7
Clearance by Stealth
As late as the 1750s most people in the rural Lowlands had a stake in the land, however small, as single or multiple tenants, subtenants or cottars. The truly landless, such as farm servants and day labourers, were but a small minority in the Scottish countryside. Half a century later that time-honoured social order had all but vanished. Multiple tenancy had virtually gone and the numbers of rent-paying tenants, already in decline from the later seventeenth century, had contracted much further. Cottar families, once universal in the old world, hardly existed at all within the new farm holdings by 1815 and their disappearance became the source of much contemporary comment. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, landless servants and labourers, housed in the new farm steadings, and tradesmen, plying their crafts in villages and small country towns, were now in the majority.
The population of Scotland rose by more than a fifth between the 1750s and the census of 1801. That increase, coupled with the narrowing opportunities for land, further grew the proportion of the landless in Scottish society. This was nothing less than a social revolution, but it was also an economic revolution. By the 1820s, Lowland Scotland was starting to attract international praise for the excellence of its agronomy. The new farming had produced formidable figures like Hugh Watson of Keillor in Forfarshire, who pioneered the Aberdeen-Angus breed; Amos Cruikshank, who did the same for Shorthorn cattle; and James Kilpatrick of Kilmarnock, who brought the Clydesdale strain of draught horses to perfection. James Small introduced the improved light plough, and Andrew Meikle built the first successful threshing mill, in 1788. ‘Lothians farming’ soon became a byword across Europe and beyond for ‘state of the art’ arable agriculture. George Hope’s 600-acre holding at Fenton Barns in East Lothian became so renowned that English farmers came across the border to learn the new ways. The physical world of agriculture was also becoming more familiar to modern eyes. An old landscape of runrig cultivation, township clusters, scattered arable, bogs and moors had taken on a new face: enclosed fields, compact farms with the attached labour force of ploughmen, servants and labourers, radically higher grain yields, because of improved rotations, and the mushrooming expansion of neighbouring rural villages.
Remarkably, too, it was a silent revolution. Loss of land and old rights must have caused pain and anxiety for many but collective protest of the kind seen in the western Borders in the 1720s and later in the bitter disturbances across parts of the Highlands were notable by their absence. Even when the famous ‘Captain Swing’ riots almost brought the agricultural parishes of southern and eastern England to the brink of social war in the 1820s and 1830s, the rural Lowlands of Scotland remained quiet. Furthermore, in the longer term, there was little evidence of folk memory of dispossession in song, verse or story among the communities, another stark and dramatic contrast with the social history of many parts of the Highlands and Islands. The verses of the national bard, Robert Burns, were composed in the later eighteenth century as the social revolution gathered pace, but there is no mention in them of any social trauma which the rural population might have suffered as a result.
The English radical William Cobbett saw for himself the social consequences of displacement and land consolidation during his tour of Scotland in autumn 1832. As he crossed the border into Berwick and then on to the Lothians he noted the contrasts with the countryside of his native England, which he had described previously in his Rural Rides of 1830. He was certainly mightily impressed by the productivity of the agriculture and described the big arable farms of the region as ‘factories for making corn and meat’. But to him these remarkable achievements had come at a human cost: ‘Everything is abundant here but people, who have been studiously swept from the land.’ He came across one district, more extensive than the English county of Suffolk, which had only three towns and a few villages. Cobbett reckoned that in Suffolk there were nearly forty market towns and 490 villages. Of richly fertile East Lothian, he remarked on ‘such a total absence of dwelling houses as, never, surely were before seen in any country on earth’, and then added: ‘in this country of the finest land that ever was seen, all the elements seem to have been pressed into the amiable task of sweeping the people from the face of the earth.’1
1
The practitioners of landlord-inspired improvement in the Lowlands were an élite group of surveyors and factors who planned the changes and managed both their introduction and development. Sometimes described as ‘superintendents of improvements’, they were functionaries of professional standing and wide experience – men such as William Keir, John Burrell and Robert Ainslie, who respectively served the dukes of Buccleuch, Hamilton and Douglas in the 1760s and 1770s. They reported to these magnates at regular intervals on the conduct of their duties, which they performed only with the tacit consent of their aristocratic employers. But some were also afforded considerable latitude and discretion in their management and so had enormous influence over the shaping of the new social order on some of the great landed estates of Scotland.
It becomes clear, when their papers and diaries are compared, that they shared a common set of precepts and principles.2 The report presented by Robert Ainslie to the Duke of Douglas in 1769 can serve as an exemplar of their approach to improvement. The Douglas family owned considerable acreage in the four counties of Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire, Angus and Berwick. Ainslie laid out a scheme of improvement for the Lanarkshire estate which stretched across nine parishes in the south of the county. He described the lands as ‘mostly run-rig and Rundale amongst the Tenants who generally occupied their pastures amongst them in common … no place admitted of more Improvement’.3 The key precondition for reform was to be the abolition of communal holdings, contraction in tenant numbers, and the building up of compact arable farms to a size which should be determined by the work rate of the improved horse-driven plough teams. Pastoral husbandry, however, demanded much more extensive holdings: ‘Land therefore that is adapted principally or for the Sole purpose of Sheep pasture Should be Laid out in pretty, large farms.’ But none should contain less land than was sufficient for the working of one plough team. Fifty acres in ‘a good climate and middling soil’ were recommended. However, in the improved regime, about half of all land should ideally be in grass and the remainder in arable. Therefore, Ainslie claimed, the actual optimum size for a viable holding was likely to be around 100 acres, which was considerably in excess of the size of most pre-improvement tenancies.
These bigger farms also had another purpose:
In every Business which requires money and skill there must be an object Sufficient to attract the attention of the man possessed of these.
Very small farms present no such object and therefore where they prevail improvements are not to be expected.
For Ainslie, then, the removal of many small tenants was a necessary preliminary to the advance of improvement and in time higher rentals for the landlord. But, crucially, he judged that equally vital to success was the need to avoid large-scale displacement of the existing tenantry. Mass clearance was in his view, ‘a dangerous and most destructive experiment’. He shared the eighteenth-century belief in the causal connection between a large population and the wealth of a nation. Therefore he condemned in the strongest possible terms the policies of clearance which he understood were being introduced on some Highland estates at the time and were leading to loss of people through emigration. But Ainslie also had a specific and practical reason for hostility to depopulation. He recognized that improvement in mixed farming was a labour-intensive process: ‘improvements cannot be carried on without hands and therefore the present inhabitants of a country instead of being forced from it, should on the contrary be preserved with great care’. In a single sentence, Ainslie had gone far to explain a critical distinction between the process of agrarian change in most of the arable Lowlands on the one hand and the hill country of the Borders and much of the western Highlands on the other. On lands more suited only to pastoralism, the availability of labour was of much less concern to both farmers and proprietors.
But while Ainslie opposed loss of people, he was also fully aware that the enlargement of farms would lead to a great many being turned off the land. A decline in the number of rent-paying tenants was inevitable but he took the view that since improvement in its initial stages needed more people, not fewer, many of the dispossessed could be redeployed as servants and labourers under the new régime. He estimated that they would even enjoy more regular work and hence higher incomes in improved agriculture. However, the basic key to his policy of maintaining those who lost their holdings was to relocate them in rural villages: ‘a parcel of houses together where people might be accommodated with houses and a few acres of land each, barely to maintain a cow and a horse or two, which they will employ in driving carriages and be hired by the proprietor in his works, or as is common by the carrying on with rapidity their necessary improvements of inclosing, liming, etc’. Significantly, too, Ainslie envisaged that the new hamlets would be built within the bounds of the old townships from which smaller tenants and cottars had been removed in order to minimize disruption and maintain some links with the past. Today, the names of many villages and small towns in the Lowlands end with the suffix ‘-ton’, such as Lamington, Newton and Abington in Lanarkshire, recalling their origins as the sites of once traditional townships. In addition, labourers, wrights, masons, ditchers and hedgers, together with shoemakers, weavers and tailors, would be needed to service the needs of the larger population. They too should be housed in the new villages. Indeed, Ainslie took the view that the transformation of landed estates would bring lasting benefits not only to landlords but also to the people who laboured in them. In this he may well have been drawing on one optimistic strand of Scottish Enlightenment thought which stressed the possibilities of progress for all. Indeed, his concluding remarks were almost utopian in aspiration:
By preserving the people on the lands, inducing more to come thereto; promoting their propagation By encouragement to many and Giving them Examples of proper Industry. In short, By Defusing honest Industry amongst the people every thing will prosper; peace; plenty; and Smiling Facility; will run through the whole, with that Blessing their worthy Patron, will have Joy and Comfort in his permanent profits; But fleeting and Comfortless are the sums squeezed from the Bowels of the Poor.
To Attempt to force more will ruin the whole design, and to expect it, and be disappointed is freight [sic] with the worst Consequences.
In the words of one scholar, writing about the Lowlands in the later eighteenth century, ‘the overwhelming tenor of the evidence in every county, is of holdings thrown together to make larger farms and of tenants evicted’.4 On the Morton estate in Fife, the proportion of multiple tenants fell from 20 per cent of the total in 1735 to 8 per cent by 1811. In the Lanarkshire lands of the Duke of Hamilton, the number of multiple tenants declined by 61 per cent between 1762 and 1809. Ruthven parish in Forfarshire had forty tenants in 1750 but the number had shrunk to twelve by the early 1790s. There were ninety-one in 1750 and fifty-one forty years later. The table below presents data from eleven estates across the Lowlands and confirms the widespread nature of tenant removal throughout the region.
But there was little uniformity in the extent of consolidation. Agricultural specialization, topography, soil type and climate all dictated a range of outcomes. The biggest arable holdings, averaging over 300 acres or more, were to be found in the rich lands of East Lothian and Berwickshire. Some of the parishes there contained fewer than a dozen farms c.1800, a significant decline from the pattern of the past. In the parish of Athelstaneford, East Lothian, for example, in 1794 only sixteen holdings were recorded, mostly between 100 and 200 acres; three were over 300 acres, but only one under 100. In the same county, the number of farms in the parish of Spott had fallen by two thirds over sixty years. Elsewhere, in the carse lands of the rivers Forth and Tay and the dairy-farming regions of the south-west Lowlands, holdings were usually smaller, with farms in Ayrshire and Lanarkshire worked mainly by families without much in the way of hired help. The introduction of big sheep walks in the hill country on the fringes of the Highlands and upland parishes of southern Lanarkshire, Aberdeenshire and Angus could lead to a more rapid collapse in small-tenant numbers, not unlike the experience of the central, western and northern Highlands. For instance, in the south Lanarkshire parish of Carmichael, population fell by 13 per cent between 1755 and the early 1790s, when numbers on average rose by 20 per cent throughout Scotland. In the same upland area of the county, numbers in the district of Douglas declined by 15 per cent and in that of Roberton by more than a third in the second half of the eighteenth century. The parish minister reported of Libberton in south Lanarkshire that ‘the ruins of demolished cottages are to be seen in every corner, the number of inhabitants had fallen by a half since the 1750s due to the letting of the lands in large farms’.5 In nearby Crawford, a report from 1771 suggested ‘the present plan of turning the whole farms into large store farms had so reduced the numbers of consumers and consequently the quantity of corn needed to maintain them’.6 Similar trends were described in Lamington, where the congregation of the local church had gone from 400 to 200 in the space of a few decades. It was alleged that this was caused by the ‘union of farms in the district of Wandell where 4000 out of 5000 acres were now devoted to sheep pasture’.7 In the hill country of the adjacent county of Ayrshire, where large grazing farms had also replaced numerous arable tenancies, ‘in consequence whole baronies and large tracts of land, formerly planted thick with families were thrown together to make way for the new mode of management’.8
It is plain from the evidence that social dislocation on this scale was not typical of most of the Lowlands but was more likely to take place in the upland fringes of the region where both topography and climate dictated the dominance of pastoral husbandry. The papers of the principal landlord in Ayrshire, the Earl of Eglinton, show that extensive displacement of people was uncommon in Lowland districts in the later eighteenth century and mainly confined to the hilly parts of his estates. Indeed, throughout the Lowlands the general pattern of tenant reduction, movement to compact holdings and larger farms, was a gradual, step-wise process which might often take several decades to accomplish until the old settlements traditionally occupied by many multiple tenants eventually came to be controlled by single husbandmen. This was clearance by stealth and attrition but in the end had the same long-term effect as the dramatic episodes of collective eviction: many fewer people at the end of the process with a stake in the land. On the whole, tenancies contracted and disappeared through the patient ‘weeding out’ of possessors until the end result was achieved of holdings, which were essentially modern farms, leased to single individuals.
Three brief examples show how this was achieved. First, the fermetoun of Letham on the Fife estate of Lord Melville had eight tenants in the 1670s and six in 1694 who shared the rental payments. But the overall population of the township was significantly greater than the families of the main husbandman as it was also much subdivided among cottars and their kinfolk. By 1740 four tenants remained and ten years later only two. By 1755 the old well-populated township had become a single farm with just one tenant and his family. To get to that final stage, however, had taken over eight decades from the 1670s.
Secondly, there is the case of the township of Carngillan on the estate of the Earl of Eglinton in Ayrshire. In 1747 it was farmed by eight tenants together with cottars and servants. The thinning of the inhabitants began in 1757, when tenant numbers declined by one. The lease of another was terminated in 1777, followed by four more in 1797. By 1815 Carngillan was occupied by a single farmer, named Alexander Morton. He eventually had the single lease of a holding which had once supported eight families and their cottars in the 1740s. The Mortons were not listed in the original rental of 1747 and only appeared for the first time in 1757, when John Morton took a share in the township. From then until 1815 he and his descendants slowly absorbed more and more land as leases lapsed over the years until the goal of sole possession was attained.
The third illustration comes from the township of Drumglary on the Earl of Strathmore’s estate in Angus. In 1690 it was held in runrig by five families. One tenant had one third of the land and the others shares of a sixth each. The first attempt at reorganization came in 1771 with an agreement between the Earl and three of the tenants as leases of the other two had already expired earlier that year. The estate was about to undertake an ambitious programme of improvement, so Strathmore’s factor offered a deal to the two remaining tenants whose leases would not lapse until 1777. In return for surrendering them in advance, each was promised preferential treatment when the new, improved holdings became available. The promise was kept. In 1784 the names of both tenants remained on the rent books of the estate.
Of course, austere figures cannot begin to convey anything of the human story of displacement and the pain of losing a secure livelihood. It should be recognized that clearance by attrition did not simply affect single husbandmen or heads of households. When a lease was not renewed, wives, children, aged family dependants, cottar families and servants also lost their homes. The casualties of transformation must have been very considerable indeed.
The basic legislation governing eviction had been introduced as early as 1555, when an Act of the Scottish Parliament ‘Anent [concerning] the Warning of Tenants’ was passed and then clarified by an Act of Sederunt of the Lords of Council and Session of 1756. Consent to a landlord’s request to remove a tenant could only be given in a sheriff court through an application submitted at least forty days before Whitsun. (See Annex D for the text of a ‘summons of removing [or removal].) If the sheriff agreed, the decision ‘shall be held as equal to a warning executed in terms of the Act of Parliament’. This was a much simpler and speedier procedure than the processes which took place when enclosures were being established in England. Also obliged to ‘flit’ (move) would be the tenant’s family, his servants, cottars, subtenants and other dependants. If those listed in the writ of removal refused to comply, they would be ‘held as violent possessors and compelled to pay the violent profits of the same, conform to law in all rigour’. Continuing disobedience meant officers of the court were entitled to use force and physically eject the offending parties. By analysing the summonses preserved in sheriff court records, it is therefore possible to compile rough ‘indexes of coercion’ during the era of improvement.
The data for four courts throughout the Lowlands at Cupar, Dunblane, Peebles and Linlithgow are set out in Annex C, and below for a fifth, Hamilton sheriff court in Lanarkshire.
According to this evidence the threat or reality of eviction was rare. Even during the peak years of improvement, summons of removal were employed only infrequently. The average for the five courts surveyed in Annex B was a mere 16.8 writs per annum in the last four decades of the eighteenth century. These figures can be contrasted with the hundreds of summonses of removal granted in some years to west Highland and Hebridean estates. Moreover, most summonses granted by these Lowland courts seem only to have been granted to provide legal recognition of the end of leases and formal notice to tenants to leave their farms by the date specified in the original agreement with the proprietors. Actions for arrears of rent or breaches of contract were few and far between.
Gradual dispossession rather than mass clearance within short time frames was therefore favoured in most of the Lowland regions with the exception of districts more suited to large-scale sheep farming. One critical factor influencing the pace of change was the cost of improvement in mixed-farming economies. Sheep walks needed little more than the construction of miles of drystone dykes and the building of a few shepherds’ cottages. In most of the arable districts in the Lowlands, however, the depletion of tenant numbers was only one part of the comprehensive improvement of estates designed to deliver the financial holy grail of a massive augmentation in rental income. That rents did eventually climb to unprecedented levels is not in question. On the Douglas estate in Lanarkshire, for example, average rents rose eightfold between 1737 and 1815. The Earl of Morton’s annual rental in Fife spiralled from £377 in 1742 to nearly £4,000 in 1815. On the Earl of Eglinton’s Ayrshire lands the annual rental had risen to £11,084 by 1797, then more than doubled to £25,992 by 1815. The greatest gains in landlord incomes took place during the Napoleonic Wars. Even then, however, it was reckoned that at least four to five years from the initial investment in schemes of improvement had to pass before rewards of this order of magnitude could be realized.
Improving theorists assumed that independent farmers, liberated from the chains of archaic communal agriculture, were alone capable of introducing and developing the new husbandry successfully. However, once this élite cadre was in place, the opportunities of the market could only be exploited with the support of substantial landlord investment in enclosure, farm steadings and roads. None of this came cheaply. The conventional wisdom, for instance, was that enclosure by hedge and ditch cost £2 per acre (£148 at 2017 values). Overall expenditures were even more costly. From 1771 to 1776, the Earl of Strathmore invested £22,233 in his Angus estate on a large-scale programme of improvement on enclosure, drainage, roads, bridge construction and the building of new farm steadings. It was estimated that enclosing only a quarter of the tenancies on the Duke of Hamilton’s lands in Lanarkshire would cost £2.65 per acre in the 1760s and £4,659 overall. It was perhaps inevitable, given the considerable financial demands of improvement, that even the wealthiest magnates were forced to pace the consolidation of farms and decline in tenant numbers.
Also, these high expenditures are suggestive of a partnership type of relationship between Lowland landlords and tenants. The proprietors during improvement did not simply cream off unearned incomes via increased rents. They invested heavily in the process and it was this in collaboration with the work and skill of the farmers which eventually produced higher returns. Some Highland magnates also spent on fishing enterprises and on unsuccessful attempts to establish manufactories. But the general programmes of letting crofts to those who laboured on the kelp shores or in unreclaimed moorland required little investment. The income derived from those activities was unearned and the process more exploitative than collaborative.
A harvest crisis could also influence the speed of development. Many estates began to implement programmes of improvement in the 1760s. But several of these stalled for a time in the following two decades during the years 1772–4 and 1782–3 because of a sharp deterioration in weather conditions. Between 1757 and the later 1760s the weather was benign and this, together with rising grain prices, helps to explain the first dynamic phase of improvement. Then, in 1772, in the western Lowlands at least, ‘shakening winds’ were accompanied by ‘Rotting Rains’ and followed by ‘parching Drought’ in 1773.9 One factor noted that ‘the whole spirit of Improvement is knocked on the head’ as a result.10 Arrears of rent mounted and some tenants even had to surrender leases because of harvest failure. A similar crisis occurred in 1782–3. As a result, on the Duke of Hamilton’s Lanarkshire estate, for example, the consolidation of tenancies virtually came to a halt, with only 2.5 per cent of farms between 1782 and 1785 involved at that time.
The rate of displacement may have been influenced in part by a concern to maintain social stability. The agricultural reporter for Fife, John Thomson, argued that there were dangers as well as opportunities in ‘the uniting of farms’. Concentrating the management of the land in the hands of a few might make economic sense, but equally it could pose a grave danger to social order and even threaten the political stability of the nation. Thomson was writing during the long wars with France and pointed to events across the Channel to reinforce his point that economic discontent could lead to revolution and anarchy. How far these arguments were in the minds of the landed classes at this time cannot be easily known. Such concerns did not seem to have inhibited some Highland lairds from enforcing clearances before 1815. Equally, however, there was a recognition that the potential for tenant truculence had to be taken into account when plans of improvement were being prepared. Thus the Earl of Strathmore’s factor in Angus wrote anxiously to his master in 1754 that ‘he had enough to do for some time past to keep proper order in the [Baron Court]’, which was still functioning at that date. The disputed issue was the reclamation of the mosses in one part of the estate which had disturbed traditional rights of access.11 In Ayrshire, apparently, tensions were also quite widespread. The agricultural reporter for the county commented in 1793 that ‘Near some towns where the notions of manufacturers predominate’ some farmers had formed themselves into ‘associations’. It was said of these that members ‘find themselves, under severe penalties, never to offer any mark of civility to any person in the character of a gentleman’. The reporter considered these groups so threatening that he advised proprietors to retaliate by forming counter-associations in order to prevent the recalcitrants being offered long-term leases to farms.12 On the Hamilton estates in Lanarkshire in the later eighteenth century it was apparently not uncommon for the tenants of a particular neighbourhood to form a ‘secret combination’ to ensure that sitting tenants would triumph when farms were put up for public bidding at the termination of leases.13 So effective were these that the Duke’s factor counselled against ‘public roups’ (auctions), where collective action could develop, and argued in favour of letting land, wherever possible, through private bargains:
it is my opinion that roups for farms in this country are the same with all the other places I have yet the experience of. That is, whatever the private offerer may intend by a private bargain, his mouth is entirely shut up from offering at a publick roup by a Secret Combination which is as Common to them as the Flame of Fire flies upwards, which establishes that solid oppinnion [sic] of mine never to get farms by any other method than private offers … 14
A survey of sheriff court and other legal records confirms that some tenants, and especially the more substantial men, were more than capable of taking action to protect their interests by going to law. Summons of removal could be and were challenged in the courts and landlords who pursued eviction by those means had to be punctilious in following the formal process with great care if they were not to attract objections on technical grounds.15 The legal representative of the Duke of Gordon in 1770 concluded: ‘A Process of Removing which requires the most summary dispatch and from its nature must be extremely simple and plain, has of late years become quite a labyrinth in the law; and any heritor may sooner be dispossessed of his estate by a judicial sale than it is practicable to have a litigious tenant removed from a farm.’16 In addition, among Court of Session papers, documentation of legal actions taken by tenant farmers against their landlords sometimes surface. These included cases of compensation demanded for building on lands during the tenure of a lease, resisting landlord claims of broken leases, opposing summonses of removal, protesting against the levying of feudal dues and the like.17
2
Increasingly the country population, and especially those with some means, had a choice. In the second half of the eighteenth century, emigration across the Atlantic, where land was cheap and abundant, offered an alternative to those who feared rack renting, dispossession and the loss of social status.
The end of the Seven Years War in 1763 with victory over France was decisive in this respect. Many thousands of acres in North America were won from the defeated enemy and became available for purchase and speculation. However, those who bought territory were conscious that land without settlers to farm it was useless. Before too long, therefore, a publicity campaign in the Scottish press began to attract emigrants. Emigration had rarely been regarded as a positive choice in the past but the offer of cheap land was likely to be more tempting when the opportunities even to rent it were narrowing in the homeland. Further, the emigrant trade was becoming more secure and efficient. Some Glasgow merchant houses engaged in the Atlantic trades began to become involved, partly because tonnages outwards to the colonies were never as great as their inward cargoes of tobacco, timber and rice. Emigration was becoming a specialist business with advertisements publicizing the ‘comforts’ which could be enjoyed during the long voyage and the competence of captains and crew.
Between 1700 and 1815 around 90,000–100,000 Scots left for North America, the majority going between c.1763 and c.1775. The Highland exodus has attracted most attention but emigration was taking place from all parts of the country. So great was it from the western Lowlands in the early 1770s that in the summer of 1774 the Scots Magazine observed with some alarm and exaggeration that emigration threatened to transform the west into a great grass park only suitable for grazing cattle and sheep. The Register of Emigrants for the years 1773–6 allows the scale, social composition and geographical spread of the movement to be explored in some detail. Forty per cent of the nearly 10,000 enumerated in the Register were from Scotland. It was not a migration of the rootless poor or of unskilled labourers. The vast majority were farmers or artisans in the textile trades, which were then experiencing a serious depression. Twenty-five per cent of ‘independent’ or ‘semi-independent’ individuals came from agricultural occupations. A striking feature of the migration was the role of tenant groups which came together to plan the voyages across the Atlantic and then organize settlement of migrants on American land. One such was the ‘United Company of Farmers’ based in the counties of Stirling and Perth. It sent agents across the Atlantic to search for good land, gathered funds to purchase territory and commissioned a vessel for the voyage, and eventually settled the emigrants in 7,000 acres along the Connecticut River in the colony of New York.
Another was the Scots–American Company of Farmers, which comprised over 138 tenants from Renfrewshire, Lanarkshire and Dumbartonshire. The ambitious objective was to gather enough funds to enable them to purchase 100,000 acres in North America. They complained of high rents and the threat of dispossession on the west of Scotland estates of Lord Blantyre and the Duke of Douglas. The Company sent two of their number across the Atlantic to survey lands on the frontier, and their travels there became a veritable odyssey. In four months they covered more than 2,700 miles from up-country New York to North Carolina, before deciding to purchase 20,000 acres at Ryegate, far up the west bank of the Connecticut River in New York colony.
But emigration did not lead to rural depopulation. The migration data assembled in Table 7 suggest the key feature was more internal mobility within the countryside rather than any mass exodus of people from the land. Some parishes were indeed losing numbers, but others were gaining population through the interaction of village and town development, agrarian specialization, and the spread of rural manufacturing and mining communities.
As Robert Ainslie argued in his treatise on improvement considered earlier, there was a positive advantage within the mixed-farming economy in retaining rather than expelling those who had lost tenancies through the reorganization of holdings. Several strategies were employed with the objective of absorbing the displaced and so benefiting from their labour. The most common was the foundation of village settlements. Several were planned, others seemed to have grown more organically. By the 1790s there were villages in 43 per cent of parishes in Fife, plus 83 per cent, 35 per cent and 44 per cent respectively in parishes of Ayrshire, Angus and Lanarkshire. Table 8 provides more detail on those and on the small rural towns which also saw growth in the number of their inhabitants.
Displaced tenants could be absorbed by other means. In the north-east Lowlands, farms were being thrown together with as much enthusiasm as elsewhere. But the emerging pattern in the counties of Aberdeen, Kincardine, Banff, Moray and Nairn differed from other areas. New smallholdings were being created even as larger holdings were being established. The reason was that there was a good deal of unimproved moorland and mosses in the region. Landowners hit on a scheme to reclaim these areas. They settled them with crofters or smallholders, often evicted tenants or cottars, who were given tracts of moor and encouraged to cultivate them while having only to pay minimum or zero rents until the land furnished steady returns. Thus, in one parish of Old Deer in Aberdeenshire in 1840, there were 140 extended compact farms but also 401 crofts and smallholdings. These strategies were very successful, with most parishes reporting considerable expansion of their available acreage by the 1840s.18
The same approach was adopted on a much lesser scale on poor land elsewhere outside the north-east:
In the more fertile and better cultivated portions of Buchan, a system had prevailed of augmenting the number of large farms; and in consequence diminishing that of the small. By the operation of this system, many of the small holders, deprived of their possessions, were forced to betake themselves to the improvement and cultivation of a piece of wasteland on the side of a hill, or on the margin of a moor or moss, given them by one proprietor at a nominal rent for a stipulated number of years, seldom exceeding seven, and afterwards to be paid for at value.
At the same time the active spirit of improvement … led to the removal of cottars and subtenants … those also had no other resource left them but that of the crofters.19
Also elsewhere, irregular patches of nutrient-poor soil which had been part of the pre-improvement landscape were rented out to colonies of smallholders for the purposes of reclamation. It was a cheap form of land improvement which substituted human labour for capital investment. More land became available as the commonties were privatized. Commonties of waste land were shared between different estates and varied in size between several thousand and a few acres. They could be divided into private ownership under legislation of the pre-1707 Scottish Parliament simply by one landowner pursuing a claim in the Court of Session whether other parties in the neighbourhood agreed or not. The peak years of these divisions were from 1760 to 1815, when 45 per cent out of all actions undertaken from 1600 to 1914 were recorded. Some of the commonty land was simply added to adjacent farms but in other cases it was split up into small lots to provide for those displaced by tenant reduction, which helped to preserve some of the human capital of the estates.
3
A paradox remains to be resolved. Many tenants and cottars were dislodged from the land in the second half of the eighteenth century. Concurrently, the population of Scotland was rising, an increase which was not only sustained after 1800, but became even faster in the following decades. Nevertheless, there was little evidence of structural unemployment in the countryside and wage levels there were not only stable but started to increase from the 1760s to 1812 in most years. That cycle goes a long way to explain the silence and absence of disturbance associated with the Lowland removals.
In part the rural labour market remained uncongested for the reasons given earlier in this chapter: the need for many hands to be employed in the infrastructure of the new agriculture during the primary phase of improvement and the simultaneous spread of textile work and other manufactures in the country parishes. But it is also important to recognize that some of the rural population were being drawn from the land to the expanding cities and towns by the hope of higher wages and fresh opportunities. Some of the tenant class must have also felt the pinch of high rents, especially in years of poor harvests such as 1772–4 and 1783–4. Others, and in particular the lesser folk, had lost their tiny holdings completely and been forced to work as landless labourers. Serious deprivation might have been unusual but a sense of falling status would have been common. And, as will be shown in Chapter 9, once the mould of the improved structure had taken shape, the mechanisms of labour recruitment in the Lowlands effectively squeezed out those who were surplus to the work of the farms. The rigour of the lease system also meant that any attempt by farmers to subdivide their holdings, which might have anchored families to the land, would have been met by landlords starting legal proceedings against them for breach of contract followed by summary eviction. Subletting to kinfolk or others was universally opposed by landlords in the Lowlands, while it was enthusiastically encouraged in the western Highlands and Islands until the 1820s. As one scholar has put it: ‘Any increase in population tightened the screw, with increasing numbers struggling for a diminished number of tenancies or for employment in a tightly organized labour market. The pressure or temptation to flee the land was intense’.20
There is a final issue to consider. As population rose, proportionately fewer Scots worked the land as their forefathers had done to provide food and shelter for their families. Many more than before now had jobs in industry, mining and a host of other urban employments. They had to pay in the market for the houses where they lived and the food and drink they consumed. Without the huge increase in the yields of grain crops and higher levels of labour productivity resulting from agricultural improvement, many of this growing army of non-food producers would soon have faced intolerable prices for bread and drink and even perhaps the threat of starvation. It was the reformed agricultural system which delivered the enhanced supply of food and, together with some foreign imports, helped to avoid such a disaster. Thus the agrarian transformation was of vital human benefit, but it also came with some social costs and one of them was the dispossession of numerous families whose ancestors had lived and worked on the land since time immemorial.