On the whole the rural Lowlands of Scotland were blessed with a much more favourable natural environment for arable agriculture than the Highlands. It was a fundamental advantage which went a long way to explain the different histories of the two regions during the era of removals from land. Of course, not everywhere south of the Highland line was flat and fertile. The terrain of the Southern Uplands, for instance, bordering England, often consisted of a moorland plateau, traversed by rolling hills and broken by mountainous outcrops which fashioned a rugged landscape not unlike parts of the southern and eastern Highlands. Like them it was a region in the central and western districts more broadly suited to pastoral than arable farming. Pockets of gentler hill country could also be found in other areas of the central Lowlands, notably the Ochils near Stirling, the Campsie Fells not far from Glasgow, and the Lomonds in Fife. These examples apart, however, comparing the geography of the Lowlands and Highlands at a general level does reveal deep contrasts between the two regions which had been fashioned over millennia by differences in geology, geography and climate.
Today, much of eastern Scotland receives less than 871 mm (34.3 in) of rain annually. The town of Dunbar, to the south-east of Edinburgh, has an annual rainfall of only 560.18 mm (22.05 in), less than Barcelona in north-east Spain. Further north, the eastern coastal strip is partly protected from storm clouds by the Highland massif to the west. In contrast, the western Highlands is one of the wettest areas of the UK, with an annual rainfall of 4,577 mm (180.2 in). Sunshine in the Highlands and north-west coastlands reaches only 711–1,140 hours annually, but it reaches 1,471–1,540 hours on the eastern and south-west Lowlands. The north and west of the country are also the windiest parts of Scotland when the autumn and winter depressions sweep in from the Atlantic. Orkney, Shetland and the Outer Hebrides can experience more than thirty days of severe gales over the period of a year. These climatic differences have obvious implications for the agrarian economies of the Highlands and Lowlands and their historical development.
Of even greater consequence than climate is the extent of rich soil to be found in a number of Lowland districts. East Lothian, Berwickshire and eastern Roxburgh, lying to the north and east of the English border, are fertile plains with a climate which, unusually for Scotland, allows in some parts the widespread cultivation of wheat. Extensive stretches of alluvial soil, the ‘carse’ lands, also can be found across the estuaries of the rivers Forth and Tay, while the coastlands of the north-east lowlands of Aberdeen, Banff and Kincardine today contain the most extensive areas of continuous arable in the whole of Scotland.
Even in the sixteenth century, long before the age of improvement from the 1760s, some of those places already had high reputations for their fertility. In 1582, for example, George Buchanan enthusiastically praised the Carse of Gowrie as ‘a noble corn country’ and, for William Lithgow, it was ‘the diamond plot of Tay’. Buchanan thought the Moray district, further north, so ‘abundant in corn and pasturage … that it may truly be pronounced the first country in Scotland’. According, however, to the leading historian of that time, Hector Boece, the Lothians were ‘the most plentuus ground of Scotland’. It was no coincidence that each of the hinterlands described as ‘plentiful of corne’ were close to the four major towns of Scotland, Edinburgh, Dundee, Perth and Aberdeen in the medieval and early-modern periods.1
Despite these advantages, however, which were to become even more evident over time, there was still a great deal of similarity in the seventeenth century between the landscape and farming techniques of the Highlands and Lowlands. The rural Lowlands of today with their vistas of separated and compact farm steadings, trim fields and neat hedgerows would have been completely unrecognizable to Scots of the centuries before the 1750s. Indeed, most contemporary descriptions portray a landscape at that time which was not unlike that of the inhabited localities of the Highlands considered in Chapter 1. As late as 1780, the Rev. John Mitchell, in his Memories of Ayrshire, provided a bleak picture of an older rural world already beginning to pass into history:
The face of the country was far from being cultivated or inviting. On the contrary, it appeared rough and dank, consisting greatly of heath moss, patches of struggling wood and rudely cultivated grounds. The roads, made entirely by statute labour irregular in their line, and far from being level to their track.
The ditches which bounded them were seldom cleared out. Young trees were rarely planted …, the country presented upon the whole a repulsive appearance.2
As in the Highlands, small clusters of houses, or fermetouns, spread at intervals across the countryside. Their dwellings were not much better than the turf huts of the Highland baile: ‘pitiful cots, built of stone and covered with turves, having in them but one room, many of them no chimneys, the windows very small holes, and not glazed’.3 Narrow strips of cultivated land linked by tracks or loanings crossed a landscape which was covered for the most part by bog and moor. As in the Highland townships, these small islands of cultivation were worked in the runrig system, each tenant or group of farmers with their shares of infield, outfield and rough grazing. The land was ploughed into ridges by the cumbersome old Scots plough pulled by several oxen, which was often jointly owned by the farmers of the touns. The plans of late-eighteenth-century surveyors, who were employed to advise landowners on improvement in the second half of the eighteenth century, convey a vivid picture of the old farming landscape. The cultivated areas were patches of unenclosed ground of irregular shape and size with the tiny holdings of tenants dispersed throughout the whole rather than set in compact, individual blocks. Many essential seasonal tasks, like ploughing, harvesting, peat-cutting and thatching, were carried out by collective effort. It also made economic sense that necessaries, such as wood and iron tools which had to be purchased from outside, should also be acquired through the pooling of the scarce resources of these small communities.
But, as elsewhere in the peasant society of Scotland at the time, most raw materials came from the land worked by the people: flax and wool for clothing; timber (where available in a country mainly bereft of woodland) for building; charcoal used in a number of manufactures; animal fats for soap and candle making; hides for tanners, boot and shoe makers, and saddlers; horn for cutlers; ponies, oxen and horses for transport and carriage; straw and heather to pack goods and thatch houses; and sour milk as a bleaching agent. Manufacturing was to some extent urban-based, but a striking feature of the period was that much industry was to be found in the countryside, with spinning, weaving, salt burning and mining especially commonplace. By the early eighteenth century, the plain-linen trade to England had become even more valuable than the traditional export of cattle across the border, while the removal of tariffs after the Union of 1707 gave it stimulus which was just as likely to be felt in the cottages of the rural townships as in the craft workshops of the burghs.
There was, of course, a close symbiotic relationship between country and town. Over two thirds of the incomes of the urban labouring classes were spent on food, primarily oatmeal, milk and some salted fish. The eighteenth-century novelist Tobias Smollett described the typical diet of the Lowland Scot: ‘Their breakfast is a kind of hasty pudding of oatmeal, or peasemeal eaten with milk. They have commonly pottage to dinner composed of cale (kail), leeks, barley or big (a form of barley) and this is reinforced with bread and cheese made of skimmed milk. At night they sup on sowens flummery of oatmeal.’4 Modern historians reckon that in Scotland as a whole grain provided around 82 per cent of the average daily calorie intake of the population. Ale, made from malted barley, was the usual drink of the people. When Westminster tried to impose an increased tax on malt in 1725, the decision provoked a storm of national anger and violent backlash. A number of confrontations with officers of the excise in several customs precincts culminated in the famous Malt Tax Riots in Glasgow which have come to be seen as the most dangerous challenge to the authority of the British state in those years since the Jacobite Rising of 1715. Order was finally restored only after several troops of well-armed dragoons arrived in the city.
What, therefore, both Highland and Lowland Scotland still had in common was the dependence of most country people on the land and above all else on the yields of the annual grain harvests in August and September. The vulnerability of the north and west to partial harvest failure has already been noted in Chapter 1. But after the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660, the Lowlands seem to have had a happier experience than the Highlands in most years. Indeed, whereas in the later sixteenth century there had been partial dearth and high prices in around a third of the localities, the economic challenge in Lowland Scotland before 1695 came to be seen as a problem of falling prices for cereals. An annual surplus of home-produced grain, apart from the year 1674, had become the norm and was leading to saturation of supply in the domestic market.
This novel condition saw Scotland emerge for a number of years as a grain exporter, a role in international commerce which would have been unthinkable a century before. Meal from the eastern coastal estates was now traded as far afield as Scandinavia, the Low Countries and France, as well as to the north-east counties of England. In July 1695 the Scottish Privy Council even decided to grant subsidies for grain exports because of the persistence of stagnant prices at home. In an ‘Act for Encouraging the Export of Victual’, a twenty-shilling bounty was provided on each boll of grain traded out of the country. It was indeed ironic, however, that in the very year that law was passed, surplus changed abruptly to serious shortage in what soon became one of the worst series of harvest failures in Scottish history. What followed confirmed the continuing exposure of the populations in both Highlands and Lowlands to climatic changes. A society where subsistence agriculture was dominant in most areas still remained at great risk to adverse weather conditions during the three key phases of seeding, growing and harvest.
The crisis which engulfed Scotland in the later 1690s lasted from 1695 until 1700. Devastation of the crops centred mainly on the Highlands, the hill country of the Borders, Aberdeenshire, Angus and, more generally, in upland areas of marginal farming. Fertile low-lying districts in the eastern Lowlands were spared the worst. East Lothian and estates along the Cromarty Firth and in Easter Ross, for instance, were still able to send grain supplies at famine prices into Edinburgh.
The crisis came about because of exceptional weather deterioration during the late ‘Maunder Minimum’ at the lowest point of the Little Ice Age in the early modern period. Scotland’s experience was far from exceptional in what was one of the coldest phases ever recorded in Western Europe and which resulted in an advance of the Alpine, Scandinavian and Icelandic glaciers. The main features of the period were harsh winters and very wet summers. The countries of northern Europe were hit especially hard. Finland lost an estimated one third of its population through famine-related disease and Estonia around one fifth. But France and the Low Countries also suffered extreme privation. Uniquely England was spared the worst, due partly to its well-developed Poor Law system which provided some sustenance for the most vulnerable and, more crucially, because of the tradition of sowing grains in both spring and winter, which provided a degree of protection whenever one crop failed. Scotland, which had always sown only once, during springtime, proved to be much less fortunate.
The run of poor harvests had devastating consequences. Current estimates suggest that the population of Scotland may have fallen by some 13 per cent due to a combination of famine-related diseases and extensive emigration in the 1690s. Mortality rates climbed as high as 20 per cent in Aberdeenshire and other parts of the north-east and were probably even greater in the Highlands, Hebrides and Northern Isles. Death stalked the countryside on a scale never seen before in living memory: ‘Everyone may see Death on the face of the Poor that abound everywhere … the Thinness of their Visage, their Ghostly Looks, their Feebleness, and their Fluxes threaten them with sudden Death.’ The author of this lugubrious description, Sir Robert Sibbald, recounted how even ‘Poor Sickning Babs’ were starving, ‘for want of Milk, which the empty Breasts of their Mothers cannot furnish’.5 It was the lesser folk, the smaller tenants, cottars and servants, who were most at risk. Contemporary records show many from these classes wandering in large numbers on the roads in search of subsistence from more favoured areas which had vanished at home. Many, especially from Ayrshire, Argyll and Wigtownshire, fled the country altogether and took the short crossing from the south-western ports to the north of Ireland. The most recent estimates suggest that over 40,000 Scots probably became refugees in Ulster between 1695 and 1700. It was the largest single accession of Protestants to the Ulster Plantation since its origins in the early seventeenth century. They left behind unpaid rents, derelict townships and abandoned land. It is clear that even abatements, reductions and so-called ‘eases’ of rent were not enough to stem the outflow in many districts. The records of a number of estates in parts of the south-west, north-east and the Border counties show that rent arrears resulting from the crisis of the last decade of the seventeenth century were still being paid off two decades later.
The shared experience of human suffering during these ‘Ill Years’ might imply an economic convergence across Highland and Lowland Scotland in early modern times. But an examination of deeper trends from the later seventeenth century suggests rather that this was at root a crucial period of quickening divergence between the two regions.
The British civil wars of the 1640s and early 1650s, which triggered considerable Scottish involvement, had caused immense loss of treasure and profound dislocation on both sides of the Highland line. Yet there can be little doubt that the forces making for eventual long-term social stability were even at that stage much more potent in the Lowlands. The power of the state was already dominant in most of the region, with the sole exception of parts of the Border countryside. But after the Union of Crowns in 1603, the joint monarchy of James VI and I rapidly subdued the recalcitrant districts of southern Scotland. For a few years afterwards legislation continued to be enacted there against ‘outlaws and broken men’, but by the end of James’s reign in 1625 the Border region had become effectively incorporated in the Scottish state. This was the political background to the expansion of the cross-Border livestock trade and the packhorse commerce in linen from the western Lowlands, centred on Glasgow, and its growing community of ‘English merchants’, selling yarn to the markets of the north of England.
Furthermore, two key sources of long-term support for stable governance, the burghs and the reformed church, had a much greater physical presence and hold in the Lowlands than the Highlands. While urban life was notable by its virtual absence in the western Highlands and Islands, both the four ‘great towns of Scotland’ and the sixty-odd medium- and smaller-sized towns which existed in the years before the Union were situated in the eastern and central Lowlands. Towns had always a strong vested interest in law and order as peace was good for trade. Similarly, the church had established a full network of parishes and kirk sessions throughout the region by the early decades of the seventeenth century. Indeed, by the 1660s it was the normal thing for the Lowlands not only to have an organized parish structure but a school and a functioning system of poor relief as well. This ‘parish state’ was a vital agency for the maintenance of law and order at the local level through the moral surveillance of the kirk session, control of schooling and regular administration of funds for the poor. The authority of the parishes was strikingly illustrated by the reach and influence of the ‘testificat’ system. By this, men and women could only move from one parish to another with a certificate of proven good conduct, or testificat, signed by the parish minister. Kirk session records confirm the widespread enforcement of the system with ministers conscientiously checking details to ensure accuracy and noting the absence of anyone who had not received official consent to leave their parish. In areas distant from the southern and eastern fringes of the Highlands the influence of the national church was much weaker and more erratic.
The development of stability in the Lowlands soon became fully confirmed in a visual sense by the transformation of the great houses of the landed classes. Even in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, the curtain-wall castle and the tower house, or fortalice, were giving way to the country house. The former were designed for defence and the physical projection of military authority and power, the latter more for comfort, display and material status. Commonly, hybrid buildings began to appear, in which the old fortified dwellings were not abandoned but remodelled to form the core of a more modern structure better suited to less turbulent times. Thus, in 1602–6, Glamis Castle, in Angus, underwent a programme of radical alteration under the aegis of the first Earl of Kinghorne when a more symmetrical façade and grand new circular staircase were added to the building. In 1677, his descendant, Patrick, first Earl of Strathmore, made further improvements. Soon the old castle had metamorphosed into a fashionable and classical baroque mansion. The building of Palladian-style country houses was also a feature of the later seventeenth century. The architectural doyens of the day were Sir William Bruce (1630–1710) and James Smith of Whitehill (c.1645–1731) who designed such striking creations as Hopetoun House, Kinross House and Hamilton Palace. Gardens, terraces, avenues, parterres, water features and statues became integral elements of the surroundings of these great houses in order to show them off to best advantage.
The architectural triumph of the country house over the ancient castle was a telling physical metaphor for more peaceful times in the Lowlands. But law and order also had key effects on the structure of rural society. Dependence on armed followings became a thing of the past at a much earlier stage than in the Highlands. Even in the formerly troubled Borders, the military basis of tenancy and landholding had gone by 1700, even if some old-style paternalism lingered on among some of the great Border families, like the Scotts and Kerrs. But for most Lowland aristocrats and lairds, their estates were now mainly seen as assets for the extraction of revenue to support ever-growing levels of personal consumption. The relationships with their tenants still involved labour services inherited from the old feudal order: ‘bonnage’ (literally ‘bondage’), meaning work to be done on the landowner’s home farms, especially at harvest; ‘thirlage’, which bound tenants to have their corn ground at the landlord’s mill; and the custom of digging, drying and stacking his peat supplies in the spring and summer months. But these hangovers from the past could not conceal the fact that the social relationships in the Lowlands were becoming more embedded in impersonal economic contracts rather than old-style paternalistic relationships. The clauses of the new leases (or tacks) between landowner and tenant were now exclusively concerned with the economic responsibilities of rental payment, management of livestock and requirements of cultivation. In the long run this was to become a major source of divergence between the mores and expectations of the people of many parts of the Highlands and Lowlands, a growing differentiation eventually to have profound social consequences in later decades.
Contrasts in the internal social hierarchies of the Highland baile and the Lowland fermetouns were also visible before c.1750. As seen in Chapter 1, Highland townships contained large numbers of small tenants and cottars who carried on the daily toil with their families without the need for hired labour. Written leases remained uncommon below the level of the tacksmen and security of tenure depended in the final analysis on custom and the will of the chiefs and leading clan gentry. Much of the work on the land, in harvesting, peat cutting, house construction and herding was carried out by communal effort. By and large, therefore, the clansmen and their families remained locked within a subsistence regime. Direct contact with markets elsewhere, especially for the lucrative droving trade in cattle, was usually monopolized by the fir-tacsa and others in the clan élite.
These traditional social arrangements were mirrored in many parts of the Lowlands, more especially in the hill country of the Borders, parishes on the fringes of the Highlands in Aberdeen, Angus and Perth, and some of the counties in the south-west region. However, in favoured districts with more arable land, such as the coastal strip from eastern Aberdeenshire to Berwickshire, different structures were coming to the fore. Some townships in these areas had almost reached the size of small villages with consolidated and compact holdings of 100 acres or more and a single husbandman employing cottars, tradesmen, farm servants and day labourers. In effect, the tenants of these places had become an embryonic rural bourgeoisie who employed other people to work the farms on their behalf. These dependants no longer had any legal right to the occupation of land, and any security which they did possess was based on wage contracts (as servants or labourers) or tradition and custom (as in the case of the numerous cottar class). In the advanced areas of the eastern Lowlands, many rural dwellers and their families were now more proletarian than peasant in status and occupation, and this some time before the much more wide-ranging social changes of the second half of the eighteenth century.
Another distinction between the two regions was that some substantial farmers in parts of the Lowlands were now making direct connection with the grain and livestock markets of neighbouring Scottish towns and across the border to England. No longer did landowners and their agents have monopoly control of this commerce. These larger holdings produced supplies of meal, beef, cheese and butter well in excess of the needs of the families and dependants of the tenants. It was therefore inevitable that they had to sell into the market and break out of the constraint of subsistence culture. The substantial husbandmen also made decisions for themselves and were no longer prepared to be confined by inherited custom or communal traditionalism. In the northern and western Highlands, however, such pushing, richer and more enterprising individuals were usually notable by their virtual absence below the social rank of the fir-tacsa.
Even by the early decades of the eighteenth century, this small class of capitalist farmers was expanding and absorbing the smaller holdings of their neighbours. Multiple tenant farms were in retreat, not only in the progressive eastern Lowlands but also on several estates in the north-east and south-west. In the Douglas estate in Lanarkshire, for example, the proportion of multiple tenancies had fallen from 64 per cent in the 1730s to 16 per cent by the 1750s. Similarly, on the Morton lands in Fife, where 40 per cent of the holdings were in multiple possession in the 1710s, only 3 per cent were so described in the 1740s. On the Earl of Glasgow’s properties in Ayrshire a mere 3 per cent of the tenancies were held in multiple possession by the 1750s.
Two examples of the new breed in the vanguard of these changes were George Leith of the parish of Tillinessell, Aberdeenshire, and William Nisbet of Crimond parish, also in Aberdeenshire. Leith’s holding supported seven cottars and servants in addition to the labour of his own immediate family in the 1690s. By the end of the seventeenth century Nisbet had become the only tenant farmer in the Kirktoun of Crimond, which had comprised several other possessions in the past. But he had an impressively large labour team to support his activities consisting of three cottar families, six servants and herds and half a dozen tradesmen, including a weaver, tailor and shoemaker.
As the labour force of these enlarged single tenancies grew, so their masters invested in better living quarters and outbuildings. That led in turn to the steady replacement of the old long houses where beasts and people had shared the living space with the courtyard farm steading with byres, stables and more accommodation. It was followed by another key development, the use of lime mortar enabling the construction of houses with load-bearing walls without the need for the old roof-couples. Tenant houses with two or even three storeys started to be built, a form of construction hardly known in the Highlands, except occasionally among the clan gentry. The introduction of dwellings of this type implied a new commitment to longer-term investment. Rather than a house which might only stand over the term of a lease or even less, these new buildings were designed to last over several generations. Some may have been constructed by landowners as a means of attracting able tenants by offering them more congenial quarters. But others reflected the willingness of richer farmers to sink more of their own resources into holdings because extended tenures were guaranteed by the long-term tacks which were now more common.
These bigger and more elaborate dwellings for some tenants also suggested the development of a greater degree of social stratification within Lowland rural society, since little evidence has survived of any parallel improvement in the dwellings of the lesser folk. A survey of the barony of Lasswade near Edinburgh in 1694, a district recognized to be in the van of progressive agriculture, highlighted the significance of the new buildings:
The houses of the larger tenants there, on holdings with 65–130 acres of arable land, were of two and in one case three stories, with lime-mortared walls.
They had several rooms, with up to four on the first floor and glazed windows. Sketch plans of the farmsteads accompany the survey. They show that while traces of the long-house plan survived in the layout of the main block, some of the outbuildings were grouped into separate wings forming L-shaped steadings or in one instance a Z plan. It is significant that the best of these houses had been built as recently as 1693.
It is also interesting to note that the descriptions of the cottar houses associated with these farms do not differ materially from those found elsewhere at the time.6
These house types may still have been uncommon outside favoured arable areas in the later seventeenth century. The tenants of Lasswade, for instance, had the benefit of proximity to the Edinburgh market and also worked rich and fertile land. Nonetheless, their steadings were the forerunners of the even more elaborate buildings which eventually became common in most parts of Lowland Scotland. These changing house types also demonstrate the social and economic gap which was opening up between much of the Highlands and the rural Lowlands. Stone-built houses did eventually become more common in Gaeldom by the early nineteenth century, but when the layout of deserted townships of the Victorian era are explored, the houses differ little from those which were already being abandoned in a few Lowland districts more than 150 years before.
More permanent housing both reflected and resulted from the proliferation of secure, longer leases which have been identified for many Lowland estates in the early eighteenth century. Nineteen-year tacks became standard after the 1760s but their origins lay further back in time. On the extensive Leven and Melville lands in Fife, 11 per cent of tacks were for nineteen years, while by 1700–1724 the proportion had risen to 40 per cent. Equally, of seventy extant tacks for the Duke of Hamilton’s estate in Lanarkshire for the years 1710–50, all but two were for nineteen years. The pattern was repeated on the Earl of Eglinton’s Ayrshire properties with all extant pre-1750 tacks being for nineteen years. Even on those estates where such especially long leases were uncommon, as in the Earl of Panmure’s Angus lands, the mean tack length in the first two decades of the eighteenth century had already reached fifteen years.
This development was by no means universal throughout Scottish rural society. In pastoral areas, such as the Border counties and the Highlands, the granting of longer tacks to the lower peasantry was much less common, even if it was de rigueur among the gentlemen of the clans. One reason for this was that the cattle-droving trade was primarily vested in proprietors in the Borders and the fine in the Highlands. Tenants themselves did not deal directly with the markets; their function was rearing the livestock, not selling on the animals. It was, however, a different story in arable or mixed-farming areas. To increase grain outputs, the continued cooperation and commitment of tenants was essential during the year-round process of cultivation, preparation and adoption of new techniques. Therefore the provision of longer leases became more likely because landlords needed to attract and retain capable and enterprising tenants by offering them more secure conditions. The dichotomy was therefore not so much a Highland/Lowland social division, but rather one between pastoral and arable districts wherever they existed in Scotland. The problem for Gaeldom, however, was that large-scale arable agriculture of the Lowland type was impossible in many parts of the Highlands and Islands for reasons of geography and climate.
Such differentiation had great future importance. In areas of arable and mixed farming, long leases necessarily lapsed at greatly varying times, making it difficult for landlords to carry out sudden wholesale removal of small tenant communities in single acts of collective eviction. They were forced to act in a gradual and piecemeal fashion through attrition as tacks ended one by one over a period of years. In pastoral districts, on the other hand, large-scale removals proved much easier to achieve over relatively short periods of time. In the Highlands, as late as the middle decades of the nineteenth century, crofters held their smallholdings only on annual leases. That kind of short-term tenure left them much more at risk to the changing economic priorities of landlordism.
The people below tenant rank are much more difficult to document for the period before c.1750. Estate archives are abundant for many parts of the Lowlands, but they primarily record the rent-paying tenants who mattered most to proprietors. The majority of rural inhabitants rarely appear in the documentation and, for the most part, remain a shadow people. One unique source does, however, provide some important insights into their condition. The Scottish Parliament authorized three consecutive poll taxes in 1693, 1695 and 1698, and the record of allocations of payment contain details of the entire social pyramid of that decade from the most powerful aristocrats to the humblest servants. Since the sums levied depended on wealth and social position, the poll tax material gives a kind of surrogate outline of Scottish society at the end of the seventeenth century. Inevitably analysing it presents technical problems of interpretation; also the documentation has only survived for some areas in the Lowlands. The Aberdeenshire returns are comprehensive, and partial poll lists are also available for Renfrewshire, Midlothian, Berwick, West Lothian and Selkirk. They represent a fraction of the original records but can still provide useful coverage of areas with different economic and social profiles across the country. In all, it is possible to examine from these data the social position of 25,690 individuals from over sixty parishes in the north-east, south-east and south-west of Scotland.
The most striking feature of ‘the people below’ was the virtual ubiquity of the cottar class and its overall numerical significance throughout much of the Lowlands. Indeed, in most rural parishes, cottar families made up somewhere between a third and a half of the entire population. If Lowland Scots of today could trace their ancestry directly back to the seventeenth century, it is more than likely many of them would find they were descended from the cottar families who were so common across the countryside before the time of improvement. Cottars held small patches of land from tenants or subtenants in return for labour services and occasionally for small payments in rental. They possessed a few acres or lived in rows of cottages known as cottouns within the fermetouns. Many were also weavers, blacksmiths, carpenters and other artisans with a house and a ‘yard’ in the township. A typical set of cottar-tenant obligations is shown below in Table 1.
The poll tax data suggest that only in Renfrewshire and highland Aberdeenshire were the number of cottars significantly below the average. Tenancies in those counties were relatively small and had less need for additional manual labour other than that which could be furnished by the families of the farmers. Cottars, however, were much more common on the bigger market-orientated single holdings which had come about through early phases of farm consolidation. Thus, in the 1690s, two thirds of Midlothian parishes and over half of those in Berwickshire, both counties in the fertile south-east of labour-intensive arable husbandry, had significant cottar communities. Equally, high proportions were recorded in Lowland Aberdeenshire with cottars present in 67 per cent of parishes in the grain-producing Lowland coastal belt. However, throughout the hill country in the west of that county, which was dominated by stock rearing needing little labour, cottars were few and far between. As seen in Chapter 1, the same social pattern was typical of most Highland townships, where the tiny pockets of cultivable arable could be easily worked by families of tenants without support from hired workers.
| – | Archd Myles in Craigburn posses a house yeard and one acre of Land Laboured by the Tennent |
| – | Alexdr Miller in Knowhead 2 acres and a half Laboured and payes 3 bolls and 21 lib. of money |
| – | Jems Leslie ane hous yeard and ane acre Laboured |
| – | John Robison Sheepherd a hous yeard and ane acres in 2 divisions |
| – | David Reekie 2 acres with hous and yeard and land Laboured payes 5 bolls bear 1 shearer and—of money |
| 6. | David Patie ane acre with hous and two years and land Laboured pays 2 shearers and seven lib. of money |
| 7. | Willie Lanceman ane acre without hous or yeard to it 12 lib. |
| 8. & 9. | The Whythons and yeard with 4 acres to it possest by Will: Patrick and Cristian Tullow in 2 Divisions |
| 10. | Thom: Shipherds relict a hous yeard and 2 acres of Land |
| 11. | Wm. Greig a hous and yeard without Land payes 7 lib. |
| 12. | Janet Shipherd ane hous yeard and acre |
| 13. | Andrew Baxter a hous yeard and payes 5 lib it has ane acre of land belonging to it but not possest by him |
| 14. | Alexdr Mackie in hillhead about ane—acre |
| 15. | Alexdr Paterson 3 acres whereof two are on the Westermost march above the highway |
| Source: NRA(S) 874, Berry Papers, Box 12/6, Ane Account of the Rinds and Parcells, Inverdovat, 1714 | |
Cottars were prevalent in the old society for a number of reasons. Much of the work in the fermetouns concentrated in a few periods of peak demand for ploughing, harvesting and fuel gathering, a cycle which combined short periods of maximum effort with much slacker times. Cottar families therefore provided a reserve supply of labour guaranteed to meet requirements in the busy times but could easily be laid off for much of the rest of the year. Again, by paying for labour in small patches of land, tenants saved on money outlay when the cash economy was underdeveloped. In the old-style farming, tenants were burdened with considerable services to their landlord and had to provide a number of days’ work on the mains (or landowner’s) farm, additional labour at harvest, and help with the carriage of the landowner’s grain, manure, lime and peat. Cottar families were the first option to go to for help with these tasks, which tended to be demanded at the busier times of the agricultural year.
Moreover, the labour routines of the period demanded abundant supplies of workers as almost everything depended on human effort and the use of hand tools. Therefore, as farm size increased in some places, the number of cottars and servants inevitably had to rise in turn. Enclosures were still few and far between, outside some areas of pastoral farming, and so children of the cottar families were widely used to herd cattle to prevent damage to crops on the arable as they neared maturity. Peat digging, gathering and drying was also an arduous task throughout the spring and summer months. Ploughing the land by the ‘old Scots plough’ needed several men not only in attendance but also to maintain and feed the animals. Some cottars within the townships were also skilled tradesmen whose small plots of land provided for their subsistence needs. The expansion of cottage industry in the rural communities was a notable feature of the pre-1750 period, with the spinning and weaving of woollens becoming especially significant in the Border region and the north-east, while the making and selling of linen cloth was a common pursuit across much of the rest of the Lowland countryside.
There might be a temptation to sentimentalize the way of life of the cottars. On the face of it, their possession of some land, though tiny in extent, could be said to give them more ‘independence’ than the mass of landless servants and labourers who in later decades were to become the working proletariat of the new agrarian system. But the extent of cottar freedom needs to be kept in perspective. They had no legal rights to the land and lived on it at the sole discretion of their masters, the tenant farmers. If tenants moved to other holdings or their leases were not renewed at the end of term, cottar families in turn had no choice but to go with them or even be abandoned altogether. Significantly, references to cottar evictions are rare in sheriff court records, which suggests that they could be turned off at the will of masters without any recourse to the cost of a formal legal process. In the final analysis, indeed, they might be more accurately described as ‘labourers’ who had a patch of land rather than ‘possessors’. They can be seen as a kind of hybrid class combining characteristics of both peasants and proletarians. Some also were required to help pay for their holdings not only in labour but in rent. Before their large-scale removal took place in the later eighteenth century, contemporary comments on the lives of cottars were few and far between. However, one graphic account from the estate of Lord Douglas in Angus supports the view that some at least had to endure a life of poverty, hard toil and profound insecurity:
A Tenant here for every plow has Two sometimes 3 or more Familys of Cottars and these have two or three acres of land each which are set so Dear as that they commonly pay the half and sometimes the whole of the Taxman’s Rent: if your Graces estate here was set at the same Rate as the Cottars and Subtenants Possessions are, it would be Ten or perhaps twelve times the rent it now is.
These cottars uphold their own houses and work all the land, for I hardly have observed a Tennant work here; the Cottars slavery is incredible and what is worse they are liable to be turned out at the Master’s pleasure to whom they work …7
The poet Robert Burns, himself of Ayrshire farming stock and who also laboured on the land for much of his life, immortalized the cottars in his popular sentimental poem ‘A Cottar’s Saturday Night’, first published in 1786. Writing in the rural dialect of his native county, Burns praises their stoic acceptance of poverty. In the first stanza, he describes the cottar wearily wending his way home to his cot house on a Saturday evening in the early winter at the end of a week of hard labour. As he walks, he looks forward to a day of rest on the Sabbath:
November chill blaws
Loud wi’ angry sugh: The short’ning winter-
The miry beasts
Retreated frae
The pleugh
The black’ning trains o’
craws to their repose
The toil-worn Cotter [sic]
Frae his labour goes,
This night his weekly
Moil is at an end,
Collects his spades, his
Mattocks, and his hoes,
Hoping the morn in
ease and rest to spend,
And weary, o’er the
moor, his course does
homeward bend
[sugh – rushing sound of wind; moil – toil; mattocks – shortened version of pickaxes]
Most of the remainder of the ‘people below’ in the old order were smaller numbers of landless male and female servants who were hired into full-time employment. Married servants, who were common in the south-eastern counties, had labour contracts for a year, were paid mainly in kind and were provided with cottages attached and the keep of a cow. Single male and female servants, who comprised the vast majority of that class beyond Fife and the south-east, had no such partial independence. They possessed no land, were paid partly in money and kind, lived within the farmer’s household and ate with his family in the kitchen. The poll tax lists suggest that servants in a few counties were already equal in number to cottars and their families, as in Berwick, Midlothian and Renfrewshire, but elsewhere remained a minority. The existence of such a landless class in some districts might seem to be in conflict with the argument above that access to some land, however limited, was the firm cornerstone of the old rural Lowlands before 1750. But the inconsistency was more apparent than real.
Often they [the servants] came of cottar families and on marriage might set up as had their parents. Cottars and servants therefore formed a seamless group, in which, through life, the child of a cottar bound to give service for some days in the year, yet with that precious if insecure title to land, would move into full-time service for a period before marrying and returning finally to the cottar position.8