8
Whatever Happened to the Cottars?
Before the later eighteenth century cottar families were very numerous across the Lowland countryside. Indeed, as the surviving poll tax returns of the 1690s surveyed in Chapter 3 confirmed, they and their families probably accounted for between a quarter and a third of the rural population in many areas. Cottars were provided with smallholdings in return for supplying labour to main tenants at busy times of the farming year. As already shown, while the consolidation of direct tenancies and the eradication of multiple tenure took place relatively gradually, the removal of the cottars was carried out more rapidly in most counties during the last few decades of the eighteenth century and was virtually complete by the early years of the nineteenth. Their dispossession was compressed in time and carried out in a systematic and comprehensive fashion.
1
An abundance of contemporary evidence confirms that the cottar system was under widespread attack from the 1770s. In Lanarkshire 28 per cent of parishes reporting in the OSA described their extensive removal. For Angus, the figure was 22 per cent and in Fife 33 per cent. But these data almost certainly underestimate the sheer scale of dispossession because most parishes in the OSA returns made no specific mention of cottars at all. For instance, of sixty Ayrshire parish reports, only twenty-four contained details on cottars. Of those which did, however, nearly all described clearance and dispersal. The testimony of observers at the time adds further weight to the numerical conclusions. The agricultural reporter for Lanarkshire commented in 1798 that ‘It is vain to see anything of the ancient cottages … the former nurseries of field labourers, for they may be said to be now no more.’ He went on to add that ‘the few scattered ones which still remain can scarcely be called an exception’.1 Similarly, in Fife the reporter described an identical process in the northern parishes of the county. The witnesses were at pains to emphasize the radical nature of the removals by their colourful use of language. The minister of Kilmany in Fife referred to ‘the annihilation of the little cottagers’.2 His colleague in Marrikie, Angus, described how ‘many of the cottagers are exterminated’.3 Other observers noted the existence of numerous dwellings in their parishes, formerly the huts of cottar families, which were gradually falling into ruins. Elsewhere, cottar houses were being demolished and the stone used for drystone dykes and walls for field and farm enclosures.
Ironically, however, while the scale of this social transformation has been virtually ignored by scholars until recent times, it did attract a great deal of comment and concern in the late eighteenth century. Some contemporaries thought the removals were to blame for the increase in the overall wage costs of farm labour. The critics pointed out that the attack on the cottar system was eliminating the traditional ‘nursery of servants’ because it was the sons and daughters of cottar families who provided the main source of these farm workers. But recruiting them had now become much more difficult because so many cottar families had been forced off the land. This, together with the lure of more and better-paid opportunities in industry and the towns, had led to the possibilities of a crisis in the agricultural labour market. Other commentators, perhaps less convincingly, saw a relationship between the clearance of the cottars and the rising costs of the Poor Law in some of the larger towns as the disinherited were having to move there in the search for work.
Perhaps, however, it is only by focusing on the local experience that we can gain specific insight to the cottar removals. Thus, in the district of Inverdovat on the Tayfield estate in Fife in 1707, ten ‘cotteries’ had existed. A few years later, the number had risen to thirteen. As late as 1733, several cottars remained in the township, though evidence for some decades after that is meagre. By 1813, however, when the social structure of the district can be documented once again, no cottar holdings remained. Again, in the parish of Colmonell in Ayrshire, the cottar class was still numerous in the 1760s: ‘there was hardly a tenant who had not one or more cottagers on his farm’. By the 1790s it was acknowledged there were ‘very few’ in the entire parish’.4 Similarly in Kilwinning, in the same county, cottars were virtually omnipresent in the farms of the early eighteenth century. But by 1790 ‘the cottages are, in great measure, demolished’.5 Virtually identical patterns were described in several areas of Angus at the other end of the Lowlands. A general decline in population was reported in the parish of St Vigeans because of holdings being united into one. But the fall in the number of cottars was even more extensive than the decline of tenants. Of one farm, for instance, it was reported that there had been eighteen of them in 1754. By 1790 only a single solitary family remained.
Eradication did not take place at the same pace or on the same scale in all parts of the Lowlands. In the later eighteenth century, for instance, the cottar system was still relatively undisturbed in much of the north-east region. Of seventy-eight parishes in the OSA which made reference to cottars in the counties of Angus, Ayrshire, Fife and Lanarkshire, twenty-seven (or 34 per cent) noted their existence without suggesting removals. Nevertheless, the long-term trend was plain as evictions accelerated into the early decades of the nineteenth century. The clearance of the cottars was a remarkable change in the entire structure of rural society. It became a fundamental factor in the growth of a predominantly landless wage-earning labour force, a rise in local migrations in the countryside and a revolution in traditional patterns of human settlement. In essence, an entire social tier of the old order had been eliminated in many areas over the space of a few decades.
One factor which speeded up clearance, though did not in itself cause it to happen, was the nature of the legal process. Unlike tenants and subtenants, cottars, in the sense defined here, had no legal rights to land. In addition, they do not appear to have been protected by the legislation of 1555 and 1756 which laid down the formal procedures to be taken to enforce removal of tenants, especially the requirement to issue legal warnings forty days before Whitsun in order to allow writs to be challenged at law. There are only a few instances in court records of notices of removal being issued against cottars. Thus, at Hamilton sheriff court in 1779, John Crawford of Aikerfin obtained a ‘Lybell of Removing’ against William Young and James Young, ‘who possess a cothouse and two cows grass in Aikenfin’.6 A similar decision was made in favour of Matthew Baillie of Carnbroe in Lanarkshire against five ‘cottars in Carnbroe village with houses and yards’.7 But these cases were unusual and probably related to cottar families who opposed removal. The paucity of references to such cases in court records tends to suggest that cottars were usually evicted at the will of individual tenant farmers.
As noted earlier, several observers took the view that the destruction of the cottar system had led to a number of adverse effects. In the opinion of some it made the recruitment of the next generation of unmarried farm servants more difficult. The cottar families had also provided essential labour for ploughing, sowing, herding, shearing, grain harvesting and peat cutting in return for a cot house, a few rigs within the lands of the township, and the right to graze a cow or a few sheep. Widespread forcing out of cottars must have meant for most farmers the possible risks of losing a secure supply of labour. Yet these drawbacks seem to have been considerably outweighed by the potential long-term advantages of mass removal. In fact, when the displacements are examined in detail, their rationale can be seen to have been entirely consistent with the nature of the improved agrarian economy. When farms were united and the number of tenants fell, a decline in cottar numbers could also be expected, especially where arable farms were being replaced by pastoral holdings with more limited needs for labour.
The division of commonties and the intaking of mosses and muirs, described in Chapter 7, also weakened their way of life. These marginal lands had long been crucial to cottar subsistence support. They provided many of the basic needs of families at no cost other than their own labour. Building materials, like stone, wood, heather and bracken, came from these sources. They also afforded peat and turf for fuel while commonties were also a key resource for grazing a few stock. In the second half of the eighteenth century, however, all of these traditional sources of subsistence were being removed or drastically reduced as the division of commonties grew apace. The process was part of a broader strategy which led landowners to exploit all the territory of their estates ‘at proper value’. Thus, on some properties bogs were drained, and in others marginal land was absorbed into regular cultivation and new rent-paying smallholdings were created. Moreover, just as proprietors laid claim to all the minerals on their lands, they also increasingly sought to control access to former ‘common’ resources like peat and wood. There is plenty of evidence of a drive to cut back or even eliminate traditional rights of access to moorland and peat bogs. One example, from the Earl of Panmure’s estate in Angus, illustrates the process:
The Estate of Edzel and Newar is now mostly sett and the boundaries of the several possessions settled, and there is reserved the Moss of Mergie as is thought of about 800 or 1000 acres … the muir of Slateford ought to be enclosed and planted and the thing should be set about immediately. It will be a most beautiful thing and in time will come to be of great value.
For many years past this muir has been grossly abused by casting of turf in it. No less than thirty stacks or thereby yearly have the inhabitants taken out of it besides what the adjacent tenants and cottars take. The factor has prohibited these practices for the future under the severest penalty and has taken the tenants bound in the Minutes of Tack granted them not to cast turf themselves nor suffer others to do so, so far as they can hinder it.8
[cast – cut]
Cottars were also being squeezed out by other forces as the system was now seen to impose unacceptable costs on tenant farmers. Plots of land and grazing rights provided in return for labour had been acceptable when there were plenty of under-utilized areas within the fermetouns. It was less tolerated when outfields were being taken into the infields and worked intensively by regular sequences of crop rotation. The higher rents farmers had to pay in the later eighteenth century forced them to look more critically at the real costs of cottar holdings. In Colmonell parish in Ayrshire, for instance, cottars had possessed a house, a yard, a small piece of land and enough grass for one or more cows. Their value was ‘thought to be trifling while rents were low’ and markets limited.9 But the balance of advantage in the new agriculture meant that it was more profitable to absorb the land of the cottars in order to produce more grain and stock for the market. The resulting savings could be considerable. In one estimate for the Rossie estate in Fife, cottars were said to have occupied a fifth of the infield land. As grain prices rose, there was a powerful incentive to remove these families and add their possessions to the full cultivation regime of the improved farms.
Increasingly, also, other observers argued that cottars might place a burden on the Poor Law. The fear was not in itself new. Cothouses had long been seen as repositories of the poor, the aged and infirm, and of landless vagrants coming from elsewhere. Thus the kirk session of Wiston in Lanarkshire proclaimed in 1752 that ‘all persons who have coattages [sic] to set to beware that they bring no persons or families from other parishes who are not able to maintain themselves’.10 Those who did so would be obliged to support them without any assistance from the kirk session. But concerns became more common in later decades with the greater mobility of population then. Certainly, in some rural parishes, there was growing alarm about higher levels of vagrancy in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In Douglas in Lanarkshire, for example, reference was made in 1764 to ‘the great number of vagrant persons and sturdy beggars’ who were now in the parish.11 Again, in 1788, the poor lists for Douglas increased as a result of the influx of strangers who were attempting to take possession of deserted cothouses. Demolition of these dwellings now became commonplace. As one commentator put it, those who still kept cottars had ‘to submit to the risk of being burdened with a heavier poor’s rate’.12 Several of the OSA reports described how empty cottar dwellings were no longer allowed to moulder away but were being pulled down and completely levelled.
In essence, therefore, the cottar structure was in conflict with key aspects of new agrarian order. Cottars fitted well with a regime where demand for labour tended to concentrate in brief periods of the year around tasks like grain harvesting and fuel gathering. It was an advantage for tenants then to have a reliable pool of labour which could be called upon in the busy seasons and then laid off without any cash cost until needed again. However, the needs of improved agriculture were radically different from the old. Intensive cultivation of land, by regular ploughing, adoption of new crops – such as sown grasses, turnips and potatoes – and of innovative rotations, ensured that the working year started to lengthen. There was, on the whole, an evening out rather than an accentuation of seasonal labour needs within mixed farming. The regime favoured the hiring of full-time workers on wage contracts who laboured throughout the entire farming year.
The number of labourers needed in the new system did not fall. Indeed, for a time it rose considerably because of the making of enclosures, building of farm steadings and construction of roads. The key change was, therefore, in the way labour was contracted, not in the amount of labour needed. Therefore the traditional stake in the land was stripped out of the contract and instead full-time landless servants and day labourers became the norm throughout the Lowlands. Married servants hired by the year were most common in the intensive arable districts of the south-east, but elsewhere single male and female servants employed for periods of six months predominated. Ironically, the hinds, or married servants, bore some similarity to the cottars of old. They too were provided with a house, garden, fuel, the keep of a cow and other privileges as part of the wage reward. The crucial difference, however, was that they were full-time workers, entirely under the masters’ control during the one-year term of employment, and could be dismissed at the end of it.
This position of subordination was crucial. While the independence of the cottars can be exaggerated – they did possess land but only in mere fragments and they had to obtain work in larger holdings in order to make ends meet – they were obviously less dependent on the will of the masters, because their smallholdings provided their families with meal and milk. But the new agriculture demanded much higher levels of labour control as tenants were coming under added pressures. Not only were rents going up, but the wages of agricultural workers were also rising from the 1770s, and especially from the 1790s, as industrial and urban expansion lured many away from the country districts to the towns. There was therefore an incentive for tenants to introduce ways of improving the productivity of labour.
The clearance of the cottars can be seen in this context. In the most improved districts, where the old Scots plough was being replaced by James Small’s much lighter version, eventually using a team of just one man and two horses, the clearest effect is evident. Gradually the whole work routine centred around raising the efficiency of the horses. Hours of labour and number of workers became closely related to the horse teams and their work rate. Ploughmen took responsibility for a particular pair and their entire routine from early morning to evening was devoted to the preparation, working and final grooming of their animals. The system meant that the horsemen had to be permanent servants, boarded within the farm steading or in a cottage adjacent or close to the stables of their horses. The part-time labours of the cottars were now redundant. It also became possible to tailor labour requirements to the numbers actually required for specific farm tasks. Since farmers who hired servants had fixed, certain, and clear wage and housing obligations to their workforce for periods of either one year or six months, they began to tailor their needs exactly to the labour required for the proper running of the farm. In addition, there was an urge to ensure that the work team was organized in such a way that it was fully employed when at work.
There were, therefore, clear incentives to evict cottars. Yet there was one important constraint on such action. Cottar families had been the main source of seasonal labour, especially at the key times of grain harvesting, gathering and processing. Harvest labour had not only to be available, but vitally it also had to be reliable at the most crucial time of the agricultural year. To risk eliminating a traditional source of harvest workers without secure alternatives was to court disaster. This was especially so in those counties outside the south-east region and parts of Fife, where farmers were increasingly dependent on unmarried servants. In western and central districts, single servants were in the majority. There were few families to lend a hand at busy times. Not surprisingly, it was principally from these areas that the complaints came that the attack on the cottar structure was causing difficulties of labour supply. Eviction of the cottars therefore depended on finding a secure alternative source of seasonal labour.
There were three possibilities. First, in the 1780s and 1790s, seasonal migration by young men and women from the southern and eastern Highlands had already become established on a considerable scale. Second, migrants from Ireland were also recruited in large numbers during the grain harvest season throughout the counties of the south-west and western Borders. Third, and crucially, the dissolution of the cottouns was paralleled by a growth in rural settlements and villages, a subject which will be treated in more detail later in this chapter. This small-scale urbanism was primarily, though not solely, driven by the spread of the textile industry in many Lowland counties in the later eighteenth century and the concentration of services and trades ancillary to agriculture. Increasingly, therefore, the gap left by the cottars in the supply of seasonal labour was filled by the dependants of weavers, miners, iron-workers, day labourers and tradesmen hired from neighbouring rural villages and small towns. The clearance of the cottars could therefore progress with little economic impediment or disadvantage.
2
A major question is what became of them and their families after they lost their smallholdings. The numbers displaced must have been considerable and for that reason there was considerable contemporary interest in their fate. John Naismith, the agricultural reporter for Lanarkshire, noted how in that county in the 1790s the cottars had mainly gone and been replaced by unmarried servants boarded in the houses of the farmers. But, while the cottars had vanished from the steadings, he also went on to describe the presence of ‘a new set of cottages’:
The county … is supplied with a new set of cottages. Several landholders partly perhaps to prevent the depopulation of the country, and partly for their own emolument, have let out, either in feu or long leases, spots of ground, for houses and little gardens, generally upon the sides of the public roads. Upon these, many little handsome cabins have been erected, which accompanied with neatly dressed gardens, supplied with pot-herbs, and frequently ornamented with a few flours [sic], have a very pleasant effect. These are mostly clustered into villages, some of which are pretty and populous.13
Crucially, therefore, Naismith seems to be reporting not the dispersal of the cottars but rather their relocation. An almost identical development was described in one district of Fife at the same time. There, in the parish of Ferry, a parallel was drawn between the decline of population in the rural districts and an increase in numbers in the local village. Farmers were ‘Not inclining to keep such large cottaries [sic] as formerly’, so several cottar families therefore moved into Ferry village, ‘where they hire small houses and support themselves by their industry, either as tradesmen or day labourers’.14 The parish minister of Sorn in Ayrshire noted a similar connection between clearance of cottars in the country districts and village growth. He commented on the settlement of Dalgain, which lay beside the water cotton-spinning complex of Catrine and had been founded in 1781 by a Dr Stevenson from Glasgow. He feued out small lots of land and by 1797 the population of the settlement had risen to more than fifty families. Significantly, the minister added that the majority of these ‘formerly lived in cothouses, which are now in ruins. Most of these families are provided with gardens of various dimensions behind their houses.’15
These observations, describing contraction in the country population and associated increases in village and town numbers in the neighbourhood, were repeated in several other areas. In Stonehouse in Lanarkshire, the ‘country’ population in 1696 was 600, the ‘village’ total 272. By 1792, a mere 467 resided in the rural area and 593 in the village. Similarly, in Dalmellington in Ayrshire, total parish numbers declined from 739 in 1755 to 681 in 1792. However, the general trend concealed dramatic changes within the local demographic structure. It was observed that in the country area population had ‘considerably diminished’ due to cottar removal but had risen ‘in proportion’ in the village of Dalmellington, which by 1792 contained over 500 inhabitants, or almost three quarters of the total parish population at that date. In Dalry numbers in the parish had increased by around one third from Webster’s census in 1755 to 2,000 in 1792. But the country part had fallen while the population of the village had almost doubled to 814, or 41 per cent of the total. It would appear therefore that the key to an understanding of what happened to the cottars after their displacement lies in village and small-town expansion in rural areas which was taking place at the same time.
Historians have long been aware of the proliferation of planned villages in this period. But perhaps insufficient attention has been paid to the function of these settlements and others in suppressing potential social discontent which might have arisen from cottar removal and also in maintaining the labour supply vital to the completion of the improvement process. Partly this may be because the sheer scale of small-settlement development in this period might not have been wholly appreciated. The ‘planned’ villages were significant but they seem to have been only a part and, in some areas, only a fairly minor proportion of settlement building and extension. The rise in the population of rural small towns and existing villages was also significant. The numbers gathering in unplanned settlements, several of them no bigger than clusters of a few dozen houses, also need to be noted. For instance, one published list of planned villages describes only seven being founded in a sample of four Lowland counties between c.1760 and c.1800. When the analysis is extended to include all references to villages, both planned and unplanned, in these counties, the pattern changes. By that measure, 48 per cent of parishes in Fife, 83 per cent in Ayrshire, 35 per cent in Angus and 44 per cent in Lanarkshire contained settlements of that kind.
A substantial population increase in some of the individual settlements should also be noted. The village of Larkhall in Lanarkshire rose in numbers by 44 per cent between 1755 and 1792. In the parish of Glassford in the same county, population was rapidly concentrating in ‘three small but thriving villages’.16 One of them had 14 houses and 83 inhabitants in 1771. By 1791 the number of houses had risen to 44 and the population to 196. Small hamlets were growing throughout the county. Six existed in the parish of Cambuslang and were in flourishing condition in the 1790s. It was also common to find houses being built along main roads and at important junctions. The expansion of industrial and mining towns set in rural settings was especially fast. Airdrie increased its population sixfold in the second half of the eighteenth century. In Fife the town of Dysart and associated villages rose in numbers to 2,699 in 1792, a 62 per cent increase from the 1750s. The pattern was repeated in the south-west Lowlands. Girvan in Ayrshire had no more than a couple of dozen houses and 100 people in the 1750s. By the 1790s this figure had swollen to over 1,000 inhabitants. The parish minister was convinced that the town’s growth was in large part linked to ‘the almost total exclusion of cottagers from the farms’.
The above is not intended to be an exhaustive account of settlement development. Nevertheless, the evidence seems conclusive: cottar eviction was paralleled by a striking expansion and foundation of villages. This seems to suggest that many displaced cottars must have managed to find alternative jobs and homes within the modernizing rural Lowlands. Chapter 3 showed that cottar families endured a hard life of deep poverty and heavy toil in the traditional townships. Hence, while many may have abandoned their few acres because they had little choice but to do so, others might well have been positively attracted by the thought of better prospects and higher earnings in these new villages which were spreading across the countryside.
The major determinant of village development was the enhanced labour needs of the agrarian and industrial economies of the rural districts. But an additional factor was landlord strategy. The proprietors of many estates showed a keen interest in the foundation or extension of these settlements. There was an awareness that laying down farmland in smallholdings close to a town or village could be highly profitable. It might attract artisans and ‘manufacturers’ who could pay high rentals and also extend local markets for agricultural produce. In addition, there was a general concern among many magnates about depopulation and losses of human capital. Villages were able to take in some of those displaced by improvement, and so helped to maintain social stability and, by attracting industry, absorbed the dispossessed as an economically valuable population.
At the same time, however, the village system was fundamental to the progress of improvement itself. It was recognized that the new agriculture needed other workers as well as those who actually cultivated the land. The building of enclosures, digging numerous ditches, the taking in of waste, construction and extension of roads, bridges, farmhouses and mansions for the gentry were all going on apace in late-eighteenth-century Scotland. Tables 9–11 below give an idea of the range of works in progress. The labour needed to undertake them was considerable. On the Hamilton estate in May 1772, the ‘putting out’ of enclosure on the 131-acre farm of Over Abbington needed twenty-seven labourers, or an average of nearly five workers per acre. Gangs of contracted labourers had to be brought in to build the enclosures. On the estate of Lord Dumfries in the Borders, for example, one Robert Patrick, ‘dyker’, was employed with sixty men and twenty-four horses, constructing dykes and planting hedges. His services and those of his men were available for hire to other proprietors in the district.
It is against this background that the growth of small settlements, linked to the labour requirements of the new farms, can best be understood. Small lots with a house and garden were divided up within the villages to accommodate casual labourers and their families. They paid rents for the plots and sold their labour by the day to farmers in the neighbourhood. They could be hired and laid off when necessary. This new class was an adjunct to the improvement process, a reserve army of labour which no longer had traditional rights to land of the kind possessed by the cottars, but were still available for hire on a casual basis. Waged connections had replaced customary relationships.
Table 9 Intended improvements on the estate of the Earl of Eglinton in Ayrshire, 1771
| − | to repair Mansion House and Castle and improve gardens etc. |
| − | to compleate enclosure and subdivide Over, Mid and Laigh Moncurs, Chapple, Weirstoun, Ladyhall, Milnburn, Banrsleys and Auchinwinsey [Kilwinning] ‘with ditches and Clapt Earth Quickset Hedges’. |
| (iii) | Same to Meikle and Little Stones, Stonemoor and Stone Castle, Bowhouse and Lawthorn [Stone Barony]. |
| (iv) | New steading on Stonecastle and Little Stone ‘which are quite fallen to ruin with lying waste several years’. |
| (v) | To enclose a subdivide in Ardrossan barony ‘partly with snap stone dykes and partly with ditches and Clap quickset dykes’. Blackstone (stone dyke), Holmbyres, Towerleanhead, Yonderhouses, Gaithill (?), Burnhouse and Ittington (all with ditch and hedge). Meikle Busbie, Little Busbie (stone snap dykes), Ardrossan miln and Chappelhill (stone and ditches). Also to enclose and subdivide Sorbie, Darleith, Coalhill Mains and Stanley Burn with ditches and quickset dykes. |
| (vi) | Steading of houses on Knockvivoch, Coalhill and Chappelhill, north end of Little Busbie – ‘all of which farm houses are gone to ruin’ and little steading in Saltcoats lands. |
| (vii) | In Roberton to enclose and subdivide properly with ditches and quickset dykes: Milntoun, Milnlands, Mnurehouse, Gatehead, East and West Murelands, Corsehouse, Annanhill and Knockentikes. To complete enclosures already begun and to subdivide Windyedge, Thornhill, Greenhills and Fordalhills (with ditches and quickset dykes). |
| (viii) | In Dreghorn to enclose and subdivide with ditches and quickset dykes in the 2 Towend farms possessed by Jas. Orr and Hugh Galt and lands possessed about Kirktoun by Robt. Wilson, Jas. Cockburn, Jas. Mure, Hugh Bankhead, Andrew Fulton, David Dale and Hugh Dunlop and John Barnet. Also lands of Corsehill and Lowhill possessed by Gavin Ralston, Poundstone by Jas. Auld and Kirklands by Jas. Boyd. |
| (ix) | To build steading of houses on lands of Jas. Auld, Hugh Dunlop, And. Fulton (about 60 acres) ‘whereon no house ever was’. |
| (x) | Also steading of houses on Corselees, Sclates, Cleugh ‘which were let down and gone to ruin the last nineteen years’. |
| (xi) | In Eastwood to complete the enclosure and subdivision on Giffnook, Hillhead, Henry’s Croft (all with hedges and ditches) and to complete manor house in Eaglesham. |
| (xii) | A steading of houses on High Craigs, Temples, Stonebyres, Stepends, Walkers. And to enclose and subdivide these farms partly with stone dykes and partly with ditches and hedges. |
| (xiii) | In Eaglesham to complete the enclosure and subdivision of Threepland, Nethercraigs, Polnoon, Mains, Kirklands, Hole, and the sundry inclosures marked out and begun about the Kirktoun of Eaglesham and also the farms of Brackenrigg, Borlands, Windhill, Rossmiln, Floors, Boggside, Tofts, Corselees, Picketlaw, Hills, Upper and Nether Braidflat, Over and Nether Kirkland Moore, Kirktoun Moors, Bonnytoun, Blackhouse, North Moorhouse, Langlee. |
| Source: NRS Sheriff Court Records (Ayr), SC6/72/1, Register of Improvement on Entailed Estates. | |
In the old social order, many cottars were also tradesmen. Improved agriculture had, if anything, even greater need for wrights, masons and ditchers than the traditional system. These craftsmen, too, increasingly congregated in villages and small rural towns, but their disappearance from the farms should not necessarily be seen as the consequence of coercion. The need for their skills was increasing to such an extent that they too could become detached from the land and pursue their trades on a full-time basis in a different setting. It was not simply farm servants who were becoming more specialized. Others, such as day labourers and tradesmen, who had been integral parts of the cottar communities, were now able to work for longer periods in the year because of agricultural transformation.
3
In the decades after c.1760 there was little evidence in Lowland Scotland of the angry peasant revolts or the great surges of collective disturbances which characterized much of French and Irish rural society at that time. The relative stability of the Lowland countryside was especially striking in light of the social dislocation and the systematic attack on customary rights and privileges documented earlier in this chapter and in those which follow. Pain and anxiety must have been inflicted, but anguish and bitterness rarely surfaced above the relative calm of rural life.
Most scholars would accept that no hidden popular uprisings on the scale of the Galloway Levellers in this later period remain to be uncovered by more research. As one historian has remarked: ‘it is highly unlikely that there exists a seam of undiscovered public rural violence in eighteenth-century Scotland’.17 At the same time, however, some writers have criticized the orthodoxy of uniform stability, asserting that public protest was pointless and would inevitably have led to swift retribution by the authorities, so other means had to be employed to defend traditional rights. These would be subtle and clandestine and include sabotage, theft, arson and pilfering.
Rural protest was indeed common in the Scottish Lowlands, but instead of attacks on landlords and farmers it was channelled into collective religious dissent. One scholar has asserted that patronage disputes, caused by opposition to the system whereby a hereditary patron had the right to ‘present’ (or select) the minister of a parish church, represented ‘the most significant Scottish equivalent to rural protest in the rest of the British Isles’.18 The first of these contentions can be tested against a mass of sheriff court records and estate archives. One suggestion is made that ‘indirect’ protest is ‘harder for the historian to discern’.19 In part this may be true. But as earlier chapters in this book have shown, factors and ground officers maintained very close surveillance on their estates and the people who lived on them. It is highly unlikely that serious or systematic destruction of property, physical assault or widespread pilfering would have gone unrecorded in their correspondence, reports, memoranda and journals. The same can be said of the records for seven sheriff courts throughout the Lowlands which have been the subject of close research for this book. These local jurisdictions dealt with petty theft, grazing disputes and right of way, mobbing, assault and enclosing disputes and breaking into private lands, as well as some more serious criminality.
A scrutiny of both sets of material provides little support for the notion that ‘everyday forms of peasant resistance’ were at all common. Only four cases were discovered, among the hundreds of removal actions examined, of refusal to leave land, so that ‘letters of ejection’ had to be issued to enforce eviction. In the court material only one instance came to light of dyke breaking. Those brought to justice were described as ‘White Boys or Levellers’, which had connotations both with peasant gangs in Ireland and the events in Galloway during the 1720s examined in Chapter 5. But this was no agrarian protest. Those prosecuted were all colliers from Ceres in Fife who had broken down part of an enclosure, formerly an open field, so they could walk to the village kirk. A handful of cases of pilfering of wood also came to light. One court process alleged that stealing wood was caused by new landlord controls over common lands. Thus, at the Dunblane court in 1790, seven women were charged with ‘having broken down, leapt over, destroyed fences surrounding the enclosures of William Stirling of Keir, and carried away pailings [sic] of these fences’.20 Two of the women denied the charge but admitted carrying away ‘two small burdens of rotten sticks’. Another went further, questioning ‘If it was or is a Crime to carry off rotten Whins or Broom from any Gentleman’s ground in the neighbourhood without ever being challenged.’21
But, according to the records, incidents like these were uncommon. Indeed, in such a grossly unequal society, undergoing dislocating economic change, the small number of petty misdemeanours which came before the courts is remarkable. The fundamental historical significance, therefore, of this period is not the evidence, slight as it is, of scattered acts of hostility. Rather, it was the extraordinary imbalance between the unprecedented transformation of rural society in the Lowlands on the one hand and the virtual absence of any overt popular opposition to it on the other. Even if future research discovers more incidents of routine resentment, the meaningful question will still remain, not why there were some incidents, but, on the contrary, why there were so few.22
It has been acknowledged earlier in the book that disturbances caused by disputed elections to church offices were common in the Lowlands. One argument is that they reflected not only strong feelings on ecclesiastical governance but also opposition to agrarian improvement. Yet whether that was indeed the case is debatable. The contention places two social trends, agrarian improvement and religious dissent, together and assumes rather than demonstrates a causal link between them. Religious protest encompassed all types of community and took place in virtually every district of Scotland. It cannot be associated solely or mainly with those rural parishes of the Lowlands where cottar removal and tenant reduction occurred.
Equally, the implicit assumption that those who protested over patronage were driven by economic stress and class bitterness hardly convinces. The growth of religious dissent in the eighteenth century was a European phenomenon which took place across a great range of economic and social contexts. By 1826 around one third of Lowland Scots belonged to Presbyterian dissenting congregations and by 1850 nearly 60 per cent of Protestant worshippers no longer belonged to the established church, in large part because of the emergence of the Free Church of Scotland in 1843 and increases in Irish Catholic immigration. At the same date, 47 per cent of English churchgoers were also to be found in Nonconformist congregations. The fracturing of the national churches was based ultimately on changing popular beliefs, the growing appeal of evangelical religion and a broader transformation of British society. It did not reflect developments peculiar to the rural Lowlands of Scotland.
The limited available evidence of the social composition of the dissenting congregations also suggests that a crude class-based analysis of religious dissent and opposition is difficult to accept. Thus in West Calder in West Lothian, one third of the population were Presbyterian dissenters. But they included four landowners, 40 per cent of the tenant farmers and 21 per cent of cottars and day labourers. At Strathaven Burgher church, between 1767 and 1789, 58 per cent of the members’ names on the baptismal role were those of tenants. The sketchy evidence for other areas suggests similar patterns. Dissent drew heavily on the middle ranks of rural society and even a few landowners. It was not a movement exclusively of the poor and dispossessed.
The curious silence of the rural population does not necessarily mean the absence of pain, anxiety, insecurity or misery. But the public tranquillity of the time does demand some explanation. After all, rural society was not naturally peaceful. Food rioting broke out in many parts of the country in 1709–10, 1720, 1740, 1756–7, 1763, 1767, 1771–4, 1778, 1783 and 1794–6. On occasion these eruptions could pose a strong challenge to local forces of law and order. Attacks on custom officials by mob violence were commonplace. The scale and extent of patronage disputes and religious dissent, already discussed, are also revealing. They all show that the Scottish people were not instinctively deferential or submissive to established authority. The fragmentation of Lowland Presbyterianism suggests rather a society with a robust independence of mind and spirit derived from the Calvinist inheritance of the ‘equality of souls’ before God. It was a tradition which helps to explain the social and political radicalism of Scottish Presbyterians in Ulster, most of whom were the descendants of small tenants, cottars and servants who had migrated across the Irish Sea from the western Lowlands in the seventeenth century. The Scottish Militia Riots of 1797 which engulfed several Lowland rural communities were an angry response to the legislation which brought in a form of conscription by ballot for the Scottish militia. For a time also, in the early 1790s, the reform societies incorporated as the Friends of the People briefly threatened the hegemony of the landed political establishment. These illustrations of popular discontent confirm that the people of the Lowlands were not naturally apathetic when customary rights were challenged. It seems likely, therefore, that social stability would indeed have been gravely threatened if the removal of people from the land had caused widespread hardship and destroyed traditional status as in parts of the Highlands. There was indeed a precedent for such disturbance in the Levellers’ Revolt in Galloway described earlier in the book. That the countryside remained quiet in the later decades of dispossession might be explained by the nature of the cottar function, the relocation of cottar families in the expanding villages, small country towns and other settlements, and the buoyant labour market of the rural Lowlands at the height of the removals.
By the later eighteenth century cottars can be described more as proletarians than peasants whose links with land had become very tenuous. They did possess small patches but had to provide labour on neighbouring larger holdings to secure a living. Both pronouncements by Justices of the Peace and sheriff court records suggest that, in law, servants and cottars were defined collectively as dependent labourers and not independent possessors of land. Some information extracted from the records of Cupar sheriff court in Fife confirms the point. Normally the cottars are a shadowy and elusive group in the historical documentation. But depositions given in a legal case of 1758 cast light on some aspects of their way of life. This evidence is presented below. The short biographies in Table 12 illustrate how cottars had both servant and labouring experience, that their families included both cottar and labouring children, and that there was considerable lateral and vertical mobility among them. On the face of it, the distinction between them and the servant class seems very blurred.
Moreover, dissolution of the cottar system coincided with rising employment opportunities as a result of agrarian improvement and the first phase of industrialization. Inevitably there were years of crisis in each of the last three decades of the eighteenth century, notably in 1772–4, 1782–4 and 1795–6. But in most years the rural labour market in the later eighteenth century remained buoyant for both farm and industrial workers. Parish ministers commented on the fact that there were usually jobs in most districts for those who wanted them. Crucial to the future employment of the cottars was the dynamic development of the linen and cotton manufactures. Many cottar families had textile skills and were likely to take advantage of the new opportunities. An examination of the social structure of six rapidly expanding small towns spread across the countryside of Cambuslang, Carstairs, Larkhall, Balmerino, Galston and Kirriemuir confirms the overwhelming importance of textile spinning and weaving in the household, not only for adult males but also for women and girls. Previous discussion has not only stressed that textile industrialization was in many ways a rural phenomenon but that employment in country districts rose as the economic transformation gathered pace. The removal of cottar families was, with clearances in the pastoral districts of the Borders and Lowland hill country, the closest numerical parallel with the level of displacement which took place in the Highlands and Islands. But the cottars were fortunate that eviction did not necessarily mean destitution because of the opportunities which prevailed in the Lowland labour market until the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
Table 12 Life histories of six cottars, Monthrive, Fife, 1758
| Henry Reickie: ‘in Pratis’; married; 52 years = born 1706 |
| History: herded for 1 summer in Monthrive 38 years ago (c.1720) and was a cottar and had beasts pasturing there 3 years sometime after his herding and had lived in Pratis (which adjoins Monthrive) ever since. |
| William Morgan: ‘In Pratis Cottoun’; married; 55 years = born 1703 |
| History: Born and raised in Monthrive, his father being a cottar there. Herded therein 1715 then sent to Nether Pratis and other places, returning in 1721 to herd for one year at Monthrive. Then 2 years in Baliarmo. Then a fewar [tenant of a feu] in different places till 10 years ago when he returned to Nether Pratis, has been a workman at Balbirny’s Cuarry at Clutty Den, for last 7 years. |
| David Dowie: ‘in Lethem Cottoun’; married; 44 years = born 1714 |
| History: Born and raised in Monthrive; 1722–5 herded his father’s beasts; lived at Monthrive till 1727 when he went to Over Pratis for 2½ years; then returned to live with his father for 5 years who was a cottar at Monthrive; has been at Lethem ever since. |
| William Lindsay: ‘in Skelpie Cottoun’; married; 36 years old, thus born in 1722 |
| History: 1739–51 – herd and servant in ‘The Room of Monthrive’. |
| Thomas Honeyman: ‘Cottar in Carskerdo’; married; 56 years – born 1702. |
| History: 1715–16 – herd in West Quarter of Monthrive; 1726–32 – servant in ditto. |
| Thomas Braid: ‘Cottar in Muirhead’; married; 56 years = born 1692 |
| History: c.1713–14 – Herd in Muirhead; c.1714–15 – ‘in the Keam in the neighbourhood …’; c.1715–20 – servant in Monthrive; then ½ year in Cairny as servant; following all as servant: 2½ years Clatto; 2½ years Greenside; ½ year Waltoun; 6 years Cassindilly; 5 years Muirhead; 6 years Tarritmiln; 11 years Scotstarvit; since then in Muirhead. |
| Source: NRS, Sheriff Court Records (Cupar), SC20/5/12. |