the children’. Therefore, at the heart of clanship was the belief that all clansmen were bound together by ties of common kinship and descended by origin from legendary patriarchs of antiquity. Yet, in reality, clans in the Highlands had not evolved from the very remote past but rather as a response to political turbulence and social dislocation in northern Scotland during the early Middle Ages. At that time, people sought protection from danger and threat by gathering in loyalty to great men of influence, power and prestige as the crown itself could not guarantee law and order throughout the entire realm of Scotland. In particular, the hill country of the north and west mainland, the Western Isles and the Scottish Borders were semi-autonomous entities, mainly beyond royal control, from the thirteenth through to the seventeenth centuries.
The nature of clanship has long been shrouded in myth, song, story and romance. Only in recent years has modern scholarship started to unlock some of its secrets and begun to reveal a more convincing and authentic narrative of its origins, structure and complexity. Clanship was not unique to the Highlands. Until the seventeenth century other parts of Scotland had also been based on kin-based societies where the power and influence of great men and family networks commanded ultimate authority. The Borders, another region of recalcitrance in the face of royal authority, was in this sense entirely comparable to the western Highlands. In 1587, when the Scottish Parliament discussed the problem of regional disorder throughout the realm, it was both Border and Highland élites who were directed to impose more control over their people. In the north-eastern Lowlands, too, there were also some vestiges of similar social and cultural patterns.
There can be little doubt as well that claims of blood connection both in and beyond Gaeldom survived into the eighteenth century, albeit not for the purposes of making war. Lowland magnates at that time were very conscious of the need to provide support to kinfolk who sought careers, posts and opportunities in Scotland, Britain and the Empire. But clanship in the Highlands, in large part because of its martial imperative, became much more embedded in Gaelic culture through bardic genealogies, songs, stories and traditions. Even in the later eighteenth century and beyond, travellers to the Highlands who were appalled by the squalor and poverty which they witnessed were also mightily impressed by the rich culture of poetry and music of the people which they experienced.
More than any other part of Scotland, the Highlands and Islands were able to resist for longer the encroachment of royal power, because geography presented formidable barriers to the enforcement of state authority. In that sense, the distinguishing feature of the Highland clan was not so much its antiquity, social structure or family connections, but its longevity, surviving into the eighteenth century long after other kin-based regional societies in Scotland and Britain as a whole had passed into history.
The clans which can be documented during the Middle Ages had a range of ethnic and territorial origins. Anglo-Norman, Celtic, Norse, Gaelic, Anglian and Flemish families can be counted among their founding dynasties, a truly multinational inheritance. Over time, dominant tribal élites legitimized their status and power by tracing bloodlines to some prestigious figure in the distant past who could provide the commons of the clan with a sense of identity and historical meaning. Most of these pedigrees were created and re-created with the scantest of concern for historical or chronological accuracy. The invention of tradition was pragmatic and expedient in order to enhance family status, accommodate changing alliances and absorb other clans into the greater whole. It comes as little surprise, therefore, to learn that among the founding ancestors claimed by the MacGregors was Pope Gregory the Great, while ClanCampbell was wont to include the legendary but elusive King Arthur among its ‘name-fathers’.
The realities were, of course, more prosaic. The Grants, for instance, who were probably of Anglo-Norman stock, did not become prominent until after the marriage in the fifteenth century of Iain Ruadh (Red John) to Matilda, the heiress of Glencairnie, which allowed the acquisition of extensive lands in Moray and Inverness. Thereafter, their rise to prominence depended above all on their close association with the Gordons, earls of Huntly, which allowed consolidation and extension of their landed interest and power in the central Highlands. The McKenzies became important only after they provided military support to the Scottish crown in the attempt to subdue the Lords of the Isles. After forfeiture of the Lords, the head of the McKenzies received a crown charter in 1476 for the lands of Strathconnan and Strathgarve in central Ross-shire. Thereafter, they ruthlessly expanded their domains until by the later seventeenth century the fiefdom of the McKenzies was second only to the mighty imperium of ClanCampbell.
The McNeills had a pedigree which went back to Niall, a Knapdale warlord of the eleventh century, but they seem only to have emerged as an important kindred in the turmoil which followed the Norwegian ceding of the Western Isles to the Scottish crown in 1246 and was then followed by the beginning of the Wars of Independence with England. It was at this time that they became established on their principal territory on the island of Barra. Then, through association with Alexander MacDonald, Lord of the Isles, the McNeills were awarded Boisdale in South Uist by charter. By the middle decades of the fifteenth century they were also ensconced on the isle of Gigha and in parts of Knapdale on the Argyll mainland.
The chief, as tribal patriarch or ceann-cinnidh, and the fine, or leading gentlemen of the clan, could be reasonably confident for the most part in their kinship connections to the ruling families of past generations as the relationships were recorded and embellished in the epics, eulogies and elegies of the bards and genealogists. Whether the mass of clansmen had inherited similar blood relationships to their chiefs is much more doubtful. The belief that they had done so, however, was what mattered, because that exclusive family bond was a critical factor in the development of cohesion across the different strata of clan society. One of the best insights into its central importance came not from a Gael, but from an outsider, Edmund Burt, the English officer of engineers, in his letters written in the 1720s and 1730s from the Highlands to a friend in London. The period is important because, as suggested in the next chapter, clanship was already in decay at that point. Despite this, the mindset of the clansmen whom Burt encountered seems to have remained cast in stone:
The ordinary Highlanders esteem it the most sublime degree of virtue to love their chief and pay him a blind obedience, although it be in opposition to the Government, the laws of the Kingdom, or even to the law of God. He is their idol; and they profess to know no king but him.
This power of the chiefs is not supported by interest as they are landlords, but as really descended from the old patriarchs or fathers of the families; for they hold the same authority when they have lost their estates …
… as the meanest among them pretend to be his relations by consanguinity, they insist upon the privilege of taking him by the hand wherever they meet him.7
The chiefs personified their clans and were identified by patronymics which often went back several generations to the formative period of the evolution of the kindred, so providing the crucial legitimacy of myth, history and longevity. Thus the chief of ClanCampbells of Argyll was MacCaileinMor, the big son of Colin, and the chief of the Macdonalds of Clanranald was addressed as Mac vic Ailean, grandson of Allan.
Despite these ties of affection, however, the realities of history were in conflict with beliefs of consanguinity across the entire clan community. As the larger clans relentlessly augmented their territory through conquest, marriage and the acquisition of crown charters, effective control of the new lands became more difficult. This was especially the case when districts had to be annexed rapidly and effectively in times of conflict across difficult and broken terrain. A case in point was the challenge of command and control which confronted the MacLeods of Dunvegan. Their sprawling territories at the peak of possession included a number of small islands in the Outer Hebrides, such as Pabbay, Ensay, Berneray, Taransa and St Kilda, in addition to the main island of Harris, and the districts of Bracadale, Waternish, Duirnish and Minginish in Skye.
The strategic response to the challenge of governance within the context of kin-based society was to lease or make life-grants to junior members of the ruling family and so establish new lines of descent and cadet branches of the main clan. These cadres then became identified by the name of the district over which they held lordship and authority. Once consolidated, these kin groups would then infiltrate the existing landed hierarchy of the newly acquired territories and steadily replace the native élites with their own kindred. This practice was commonplace among such imperialistic clans as the MacDonalds in the heyday of the medieval Lordship of the Isles and then even more aggressively with the Campbells and McKenzies in the seventeenth century.
As ClanDonald reinforced territories in the Western Isles, so members of its fine were settled in different districts across the insular districts of the region. Eventually no fewer than seventeen different branches, or sliochden, had emerged to assume landed control. Each was linked with a particular part of the ClanDonald empire, such as Glencoe, Ardnamurchan, Sleat and Knoydart. Even these sub-hierarchies could split into further septs, or divisions, possessing even smaller areas. From the MacDonalds of Clanranald, for example, there developed the cadet families of Knoydart, Glengarry, Morar and Kinlochmoidart. There was a similar dynamic in other clans. Five branches of the Frasers were documented in 1650, but by 1745 the number had risen to over thirty. The ClanDonachy, or Robertson, is noted as being in possession of lands in Strowan in Perthshire, in 1451. Each of the twenty-four branches of the clan had established authority over multiple sub-areas within the broader domain by the eighteenth century.
This evidence of evolution and aggrandisement makes nonsense therefore of any claim that clans were united through ties of blood. The possessions of many of them were often in a state of flux as small kinship groups were overwhelmed and absorbed into the territorial empires of more powerful rivals through conflict or intermarriage. In such cases, changes of allegiance were commonplace as families adopted the identity of other locally dominant clans for sound reasons of security and survival. In addition, it was common for weaker units to develop close alliances with stronger kindreds. For instance, the MacRaes and MacLennans became loyal allies and followers of the MacKenzies, as did the MacColls in their long association with the Stewarts of Appin. The blood ties between the ruling families and the ordinary clansmen were therefore largely mythical, but the belief in consanguinity, suggested by the very term clann, or children, gave, as suggested above, a deep emotional bond which did much to cement social cohesion within clanship. Essentially, therefore, the clan did not consist of those of the same blood kindred but rather those who followed the same chief and ruling family whatever their own blood lineage or ancestral connections.
As noted earlier, clan-type social structures had been common in other parts of Scotland in earlier periods but lasted longer in the Highlands and Islands than elsewhere. A key factor was the topography of the region. Dr Johnson, during his travels, reflected on the advantages possessed by the people of ‘mountainous countries’ when presented with the threat of the imposition of control by a distant central authority:
they are not easily conquered because they must be entered by narrow ways, exposed to every power of mischief from those who occupy the heights; and every new ridge is a new fortress where the defendants have again the same advantage. If the war be not soon concluded, the invaders are dislodged by hunger … The wealth of mountains is cattle, which, while the men stand in the passes, the women drive away.8
In the medieval period, feudalism had become the key strategy designed to integrate the kingdom of Scotland under royal authority. The crown in feudal theory exercised superiority over all men and land and the major lords held their domains directly from the monarch in return for military service. David I (1084–1153) did much to feudalize Scotland, including the southern and eastern frontiers of the Highlands. Even further west in the region, leading families often formally accepted royal authority and in return were granted feudal charters from the monarchy which guaranteed legal title to the possession of their lands. The status of the clan chiefs was therefore hybrid. On the one hand they were tribal leaders; on the other, thanks to the dictates of feudalism, they were also landowners in law, in the same way as their peers in Lowland society, and with the royal charters confirmed by the monarch to prove their legal authority over every square inch of their domain.
But allegiance to the crown did not necessarily follow on from these formal legal decisions and agreements. As Johnson observed in the later eighteenth century, the kind of medieval warfare pursued by forces of heavily armoured knights was unsuited to the Highlands since the terrain was incapable of providing for the heavy maintenance costs of that martial élite. The levies of the crown could live off the land in the arable districts of south and east Scotland but that was much more challenging in Gaeldom, where harvests were usually meagre and more at risk from climatic hazards. Moreover, unlike most of the Lowlands, those two important ancillary agencies for the enforcement of state control, the church and the towns, were much less influential in the north-west than elsewhere in the kingdom during the early modern period. It might also have been the case that the contemporary Lowland perception of the Highlands as a barbarous, primitive and poverty-stricken region would not have encouraged the Scottish monarchy to spend scarce resources in attempts to seek full incorporation of the recalcitrant Gaidhealtachd into the Scottish state.
The power vacuum which inevitably followed was filled by the larger clans, most of whom were in violent competition, one with the other, until the seventeenth century. The ensuing age of turbulence can be seen in the remarkable increase in formidable stone castles and other fortified dwellings which were built by the Gaelic aristocracy. Today the grandeur of their crumbling ruins, as at Tioram, Sween, Urquhart, Dunstaffnage and many other sites, are striking monuments to the age of medieval clan power. These great edifices also served another purpose in addition to their function of places of protection and defence. The mass of the population in the Highlands and Islands lived in poor smoke-filled turf huts, and the castles in their sheer physicality and towering walls manifested in stone the authority and prestige of the ruling family to the ordinary clansmen, as well as projecting military strength and unyielding power to potential enemies and rivals.
For nearly 150 years in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Lordship of the Isles ruled by ClanDonald, a Gaelic kingdom within a Scottish kingdom, provided a degree of order and authority to a sea empire which stretched from the island of Islay in the south to the Butt of Lewis in the far north-west. The collapse of the Lordship after 1496, as a consequence of fratricidal conflict within the ruling MacDonald family, triggered decades of violence in the sixteenth century as the clans of the west warred for dominance. This time of chronic warfare cemented their internal loyalties as never before and further embedded the status of chiefs and fine as the supreme guarantors of protection to the people of their lands. It was against this background of endemic insecurity and constant rivalry, often punctuated by episodes of uninhibited killing, that some key aspects of clan society can best be understood.
Military preparedness was a sine qua non. Martin Martin, or Màrtainn MacGilleMhátainn (1669?–1719), a native of Skye, writing in the later seventeenth century, recalled how courage and prowess in war were the vital qualities of a chief. In the Western Isles, he described how it was necessary for young heirs to chiefdoms to demonstrate a ‘publick specimen of their valour’ before they could be accepted by the clan. Because of this, the chief and other members of the fine of the clan were wont to take part in ‘a desperate Incursion upon some Neighbour or other that they were in Feud with’ and to ‘bring by open force the Cattle they found in the Lands they attack’d or to die in the Attempt’.9 The intense militarism of the western clans at this juncture was also illustrated by the widespread practice of sorning, or the extraction by fighting men of food and hospitality from tenants within the clan territory or, indeed, on the lands of other clans with whom a feud existed. Sorning suggested the existence of a parasitic warrior class which was not engaged in labouring the land but in preparing for or making war.
In turn, the effective deployment of martial resources for battle depended on the depth and integrity of the connection between clan élites and followers. The levels of cohesion drew on a number of influences. The bards, genealogists and orators did much to embed the historical identity of the clan and enhance the prestige of the chief by recounting the epic deeds of his ancestors. The custom of fostering reinforced real or fictive ties of kinship within the clan élites as the children of the chief were brought up over a period of seven years or more in the households of leading clan gentry. They in turn would foster their own children in the same way among satellite families positioned below them in the social hierarchy.
Distribution of land by means of these networks also bound the subordinate gentry to their chiefs. Prominent among the clan gentry were the fir-tacsa, or tacksmen. As an earnest of kinship they were granted tacks (leases) to the townships, or settlements, of the clansmen. They lived as quasi-landlords among these tenants on the difference between the rents they gathered and the payments made to the chiefs. Tacksmen were the recognized organizers of their subordinate clansmen in time of war. But they also had important economic functions to ensure their subtenants carried out labour services for the ruling house and to order the fair distribution of land in the townships for which they had responsibility. The fir-tacsa were also key to the trade in cattle to the Lowlands. They not only organized the round-up of the beasts and gathering them into droves, but were also responsible for offsetting their sale value against township rental payments.
In addition, rentals in kind of cattle, sheep, meal, cheese, hens and geese, which were paid to the chief by clansmen in their role as tenants, were sometimes converted back into the provision of subsistence support in seasons of shortage. In this way, the clan élites were able to provide a form of social insurance in a volatile environment. It was an expected obligation which endured as an expectation among the people long after the ethic of clanship itself had passed into history. Feasting at the behest of the leading families also had a vital social purpose. As well as demonstrating the chief’s capacities for generosity and hospitality, collective eating and drinking also generated a sense of communal harmony for all clan families no matter their rank. The feasts of the medieval period were often lavish affairs with the consumption of enormous amounts of food and drink. Even in the early seventeenth century, some of the old traditions survived and were reported in somewhat exaggerated terms. It was said that when the daughter of MacLeod married the heir of Clanranald, some of those present boasted that the feasting went on for six days and nights. They dimly recollected that ‘we were twenty times drunk every day, to which we had no more objection than he had’.10 These celebrations in a society where scarcity of basic food was common did much to enhance the status and prestige of the chief and his household. They were only made possible by the prevalence of rentals in kind in this period and their limited sale to markets outside the Highlands.
Ultimately of even more significance than support in times of crisis and the provision of hospitality was the provision of land to clansmen. As feudal lords the clan élites had the same absolute rights of ownership over their property as proprietors anywhere else in Scotland. Yet, within the kin-based society, the territory of the clan was governed by a quite different set of assumptions potentially in conflict with the legal realities of private landownership. The areas settled by each clan were regarded as its collective heritage, or duthchas, and the fine were seen, not as the sole masters of these lands, but as the current guardians, protectors and trustees of the people who lived on them. Real or nominal kinsmen within them felt they possessed a prior claim to clan holdings as a result of their loyalty to and connection with the ruling family. One instance of this comes from a Clanranald rental of 1718 for the Isle of Eigg which shows the Captain of Clanranald asserting his ‘power of keeping in his own Kinsmen and tenents on this Isle’.11
The strong belief existed that the chief should provide land for his clansmen even if they did not have rights to specific individual holdings in perpetuity. Edmund Burt in the 1730s noted how chiefs commonly packed townships with tenants and subtenants for this purpose. This was a reflection of the subsistence needs of the people on the one hand and the military imperative to establish a large following on the other. Nevertheless, some chiefs apparently moved clansmen about their lands as circumstances required. When Sir James MacDonald was attempting to make peace with the crown in the early seventeenth century, he at first offered to remove elements of ClanDonald South from Kintyre to Islay. Subsequently, he went further and undertook to move them anywhere the state wished.
Commonly, as a result of inter-clan feuds and fear of annexation, entire townships were abandoned and lay unoccupied for many years, the people who had lived there having gone elsewhere. Surviving estate papers record a considerable turnover of tenants, even in those townships under continuous settlement. The local mobility of tenants and cottars was often part and parcel of the old way of life and did not simply emerge during the era of clearance. For instance, a series of rentals for Kintyre, a relatively fertile district, between 1502 and 1605 reveals that no family held the annual lease of a township over the whole period. But, this evidence notwithstanding, the cultural force of duthchas seems to have pervaded Gaeldom and was central to clan identity. It articulated the expectations of the people that the ruling families had the responsibility to act as protectors to guarantee secure possession of some land in return for allegiance, military service, tribute and rental. It was a powerful and enduring belief which endured long after the rationale of clanship itself had vanished and when élites had shed ancient responsibilities and metamorphosed into commercial landlords.