T. M.

Devine

THE SCOTTISH CLEARANCES

A History of the Dispossessed 1600–1900

 Contents

List of Annexes
List of Tables
List of Maps
Maps
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations

Introduction

PART ONE
1 Land and Clanship
2 The Long Death of Clanship
3 Before Improvement

PART TWO
4 Forgotten History: Dispossession in the Borders
5 Resistance
6 Transformation and Landlordism
7 Clearance by Stealth
8 Whatever Happened to the Cottars?
9 The Lowlands after Dispossession

PART THREE
10 More People, Less Land
11 Harvesting Men
12 Rejecting the Highlands
13 Passive Victims?
14 Clearance and Expulsion
15 Turning of the Tide
Conclusion

Annexes
Annex A The Highland Clearances as Holocaust: Excerpts
from Popular Histories, 1974–2000
Annex B Tenant Structure on Four Lowland Estates, 1675–
1824
Annex C Summonses and Decreets of Removal: Selected
Lowland Sheriff Courts, 1662–1800
Annex D Estimated Net Out-Migration from Ayr, Angus,
Fife, Lanarkshire, 1755–1790s
Annex E Summons of Removing, Sutherland, 1810
Illustrations
Notes
Bibliography
Glossary
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

T. M. Devine has written four books for Penguin: The Scottish

Nation, Scotland’s Empire, To the Ends of the Earth and
Independence or Union. He is Sir William Fraser Professor Emeritus
of Scottish History and Palaeography at the University of Edinburgh.
In 2001 he was awarded the Royal Gold Medal, Scotland’s supreme
academic accolade, and has won all three major prizes for Scottish
historical research. He was knighted in 2014 for services to the study
of Scottish history. In 2018 he received the UK Parliament’s All Party
History and Archives Group Lifetime Achievement Award for
Historical Studies.
 PENGUIN BOOKS

THE SCOTTISH CLEARANCES

A Daily Telegraph, Herald and Scotsman Book of the Year 2018

‘Scotland’s best modern historian … he make history accessible

backed up with formidable original research … a balanced, detailed
and extremely readable account of one of the saddest events in
Scotland’s history’ Ewen MacAskill, Guardian

‘It is his magnum opus … also provides a final and exquisite stitching
underpinning the tapestry woven through his other great Scottish
histories: To the Ends of the Earth, Scotland’s Empire and
Independence or Union’ Kevin McKenna, The Herald

‘Devine treats the subject with sensitive intelligence … in providing

us with the material which makes it more possible to see history as it
actually was, Sir Tom has written a necessary book’ Allan Massie,
Scotsman

‘In this powerful book Devine lays out the history with admirable
lucidity and comprehensive depth … The processes of
dispossession related in this important book continue to mark
contemporary Scotland. The emptiness of the countryside, north and
south, is marketed as a natural and positive state of affairs. Solitude
and wilderness are valuable commodities today. Tom Devine lays
out, in comprehensive depth, the traumatic process that created
these conditions’ Ewen Cameron, Irish Times

‘In a meticulously detailed history Devine sets the record straight …

there are some notable myth-busting moments and a lot to admire in
this book’ Stuart Kelly, Spectator

‘A giant of Scottish intellectual life, Professor Sir Tom Devine is

always a clear eyed guide to the country’s history … this book is a
 history which still matters’ The Herald

‘Devine’s book should be in every Scottish library, private as well as

public. He is a master … expert in moulding the morass of new
historiographic material into a digestible whole. He writes with
admirable clarity, sticking closely to verifiable information, with two
audiences in mind, one his peers in universities, the other the
reading public’ Alan Taylor, Scottish Review of Books

‘This book is very much in the Devine mould: eloquent, erudite and
comprehensive … his usual trenchant style is also on display. These
features will ensure its relevance to Scottish historical studies for
some considerable time to come’ D. S. Forsyth, Literary Review

‘So much British History is London-centric but T.M. Devine, probably

the foremost historian of Scotland, challenges that’ Simon Heffer,
Daily Telegraph, ‘50 Books that Blew Us Away 2018’

‘Likely to represent the definitive word for at least an academic

generation on this most controversial of topics in Scottish history’
The National

‘Sir Tom Devine has swept away much of the misunderstanding but
has not deadened the story. What he tells is in many respects even
more dramatic’ Brian Morton, The Herald

‘A massively researched work’ Magnus Linklater, The Times

Scotland

‘Scotland’s most important current historian … When it comes to the

Clearances, Devine is again an exhilarating puncturer of myths and
resolver of mysteries. Devine is rigorous, factual, endlessly curious
and unafraid to draw big conclusions. He has made a superb book. It
is crammed with data but is colourful and passionate as well. Anyone
interested in Scottish history needs to read it … it is also a great
contribution to British history’ Andrew Marr, Sunday Times
 ‘A great historian punctuates a national myth. This superb book is
written by a member of the Scottish intellectual aristocracy (Tom
Devine is a knight as well as a professor) which renders its
conclusions almost unassailable. This is a life work … what is
obvious is that the book is massively researched’ David Aaronovitch,
The Times
 In memory of
Malcolm Gray

1918–2008

Historian of Scottish rural society

Few things cry so urgently for rewriting as does Scots
history, as in few aspects of her bastardised culture has
Scotland been so ill-served as by her historians.
The chatter and gossip of half the salons and drawing-
rooms of European intellectualism hang over the antique
Scottish scene like a malarial fog through which peer the
fictitious faces of heroic Highlanders, hardy Norsemen,
lovely Stewart queens, and dashing Jacobite rebels.
Those stage-ghosts shamble amid the dimness, and
mope and mow in their ancient parts with an idiotic vacuity
but a maddening persistence.
Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Hugh MacDiarmid, Scottish
Scene or The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Albyn (1934)
 Annexes

A The Highland Clearances as Holocaust: Excerpts from Popular

Histories, 1974–2000
B Tenant Structure on Four Lowland Estates, 1675–1824
C Summonses and Decreets of Removal: Selected Lowland Sheriff
Courts, 1662–1800
D Estimated Net Out-Migration from Ayr, Angus, Fife, Lanarkshire,
1755–1790s
E Summons of Removing, Sutherland, 1810
 Tables

1. Cottar structure in a Fife fermetoun, 1714

2. Number of sheep driven across the Border to England, 1665–91
3. Population of selected east and central Border parishes, 1755
and 1790s
4. Number of cattle driven across the Border to England, 1665–91
5. Tenant numbers on eleven Lowland estates, 1735–1850
6. Summonses of Removal, Hamilton sheriff court, 1763–84
(available years)
7. Parishes gaining and losing population in the counties of Angus,
Fife, Lanarkshire and Ayrshire, 1790s
8. New and extended settlements, villages and towns in four
Scottish Lowland counties, 1790s
9. Intended improvements on the estate of the Earl of Eglinton in
Ayrshire, 1771
10. References to improvements on Richard A. Oswald’s
possessions in Ayrshire, 1803
11. Men employed in enclosing and planting Hamilton estates,
Lanarkshire lands, March 1774
12. Life histories of six cottars, Monthrive, Fife, 1758
13. The population of South Ross of Mull in mid-century: the effects
of clearance
14. Summonses of Removal as proportion of number of households,
parish of Barvas (Lewis), 1848–53
15. Census areas and population, parish of Barvas (Lewis), 1851
16. Summonses of Removal, island of Lewis, 1848–53
17. Summonses of Removal in kelp parishes, Lewis, 1848–53
 Maps

1 Counties of Scotland
2 Central Lowlands and Borders
3 Central Lowlands
4 Western Highlands and Islands and South-West Highlands
5 Eastern Highlands and the North-East
 List of Illustrations

1. The ruins of Castle Tioram on Loch Moidart in the western

Highlands (Getty)
2. The cairn at Culloden Moor (Alamy)
3. The Runrigs of Corsehill, Eglinton estate, Ayrshire, 1789
(National Records of Scotland, RHP3/20 copyright © Rt Hon Earl
of Eglinton and Winton)
4. A view of the Scottish Borders from Carter Pass (Alamy)
5. Horsefair on Bruntfield Links, Edinburgh, Paul Sandby, 1750
(National Gallery of Scotland. Purchased by Private Treaty 1990)
6. Culzean Castle, Ayrshire (Getty)
7. An improved farm steading, Wester Kittochside, South
Lanarkshire (copyright © Royal Commission on the Ancient and
Historical Monuments of Scotland; C/44446)
8. The village of Tyninghame, East Lothian (copyright © The
Scotsman Publications Ltd)
9. Ploughman and horse team, later nineteenth century (Scottish
Life Archive, National Museums of Scotland)
10. The township of Ormsaigbeg, Ardnamurchan peninsula
(copyright © Heritage Ardnamurchan)
11. Private soldier of 42 Regiment of Foot (© National Museums
Scotland)
12. The Last of the Clan, Thomas Faed, 1865 (Glasgow
Museums/Bridgeman Images)
13. The ruins of the township of Arichonan, Argyll (Alamy)
14. The Hercules (Getty)
15. Marines landing at Uig, Skye, in 1884 (Illustrated London News
Ltd/Mary Evans Picture Library)
 Abbreviations in References

HPL Hamilton Public Library

IC Inveraray Castle Archives
NA National Archives
NLS National Library of Scotland
NRA(S) National Register of Archives (Scotland)
NRS National Records of Scotland
NSA New Statistical Account
OSA First or Old Statistical Account
PP Parliamentary Papers
 Introduction

I have thought, written and taught on several of the issues in this

book for nearly forty years. But this is the first time I have tried to
bring all the parts of a fascinating historical jigsaw into a single
framework. The main purpose of doing so is to consider through a
comparative investigation the dispossession of people from land in
the Highlands and rural Lowlands during that extraordinary period
almost three centuries ago when it can truly be said the modern
nation of Scotland was born.
In 1814 Sir Walter Scott published Waverley, Or, ’tis Sixty Years
Since, a novel which opened at the time of the last Jacobite rising in
1745–6. The book quickly became an international bestseller and
launched Scott into literary stardom. In the preamble to the text he
has the anonymous narrator look back and comment on the previous
six decades of Scottish history from the standpoint of an observer
living in the second decade of the nineteenth century:
There is no European nation, which, within the course of half a
century, or little more, has undergone so complete a change as this
kingdom of Scotland …
The increase of wealth, and extension of commerce, have since
united to render the present people of Scotland a class of beings as
different from their grandfathers as the existing English are from
those of Queen Elizabeth’s time.
For Scott, then, the transformation of his native land was rapid,
profound and comprehensive. A trio of radical developments, all
interacting and taking place simultaneously from the 1760s, had
changed the face and character of the country. These powerful
forces were industrialization, urbanization and agricultural revolution.
This book focuses on the social effects of the last of these at the
time when an old Scotland began to fade into history and the new
age of market capitalism was in the early stages of formation. In the
history of the Scottish Highlands this period has become known as
the Age of the Clearances.
The Highland clearances have not only been a central topic of
historical interest but have also long entered into the popular and
cultural consciousness of Scots both in the homeland and
throughout the global diaspora. It is widely assumed that the removal
of peasant communities took place exclusively north of the Highland
line with the empty glens and remains of crumbling townships in the
hill country bearing mute physical testimony to that fact. The
Canadian writer of Highland ancestry Alistair MacLeod, in his short
story ‘Clearances’, has his main character pay a visit to
Ardnamurchan on the west Highland mainland during the Second
World War. There, in the land which his forefathers had left many
years before to sail across the Atlantic for a new life in Cape Breton,
he begins to grasp for the first time the original meaning of
‘clearance’:
Where once people had lived in their hundreds and their thousands,
there stretched out only the unpopulated emptiness of the vast
estates with their sheep-covered hills or the islands which have
become bird sanctuaries or shooting ranges for the well-to-do. He is
himself as the descendant of victims of history and changing
economic times, betrayed perhaps by politics and poverty as well.
In similar vein, the Scottish novelist Neil Gunn wrote of the deserted
lands of Sutherland from where his own kinfolk, the MacKeamish
Gunns, had long disappeared:
In Kildonan there is today a shadow, a chill, of which any sensitive
mind would, I am convinced, be vaguely aware, though possessing
no knowledge of the clearances. We are affected strangely by any
place from which the tide of life has ebbed. (Caithness and
Sutherland, published 1935)
Few would deny that these evocations are both haunting and
compelling. The Scottish Highlands, contrary to the image projected
in countless tourist brochures, are not one of the last great
wildernesses in Europe but in many parts can be more accurately
described as a derelict landscape from where most of the families
who once lived and worked the soil have long gone. Numerous
townships which had existed from medieval times were cleared or
abandoned in the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth, never
again to be inhabited. A number of commentators then and since
have taken the view that the dispersal of the people across the seas
was caused by greedy landlordism and the brazen subordination of
human need to human profit.
Yet the actual historical record shows that the realities of diaspora
were far from simple. Many more Gaels left the Highlands after the
removals came to an end in the later 1850s than during the age of
the clearances itself. Nor did evictions necessarily cause widespread
depopulation in all parts of the region as they undeniably did in
specific estates, glens, coasts and straths. The decennial censuses
confirm that the population of the Highland counties, with the
exception of Argyll, which reached its peak in 1841, continued to rise
during the clearance period and only started to fall into decline after
the removals came to an end. A thorough scholarly study of one
parish, Morvern in west Argyll, which suffered from clearance on a
particularly extensive scale, estimates that of all the people who left
there in the nineteenth century probably only around a quarter did so
as a direct result of eviction, and it is by no means certain that all
those who were forced from their homes left the parish for
elsewhere.
Nevertheless, the profile of the Highland clearances, nationally
and internationally, is remarkable. By no means confined to historical
writing alone, the subject has also become embedded in works of
fiction, poetry and across the genres of music, drama, film, art and
museology. A selection of the creative output on the subject could
include: Neil Gunn, Butcher’s Broom (1934) and The Silver Darlings
(1945); Fionn MacColla, And the Cock Crew (1945); Iain Crichton
Smith, Consider the Lilies (1968) and Collected Poems (1992);
Kathleen Fidler, The Desperate Journey (1964) – a widely read story
for primary schoolchildren; John McGrath, The Cheviot, the Stag and
the Black, Black Oil (1974), a hugely popular stage play which has
been reprised several times over the years; and the television film
Yet Still the Blood is Strong (1984). The clearances not only have
profound historical resonance but have metamorphosed into an even
broader Scottish cultural and political phenomenon. Even those who
would not claim to know much about the history of the nation have
usually heard about the Highland clearances.
None of the works cited above, however, has ever had the popular
appeal of the biggest selling Scottish history book of all time, John
Prebble’s The Highland Clearances, published for the first time in
1963. Since then it has achieved world-wide sales of more than a
quarter of a million copies and remains to this day the most widely
read text on any aspect of Scottish history in North America. Recent
research among the diaspora across the Atlantic has confirmed that
the clearances are known there primarily by a reading of Prebble’s
book, some historical fiction, consulting a few websites and visiting
heritage centres on trips to Scotland which draw on the same written
sources. The Highland Clearances is part of a Highland trilogy, Fire
and Sword, which also includes Culloden (1961) and Glencoe
(1966). In the foreword to Glencoe, Prebble wrote: ‘I have written this
book because its story is, in a sense, a beginning to what I have
already written about Culloden and the clearances – the destruction
of the Highland people and their way of life.’
John Prebble (1915–2001) was born in England but emigrated,
aged six, to Canada with his parents, later returning to the UK as a
young boy of twelve. It is suggested that early friendships among
members of the Scottish emigrant communities in Canada first
stimulated his interest in Highland history. He joined the Communist
Party of Great Britain as an adult but left it after the end of the
Second World War. However, Prebble never lost his critical approach
to the human impact of market capitalism, or sympathy for its
victims.
Some scholars have rubbished The Highland Clearances as a
work of faction, or a fusion of fact and fiction, rather than a serious
history. Predictably the book rarely features in the prescribed reading
lists of Scottish universities, except perhaps as an exemplar of
partisan historical interpretation. I recall a colleague once setting
students the essay question: ‘Prebble’s The Highland Clearances is
not a good history but it is a good novel. Discuss.’
But most readers seem not to care about the ferocious criticisms
which the volume has sometimes attracted from members of the
academy. For the general public, Prebble tells a compelling story in
very readable prose presented as a dramatic saga of betrayal, loss,
tragedy and forced exile of the Highland clans from their native glens
which in his interpretation remain empty to this day as silent
memorials of man’s inhumanity to man.
The author makes his own position perfectly clear from the outset:
‘This is the story of how the Highlanders were deserted and then
betrayed. It concerns itself with people, how sheep were preferred to
them, and how bayonet, truncheon and fire were used to drive them
from their homes.’ The book is an accessible and fluent read, in part
because the author does not even try to come to grips with any of
the many challenging complexities of Highland history. Those in the
dock are always the former chieftains of the clans, by the later
eighteenth century transformed into commercial landlords, whose
greed, Prebble insists, led them to sacrifice their erstwhile clansmen
for filthy lucre. At root, indeed, the volume is concerned with a
classic struggle between the forces of good (the defenceless people
of the Highlands) and evil (the brutal landlords and their callous
lackeys, the notorious factors (estate managers) of ill fame).
Prebble’s perspective on clearances had been fashioned by almost a
century of polemic, political and fictional writing which stretched back
into the Victorian era. Most of the documentation in the book relies
on these earlier works with little evidence of original research by the
author. Almost all of this passionate oeuvre was produced at the
height of Victorian controversies about clearances between the
1840s and the 1880s. It was deeply sympathetic to the people who
had been displaced, strongly supportive of the vital need for land
reform and bitterly hostile to what was seen as oppressive and brutal
landlordism.
However, there was one significant and salient gap in the genre.
No academic history of clearance based on original sources was
published until the second half of the twentieth century. Popular
accounts were therefore in the vanguard over many decades while
the professionals lagged very far behind in their research and
writing. Scottish historians in the universities before the great
expansion from the 1960s were few and far between, and most of
those who were active in research and writing tended to focus on the
history of the independent nation before 1707. The new Burnett-
Fletcher Professor of History at Aberdeen stated in his inaugural
lecture in 1964 that modern Scottish history was less studied than
the history of Yorkshire. Malcolm Gray’s pathbreaking The Highland
Economy 1750–1850, published in 1957, was an exception, but even
in that book clearances appeared only incidentally in the text. Not
until 1982 did a professional historian attempt to tackle the subject in
a comprehensive fashion, with the appearance of Eric Richards’s A
History of the Highland Clearances. Since then a number of books
have been published on aspects of clearance. The new interest in
the subject from the 1960s has helped to influence current political
debates in the devolved Scottish Parliament on land reform.
At the time of the clearances, there were vitriolic contemporary
condemnations of landed iniquity from the pens of Robert Allister,
Eric Findlater, Thomas Muloch, Donald Ross and others, though
their writings have now been largely forgotten and are mainly of
interest to scholars of Highland history. More influential and potent
by far in the fashioning of modern thinking were the books by Donald
MacLeod and Alexander Mackenzie published in the later nineteenth
century. Prebble himself admitted that it was reading MacLeod’s
Gloomy Memories of the Highlands of Scotland, subtitled The
Extirpation of the Celtic Race from the North of Scotland, which first
drew him to write on the history of the Highlands. Mackenzie’s
History of the Highland Clearances (1883) was published at the time
of the great crofting agitation of the 1880s and the Royal
Commission chaired by Lord Napier into crofting conditions in that
same decade. The book brought reports of several evictions together
in one volume and catalogued the misdeeds of landlordism at
considerable length. It was a formidable compendium, overtly
propagandist and designed to support the crofters’ cause by
publicizing the injustices of clearance. The volume was published at
a time when the Liberal Party and some radical politicians were
engaged in a much wider assault on the privileges of landlordism
throughout Britain. Indeed, at the time clearances came to epitomize
the abuse of landed power and the vital need for land reform, which
from that point on was rarely off the political agenda in the years
before the Great War.
The events in the Highlands also stirred much interest and
condemnation outside Scotland. Most famously, Karl Marx, in
Chapter 27 of Das Kapital (1867), railed against the clearances as a
primary exemplar of peasant expropriation and the ‘reckless
terrorism’ which had usurped communal rights in the name of private
property.
Until John Prebble and Ian Grimble’s The Trial of Patrick Sellar,
published in the early 1960s, few other focused accounts of the
removals appeared. But literary works by Neil Gunn and Fionn
MacColla had kept interest alive in the 1930s and 1940s. Earlier,
scathing attacks on landed élites in general had been integral
elements of the polemics by the Labour politician Tom Johnston,
later Secretary of State for Scotland in Churchill’s government during
the Second World War. His bestselling Our Scots Noble Families
(1909) and History of the Working Classes in Scotland (1920)
skilfully linked the political quest for political reform directly with the
story of the removals in the Highlands.
Since Prebble wrote, others have followed his lead and sometimes
gone even further in the intensity of their rhetoric. Clearances in
some texts have taken on a modern meaning as harbingers of
twentieth-century ethnic cleansing while others even claim in works
published over the last few decades that a genocide had been
committed in the Highlands and the fate of the cleared Gaels bears
comparison to that of the Jews, gypsies, mental patients and
homosexuals who suffered in the Nazi death camps. (See Annex A
for a sample of these views.) The campaign mounted in recent years
to tear down the massive statue to the first Duke of Sutherland,
which towers on Ben Braggie, above the town of Golspie on the east
coast of Sutherland, has been justified because it is ‘the Murderer’s
Monument’. The 100-foot memorial to the Duke, or the ‘Mannie’ as it
is known locally, has had graffiti sprayed on it with the word ‘Monster’
in green paint. As recently as 2011 two large sandstone sections of
the plinth were removed and more stones have been extracted from
it since then. The police believe there is an ongoing campaign to
topple the edifice once and for all.
It was of some significance that The Highland Clearances first
achieved bestseller status in Scotland during the late 1960s and
1970s, when the country first began to experience the early stages
of deindustrialization and rising levels of unemployment as the
postwar boom petered out and politically Scotland started to move
mainly to the left. For some the history of the evictions became a
symbol for the emerging tragedy of an economy in decline, the social
impact of deindustrialization sometimes being described as a
modern clearance.
This was also the time when Scottish nationalism finally achieved
some electoral purchase with Winnie Ewing’s famous victory in the
Hamilton by-election of 1967. Nationalism, clearances and
victimhood soon became intimately linked by some polemicists, a
tendency which has continued to the present day through the
proliferation of social media. The contentions were that the historic
tragedy of the Gaels had taken place during the Union and
sometimes also, against all the evidence, that English landowners
and sheep farmers were mainly responsible for the draconian acts of
eviction.
The roots of Scottish heritage were starting to attract new interest
at the same time as part of a broader ethnic revival in folk culture,
tales and song which was proving popular throughout the Western
world. Genealogy and family history became fashionable as more
and more people became interested in finding out where they had
come from and the origins of their personal identities. It was in those
decades too that the first glimmers of sartorial neo-Highlandism
started to come to the fore. Kilts, sporrans and tartans, formerly
favoured almost exclusively by the county set and Scottish military,
began to be worn more often at weddings, formal events and
graduation ceremonies, though the remarkable universality of
Highland dress at those occasions still lay in the future. As
Highlandism became more influential, Highland symbolism came to
be even more significant as an important marker of Scottish identity,
so ensuring that the saga of the clearances could now be
incorporated into the heritage of all Scots whatever their ancestral
local and regional background. This neo-Highlandism built on the
huge earlier influence of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels in
Victorian times which invested the Highlands with an extraordinary
romantic aura and magical appeal.
John Prebble himself never claimed to be a historian and always
referred to himself as a historical writer. He seems to have been
surprised and somewhat taken aback by the storm of criticism
generated by his book. Some thought the furore simply reflected
jealousy on the part of an academic establishment whose works
might be scholarly and rigorous but could never hope to achieve a
fraction of Prebble’s sales. It is also fair to say that he had tackled an
important and controversial subject which most historians up until
that point had studiously ignored or consciously avoided. But
scholars were also right to be concerned that a book which some of
them believed to be riven by bias and distortion, as well as being
under-researched and devoid of much critical perspective, had been
widely accepted by the public as the authentic chronicle of
clearance.
Yet Prebble’s publishing success is only the most remarkable
example of the lure of the Scottish Highlands for all kinds of writers
and artists. Academic historians have also succumbed to the same
seduction in recent times. At the last count, more than fifty research-
based books have been published since about 1980 on aspects of
the history of the Highlands since the eighteenth century. The appeal
and romance of the Jacobite Risings partly explain this
phenomenon, though books on that subject make up a relatively
small proportion of the overall publication list. One distinguished but
sceptical professor a few years ago was so annoyed by this
explosion of writing on one region that he wrote an article in a
learned journal protesting that there was simply ‘too much Highland
history’. But his complaint had no effect as studies of the Highlands
continued to pour from the university presses. The professor was
undeniably correct, however, to claim a gross imbalance in scholarly
productivity. Over the last four decades, fewer than half a dozen
monographs have been published on the history of the rural
Lowlands, the part of the country where the great majority of non-
urban Scottish people lived, not only today but at the time of the
evictions.
In terms of popular writing, and a range of genres from fiction to
drama, which has sustained interest in the Highland story of loss of
land, the imbalance is, if anything, even more striking. No oral
tradition, folk memory of dispossession, poetry of tragedy or words of
lament surround the Lowland experience of land loss. Only one book
to date has the title The Lowland Clearances (2003). Published
fourteen years ago, it was compiled by two former BBC Scotland
journalists, Andrew Cassell and Peter Aitchison, and is based on an
excellent Radio Scotland series they presented and which featured a
number of historians as expert commentators. The book is written in
an accessible style but its history since publication stands in stark
contrast to Prebble’s stellar success. The publishers only decided
recently to go ahead with a first reprint after a campaign on the
internet convinced them to do so. By way of comparison, the new
edition of a popular guide to clearance sites in the Highlands, The
Highland Clearances Trail (2006), has been reprinted eight times in
the last six years.
Does this very low profile imply that a concept such as ‘the
Lowland clearances’ is either myth or a most remarkable sidelining
of a central part of modern Scottish history? Certainly the idea
remains controversial, even for some historians, and as a modern
coinage has yet to achieve much appeal or interest among the
general public. Lowland rural society has in fact long been one of the
Cinderella subjects of Scottish history. Scotland had become one of
the most urbanized countries on earth by the middle decades of the
nineteenth century, and it is perhaps not surprising that a nation
which has overwhelmingly lived in towns and cities for generations
has lost interest in much of its rural past.
Of course, in addition, and crucially, the Lowlands cannot match in
any way the human appeal of the story north of the Highland line, set
as it is against a background of romantic mythology and world-
renowned natural beauty. The Highlands are more than a
geographical region for most Scots but have become an iconic land
which helps to define their identity and has repeatedly been used to
imagine the Scottish nation in story, art, music and film. That
unofficial national anthem (or dirge, depending on one’s opinion),
‘Flower of Scotland’, has the famous line: ‘That fought and died for /
your wee bit hill and glen’.
For much of the rest of the world, indeed, a once renowned
Victorian centre of industry has metamorphosed into a Highland
country. The ‘land of the mountain and the flood’ adorns numerous
tourist posters, and the familiar symbols of Scottish identity, tartan,
kilts, clans and bagpipes, are all of Highland origin. When Europeans
‘play Scots’, as groups of people in several countries of northern
Europe, stretching from Russia to Holland, have bizarrely begun to
do in recent years, they wear Highland dress, take part in Highland
games, become members of pipe bands and masquerade as kilted
soldiers in military enactments.fn1 It is said that, during his numerous
popular concerts throughout the world, the renowned
violinist/conductor André Rieu and his orchestra achieve most
emotional impact on audiences with the haunting tune ‘Highland
Cathedral’, composed by two Germans, Ulrich Roever and Michael
Korb, for a Highland Games held in Germany in 1982. The music is
usually set against the backdrop of a Highland castle and massed
pipe bands ranked across the stage. Highland culture, whether in
authentic or invented form, has an extraordinary glamour which has
marginalized the history of the rural Lowlands.
Nowhere is this more visible than in the USA. At the last count,
there were 160 American ‘clan societies’, nearly 2,000 pipe bands,
over 150 Highland-dancing schools and seventy Highland Games.
The sense of identity of those who take part depends on a cult of
Highlandism invented and embroidered in Scotland during Victorian
times. Many third- and fourth-generation American Scots share the
view that Scottish emigration across the Atlantic came from the
Highlands and was initiated by force and coercion. The boring reality
is that the vast majority left from the farms, towns and cities of the
Lowlands and were mainly attracted to North America because they
saw it as a fabled land of opportunity to achieve a better life. The
mythology, however, has it that the ancestors were driven from their
homeland by the collapse of the Jacobite Risings, post-Culloden
ethnic cleansing and, above all, by ‘the clearances’. The key sources
for these beliefs are John Prebble’s books, a few novels and films,
and more recently the hugely popular Outlander fantasy series, now
widely televised, by the American author Diana Gabaldon, which is
based on time travel between the 1940s and the eighteenth century.
‘Roots Tourism’ to Scotland has a similar bias. Whatever the
geographical origins of their families, visitors often admit to feeling a
strong and special empathy with the Highlands and its history of
exile, victimhood and dispossession. The story is told of one Texan
lady of Scottish ancestry who was much disappointed when
genealogical researchers reported that her forebears came from the
industrial Lowland town of Motherwell rather than a cleared township
in Skye.
It would be impossible to alter the marginalization of the rural
Lowlands in popular culture as Highlandism and its associated
mythologies are just too deeply embedded and potent in the popular
imagination for such an attempt to have any chance of success.
However, it might be more realistic to address the much more limited
question of historiographical imbalance in relation to the single issue
of dispossession from land. The definition of ‘clearance’ is now
subject to broader scholarly interpretation than it was in the
nineteenth century, when the term came into popular usage for the
first time. Then it referred exclusively to the removal, usually by
force, of traditional peasant communities in the Highlands in order to
make way for sheep farms. But modern scholarship has shown that
that time-honoured concept of ‘the clearances’ cannot capture the
full range and complexity of the actual historical experience of
dispossession.
The historical geographer Robert Dodgshon has argued
convincingly on the basis of research published in recent years that:
 whilst the wholesale clearance of touns (the standard farm unit in
Scotland before improvement) to make way for sheep is still rightly
seen as the prime means by which many highland touns were
restructured, it is clear that a significant number did not experience a
clearance of this kind.
We have long known that many along the western seaboard were
tidied up into newly configured crofting townships rather than
cleared. Others experienced a clearance but via a gradual reduction
in tenant numbers. Still others were reorganised or divided up into
small consolidated farms.
Finally, a sizeable number of highland touns did not undergo any
form of fundamental structural change at all, other than enclosure, in
their transition to modern forms since, even by the time they first
appear in late seventeenth century rentals, they were held and
worked as single tenancies.1
This perspective now makes more achievable the task of carrying
out a comparative analysis which covers both Highland history and
the much less familiar narrative of what happened in the rural
Lowlands. It might even be that the evolution of the two regions had
more in common than implied in the older historiography. Equally,
however, demographic, economic, cultural and geographical
differences between the two might explain why dispossession in the
Highlands is remembered while loss of land by communities in the
Lowlands has for the most part been ignored and forgotten except by
a few scholars.
The Scottish experience of rural transformation was a national
variant of broader developments in Europe. A primary determinant
across the Continent and in Britain as a whole was a sustained
revolution of increasing population which soon generated immense
pressures on traditional modes of food production. In the past, a
significant rise in humans had usually hit barriers of disease, harvest
failure and other natural disasters. As a result any surge in numbers
eventually tended to fall away. Thomas Malthus in his seminal text,
An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), argued that
population had a tendency to grow as increases in food supply
improved human health and well-being. Equally, however, the rise in
numbers would be transitory because more people would soon press
upon the capacity of agriculture to feed extra mouths, thus causing
susceptibility to disease and famine. Mortality crises would then cut
back the size of populations to the earlier levels which had existed
before the increase. This so-called ‘Malthusian trap’ was one
explanation for the cataclysmic rise in death rates and mass
emigration associated with the Great Famine in Ireland of the 1840s.
Elsewhere, however, a revolution in food production based on higher
grain yields, innovative crop rotations, developments in long-distance
transportation and improved organization of farming ensured the trap
was not sprung in most parts of Western Europe.
To achieve this positive result, different nations and regions took a
wide spectrum of routes to agrarian modernization. In France it took
the form of assertion of peasant individualism and the eradication of
feudal controls during and after the Revolution. In Denmark it was
the state which was influential and tried to achieve some social
equity in the distribution of improved holdings. In Scotland, and much
of mainland Britain, the pattern was different again with landed
magnates deploying their power to introduce far-reaching changes
from above. Some of their decisions resulted in dispossession of
traditional rural communities on a large scale. As a result only a
small minority of the many families who once had access to some
land still remained in possession by the time this social and
economic revolution had come to an end.
This is the first book to examine this historic transformation of
Highland and Lowland Scotland in a single study which also tries to
draw comparisons and contrasts between the two regions as well as
showing awareness of the mosaic of differences within them. As
such it does not claim to be a definitive study. The objective has
rather been to mark out the parameters for what happened, engage
with some of the more salient questions and attempt to provide
interim answers to them. The themes of the book range across
traditional society, clanship, the origins and impact of rural change,
protest and stability, emigration, landlordism, peasant mentalities
and migration. At its core, however, is the central issue of
dispossession from land, how it came about and how such loss
affected the peoples of rural Scotland wherever they lived.
Predictably, most of the sources for the period record the perspective
of landowners, managers, clerics, accountants, trustees and middle-
class travellers rather than those directly affected by the momentous
changes experienced by innumerable tenants, crofters, cottars and
labourers. But, as the book will try to demonstrate, much invaluable
information can be gleaned from these records about society at all
levels, as long as the limitations of such sources are acknowledged
and taken into account. Nevertheless, the people are not always
mute and silent. Every effort has been made to allow them to speak,
either through the evidence they gave to several government
enquiries, the memories of observers sympathetic to their interest
and, most crucially of all, their own repository of ballad, poetry, song
and story.
What follows is organized in three parts. Part One considers the
nature of traditional societies before widespread dispossession
began. Part Two analyses the roots of fundamental social change
and focuses on the loss of land in the Border and Lowland regions.
Finally, Part Three concentrates on clearances, their origins and
effects, in the Highlands. Throughout, comparative comment alerts
the reader to similarities and differences between these areas of the
country as well as within them.
The annexes that follow the main text are primarily for the interest
of scholars and those who may wish to explore the more detailed
evidence supporting some of the arguments in the book.
Part One
 1

Land and Clanship

Nowadays the Scottish Highlands have immense global appeal as a

region of magical natural beauty. Towering peaks, remote glens and
silent lochs feature in innumerable films, works of art and countless
tourist brochures. In that different place the jaded traveller can hope
to escape to a world which promises spiritual renewal and restful
refreshment far away from the strains and stresses of modern life.
Yet, in the perspective of history, that popular image of the Highlands
is a modern invention which became fashionable only from the very
late eighteenth century. First created during the Romantic era as a
direct consequence of a revolution in aesthetics and visual taste at
that time, the iconography then became shaped by new concepts of
scenic beauty, the picturesque and the sublime, which transformed
how humans saw and experienced their natural environment.
Before that time the conventional perception of the Highland
landscape was radically different. Mist-covered mountains situated
alongside vast stretches of desolate moorland stirred feelings of
foreboding and melancholy rather than emotions of awe. In his
famous journey of 1773 to the Western Isles across the hill country
of the mainland, Dr Samuel Johnson found himself repelled and
ultimately depressed by the ‘wide extent of hopeless sterility’ which
he encountered on his travels.1 Nearly forty years before, the
English military engineer Captain Edmund Burt saw the
neighbourhood around Inverness as ‘a dismal gloomy Brown … and
most of all disagreeable, when the Heath is in Bloom’. For Burt, bens
and glens clothed in purple heather during the months of autumn
were therefore ugly and sinister and not in any way bonnie or
appealing.2 Even in 1800, by which time the aesthetic revolution was
already in its early stages, the author of The General Gazetteer or
Compendious Geographical Directory could report on the ‘North
division of the country’ as ‘chiefly an assembly of vast dreary
mountains’.3
This was the land of the Highland clans from their origins in early
medieval times until their disintegration in the eighteenth century.

1
Scottish Gaeldom, An Gaidhealtachd, literally ‘the Place of the Gael’,
lay north and west of the Highland Boundary Fault which crosses
Scotland in a line from the town of Helensburgh in the south-west to
Stonehaven in the north-east. The core geographical region includes
the counties of Argyll, Ross and Cromarty, Sutherland and
Inverness, but in earlier times ‘the Highlands’ also encompassed in
linguistic and cultural terms the western and northern districts of
Aberdeenshire, Angus, Perthshire and Stirlingshire. Not all the lands
of the clans lay in impenetrable mountain country. Several of the
inner and outer Hebridean islands, and especially the foothills of the
main Highland massif to the east and south, contained districts of
relatively flat and productive land. Even in the harsher landscape to
the north and west, the people tended to settle mainly on the
scattered pieces of arable land which could be found discontinuously
across an otherwise barren terrain.
No matter where they lived, however, living conditions for the
Gaels were hard and often challenging in the extreme. Only a small
fraction of the land, later reckoned to be around 9 per cent of the
whole, was suitable for cultivation. But even this scarce arable was
often split into mere patches rather than formed in the continuous
stretches characteristic of most parts of the Scottish Lowlands.
Some places, such as the Kintyre peninsula, the islands of Tiree and
Islay, and the western coastlands of the Outer Isles, did indeed have
a reputation for fertility. But most other areas were much less
favoured. It was said in Victorian times, for instance, that of four
parishes in north-west Sutherland only a one-hundredth part of the
soil there had ever been cultivated. Even in some more southerly
districts, closer to the Lowlands, arable was often in short supply.
Thus in the parish of Lochgilphead in south Argyll, nineteenth-
century estimates suggest that only a tiny one-fifteenth of the land
surface had ever been under the plough.
Settlement in the western Highlands and Islands was mainly
confined to very limited areas because of the challenging constraints
of geology, climate and geography. Therefore, when modern visitors
contemplate hills and glens which are empty of people, they should
not assume that they were inhabited in the past or that their present
silence and loneliness were necessarily the consequence of later
clearance or emigration.
A historical demographer has recently analysed General William
Roy’s great map of Scotland, drawn between 1747 and 1755 and
hence before the period of convulsive change. He concludes:
This [the Roy map] shows settlements as clusters of red dots
reflecting small groups of houses that dominated settlement patterns
before the reorganisations of the following hundred or more years.
The overwhelming impression for the whole of the land north and
west of the Great Glen is vast areas of higher land with no houses at
all. Lower down, even the most densely populated inland straths
seldom show sets of red dots located less than about half a kilometre
apart in the lower reaches; in their middle sections there are rarely
less than one per kilometre; and higher up they peter out almost
entirely.
Many straths and glens were much less settled than this, with just
a few scattered settlements where the land allowed. Some strips of
coastline had rather denser patches of settlement spread out for a
few kilometres, but in the mid eighteenth century most of the coast
was completely without houses or had just odd groups clustered on a
headland or around the head of a small bay.fn1
Other constraints made the Highlands a risk-laden environment for
the people who scratched a living from the land. Climatic conditions
were among the most hazardous. A historical geographer has
commented:
 extreme events, including gales, storms, floods and blizzards, were
all capable of devastating crops and stock in a matter of hours. On a
larger or longer time-scale, poor seasons, especially when two or
more ran in succession, could have equally devastating effect on a
regional scale. Cold, wet summers could leave farmers with a
harvest barely sufficient to match the seed used whilst long, hard
winters could thin herds and flocks dramatically if little shelter was
available, or could make it difficult to sow crops until well into the
normal growing season.4
The western Highlands and Islands in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries were likely to experience partial crop failure once in every
three years. Severe shortages were recorded in 1671, 1680, 1680,
1688, 1695 and 1702. Between 1647 and 1707, one of the most
intensely cold and stormy phases of the Little Ice Age afflicted many
parts of Europe. The migration of Arctic sea ice southwards caused
mean temperatures to fall steeply in the Highlands while districts
along the western seaboard and across the Hebrides were fully
exposed to increased risk of storm. Some tounships in the most
vulnerable parishes were temporally abandoned altogether by their
inhabitants during this period. The worst crisis came with the onset
of the so-called ‘Lean Years’ in the 1690s, when successive harvest
failures resulted in famine, disease and increased mortality across
the whole of Scotland. The most recent estimates suggest that the
population of the country as a whole fell by as much as 15 per cent
as a result of sharp rises in mortality and the related mass
emigration of famine refugees from south-west Scotland and the
southern Highlands across the North Channel to Ulster. The
available evidence also indicates that death rates were probably
higher in the Highlands and Islands than elsewhere in Scotland.
The disasters of the Lean Years were triggered by an especially
acute but ephemeral climatic deterioration in the later seventeenth
century, which for a time also gripped Scandinavia, France, Holland
and the German states. More common were the routine natural
hazards of life in Gaeldom. Many communities in the Uists, Harris,
Bernera, Coll and Tiree grew their grain crop on the rich machair
lands of the western coastal fringes. The machair was made up of
calciferous sand which the people continuously fertilized by animal
manure and seaweed. But cultivating these soils increased the risks
of erosion especially when severe storms struck. In the 1750s, for
instance, sandstorms frequently overwhelmed both settlements and
arable in the Hebrides while the low-lying nature of the coastal areas
also made them vulnerable to inundation by sea storms. A similar
problem of flooding in cultivated stretches was common beside rivers
in the glens of the central and northern Highlands. Estate surveys of
the time were replete with evidence of lands lost and peasant
holdings swept away. The experience of farmers in Glen Shira (near
Inveraray in Argyll) would not have been unusual. It was said that the
people there were able to catch salmon where they had previously
ploughed because serious flooding had altered the river channels.
These natural challenges meant that the returns on grain to the
people in most parts of the north and west in medieval and early
modern times were often meagre at best and seriously deficient at
worst. Life for the mass of the people must have been a constant
struggle to survive. It was far from the idyllic existence portrayed by
later writers politically sympathetic to the Gaels during the Age of the
Clearances. The endemic poverty of the western Highlands was one
reason why the Scottish state took so long to impose its authority
throughout the territory. If the resource base of the region had been
richer and more productive, governments would probably have been
tempted at a much earlier time to establish a more effective
dominion over the north-west and insular districts.
Yet, while much of the terrain only provided poor crops, having
some land, however tiny, was vital to the survival of each family. For
this was a subsistence-based society where virtually all the
necessities of life had to come directly from the land. The common
food and drink crops were oats and bere (a hardy form of barley),
both grown for their resilience in a harsh climate rather than because
they were likely to be a source of increased yields, especially as the
growing season was shorter than elsewhere in Scotland. Oats were
the dietary staple throughout the Highlands, while from bere came
ale and, later, whisky. The universal fuel was peat or turf, dug out
from the boglands in spring, stacked and dried during the summer
months as fuel for the long Highland winter.
Construction of the dwellings of the people also drew on
perishable organic materials such as turf, straw, heather and ferns,
not only for roofs but also for walling. The stone-built houses whose
remains litter many parts of the western Highlands and Islands today
came much later. Indeed, passing travellers often found it difficult to
make out at a distance the settlement clusters of township huts as
they merged so completely into the surrounding heath and moorland.
Contemporary accounts also suggest that these habitations were
rarely permanent fixtures. Thatch was recycled annually and turf
walls and wattle interiors were usually taken down every three years
or so, with the organic matter then used as compost and field
manure. The extent and frequency with which the most basic
materials used in the traditional house were renewed meant that
most dwellings seem to have passed through regular cycles of
construction and deconstruction.
Wool from the small sheep of the region was a primary raw
material for spinning, weaving and dyeing, routine labours
throughout the year. That the amount of cloth worked up was
considerable is confirmed by the volume of plaid which is often
documented in rental accounts. The household crafts also turned out
brogues made from raw hides with leather tanned from bark. Until
the sixteenth century, when some cash payments started to become
more common, the rentals paid by the peasantry to their chiefs and
leading gentry consisted overwhelmingly of produce extracted from
the land. These payments in kind included livestock, grain, fish,
poultry, cloth and whisky. As will be shown later, the distribution of
land was also fundamental to the cohesion of clanship and to the
prestige and power of those at the top of the social pyramid.
A few items, of course, had to be imported from elsewhere. These
included salt, for preserving fish, and iron in small quantities for
some farming implements and the fashioning of weapons. Most
crucial, however, was wood. The evidence from Major-General
William Roy’s military map of 1755 suggests that on the Highland
mainland woodland cover was only a little over 3 per cent of the
whole, though later figures place it slightly higher. Wood for the
making of ploughs, hoes, spade handles and room partitions was
therefore very highly prized. Above all in importance were the roof-
couples for dwellings. They would be carried from place to place as
families moved and were often passed down from one generation to
another. The value of timber can be confirmed by the fact that on
leaving a holding tenants were usually allowed to take both roof-
couples and doors with them on their departure.

2
The universal unit of settlement in the pre-clearance Highlands was
the township or baile. Usually consisting of around four to twenty
families, and sometimes more, they were scattered across the
landscape in pockets of scarce arable along the glens and
coastlands of the west. Some took the form of nucleated holdings,
but most were dispersed settlements reflecting the patchy nature of
good land outside the richer terrain of the southern and eastern
fringes of the Highlands and the more fertile lands of some of the
islands. Two key aspects of these communities stand out. First was
the universal social need for a stake in the land, however small.
Second were the close links of kindred which meant that tenants with
married children by custom divided land among them. If population
only rose and fell within traditional limits, these traditions were
tolerable. But when in the future numbers increased in any sustained
way, this form of partible inheritance threatened demographic
disaster by pulverizing holdings which were originally only ever
enough to support single families.
In addition to the tenants, the bailes were also populated by
people whose names did not feature in the rental books. These
‘cottars’ held even tinier plots of land because of familial ties to
tenants or in return for labour services on bigger holdings.
Communities were therefore held together seamlessly with all having
some access to land, however minuscule, so vital was it for daily
existence and subsistence. Almost all families were able to graze a
few cattle, goats and sheep on the grasslands of the less fertile
areas around the township and the hill country beyond. But the
distribution of land also had a key social and economic purpose as
the resource foundation of clan society:
Land in the Highlands … was laid out not so much to ensure an
effective agricultural economy as to stabilize a class structure and to
verify mutual obligations. It passed from proprietor to tacksman to
small tenant, from tenant to subtenant, from subtenant to cottar or
servant. At each stage some ground would be kept in immediate
occupation, but the rest would be handed down, as an earnest of
kinship, or to ensure rent, loyalty, service, each linked with the next in
mutual obligation.5
To eighteenth-century ‘improving’ writers the weaknesses of a social
system of this kind were self-evident. They took the view that it was
impossible for a class of richer peasants to emerge from a society
where limited land was so fragmented and the potential for capital
accumulation further constricted by communal working and
traditional custom. But these thinkers judged the past in terms of
their own age rather than by those of the world of clanship. The
effects of kinship obligation and the use of land in return for labour
services meant that the precious asset had to be distributed widely
rather than settled in a small number of dominant peasant families.
Differences in wealth between tenants do not seem to have been
thought significant and little evidence of any striving for greater social
status or more material gain within the structure of clanship has
come to light. Crucially, also, in the heyday of clanship chiefs had a
powerful rationale to pack large numbers of warriors into their lands
at a time when the building up of military power was much more
important than the augmentation of rent rolls.
Nevertheless, this tribal society was not lacking in enterprise or the
creative ability to adapt to the challenges of living in a harsh
environment. Township land was laid out in the runrig tradition by
which the shares of each tenant were scattered across the arable in
intermixed strips which were often regularly subject to reallocation in
order to ensure reasonably fair access to good and bad soils. Rarely,
outside the southern and eastern Highlands and some other
favoured areas, was the arable configured in compact blocks, as in
most of the Highlands the good ground was separated out by ridges,
moor, bog and waterlogged areas. The traditional township and
runrig cultivation are sometimes depicted as unchanging archaic
structures inherited from an antique past and frozen in time. In fact
adaptation and change were integral features of the townships in the
old Highlands. The most striking change was an increase in the
region’s capacity to rear cattle and with that the great expansion of
the droving trade to the Lowlands and England.
This was a salient example of how the comparative advantage of
Gaeldom could be exploited. Deficient in arable resources, the
Highlands had rough pasture in plentiful supply, enabling the region
to become a specialist centre for the breeding, though not fattening,
of small black cattle. Costly investment in transport infrastructure
was unnecessary. Stock went on the hoof to the Lowland cattle
markets of Crieff and Falkirk for onward sale. So much did their
tracks become accustomed to the repeated imprint of man and beast
that they came to be known in time as the ‘drove roads’. By the
middle decades of the seventeenth century, the export trade in cattle
embraced all the Highlands and Islands. In the 1680s, for instance,
herds of 1,000 head of cattle making their way south were not an
unusual sight. Indeed, clan society provided an effective business
structure for the droving trade. The contract covering the whole of
the land settled by a clan and its satellites was negotiated by leading
families with drovers from the Lowlands. Gathering in of stock would
then be organized from individual townships by the clan gentry, and
the market value of the tenants’ cattle was settled and recorded as
payments against their book rentals.
This major increase in cattle exports provided a novel flexibility to
this subsistence-based economy and, not surprisingly, the balance of
activity within the peasant holdings soon began to change as a
result. The mixed economy of the townships was able to switch more
land from arable to pasture and use the purchasing power released
by droving to buy meal from more favoured Lowland areas on the
fringes of the Highlands. Meat was rarely consumed in Gaeldom as
animals were too precious a potential cash commodity for them to be
sacrificed as a source of food. So sales of stock provided the
purchasing power to buy in the vital supplies of meal. Indeed, by the
middle decades of the eighteenth century, contemporaries observed
that large parts of the central and western Highlands were only able
to subsist by large importations of meal. It was said, for instance,
that: ‘This country [Gairloch] and all the West coast, are supplied in
the summer with meal by vessels that come from the different parts
at a distance; such as Caithness, Murray [sic], Peterhead, Banff,
Aberdeen, Greenock etc.’6
Nor was the arable economy inflexible. The people had learned
how to respond to some of the problems of shallow soils, marginal
land and regular waterlogging. The techniques which were adopted
called for a great deal of labour, but that was the one resource in
abundant supply in most parts of the north and west. The common
method was the labour-intensive construction of lazy beds
(feannagan) and then working them by the spade or foot-plough
(cas-chrom). The feannagan were raised sandwiches of soil with
furrows between which were built up even on rock surfaces as well
as on uncultivated moorland. Animal dung, old thatch compost,
seaweed and shell sand were then added to the beds to provide
enrichment. When prepared by the cas-chrom, the lazy beds could
produce even higher grain yields than horse-drawn ploughing, but at
the cost of a very great deal of human effort. Yet in a society where
labour was plentiful and arable scarce, this was a rational trade-off.

3
The clan, A’ Chlann, literally means ‘the children’. Therefore, at the
heart of clanship was the belief that all clansmen were bound
together by ties of common kinship and descended by origin from
legendary patriarchs of antiquity. Yet, in reality, clans in the
Highlands had not evolved from the very remote past but rather as a
response to political turbulence and social dislocation in northern
Scotland during the early Middle Ages. At that time, people sought
protection from danger and threat by gathering in loyalty to great
men of influence, power and prestige as the crown itself could not
guarantee law and order throughout the entire realm of Scotland. In
particular, the hill country of the north and west mainland, the
Western Isles and the Scottish Borders were semi-autonomous
entities, mainly beyond royal control, from the thirteenth through to
the seventeenth centuries.
The nature of clanship has long been shrouded in myth, song,
story and romance. Only in recent years has modern scholarship
started to unlock some of its secrets and begun to reveal a more
convincing and authentic narrative of its origins, structure and
complexity. Clanship was not unique to the Highlands. Until the
seventeenth century other parts of Scotland had also been based on
kin-based societies where the power and influence of great men and
family networks commanded ultimate authority. The Borders, another
region of recalcitrance in the face of royal authority, was in this sense
entirely comparable to the western Highlands. In 1587, when the
Scottish Parliament discussed the problem of regional disorder
throughout the realm, it was both Border and Highland élites who
were directed to impose more control over their people. In the north-
eastern Lowlands, too, there were also some vestiges of similar
social and cultural patterns.
There can be little doubt as well that claims of blood connection
both in and beyond Gaeldom survived into the eighteenth century,
albeit not for the purposes of making war. Lowland magnates at that
time were very conscious of the need to provide support to kinfolk
who sought careers, posts and opportunities in Scotland, Britain and
the Empire. But clanship in the Highlands, in large part because of
its martial imperative, became much more embedded in Gaelic
culture through bardic genealogies, songs, stories and traditions.
Even in the later eighteenth century and beyond, travellers to the
Highlands who were appalled by the squalor and poverty which they
witnessed were also mightily impressed by the rich culture of poetry
and music of the people which they experienced.
More than any other part of Scotland, the Highlands and Islands
were able to resist for longer the encroachment of royal power,
because geography presented formidable barriers to the
enforcement of state authority. In that sense, the distinguishing
feature of the Highland clan was not so much its antiquity, social
structure or family connections, but its longevity, surviving into the
eighteenth century long after other kin-based regional societies in
Scotland and Britain as a whole had passed into history.
The clans which can be documented during the Middle Ages had a
range of ethnic and territorial origins. Anglo-Norman, Celtic, Norse,
Gaelic, Anglian and Flemish families can be counted among their
founding dynasties, a truly multinational inheritance. Over time,
dominant tribal élites legitimized their status and power by tracing
bloodlines to some prestigious figure in the distant past who could
provide the commons of the clan with a sense of identity and
historical meaning. Most of these pedigrees were created and re-
created with the scantest of concern for historical or chronological
accuracy. The invention of tradition was pragmatic and expedient in
order to enhance family status, accommodate changing alliances
and absorb other clans into the greater whole. It comes as little
surprise, therefore, to learn that among the founding ancestors
claimed by the MacGregors was Pope Gregory the Great, while
ClanCampbell was wont to include the legendary but elusive King
Arthur among its ‘name-fathers’.
The realities were, of course, more prosaic. The Grants, for
instance, who were probably of Anglo-Norman stock, did not become
prominent until after the marriage in the fifteenth century of Iain
Ruadh (Red John) to Matilda, the heiress of Glencairnie, which
allowed the acquisition of extensive lands in Moray and Inverness.
Thereafter, their rise to prominence depended above all on their
close association with the Gordons, earls of Huntly, which allowed
consolidation and extension of their landed interest and power in the
central Highlands. The McKenzies became important only after they
provided military support to the Scottish crown in the attempt to
subdue the Lords of the Isles. After forfeiture of the Lords, the head
of the McKenzies received a crown charter in 1476 for the lands of
Strathconnan and Strathgarve in central Ross-shire. Thereafter, they
ruthlessly expanded their domains until by the later seventeenth
century the fiefdom of the McKenzies was second only to the mighty
imperium of ClanCampbell.
 The McNeills had a pedigree which went back to Niall, a Knapdale
warlord of the eleventh century, but they seem only to have emerged
as an important kindred in the turmoil which followed the Norwegian
ceding of the Western Isles to the Scottish crown in 1246 and was
then followed by the beginning of the Wars of Independence with
England. It was at this time that they became established on their
principal territory on the island of Barra. Then, through association
with Alexander MacDonald, Lord of the Isles, the McNeills were
awarded Boisdale in South Uist by charter. By the middle decades of
the fifteenth century they were also ensconced on the isle of Gigha
and in parts of Knapdale on the Argyll mainland.
The chief, as tribal patriarch or ceann-cinnidh, and the fine, or
leading gentlemen of the clan, could be reasonably confident for the
most part in their kinship connections to the ruling families of past
generations as the relationships were recorded and embellished in
the epics, eulogies and elegies of the bards and genealogists.
Whether the mass of clansmen had inherited similar blood
relationships to their chiefs is much more doubtful. The belief that
they had done so, however, was what mattered, because that
exclusive family bond was a critical factor in the development of
cohesion across the different strata of clan society. One of the best
insights into its central importance came not from a Gael, but from
an outsider, Edmund Burt, the English officer of engineers, in his
letters written in the 1720s and 1730s from the Highlands to a friend
in London. The period is important because, as suggested in the
next chapter, clanship was already in decay at that point. Despite
this, the mindset of the clansmen whom Burt encountered seems to
have remained cast in stone:
The ordinary Highlanders esteem it the most sublime degree of
virtue to love their chief and pay him a blind obedience, although it
be in opposition to the Government, the laws of the Kingdom, or
even to the law of God. He is their idol; and they profess to know no
king but him.
This power of the chiefs is not supported by interest as they are
landlords, but as really descended from the old patriarchs or fathers
 of the families; for they hold the same authority when they have lost
their estates …
… as the meanest among them pretend to be his relations by
consanguinity, they insist upon the privilege of taking him by the
hand wherever they meet him.7
The chiefs personified their clans and were identified by patronymics
which often went back several generations to the formative period of
the evolution of the kindred, so providing the crucial legitimacy of
myth, history and longevity. Thus the chief of ClanCampbells of
Argyll was MacCaileinMor, the big son of Colin, and the chief of the
Macdonalds of Clanranald was addressed as Mac vic Ailean,
grandson of Allan.
Despite these ties of affection, however, the realities of history
were in conflict with beliefs of consanguinity across the entire clan
community. As the larger clans relentlessly augmented their territory
through conquest, marriage and the acquisition of crown charters,
effective control of the new lands became more difficult. This was
especially the case when districts had to be annexed rapidly and
effectively in times of conflict across difficult and broken terrain. A
case in point was the challenge of command and control which
confronted the MacLeods of Dunvegan. Their sprawling territories at
the peak of possession included a number of small islands in the
Outer Hebrides, such as Pabbay, Ensay, Berneray, Taransa and St
Kilda, in addition to the main island of Harris, and the districts of
Bracadale, Waternish, Duirnish and Minginish in Skye.
The strategic response to the challenge of governance within the
context of kin-based society was to lease or make life-grants to
junior members of the ruling family and so establish new lines of
descent and cadet branches of the main clan. These cadres then
became identified by the name of the district over which they held
lordship and authority. Once consolidated, these kin groups would
then infiltrate the existing landed hierarchy of the newly acquired
territories and steadily replace the native élites with their own
kindred. This practice was commonplace among such imperialistic
clans as the MacDonalds in the heyday of the medieval Lordship of
the Isles and then even more aggressively with the Campbells and
McKenzies in the seventeenth century.
As ClanDonald reinforced territories in the Western Isles, so
members of its fine were settled in different districts across the
insular districts of the region. Eventually no fewer than seventeen
different branches, or sliochden, had emerged to assume landed
control. Each was linked with a particular part of the ClanDonald
empire, such as Glencoe, Ardnamurchan, Sleat and Knoydart. Even
these sub-hierarchies could split into further septs, or divisions,
possessing even smaller areas. From the MacDonalds of
Clanranald, for example, there developed the cadet families of
Knoydart, Glengarry, Morar and Kinlochmoidart. There was a similar
dynamic in other clans. Five branches of the Frasers were
documented in 1650, but by 1745 the number had risen to over
thirty. The ClanDonachy, or Robertson, is noted as being in
possession of lands in Strowan in Perthshire, in 1451. Each of the
twenty-four branches of the clan had established authority over
multiple sub-areas within the broader domain by the eighteenth
century.
This evidence of evolution and aggrandisement makes nonsense
therefore of any claim that clans were united through ties of blood.
The possessions of many of them were often in a state of flux as
small kinship groups were overwhelmed and absorbed into the
territorial empires of more powerful rivals through conflict or
intermarriage. In such cases, changes of allegiance were
commonplace as families adopted the identity of other locally
dominant clans for sound reasons of security and survival. In
addition, it was common for weaker units to develop close alliances
with stronger kindreds. For instance, the MacRaes and MacLennans
became loyal allies and followers of the MacKenzies, as did the
MacColls in their long association with the Stewarts of Appin. The
blood ties between the ruling families and the ordinary clansmen
were therefore largely mythical, but the belief in consanguinity,
suggested by the very term clann, or children, gave, as suggested
above, a deep emotional bond which did much to cement social
cohesion within clanship. Essentially, therefore, the clan did not
consist of those of the same blood kindred but rather those who
followed the same chief and ruling family whatever their own blood
lineage or ancestral connections.
As noted earlier, clan-type social structures had been common in
other parts of Scotland in earlier periods but lasted longer in the
Highlands and Islands than elsewhere. A key factor was the
topography of the region. Dr Johnson, during his travels, reflected on
the advantages possessed by the people of ‘mountainous countries’
when presented with the threat of the imposition of control by a
distant central authority:
they are not easily conquered because they must be entered by
narrow ways, exposed to every power of mischief from those who
occupy the heights; and every new ridge is a new fortress where the
defendants have again the same advantage. If the war be not soon
concluded, the invaders are dislodged by hunger … The wealth of
mountains is cattle, which, while the men stand in the passes, the
women drive away.8
In the medieval period, feudalism had become the key strategy
designed to integrate the kingdom of Scotland under royal authority.
The crown in feudal theory exercised superiority over all men and
land and the major lords held their domains directly from the
monarch in return for military service. David I (1084–1153) did much
to feudalize Scotland, including the southern and eastern frontiers of
the Highlands. Even further west in the region, leading families often
formally accepted royal authority and in return were granted feudal
charters from the monarchy which guaranteed legal title to the
possession of their lands. The status of the clan chiefs was therefore
hybrid. On the one hand they were tribal leaders; on the other,
thanks to the dictates of feudalism, they were also landowners in
law, in the same way as their peers in Lowland society, and with the
royal charters confirmed by the monarch to prove their legal authority
over every square inch of their domain.
But allegiance to the crown did not necessarily follow on from
these formal legal decisions and agreements. As Johnson observed
in the later eighteenth century, the kind of medieval warfare pursued
by forces of heavily armoured knights was unsuited to the Highlands
since the terrain was incapable of providing for the heavy
maintenance costs of that martial élite. The levies of the crown could
live off the land in the arable districts of south and east Scotland but
that was much more challenging in Gaeldom, where harvests were
usually meagre and more at risk from climatic hazards. Moreover,
unlike most of the Lowlands, those two important ancillary agencies
for the enforcement of state control, the church and the towns, were
much less influential in the north-west than elsewhere in the kingdom
during the early modern period. It might also have been the case that
the contemporary Lowland perception of the Highlands as a
barbarous, primitive and poverty-stricken region would not have
encouraged the Scottish monarchy to spend scarce resources in
attempts to seek full incorporation of the recalcitrant Gaidhealtachd
into the Scottish state.
The power vacuum which inevitably followed was filled by the
larger clans, most of whom were in violent competition, one with the
other, until the seventeenth century. The ensuing age of turbulence
can be seen in the remarkable increase in formidable stone castles
and other fortified dwellings which were built by the Gaelic
aristocracy. Today the grandeur of their crumbling ruins, as at
Tioram, Sween, Urquhart, Dunstaffnage and many other sites, are
striking monuments to the age of medieval clan power. These great
edifices also served another purpose in addition to their function of
places of protection and defence. The mass of the population in the
Highlands and Islands lived in poor smoke-filled turf huts, and the
castles in their sheer physicality and towering walls manifested in
stone the authority and prestige of the ruling family to the ordinary
clansmen, as well as projecting military strength and unyielding
power to potential enemies and rivals.
For nearly 150 years in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the
Lordship of the Isles ruled by ClanDonald, a Gaelic kingdom within a
Scottish kingdom, provided a degree of order and authority to a sea
empire which stretched from the island of Islay in the south to the
Butt of Lewis in the far north-west. The collapse of the Lordship after
1496, as a consequence of fratricidal conflict within the ruling
MacDonald family, triggered decades of violence in the sixteenth
century as the clans of the west warred for dominance. This time of
chronic warfare cemented their internal loyalties as never before and
further embedded the status of chiefs and fine as the supreme
guarantors of protection to the people of their lands. It was against
this background of endemic insecurity and constant rivalry, often
punctuated by episodes of uninhibited killing, that some key aspects
of clan society can best be understood.
Military preparedness was a sine qua non. Martin Martin, or
Màrtainn MacGilleMhátainn (1669?–1719), a native of Skye, writing
in the later seventeenth century, recalled how courage and prowess
in war were the vital qualities of a chief. In the Western Isles, he
described how it was necessary for young heirs to chiefdoms to
demonstrate a ‘publick specimen of their valour’ before they could be
accepted by the clan. Because of this, the chief and other members
of the fine of the clan were wont to take part in ‘a desperate
Incursion upon some Neighbour or other that they were in Feud with’
and to ‘bring by open force the Cattle they found in the Lands they
attack’d or to die in the Attempt’.9 The intense militarism of the
western clans at this juncture was also illustrated by the widespread
practice of sorning, or the extraction by fighting men of food and
hospitality from tenants within the clan territory or, indeed, on the
lands of other clans with whom a feud existed. Sorning suggested
the existence of a parasitic warrior class which was not engaged in
labouring the land but in preparing for or making war.
In turn, the effective deployment of martial resources for battle
depended on the depth and integrity of the connection between clan
élites and followers. The levels of cohesion drew on a number of
influences. The bards, genealogists and orators did much to embed
the historical identity of the clan and enhance the prestige of the
chief by recounting the epic deeds of his ancestors. The custom of
fostering reinforced real or fictive ties of kinship within the clan élites
as the children of the chief were brought up over a period of seven
years or more in the households of leading clan gentry. They in turn
would foster their own children in the same way among satellite
families positioned below them in the social hierarchy.
Distribution of land by means of these networks also bound the
subordinate gentry to their chiefs. Prominent among the clan gentry
were the fir-tacsa, or tacksmen. As an earnest of kinship they were
granted tacks (leases) to the townships, or settlements, of the
clansmen. They lived as quasi-landlords among these tenants on the
difference between the rents they gathered and the payments made
to the chiefs. Tacksmen were the recognized organizers of their
subordinate clansmen in time of war. But they also had important
economic functions to ensure their subtenants carried out labour
services for the ruling house and to order the fair distribution of land
in the townships for which they had responsibility. The fir-tacsa were
also key to the trade in cattle to the Lowlands. They not only
organized the round-up of the beasts and gathering them into
droves, but were also responsible for offsetting their sale value
against township rental payments.
In addition, rentals in kind of cattle, sheep, meal, cheese, hens
and geese, which were paid to the chief by clansmen in their role as
tenants, were sometimes converted back into the provision of
subsistence support in seasons of shortage. In this way, the clan
élites were able to provide a form of social insurance in a volatile
environment. It was an expected obligation which endured as an
expectation among the people long after the ethic of clanship itself
had passed into history. Feasting at the behest of the leading
families also had a vital social purpose. As well as demonstrating the
chief’s capacities for generosity and hospitality, collective eating and
drinking also generated a sense of communal harmony for all clan
families no matter their rank. The feasts of the medieval period were
often lavish affairs with the consumption of enormous amounts of
food and drink. Even in the early seventeenth century, some of the
old traditions survived and were reported in somewhat exaggerated
terms. It was said that when the daughter of MacLeod married the
heir of Clanranald, some of those present boasted that the feasting
went on for six days and nights. They dimly recollected that ‘we were
twenty times drunk every day, to which we had no more objection
than he had’.10 These celebrations in a society where scarcity of
basic food was common did much to enhance the status and
prestige of the chief and his household. They were only made
possible by the prevalence of rentals in kind in this period and their
limited sale to markets outside the Highlands.
Ultimately of even more significance than support in times of crisis
and the provision of hospitality was the provision of land to
clansmen. As feudal lords the clan élites had the same absolute
rights of ownership over their property as proprietors anywhere else
in Scotland. Yet, within the kin-based society, the territory of the clan
was governed by a quite different set of assumptions potentially in
conflict with the legal realities of private landownership. The areas
settled by each clan were regarded as its collective heritage, or
duthchas, and the fine were seen, not as the sole masters of these
lands, but as the current guardians, protectors and trustees of the
people who lived on them. Real or nominal kinsmen within them felt
they possessed a prior claim to clan holdings as a result of their
loyalty to and connection with the ruling family. One instance of this
comes from a Clanranald rental of 1718 for the Isle of Eigg which
shows the Captain of Clanranald asserting his ‘power of keeping in
his own Kinsmen and tenents on this Isle’.11
The strong belief existed that the chief should provide land for his
clansmen even if they did not have rights to specific individual
holdings in perpetuity. Edmund Burt in the 1730s noted how chiefs
commonly packed townships with tenants and subtenants for this
purpose. This was a reflection of the subsistence needs of the
people on the one hand and the military imperative to establish a
large following on the other. Nevertheless, some chiefs apparently
moved clansmen about their lands as circumstances required. When
Sir James MacDonald was attempting to make peace with the crown
in the early seventeenth century, he at first offered to remove
elements of ClanDonald South from Kintyre to Islay. Subsequently,
he went further and undertook to move them anywhere the state
wished.
 Commonly, as a result of inter-clan feuds and fear of annexation,
entire townships were abandoned and lay unoccupied for many
years, the people who had lived there having gone elsewhere.
Surviving estate papers record a considerable turnover of tenants,
even in those townships under continuous settlement. The local
mobility of tenants and cottars was often part and parcel of the old
way of life and did not simply emerge during the era of clearance.
For instance, a series of rentals for Kintyre, a relatively fertile district,
between 1502 and 1605 reveals that no family held the annual lease
of a township over the whole period. But, this evidence
notwithstanding, the cultural force of duthchas seems to have
pervaded Gaeldom and was central to clan identity. It articulated the
expectations of the people that the ruling families had the
responsibility to act as protectors to guarantee secure possession of
some land in return for allegiance, military service, tribute and rental.
It was a powerful and enduring belief which endured long after the
rationale of clanship itself had vanished and when élites had shed
ancient responsibilities and metamorphosed into commercial
landlords.
 2

The Long Death of Clanship

1
It used to be thought that Highland clanship died on the fateful
battlefield of Culloden Moor in April 1746 and was then buried by a
combination of punitive legislation and state terror. But the demise of
clan society was much more protracted than that. Indeed, the roots
of decay can be traced back to the early decades of the seventeenth
century and the more effective imposition of crown authority
throughout the Highlands during the reign of James VI and I (1567–
1625). The Scottish government and, after the Regal Union of 1603,
the British monarchy, began to enforce its writ in Gaeldom with more
determination and success then than at any time in the past. As
state power started to guarantee law and order in the north and
west, the kin-based networks of chiefs, clan gentry and followers,
which had evolved over generations for the purposes of mutual
defence and protection in times of chronic instability, were bound to
come under pressure as the practical rationale of clanship was
steadily undermined. Decline, however, was very slow, piecemeal
and varied in extent between the more stable eastern and southern
Lowland fringes and the traditionally more turbulent western
mainland and the islands of the Inner and Outer Hebrides. Also, as
the history of the ’45 Rising confirmed, even by the early eighteenth
century the martial ethos of several clans, whether Hanoverian or
Jacobite in sympathy, had not entirely died.
From the later sixteenth century, the government of James VI set
out to impose more political and administrative control on the
Highlands by employing the same tactics which were already
delivering success in the Scottish Borders, that other recalcitrant
region of feuding and lawlessness. New thinking was emerging
within the counsels of the state that ‘civility’, stability and order
should be established throughout the entire realm of Scotland. To
this was added a concern that crown revenues from some of the
semi-autonomous Highland districts were unacceptably low. At the
same time, the old assumptions that the north was only a region of
irredeemable poverty and devoid of resources were steadily being
superseded by more optimistic ideas about the possibilities of
unexploited potential for development from both the seas and the
lands of Gaeldom. As a first step, from the 1580s, the crown
demanded that some leading clan chiefs had to find sureties ranging
from £2,000 to £20,000 Scots to guarantee the good behaviour of
their clansmen. More-decisive initiatives were adopted after 1603,
when James occupied the thrones of both Scotland and England.
Now the western clans could be confronted by the full naval and
military force of a unified and expansionist British state intent. The
availability of English naval resources after 1603 was crucial
because in the western Highlands it was the sea which united the
bases of clan power and the land which usually divided them.
Equally critical in the drive for more control was the ruthlessly
efficient annexation of native lands in six counties of the north of
Ireland, which was then followed by the establishment of the
Plantation of Ulster. This naked use of coercion and the forced
displacement of the Catholic population brought home to the élites of
the clans in the western Highlands, who had many kinship links with
landed families in the north of Ireland, the present and future danger
of resisting the authority of an increasingly aggressive and powerful
British state. More directly, the conquest of Gaelic Ireland,
associated with ‘The Flight of the Earls’ in 1607, after their earlier
defeat at the Battle of Kinsale in 1601, finally eliminated the
traditional opportunities for mercenary service in Ireland by the
Highland buannachan, or household men. This specialist warrior
class within clanship had long flourished on booty, plunder and
violent employment across the Irish Sea. However, an Anglo-Saxon
Protestant wedge had now been driven between the two territories of
Gaelic/Catholic civilization. As a result, the old seaborne commercial
and military ties between the northern counties of Ireland and
A’Gaidhealtachd soon began to wither. Indeed, from the 1620s, the
now redundant buannachan began to be shipped in large numbers
by their own fine to Europe, where they first served in British
expeditionary forces and then as mercenaries in Swedish and Dutch
service during the Thirty Years War. Their fate was eloquent
testimony to the fact that the militarized nature of Highland society
was now in decay.
However, the government of James VI and I did not undertake the
same draconian policy of wholesale territorial annexation in the
Highlands of the kind which was imposed in Ireland. Instead, a range
of strategies were adopted, including partial expropriation of the
lands of those clans considered to be especially delinquent. The
main targets for this approach were ClanDonald South, the
ClanLeod of Lewis, the Maclains of Ardnamurchan and ClanGregor.
A related policy of colonization was also designed to drive another
cordon sanitaire between Gaelic Ireland and Scotland with plans to
set up colonies of ‘answerable inland subjects’ (i.e. Lowland
Protestants) in Lewis, Lochaber and Kintyre. Only the last of these
settlements, however, was even partially successful. Much more
effective was the launching of punitive expeditions along the western
seaboard in 1596, 1599, 1605, 1607 and 1608. These violent
incursions were paralleled by the award of judicial commissions to
loyal lieutenants, drawn mainly from trusted magnate families on the
Highland–Lowland frontier. The Gordons, earls of Huntly and the
even more ambitiously imperialistic Campbells, earls of Argyll, were
enjoined by the crown to extract surety for good conduct from
neighbouring clans which were judged to be more prone to truculent
disloyalty to the crown.
These were all conventional tactics long employed successfully in
the unruly districts of the Borders. But the state also embarked on a
novel attempt to produce a comprehensive solution to the Highland
problem by tackling what were seen as the social roots of disorder.
This was the policy of ‘planting civilitie’, which James himself had
outlined in his book Basilikon Doran. It was first embodied in the
Statutes of Iona of 1609 to which all major chiefs in the Hebrides had
to give their consent. The Statutes ranged from the suppression of
beggars and vagabonds, to the control of wine and whisky, from
limits on the household retinues of the fine to the strengthening of
the reformed church, from sending the heirs of men of substance to
the Lowlands to be schooled to the prohibition of ordinary clansmen
carrying arms. Not only were the chiefs bound to observe these
rulings, but they were also ordered to appear personally before the
Privy Council in Edinburgh at stated intervals as proof of their good
conduct within the terms of the Iona agreements in the present and
also in the future. The Statutes were indeed a comprehensive
programme designed to impose Lowland values on the fine, promote
their assimilation with the mores of the ‘civilized’ Lowlands and
eliminate what was seen as the chronic excesses of clanship.
There has been considerable historical debate about the practical
impact of these initiatives. But whatever their short-term effect, they
did have a potent influence on the clan élites over time. One scholar
has suggested that ‘central government’s main priority was to
educate the fine about their responsibilities as members of the
Scottish landed classes, not to denigrate their status’.1 Indeed as
confirmation of their acknowledged social position, the clan gentry
were permitted to carry arms and wear armour and also given
monopoly licences to bring wines and spirits to the Western Isles. In
return for these privileges, clan gentries were expected to become
partners with the state in the maintenance of order and to be held to
account for the conduct of their clansmen. This was to be ensured
through the exaction of substantial sureties and the annual
appearance of chiefs before the Privy Council in Edinburgh. These
attendances were rigorously enforced until the outbreak of the
Scottish Revolution in 1638.
Political control soon started to cause substantial changes within
clanship. Severe financial burdens of surety were now imposed on
the fine, varying in the 1610s from £3,000 to £18,000 Scots. The
costs of regularly appearing before the Privy Council were also
considerable and those who attended could often find themselves
detained in the capital for up to six months at a time and even longer.
Sir Rory MacLeod of Dunvegan complained to James VI in 1622 that
his annual appearances meant that he was away from his estates for
more than half the year, making it difficult for him to manage them
effectively. Sojourns in Edinburgh would also lead to expenditure on
legal fees, housing and the many pleasures of the capital. The
accounts of seventeenth-century Highland families, such as the
MacDonalds of Clanranald and the MacLeods of Dunvegan, show
increasing outlays on expensive clothing, furnishings and exotic
foods as they gradually became integrated into Scottish landed
society with all the cost implications for the maintenance of personal
status through material display which that implied.
The outbreak of civil war in Britain in 1638 brought these
compulsory annual visitations to Edinburgh temporarily to an end.
But that bitter conflict imposed even greater stresses through the
devastation of lands and economic dislocation throughout the
country. The bloodiest fighting took place during the Wars of the
Covenanters in the central and south-western Highlands, especially
after the incursions of Alasdair MacColla with his Irish-Catholic
troops from Ulster in 1644. Entire districts were despoiled and
numerous townships laid waste through the marching and counter-
marching of royalist and Covenanting forces, all of whom lived off the
land. One effect was to reinforce the militarism of the clans for a time
and so postpone the decay of martial society. During the
Cromwellian Union of 1652–60, further systematic destruction was
inflicted on several districts, stretching from Lochaber to Wester
Ross, by General George Monck during his suppression of the
rebellion led by the Earl of Glencairn in 1653–4. The long-term
economic impact of hostilities on some localities is vividly illustrated
from the McLean estates in Mull, Morvern and Tiree. Sir Hector
McLean of Duart fell with around 700 of his clansmen at the Battle of
Inverkeithing in 1651. One thousand men had originally been raised
and the losses were so great that the estate economy of the
McLeans did not fully recover until several years afterwards. A rental
of 1674 listed thirty-two out of 140 McLean townships still lying waste
at that date, more than two decades after the slaughter which was
suffered at the battle. The restoration of the Stuart monarchy of
Charles II from 1660 brought little respite. The new fiscal regime
which came into force then had an impact on landowners in the
Highlands as well as the rest of Scotland. The excise (1661), the
land tax (1665) and the cess (1667) were exacting burdens.
Moreover, from 1661, chiefs were once again compelled to attend
Edinburgh to account to the authorities for the conduct of their
clansmen.
The fifty years after the Statutes of Iona saw a massive increase in
the indebtedness of the Highland élites as a result of the combined
forces of state action, absenteeism and conspicuous consumption.
The debts of the MacLeods of Dunvegan rose to £66,700 Scots in
1649 and climbed again to £129,000 by 1663, while in 1700 an
account of Clanranald’s debts to his kinsman MacDonald of Sleat
stood at £64,000. Two decades before, fourteen leading members of
the fine of that clan had put their names to a document, ‘The Oath of
the Friends’, designed to protect the finances of their chief from
inevitable ruin. In fact, indebtedness had become a structural
problem and now plagued most of the ruling families of Gaeldom.
Various responses to financial difficulties were adopted, including a
huge increase in wadsetting (giving a pledge of lands, often to family
members of the clan élite, in security for debt), growing dependence
on Edinburgh and Glasgow merchants for bonded loans, and, not
least, a more businesslike approach to the management of land in
order to make estates yield more revenue. It was the last response
which was likely to be of profound significance for the future of
clanship. At some point, the new determination of chiefs and leading
gentry to extract additional income from their tenants was likely to
conflict directly with their patriarchal responsibilities to the clan. The
long transition from tribal chiefs to commercial landlords was now in
train, many decades before Bonnie Prince Charlie’s historic defeat
on Culloden Moor.
It is significant, for instance, that the old traditions of feasting,
heroic drinking and collective hospitality seem to have been falling
away throughout the seventeenth century. By the 1690s, Martin
Martin reported this to be the case even in the far Outer Hebrides.2
Rentals in kind, or ‘victual’ rents, were also gradually being
converted to cash values, which meant that food rentals were now
being increasingly marketed outside the Highlands for commercial
gain. On the MacLeod estates in Harris and Skye, rents were mainly
paid in kind until the 1640s. By the 1680s, however, money rents
made up half the value of the total and by the 1740s over three
quarters. The most lucrative export trade was the rearing of black
cattle, which reflected the comparative advantage of the hill country
economy for pastoral development. The beasts went to market on
the hoof without any additional investment needed for transportation.
Overheads in general were therefore relatively low. Tacksmen
rounded up the cattle from the townships under their management,
and once they had been taken to collection points on the mainland,
the remaining costs were born by Lowland drovers and merchants
until the droves were sold on at the trysts of Crieff and Falkirk. The
needs of a massively expanded Royal Navy for salt beef during the
Wars of the Spanish Succession, growing demand in the urban
areas of Scotland, northern England and, especially, in London, the
impact of the new common market between the two countries after
1707, and late-seventeenth-century prohibitions on cattle imports
from Ireland were all significant factors in this golden age of the
Highland cattle trade. By the 1720s it was reckoned that as many as
30,000 beasts were being driven south annually to the Lowlands.
Estate incomes were also being augmented by sales of timber, fish,
slate, linen and other produce as part of the drive to reduce debt and
at the same time support the growing absenteeism and
consumerism of the élites. The impact was especially marked in the
southern and eastern fringes of the Highlands. Long before the era
of clearances, the lands of great chiefs such as the Campbells of
Argyll and Breadalbane and the Murrays, earls of Atholl, in Highland
Perthshire were already locked into the demands of the Lowland
economy.
By the early eighteenth century, therefore, the Highlands was a
society in transition. The resolution of clan differences by force of
arms had begun to die out. The last major clan battle, a bloody affair
between elements of ClanChattan and ClanDonald South, was
fought at Mulroy in the Braes of Lochaber in August 1688. The fact
that the times were becoming more peaceful is one explanation for
the horrified contemporary reaction to the infamous Massacre of
Glencoe in 1692. Crown forces killed nearly thirty men, women and
children of the MacDonalds of Glencoe, a small sept addicted to
banditry and also loyal to the exiled House of Stuart. The episode
has gone down through the ages in story, legend and song. Glencoe
is remembered for several reasons, but partly because acts of
collective violence which were commonplace in the sixteenth century
and earlier had become exceptional a hundred years later.
In the same way, clans like the MacGregors were denounced as
barbaric in the early eighteenth century for their thievery and cattle
rieving. They now stood out as dangerous and threatening in a world
that was moving on. For the most part cattle raiding and protection
rackets were now confined to a few districts, such as the
Highland/Lowland peripheries and the more inaccessible parts of the
Lochaber region. The growing costs of warfare in the age of
gunpowder also made chiefs less willing or less able to arm their
clansmen properly with muskets, pistols and shot. Indeed, probably
only a minority of those who fought under John Grahame of
Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, in the Jacobite Rising of 1688–9 had
seen action in the past. Before his famous victory at Killiecrankie, he
was concerned how his mainly raw clansmen would perform under
fire. Daniel Defoe, in his Tour through the Whole Island of Great
Britain, in the early eighteenth century was impressed by the social
changes which he saw for himself. While noting that the people of
the central Highlands were considered in the past ‘a fierce, fighting
and furious kind of men’, he added that they were also ‘by the good
conduct of their chiefs and heads of clans, much more civilized than
they were in former times’.3 The remarkable expansion of cattle
droving, and the profits accruing to the fine from its success, tended
to encourage most clans to act more within the law as banditry and
cattle rustling were a threat to more lucrative peaceful commerce.
 This argument, however, should not be taken too far. Military
capability remained across the Highlands because many clan gentry
and their rank and file often served as mercenaries in Dutch and
French armies at the time. The presence of a pool of clan gentlemen
who had held command rank in the European military explains why it
was possible to regiment the clans as infantry formations during the
later Jacobite risings. The establishment of the independent
companies by the state in and after 1725 also allowed some chiefs
to give their clansmen experience of modern military tactics even if
inter-clan conflict itself was already a thing of the past before the
Union of 1707.
The old social cohesion of the clans also came under stress as the
new emphasis on economy imposed increasing strains. The bards
lamented the habits of chiefs spending longer periods in Edinburgh
and even London and criticized the upward spiral of rising debts
which took place because of chronic absenteeism. For the people of
the Highlands these were ominous signs. Rent rises started to
become more common in some areas, especially in the southern
and eastern Highlands. One laird, Archibald Campbell of Knockbuy
in Argyll, for instance, raised his rental fourfold between 1728 and
the 1780s on the profits from the booming cattle trade.
Firstly in Kintyre, about 1710, and then elsewhere on his
properties in 1737, John Campbell, second Duke of Argyll, offered
tenant leases to the highest bidder, thus substituting competition for
clanship on the largest Highland estate. This was a radical strategy
since it also involved the removal of the tacksmen, the fir-tacsa, from
their centuries-old functions as military lieutenants in the clan
structure and managers of the township economies. Land was now
rented directly to tenants and the margins formerly creamed off by
tacksmen went directly into the coffers of the Duke. Also under the
new system of competitive bidding, rents were increased by
averages of 60 per cent between 1720 and 1740 in the islands of
Mull and Tiree, in part because inter-clan rivalry between incoming
Campbells and subjugated McLeans for leases pushed them to
higher levels. Even more dramatic changes were being enforced on
the neighbouring and extensive estates of Argyll’s kinsman, John
Campbell, second Earl of Breadalbane from the early 1700s. As well
as rent increases, rigorous controls over subdivision of tenancies
were put in place, as was the selective removal of tenants who were
in arrears of rent. The Breadalbane estate papers confirm that some
‘warnings off’ or evictions were taking place on the Braes of Lorn and
Netherlorn in the 1720s and 1730s, a generation or more before
major clearances began elsewhere in the Highlands.
Not surprisingly, therefore, in the 1730s, there came the first
significant emigrations in response to these new ways. Small parties
left from Argyll, Sutherland and the central Highlands to Georgia and
the Carolinas across the Atlantic. Around the same time Norman
MacLeod of Dunvegan and Sir Alexander MacDonald of Sleat, the
two most powerful chiefs in Skye, devised an extraordinary but
ultimately unsuccessful scheme to deport some of their clansmen,
wives and children to the American colonies, there to be sold as
indentured labour for the plantations. In the resulting scandal both
MacLeod and MacDonald were threatened with judicial prosecution.
The notorious case seemed to confirm as no other could that for
some chiefs at least the ethic of clanship was already being
subordinated to the pursuit of profit.
Yet care should be taken not to exaggerate the scale and extent of
social change in the Highlands at this stage. Commercial values
were indeed developing but were not yet dominant. Tenancies on
most estates were still allocated on the basis of long kin connection
and traditional affiliation. Significant agrarian improvements were still
largely confined to the estates of the Argyll and Breadalbane
Campbells and a few other lairds in the southern and eastern
Highlands. Ironically, the new cultural, economic and political
connections with the south, while influencing the decay of clanship in
the long run, may have delayed the final demise of the old order in
the short run because from the time of the Civil Wars in the 1640s
the military capabilities of the clans became recognized by opposing
forces in the Lowlands. The Revolution of 1688–9 and the exile of
the royal House of Stuart led from that time to five attempts at
counter-revolution by Jacobite loyalists over the following fifty years
in 1689–90, 1708, 1715, 1719 and 1745. In all these episodes the
fighting prowess of the clans was a major factor in the Jacobite and,
to a lesser extent, anti-Jacobite forces. This factor served to
perpetuate clan cohesion to some extent and for a time probably
tempered the forces of commercialization. But the need for more
cash resources did indeed powerfully influence the clan gentry
before the ’45, which explains their rapid and energetic exploitation
of even greater economic opportunities after that final Rising was
crushed. But though the process of conversion to commercial
landlordism may have been advanced before 1750 among the fine,
the commons of the clans were still by and large insulated from the
transition. It was the tacksmen and the clan gentry rather than
ordinary clansmen who undertook most of the business of selling
cattle and other produce to Lowland markets. It seems clear,
therefore, that while the élites were indeed undergoing a profound
metamorphosis, most of their followers maintained traditionalist
expectations. These values were not yet directly or generally
challenged, however, because the nature of commercialization
before the 1760s meant most chiefs were still able to extract more
income from the land without entirely compromising their hereditary
functions as protectors and guardians of the people. That uneasy
equilibrium was unlikely to last for much longer.

2
It is against this background that the significance of Jacobitism for
Highland society can be considered. In a sense, military force drawn
from the Highlands became almost as important as diplomatic
support from France for the cause of the exiled Stuart dynasty after
1688. The clan regiments provided the cutting edge of the Jacobite
armies and were employed as the front-line troops in all major
battles of each Rising from 1688 until the final disaster of 1746. In
the early eighteenth century it was reckoned that a great host of
30,000 clansmen could potentially be raised for the Stuarts, though
nothing like that number ever took the field. Charles Edward Stuart
reached Derby in 1745 with fewer than 5,000 followers, not all of
whom were Gaels. But only in the Highlands by the early eighteenth
century in Britain could a force of lightly armed irregulars be quickly
mobilized for military action. Indeed, given the absence of a large
standing army in Britain and the recurrent need to despatch regular
troops to the European theatre, even a small and determined force
could have a dramatic domestic impact in the short term. This was
evidenced during the ’45. In a bloody affair lasting only around fifteen
minutes at Prestonpans, south of Edinburgh, the Jacobite force,
numbering a few thousand men, crushed Sir John Cope’s
Hanoverian army of regulars and instantly became the military
masters of Scotland. As the Earl of Islay, future Duke of Argyll, wrote
early in the Rising, the clans:
are the only source of any real danger that can attend the
disaffection of the Enemies to the Protestant Succession. Several
thousand men armed and used to arms, ready upon a few weeks call
is what might disturb any government. The Captain of Clanranald …
has not £500 a year and yet has 600 men with him.4
English officers were less complimentary, contemptuously dismissing
the Highlanders as a barbaric rabble exclusively bent on plunder. But
that view underestimated the martial élan of the lightly armed
clansmen who were able to endure greater hardship and were more
mobile than troops of the line, especially in the kind of rough terrains
where many had grown up and lived most of their lives. The better-
armed clan gentry were usually in the vanguard of an attack and in
the right conditions the famous Highland Charge could pulverize the
opposition if launched effectively from hillsides with firearms followed
up by close-quarter intense violence with broadsword, axe, dagger
and targe. As already noted, the clan hosts were also organized into
regiments and officered by gentlemen, some of whom were veterans
of service in the armies of France, the Holy Roman Empire and
Russia and were well acquainted with modern military technique.
Lord George Murray, a younger brother of the Duke of Atholl and the
leading commander of the Jacobite forces in the ’45, was
acknowledged to be one of the outstanding military tacticians of his
day, but eventually fell foul of the inept amateur Bonnie Prince
Charlie, and his role was marginalized in the weeks before Culloden.
However, with Murray in command, his army won virtually every
skirmish and battle against regular troops in 1745–6 except, of
course, for the final resounding defeat in 1746 when his place was
taken by Charles Edward Stuart as field commander. Indeed one
reason for the decision to stand and fight south of Inverness on that
day in April 1746 was Charles’s belief in the invincibility of his
clansmen when opposing regular forces. The ensuing disaster was
largely caused by the incompetence of his leadership, the unsuitable
nature of the ground for the traditional assault of the clans and the
hungry and exhausted condition of the Jacobite forces, most of
whom had taken part in a failed pre-emptive strike during the
previous night on the camp of the Hanoverian army at Nairn a few
miles to the south.
The support of many Highland clans for Jacobitism therefore gave
the cause a degree of military credibility in the same way that the
French connection boosted its political and diplomatic standing. Not
all clans were Jacobite in sympathy, especially in those areas where
Presbyterianism had made a deep impact by the eighteenth century,
as in the counties of Argyll, Sutherland and Caithness, and in Wester
Ross. It was said that Presbyterianism in A’ Gaidhealtachd was
essentially nothing other than the Whig/Hanoverian interest at
prayer. Most of the Campbells, MacKays, Munros, Rosses and
Gunns were usually likely to favour the established order. The
Mackenzies, earls of Seaforth, were also loyal Hanoverians. But
‘government clans’ were always a small minority, probably less than
ten of the fifty principal clans, and their main effect was to divide
family allegiances and encourage those of wavering Jacobite loyalty
not to come out in the Risings.
Again, even if there was latent sympathy, active support for the
Risings in the Highlands varied very significantly over time and
space and within clanship. Some families were split on points of
political and religious principle and few clans were committed to
either side in their entirety, if only because it was prudent to keep a
foot in both camps to try to ensure that family lands would remain
secure whatever the final outcome might be. Thus, the first Duke of
Atholl was a staunch supporter of the revolution of 1688–9 but three
of his sons fought for the Jacobites under the Earl of Mar in 1715.
Over time militant Jacobitism in the Highlands came to focus mainly
on the Grampian region and parts of western Inverness-shire; the
clans of the inner and outer Hebrides played little part in the ’45 on
either side. The refusal of the chiefs of the MacDonalds and
MacLeods in Skye to take part was a particularly bitter blow for the
Stuarts, but the insular clans were likely to be cautious as it was they
who would have to face the formidable firepower of marauding
squadrons of the British navy.
Indeed, the grave risk of coming out in the ’45 made even some
committed Jacobites opt for prudent neutrality. Charles had landed in
the Outer Hebrides in the summer of that year with only seven
companions, some arms and 4,000 French gold coins. The Jacobite
leadership in Scotland reckoned that he needed to bring with him a
war chest of 30,000 French gold pieces, supplies for 10,000 men
and a force of 6,000 French soldiers if he was to have any
reasonable chance of military success. Not surprisingly, therefore,
many found it difficult to reconcile Jacobite allegiance with hard
political realities. The uncertainties also explain why several families
had members of kin on both sides. One extraordinary illustration of
this was the experience of the Chisholms. The youngest son of
Roderick Chisholm of Chisholm led the clan for Prince Charles and
perished at Culloden. His father stayed at home and had two other
sons fighting in the Royal Scots Fusiliers on the Hanoverian side in
the same battle. Entire clans were also divided. William Mackintosh
of that Ilk tried to raise his men for the government, but all except
nine deserted to join the 600 clansmen recruited by his wife, Lady
Anne Mackintosh, for the Jacobites. Ewen MacPherson of Cluny,
one of the most gifted Jacobite regimental commanders of the ’45,
was unable to bring out his entire clan in 1745 as its most powerful
cadet branch, the MacPhersons of Invereshie, remained neutral
throughout the Rising. In addition, but particularly in the ’45, some
chiefs had to resort to threats and strong-arm tactics to force out
their clansmen. Sending around the ‘fiery cross’, the traditional call to
arms, was no longer always enough.
 However, the complex nature of shifting loyalties and divided
responses does not answer the key question why so many clans
remained loyal to the Stuarts and supported their restoration from
the Revolution of 1688 until the 1750s. To some extent their
allegiance was a dynastic extension of clan commitment to the
concept of kinship:
The royal house of Stuart was the rightful trustee of Scotland in the
same way that clan chiefs were the customary protectors of their
followers. Dynastic legitimacy was seen as the source of justice, the
basis of government. But the lawful exercise of government and the
maintenance of justice were imperilled by the sundering of
genealogical continuity, first by the replacement of James VII and II
by his son-in-law William of Orange in 1689, and then by the
succession of the House of Hanover under George I in 1714.5
The religious factor was also fundamental. The victory of vengeful
Presbyterianism in the revolution of 1688 swung Episcopalians and
Roman Catholics in favour of the Catholic Stuarts in the Highlands
and north-east Lowlands. Only through the removal of the
revolutionary regime of 1688 and, after 1714, the House of Hanover
could the full rights of the ‘non-jurors’ (those refusing to take the oath
of allegiance to the new monarchy of William and Mary and their
successors) be restored. Episcopalian clans like the Camerons and
Stewarts of Appin were therefore Jacobite by nature, as were the
small Catholic populations of Barra, South Uist, Morvern, Moidart,
Arisaig, Morar and Knoydart. The tiny Catholic enclave on the
western mainland was not only loyal, but remoteness also left it
virtually immune from Hanoverian depredation until after the failure
of the ’45. It was no coincidence that it was here at Loch nan Uamh,
between Arisaig and Moidart, that the Young Pretender (or claimant
to the throne) made his first landing on the Scottish mainland at the
start of his ill-fated expedition in the summer of 1745.
Catholics, denied full citizenship under the penal laws, usually
owed allegiance without equivocation to their co-religionaries, the
Stuarts. But they made up no more than a fifth of the fighting men in
all the Risings. The overwhelming majority, around 75 per cent, were
in fact Protestant but Episcopalian (from the Latin episcopus,
bishop), whose commitment to the rule of hierarchy in the church
was in direct conflict with the Presbyterian regime of kirk session and
church elders established after 1688. Indeed, the refusal of the vast
majority of Episcopalians, despite offers of toleration, to take the
oath of allegiance to William and Mary and their successors and
abjure the House of Stuart meant they, as ‘non-jurors’, were
subjected to the penal laws in the same way as those of the Catholic
faith. But the religious factor was not always decisive. The Protestant
Mackenzies came out on the Jacobite side during the 1715 rebellion,
as did the Campbells of Glenorchy and the Earl of Breadalbane. In
that rising there were plenty of Protestant Campbells in the Jacobite
camp. Religious faith did not always ensure clan unity, as the
example of the Chisholms, a nominally Catholic clan discussed
above, illustrates.
Religion gave a stiffening and a sense of moral purpose to
Highland Jacobitism, but its roots also lay in the political and
economic realities of seventeenth-century Scotland. It is possible to
trace the identification of some clans with the House of Stuart back
to the 1640s, when they had fought under Alasdair MacColla and the
Marquess of Montrose on the King’s side against the Presbyterian
Covenanters during the civil wars. This was a connection which was
also in large part based on the hostility of many western clans to the
threatening expansion of the notoriously imperialistic ClanCampbell,
which during that conflict was bitterly hostile to the Stuart king,
Charles I, and his successor, Charles II. These were alliances and
hostilities which were to become an integral part of the later struggle
between Jacobites and Hanoverians but were already in place from
a much earlier time. As one scholar has put it: ‘If Highland
Jacobitism was born in the 1680s it had been conceived in the
1640s.’6
At one level, the appeal of the cause for the clans may also have
been because, as already argued, they could readily identify with the
values of kinship and hereditary right which were shared in the
traditions of both monarchy and clanship. James VII, when Duke of
York in the 1670s, did much to enhance this relationship and build a
bridge between the older Stuart policy of repression and a fresh
strategy of co-operation with the clan chiefs. What almost certainly
endeared James even more to clans such as the Camerons,
McLeans and some branches of ClanDonald was that, during his
short period of rule in Scotland, Archibald Campbell, the ninth Earl of
Argyll and chief of ClanCampbell, was executed in 1685 for treason
after his abortive rebellion against the monarchy, leaving his family’s
previously dominant position temporarily in complete disarray. The
monarchy generally, and James and the Stuarts in particular,
therefore came to be seen as the most effective checks on the
rampant expansionism of ClanCampbell. Those clans along the
western seaboard and in the islands who were steadily losing both
lands and feudal superiorities to the earls of Argyll had often little
choice but to support the crown because only it had the legitimacy
and resources to counter Campbell power. As the Marquis of
Hamilton remarked to Charles I in 1638, the western Gaels were
likely to join the royalist forces during the civil war, ‘not for anie greatt
affection they cyrie to your Majestie bot because of ther splene to
Lorne (i.e. Campbell) and will dou if they durst just contrarie to whatt
his men doueth’.7
Inevitably in 1688–9 the removal of the Stuarts was quickly
followed by the restoration of the Campbells to full power. Indeed,
the tenth Earl of Argyll personally administered the coronation oath
to William and Mary at Westminster and his family was soon
rewarded with a dukedom for his faithful service to the new regime.
In the western Highlands the revolution of 1688–9 became
associated with the renewal of Campbell hegemony and so support
for the exiled Stuarts was the only realistic response to the threat
which that presented in the region. The link between Jacobitism and
anti-Campbell sentiment became powerful and enduring. However,
even here there was complexity. The huge Campbell empire itself
contained political diversity and its Breadalbane and Glenlyon
branches, for instance, had been sympathetic to the Stuarts in the
Rising of 1715. Marital relationships between Cameron and
Campbell and MacDonald and Campbell existed alongside clan and
political divisions. But, overall, the enthusiastic support of the earls of
Argyll for the Protestant succession in 1688, and later, for the house
of Hanover, helped to swing their traditional rivals and mortal
enemies in favour of Stuart counter-revolution.
The economic origins of Highland Jacobitism are more difficult to
determine. Some writers have suggested that the risings were at root
an epic conflict between the forces of ancient tribalism and the
dynamic of modern capitalism. In this view, the archaic clan society
of Gaeldom was confronted by the commercial vibrancy of the
Lowlands in a long-drawn-out struggle which ended with Gaelic
society defeated in the ’45 and finally crushed in its punitive
aftermath. There are, however, several objections to this superficially
seductive thesis. For a start, Jacobite sympathies traversed the
Highland/Lowland frontier. The Stuarts attracted support from most
areas, both Lowland and Highland, north of the River Tay, including
several towns in that region, which could not be considered as ‘tribal’
in any sense. In addition, throughout Gaeldom, though Jacobite
clans were in a majority, others were loyal to the Hanoverians. More
fundamentally, the image of a backward region, mainly insulated
from commercial forces, is in conflict with the evidence presented
earlier in the chapter of growing tensions within clanship as a result
of trade developments taking place in the seventeenth century and
early eighteenth. The expansion of droving was one of the most
important growth points in the early modern Scottish economy and
could not have lifted off if there had not been pools of enterprise
within clanship. Some Jacobite chiefs were also noted for their
entrepreneurial activities and were more than the tribal patriarchs or
warrior leaders of popular legend. The fine of ClanCameron, one of
the most committed to Jacobitism, had growing interests in American
land, timber exportation, Caribbean plantations and the Edinburgh
money market. MacDonnell of Glengarry was heavily involved in the
provision of timber from his estate for charcoal for the production of
iron. On his Lowland estates, the Earl of Mar, the incompetent leader
of the 1715 rising, had a range of industrial investments, including
coal-mining and glass manufacture. Robertson of Struan ran an
extensive commercial forestry operation and timber from his estate
around Loch Rannoch was floated down to the rivers Tummel and
Tay and from there to Lowland markets. The Duke of Perth, who was
prominent in the ’45, was a noted early improver who was actively
engaged in agricultural innovation on his estate in Highland
Perthshire in the early 1740s.
At the same time, however, there was indeed some evidence of a
close correlation between political disaffection and financial difficulty.
During the ’45 it was estimated that twenty-two clans were ‘out’ for
the Stuarts and only eight for the government. However, overall, the
Hanoverians had the more prosperous clans on their side. Three
Jacobite clans, the MacDonnells of Keppoch, the MacGregors, and
the MacDonalds of Glencoe, either were landless or possessed only
marginal property. They mainly made ends meet by cattle ‘lifting’ and
the running of protection rackets. A number of other chiefs who
committed themselves to Prince Charles in 1745 were in acute
financial difficulty, much of it as a result of the attempt to live in the
style of eighteenth-century gentlemen on the meagre revenues of a
Highland estate. One contemporary, doubtless of Hanoverian
sympathy, claimed in the Caledonian Mercury that the annual total
income of the clans which fought in the Jacobite army did not exceed
£1,500, which if divided equally among the estimated 4,000 rebels
came to only 7s 6d a year each and less than a farthing a day!
In addition, in the years between the failure of the ’15 Rising and
the ’45 the state had effectively created a power vacuum in
Gaeldom. For the most part, the rebels of 1715 had been treated
relatively leniently, even if some forfeitures of property did take
place. This was mainly on the grounds that Jacobitism in Scotland at
the time was far too common for draconian action to be taken across
the board against those disaffected to the state. The Disarming Act
of 1725, passed after the abortive rising of 1719 and rumours of
further clandestine plotting, may have indeed have had more impact
on the government clans than on the Jacobites. Around the same
time, General George Wade came north to supervise an ambitious
programme of road, bridge and fort construction to reduce the
inaccessibility of the clans and assist the movement of crown forces
in the event of another rising. Between 1725 and his departure from
Scotland in 1740 he claimed to have built 250 miles of road to
facilitate the marches of government troops throughout the
disaffected districts. These were also designed to link Fort William,
Fort Augustus and small garrisons at Bernera and Ruthven which
were to act as the government’s eyes and ears in the Jacobite
districts. The whole basis of Wade’s strategy, however, was
undermined from the later 1730s, when the government stripped the
forts of adequate forces in order to increase the supply of troops for
European service. Wade’s roads did eventually prove to be useful,
but only in expediting the march south of the Young Pretender’s
army in 1745.

3
The early phase of the ’45 culminating in the victory at Prestonpans
was followed by the invasion of England which on the face of it was
a remarkable triumph for the small Jacobite force of a few thousand
men. To a significant extent, however, Charles’s early success not
only reflected the martial élan of the clans but also the weaknesses
of the Scottish state and its virtual paralysis in the summer of 1745.
After the Union, the abolition of the Scottish Privy Council in 1708
had removed the only effective government executive as well as the
main agency for intelligence gathering. When the Stuart standard
was raised at Glenfinnan at the head of Loch Sheil in August 1745,
the government commander in Scotland, Sir John Cope, had a mere
3,000 troops at his disposal throughout the entire country. Even
ClanCampbell, traditionally the crucial military bulwark of the
Hanoverian state in the western Highlands, had been weakened as a
fighting formation by the second Duke of Argyll’s estate reforms after
1737 described earlier in the chapter. They had not only eroded the
position of the fir-tacsa, a key link in the chain of military command in
the clan structure, but also made competition rather than clan loyalty
the main factor in the granting of tenancies.
Yet the very potency of the threat posed by the advancing
Jacobites ensured that the British state soon responded with
determination and vigour as battle-hardened regiments were
speedily withdrawn home from the European theatre. The retreat of
the Prince’s army from Derby was a reaction of Charles’s Council of
War to the intelligence that the Brigade of Guards now stood
between them and London and that three Hanoverian armies were
also massing to advance. There was also a recognition that the
Rising had failed to attract any significant support in the north of
England, thus making the retreat home the most prudent option. The
return to Scotland, outnumbered by the enemy and marching
through hostile territory, was itself an outstanding exploit. However,
after a further partial victory at Falkirk, the Jacobite forces retreated
again into the Highlands, so ensuring that they were no longer able
to extract funds through levies and taxation on the richer Lowland
counties and towns. Indeed, the central, and especially the western,
Lowlands, the economic heart of Scotland, had always been
vehemently hostile. The Presbyterian church wielded more power
and had greater influence in the parishes of Scotland than a distant
national authority and had always been stridently opposed to
Jacobitism as the satanic ideology of a threatened Papist counter-
revolution.
Sources of revenue now inevitably dried up, a problem
compounded by the failure of the French treasure ships, especially
Le Prince Charles, to make it through Scottish waters with vital
financial support. The Young Pretender decided to turn and fight at
Culloden on ground which favoured regular infantry and artillery and
put the clan regiments at acute disadvantage, because his cause
was by then, quite literally, bankrupt. It was not only fatigue, after the
abortive night attack on the Duke of Cumberland’s army at Nairn,
which weakened the Jacobites on that fateful day in April 1746.
Hunger also played an important part. A significant proportion of the
army was away foraging for food and took no part in the battle.
The rout of the Jacobites on Culloden Moor became the prelude to
a massive military, judicial and political assault on clan society which
the government assumed had spawned subversion. The rock-solid
belief of the state was that the martial nature of clanship was at the
heart of the problem of chronic disaffection. The fact that Lowland
formations from the north-east counties fought in the Jacobite army
and that several important clans remained loyal to the Hanoverian
state seems to have been of little consequence to London. The
relative leniency shown the rebels after the 1715 rising was not to be
repeated since there were two key differences from the aftermath of
the ’15. First, a great regular army, supported by naval units, had
been drawn into the very heart of the Highlands and could be
employed there in effective combination to wage a campaign of
terror and destruction against the clans. Second, the ’45 had come
too dangerously close to final success and so the social system
which was thought to have incubated disaffection had to be totally
rooted out.
The Duke of Cumberland, the Hanoverian commander, contended
that there had been a missed opportunity after the ’15 to destroy
clanship. He was determined that error was not to be repeated in
1746. Underpinning the eventual ferocity of the government’s
response was the belief that the Gaels were akin to a deadly poison
threatening the body politic which only radical surgery could remove.
Six years before the Rising, the following had appeared in a London
magazine:
In this great Extent of Country [the Highlands], Ignorance and
Superstition greatly prevail; In some Places the Remains even of
Paganism are still to be found, and in many others the Reformation
from Popery has never yet obtained. The Parishes where Ministers
are settled, are commonly of very great Extent, some 30, 40, 50
Miles long, and generally divided by unpassable Mountains and
Lakes; so that most of the Inhabitants being destitute of all Means of
Knowledge, and without any Schools to educate their Children, are
entirely ignorant of the Principles of Religion and Virtue, live in
Idleness and Poverty, have no Notion of Industry, or Sense of Liberty,
are subject to the Will and Command of their Popish disaffected
Chieftains, who have always opposed the propagating of Christian
Knowledge, and the English Tongue, that they might with less
difficulty keep their miserable Vassals in a slavish Dependance. The
poorer sort have only the Irish Tongue, and little Correspondence
with the civilized arts of the Nation, and only come among them to
pillage the more industrious Inhabitants; they are brought up in
 Principles of Tyranny and Arbitrary Government, depend upon
foreign Papists as their main Support, and the native Irish as their
best Correspondents and Allies. This has been the Source of all the
Rebellions and Insurrections, in the Country, since the Revolution.8
The onslaught began with the systematic pillage of western
mainland Inverness-shire and the adjacent islands by Hanoverian
forces before they marched across much of the rest of Gaeldom.
Even Highland communities loyal to the crown during the ’45 were
not spared by the avenging juggernaut. This was a direct
consequence of the prevailing Scotophobia in London government
circles where Scotland as a whole was judged to be a disloyal
country despite the majority opposition to Jacobitism north of the
border. The terrorism of the state caused extensive depredations,
the burning and laying waste of numerous townships, and the
rounding up of cattle, the essential capital assets of the clansmen,
for sale on government account in the markets of Fort Augustus,
Inverness and elsewhere. In due course, the military road system
was considerably extended until by 1767 over a thousand miles had
been built. Between 1748 and 1769 one of the greatest bastion
artillery fortresses in Europe was constructed at Ardersier, east of
Inverness, and named Fort George. It was a permanent physical
demonstration of the absolute determination of the British state that
the clans would never again rise in arms to menace the Protestant
Succession.
Through the passage of a series of Acts of Parliament, a
comprehensive attack was also launched on the culture of the Gael
and the system of clanship: tartans and kilts were proscribed as the
sartorial symbols of rebel militarism; heritable jurisdictions, the
private courts of landowners, were abolished; the carrying of
weapons was forbidden; and rebel estates were declared forfeit to
the crown. Forty-one properties were taken but significantly, in the
light of earlier discussion about the financial pressures which fuelled
disaffection, the vast majority had to be sold off by the Barons of
Exchequer to pay off creditors. Thirteen, however, were inalienably
annexed and managed by the crown between 1752 and 1784
through a Commission to promote ‘the Protestant Religion, good
Government, Industry and Manufactures, and the Principles of Duty
and Loyalty to His Majesty’. The thinking was that Protestantism
would induce ideological conformity while prosperity might draw the
teeth of the causes of disaffection.
It is tempting to view this huge military and legislative programme
as a major turning point in Highland history, especially since the
second half of the eighteenth century did indeed see the rapid
collapse of clanship. But the idea of a clear cause-and-effect
relationship between the two developments should be resisted. As
one historian has put it: ‘The fact that there never was another
Jacobite after 1745 owed more to a disinclination to rebel than to the
government’s repressive measures’.9 The savagery of the
Hanoverian forces seems to have shocked but then inspired
stubborn defiance in a population long inured to hard times. Indeed,
in the short run, there were more disturbances than usual in the
Jacobite areas. William Anne Keppel, the second Earl of Albemarle,
and Cumberland’s successor, became so frustrated by the
lawlessness that he came round to the view that the only effective
way to ensure permanent stability was to utterly devastate the
recalcitrant districts and then deport all their inhabitants to the
colonies. Equally significantly, his intelligence reports ominously
suggested that despite brutal suppression there was still the hope
and expectation that the long-hoped-for French invasion might yet
come about and provide some succour to the embattled Jacobite
Gaels.
The proscription of wardship, or military land tenures, and
heritable jurisdictions would probably have had little effect on clan
loyalties because these were founded on beliefs in the emotional ties
of blood and kin rather than legal regulation. Military land tenures in
the Highlands had also already been rendered obsolete due to the
commercial developments of the seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries already surveyed. The Commission for Annexed and
Forfeited Estates strove to improve agriculture, establish industry
and develop communications in territories it managed. Not all the
effort was in vain. Significant improvement was made in
communications, but there was no evidence that a social and
economic revolution of the kind planned to inculcate Hanoverian
loyalty or assimilation to the mores of the rest of Britain was
achieved. The profound constraints of poor land endowment,
distance from markets and hostility of the people proved hard to
overcome. One Commissioner, Lord Kames, a distinguished figure of
the Scottish Enlightenment and pioneering agricultural ‘improver’ on
his Lowland estate, admitted that the resources poured into the
Highlands had been ‘no better than water spilt on the ground’.10
But Gaeldom unquestionably did change profoundly in the
decades after Culloden. Samuel Johnson, during his tour of the
Western Isles in 1773, famously proclaimed the last rites of clanship:
‘the clans retain little now of their original character. Their ferocity of
temper is softened, their military ardour is extinguished, their dignity
of independence is depressed, their contempt for government
subdued, and their reverence for their chiefs abated’.11 But whether
all this was due, as Johnson asserted, to ‘the late conquest and
subsequent laws’ is unclear. Highland society had been in the throes
of a long transition from clanship to commercialism many decades
before the ’45. More and more, the gentry of the clans were
exhibiting the characteristics of landlords rather than chieftains. The
traditions of duthchas, that the fine were obliged by the centuries-old
duties of protection and guardianship, lived on among the people of
their lands. The ‘pacification’ of Gaeldom by the forces of the crown
was the final factor encouraging many of the élite entirely to throw off
this historic responsibility in favour of the material advantages of
proprietorship, so completing the transformation to landlordism.
 3

Before Improvement

1
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.

2
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.

3
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.

Table 1 Cottar structure in a Fife fermetoun, 1714

– 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-
day is near a close;
 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.
One scholar explains:
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
Part Two
 4

Forgotten History: Dispossession in the Borders

Today travellers by train from Carlisle to the north crossing the

Border countryside can look out at mile after mile of uninhabited but
apparently fertile land. Only the occasional cottage or farm steading
is seen as a rare sign of human habitation. Flocks of sheep graze
almost everywhere. This is not a natural landscape but one formed
by social and economic change in the seventeenth century and early
eighteenth.
For, contrary to popular belief, the removal and abandonment of
traditional rural communities in eighteenth-century Scotland did not
start in the Highlands. Two generations or more before clearances
began north of the Highland line, the dispossession of many tenants
and cottars was already under way in the hill country of the Borders,
many miles to the south, in a social revolution which has long been
mainly ignored. The proximate cause was the expansion of large
sheep farms, often with flocks averaging between 4,000 and 20,000,
and the parallel growth in other districts of extensive cattle ranches.
The specialist region for sheep was Roxburgh and Peebles in the
central and eastern Borders, while cattle rearing and fattening was
more dominant further west in Galloway and the surrounding
districts. What happened in those areas eventually generated the
model for the later and more familiar clearances in the Highlands.
Indeed, it was Border-reared and -improved Cheviot breeds which
from the last quarter of the eighteenth century began to stock
numerous farms across the north-west and the islands in a
seemingly inexorable white tide which led to the uprooting of many
peasant communities. Moreover, some of the pioneering
flockmasters and shepherds who managed the new sheep walks in
the Highlands were often men who were Borders-born and -bred
from Liddesdale and Eskdale, where they had first learned how to
run large-scale pastoral farms in the early eighteenth century.
This chapter considers the reasons for the early onset of
dispossession in the deep south of Scotland by pastoral
specialization and expansion and tries to document its extent and
significance. The analysis also explores the intriguing question of
what became of the people who lost land during a historic
transformation which within a few decades had brought to an end a
traditional way of life which had existed in the Southern Uplands for
centuries.

1
Sheep farming in the eastern and central Borders had a long
lineage. As far back as the eleventh century, the abbeys of Melrose,
Jedburgh and Kelso began to develop upland pastures in the
Cheviot Hills, upper Teviotdale and Eskdale, and the hinterlands of
the Yarrow and Ettrick Waters. When the monastic lands were
expropriated during the Reformation of the sixteenth century, it was
influential Border families, such as the Scotts, future dukes of
Buccleuch, and the Kerrs, later dukes of Roxburgh, who took much
of the former church land into their own possession. By that time,
sheep farming was already carried out on such a scale that it gave
rise to some contemporary comment. Thus, Bishop Leslie in 1578
could write of Tweeddale: ‘in this contrie … evin as with other
nychbouris [neighbours], that sum of thame are known to have four
or fyve hundir [hundred] uthers agane aucht [eight], nyne hundir, and
som tyme thay ar knawen to have a thousand scheip’.1
However, full commercialization was inhibited by continuing
instability in the Border countryside, whether from marauding armies
or endemic livestock rustling. Therefore the great families in the
region, like their counterparts in the Highlands, still had to depend on
large and loyal followings to provide defence for property and social
position. The force of these kinship connections had not entirely
disappeared by the last few decades of the seventeenth century, so
that by that time land was not yet considered to be simply an
economic asset to be exclusively used solely for profit. As one
authority has commented: ‘So long as the Borders remained a
troubled area, then large estates would have been tolerant of a
numerous tenantry.’2 Rentals from the Buccleuch as well as the
Roxburgh properties in this period confirm that both upland farms
and those situated along the river valleys had large numbers of both
tenants (often in multi-tenancy) and subtenants. Two detailed maps
of Scotland, one published in 1654 and the other compiled between
1747 and 1755, provide a pictorial and visual complement to the
documentary sources. The seventeenth-century Blaeu Map of
Scotland is the first known atlas of the country. A section on
Galloway depicts the large number of small townships in the region
before the era of dispossession, most of which had vanished by
1800. The other map, the famous mid-eighteenth-century survey of
Scotland under the direction of Major-General William Roy, has been
considered by cartographers to be not entirely accurate but is
nonetheless very useful for sites which interested the military such
as settlements, manmade structures and cultivated land. The Roy
survey therefore provides an invaluable bird’s-eye view of population
distribution and cultivated arable in the Border counties, confirming
once again their much greater density before improvement.
It was only in the period following the Regal Union of 1603 that
joint action by Scottish and English authorities began the process of
bringing the Borders into a condition of final stability. Though old
attitudes, traditions and loyalties still took many years to die out in
their entirety, state-imposed pacification soon became the essential
precondition for the rapid expansion of commercial pastoral
economy in the region. Growing demand for wool and mutton was
also influential, not least in the latter case from the mining villages of
the north-east England coalfield. Table 2 gives an indication of the
scale of the cross-Border trade in sheep which had developed even
before the Union of 1707 established free trade between Scotland
and England.
 Table 2 Number of sheep driven across the Border to England, 1665–91

Also becoming more important were town markets in the central

Lowlands. While the population of Scotland as a whole remained
overwhelmingly rural, the five counties of the south-east, in and
around the valley of the River Forth, had a surprisingly high level of
early urban development. The number of small towns and large
villages in East Lothian, Midlothian, Fife and Clackmannan meant
the area had more urban dwellers than any other part of Scotland. In
addition, of course, Edinburgh was by far the largest concentrated
market in Scotland. The population of the capital doubled in size
between 1560 and the 1640s to over 30,000. Edinburgh was also the
richest town in the country, alone paying around one third of the
taxation raised from the royal burghs in the later seventeenth
century. Scotland as a whole may not have been a nation of meat
eaters at this time, but the affluent middle and upper classes of
Edinburgh had long had an appetite for Border lamb and mutton.
Indeed, on the growing sheep farms, profits from the sales of lamb,
hogs and cast ewes to the butchers at this time far outweighed those
from wool and skins.
 By 1700, then, sheep farming was already impressive in extent
and geared to servicing demand outside the Border region. However,
the evidence of estate papers shows that alongside the big holdings
which specialized in stock rearing there was a considerable
subsistence sector of small tenants and their families clustered in
adjacent fermetouns. For example, a 1718 survey of the vast
Buccleuch estate, with 140 farms spread across Ettrick, Teviotdale,
Liddesdale, Ewesdale and Eskdalemuir, shows holdings of 500–
1,000 acres and above were dominant in the upper hill country, but
on the lower ground tenancies of 30–50 acres remained common.
Equally, the big sheep farms all paid rental in cash – a sign of their
commercial orientation – while many smallholdings still adhered to a
regime of rentals partly in kind, a reflection of their subsistence
status. Significantly, too, late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-
century commentators, looking back to earlier times, often noted that
in a number of districts long abandoned to large-scale pastoral
husbandry by that later period, ‘the mark of the plough’ was still
visible across the landscape, testifying to the small communities
which had once worked the arable land.
As the prosperity of sheep farming grew, so a conflict between the
two sectors of pastoralism and subsistence became inevitable. If the
former was to maintain its unrelenting progress, the ground
possessed by the small tenants would have to be given up. This was
because increases in stock depended in the final analysis on the
number of sheep which could be over-wintered and that in turn
demanded access to the low-lying arable ground occupied by the
fermetouns.
By about 1700, it must have been apparent to the more
commercially minded farmers that by reducing their arable the size
of their flocks and lambing rates could be increased. But, in order to
do this, the subsistence needs of the farm had to be reduced. This,
in turn, meant that tenant numbers had to be cut back and larger,
more commercially viable units established.3
Sheep farming demanded considerable space for effective
management of large flocks. That requirement in turn meant that the
squeezing out of the small tenant class in the areas of expansion of
large holdings was likely to be only a matter of time. One
contemporary improving theorist with experience of pastoral farming
in the Borders explained why size mattered:
It is well known that sheep when kept by a herd never thrive in a
confined pasture. The reason is obvious, they are too frequently
checked in their motions and disturbed in their feeding. Land
therefore that is adapted principally, or for the Sole purpose of Sheep
pasture Should be Laid out in pretty Large farms.
There is another Reason for this; the different ages and kinds of
Sheep do not agree with the same pasture, the Store Master
therefore Divides them into Separate Hirsels each of which must
have a herd; a compleat Store or Sheep farm has at least four
Separate Hirsels, viz. a live Hirsell an Eald Sheep or Wedder Hirsell,
or Drummkond Hirsel, and Lamb or Hog Hirsel, each of these Hirsels
or flocks must be so Large as to give the Herd proper Employment.
To This quantity for Hay, and if possible to Induce the tennent to
raise Turnip for winter feeding, and for Corn for the family. So that
the extent of a Compleat Stores farm must appear very
Considerable.
If possible every Store farm Should be of this kind, such a quantity
of Land is indeed absolutely necessary to Carry on the whole
process of breading and feeding Sheep to the best advantage and a
Regard should be paid to this, in the manner of laying out the moor
and pasture grounds, sometimes it happens that the different
pastures proper for the Different kinds of Sheep do not Life so
conveniently as to be put into the same farm.
Therefore the farmer must often submit to have only one or two of
these kinds of Hirsels, in this Case. The farms may be proportionably
less, but Still they ought to be of such an extent as to make the
necessary experience of it sit Light upon the profites.4
[hirsel = flock of sheep under the management of one shepherd]
This was the economic background to the eventual dispossession
of communities in the eastern borders during the decades which
followed. There were signs, indeed, by the early years of the
eighteenth century that some estates were already beginning to plan
for the removal of tenants as part of a policy of building up larger
holdings.
 2
The thinning of the tenantry was under way before c.1750. Multiple
tenancies disappeared first and these were then followed by the
elimination of entire fermetouns, with their communities of tenants
and cottars. The First or ‘Old’ Statistical Account of Scotland (OSA),
published in the 1790s, contains much detail on this social
transformation. The OSA was edited by Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster
and was an enquiry into all parishes in Scotland at a time of wide-
ranging economic change during the early stages of the Industrial
and Agricultural Revolutions. In 1790, Sinclair circulated a structured
questionnaire to over 900 parish ministers across Scotland. The 160
questions ranged over geography, population, antiquities, religion,
agriculture and industry. Inevitably, the quality and length of
responses varied greatly, but for all its weaknesses the OSA remains
a unique historical compendium of contemporary life of the period
unmatched for any other country in eighteenth-century Europe.
Evidence derived from it can also be supplemented from the Second
or New Statistical Account (NSA), which was mainly published in the
1840s.
Some of the individual parish accounts, such as those of
Smailholm, Sprouston (both in Roxburgh) and Selkirk, provide
valuable outlines of the time frame of dispossession. It seems to
have begun on a relatively small scale in the later seventeenth
century, became more common from the 1720s, and speeded up
again from the 1750s. The evidence of the NSA reports suggests
that the suppression of smaller farms and cottages was virtually
complete by 1815. Documentation of the removals can be presented
in both a qualitative and a numerical fashion. The series of extracts
reproduced below from the OSA reports leave little doubt about the
scale of clearance. These are then followed by enumeration of
population in a number of Border parishes for the half-century
between the mid-1750s and 1790s. The accounts vividly illustrate
the reaction of the local clergy to the dramatic changes they had
witnessed during their own lifetimes, together with other evidence
reported to them by their predecessors before they themselves were
appointed to parish ministry. The tone is factual but also elegiac,
descriptions of an older world which has now vanished:
There are no new houses built in the parish of late, nor cottages, but
a great many cottages pulled down, the farmer finding more loss
than profit from keeping cot-houses. The throwing down of cottages
must be one principal reason of the decrease of population.
Parish of Broughton, County of Peebles

From the best information, there is reason to believe that the parish
about 40 years ago was double in population to what it is at present.
There were then considerable villages [N.B. almost certainly these
were farming townships] in it: the one is entirely gone; and a few
straggling houses are all that remains of the other. Farms now
possessed by one, were then in the hands of 2, 4 and even 5
farmers, and the number of cottagers, besides the inhabitants of little
villages, even greater.
Parish of Traquair, County of Peebles

The population of this parish has decreased considerably. About 70

years ago, the lands were occupied by 26 tenants, but the farms
since that period have been gradually enlarged in extent, and of
course diminished in number; even of the 15 to which they are now
reduced, so many are engrossed in the hands of the same persons,
and those often settled in other parishes, that there are now only 3
farmers at present resident in the whole parish.
Parish of Tweedsmuir, County of Peebles

The great decrease of inhabitants, within the last 40 years, is

evidently occasioned by the too general practice of letting the lands
in great farms … lands, 50 or 100 years ago, were parcelled out into
at least four times the present number of farms. As late as the year
1740, five tenants, with large families, occupied a farm now rented
by one tenant. There were also, about these times, several small but
proud lairds [owner-occupiers] in the parish. Their lands are now lost
in the large farms, their names extinguished, and their mansions
totally destroyed.
Parish of Hownam, County of Roxburgh
 The decrease of the population has been chiefly occasioned by the
monopoly of farms … in the village [farming township] of Oxnam,
between 60 and 70 years ago, there were 22 tenants who kept
above 16 ploughs drawn by oxen and horses; whereas now, 3
persons occupy the whole and have only 7 ploughs, drawn by
horses.
Parish of Oxnam, County of Roxburgh

The aged people all agree in asserting that it [i.e. population]

considerably exceeded the present and their testimony is
corroborated from the numerous remains of old houses. Various
causes may be assigned for this depopulation. One, undoubtedly,
may be imputed to the monopoly of farms which diminishes the
number of farmers’ families. Another may be attributed to the
aversion of the farmers to rebuild cot-houses.
Parish of Yarrow, County of Selkirk
These comments, and the demographic evidence which follows
below and supports them, suggest a number of conclusions. The
parish ministers in their commentaries reveal a scale of
dispossession in the early-eighteenth-century eastern Borders which
evokes comparison with the more familiar Highland experience of
later decades. Those primarily involved in the decisions to remove
entire communities were, like those in north and west Scotland, the
landowners, their factors and their agents. But the new breed of élite
tenants which emerged in the sheep-farming districts was also
directly responsible for the widespread removal of the subordinate
cottar class which in traditional society had possessed tiny portions
of land in return for seasonal labour services. Their social position
had always been insecure since they had no legally confirmed rights
to their modest possessions. Whether they continued to live on them
or not depended in the final analysis not on the estate proprietors but
on the decisions of the tenantry who sublet to them the plots of land
which were vital to their subsistence and to whom they were directly
responsible. Unequivocal confirmation of their dependent status was
that when their masters moved to another holding, so did they,
together with the ploughs, tools and other equipment of the farm. Yet
rarely, except perhaps in crisis years of famine or harvest failure, had
their lowly position in the rural hierarchy ever been systematically
challenged. But now the cottar class as a whole was soon to be on
the verge of extinction throughout the eastern Borders. Clearly, as
more and more arable land was annexed for pastoralism, the need
for cottar families to help with cultivation of the soil for grain cropping
was becoming superfluous.
Also of significance in this narrative is the question of the silence
of the people who were displaced in such large numbers. The
process could not have been painless or devoid of stress, threat and
anxiety. Yet, if surviving rent rolls had not revealed the extent of
tenant removal and local ministers in the OSA had not described the
reality of extensive dispossession in their parishes, the clearances in
the eastern Borders could well have been lost to history. There was
no evidence of public disturbance or protest against loss of land of
the kind which might have attracted interest and concern beyond the
region and so left a deposit of evidence for later scholars to evaluate.
The silence is indeed remarkable in light of the age-old
connections which the people had with the land and which were so
basic to virtually all material aspects of their existence. Moreover, the
reintegration of the displaced populations into the big sheep farms as
landless servants and labourers was unlikely. This did take place in
areas of labour-intensive mixed or arable agriculture elsewhere in
the Lowlands, a process which is considered in Chapters 8 and 9.
But large-scale pastoral husbandry was land- and capital-intensive
and needed little in the way of labour apart from a few experienced
shepherds and labourers. The conventional eighteenth-century belief
was that one shepherd was needed to manage 600 sheep. In other
words, a giant sheep farm of around 10,000 sheep required only
sixteen shepherds.
As the figures below suggest, tenant and cottar displacement was
often followed by sharp falls in the population of individual parishes.
Yet, while many did experience absolute decline in numbers, small
increases in others could disguise the real extent of haemorrhage
either due to dispossession or caused by young folk moving to seek
opportunities elsewhere. The population of Scotland rose by an
estimated average of 20 per cent, or one fifth, between the 1750s
and 1790s. Therefore parishes with significantly lower increases
than that were likely to be experiencing net out-migration.
The progressive decline in the population of some parishes was
accompanied by a contraction in the arable which had once been
cultivated. There is evidence that on the estates of Roxburgh,
Marchmont and Lothian, rising prices for wool and mutton were
encouraging landowners to insist in the tacks issued to new tenants
that more and more land on upland farms should be converted to
grazing. Travellers in the region noted the shrinkage of cultivation.
Thus Robert Heron in 1793 wrote of the parish of Robertson in upper
Clydesdale: ‘Everywhere as I proceeded up the vale, I could
discover by certain marks, that it had anciently been a scene of
agricultural industry and a seat of no inconsiderable population. The
houses were only cottages. But in many instances, the walls of these
cottages seemed of very ancient erection’. He wondered what had
become of the people who once lived there and grew corn on the
now empty and barren fields.5 Evidence from the Lammermuirs
suggests that 48 settlements were abandoned between 1600 and
1750. Over the following half-century, the figure was 21 and between
1800 and 1825 the rate increased to 54 over that twenty-year period.
However, there is little indication in the Poor Law figures in the
OSA parish reports that thinning of the working population had led to
significantly increased poverty or vagrancy. The numbers of
supported poor in virtually all the registers were described as being
at normal or even sometimes at lower levels. Indeed, several
ministers asserted that, far from causing immiseration, depopulation
had led to sharp increases in money wages. Poverty, therefore,
could have been exported through the emigration and migration of
the dispossessed. Some OSA reports did indeed mention that
movement to the American colonies occurred on an extensive scale
from the region in the early 1770s. It was noted of Smallholm in
Roxburghshire, for instance, that many young men from the parish
had joined the army and navy during the American War of
Independence and never came back home. Others were said to
have left for the East Indies, the Americas, the Caribbean and above
all for England. The parish minister was of the opinion that from the
whole of Scotland ‘10,000 journeymen, wrights, carpenters, bakers,
gardeners, and taylors [sic] go yearly to London’. He went on to
suggest that ‘Many of them emigrate from this part of the country,
sailing from Berwick and Newcastle, where the passage is short and
frequent, and the freight easy.’6 Regrettably, however, little
systematic evidence has survived about the specific extent of
outward movement for this period. Between 1755 and 1801, the
population of the rural parishes in the county of Roxburgh rose by 7
per cent, Peebles by 18 per cent, Dumfries by 19 per cent and
Kirkcudbright by 24 per cent. The national average population figure
for the same period was an increase of 20 per cent. Apart from
Roxburgh, therefore, the numbers do not imply mass outward
migration from the central and eastern Borders before the 1790s. On
this evidence, the demographic impact of dispossession seems
mainly to have been contained within the Border region itself.
 Table 3 Population of selected east and central Border parishes, 1755 and 1790s

On the other hand, there is compelling evidence that many of

those removed from the land by the spread of large-scale sheep
farming moved to towns and villages in the region where they
managed to find some work in the developing cottage industries. The
town populations of Kelso, Hawick, Galashiels, Selkirk and Jedburgh
all showed significant increases in the later eighteenth century.
These urban spaces were gaining people at the expense of the
surrounding countryside, which was continuously shedding
inhabitants. Of Kelso in the 1790s, for instance, it was said:
In 38 years the increase in people has been 1543. This great
increase may, in part, be accounted for from the destruction of many
villages (farm townships) in the neighbourhood, occupied by small
farms. From the enlargement of the farms, many were obliged to
follow other trades, and Kelso, being the metropolis of the district,
they flocked there for habitations and employment; and in proportion
as labourers and mechanics have become fewer in the country,
Kelso increased in population.7
Another case in point was the village of Yetholm in Roxburgh. In the
second half of the eighteenth century, it more than doubled in
numbers because many townships in the adjacent parishes of
Hownam, Morbottle and Linton ‘had been totally razed since the
memory of people now living’ and many of their inhabitants had
moved to Yetholm.
The ‘other trades’ mentioned in the description of Kelso were
mainly associated with textile work organized at the time on a
domestic basis. Home-based spinning, weaving and knitting proved
to be the salvation of many of the evicted families in the years
immediately before the rise of factory-based woollen manufacturing
in the Border towns. It is known that many of these skills had long
been practised within the communities of the fermetouns. David
Loch, in his tour of the region in 1778, noted the range of textile
working in the closing decades of the eighteenth century which
included the making of plaids, carpets, linen, stockings, napkins,
serges and blankets and was centred on the towns of Hawick,
Peebles, Melrose, Kelso, Jedburgh, Moffat, Carnwath, Sanquar and
Dumfries. As the decay of the old rural society gathered pace, some
alternative possibilities were beginning to emerge which provided a
basic living for families who no longer had a place in the modernizing
rural economy which had sustained their ancestors for generations in
the past. That interaction between the growth of small-scale urban
industry and the parallel process of dispossession on the land might
go some way to explaining why this part of the Borders, unlike some
parishes further west in Galloway, never erupted into violent peasant
resistance.

3
While the great sheep runs concentrated in the centre and east, the
heartland of cattle rearing in the Borders was the south-west. In the
later seventeenth century more than nine out of ten of the cattle
which crossed the border for sale in England were accounted for by
the three western customs precincts of Alisonbank, Castleton and
Dumfries.
 Table 4 Number of cattle driven across the Border to England, 1665–91

These figures confirm that the droving trade was already

substantial before the Union of 1707. As with large-scale sheep
farming, pacification of the Borders in the decades following the
Regal Union had been a precondition for expansion. But other
influences cannot be ignored. The rapid growth of English urban
markets for meat during the second half of the seventeenth century
was also very relevant. London’s expansion, for instance, was little
short of phenomenal. By 1660 it was second only in size to Paris and
fifty years later had become the biggest city in Europe, dwarfing all
others, with a population of some half a million people. The
gargantuan size of the ‘Great Wen’ forced the suppliers and traders
of the city to draw on the whole of Britain for essentials of foods, fuel
and raw materials. After months of fattening in the fields of East
Anglia, cattle from Scotland were driven on the hoof a short distance
to the slaughterhouses of Smithfield in the capital. Many of these
beasts had been bred in the Borders. Some had been reared in the
Highlands counties and in addition cattle from the Buccleuch lands
around Dalkeith were fattened for sale close to Edinburgh.
 A critical factor in the emerging market for Border stock was the
passage of the Irish Cattle Act by the English Parliament in 1666
prohibiting live imports from across the Irish Sea. Irish cattle were
heavier and bigger than the Scottish breeds, which offered them little
competition in the English market. By 1663 it was estimated that as
many as 61,000 Irish cattle were imported annually into England, a
volume of trade which completely dwarfed the Scottish enterprise.
The prohibition of 1666 was therefore a precondition for the rise of
Borders cattle ranching and its eventual success in the London
market.
Droving was also encouraged by a successive lowering of
customs duties at the Anglo-Scottish border. The Scottish Privy
Council changed from a policy of preventing livestock exports to one
of encouraging them with considerable enthusiasm. So, by the
1680s, the customs charge per beast had sunk to a twentieth of that
levied at the start of the century. More than ever, the way was now
open for Galloway landowners to enter the cattle trade across the
border in a big way. By the end of the seventeenth century, some
estates were each sending annually droves of 400–500 cattle to
England. One estimate suggests an overall yearly average of
20,000–30,000 cattle were crossing the border. But this was based
on official figures of stock passing through the customs precincts. As
the frontier between the countries was very porous at the time, there
is no way of knowing how many more came over by clandestine
routes. Then came free trade after the Union of 1707; Border
landowners were more than ready to profit from the anticipated
bonanza of cattle sales to English markets.
In response to these increasingly favourable market opportunities,
some of the south-west gentry began to develop cattle parks and
extensive grazing grounds. One of the leaders in the development
was Sir David Dunbar. At Baldoon, south of Wigtown, he constructed
a large grazing area in 1684. Estimated to be two and a half miles in
length and one and a half in breadth, it was reckoned to be capable
of providing wintering for 1,000 cattle in the mild climate of the
Solway lowlands. Dunbar bought cattle from neighbouring tenants
and landowners in late summer, wintered them in the park and then
drove the fattened animals to markets in England in August and
September.
His enterprise drew most attention at the time – it was described
as ‘the mother of all the rest’ – but other Border landlords, such as
the Stair family and Lord Bargany, were also active in the same
way.8 Enclosed pasture had several advantages over open-field
grazing because it permitted segregation of livestock and better
management of herds. Now it became possible to prevent inbreeding
of sick and healthy animals and improve the quality of the animals.
Selective breeding of beasts took place on what was usually the best
land on an estate, while the pasture ground was enriched further by
liming and cattle manure. The result was improved livestock with
higher sales value at market.
Even before the Anglo-Scottish Union then, what the local people
calling ‘parking’ was a familiar trend in some western districts of the
Borders. It was inevitable, however, that at some point there conflict
would arise between the subsistence way of life of the small tenants
and cottars and the continued spread of the cattle ranches into
contested areas of good grazing land. This was likely to be the
equivalent for Galloway of the depopulating effects of
commercialized sheep farming in the central and eastern estates of
the Borders. Evidence soon began to emerge of the clearance of
townships and the annexation of common grazing lands which were
essential to the functioning of the peasant livestock economy.
Travellers in the region saw the impact. In 1723, Sir John Clerk of
Penicuik noted in his journal: ‘The inhabitants of Galloway
[Wigtownshire] are much lessened since the custom of inclosing
their grounds took place, for there are certainly above 20,000 acres
laid waste on that account.’ He described ‘the inclosures for black
cattle’ with ‘diks [dykes] of stone without mortar, very thinly built’ and
‘had occasion to compute that they bring in ten thousand guineas to
their country, for the price of their cattle is commonly paid in gold’.9
Another source noted how ‘the very little town of Minnigaff belonging
to Mr. Heron [Patrick Heron, Laird of Kirroughtree] is only a nest of
beggars since he inclosed all the ground about’. It was also reported
that ‘Evry year several tenants are exposed to the mountains, and
know not where to get any place’, and alleged that there were
instances of peasant suicides about the Whitsun term time ‘when
they were obliged to go away and did not know where to go’.10
The plight of the dispossessed was described in a vitriolic, anti-
landlord ballad, Lamentation of the People of Galloway by the
Pairking Lairds, composed by James Charters of the Kirkland of
Dalry. Charters was a tenant of the Gordons of Earlston and there is
some evidence he was associated with the ‘levelling’ of cattle dykes
in protest against the removals. Originally circulated in manuscript,
the ballad was then printed in Glasgow for wider distribution:
A generation like to this
Did never man behold,
I mean over great and might men
Who covetous are of gold.
Solomon could not well approve
The practice of their lives
To oppress and to keep down the poor,
Their actions cut like knives.
Among great men where shall ye find
a godly man like Job,
He made the widow’s heart to sing
But our lairds make them sob.
It is the duty of great men
The poor folks to defend,
But worldly interest moves our lairds,
Their mind another end
The lords and lairds may drive us out from mailings
[tenant farms] where we dwell
The poor man says: ‘Where shall we go?’
The rich says: ‘Go to Hell.’
These words they spoke in jests and mocks
That if they have their herds and flocks,
They care not where to go
Against the poor they will prevail
with all their wicked words,
And will inclose both moor and dale
 And turn cornfield into parks.11
The enclosures soon led to a loss of people. Of the fourteen
parishes in Kirkcudbrightshire which showed a fall in population
below the Scottish average in the later period 1755–1801, the six
which experienced absolute decline were situated in the remote hill
country. They included Carsphairn, Dalry and Kells. The adjoining
parish of Balmaclellan registered a rise of only 3.7 per cent, though
the national average increase was over 20 per cent in the second
half of the eighteenth century. But there was one dramatic difference
between the clearances for sheep farming in the northerly parishes
of the Borders and those which facilitated the expansion of large-
scale cattle ranching in Galloway. As noted above, in the sheep-
farming districts the removals took place in silence with little
evidence of any social disturbance. But in 1724 Galloway was
convulsed by a major peasant revolt against the ‘parking’ of land and
the evictions which were said to cause much distress among the
people of the region.
 5

Resistance

The 1724 Galloway disturbances have come down in history as the

‘Levellers’ Revolt’ since the aim of the protesters was to ‘level’ the
dykes of the large cattle parks which had been developing in the
region since the late seventeenth century. The disturbances were
unique in scale and intensity. Armed gangs of small tenants and
cottars, sometimes over 1,000 strong, roamed the countryside at
night breaking up the dykes of enclosed parks and fields which were
believed to have resulted in the eviction of peasant families. So
alarmed were the local landowners that they had to call for six troops
of dragoons from Edinburgh. But even their arrival did not
immediately bring peace and stability to the affected parishes.
The disturbances came to national attention. They were
condemned by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland,
attracted the attention of the Duke of Roxburgh, the Secretary for
Scotland, and even came to the notice of King George I himself. The
national press brought the story to a wider audience. Indeed, it was
the leading Edinburgh newspaper, the Caledonian Mercury, which
first reported on outbreaks of levelling in April 1724:
We are credibly informed from Galloway and other places in the
West that a certain Mountain Preacher, in a discourse he had in that
District not many days ago, among other Things, so bitterly
inveighed against the Heritors [landowners] and others of that
County, for their laudable Frugality in Inclosures etc. and (as he
term’d it) making Commonty [common grazing land] Property, that
next Morning several hundred arm’d Devotees, big with that ancient
 Levelling Tenet, in a few Hours rid themselves of that Grievance, to
the great Detriment of the Gentlemen in the Neighbourhood.1

1
Kelton Hill Fair, near Castle Douglas, was the location of the great
annual summer gathering for the people of Galloway in the early
eighteenth century. It was one of many held throughout the Scottish
countryside where, in a society of humdrum routine and few
entertainments, they provided a release for the country population.
Many were notorious for drunkenness and sexual excess and
regularly condemned by the church and local authorities alike for ‘riot
and dissipation’. In June 1723, Kelton Hill was the usual scene of
cattle and horse trading, stalls selling food and liquor, dancing and
carousing:
Here are assembled from Ireland, from England and from the more
distant parts of North Britain, horse-dealers, cattle dealers, sellers of
sweetmeats and of spirituous liquors, gypsies, pick-pockets, and
smugglers … The roads are for a day or two before crowded with
comers to the fair. On the hill where it is held tents are erected, and
through the whole fair day one tumultuous scene is here exhibited of
bustling backwards and forwards, bargaining, wooing, carousing,
quarrelling amidst horses, cattle, carriages, mountebanks, the stalls
of chapmen, and the tents of the sellers of liquors and cold victuals.2
It was at Kelton that some disaffected tenants first came together to
discuss a response to the displacement of families caused by the
continued expansion of enclosures and cattle parks. Notices to quit
tenancies at Whitsun had already been served on sixteen
households in the area and rumours were rife that up to 300 farmers
would also face eviction later. Documentation is scarce but so far as
is known future tactics and a campaign of resistance against the
evictions were discussed. No action was taken at that point,
however, and the area continued to remain quiet until early 1724. By
then the parishes around Kelton Hill became the centre of the
disturbances. All of the levelling activity which occurred in the
Stewartry of Kirkcudbright in the period between March and June
1724 took place within a twelve-mile radius. Fourteen of the twenty-
eight parishes in the Stewartry lay within this area, which occupied
over 330 square miles and contained around 50 per cent of the
population of the district in the early eighteenth century. The
Levellers especially drew on the communities of the parishes of
Twynholm, Tongland, Kelton and Crossmichael in their attacks on
the dykes which took place in the spring, summer and autumn of
1724.
It was not until January or February of that year that a secret bond
was drawn up and widely circulated to those prepared to resist
further evictions. It is clear that considerable planning and
preparations for the levelling had taken place. The organization of
the groups of dyke breakers was to be managed by ‘captains’ in
each parish. This practice of recruitment in the area dated back as
far as the early 1640s, when ‘captains’ were appointed to supervise
the raising of volunteers to resist the monarchy of Charles I during
the Wars of the Covenant. At a later date, anti-Jacobite cadres had
been raised in the same way during the Rising of 1715.
Moreover, the Levellers sought to gain sympathy for their cause by
posting several manifestos, justifying their actions, on the doors of
churches in Tongland, Borgue and Twynholm parishes in April 1724:
Therefore in order to prevent such a chain of miseries as are likely to
be the consequences of this unhappy parking we earnestly entreat
the assistance and aid of you the loyal parish of Borgue in order to
suppress these calamities and that we may either live or die in this
land of our nativity. We beg your assistance which will tend to your
own advantage in order to which we desire you to meet at David
Low’s in Woodhead of Tongland where we expect the concurrence of
Tongland and Twynholm [parishes] upon Tuesday morning, an hour
after the sun rise which will gratify us and oblige yourselves.3
The manifesto was composed in English rather than Scots. The
writer was probably a local clergyman who was most likely
sympathetic to the Levellers’ cause.
It is clear from other evidence that the Levellers were not simply
conservative supporters of the status quo and hostile to all
agricultural innovation. Their opposition was to the large-scale
enclosing of cattle parks and the effect this had on the common
grazing ground and arable lands of the small tenants. Thus, in their
Account of the Reasons of Some People in Galloway, their meetings
anent Public Grievances through Inclosures, the Levellers stated
their willingness ‘to take up the lands which were parked as they
were set formerly, and further to pay the interest on the money laid
out in enclosing the ground’.4 They were far from being a mindless
mob intent on opposing all improvements. Again, in their ‘Letter to
Major Du Cary’, the Levellers asserted:
The Gentlemen should enclose their grounds in such parcels that
each may be sufficient for a good tenant and that the Heritors lay as
much rent on each of these enclosures as will give him double the
interest of the money laid out on the enclosures. If he cannot get this
enclosure set to a tenant whom he may judge sufficient, he may then
lawfully keep that ground in his own hand till he finds a sufficient
tenant taking care that the tenant’s house be kept up and that it may
be let with the first opportunity and that a lease of twenty-one years
be offered. This will considerably augment the yearly rent of the
lands and the tenant will hereby be capable and encouraged to
improve the breed of sheep and black cattle and the ground, which
without enclosures is impossible.5
Dyke breaking first occurred on 17 March 1723 at Netherlaw near
Kirkcudbright. Significantly, the cattle park there was not new but had
been established some decades before, in 1688. This suggests that
the attacks were meant to form a collective resistance to the entire
development of parking and enclosures since the later seventeenth
century and not simply to the new additions which threatened
evictions in the 1720s. By the beginning of May the disturbances had
achieved considerable momentum. Large bands of 500, 1,000 and
even up to 2,000 strong roamed Galloway during the spring and
summer nights. After the loose stones were pulled down, poles
between six and eight feet long were pushed into the foundations of
the dykes until they were levered to the ground. Tools which were
used to build them were also removed or destroyed. Another
common practice was cutting the hamstrings (‘houghing’) of the
cattle which were grazing on the parks, especially if they were
suspected of having been imported illegally from Ireland.
James Clerk gave a memorable eyewitness account of what
happened in a letter to his brother, Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, dated
13 May 1724:
On Sunday 10th instant they caused public proclamation to be made
at doors of eight Parish Churches, ordering all men and women
upward of 15 to repair to the Main of Bomby.
I saw them yesterday between the hours of 8 and 12 in the
morning coming in bodies from all quarters … making in all a body
upwards of 2000, half of which were armed with good effective
firelocks upwards of 400, and pitchforks and clubs; the other half
being the workmen had long poles for prizing up the seams of the
dykes for quick despatch.
About 12 of the clock Mr Basil Hamilton’s [a local landowner
accused of being a ‘parking laird’] servants with about two or three of
this town, advanced to them in order to make a Treaty. They were
quickly enclosed, dismounted and taken prisoner, and instead of
coming to any agreement they were with much difficulty dismissed.
The mob fired three shots upon them in retreat then gave the word
‘Down with the Dykes’ upon which they fell vigorously to work to Mr
Hamilton’s large dyke, for the space of three hours they levelled to
the ground seven miles of stone dyke in length.
… there were a great many lusty young women among them who
performed greater wonders than the men. It cannot be well doubted
that perhaps there were several venereal conjunctions among the
lads and lasses, which appears being transacted in the proper
posture dykewards might very much contribute to the carrying on in
throwing down the work. I left them still at work about 5 in the
afternoon.6
If accurate, several points of interest emerge from this account, apart
entirely from the evidence that levelling seems to have provided
opportunities for amorous activity among ‘the lads and lasses’.
Clearly the gang was armed to the teeth, not only with clubs and
scythes, but also with firearms. However, apart from a few shots
being fired the confrontation with the servants of a landowner did not
end in violence. Indeed, attacks against persons seems not to have
been employed by the Levellers. The targets were the property of
the landowners in general and their cattle parks in particular. The
numbers involved in this example of levelling were impressive, as
was the boldness of those who took part. This was not a clandestine
or midnight operation but one carried out in broad daylight, with
several witnesses present who observed what took place. Also
worthy of note is that levelling had become a collective act
undertaken by entire communities. The menfolk were joined by
women, young adults and, as some other sources pointed out, also
by children.
Other methods were employed in combination with physical
destruction of the dykes in order to encourage support for the
ultimate objective of bringing ‘parking’ to an end. A propaganda war
was launched with public declarations and pamphlets outlining
grievances and calling for support. One example was the Account of
the Reasons …, cited above. Another anonymous polemic
acknowledged the legal right of the landowners to carry out
improvements to their estates but condemned the destructive effect
that some of them were having on society. Using evidence from the
scriptures at length, the author contended that wholesale
dispossession threatened not only public order but the ruin of God’s
creatures. The religious theme ran through several of the printed
protests. The oppressed tenants and cottars, it was argued, had a
God-given right to be supported by the fruits of the earth.
Even after only a few weeks of disturbances and agitation, some
members of the landed élite in Galloway feared that the local
structures of law and order were under acute pressure and
increasingly unable to cope with the excesses of the Levellers. The
sheriff and baron courts and Justices of the Peace were usually
enough to suppress and punish petty criminality. But they had
difficulty confronting what was, in some parishes of Galloway, a
revolt driven by entire communities. What made matters worse was
the position of the Church of Scotland and that of individual
ministers. Arguably, the church was the main bastion of moral and
civil order in the eighteenth-century countryside. Its hierarchy of
church courts, ranging from the General Assembly, through synods
and presbyteries, down to local kirk sessions, made it a powerful
force for stability and influence. In this structure, the parish sessions
were the most crucial. The minister and his elders could be counted
on to maintain disciplined surveillance over most aspects of the lives
of the parishioners.
The General Assembly in Edinburgh and the Presbytery of
Galloway did denounce the levelling in no uncertain terms. An Act of
the Assembly was passed in May 1724, vigorously condemning
those who levelled the dykes for their sinfulness. All ministers in the
Synods of Dumfries and Galloway were enjoined to warn the people
from their pulpits about the threat to their eternal salvation caused by
such criminal behaviour. But at the local level the church was far
from united against the Levellers. Some ministers refused to read
out the Assembly proclamation while others were accused of actively
supporting the destruction of the dykes and siding with the plight of
the dispossessed. Indeed, at least one Church of Scotland minister,
the Reverend William Falconer, was arrested in July 1724 and sent
to Edinburgh for trial with another man, having ‘unlawfully
convocated themselves with other accomplices, demolished several
enclosures in the Stewartry [of Kirkcudbright], and continued to the
number of twelve or more in a riotous manner after Proclamation
against riots had been read to them’.7 Clearly, even the reading of
the Riot Act was having little effect.
It now seemed that only the forces of the crown brought in from
outside Galloway could control these serious disturbances. Thus did
the Earl of Galloway write to his brother-in-law, Sir John Clerk, in
May 1724, in somewhat alarmist terms, urging government action:
you would hear the insolences of ane sett of people that have drauen
together and destroyed the whole encloasures in the Stewartrie, and
if we have not the protection of the Govert by allowing troops to
march in the countrie for our assistance, I doe relie believe the whole
gentlemen of Galloway will be ruined.8

2
The concern about the continued breaking of the law, combined with
an expression of sympathy for the plight of the evicted, prompted the
Duke of Roxburgh, himself a leading Border magnate, and Secretary
for Scotland, to authorize a public enquiry into the grievances of the
Levellers. This met in August 1724 and was chaired by John
McDowall, Steward Depute of Kirkcudbright. No trace has survived
either of its proceedings or conclusions. Earlier in the summer,
troops, mainly drawn from the Earl of Stair’s Dragoons, had
intervened in the disturbed region for the first time. Eventually, in
June, a further six troops of dragoons were reported to have left from
Edinburgh, ‘the better to level the Levellers’.9 A combined force was
then brought together under the command of Major Du Cary. Even
before that, several of the leaders of the protesters had been tracked
down and arrested and committed to prison in Edinburgh. Despite
this early success the military did not entirely intimidate the Levellers
or cause them to end their campaign against the hated cattle parks.
Indeed on 12 and 26 May, after the arrests had been made, large
bands of dyke breakers, reckoned to be up to 2,000 in number,
confronted the authorities on Bombie Moor and Kelton Hill. They
then dispersed from these gatherings to mount successful levelling
raids across the neighbouring countryside.
On 2 June two troops of horse and four of dragoons, under Du
Cary, in addition to several local landowners and their servants,
came face to face with a tiny group of Levellers, a mere fifty strong,
at Steps of Tarf. They were easily dispersed and several were taken
prisoner. But, despite this reverse, there was still no end to the dyke
breaking in Galloway. The local people knew the hills and valleys of
the area intimately and when confronted by the forces of law and
order were able to disperse from the incident and fell the dykes
elsewhere by night. As the Caledonian Mercury reported on 16 June:
We hear the Levellers began again to peep out since the Forces are
retir’d to their Quarters; and lest the work should not be regularly
carried on, they in the Night-time detach some chosen ones into the
Country, who soon remove all Objects of Offence, and bring all to a
beloved Party.
We see here handed about a very scriptural printed Three-
halfpenny Apology for these Men, pretending to justice this their
Procedure with the Square of the Sacred Texts.10
The references to support from Holy Scriptures for the Levellers’
cause is significant. Earlier, in May, proclamations had been read out
twice in some parish churches seeking the support of the people for
the Levellers. On the first occasion this was done in eight parishes,
and on the second twelve. This suggests a degree of sympathy, if
not support, from some local ministers. Since the traditional sources
of authority were not always on the side of the ‘parking lairds’,
officers of the crown, such as Du Cary, had to deal with the Levellers
with some sensitivity rather than draconian force. There is also
evidence of a degree of sympathy for the dyke breakers among
some merchants and lesser landowners not directly involved in the
creation of the large cattle parks.
The rising had not been finally crushed by the end of the summer
months. Incidents of levelling continued to be reported well into the
autumn in both Kirkcudbright and Wigtown. Even after the last stand
of the Levellers took place at Duchrae in Balmaghie parish, which
was followed by many arrests, sporadic disturbances still went on.
Brigadier Tom Stewart of Sorbie could report as late as mid-
November that ‘they have not been soe violent upon the dicks
[dykes] in genll’. Nevertheless, as he went on:
but the spirett keeps upp amongst them. They one Wednesday night
last, mett in a considerable body near Whithorne with sythes,
pitfforks and other weapons, killed and houghed Wig’s cattle in the
inclosure they lately throen doun, but being advertised from the town
that the dragoons were mounting to march upon them they dispersed
and severall of them threw away their wepons which have been
since found. They have broke to pieces severall of my brother’s big
yetts [gates] upon highways, leading through his inclosures to
Whithorne, and they breack and destroyed almos all the carriages
and tools Broughton had for making up his inclosures.
They have likewise a practice in sending their emissaries in the
night time to the country people houses, threatening them that iff
they doe not join them to burn their houses and meal stacks.11
The tenants and cottars who had been imprisoned stood trial at
the Tolbooth of Kirkcudbright for their offences in January 1725.
Facing them on the bench were the representatives of local
landowners sitting in judgement upon the malefactors who had
destroyed their own enclosures or those of their friends and kindred.
The accused had in their favour that, although large-scale
depredations against property had occurred, no one had been killed
or seriously injured during the disturbances. The acknowledged
sympathy on the part of some leaders of Border society had also to
be acknowledged and taken into consideration. In addition, the
attitudes of the eighteenth-century judiciary towards plebeian riot and
disturbance were frequently complex. There was often a tendency
towards leniency in order to restore good relations within the local
community as quickly as possible. Heavy sentences imposed on the
accused in such circumstances might simply lead to more unrest. It
is significant, for instance, that in October 1724, when over 200
Levellers confronted a force of dragoons at Duchrae, the troops were
ordered to use minimum force. In response, the Levellers put up only
minimal resistance. Many were arrested but almost all were allowed
to escape on the march back to the town of Kirkcudbright. For those
who were eventually tried, no capital sentences were passed, or of
transportation across the seas to the colonies. Significantly, also,
those who were arraigned were tried under civil rather than criminal
law. Instead, large fines and compensation payments were levied on
those found guilty of damage to property. Even then the punishments
might seem harsh. Yet, from another perspective, they could be seen
as merely symbolic. Impoverished small tenants and cottars would
simply be unable to pay the fines handed down by the court.

3
The history of the Levellers is well documented in some respects but
in several others the evidence about them is patchy and obscure.
This is especially the case when trying to answer the most intriguing
question of all: why did these disturbances actually occur in south-
west Scotland in the 1720s? On first consideration the answer might
seem obvious. They were triggered by the reality or the threat of
peasant dispossession in Galloway because of the onward
expansion of cattle ranching leading to the annexation of small
farms. On the surface, that explanation appears plausible and
convincing. After all, the tactics of the people in levelling the dykes
surrounding the large cattle parks seemed to confirm an absolute
connection between initial cause and final effect of their actions. Yet,
arguably, though indeed a necessary part of an overall explanation,
this in itself is insufficient, as elsewhere in the Borders at the time,
and later throughout the Lowlands, the removal of small tenants and
cottars was a commonplace. But only in some parishes of Galloway
in 1724 was eighteenth-century landlordism confronted by a popular
revolt of such threatening magnitude that it could be eventually
subdued only by military force. Moreover, the timing of levelling is
puzzling. ‘Parking’ had been going on since the 1680s, a quarter of a
century before the disturbances began. Why only in the 1720s did
the anger of the peasantry boil over into violent and armed
resistance?
Part of the answer might be found in the economic sphere. By the
early eighteenth century the big cattle farms were beginning to
encroach on, and enclose, open or common grazing grounds, the
‘commonties’ referred to earlier in the chapter. That process would
have proven a serious threat to peasant communities which were not
subject to direct eviction. They would have experienced profound
problems from strategies which menaced the tight margins of their
household economies. The slender balance between subsistence
and shortage might have been squeezed by the annexation of
common lands. Again, there is evidence that not only landowners but
tenant farmers had tried to exploit the new post-Union market
opportunities in the cattle trade. Some had invested in more stock
because of those possibilities. Now, however, as ‘parking’ intensified,
they stood to lose the vitally important access to the common
grazings for the livestock they had purchased at great risk. For them
and their families, descent into penury and beggary might follow.
There was also the economic context of the Galloway clearances
to be considered. As argued in Chapter 4, in parts of the central and
eastern Borders, the dispossession of small tenants and cottars to
make way for larger sheep runs was paralleled by the growth of
cottage industry and employment opportunities for the displaced in
the towns of Kelso, Hawick, Selkirk and Jedburgh. But these
alternatives were not available to anything like the same extent in
Galloway, where woollen working and other manufactures were
much less developed. It is likely, therefore, that the poorer rural
communities in the western Borders were faced with a much
narrower set of options: acceptance of ‘parking’ and eventual likely
eviction, or violent resistance in an attempt to reverse the
transformation of the old agrarian society.
By May 1724 it was reckoned by James Clerk, Collector of
Customs at Kirkcudbright, that the Levellers ‘have already thrown
down 12 or 14 gentlemen’s inclosures and are still going on’.12 But a
new development had occurred. They were also systematically
slaughtering any cattle illegally imported from Ireland in
contravention of the Act of Parliament of 1666. They alleged that this
illicit trade in the bigger and more valuable Irish stock was a prime
influence on the larger-scale development of the cattle parks in the
early 1720s. Undeniably, there were some close personal and family
links between landlords in the western Borders and Ulster.
Nonetheless, the allegations remain unproven, though they must
have further angered the local people in Galloway. In a missive
addressed to Major Du Cary, the commander of the troops sent to
subdue the Levellers, they asserted:
understanding that there were a considerable number of Irish cattle
in the Parks of Netherlaw, we did, in obedience to the law, legally
seize and slaughter them to deter the gentlemen from the like
practice of importing or bringing Irish cattle, to the great loss of this
poor country as well as the breeders in England, too much the
practice of the gentlemen here.13
By such allegations, they were able to maintain pressure on the
authorities’ attempt to unite the landed classes and occupy the moral
high ground as defenders of the law.
In addition, however, we also need to probe the complex world of
west Border political and religious history in order to provide a
comprehensive explanation for the Levellers’ Revolt. Arguably it is
there that the distinctive origins of the disturbances can be found.
Several aspects of the recent Galloway past are relevant to the
analysis. The long Covenanting tradition of south-west Scotland was
important. The restoration of King Charles II in 1660 led once again
to the rule of bishops in the Presbyterian church. This action was
thought heretical and oppressive by many pious communities and
their ministers, and in open conflict with the sacred Covenants
between Christ and his church established during the civil wars of
the 1640s. As a result, many clergymen left their parishes and held
alternative open-air services or conventicles. These were soon
outlawed by the state as treason and the army then enforced the will
of the King, often in a particularly brutal fashion. This period, known
as the ‘Killing Times’, is still marked in the countryside around
Wigtown, Kirkcudbright and Dumfries by the many memorials to the
martyrs who defied the civil authorities and faithfully clung to their
ideals despite savage state oppression. Galloway remained a hotbed
of Covenanting activity despite the draconian policies of the
monarchy.
Not surprisingly, the majority of the population were therefore
enthusiastic about the removal of the Stuart king, James VII and II, in
the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688–9. But then the Jacobite Rising of
1715 rekindled the old fears of a Stuart counter-revolution. Bitter
memories were revived, not simply of the Killing Times, but also of
the many years of Presbyterian struggle between the signing of the
National Covenant in 1638 and the Revolution of 1688. Old wounds
were reopened especially because of the class fissures in the local
communities. The people may have been overwhelmingly anti-
Jacobite but several of the landowners were not only sympathetic to
the Stuart cause but joined the Jacobite forces of the Earl of Marr in
1715. There were also Roman Catholic lairds in the parishes of
Pantien, Kirkpatrick, Durham and Buitlle, including the Maxwells,
earls of Nithsdale. Another prominent figure with similar loyalties was
Sir Basil Hamilton, the largest single landowner in the Stewartry of
Kirkcudbright.
During the disturbances, the estates of these families became
prime targets of the Levellers. Rumours abounded in 1724 of an
Irish-inspired Jacobite rebellion and that the enclosures were part of
a Jacobite plot. In their public statements the Levellers were wont to
stress their absolute loyalty to King George and the House of
Hanover. Thus did old grievances and memories add fuel to the fire
of economic discontent. These political and religious factors were
specific to the western Borders in the 1720s and they help to explain
why protest on the scale of the actions of the Levellers did not take
place in later decades. They, as well as the impact of enclosure,
were the catalyst for the disturbances and they were not replicated in
any other locality in the second half of the eighteenth century.
The story of the Galloway Levellers lived on in local tradition over
several generations. In 1838, a century and more after the dykes
were levelled, John Nicholson wrote a play about the disturbances.
S. R. Crockett, the Victorian Scottish novelist, himself born in
Duchrae, parish of Balmaghie, in the shire of Kirkudbright, used tales
from his birthplace to write The Dark o’ the Moon (1902) about the
Levellers. It was a sequel to his most famous novel, The Raiders
(1894). Yet, by that time no trace remained of the runrig fields of the
small tenants and cottars of the 1720s, or indeed of the large cattle
parks which had caused them to rise in protest. By the later
eighteenth century the agricultural revolution in Galloway had taken
a different course. By then the region was exporting grain from
arable farms as well as selling cattle. Not unlike the pattern in some
parts of the Highlands, clearances in the Borders seem not to have
left a legacy of bitterness or an enduring folk memory of
dispossession.
Some scholars argue that the Galloway landed élites had been
given a real fright by the depredations of the Levellers and that the
expansion of ‘parking’ slowed for a time as a result. Others contend
that what happened in the south-west of Scotland helped to shape
the agricultural revolution throughout the Lowlands. It is argued that
one of the reasons why there were fewer disturbances later in the
eighteenth century was partly because the Galloway levelling
activities had so alarmed the authorities that they took care to ensure
that popular resistance would be avoided in future. Landowners in
the second half of the eighteenth century are also said to have
implemented policies designed to prevent opposition by the people
as agrarian change gathered pace.
Perhaps, but no evidence has so far come to light in landed
archives or contemporary comments of any such causal connection
in later decades between the nature of the agrarian revolution in the
Lowlands in the second half of the eighteenth century and events in
Galloway in 1724. As will be argued later, the displacement and
redeployment of small tenants and cottars was dictated by a nexus
of economic and demographic factors at the time and not by any
lingering awareness of events nearly half a century before in the
south-west Borders.14
The Fields That Once were Homes
On Airieland Farm’s a field called Meadow Isle
enclosed by fat, well-fed dykes of local stone.
Who’d guess that once this field was home
to saddler, cobbler, cutler, chandler, horner,
that Galloway teemed with such living fields
of cottars? Their names are all but lost
to OS maps and local deeds, preserved
occasionally as woodland, little hills
or streams, not in anything so crudely, surely human as ferm
toun or croft.
Records show Meadow Isle long abandoned
by 1800, a new farmhouse built
that year, the failing gable ends a camp
for dykers hoying up brand new enclosures,
longer, higher, wider. Their final act –
demolishing its walls for use as stones
to build the last new stretch of dyke.
From out this field that once was home and more
80 years before walked John McKnaught armed
with gavelock, intent on levelling
the future. What he left behind’s
lush pasture now, a ready grazing ground
for cattle, archaeologists and those
we’ve built the longest, highest, widest dykes around.
[gavelock – iron crowbar]
Stuart A. Paterson, Looking South (Indigo Dreams Publications, 2017)
 6

Transformation and Landlordism

It has become fashionable in recent years for some historians of

English society in the eighteenth century to argue that economic
growth and social change were much slower and more protracted
than suggested in earlier accounts of the Industrial Revolution. In
this view the modernization of England was more evolutionary than
revolutionary. Already, by c.1700, the industrial, trade and urban
sectors in England were well developed and both structural change
and economic advance in agriculture were widespread. Growth,
therefore, on this model was cumulative, modest and undramatic,
though punctuated by phases of faster and more radical change.
The Scottish route to modernization differed from this pattern. By
the middle decades of the nineteenth century both countries had
become integral parts of the ‘Workshop of the World’, twin pioneers
of the new industrial society, with remarkably high numbers
employed in manufacturing and mining and living in cities and towns.
But Scotland reached that condition over a shorter timescale than
England. From the later eighteenth century, the break with the past
north of the border seems to have been more decisive and social
transformation therefore more disruptive.
Indeed, the Scottish experience in such key areas as demographic
growth, urbanization and agrarian change was so distinctive that any
uncritical attempt to combine the two in an analysis of British social
change runs the risk of distorting the historical process. This is not to
suggest that before the middle decades of the eighteenth century
Scottish society was inert and static; nor is it to argue that the old
order was swept away within a few decades. The commercialization
of agriculture was advancing in some Scottish regions before 1760,
urban growth was in place, and mercantile activity becoming more
significant both at home and overseas. In a few areas in the
Lowlands, farm organization was more recognizably ‘modern’, with
larger compact holdings under the control of single tenants who were
committed to servicing the market. As already shown in Chapters 4
and 5, dispossession of some rural communities in the Border
counties had already occurred before the middle decades of the
eighteenth century.
However, by the standards of England, one of the most advanced
economies in Western Europe in the seventeenth century, Scotland
still remained poor and laggard. Crises of mortality triggered by
famine occurred as late as the 1690s in Scotland though they had
disappeared from England from the 1620s. Food shortages were
also acute in the early 1740s. Average rates of mortality were also
higher in Scotland than in England before c.1760. This helps to
explain why Scottish population increase in the later eighteenth
century seems to have been more associated with a sharp fall in
death rates, whereas in England it was primarily linked to a
significant rise in fertility. The structures of the two societies reflected
their respective stages of economic and social development. In most
of England, a three-tier rural social system of landlords, tenant
farmers and landless wage labourers was already established. But
before 1760 there were few entirely landless people in the Scottish
countryside. Even rural tradesmen normally had a patch of land,
much of the farm labour force was recruited from cottar families with
access to some land, and even landless farm servants were often
born into cottar households, with some of them then taking on a
smallholding at marriage. Therefore, on the eve of the agrarian
revolution the vast majority of rural dwellers in Scotland depended to
a greater or lesser extent on a stake in the land to make ends meet.
In broad terms, therefore, this remained a peasant society which
bore a closer similarity to many countries in mainland Europe than to
the big neighbour in the south.
A considerable contrast in the scale of urban development should
also be noted. Town growth did take place in Scotland, but as late as
c.1700 only an estimated 5 per cent of the national population lived
in towns of 10,000 inhabitants or more compared to a figure of 14
per cent in England and Wales. This difference partly reflected the
much greater commercialization of English society. In the
seventeenth century Scottish overseas trade was less varied than
England’s, with exports dominated by unprocessed or partly
processed primary products and imports by luxuries, manufactures
and essential raw materials such as timber, and grain in years of
harvest shortage. In the eighteenth century increasing market activity
spread to the core of the rural economy as village and small town
growth brought many more than ever before into the nexus of
commercial exchange. But, relative to England, Scotland was still
behind. One telling indicator was the very late survival of ‘archaic’
controls associated with traditional societies, where the market
enclave was relatively weak. The regulation of bread prices and
artisan wages lingered on in Scotland into the period of the
Napoleonic Wars. This partly explains why, in the later eighteenth
century, the incidence of meal rioting in periods of high grain prices
was much less common than in England. Intervention either by local
authorities or the judiciary until c.1800 to some extent helped to
cushion the impact of market forces.
However, by 1830 Scotland had become a different kind of society
from that of c.1760, although not all links had been severed with the
old world which was now passing into history. Most Scots by 1830
still lived and worked in the countryside as their forefathers had
done. The position of the traditional governing class, the great
landowners, was not undermined in this period and may actually
have been temporarily strengthened. Traditional religious affiliations
were disturbed by increases in the number of dissenting
congregations and Irish Catholic immigration, but religion remained a
vital element in social life. The process of industrialization was also
far from complete in 1830 and the great nineteenth-century staples
of coal, iron, engineering and shipbuilding were all underdeveloped
and only came to maturity after the 1840s. Fast industrial expansion
was primarily concentrated in linen, cotton and wool before 1830,
and the metal manufactures, the giants of the later period, were only
managing to achieve modest growth.
Yet too much stress on continuities obscures the real significance
of the unprecedented social changes from the 1760s. It is true that
as late as the 1830s as many as two Scots in three still worked on
the farm, or the croft, or in the country village or the small rural town.
But their way of life differed radically from those who had gone
before. In the Lowlands most of the rural population had already
become a landless proletariat who hired their labour power in the
market to employers. Their lives were now just as much subject to
labour discipline, the drive for more productivity and cyclical levels of
employment as those who toiled in manufacturing and mining. In the
western Highlands a ‘peasant’ society remained but differed radically
from that of the age of clanship before c.1750. Indeed, social
transformation in Gaeldom was more traumatic and cataclysmic than
anywhere else in Scotland. The Highlands moved from tribalism to
capitalism over less than two generations. The communal bailes had
been broken up by c.1820 and replaced by single crofts (individual
smallholdings), or in the south and east Highlands by small compact
farms under single masters. Everywhere, large-scale pastoral
farming was in the ascendant. Crofters were in fact a quasi-industrial
class whose tenure of smallholdings depended in the final analysis
on working at tasks to supply the burgeoning markets for fish, kelp,
whisky, military manpower and cattle. Their crofts were meant to be
small in order to ensure they could not provide a full living for their
families and pay rents only from work on the land but had to be
fisherman or kelp burners as well. Crofters were to be labourers first
and peasant farmers only second. Lingering customary relationships
and traditional connections between clan élites and followers soon
disintegrated as the entire fabric of society was recast in response to
landlord demands, ideological theory and, above all, the
overwhelming force of market pressures. The most dramatic and
controversial exemplars of transformation were the partial or full
clearance of several communities, as an empire of sheep farming
eventually extended to all of the Highlands and Islands.
 Also, studies of comparative urban development in Europe
suggest that the rate of growth in Scotland at this time was the
fastest of any region either in Britain or on the Continent. By 1850,
Scotland was second only to England and Wales in a league table of
‘urbanized societies’, a position achieved over a much shorter time
scale than the rest of mainland Britain. Town growth at such a speed
suggests a remarkably high level of labour mobility because the
urban areas grew primarily through inward migration. In many areas
of Ireland, rural France and Germany before 1830, substantial
proportions of the population often lived and died in the same parish.
This was not the case in most areas of Lowland Scotland. Population
mobility was already noteworthy before the eighteenth century, but
then became much more rapid as the squeezing out of small tenants
and cottars together with the lure of the towns combined to cause
high levels of internal permanent and temporary migration. It was
within this transforming environment that the landed class planned
and implemented wide-ranging schemes of agrarian modernization
on their estates. The next section focuses on the powers and
influence which underpinned their dominant role in land
improvement.

1
The role of Sir John Sinclair as editor of the multi-volume Statistical
Account of Scotland, published in the 1790s, established his
reputation as the leading authority on Scottish rural society in the
second half of the eighteenth century. Therefore, his opinion that ‘In
no country in Europe are the rights of proprietors so well defined and
so carefully protected as in Scotland’ merits serious consideration.1
This section begins by examining the real extent of landlord
authority and then turns to a consideration of those factors which led
the landed classes to embark on a set of radical strategies of
improvement which eventually had enormous consequences for
those who worked the land and lived in the age-old communities of
the countryside. It was the decision and the will of the proprietors
which initially drove forward the historic transformation of rural
society in the second half of the eighteenth century, with the
objectives then worked out in detail and introduced on their estates
by surveyors, factors, superintendents, chamberlains, managers and
other subordinate functionaries.
As in any pre-industrial society, land was the primary unit of
resource and those who possessed that asset, especially if their
ownership ran to thousands of acres, had immense economic,
political and social authority. There is a case for saying that the
grandees of Scotland could be placed near the top of any
comparative European hierarchy of power when judged by social
position and political influence. For a start, landownership in
Scotland was confined to a small élite class, reckoned at just over 2
per cent of all adult males in the population. By comparison, 12 per
cent in England and 20 per cent of the population of Sweden had
landed status. Ever since feudal tenure was introduced in the
eleventh century, the land of Scotland had been possessed by fewer
than 1,500 owners. Even that figure underestimated the extent of
concentrated control by a very small number of aristocratic
grandees, like the eighteenth-century ducal families of Buccleuch,
Hamilton, Sutherland, Argyll, Atholl and a few other major owners.
There were 7,500 landlords by 1800 but 90 per cent of Scotland was
owned by only 1,500 of them. The ranks of the smaller lairds were in
decline as the greater families absorbed their estates through
marriage and purchase.
This degree of control over land was matched by a virtual
monopoly of political power. After 1707 there were thirty seats in the
Scottish counties and fifteen from the burghs in the Westminster
House of Commons. So great was the dominance of the magnates
in the political sphere that even most smaller landowners below
aristocratic rank were effectively excluded from a franchise which
was the tiniest of all the British nations. A mere 3,100 men, or 0.2
per cent of the Scottish population, had the right to vote. The Irish
capital, Dublin, could boast more electors than in all of Scotland in
the eighteenth century. But oligarchical control was even more
exclusive than this would suggest. In the countryside it was generally
feudal superiors rather than landed proprietors per se who had
voting rights. By splitting superiorities among kinsmen, associates
and clients, the greater men manufactured fictitious or ‘faggot’ votes
which both helped them to control elections in the local
constituencies and extend their personal influence. The noble
houses of Argyll, Sutherland, Buccleuch and Atholl orchestrated a
system of unequalled electoral manipulation which reinforced the
hegemony of their families both on their own lands and further afield.
Two legal instruments further embedded magnate power.
Primogeniture ensured that landed estates were inherited by single
heirs under impartible process, so preventing the kind of territorial
fragmentation which impoverished those European gentry families
who practised partible inheritance. Entail was formally established by
an Act of the Scottish Parliament in 1685 with a public record of
entails introduced at the same time. This meant that inheritance was
confined to a definite series of heirs and a succeeding owner could
not break the line. Selling the estate was also prohibited, as was
contracting debts that might threaten ownership. By 1825 at least
half of all land in Scotland was under entail, with the majority of
deeds registered after 1780. This legal device afforded protection
and security but was also potentially a constraint on development of
land. An Act of Parliament was passed therefore in 1770 permitting
investment in the improvement of an estate through the owner
becoming a creditor to his heirs for up to the value of four years’
rental income. Some degree of financial flexibility was therefore
introduced into the system precisely at the time when considerable
resources were needed for costly programmes of agricultural
investment.
Across most of Western and Eastern Europe peasant
proprietorship was widespread and well entrenched, and curbed the
capacity of seigneurs to change customary structures and practices.
Peasants were not only considered to be inherently conservative, but
were also able to impede élite schemes of improvement, because in
many regions of the Continent they were the legal owners of their
own smallholdings. In Scotland, however, as in England, the balance
of power and authority was much more in the landlord’s favour.
Peasant proprietorship in Scotland was uncommon except in a
narrow stretch of land from Ayrshire in the west to Fife in the east
occupied by so-called ‘bonnet lairds’. Elsewhere the lease, or ‘tack’,
alone gave legal access to land. Becoming the tenant of a farm
therefore depended in the final analysis on the will of the proprietor,
who also determined the length of occupation for each holding.
The system was vital to the perpetuation of landlord authority.
Since farmers held land at the discretion of the owner, they were in a
subordinate position in competition with others for a scarce and vital
resource. The proliferation of written leases, a feature of
seventeenth-century agrarian development in the Lowlands, made
the dependent relationship more explicit. It also gave the landed
class even more legal muscle, which, through detailed clauses in the
contractual agreement, were infinitely adaptable to encourage and
nurture enterprising husbandmen, insist on the adoption of improving
methods, and, above all, provide an instrument of control to shape
the number and size of tenancies when leases expired at term. The
next chapter will illustrate how removal of tenants most commonly
took place through the decision of a proprietor not to extend the
period of an individual lease when it lapsed. Numbers were perforce
thinned in a staged and gradual fashion as part of the normal routine
for leasing and re-letting farms.
The Union of 1707 not only maintained these traditional powers of
the landed classes but also provided them, their kinsmen and
associates with easier access to the rich stream of patronage and
career opportunities in London and throughout the British Empire, as
well as the benefit of free trade with England for the products of their
estates, like coal, salt, linen, cattle, wool and grain. Three
developments after 1707 were also important. First, the decisive
defeat of Jacobitism in 1746 finally removed the possibilities of a
Catholic counter-revolution and the danger of any return to absolute
monarchy. Second, the Patronage Act of 1712 gave landowners (in
their role as heritors) the legal right to appoint to vacant church
offices in each parish of Scotland, including who succeeded to the
important and influential post of kirk minister. In later years this
privilege was often bitterly contested by local communities whose
role in appointments had been brought to an end by the legislation.
Third, the thinkers of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment
helped to give intellectual credibility to a system of government
dominated by a tiny propertied oligarchy. The great men of the time,
Adam Smith, David Hume, Adam Ferguson, William Robertson and
others, were innovative thinkers on philosophical and social matters
but never questioned an established order founded on the belief that
only those with a firm and secure stake in landed property could be
trusted to govern the country with prudence. Whereas the
philosophes in France may have helped to arouse radical fervour,
the writings of the literati in Scotland served to legitimize existing
political structures.
In reality, however, there was no deep conflict on the issue of
governance between the intellectuals of the two countries. The first
phase of the French Revolution was dominated by the ideas of
Montesquieu, notably those expounded in his masterpiece, L’Esprit
des lois, of 1753. He favoured exactly the system which prevailed in
both England and Scotland at the time: a liberal, constitutional
monarchy with sovereignty shared between crown, Parliament and
the law courts, together with a major role for the landed aristocracy
in government. The great French philosopher did not therefore differ
fundamentally from his Scottish contemporaries. He was
revolutionary in the French context, but Scotland like England had
already achieved many decades before the ‘ideal’ government on
which he bestowed so much praise. The Scottish thinkers were
therefore ‘conservative’ in the sense that they too agreed about the
merits of a property-based regime.
The main material threat to landed dominance might have come
from the new age of industrialization and urbanization and with it the
emergence of a powerful new class of city and town élites. Ironically,
however, the economic revolution, far from undermining the
hegemony of the old ruling class, helped to give it further material
resilience. One mark of enduring magnate power was the evidence
that the larger estates were still growing in size at the expense of
smaller properties throughout this period. Urban and industrial
growth was indeed striking, but Scotland remained an
overwhelmingly rural society until well into the nineteenth century.
Urbanization led to a significant rise in the number of families who
did not grow their own food but instead had to buy in the market
place the meal, potatoes and milk produced by the farmers of the
landed estates who as a result were able to pay higher rents to
proprietors. Industrialization and agrarian change in the early stages
were interrelated because much weaving, spinning and mining still
took place in small villages set in the countryside rather than large
towns. Many landed gentlemen were at the very cutting edge of
market-driven capitalism, which is confirmed by their energetic role
as agricultural ‘improvers’, founders of industrial villages, partners in
coal pits, ironworks and banks, and in the construction of roads,
canals and ports. They were stubbornly conservative in political
terms but revolutionaries in the economic sphere who made a major
contribution to the shaping of the new order.
As a result, the ‘unreformed’ political system which the magnates
controlled was entirely capable of passing and implementing
legislation for the advance of capitalism. The system of bounties on
linen exports, which was crucial to the expansion of that strategic
sector in the mid-eighteenth century, the establishment of the Board
of Trustees for Manufactures and Fisheries, and the abolition of
‘serfdom’ in the collieries and saltworks in 1775 and 1799, designed
to attract more labour to those industries, were only a few examples
of parliamentary measures devised to boost economic development.
Such innovative legislation in the economic sphere arguably also
helped defuse potential discontent among the leaders of the new
urban society who might otherwise have felt aggrieved at their
continued exclusion from political authority. The ‘unreformed’ state
might have been politically archaic, and even perhaps reactionary,
but was demonstrably proactive in economic affairs. Ironically many
of the emerging class of merchants and manufacturers also helped
to consolidate the power of the traditional élites, by themselves
buying into landed status. But that did not lead to a bourgeois
conquest of the old landed interest. Those who managed to move
into land were small in number and even the wealthiest from the
towns, such as Glasgow’s tobacco lords and sugar princes, found it
difficult to move beyond the ranks of the lesser gentry as the cost of
land was great and increasing in the later eighteenth century. The
territorial hegemony of the aristocracy was therefore not in the least
impaired and a potential class of critics was successfully absorbed
within the existing system.
In the early 1790s the regime controlled by landed magnates and
their kindred in the law was challenged for a time by the
development of political radicalism. But the threat was weak and
ephemeral as, after a scare from 1790 to 1792, the challenge from
reform alliances like the Friends of the People Associations petered
out. The war with France made it possible for the state to brand all
radicals as traitors, which helped to legitimize the use of coercion
against them. The excesses of the French Revolution, with the onset
of the Reign of Terror, seemed also to confirm the validity of the
conservative position that popular democracy would lead inevitably
to bloody anarchy. In Scotland, this prompted a closing of the ranks
of the propertied classes, especially after the third Convention of the
Friends of the People, because its proletarian composition and
overtly radical demands posed a threat not only to the magnate-
controlled oligarchies but also the entire propertied hierarchy of the
time. The new spirit of political conformity was displayed in the
widespread popular enthusiasm to join the volunteer regiments by
both the professional and commercial classes, and in the sweeping
success of the governing party in the elections of 1796.
Another key foundation of the structure of power was the
distribution of patronage. Posts, pensions and promotions within the
army, navy, civil service and legal system were dispensed by figures
of influence and the government in return for loyalty and conformity.
The favour of the great was essential for any gentleman who aspired
to a position of significance. If sources of patronage had contracted
in relation to demand, the régime might possibly have been
destabilized. For instance, there is some evidence from Ireland that
shortage of opportunity for younger sons of the gentry and
‘middleman’ class in the 1790s helped to produce the ‘restless
spirits’ who played a significant role in the extensive social
disturbances of that decade and which eventually led to the great
rebellion of 1798. There was little danger, however, of this occurring
in Scotland. Economic growth at home and the expansion of the
British colonies in North America, the Caribbean and India in the
eighteenth century had released jobs and posts for the sons of the
middle classes and the gentry. Furthermore, Henry Dundas, the
government’s political manager in Scotland, achieved an even more
influential role in the dispensation of patronage when he became
Secretary for War and then the leading figure in the new Board of
Control of the East India Company. The huge expansion of the army
and navy after 1793 funded by the financial resources of the ‘fiscal-
military state’ produced numerous new opportunities to strengthen
government support and buttress the stability of the prevailing social
order. India became, in Sir Walter Scott’s words, the ‘corn chest for
Scotland’, as a host of young Scots made their careers in the civil
and military administrations of the subcontinent.2
In France, economic crisis, harvest failure and high grain prices
were at the very heart of the revolution. In Scotland, too, there
seemed abundant reasons for popular discontent. Meal prices rose
sharply in the final two decades of the century, and increased again
from 1795. As will be seen, the way of life of countless communities
in the countryside changed dramatically as consolidation of land and
dispersal of people intensified in the wake of the agricultural
revolution. Town workers also were exposed to new insecurities,
demands and pressures, as industrial development became
increasingly linked to the rise and fall of international markets. But,
given the scale of the upheaval, what is striking is the relative social
stability of Scotland. There was little of the angry peasant rebellions
or of the great surges of collective unrest which characterized Ireland
or France at this time. Food riots did occur in years of particularly
high grain prices but they were much less common and frequently
less violent than those in France, and far fewer even than the
outbreaks which occurred in England. Closer connections than
hitherto realized have recently been identified between the anti-
Militia Act rioters of 1797 and the radical United Scotsmen in parts of
the eastern Lowlands. But, on the whole, there was little effective
fusion in the 1790s between the episodes of popular unrest and the
overtly political movements which sought constitutional change.
Examination of the social history of the later eighteenth century
reveals why popular protest was sporadic, and in the event posed
little threat to the governing grip of the landed classes. In the period,
many communities throughout the length and breadth of Scotland
suffered loss of land, and customary rights were challenged as never
before. The experience must have inflicted pain and anxiety. But in
the same decades there was a modest rise in living standards for the
majority of people, especially between c.1780 and c.1800. Surveys
of occupational groups as varied as male farm servants, urban
masons and rural handloom weavers have found that while grain
prices were indeed rising, money wages were rising faster still. Only
from the second decade of the nineteenth century was there a clear
break in this upward trend. The cushion of moderately improving
living standards in the short-term for the majority may have alleviated
some of the harsher effects of social disruption and reduced one
possible cause of widespread popular disturbance.
This was a distinctively Scottish experience and not paralleled in
most areas of Western Europe, or even of England, where, in the
1780s and 1790s, prices did outstrip money incomes. Peculiarly
Scottish factors help to explain the trend north of the Border. So
much of the economic expansion depended on labour-intensive
methods that it led to a huge increase in demand for such major
groups as handloom weavers and farm servants. At the same time,
Scotland contributed disproportionate numbers of soldiers and
seamen to the war effort between 1793 and 1815. Added to that was
the relatively slow pace of national population increase, significantly
lower than that of Ireland, France and England in the later eighteenth
century, which ensured that the labour markets were rarely in danger
of being glutted with a flood of additional workers. The general result
was that employers, whether in country or town, had to bid higher to
ensure regular supplies of labour.
Potential unrest was also defused by the widespread opportunities
for both emigration and migration. Population mobility in this rapidly
changing society was unusually high by the standards of many
Western European countries. Transatlantic emigration was
undoubtedly one alternative to physical protest against the onward
march of agrarian capitalism in the western and central Highlands.
But the ‘safety valve’ of migration worked also very effectively in
Lowland Scotland, where the close proximity of ‘improving’ areas of
agriculture, the foundation and extension of planned villages and
new towns, and the rapidly expanding cities of Glasgow and
Edinburgh facilitated and encouraged temporary and permanent
movement of people in large numbers. Losing a stake in the land,
therefore, did not present as grave a threat to survival when
alternatives not only existed but were close and accessible to many.
In the final analysis, however, the survival of the old régime
depended ultimately on the role and responses of the landed class
itself. In a hierarchical society, the legitimate right to govern was
based not only on the inherited privileges of rank, but also on the
expectation of the performance of traditional obligations. The tenant,
for example, paid his rental in good years on the assumption that his
landlord might be a source of support in bad times. There is
considerable evidence that, before 1800 at least, some among the
Scottish landed classes had not entirely shed paternalistic values.
Indeed, they intervened in two key areas to reduce the worst aspects
of social distress. The first was by purchasing grain in years of
scarcity and making it available at subsidized prices to local
communities. The second, and more recent, development was the
willingness of landowners to allow themselves to be rated for poor
relief. It was at this time that local assessments became common in
several districts of the Lowlands. In the later eighteenth century also
no clear distinction was yet made between the ‘impotent poor’,
entitled to relief, and the able-bodied unemployed, who were not.
Only in the nineteenth century did the system become more rigorous
and discriminating. In earlier decades, however, poor relief was
much more flexible and less parsimonious, and helped to provide a
basic safety net in years of economic crisis such as 1782–3, 1792–3
and 1799–1800. It was not uncommon for tradesmen to petition
Justices of the Peace and the Court of Session in wage disputes
with their masters, and the judiciary in return was sometimes
prepared to use its powers to adjust wage levels in order to take
account of rising prices.
A free market in prices or in wages was therefore not yet a
complete reality. Regulations were mainly jettisoned in the years
after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and the removal of the old
controls then did much to intensify the deeper social tensions of that
later period. But in the 1790s lingering paternalism, through the
provision of food subsidies, a more responsive poor law and
intervention in wage bargaining had not yet disappeared. This
helped to give the old régime a degree of social acceptance and a
legitimacy which enabled it to come through even the challenging
decade of the French Revolution remarkably unscathed.

2
Yet, despite their overwhelming authority, landowners were not
omnipotent monarchs in their domains. The later eighteenth century
was indeed a time of rising rent rolls for many gentry families but
also one of strain and anxiety for others. An increase in the number
of surviving children among landed families was a new and
challenging feature of the period. More financial support was now
needed for younger sons and tochers (dowries) for daughters, as
well as maintaining annuities for widows, spinsters and other ageing
relatives, costs which were all bound by family duty and obligation.
More than a few landlords coming into their inheritance were soon
confronted by the harsh realities of the many financial obligations to
kinfolk. The women of gentry households had taken part in the work
of the estates in the past. By the Victorian era they had become
leisured wives and daughters, consumers not producers and
dependent on the support of their families. The young men flocked in
large numbers to become officers in the British military from the
1750s and in doing so, in the words of one authority, ‘were exposed
to the most luxurious, individualistic, fashionable and reckless
profession of the age’.3
Landlords in the western Highlands and Islands were especially
constrained. A challenging and volatile climate, precious little
workable soil for grain cultivation, and distance from urban markets
in the Lowlands, hugely compressed their available options,
compared at least to proprietors with estates situated south and east
of the Highland line. The basic contradiction at the heart of Highland
landlordism soon became crystal clear: a vain attempt to emulate the
levels of display and consumerism of their peers elsewhere in Britain
on the meagre surpluses of a poor peasantry. Most of the Highland
gentry began to live outside the region from the later eighteenth
century, and in their search for gentlemanly status among their peers
in the south soon fell into what has been termed ‘the luxury trap’.
David Stewart of Garth suggested that misadventure was not
inevitable and there was a choice to be made:
If unable to vie with their southern neighbours in luxury and
splendour, might not gentlemen have possessed in their mountains a
more honourable distinction – that of commanding respect without
the aid of wealth, by making a grateful people happy, and thus
uniting true dignity with humanity.4
However, the scholar who has looked in most detail at this key issue
argues that Stewart’s suggestion was unrealistic:
Family and land had been the main source of identity and status in
the pre-modern Highlands, and although these factors retained a
disproportionate role within the Highland psyche, in the modern
metropolitan context it was individual wealth and possession,
education, employment and personal behaviour that were more
important for identity and social regard.5
During the Napoleonic Wars, despite increasing revenue streams
from cattle, kelp and military recruitment, pressures were already
intense. Loans and credit formerly readily available in the market
were being drained away by the higher returns now offered from
government stocks and bonds in order to pay for the costs of the
conflict and support allies in the struggle against France. Also, the
creditors of the landowners were no longer in the main the loyal clan
gentry of old, but banks and insurance companies based in the cities
which had a much more rigorous approach to unpaid debts than
faithful kinsmen. So acute did the strains eventually become in the
decades of price collapse in the 1820s and 1830s that almost all
families descended from hereditary clan chiefs were forced to
surrender lands in bankruptcy which had been possessed by their
families for centuries. They had been irrevocably caught in a
contracting vice of stubbornly high costs and falling levels of income
from which in the end there was no escape.
Few, apart from the great ducal families of Atholl, Argyll and
Sutherland, were able to survive the financial tempest. The Malcolms
of Poltalloch in Argyllshire, for instance, were a rare example of
traditional Highland lairds who were able to prosper throughout the
period while most of the rest lost their estates. But the Malcolms
survived because they possessed immense sources of external
income through multiple investments in Atlantic trade and slave
plantations in the Caribbean. Some properties came to be managed
by trustees for the creditors of the insolvent but most were sold off to
affluent merchants, bankers, industrial tycoons and lawyers from
outside the Highlands, who often had little rapport with, or sympathy
for, the hordes of impoverished crofters and cottars whom they found
crowded into their estates after purchases were completed. By the
middle decades of the nineteenth century over two thirds of Highland
estates had changed hands. All of the Outer Hebrides, from Barra to
Lewis, and extensive districts in the islands of Skye and Mull,
together with Knoydart, Moidart, Glengarry, Glensheil, Arisaig, Kintail
and Morvern on the western mainland, had been acquired by a new
wealthy élite, few of whom had any traditional or family connections
with the Highlands.
Also, as was to become painfully obvious once the market
economy had successfully colonized all corners of Scotland, the
comparative advantage of the west Highlands in the longer term lay
almost exclusively in the development of large-scale pastoral
husbandry. Such a land- and capital-intensive economy offered few
possibilities for the people of the region, apart from the hiring of a
small number of shepherds and ancillary labourers. But sheep
ranching was to have more lethal social consequences for the local
populations than its limited impact on employment. Large-scale
pastoral farming and subsistence peasant agriculture were
fundamentally incompatible in the long run. In return for paying
inflated rentals, the flockmasters demanded access to the low-lying
patches of arable on which the people of the small townships lived
and scratched a poor living from a few acres of land. Only the
dispossession of small tenants and their families eventually resolved
that conflict as peasant traditionalism succumbed to the power of
agrarian capitalism. The history of dispossession in the Border
counties many decades before had already demonstrated that harsh
reality. Soon it would be illustrated again on an even bigger scale in
the Highlands and upland districts of the Lowlands on the fringes of
the hill country.
Because of richer land and a more benign climate, however, the
Lowland landed classes in general had more options and greater
flexibility than their Highland counterparts. Yet, even for improving
lairds in mixed farming areas, modernization of estates was not
always a straightforward business. Landlords and their managers did
not labour on the land. It was tenant farmers, their families, cottars
and servants who made the improved regime work in districts of
grain or mixed farming and which led to radical increases in crop
yields and so to higher rents. In that context draconian imposition
from above to force change was likely to prove counter-productive.
Instead, the embryonic capitalist farming class had to be nursed to
maturity by a combination of cajoling, reward, careful management
of rentals and, when necessary, the threat of removal if improving
clauses in leases were broken or not implemented. The stick was
used but more often it was the carrot. The process of negotiation
ensured that social relations between proprietors and tenants in
most of the Lowlands tended to be more cooperative than in many
parts of the Highlands, where the two sides were often driven apart
in bitter dispute over absolute rights to land between sheep and
people.
There were also serious tensions between the old élite obligations
for the people of their properties and the imperatives and attractions
of the new market economy. Certainly, the profit motive now became
much more influential than it had been in the past. But both Highland
and Lowland landowners sometimes agonized over the conflict
between maximizing estate revenues and maintaining traditional
responsibilities to the people of their estates as their forebears had
done. When the removal of families from the land was judged the
most ‘rational’ economic option, these dilemmas rose to the surface
and became especially acute.
Two examples can be offered for illustrative purposes. Francis
Humberston Mackenzie of Seaforth possessed ancestral lands in
Kintail in Wester Ross, with Brahan Castle in Easter Ross the main
family seat. He also owned the island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides
and tried for a time to play the role of clan chief while at the same
time enjoying the material rewards of commercial management of his
estates. He served as MP for Ross-shire from 1784 to 1790 and
again between 1794 and 1796. Seaforth owned houses in
fashionable areas of both London and Edinburgh. He had inherited
large debts and these continued to increase as a direct consequence
of the demands of his lifestyle in the cities. Deep anxieties about
finances now started to surface in the Seaforth correspondence.
Higher rentals from sheep farming were an obvious option to offer
some temporary respite from the pressures, but Seaforth persistently
refused very attractive offers from flockmasters to rent his lands in
Glenshiel because he believed sheep runs would inevitably lead to
widespread evictions of the people:
In the years 1784 and 1787 while I was labouring under the most
cruel distress and doubtful if I could keep even a remnant of my
lands, I was so anxious to keep together the people I looked on as
hereditably attached to my family that in spite of all wishes and better
advice I refused to deal at all with the sheep farmers who offered
double and treble their rents.6
This decision was against the strong advice of his factor, Colin
Mackenzie, who saw large-scale pastoral husbandry as the only
financial panacea for the encumbered estate.
Seaforth was not the only Highland laird caught in this dilemma.
Sir John Sinclair wrote of him: ‘Col. Mackenzie of Seaforth … and
other proprietors of Highland estates … who may be desirous of
having full value of their property but cannot think of parting with their
people.’ Another adviser also recommended in 1800 that the island
of Lewis be turned over mainly to sheep but thought the proprietor
would not be willing ‘to break the strong line of affection which unite
ten thousand people to the place of their nativity’.7 Only in 1802,
nearly two decades after the first approaches to turn Seaforth’s lands
over to pastoralism, was a sheep farm finally established on Lewis.
The lucrative offers of inflated cash rents and his continued struggle
with large debts had finally made Seaforth surrender to harsh
realities in what had been a vain attempt to save the patrimony of his
family from forced sales. As time passed, more and more of the
Mackenzie lands had to be sold off to meet debt payments. When
Seaforth’s own heir died in 1862, most of the old estate was already
in the hands of new owners.
The other example comes from the improvements of the third
Duke of Buccleuch on the great Border estates amassed by his
family, the Scotts, over several centuries. These were reckoned in
1781 to extend to 193,530 acres over immense areas of eastern
Dumfriesshire, southern Roxburghshire and south-west Selkirkshire.
From the 1770s a major programme of agricultural reform on these
territories was launched under the direction of the Duke’s ‘overseer
of improvements’, William Keir. The rich diversity and extent of the
Buccleuch lands allowed for greater flexibility of action than Lord
Seaforth had in Wester Ross and Lewis. But, in the same way,
Buccleuch was determined to avoid dispossession of the tenants. He
therefore ordered Keir to draw up a list of all families living on his
estates and to report back to him on the best way of ensuring how
they could be resettled after the boundaries of the traditional
holdings were altered. It is clear from the Duke’s correspondence
that this objective was of major concern to him and it had to take
priority over the planning of new farms judged by the sole criterion of
economic efficiency. However, evidence from many other estate
papers suggests that the Duke of Buccleuch was unusually
magnanimous in his concerns for the people of his estates, perhaps
because his great wealth allowed him more scope to provide for
them in a more benevolent fashion than was the case among more
impecunious lairds.
The incidence of dispute and protest over the rights of local
landlords as patrons of appointments to vacant church offices also
confirms some of the limitations of élite authority. Lay patronage had
been abolished at the time of the Presbyterian settlement of 1690
and replaced by a system whereby the parish elders selected new
ministers. Amid great controversy in Scotland, patronage was
restored by the Westminster Parliament in 1712 in defiance of the
Act of Union, a decision which came into practical effect after 1729
when the General Assembly finally ceased to veto the selections of
patrons. Thereafter, patronage often led to confrontation between
landed patrons and congregations. The system was abhorred as a
process which placed the superiority of secular over spiritual
authority and also smacked of the post-Union anglicization of the
Church of Scotland. It is reckoned that opposition to appointment of
ministers by lay patrons occurred in one third to one half of
Scotland’s parishes between 1712 and 1874, the date when
patronage was finally abolished.
Protests often took the form of collective acts of violence against
the decisions of landed patrons, which could result in intervention by
the military to restore order. Not all the rioters were from the lower
levels of rural society. Affluent tenant farmers, professional families
and even smaller landowners also came together to try and defeat
the authority of greater magnates, who controlled most rights of
patronage. The bitter complaint was that they were usurping the
popular rights of the people to decide on who should be the
representative of Jesus Christ among them in their Sabbath worship.
These disputes became the most common form of popular protest in
rural Scotland in the eighteenth century. When the objectors failed in
their objective to overturn the decision of the patron, it was not
uncommon for entire congregations to secede from the church and
join the ranks of dissenters. Indeed, patronage stirred such deep
feelings that it eventually led to the Great Disruption of 1843, which
split the Presbyterian establishment in Scotland down the middle
between the Auld Established Kirk and the Free Church.
 In John Galt’s novel Annals of the Parish (1821) his main
character, the parish minister, the Rev. Micah Balwhidder, was
appointed to his office by the local patron in 1760. This triggered ‘a
mad and vicious protest’ by the people and a ‘guard of soldiers’ had
to be summoned to protect the presbytery. As Balwhidder
approached his new charge to address the congregation for the first
time on the Sabbath:
Dirt was flung as we passed, and reviled us all, and held out the
finger of scorn at me … Poor old Mr Kilfuddy of the Braehill got such
a clash of glar [soft mud] on the side of his face, that his eye was
almost extinguished.
When we got to the kirk door, it was found to be nailed up, so as
by no possibility to be opened. The sergeant of the soldiers wanted
to break it, but I was afraid that the heritors [landowners of the
parish] would grudge and complain of the expense of a new door,
and I supplicated him to let it be as it was: we were, therefore,
obligated to go in by a window, and the crowd followed us making
the most unreverent manner, making the Lord’s house like an inn on
a fair day with all their grievous yellyhooing.
We should not therefore assume that the people were
automatically submissive to landed authority. The Levellers’ Revolt in
Galloway, described in the previous chapter, demonstrated that
power had to be employed with some care to avoid inciting a violent
reaction. Robert Burns’s great poem and song on the dignity of
labour and poverty, ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That’, published in the
radical decade of the 1790s, contains some irreverent verses written
by one Ayrshire ploughman about those who had dominion in his
district. Burns’s feelings derived in part from the Calvinist tradition in
Scotland of the equality of all souls before God, whatever the earthly
rank of social classes:
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine;
A Man’s a Man for a’ that:
For a’ that, and a’ that,
Their tinsel show, an a’ that:
The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor,
Is king o’ men for a’ that.
 Ye see yon birkie, ca’d a lord,
Wha struts, an’ stares, an’ a’ that:
Tho’ hundreds worship at his word
He’s but a coof for a’ that:
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
His ribband, star, an’ a’ that:
The man o’ independent mind,
He looks an’ laughs at a’ that
[birkie – conceited fellow; coof – silly or stupid person]
Even landlords in the Highlands did not always have it their own
way. Public protest did take place, but probably much more common
was covert opposition to landowner plans. An example of this took
place on the Tiree estate of the improving grandee, John, fifth Duke
of Argyll, in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth. The
island of Tiree was blessed with fertile land and for the Hebrides a
relatively benign climate. In an almost identical strategy to improvers
in the Lowlands, the Duke and his advisers determined on a policy of
establishing medium-sized compact farms under single
husbandmen, breaking up the traditional townships and decanting
the displaced population into villages, there to work in fishing and
textile manufacture. The numbers required to move were
considerable because the settlements were populated not just by
tenants but also by colonies of cottars, who were often kinfolk of the
rent-paying peasants.
For over four decades, with some intermittent gaps, the Argyll
estate battled against refractory tenants in the runrig townships who
stubbornly refused to participate in schemes of improvement despite
a largely benevolent approach. All the time, the population of the
island was continuing to rise while the Duke’s need for higher rents
from the improved farms became ever greater. But his grand plans
ultimately depended on the cooperation of the people, and this was
not forthcoming. In 1803 he conceded defeat, gave up the idea of
larger single farms and ordered that the townships be divided into
small croft holdings for not only the tenants but also for cottars and
their families. He was swayed as well in this decision by rising prices
for kelp and the need for a large seasonal labour force on the coast,
for the gathering and burning of the seaweed.
In any society as grossly unequal as eighteenth-century Scotland,
there were bound to be tensions below the surface which might
become more visible and sometimes violent when stirred by high
food prices, rises in taxation or threats to popular rights. Meal mobs
could gather in seasons of spiralling grain prices and attacks on the
hated excisemen and customs houses were so routine as to be
regarded as something of a national sport. However, as the
patronage disputes confirmed, it was in the sphere of religion that
direct conflict between élites and the people was probably most
common and enduring.

3
The impetus for landlord-driven improvement in rural society from
the 1760s came in large part as a response to the steep rise in
demand for agricultural produce and raw materials caused by
Scottish industrialization and urbanization in the second half of the
eighteenth century and thereafter. It was these booming markets in
most years which fundamentally lowered the threshold of risk for
both large-scale investment in infrastructure and widespread
changes in agrarian organization. One informed contemporary,
writing in 1815, noted the remarkable pace of Scottish rural
transformation in earlier decades:
there never were greater agricultural improvements carried on in any
country than there have been in Scotland during the last thirty years;
that the progress of the most correct systems of husbandry has been
rapid and extensive beyond what the most sanguine could have
anticipated; and that in short, when we compare the present state of
agriculture in the south-eastern counties with what must have been
its state about the middle of last century, the efforts of several
centuries would seem to have been concentrated in the intermediate
period.8
Scottish exports rose ninefold in volume between 1785 and 1835
with manufactured goods the main driving force in that colossal rate
of expansion. By the census of 1851, Scotland had become even
more industrialized than the rest of Britain as measured by the
proportion of the male labour force employed in industry and mining:
43.2 per cent for Scotland compared to the national figure of 40.9
per cent. City and town growth was equally explosive. As suggested
earlier, urbanization in Scotland in the century between 1750 and
1850 was the fastest of any country in Europe. In 1750, Scotland
was seventh in the league table of ‘urbanized societies’, as
measured by the ratio of national populations living in towns of
10,000 inhabitants or above. By 1800 it was fourth, and second only
to England and Wales by 1850. Even that figure underestimates the
full extent of urban development because it fails to take into account
the smaller towns and larger villages, which started to spread from
the later eighteenth century. In the 1790s there were sixteen towns
with populations over 5,000; thirty-three with between 2,000 and
5,000; and, below 2,000, as many as seventy others.
Overwhelmingly, this small-scale urbanism was concentrated in the
Lowlands, with only marginal town and village growth north of the
Highland line.
The entire process greatly multiplied the number of those who had
to depend on the market for food, drink and raw materials rather than
on their own labours on the farm or smallholding. Grain prices
soared on trend with a significant spike during the Napoleonic Wars,
except for a few years of slump before and immediately after 1800.
In the Kingdom of Fife, for example, average prices for oats between
1765 and 1760 were 56 per cent higher than in the years 1725–60.
But between 1805 and 1810 they averaged more than 300 per cent
greater than the 1760s. Landowners creamed off much of the profits
of their tenants by raising rents, and that stream of income fuelled in
turn even more estate investment. In the same period, Lowland and
English consumption of Highland beef, wool, mutton, timber, slate,
fish, kelp and illicit whisky went up. Prices for black cattle alone
quadrupled between 1740 and 1800, while some commentators
suggested that during the Napoleonic Wars Highland lairds could
increase their rentals fivefold simply by converting land to sheep
runs. Commercial forces were now so overwhelming that radical
social change in Gaeldom seemed inevitable.
But it is important to recognize that material factors alone did not
drive landlord strategies. The power of ideas was also decisive,
especially those derived from the Scottish and European
Enlightenments on the optimistic possibilities for progress in both the
human and natural spheres. The common eighteenth-century
collective term for all this was ‘improvement’. Improvement was by
no means a uniquely Scottish phenomenon. Similar ideas were
influential in the rest of the British Isles and Europe, but they seemed
to have been introduced in Scotland with unusual force and vigour,
not only in terms of agrarian change but also in the rebuilding of
urban spaces. Partly this may have been because of the growing
consciousness among the Scottish ruling classes of the material
inferiority of their country in relation not only to England but also to
other more advanced and prosperous nations. Closer political
association with England after the Union of 1707 only made these
patriotic feelings more palpable and pressing. For the optimists it
seemed that the propitious economic conditions of the middle
decades of the eighteenth century had finally made it possible for the
laggard northern kingdom to catch up with its greater southern
neighbour.
Another factor may have been the early and widespread
dissemination of enlightened ideas among the Scottish educated
classes. Enlightenment thought in Scotland most often emerged in
full flow from the lecture halls of the country’s five universities. It has
become almost a cliché to say that some of the key works of Adam
Smith, Francis Hutcheson, Adam Ferguson, William Robertson, John
Millar and others first saw the light of day as teaching notes. Their
students left university and went on to careers in the church, the
legal profession, teaching and civil administration, armed with the
benefit of the new learning and its emphatic belief in human
progress. It is striking, for instance, how the local parish ministers of
the 1790s, virtually to a man, welcomed and praised the new ethic of
agricultural improvement in their reports published in that decade in
the OSA. The estate factors and surveyors who carried out the
practical business of agrarian reform were also educated
professionals who would have been aware of the innovative ideas. It
is striking, for instance, that William Keir, ‘overseer of improvements’
on the Duke of Buccleuch’s lands in the Borders, for thirty-eight
years from 1772, had certainly read and reflected on some of the
writings of Adam Smith and other luminaries of the Enlightenment.
Keir’s major report to the Duke in 1791 was shot through with
Smithian ideas and principles.
Several common precepts emerged from the improving literature
and the practical programmes of the estate managers. Virtually all
aspects of the traditional rural social and economic structure were
vigorously condemned for irrationality and inefficiency. Uncritical
intellectual legitimacy and credibility were afforded instead to virtually
everything that was novel and innovative. Communal holdings and
traditional patterns of work were especially damned because they
were thought to inhibit individual freedom of enterprise and the
natural aspiration of man to strive for profit and reward. Common
lands were also unacceptable and they should be taken over, put
under the plough and worked by industrious husbandmen. Nature
was not preordained but could be changed for the better by rational
and ordered human intervention. Indeed, the enthusiasts for
improvement sometimes seem like religious zealots determined not
only to take more profit from the land but to do so as an essential
part of an ideological mission to modernize Scottish society.
 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
 Table 5 Tenant numbers on eleven Lowland estates, 1735–1850

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.
 Table 6 Summonses of Removal, Hamilton sheriff court, 1763–84 (available years)

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.
Table 7 Parishes gaining and losing population in the counties of Angus, Fife, Lanarkshire
and Ayrshire, 1790s

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.

Table 8 New and extended settlements, villages and towns in four Scottish Lowland
counties, 1790s

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.
 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.
 Table 10 References to improvements on Richard A. Oswald’s possessions in Ayrshire,
1803

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.
 Table 11 Men employed in enclosing and planting Hamilton estates, Lanarkshire lands,
March 1774

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.

 9

The Lowlands after Dispossession

The dispossession of people in the Highlands has always had a high

historical profile. In the Lowlands it is low to the point of virtual non-
existence. It is ironic, therefore, that landlessness in relation to
overall population of each region was considerably greater among
the people of the Lowland countryside at the end of clearance than
in the western Highlands and Islands. As the next chapter will show,
the number of those with some stake in land, however tiny, as
crofters and cottars, continued to grow in the north-west region
throughout the entire cycle of mass clearance until the evictions
mainly came to an end in the years after the potato famine of the
later 1840s. The numerical and political significance of the crofters
became clear in the 1880s when government set up a Royal
Commission to investigate their conditions and then passed
legislation in 1886 to protect their interests. Long before that time,
however, the vast majority of rural Lowlanders were already bereft of
land. Only in one region did the age-old connections survive. In the
north-eastern counties of Aberdeen, Banff and Kincardine, as has
been seen, landlords divided wastes, moors and hillsides above the
line of cultivation into small crofts at no rental until economic returns
were achieved. The lives of these crofting families was one of
unremitting drudgery and hard toil for meagre returns. Some of them
might well have been tenants and cottars who had lost land when
dispossession gathered pace. It was said of some parishes in upper
Banffshire, for example, that at first the new colonies of crofters were
‘mere specs of cultivated land in the midst of the great waste’.
Eventually, however, whole areas came under regular cultivation
without, so it was said, ‘costing the proprietor a penny’.1
In Aberdeenshire, by the 1880s, 43 per cent of holdings were at or
under 100 acres; in Banff the figure was 49 per cent and in Moray
and Nairn 40 per cent. Elsewhere in most of the south, especially
across the eastern plain, the big farms reigned supreme. Only 4 per
cent of holdings in Berwick, 5 per cent in East Lothian and 12 per
cent in Fife and Kinross were less than 100 acres. The old world of
subsistence husbandmen, multi-tenants and cottars had passed
away into history in these districts to be replaced by enlarged
compact farms, where full-time waged servants and labourers lived
and worked. Landless tradesmen, formerly living in the fermetouns,
with a few rigs of land, were now gathered in rural villages and
country towns. Everywhere single blocks of land of varying size had
taken the place of the traditional township clusters. These improved
holdings were under the authority of one master with his family
house, outbuildings for tools and storage, together with living space
of different kinds for his workers, all within the same steading.

1
However, it would be wrong to conclude that these far-reaching
changes atomized rural society and left it arid and devoid of human
colour. The age-old institutions of kirk and school maintained their
social centrality and connection with the past, as did the inns and
howffs where the menfolk from different farms would gather for
evenings of conviviality. As Robert Burns memorably recorded of
one watering hole in Ayrshire in the late eighteenth century:
While we sit boozing at the nappy,
And getting fou and unco happy,
We think na on the lang Scots miles,
The mosses, waters, slaps and styles,
That lie between us and our hame,
Where sits our sulky sullen dame,
Gathering her brows like gathering storm,
Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.
 [nappy – strong ale; fou – drunk; unco – very; mosses – marshes;
slaps – steps; dame – wife]
Robert Burns, Tam O’Shanter, published 1791.

Also, the larger farm steadings were communities of families,

ploughmen, labourers, foremen and single women, working both in
the house and in the fields, which replicated something of the life of
the fermetouns, though the people who laboured in them were now
engaged as hired employees rather than landholding cottars or small
independent husbandmen. Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair
(1932–4), his great trilogy of rural life set in the north-east Lowlands
before and after the Great War, describes a society where
neighbourliness remained very much part of the weft and woof of the
countryside. Weddings, christenings and funerals were all collective
events which drew in many people from far and wide. Neighbouring
tenants and crofters supported one another when some were
stricken by the misfortunes of bereavement, disability or financial
loss. As the sons and daughters of the large families of the small
tenants grew to adulthood they would take service as ploughmen
and maid servants in other districts, so extending family networks far
and wide. Gossip, good or bad, and plenty of it, was a popular
source of news and rumour which helped bond the people together
as well as sometimes fracturing relationships if the reputation of a
family was shamed in the telling. In the long winter evenings in the
kitchen or the bothy after a day’s work, there were stories and jokes
to be told, singing to be enjoyed, making music with fiddle, bagpipe
or melodeon, playing games and cards and ‘speeran guesses’
(posing riddles). Books were generally too expensive for the farm
servant community until the later nineteenth century. But
broadsheets and chapbooks were widely read, as was the
remarkably popular People’s Journal, the biggest-selling periodical in
Scotland among the working classes both in country and town for
most of the nineteenth century.
The new rural world also had a rich popular culture. Many of the
rituals and festivities of days gone by survived but also meshed with
others which emerged in response to the different patterns of living
and work after improvement. By the early nineteenth century, the
twice-yearly hiring fairs were firmly established in the small towns
and villages of the countryside. Apart from the serious business of
gaining a fee for the next term, the fairs were great social occasions,
a time to renew acquaintance with old friends from isolated farm
steadings, enjoy the craic (good banter and chat), partake of a drink
or two, and perhaps meet a new lad or lass. The ending of one year
and the beginning of the next on 31 December and 1 January was a
special time in rural and urban Scotland since it combined an
inebriated wake for what had gone before with hopeful celebration of
what was yet to come. Thanksgiving Sunday for a successful
harvest, or hairst, usually took place in October and was also an
important date in the farming calendar. Another event of great
antiquity was the harvest home, or kirn, when the fields had all been
shorn and grain stored for the year. The centrepiece of the kirn
supper was the preparation of a distinctive concoction known as
meal-and-ale. One recipe advised: ‘A bottle of stout, half a bottle of
whisky and two bottles of brisk ale were poured into a large milk
plate, and a bowlful of sugar stirred into it. The oatmeal was strown
into the mess gently, till it was of the consistency of not too thin
porridge’.2 Beef, fowl and plum-duff often followed until the tables
were redded (cleared) and the dancing started, usually lasting into
the wee small hours: ‘with many folk far from sober, and some of
them under the table. Neighbours were invited, of course, and every
farm had its meal-and-ale in turn. Once upon a day you could be
worn out by the time they were all of them put past.’3
The daily lives of the farm servants, whether at work or leisure,
took place under the watchful eye of the farmer or of his grieve
(foreman), the so-called ‘iron men’ of the new agriculture. The
working day for the horsemen began at 5 a.m. and, with hurried meal
breaks, lasted until 6 p.m., or until darkness fell. In the larger farms
the labour force resembled military regiments with their hierarchies,
rules, predictable monotonies, set working hours and barrack-like
living quarters: ‘there was a tyranny about the great touns; their men
were as firmly shackled by the cry of a hungry beast or a week of
fine weather as any modern factory hand to the punch-clock at the
plant gate’.4 It was said that the unrelenting manual work in all
weathers bred men who were hard and dour.
The daily cycle of their labours was well captured in one of the
most famous ‘bothy ballads’ of the time, ‘Drumdelgie’:
Oh ken ye o’ Drumdelgie toon
Where a’ the crack lads go?
Sra’bogie braw in a’ her bouns
A bigger canna show
At five o’clock we quickly rise
And hurry doon the stair
It’s there to dorn oor horses,
Likewise to straik their hair
Syne, after workin’ half an hour,
To the kitchen each one goes;
It’s there to get oor breakfast
Which is generally brose
We’ve scarcely got our brose well supt
And g’en oor pints a tie
When the foreman cries, ‘Hullo, my lads
The hour is drawin’ nigh.’
At sax o’clock the mull’s put on,
To gie us a strait wark;
It tak’s four o’ us to mak’ to her,
Till we could wring oor sark
And when the water is put aff,
We hurry doon the stair,
To get some quarters through the fan,
Till daylicht does appear
When daylicht it begins to peep,
and the sky begins to clear,
The foreman he cries oot, ‘My lads,
Ye’ll stay nae langer here!
There’s sax o’ you’ll gae to the ploo,
And twa can ca’ the neeps;
And the owsen they’ll be aifter you,
 Wi strae raips roon their queets.’
But when that we gyaun furth
And turnin’ oot tae yoke,
The snaw dang on sae thick and fast
That we were like to choke
The frost had been so very hard,
The ploo she widna go;
And sae oor cairtin’ days commenced
Among the frost and snaw.
Oor horses being but young and sma,
The shafts they didna fill,
And often needed the saiddler lad
To help them up the hill
But we will sing oor horses’ praise,
Though they be young and sma’;
For they outshine the neiper anes
That tip the road sae braw
Sae fare ye weel, Drumdelgie,
For I maun gang awa’;
Sae fare ye weel, Drumdelgie,
Your weety weather an a’.
Fare ye weel, Drumdelgie,
I bid ye a’ adieu;
I leave ye as I got ye –
A maist unceevil crew.
[ken – know; toun – farm steading; braw – fine; boun – bounds; corn
– feed oats; straik – stroke; brose – oatmeal and water dish; pints –
laces; mull – threshing or meal mill; wark – work; sark – shirt; oot –
out; ploo – plough; sax – six; ca’ – carry; neeps – turnips; owsen –
oxen; raips – ropes; queets – ankles; cairtin’ – carting; saidler lad –
lad with a whip; neiper – neighbouring farm; maun – must; gang awa
– go away; unceevil – uncivil; weety – wet; crew – work force of a
farm]
The ballad vividly brings out the continuous round of hard toil from
before dawn until dusk. Dressing and then eating a meagre
breakfast was done in a hurry (‘pints’, or boot laces, not even being
tied in the rush) under the watchful eye of the foreman. Even before
dawn broke, the hour when labour in the fields usually started, there
was still strenuous work to be done beforehand manning the barn-
mill. The frost was so deep that the ploughs could not turn the earth
but there were plenty of other outdoor tasks to be carried out while
the snow storm lasted. It is hardly surprising given the unrelenting
daily round that the ballad ends on a sour note which is very typical
of the genre. Only the bond between the ploughman and his pair of
‘young and sma’ horses gives more of a glimmer of pleasure and
contentment among the daily grind. The horses were fed and
groomed before the ploughman had his own breakfast and though
they might need the whip to climb the hill, he still proudly sings their
praises as a better pair than any in the neighbouring farm.
Cottar families, the dominant social formation in the countryside
before c.1750, had been entirely stripped out of the system by the
early nineteenth century. Wage-earning married servants, hired for a
year, and single male and female servants contracted for six months,
now comprised the vast majority of the farm labour force. There had
always been some landless servants in the fermetouns but their
numbers now swelled into a great rural army which outnumbered all
other workers. In the rich arable lands of the south-east region they
were married men for the most part who lived with their families in
small cottages within the farm steadings. The same class could also
be found in other districts, but in most parts married horsemen were
vastly outnumbered by the young bachelors who had come to their
first jobs on the farms in their early teens. As men of skill and
reputation, the ploughmen, fully trained after two years of
apprenticeship, would doubtless have had a greater sense of pride in
their work and status than Highland crofters scratching a living from
poor land or toiling in the gathering and burning of seaware to make
kelp in the islands and coasts of the north-west region. The ballads
sing of their skills and reputation, as in ‘The Praise of Ploughmen’:
Ye lads and lasses a’ draw near,
I’m sure it will delight your ear
And as for me I’ll no be sweir
Tae sing the praise o’ ploughmen
The very King that wears the crown
 The brethren of the sacred gown,
The Dukes and Lords of high renown,
Depend upon the ploughman.
The gardener he cries out wi’ speed
I’m sure I was the first man made,
And I was learned the gardener trade
Before there was a ploughman.
Oh gardener, lad, it’s true you say;
But how long gardener did you stay?
I’m sure it was just scarce a day
Ere y became a ploughman.
The standing of the horsemen in rural communities was burnished
at the ploughing matches which became popular in the localities
after improvement. Judges ‘would be looking for furrows as neat and
as regularly set together as the pages of a book’ if they were to
award a prize.5 A champion ploughman was a figure of high repute
in his local area who could earn more than his fellows and be offered
a higher fee at the next hiring fair. A ploughman also had a strong
sense of craft pride, which was fortified and protected by initiation as
a brother of the Horseman’s Word, a fraternal secret society based
on Masonic ritual open only to those who worked with horses on the
farm. The society originated in north-east Scotland, then spread
throughout the Lowlands and eventually into England. At the
conclusion of the ceremony of initiation, which took place at dead of
night, the novice was given a secret word which, it was said, when
merely whispered to a horse would make the animal compliant.
Rumour also had it that the word was likely to have the same effect
on young women. The penalties for those who revealed the secret to
anyone outside the society were self-inflicted and awesome. The
initiate promised:
So help me Lord to keep my secrets and perform my duties as a
horseman. If I break any of them – even the last of them – I wish no
less than to be done to me than my heart be torn from my breast by
two wild horses, and my body quartered in four and swung on
chains, and the wild birds of the air left to pick my bones, and these
then taken down and buried in the sands of the sea, where the tide
 ebbs and flows twice every twenty four hours to show I am a
deceiver of their faith. Amen.6
The horsemen might have seen themselves as the princes of the
farm, but they could not function without the support of many other
hands. Of crucial importance were women workers. By 1871 over a
quarter of all permanent farm servants in Scotland were women, and
they also formed the majority of the seasonal labour force at the
busy times. The reliance on female labour was distinctively Scottish
as nothing like the same dependency existed in the southern and
Midland counties of England. By custom females were paid half the
male wage. They carried out all the work of the farm except those
which directly involved the management of horses: sowing, reaping,
weeding, hoeing, singling and pulling turnips, gathering in the potato
crop and spreading manure. Women had also a monopoly of milking
and cheese making. Small family-run farms in the south-west region
especially depended on the labour of wives and daughters. The lives
of these women were likened by some observers to those of black
slaves, so all-consuming were the hours of work and so tiny the
pittance paid by fathers to unmarried daughters under the ‘tyranny of
family labour’. It was said that women were such a significant part of
the workforce because the heavy industries in Scotland of iron, steel,
engineering and shipbuilding drew off so many men from the
countryside to better-paid jobs in the towns and cities.
The ‘orra man’, or ‘other man’, was a master of all trades. He
could plough, manage cattle and put his hand to the repair of the
farm tools. During the busy season of grain and potato harvests, all
the permanent servants were joined by day labourers from the
villages, together with Irish and Highland migrants who came
annually from much further afield. Then there were the shepherds,
the ‘lonely men of the glens and the hills’. They were highly paid,
their status and wages equalling those of the farm grieves, but they
lived a life of lonely isolation for most of the year, and, if single,
usually had only their faithful collies for company or perhaps from
time to time a boy apprentice. The job was monotonous outside the
busy times of lambing, dipping, shearing and the arduous task of
smearing the sheep to protect them from parasites. But during harsh
Scottish winters shepherding could become a dangerous occupation,
when the men risked their own lives for the safety of their flocks. It
was reported that on one fateful Sunday in the town of Moffat in the
Borders, twelve shepherds who had died during severe blizzards
were buried in the kirkyard on the same day. Being apart from
society over many years could also take its toll: ‘In time he could
take to drink, and his teeth blackened by long years of tobacco
usage and a reliance on primitive hygiene; in his hill bothy he made
his porridge once a week in the big bothy pot and then poured it into
the drawer of a chest, it was said – there to be cut in cold slices
when he needed it.’7
The first half of the nineteenth century was lotus time for the
country tradesmen who were now detached from the steadings and
lived in villages or plied their crafts in the neighbourhood of the
farms. There had always been trades in the old style farming like
millers, weavers and smiths. But improvement revolutionized
demand for skilled men. First, iron replaced wood in countless small
details, such as household utensils, hinges, locks and much more.
The supply of timber also became more abundant. Wood sawn in
straight angles and shapes was essential for the joiners who helped
construct the new steadings and farm houses. Wooden fitments
transformed house interiors with a hallan (partition or screen) at the
door to reduce drafts, box beds, benches, seats, shelves, dressers.
Iron-framed ploughs also hugely increased repair and construction
work for country smiddies (blacksmith workshops). In this period,
they became akin to small social centres to which the menfolk would
gravitate to gossip and hear the latest local news. The cultivation of
land by the work horses was an additional boon for the smiths as
iron shoes had to be replaced at regular intervals. Following in the
train of improvement was also a great rebuilding of the countryside.
To function to best effect the steadings on the larger farms needed
adequate barns, milkhouses, grain lofts, stabling and cart sheds.
These works led to an unprecedented demand for masons and
joiners as well as the supplying trades of sawmilling, brick and tile
making, and quarrying. Only later in the nineteenth century did the
good times tail off as transport development of road and rail helped
businesses in the urban areas to colonize the countryside and
undercut many small rural enterprises.

2
At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the long boom which had
sustained the huge wartime profits of British agriculture came to an
abrupt end. After c.1812 there was a downward trend in grain prices,
a marked fall in the wage levels of farm labourers and a visible
increase in the numbers out of work on the land. Unemployment,
initially caused by a temporary decline in the fortunes of the farming
class, was then exacerbated by the postwar demobilization of large
numbers of soldiers and sailors and a persistent natural increase in
rural population. In some parts of the British countryside the labour
markets rapidly became saturated, triggering desperate and violent
disturbances of the labouring poor. The most threatening outbreaks
were in the southern and eastern counties of England. Angry risings
by farm labourers took place in East Anglia in 1816, again in the
same region in 1822, all over the south and east of England in the
famous ‘Captain Swing’ riots of 1830, and again, though more
scattered, in 1831–4. Furthermore, these spectacular episodes were
paralleled by the more common incidence of casual violence, of
stacks being fired, of animals maimed and fences destroyed.
Protest also took place in a few parts of the Scottish Highlands, in
rural Ireland and in Wales, but not in Lowland Scotland. The
tranquillity of the region was noted by contemporary observers, who
drew a contrast with overt unrest in other parts of Britain and also
with the spirit of revolt coming to the surface in some of the towns
and cities of the industrial west of Scotland which finally erupted in
the ‘Radical War’ of 1820. As one East Lothian farmer commented in
1812:
during this season of scarcity and distress, when part of the
labouring classes in other districts of the Kingdom, almost driven to
desperation and madness by the want of employment and the high
 price of provisions have committed the greatest outrages against
individuals and property, the lower orders in this district have
sustained the pressures and hardships of the times with a degree of
patience and regularity of conduct which entitle them to the highest
confidence and respect from their superiors in rank and fortune.8
Again, during the difficult winter of 1817–18, the Justices of the
Peace in the south-eastern Lowlands, after the most careful enquiry,
found no evidence of any rise in social tension and agreed that there
was therefore no need to appoint a single special constable.
Kincardine magistrates reported somewhat smugly in 1820, the year
of the disturbances by weavers and other workers in the south-west,
that ‘there was scarcely a murmur to be heard, and our “little
community” is too much of an agricultural cast for the spirit of
radicalism to take root in it’.9 In the year 1830, William Cobbett, the
English radical, came north to find out why the Scots were quiet
while the English burnt the ricks. It was a good question and trying to
answer it helps to bring out some of the distinctive features of rural
Lowland society after the era of dispossession.
One salient contrast between the two regions was their differing
systems of recruiting labour. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars,
farm workers in the southern and eastern counties of England were
paid and hired in a variety of ways depending on local custom and
agrarian specialization. In general, however, the old system of long-
hires and the tradition of boarding labourers within farms and paying
them in kind had been abandoned. Instead, most workers by the
early nineteenth century took their earnings on a daily or weekly
basis. They had become a casualized labour force likely to be at risk
from both short- and long-term unemployment. Furthermore, they
were in the main hired from neighbouring local villages rather than
boarded within the farm steadings. Increasingly these labourers were
paid in money with only vestigial remains of traditional allowances in
kind. In sum, a very significant number of farm workers in the south
of England were accustomed to volatility in money wage-levels and
to the direct impact of price changes on their material condition.
Since they lived in villages with their fellows rather than in the farm
steadings supervised by the masters they were also likely to be less
amenable to the social discipline of the farming class.
In the Lowlands of Scotland the structure of labour payment and
recruitment differed markedly. Payments in kind, though they varied
in detail, still formed a very substantial part of the wage reward for
most workers. In the south-eastern Lowlands and parts of the east-
central district, as noted earlier, most permanent farm workers were
married ploughmen, or hinds. As far as life’s necessities were
concerned, they were insulated from the market when fee’d. The
allowances of the hind included stipulated measures of oats, barley
and pease, the keep of a cow and ground for planting potatoes. The
rental of the cottage was paid for by the labour of his wife and
daughters during harvest. Fuel was carted from town at the master’s
expense and, by law, he was also obliged to provide for the hind for
six weeks when he was unable to work because of ill-health. Single
men and women servants, who were most common in the north-east
and south-west Lowlands but were also important elsewhere,
obtained board and lodging within the steading in addition to a cash
wage. The system undeniably provided Scottish farm servants with
an enviable security compared to their counterparts in southern
England. They were guaranteed food and shelter according to
familiar and acknowledged standards. But, crucially, these
advantages were only provided for those who were employed.
The contract of service was also different north of the Border, with
most farm workers hired for periods of a year or six months. This
was caused in part by contrasts in the labour markets and agrarian
structures of the two regions. Labour was in surplus by the end of
the eighteenth century in southern England. The region had become
an area of cereal monoculture and, as the acreage under the grain
crops grew as a result of the wartime rise in prices, large fluctuations
in the seasonal demand for labour developed in parallel. On the one
hand, more workers than ever before were required at harvest; on
the other, the widespread adoption of the threshing machine from the
early nineteenth century took away a traditional winter task from men
on the farm. Therefore, because of the marked differences in labour
needs at different seasons, masters in the south and east had an
incentive to eliminate the principle of the long-hire and instead take
on men only when they needed them.
In the Scottish Lowlands, however, the tradition of long-hires was
perpetuated because it fitted in so well with farmers’ needs. From the
late eighteenth century, agriculture came into direct competition with
manufacturing and mining for labour. Industrial and agrarian change
proceeded simultaneously and, more importantly, often in close
geographical proximity in the Lowlands. Indeed, most spinning and
weaving of textiles took place in the countryside, while before the
1830s industrial and agricultural work were rarely wholly separate
activities. But ironically it was precisely at this time that improved
agriculture demanded a more specialist and dedicated labour force.
Yet, because of the elimination of the cottars and the counter-
attraction of the towns, the farming class found it increasingly difficult
to maintain the necessary pool of extra workers. These varied
pressures, therefore, not only forced a marked increase in
agricultural money wages but also embedded the long-hire, at least
in part, as a means of securing labour.
Shortage of workers, however, could not have been the only
factor, because after 1815, when they became more plentiful, there
was still no incentive to move towards casualization. An additional
influence, therefore, was the impact of land and climate. Few areas
in Scotland had either the soil conditions or the favourable weather
of the great grain-growing districts of south-east England. Apart from
commercial pastoralism in the hill country, mixed agriculture, fusing
both cultivation and stock breeding, was the norm throughout most
of the Lowlands. The regime needed abundant acreage under
turnips and artificial grasses to feed cattle and sheep, and that in
turn led to an extension in the working year because of the multiple
tasks of weeding, dunging, singling and, most importantly, of
intensive and regular ploughing associated with this crop sequence.
In essence, then, the social effects of agrarian change in a mixed-
farming region were almost the reverse of those in a specialist cereal
zone. Since work was spread evenly throughout the year, farmers
had a vested interest in recruiting labour over long periods.
 This was vital anyway because of the crucial position of the
horseman in the agricultural workforce in Scotland. As already
shown, the key to the Scottish farmer’s policy of hiring was the need
to use his work horses as economically as possible. Horses cost
much in both feed and maintenance whether they were at work in
the fields or unoccupied in the stables. It became essential,
therefore, to spread work for the horses throughout the day and the
year and to ensure they functioned as efficiently as possible when at
work. Thus, each ploughman assumed responsibility for a pair and
his entire routine from the early morning to evening was concerned
with their preparation, working and final grooming. Experienced
ploughmen had therefore to be permanent servants living in the farm
steading near their horses and engaged on the long-hire.
Furthermore, while giving security to the worker when in
employment, these contracts also helped to reinforce the farmer’s
powers of labour discipline. The hired servant was entirely
dependent on his master during the period of contract and it was
also suggested that the very personal interaction of bargaining
between each of them at the feeing (hiring) markets made for an
individualized relationship which weakened collective solidarity
among farm workers. Doubtless, also, the custom of boarding
unmarried servants in the steading and often feeding them in the
farm kitchen made it much easier for the farmer to impose
surveillance on them.
Only the bothymen were said to be less amenable to social
control. They slept, ate, drank and passed their time off work in the
evenings in rough and spartan barracks, or bothies. They had the
reputation of being more detached from their employers than other
workers and, so it was said, likely to be more restless and easily
discontented. For instance, while Chartism in the 1830s seems to
have had little appeal for Scottish farm workers in general, it did
attract some adherents from the bothy districts. Also, in the same
areas attempts had been made earlier to pursue action over
grievances. In 1805, for example, an organization of farm servants in
the Carse of Gowrie was suppressed under the Combination Acts. In
1830 the same area was agitated again. A meeting at Inchture, near
Dundee, brought together around 600 ploughmen to be addressed
by trade unionists from the city. A committee was elected to extend
the movement throughout Perthshire and to press demands for an
8–10 hour day and payment of overtime. But the bothy system was
not common in most farming regions in the Lowlands. It was virtually
unknown in the south-east, and in the north-east bothies were rare
outside the old red sandstone areas of southern Kincardine and
parts of the coastal plain of Moray and Nairn. In the Carse of Gowrie
in Perthshire, bothies were more numerous because there was a
good deal of stiff, clay land requiring large numbers of horses and
ploughmen to work the land and an obvious incentive therefore to
build basic accommodation for single men.
Because the ploughmen were the specialist horsemen of the new
agriculture, general labourers had to be brought in for other tasks
such as harvesting or to carry out draining and ditching work, which
became a rural obsession from the 1840s. Superficially, they bore a
resemblance to the labourers of southern England; both were hired
on a short-term basis and both were paid mainly in cash. Yet their
intrinsic differences were more important than their apparent
similarities. Day labourers in Scotland formed only a minor part of
the workforce. In the 1790s, 20 per cent of agricultural workers in
Dalmeny parish, Fife, were day labourers; 10 per cent in Gask,
Perthshire; 7 per cent in Oldhamstocks, Berwick; 1 per cent in
Auchentoul, Fife; 5 per cent in Barmie, Elgin; 11 per cent in Edzell,
Forfar. Indeed, many of them were actually the wives and children of
married male servants. In the south-east, for example, the cash
wages of dependants formed a useful addition to the income of
households paid in kind. Scottish farmers therefore did not have to
keep a large pool of underemployed labourers in the fashion of
southern England in order to meet the exceptional requirements of
harvest time. The Highlands and Ireland provided a large and
growing reserve army of seasonal workers, and the rest could
usually be hired from neighbouring villages.

3
Most farm workers were therefore largely insulated from the volatility
of the labour market because of the long-hire system, and this might
help to explain the stability of the rural Lowlands in this period.
However, this rests on the assumption that most workers on the land
continued to find jobs in these years. Measurement of employment
at any time before the late nineteenth century is difficult since there
is little possibility of quantifying numbers in or out of work in precise
terms because of the absence of suitable data. Nevertheless, some
insights from the contemporary press and in parliamentary papers
can help to provide a general profile of the labour market. An
invaluable source until the later 1820s is the Farmer’s Magazine,
which published very detailed quarterly reports on each agricultural
region in Scotland. These not only provide full comment on prices
and products, but also describe conditions of employment among
various grades of farm labour.
From this evidence it would seem that after 1815 short-term
unemployment was reported in 1817–18, 1821 and 1827, but little
indication of the problem of structural unemployment which caused
such misery in the rural areas of the south of England. Also, the
severity of unemployment in these exceptional years varied both
regionally and between different groups of workers. In the crisis
years, in the south-east it was single servants hired on six-monthly
contracts who usually went without a fee. That experience was much
less common among married ploughmen, who formed a majority on
most farms there. But the south-east was likely to be most
vulnerable when grain prices collapsed from the wartime peaks
because of its emphasis on cereal cultivation. Most other areas were
in a more fortunate position. In the central district, which included the
counties of Fife, Perth and Stirling, there was a more nuanced
response. Few complaints were recorded that agricultural workers
had much difficulty in finding jobs.
The contrast was even more striking between the pattern in the
south-east and the north-eastern counties of Banff, Kincardine and
Aberdeen. Here the more balanced agrarian structure and the
development of land reclamation projects after 1815 ensured a
greater vigour in the labour market than elsewhere. In 1816–17, for
example, the north-east began to shed farm workers later than the
south-east and to take on additional hands at an earlier stage, when
the temporary crisis had begun to pass. Again, 1821 was a bad year
in the south-east but hardly at all in Aberdeen and Banff. Throughout
the period, indeed, half-yearly money wages for single male
ploughmen in these latter counties were consistently 15–20 per cent
higher than those offered in the Lothians and Berwickshire. Crucially,
no evidence was recorded of the growth of a significant surplus of
labour of the kind which caused social instability in southern England
and, as will be seen in the next chapter, was also starting to emerge
in the western Highlands and Islands as the bi-employments of
military service, kelp burning and fishing during the Napoleonic Wars
suffered protracted decline.
One of the reasons for the favourable equilibrium of jobs and
labour in the rural Lowlands was the buoyancy of industry. The
decline of linen spinning and stocking knitting in the countryside was
compensated by a sustained expansion in linen weaving in the east-
central districts. Weaving increasingly became a specialized activity,
carried on mainly in rural villages rather than farm cottages, and so
became a real alternative to agricultural work, since wages, although
they fell after 1815, proved more resilient than in the cotton-weaving
districts of the west. But probably even more important was the
response of Scottish agriculture to the postwar depression in grain
prices.
Lowland farming was better placed than the specialist wheat-
producing regions of southern England. The range of crops grown,
the significance of animal rearing and fattening, and the relative
unimportance of wheat cultivation, except in the south-east, lent the
agrarian system a versatility which regions of grain monoculture
manifestly lacked. The grains commonly grown in the north, oats and
barley, were notably less affected by the slump in prices than wheat.
Between 1805 and 1812 the average annual price for wheat in the
south-east zone, according to the Haddington fiars (annual grain
price averages used to determine clerical stipends), was 85/- per
quarter. Between 1813 and 1820 it fell by 7 per cent to 5/- per
quarter. On the other hand, the decline in barley and oat prices was
much less acute. Barley fell by about 9 per cent between 1813 and
1820 in relation to the average of 1805–12; oats by 1 per cent.
Scottish farmers had another basic advantage. Some of the
money costs of agriculture were less onerous north of the border.
There was no payment of tithes in kind: they could be valued and,
when valued, did not afterwards increase. Poor Law assessments
were still only a marginal and indirect burden on Scottish tenant
farmers compared to southern England; landlords paid half the
amount directly, and the remainder was passed on to their tenants.
But as late as 1839 only 236 out of 900-odd parishes had
assessments and the majority of these were to be found either in the
south-east or in the growing towns and cities of the central belt. A
more important cost, however, was labour, and here the continuation
of payment in kind as an integral part of the total wage was again of
considerable significance. When grain prices were depressed and
pressures on cash resources increasing, it made economic sense to
maintain in-kind rewards and so cut down on money outlays.
The resilience of the labour market, however, is still surprising.
True, it was only much later in the nineteenth century that
mechanical reapers and other key innovations started to replace
some workers. Nonetheless, even earlier, improved agriculture did
undeniably bring savings in labour costs. Ploughing was now carried
out by single men and two horses. The threshing machine and the
import of coal, instead of peat dug and dried on the farm, released
many from old tasks. With the removal of the cottars, farmers also
secured much more control over labourers and were able to force
their concentration exclusively on farm work and so boost their
productivity.
But while fewer hands might be needed for some tasks, in other
aspects demand for workers continued to increase because of the
more intensive cultivation of potatoes and barley. For the first time,
from 1821–2 a major export trade developed in potatoes from the
counties of Perth, Stirling, Angus and Kinross. The real agricultural
potential of the north-east as a cattle-fattening region was also
unlocked from the later 1820s as a result of the growth of steamship
connections with London. Previously beasts destined for the
southern market had had to be sold lean and under-priced. The
Lothians and Berwick, where grain farming had always been of most
significance, also began to move at this time towards a more closely
integrated regime of arable cultivation and stock fattening.
All those developments, to a greater or lesser extent, soon led to
an increased intensity of work on a given area of land. Employment
expanded in the north-east because more acres were absorbed into
cultivation by the draining of stiff, clay land and the extension of
turnip husbandry. The impact of this development is clearly evident
in wage rates. Money wages for single male servants in
Aberdeenshire had reached a wartime peak of eight guineas per half
year in 1810. By 1816 this figure had been sharply reduced to just
over £4. Thereafter, however, the recovery became obvious. Rates
rose to £6 in 1820, steadied around that figure until 1823, reached
£7 by 1825 and remained at about that level until the early 1830s.
In the south-east, agrarian adjustment resulted in heavy
investment in drainage schemes and generous additions of rape and
bone dust to boost turnip yields. These advances had a visible
impact on the job prospects of single female servants and day
labourers. Female money wages in East Lothian and Berwick
showed an impressive stability in spring and summer from about
1819. Indeed, between 1819 and 1825, Whitsun wage rates for
women were actually higher than those for men on three occasions.
This, of course, was as much a reflection of the demand for women
domestics in nearby Edinburgh as proof of the more vigorous labour
market in agriculture. The same qualification could not, however, be
applied to male day labourers. Between 1815 and 1817
unemployment was acute among this group as investment plans
were abruptly curtailed. But in the following decade day labourers
apparently only encountered similar problems in 1827.
In the same postwar decades of the 1820s and 1830s being
considered here, the people of the north-west Highlands and Islands
had been caught in a contracting vice of an inexorable increase in
population on the one hand and the collapse of the economic
activities which had sustained them for a time before 1815 on the
other. The future looked increasingly desperate, since only sheep
farming seemed likely to have any prospect of profit. Landowners
were also starting to agonize about how they could manage to rid
their estates of the growing ‘surplus population’ of destitute people.
The contrast with the experience of the communities in the rural
Lowlands had now become stark in the extreme.

4
As in the crofting districts of the Highlands, the root cause of the
social crisis in southern England was the emergence of a gross
imbalance between a rising population and limited employment
opportunities. Indeed, fewer labourers were leaving the agricultural
districts of East Anglia, Suffolk, Surrey, Sussex, Middlesex, Kent and
Hampshire precisely at the time when grain farming was itself in
acute difficulty after the Napoleonic Wars. There was thus increasing
pressure on the regional Poor Law at a time when farmers and
landlords were less able or less willing to raise their rate subsidies to
provide support. Indeed, the attempts to cut the Poor Law dole was a
major factor in the discontent which triggered the ‘Captain Swing’
riots all over the south and east of England in 1830.
The demographic experience of the Lowlands in Scotland was
again different. In the later eighteenth century, migration from the
rural counties, although it had already begun, was occurring at a
relatively slow pace. The safety valve of migration and emigration
then became of much greater consequence in the nineteenth
century. Indeed, between 1801 and 1851 many parishes in the
Lowlands showed a net decline in numbers as the movement from
country to town began to accelerate. The vital fact was that Lowland
counties were able to shed potential surplus numbers more
effectively than the southern regions of England or the Highlands.
For example, the way labour was housed in some Lowland regions
influenced the movement of younger workers. In districts where
there were few others then employing farmers and unmarried
servants, ploughmen had to come from a distance at their first
engagement, and when they married might have to move on again
because of the scarcity of family cottages. So in Perthshire the
dependence on unmarried men was great enough to cause a drain
from agricultural labour at the age of marriage. In the mid-nineteenth
century between a quarter and a third of the men in that county who
had been servants or agricultural labourers were likely to leave for
some other occupation by the time they were thirty.
The labour structure in Perthshire was, however, almost unique.
Of general significance throughout the Lowlands in promoting
migration was the generalized Scottish system of hiring farm
servants. The long-hire did offer security of employment for a time,
but when it lapsed the majority of workers, and single men
especially, tended to discharge themselves and venture to the hiring
fairs in search of a better master, attractive conditions and more
experience. The Scottish single farm servant was therefore
habitually mobile, even if his movements were usually confined to a
particular neighbourhood. Furthermore, the feeing market was a
uniquely effective medium for relating the number of places to the
number of potential servants needed by farmers for periods of
between six months and a year. Those not hired at Whitsun (May) or
Martinmas (November) were confronted with the prospect of seeking
work elsewhere, not having a job for six months until the next fair, or
trusting to the chance of being hired as day labourers and accepting
the fall in status that implied. Unlike the cottars in the western
Highlands it was impossible for them to find any other place on the
land, because the iron rule applied in all Lowland leases was that
any farmer who dared to subdivide his tenancy would suffer
immediate eviction by the authorities of the estate. Nor could the
rural unemployed, unlike their counterparts in England, necessarily
depend on the Poor Law, because in Scotland the rights of the able-
bodied, or the unemployed, to relief were not officially recognized.
Moving from the parish of origin, therefore, did not imply a loss of
‘settlement’ rights as it did in southern England and where it acted as
a deterrent to migration from that region. Those without a hire had no
choice therefore but to move on, either to a village, a town or
overseas, because in Lowland farm service the place where they
ate, lived and slept always went with the job. The mechanism did not
involve any form of direct eviction but was nonetheless a subtly
effective system for limiting population congestion on the land.
Nevertheless, as far as migration was concerned, the positive lure
of the towns and the opportunities which came from moving
overseas should also not be underestimated. Towns and industrial
areas more generally provided a greater range of jobs and often
better wages than the humdrum life of farm service. Here was
another striking parallel between the Scottish Highlands and the
English south. In both regions, non-agricultural employment was
shrinking in the early nineteenth century as manufacturing in
England increasingly retreated to the coalfields of the north, and in
Scotland concentrated in the central Lowlands. There were therefore
few local alternatives in these two regions to draw rising population
off the land. It might also be that as farmers imposed more discipline
on their workers, urban places offered lives of more freedom and
independence, especially for young adult migrants. A key feature of
the Lowlands, unlike the western Highlands, was that few rural
parishes were far from towns. The four great city hubs of Aberdeen,
Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow were set some distances apart
across the region, and each had its own distinctive pulling power in
the immediate hinterlands of the north-east, central, south-east and
western regions. By the census of 1871 one in five Scots lived in
these cities; by 1851 it was more like one in three. The urban areas
could only have grown fast by immigration because of the lethal
effect of their high rates of mortality on natural increase. The majority
of the new urban dwellers therefore had to come from the farms and
villages of the rural districts. In 1851, for instance, Glasgow took 53
per cent of those not born in the city from Lowland sources,
Edinburgh 66 per cent, Dundee 60 per cent and Aberdeen 80 per
cent.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century migration moved up
another gear. Now the movement really did become a flight from the
land. Between 1871 and 1911 the number of ploughmen and
shepherds fell by more than a third and the decline in women
workers was even more. It was the young of the rural world who
were leaving in greatest number. One early-twentieth-century
estimate suggested that half of all workers had left agricultural
employment by their twenty-fifth birthday. What had begun as a
trickle at the beginning of the nineteenth century had become a flood
by its end.
Some of this exodus was caused by the ebbing away of industry
from the countryside in later Victorian times. It should be
remembered that much industrial activity was still rural-based as late
as 1830. In the central Lowlands, and in some other districts,
handloom weaving remained an important rural activity even up to
the 1850s. Moreover, as already noted, a multitude of skilled trades
had grown up as essential supports of improved agriculture. Country
blacksmiths were necessary for the making and repairing of the new
iron-framed ploughs. Horses replaced oxen in the later eighteenth
century and had to be shod regularly, on average every six to eight
weeks. The building and rebuilding of farm steadings with houses,
byres, milkhouses, barns and stables took place in two main phases
during the ‘High Farming’ of the 1850s and again, to a lesser extent,
in the 1870s. This created demand on a large scale not only for the
building trades but also for skills in quarrying, stone breaking, brick
making and sawmilling. In addition, the new-style farming could not
have been carried on without millers, joiners, masons, ditchers and
dykers. Tailors, shoemakers (or ‘souters’) and country weavers
served the needs of the labouring population. The signal importance
of this range of trades is often forgotten when writers focus simply on
ploughmen, women workers and bothymen.
But these trades were being steadily undermined by urban
competition in the second half of the nineteenth century. Already by
the 1850s, the technology of power looms was destroying the textile
economy in numerous villages in Perth, Fife and Angus and
promoting large-scale migration as a result. The development of a
myriad of railway branch lines enabled cheap factory goods to be
sold far into the rural districts, and so threatening traditional markets
for tailors, shoemakers and other tradesmen. This displacement of
craftsmen and their families from the smaller country towns and
villages became a familiar feature of the rural outflow by the end of
the nineteenth century. While some, such as the country shoemaker,
vanished into oblivion, others, such as the blacksmiths, continued to
thrive as long as the horse economy survived, and in some cases
even diversified into agricultural engineering.
Attitudes were also changing among the farm workers. The
structure of service in Lowland Scotland resulted in high levels of
internal mobility in the countryside. ‘Flitting’ (moving) to another farm,
usually in the same parish or county, at the end of the six-month or
annual term was part of the way of life. The contract of employment
meant that in law servants had only one or two opportunities to move
in the year and that focused minds at the crucial periods when there
was always the temptation to seek a place elsewhere for better
wages, more experience or a change of surroundings. But the
reasons for mobility were legion. When asked, one Lothians farm
worker between the wars in the twentieth century answered tersely:
‘Possibly the neighbours, possibly the gaffer [foreman], possibly the
farmer, possibly the horses. Maybe the horses came first if they
didnae have a good pair of horse, or the harness wasn’t up to
scratch.’10 For married men the costs of moving were low. A house
came with the job and the new employer provided a few carts to
move the family and their household belongings. Servants could
carry their own locks with them when they flitted. An East Lothian
writer noted in 1861 how one married ploughman’s door ‘was literally
covered with keyholes, made to suit the size of the lock of each
successive occupant’.11 Almost all this habitual movement was
localized and over short distances, but it accustomed farm servant
families to levels of mobility that could in certain circumstances
encourage them to leave the land altogether for a new life
elsewhere.
The relationship between the system of employment and migration
was even more clear-cut in the case of single servants, the majority
of regular workers in the Lowlands. At marriage they faced a stark
choice, because in many areas there was a distinct lack of family
cottages. Some could continue in agricultural employment as day
labourers. In the north-east they might seek to return to the crofts
from where many had originally come as young servants. But the
number of smallholdings was too few to absorb those who left full-
time employment on the farms in their mid-twenties, and anyway the
possibility of such a move back to the land was mainly confined only
to the north-east area of the Lowlands. Young ploughmen had also
been accustomed to a nomadic life, regularly moving from one
master to another. At marriage, therefore, many left the land
altogether, went to the towns and tried other occupations.
This traditional exodus became a great haemorrhage from the
later nineteenth century onwards. The towns and emigration
overseas now exerted a magical appeal over the rural young. This
was partly due to rising expectations as a result of better agricultural
wage levels and the spread of urban values, following the
construction of railway branch lines throughout the Lowlands. Life on
the land had always been hard, but now many came to see it as
intolerable when compared to the working conditions and social
attractions of the towns. Before 1914 a ploughman would rise at 5
a.m. to feed and groom his horses, yoke them at 6 a.m. and work
until six in the evening, with a break between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. The
only holidays were Sundays, New Year’s Day and hiring days. The
burden of work on the family farms of the south-west fell very heavily
on women. One observer in 1820 called it ‘the slavery of family
work’. Dairying near the cities involved very early rising, at about 2 or
3 a.m., because of the popular prejudice in favour of warm milk.
Similarly, dairy women in upland farms needed to milk early to
ensure that milk could be despatched to town by early-morning
trains. Where milk was made into cheese there was, in the words of
one commentator:
an enormous amount of continuous labouring, seven days a week
during six to seven months in the year … I have seen the women folk
on such farms at 3 o’clock in the afternoon in the same garb they
had hurriedly donned between 3 and 4 o’clock in the morning, having
been constantly toiling, one day succeeding another … it is usual for
women on dairy farms to work sixteen hours per day, time for meals
only being allowed for.12
Even the leisure activities of farm workers were dominated by work.
The bothy ballads were mainly about work and the kirns that marked
the end of the harvest season also celebrated work. Compared to
the life of hard toil on the land, the town jobs of domestic servant,
railway porter, policeman and carter seemed infinitely less
demanding. Not only did they pay better than agricultural work in
some instances, but they also had shorter hours, more leisure time,
and freedom in the evenings and weekends from employers. In
contrast, rural life had fewer social attractions. Scottish farm workers
were dispersed in cottages, bothies and chaumers (sleeping
quarters for single male farm servants, usually above the stables) in
the steadings. Long hours and the habitual turnover of labour at the
end of each term confined most social life to the occasional fair or
agricultural show. The hunger for a more interesting life was
confirmed when the Board of Agriculture helped to establish the
Scottish Women’s Rural Institutes. They were an immediate
success, despite initial male opposition, and five years later had 242
branches and a total membership of 14,000. But for many, and
especially the young, this hunger could be fully satisfied only by
moving off the land altogether. As the Royal Commission on Labour
concluded in 1893:
there is much drudgery and very little excitement about the farm
servant’s daily duties, and I believe the young men dislike the former
and long for the latter. By the labourers themselves slight importance
is attached to the healthy character of country life in comparison with
various branches of town labour. That phase of the question sinks
into insignificance in their estimation, and only the shorter hours,
numerous holidays and ever present busy bustle and excitement of
town life or the neat uniform and genteel work of the police constable
or railway porter, are present to the mind of our young farm
servant.13

5
A life of hard labour of the farms also had to increasingly compete
with the attractions of life overseas. There could be found what was
craved by both masters and men – the ownership of land. For both
classes, independent status and owning land was impossible in
Scotland. But the opportunities were abundant in North America,
Australia and New Zealand. European migration to the New World
had been under way from the period of the Discoveries in early-
modern times, but in the second half of the nineteenth century the
age of mass emigration began. This was not simply because of the
voracious demand for labour in North America as both the American
and Canadian economies experienced unprecedented expansion
into new land. It was also made possible by the crumbling of two of
the great constraints that had restricted emigration in the past,
distance and cost of travel, both of which normally meant that
leaving Europe for the Americas was likely to end in permanent
exile. Also, the New World had long been seen by most Europeans
as alien, covered by densely forested wildernesses where the risks
and dangers far outweighed the opportunities.
Emigration, like all other aspects of human existence, was
transformed by the transportation revolution of the nineteenth
century. Although the cost of steamship travel was actually about a
third higher than crossing by sailing ships, the new vessels radically
increased speed, comfort and safety. In the 1850s it took six weeks
to cross the Atlantic from the Clyde. By 1910 the average voyage
time had fallen to around seven days. In the early 1860s, 45 per cent
of transatlantic emigrants still left under sail. By 1870 all but a tiny
minority crossed the Atlantic in steamships. By drastically cutting
voyage times the steamship removed one of the major costs of
emigration: the time between embarkation and settlement during
which there was no possibility of earning. That also explains the
increasing scale of return emigration. By 1900 it is estimated that
around one third of those Scots who left came back sooner or later.
Going to North America was no longer a once in a lifetime decision.
The steamship was the most dramatic and decisive advance but it
was paralleled by the railway, which made it possible for emigrants
to be quickly and easily transported from all areas through the
national network to the port of embarkation. Agreements were
commonly made between shipping and railway companies, allowing
emigrants to be transported free to their port of departure. The
expansion of the railroad in North America brought similar benefits.
By the 1850s the completion of the Canadian canal network and the
associated railway development facilitated access to the western
USA by allowing emigrants to book their passage to Quebec and
Hamilton and then by rail to Chicago. The links between steamships
and railways led to the provision of the highly popular through-
booking system by which emigrants could obtain a complete
package, with a ticket purchased in Europe allowing travel to the
final destination in America. The Chambers’ Journal in 1857
described it as a ‘prodigious convenience’ which would ‘rob
emigration of its terrors and must set hundreds of families
wandering’.
Some of the leading railway companies in Canada played a
vigorous proactive role in the emigrant business. They recognized
that the railway was not simply an easy and rapid mode of transport
for new arrivals from Europe, but was also the most effective way of
opening up the wilderness and prairie territories to permanent
settlement. The mighty Canadian Pacific Railway Company (CPR)
vigorously promoted emigration because of this. In 1880 it had been
allocated 25 million acres of land between Winnipeg and the Rocky
Mountains by the Dominion government. In order to generate profit,
the company had to increase traffic through expanding areas of
settlement, and to achieve that goal embarked on an aggressive
marketing campaign in Britain designed to stimulate emigration to
the prairies. Scotland was specifically targeted and agents of the
CPR toured the country areas, giving lectures and providing
information. The CPR even sought to limit the hardships of
pioneering by providing ready-made farms in southern Alberta, with
housing, barns and fences included as part of the sale.
A veritable explosion in the quality and quantity of information
available to potential emigrants took place. The Emigrants’
Information Office opened in 1886 as a source of impartial advice
and information on land grants, wages, living costs and passage
rates. Circulars, handbooks and pamphlets were made available in
greater volume and were valued because of their avowed objectivity.
Even more important were local newspapers. The Aberdeen Journal
was a significant vehicle for raising interest about emigration in the
rural communities of the north-east. Advertisements for ships’
sailings, information on assisted passages, numerous letters from
emigrants and articles on North American life were very regular
features as the country population was relentlessly bombarded with
all the facts about the emigration experience. Overseas governments
and land companies also became more aggressive, professional and
sophisticated in promoting emigration. In 1892, for instance, the
Canadian government appointed two full-time agents in Scotland
who undertook tours of markets, hiring fairs, agricultural shows and
village halls. The illustrated lecture, using the magic lantern, was a
favourite device. W. G. Stuart, the agent for the north, was even able
to deliver his presentation in Gaelic if the audience asked for it.
From the 1870s to the Great War, the Canadian government’s aim
was to settle the Prairie West with immigrants who would establish
an agricultural foundation for the Dominion. The key influence on the
strategy was Clifford Sifton, the Minister of the Interior from 1896 to
1905. He pioneered the first emigration communications strategy by
flooding selected countries with appealing literature, advertisements
in the press, tours for key journalists who then filed flattering copy on
their return home, paying agents’ fees on a commission basis for
every immigrant who actually settled in Canada, and giving bonuses
to steamship agents for promoting the country in the United
Kingdom. The rural districts of Scotland were particularly targeted
because of the historic links with Canada and their population of
experienced farmers and skilled agricultural workers.
The Lowlands, as noted, had very high levels of internal mobility.
That most rural parishes in the 1860s already experienced net
outward movement of people is crucial to an explanation of the roots
of emigration. The Scots were mobile abroad, in large part because
they were also very mobile at home. There is now some evidence
that from the later nineteenth century the volume of emigration
varied inversely with that of internal migration. People in country
farms and villages searching for opportunities elsewhere seem to
have been able to weigh the attractions of the Scottish towns against
those of overseas destinations and come to a decision on the basis
of these comparisons. In the decades 1881–90 and 1901–10, for
instance, there was heavy emigration, with 43 and 47 per cent
respectively of the natural increase leaving the country. In the same
twenty-year period, movement to Glasgow and the surrounding
suburbs fell to low levels, while there was actual net movement out
of the western Lowlands. On the other hand, during the 1870s and
1890s emigration declined but larger numbers moved to the cities
and towns. The pattern suggests a sophisticated, literate and mobile
population which had access to sources of information in
newspapers, letters from relatives and intelligence from returned
migrants that allowed informed judgements about emigration to be
made. It also highlights once again the key importance of the
transportation revolution which enabled the historic and habitual
internal mobility of the rural Scots to be translated fully into
international movement.
Lowland rural emigration was not induced so much by destitution
or deprivation – as in the Highlands for long periods – as by the lure
of opportunity. Throughout the nineteenth century and early
twentieth, Canada was the great magnet for those who wished to
work the land, while rural tradesmen and industrial workers tended to
opt more for the USA. In his novel Sunset Song (1932), Lewis
Grassic Gibbon wrote a memorable evocation of rural life in the
Mearns district of north-east Scotland in the years before the Great
War. He depicts the restlessness now affecting the young men who
worked on the farms of the area. One of his characters, Will Guthrie,
had decided, like others, to leave for North America: ‘soon as he’d
saved the silver, he was off to Canada, a man was his own master
there’. From emigrant letters and newspaper articles one can piece
together the attractions of emigration for both small tenants and farm
servants. A primary incentive was the possibility of owning land for
themselves which was impossible at home. Land was cheap to
acquire and increasingly made available for purchase in developed
form by land companies and by the Dominion and provincial
governments. In Canada and Australia land was plentiful, whereas in
Scotland even affluent farmers were dependent on their landlords,
with tenure regulated by detailed leases enforceable at law and other
sanctions. The Board of Agriculture in 1906 reviewed the reasons for
the decline in the rural population and concluded with respect to
Scotland that:
Many correspondents refer to the absence of an incentive to remain
on the land and of any reasonable prospect of advancement in life,
and it is mentioned in some districts, particularly in Scotland, many of
the best men have been attracted to the colonies, where their
energies may find wider scope and where the road to independence
and a competency is broader and more easy to access.14
The last word should go to Joseph (Joe) Duncan, the able and
shrewd secretary of the Farm Servants’ Union, when he commented
on the volume of emigration in the years before the Great War:
There has been a fairly steady stream of emigration from the rural
districts of Scotland, rising at times into something of a torrent, such
as we have just had within the last three or four years.
It is interesting to note the counties from which emigration has
been the greatest. By far the greatest emigration has taken place
from the counties of Elgin, Nairn, Banff and Aberdeen. This is
probably accounted for by the fact that there are fewer industries in
these districts and less chance for farm workers changing occupation
within their own districts.
It is in these counties too that the largest number of single men
employed on the farms are to be found, while the fact that it is the
custom there for the bulk of wages to be paid at the end of the six
months, produces a system of involuntary saving which provides the
young men with the necessary cash to pay for passage abroad …
The emigration has been less in the counties south of this where
the wages are higher and where the opportunities of entering other
employment are greater. Emigration has generally been to Canada,
Australia coming next, and increasingly, and then, much behind
these, New Zealand and the United States.
Emigration has helped to increase wages and has also contributed
to the independence of the workers remaining. It is the case today all
over Scotland that there is a scarcity of suitable men for the farms,
and although there seems now to be a slackening in emigration it is
not likely that any large increase in the number of competent men
will take place.15
Part Three
 10

More People, Less Land

1
A rapid and sustained increase in population was the critical and
dominating factor in the social history of the Highlands in the century
after c.1750, though often ignored in popular accounts of clearance.
Numbers were rising, of course, all over Britain and Europe at the
time, but the demographic revolution posed major challenges to
those regions, like the Scottish Highlands, where their inhabitants
had always lived close to the margins of subsistence. In the 1750s
the population of Scotland was 1.265 million and by 1821 it reached
2 million. The retained population of the country between 1755 and
1820 had therefore grown by roughly two thirds in sixty-five years.
The consensus among demographic historians is that the increase
came about mainly because improved and more secure food supply
had helped to cut to some extent the appalling levels of mortality
among infants and the very young. To this amelioration in nutrition
was added the impact of inoculation on smallpox from the 1760s, a
disease which was by far the most lethal epidemic killer of the time.
A rise in numbers was evident across all four Highland counties,
but two strikingly different regional profiles also became apparent
throughout the period. In the southern districts of the county of Argyll
and the eastern areas of the Highland plateau the increases were
very moderate. Indeed, 41 out of 68 parishes there failed to show
any actual growth at all between the 1750s and 1790s. It was a
different story, however, in the far west and north, specifically along
the seaboard from Morvern to Cape Wrath and including most of the
islands of the Hebrides. Here, thirty-two of forty-three parishes
showed a rise of more than 25 per cent, significantly above the
average for Scotland as a whole.
The difference between the two zones became even more
significant during the following half-century. Across the western
districts between 1801 and 1841, the increase was of the order of 53
per cent, while in the south and east growth of a mere 7 per cent
overall was recorded. At the local level the rise was sometimes more
spectacular. On the island of Tiree, the population was 1,500 in the
1740s but had swollen to 4,453 by 1831. Throughout the Western
Isles, growth was of the order of 80 per cent between 1755 and
1821. Even without clearances, increases of this order of magnitude
would have posed massive challenges to a society which had always
existed close to the very margins of subsistence. It was also a tragic
irony that where arable was more available and a resilient agrarian
regime had been introduced the rise in numbers was small, but it
was significantly greater in those parts of the Highlands with the
poorest land and the most fragile peasant economies.
The basic cause of this profound demographic differential, which
was to profoundly shape the course of Highland history, was the
variation in regional migration. In simple terms, many more people
consistently left the parishes of the south and east than they did the
north-west. Proximity to the booming centres of industry and urban
development in the Lowlands was undeniably one explanation for
this pattern. Studies of Highland migration to Greenock, Paisley,
Glasgow and Dundee in the decades before 1851 show that the vast
majority of those who settled in these cities and towns had been
born in the southerly and easterly parishes which were close to
them.
But the distinctive social structure of the region was also crucial.
By c.1840 a moderate consolidation of traditional townships had
taken place throughout the south and east which, as already noted
for the Lowlands, led to a continuous decline in the numbers holding
direct tenancies of land. The extent of contraction varied significantly
within the area; it went furthest, for instance, in highland Perthshire
and along the coastal plain north of Inverness. Nonetheless, across
the entire region legal rights to land were being widely and
inexorably reduced. Complete landlessness of the Lowland kind was
not always common, since the New Statistical Account of the 1840s
confirms that smallholdings and subtenancies clung on in most
areas. But in the main they were effectively linked in with the labour
needs of neighbouring larger farms and the people who lived on
them were as much dependent on earning wages as on what they
could grow on the land.
The attachment to land was further weakened by the development
of work outside agriculture and the growth of small towns and
villages. For instance, the prosperous fishing industry in southern
Argyllshire, along the lochs of the Clyde estuary and Loch Fyne,
provided secure income and steady employment. The fishery
supported village populations with a commitment to the sea and only
tenuous connection to the land. Several of the Argyll burghs, such as
Campbeltown, Tarbert, Inveraray and Lochgilphead, had particularly
heavy rates of migration to the Lowland towns, a pattern which
reflected their capacity to pull in migrants from surrounding rural
districts and then channel them south. This was therefore a regional
society where a money economy was now in place which was likely
to lead to an erosion of peasant culture and values. The local
manufacture of necessities, such as clothing, was already in retreat
and by the 1840s the import of foods, fuel and some luxuries like tea
and sugar had become common. The southern and eastern
Highlands were therefore being assimilated to the market economy
of the Lowlands and in the process the age-old peasant attachments
to land were starting to fray.
Some contemporaries argued that the spread of schooling in the
region added to this social revolution by raising expectations and
spreading literacy. In 1826 the Church of Scotland estimated that in
the Hebrides and other western parts of Inverness-shire at least 70
per cent of the population were unable to read, but in Argyllshire and
Highland Perthshire the figure fell to about 30 per cent. These data
correspond with other evidence. In 1858, for instance, less than 20
per cent of migrants from Argyllshire to the town of Greenock signed
marriage registers only by mark, compared to 8 per cent for Lowland
migrants and 64 per cent for those who had come from Ireland. A
number of experienced contemporary observers saw a close
connection between literacy rates and migration trends, though there
is no easy method of determining how accurate their opinions were.
The Rev. Norman McLeod, minister of the Gaelic Church of St
Columba in Glasgow, a man with intimate knowledge of the Highland
community in the city, reckoned that ‘from the places where there are
good schools young men come to Glasgow and Paisley to look for
employment’.1 He also asserted that on the Isle of Tiree the density
of population was ‘lower in parts where schools are’. Charles Baird,
Secretary to the Committee for Destitute Highlanders in 1837, was
equally confident of the relationship between literacy and mobility:
‘Highlanders when educated become migrants’ was his simple
aphorism.2 It is not made explicit in these comments, but what might
be implied by ‘good’ schools were those which favoured instruction
in English.
The much greater increases in population in the northern, central
and western Highlands bring into sharp focus an intriguing historical
puzzle. This region was to become notorious as the centre of large-
scale clearances to make way for extensive sheep runs. Yet, despite
widespread dispossession, mass migration leading to depopulation
did not automatically follow from the displacement of many
communities. Only in parts of estates where removals hit particularly
hard was there extensive evidence of abandoned dwellings and
empty habitations. Indeed, in general, the population of the four main
Highland counties increased decade by decade in this period. Argyll
reached peak population first in 1831, because of the substantial
outflows to the Lowlands already discussed. But Inverness did not
do so until after 1841, Sutherland in the decade 1831–41 and Ross-
shire only in the early 1850s. In fact, the loss of people had been
proportionately heavier in parts of the Borders countryside of the
eighteenth century, where the spread of pastoralism had also led to
considerable levels of eviction. Indeed, many more Gaels left the
Highlands for overseas or the Lowlands after mass clearance had
come to an end in the later 1850s than during the era of the great
removals in earlier decades.
The answer to the conundrum cannot lie in the possibility that the
scale of Highland eviction has been exaggerated. On the contrary,
the historical record confirms the evidence of a troubled trail of social
convulsion as the sheep frontier steadily moved north. The
introduction of cattle ranching was first to have an effect in parts of
Argyll, Dumbartonshire and Perthshire as peasant communities were
widely dislodged in its wake. One observer, John Walker, estimated
that, as a result of the conversion of small farms into large cattle
holdings, population had fallen in seventeen parishes in those
counties over the space of three decades since 1750. Much more
significant, however, was sheep farming. The new Blackface and
Cheviot breeds from the Borders, Na Caoraich Mora (the big sheep),
had much greater carcase weight and wool-carrying capacity than
the native animals. They were also greedy for land and required
different levels and types of terrain for the different ages and
genders of the flocks. The Cheviots in particular had special needs.
Initially they enabled sheep farmers to pay twice the rent than was
usually possible on land grazed by Blackface, but they could not
easily survive the Highland climate without access to low ground for
wintering, which inevitably posed a threat to the arable of the
traditional townships. At the same time, sheep competed for grazing
with the black cattle of the tenants. Also at risk, therefore, were the
sheilings in the hill country where livestock were driven during the
summer months to allow the grain grown in the townships to mature
and ripen. Sheep farming consequently undermined the basis of the
old economy by other means than direct clearance. So, in two
sheep-grazing parishes in Sutherland (Creich and Assynt) between
1790 and 1808 the numbers of cattle fell from 5,140 to 2,906, while
sheep flocks grew from 7,840 to 21,000.
Much more cataclysmic, however, was the direct removal of
peasant communities to make way for the big pastoral farms. The
new order and the old economy were fundamentally incompatible,
since not only was there intense competition for scarce land, but the
rental return from sheep was many times higher than that from black
cattle. This was not only because of price differences in the market
caused by the new industrial demand for wool. Sheep used land
more intensively and extensively than cattle as they could graze in
areas which had been little worked in the older pastoral economy. In
addition, landlords stood to gain from more secure returns. Sheep
farms were normally managed by affluent graziers from outside the
Highlands who could guarantee proprietors regular and rising
incomes in single large sums, whereas large numbers of small
tenants were much less reliable as their rent payments fluctuated
with the weather and volatility in the markets for cattle.
Nor could many of the indigenous inhabitants hope to gain a
substantial share in the sheep economy. Pastoralism was most
efficient when practised on a large scale, which built an
insurmountable financial barrier for most Highland tenants. There is
evidence, for example, on the estates of MacDonnell of Glengarry
and Cameron of Lochiel in Inverness-shire of some townships
putting together small flocks of Blackface in the 1770s. So-called
‘club farms’ with some sheep were also organized by the peasantry
in several other districts. But by and large the landlords were too
impatient for the huge profits to be won from grazing in big holdings,
especially since there was a plentiful supply of ambitious and
enterprising farmers coming in from the pastoral districts of Ayrshire,
the Borders and Northumberland eager to bid highly for Highland
leases. Most landowners and their managers seem to have taken
the hard line that the unexploited lands of the north had become too
valuable to risk being let to inexperienced peasant farmers.
As the sheep frontier advanced, so also therefore did clearance.
The most notorious and controversial removals took place on the
Sutherland estate, at the time the largest landed property in private
ownership in Europe. Between 1807 and 1821 the factors of the
Countess of Sutherland and her husband, Lord Stafford, removed
several thousand people from the internal parishes to tiny crofts of
no more than three acres established on the inhospitable eastern
coast. There they were to labour to bring barren land into cultivation
by spade husbandry and at the same time take up fishing in a
harbour-less maritime environment. One of the principal managers of
the estate asserted that the small size of the holdings would be
sufficient ‘for the maintenance of an industrious family’ but also
‘pinched enough’ to force crofters to take up fishing as well.3
Meanwhile the fertile inland straths where their ancestors had lived
since time immemorial were converted into large holdings for sheep.
In its scale and ambition the Sutherland strategy was the most
extraordinary example of social engineering in nineteenth-century
Britain. Old men looking back from the 1880s, giving evidence to the
Royal Commission on the Highlands and Islands in that decade,
could name forty-eight cleared townships in the parish of Assynt
alone.
The plan to create a dual economy with different specializations on
the coast and in the interior might have some appeal in theory –
such a division of function had been successfully implemented on a
number of Lowland estates – but had grave weaknesses in practice.
On more than one occasion the new houses and allotments were not
ready for occupation when the people were moved. Those who had
worked the land and grazed cattle for a living could not suddenly
become expert fishermen. The process of dispossession was also
sometimes carried out with great harshness, notably when two
agricultural experts from Moray who had been employed by the
Sutherland family, William Young and Patrick Sellar, forced through
large-scale clearances in 1812 and 1813 which pushed the people of
the Strath of Kildonan to open revolt. Sellar was a lawyer by
profession but also a zealot for agricultural improvement. Two years
later, in neighbouring Strathnaver, he was alleged to have behaved
with such brutality in enforcing some clearances that he was indicted
for breaking the law and eventually stood trial at the High Court in
Inverness for ‘culpable homicide, oppression and real injury’. The
indictment charged him with ‘wickedly and maliciously’ burning hill
pastures, ‘violently’ turning out pregnant women, the aged and infirm
from their homes and ‘cruelly depriving’ them of shelter. He and his
henchmen were also accused of ‘setting on fire, burning, pulling
down and demolishing … dwelling houses, barns, kiln, mills and
other buildings’.4 Sellar was determined that, once cleared, the
settlements would be rendered completely uninhabitable. Despite
the weight of eyewitness evidence, however, he was eventually
acquitted after trial of culpable homicide. Nonetheless, his name
lived on in infamy as the most hated man in the Victorian Highlands.
The main objective of the Countess of Sutherland and the
Marquess of Stafford was to substantially increase income from their
vast estate through the creation of enormous sheep farms across the
interior worked by farmers and shepherds from the Scottish Borders
and northern England. But they were not unmindful of the needs of
the people who were dispossessed from these areas as the large
pastoral farms came into being. The aim was not dispersal or
expulsion but relocation of the population. The estate invested many
thousands, building from scratch a large planned village at
Helmsdale on the coast at the mouth of the Strath of Kildonan,
complete with a harbour, designed by John Rennie, the famous
engineer, and facilities for fish curing. This was intended to be the
hub of a new fishing industry which would provide work for those
who had lost their land. In outline, the scheme bore a resemblance
to the villages successfully developed on several Lowland estates in
the later eighteenth century, described in previous chapters, as
alternatives for the displaced populations. But the scheme was
botched. The people were alienated by Sellar’s reign of terror and
little thought was given as to how peasant farmers with no fishing
skills and little capital would adapt to a new and strange way of life.
There was a striking contrast with the way in which many
landowners south of the Highland line gradually nurtured their
tenantry into the new practices of improvement. The Sutherland
experiment, on the other hand, demanded instant transformation
from the people. The Countess, but especially her estate managers,
had apparently little understanding of the values and culture of the
people and their attachment to a time-honoured way of life. To these
non-Gaels, their attitudes were not only archaic but wholly irrational.
Sellar, for example, had nothing but racialized contempt for the
people, dismissing them scathingly on more than one occasion as
primitives or ‘aborigines’. The inevitable failure of the strategy soon
led to significant levels of emigration to North America from the
coastal crofting settlement, and in the longer term a tarnished
reputation for the House of Sutherland from which it never
recovered.
In the scale and ensuing controversy which they generated, no
other set of clearances matched those of Sutherland. Indeed, the
vast majority of removals probably only involved a few people at a
time until the more draconian episodes of the 1840s and 1850s took
place during the potato famine. Gradual and relentless displacement
rather than mass eviction was the norm, but taken together the
numbers involved were considerable and suggest a systematic
process of enforced movement on an unprecedented scale. A
pioneering modern historian of the Highlands summarized what
happened:
After 1800 in a more remote country and among a more stagnant
population, sheep farms, individually much larger than the south,
began to sweep over wide areas of the country; previously we hear
of groups of families moved, and of remote glens cleared, but now of
whole straths emptied from source to sea.
Where dispossessed families had been numbered in tens before,
now there were hundreds. Kintail, Glenelg, Loch Arkaig,
Balnagowan, Glencalvie, Greenyards, Strathglass and
Glenstrathfarrar, names of bitter memory plot the movement of the
sheep frontier.5
Press reports from external commentators on the evictions are not
uncommon. But the reactions of the people who were actually
cleared are rare indeed. One of them is presented below. It concerns
the eviction from their homes of over fifty inhabitants of the
settlement of Aoineadh Mor, or Inniemore, sometimes Unnimore, in
Morvern, western Argyll, in 1824. Later surveys have found the
remains of twenty-two buildings, fifteen of which were probably
dwellings. Christina Stewart, a rich spinster from Edinburgh, bought
the lands from the Argyll Estates in Morvern in 1824. Very soon after
purchase, she evicted the smallholders of four townships, including
Inniemore, a total of 135 people in all, in order to establish two large
sheep farms. So far as is known Christina Stewart never visited
Morvern.
 The minister of Lochaline village in the parish had a son, Norman
MacLeod, who later visited the Inniemore folk in their new homes in
Glasgow and then published the Gaelic memories of Mary Cameron
in his Reminiscences of a Highland Parish in 1863. The remains of
the settlement had been long covered by forestry planted in the
1930s but they were rediscovered several years ago and the site is
now open to public view.
Mary Cameron’s account runs as follows:
That was the day of sadness to many – the day on which MacCailein
[the Duke of Argyll] parted with the estate of his ancestors in the
place where I was reared.
The people of Unnimore thought that ‘flitting’ would not come upon
them while they lived. As long as they paid the rent, and that was not
difficult to do, anxiety did not come near them; and a lease they
asked not. It was there that the friendly neighbourhood was, though
now only one smoke is to be seen, from the house of the Saxon
shepherd.
When we got the ‘summons to quit’, we thought it was only for
getting an increase of rent, and this we willingly offered to give; but
permission to stay we got not. The small sheep were sold, and at
length it became necessary to part with the one cow. When shall I
forget the plaintive wailing of the children deprived of the milk which
was no more for them? When shall I forget the last sight I got of my
pretty cluster of goats bleating on the lip of the rock, as if inviting me
to milk them? But it was not allowed me to put a cuach [pail] under
them.
The day of ‘flitting’ came. The officers of the law came along with
it, and the shelter of a house, even for one night more, was not to be
got. It was necessary to depart. The hissing of the fire on the flag of
the hearth as they were drowning it reached my heart. We could not
get even a bothy in the country; therefore we had nothing for it but to
face the land of the strangers [Lowlands]. The aged woman, the
mother of my husband, was then alive, weak, and lame. James
carried her on his back in a creel. I followed him with little John, an
infant at my breast, and thou who art no more, Donald beloved, a
little toddler, walking with thy sister by my side. Our neighbours
carried the little furniture that remained to us, and showed every
kindness which tender friendship could show.
 On the day of our leaving Unnimore I thought my heart would rend.
I would feel right if my tears would flow; but no relief thus did I find.
We sat for a time on ‘Knock-nan-Càrn’ [Hill of Cairns], to take the last
look at the place where we had been brought up. The houses were
being already stripped. The bleat of the ‘big sheep’ was on the
mountain. The whistle of the Lowland shepherd and the bark of his
dogs were on the brae …
What have you of it, but that we reached Glasgow, and through the
letter of the saintly man who is now no more, my beloved minister,
(little did I think that I would not again behold his noble
countenance), we got into a cotton work [mill] …6
But despite widespread eviction of this kind, the numbers living in
the north-west Highlands and Islands continued to rise until the
1850s. It is therefore difficult to argue that sheep farming per se
triggered a great exodus from the Highlands as a whole, although
the loss of people in particular districts was undeniably grievous.
Thus the aforementioned parish of Kildonan in Sutherland had 1,574
inhabitants in 1811 but only 257 two decades later, or less than a
sixth of the earlier figure. But the scale of migration from the south
and east Highlands suggests instead that proximity to the Lowlands
and a regional social structure which prevented the splitting of land
among heirs and kinfolk were in the long run more potent ‘push’
factors than episodes of clearance. When fourteen sample parishes
in Argyllshire are examined for the 1790s, no clear pattern of
population loss emerges from those which had more sheep than the
county average. However, when the same parishes are arranged in
two geographical groups, a much more coherent picture can be
traced. In those closest to the Clyde estuary, eleven out of twelve
showed a decline in population. On the other hand, only two out of
fourteen in the more remote northern parts of the county showed a
decrease.7

2
Why then were clearances before the potato famine of the 1840s not
followed by depopulation in the north-west Highlands but by
continued growth in the number of people? Unfortunately, there are
no systematic data available to chart the extent of land taken over by
sheep farming, though in some areas, notably on the Sutherland
estate, it is plain that the land lost by the old tenants was very great.
The same could be said of the small islands of Rum, Muck, Canna,
Lismore and Ulva, which were swept of almost all their native
inhabitants, as were some districts on the western mainland such as
the Knoydart peninsula in Inverness-shire. Yet it has also to be
remembered that much of the territory claimed by the big
flockmasters had never been cultivated before as arable and lay in
the hill country rather than in the lower areas where the townships of
the people congregated. Also, clearance sometimes involved the
piecemeal erosion or removal of some townships, while others, even
in the neighbourhood of those which had been lost, were left
untouched and managed to survive for many years afterwards. Local
evidence can provide some useful insights into what happened at
the micro-level.
On the Duke of Argyll’s Ross of Mull estate in the 1840s and
1850s, there were eleven townships before 1840. As Table 13 below
shows, the process of eviction was complex. Five townships –
Kilvicuen, Knocknafenaig, Tireregan, Shiaba and Ardalanish – were
cleared, sometimes quickly but also over much longer periods of
time. Crucially, many of the displaced were not expelled from the
estate but resettled from the fertile districts of the southern Ross to
the poorer lands of the north, centred on the township of Ardtun,
which saw a considerable rise in population as a result. Six of the
settlements survived into the post-clearance era after c.1860 in the
southern Ross of Mull, though by the later twentieth century they
were all abandoned and entirely bereft of inhabitants as a result of
‘voluntary’ migration from the later nineteenth century.
 Table 13 The population of South Ross of Mull in mid-century: effects of clearance

The modern history of the parish of Morvern in west Argyll is

probably the most thoroughly researched of any in the western
Highlands to date. Phillip Gaskell’s micro-history, Morvern
Transformed (1968), drew on a great mass of estate papers and
plans, personal correspondence and census returns, together with
careful archaeological surveys of existing township remains. It is
known that Morvern was the scene of ten clearances carried out by
five local landowners between 1824 and 1868. In all, these
proprietors evicted 150 families over a period of sixty-four years.
Gaskell’s meticulous scholarship provides an unusually
comprehensive guide to what happened. Over 760 men, women and
children were forced to move from their homes in the parish during
the course of the century. The despair and distress of the people
who were cleared are described. However, known evictions
accounted for only 23 per cent of the estimated 3,250 people who
left Morvern over the same period, most of whom moved away after
c.1870 when no significant removals took place. The migration of the
great majority was therefore ‘voluntary’, or at least was not triggered
directly by eviction, though the estates had other means at their
disposal to induce movement if they chose to deploy them.
The remains of forty-six settlements with three houses or more in
each case were also analysed and yielded significant results when
combined with appropriate documentary evidence. Ten survived into
the twentieth century and sometimes beyond; one had been partially
cleared, but some of the inhabitants lived on for some time
afterwards before the settlement was finally abandoned; ten were
fully cleared; and twenty-five were eventually abandoned, mainly in
the later nineteenth century, but with no evidence of any evictions
having taken place. In sum, of the forty-six settlements, 22 per cent
were emptied by clearance alone.
The history of clearance on the Isle of Skye is different again.
Unlike on Mull, there are few physical remains of townships
abandoned because of eviction, although it is known that clearance
did take place on some properties. Strathaird in 1849 had a
population of over 600, most of whom according to the landowner,
Alexander Macalister, had not paid any rents for several years. All
were served with summonses of removal in that year and offered
assistance to emigrate. The tenants petitioned Sir George Grey, the
Secretary for Home Affairs in London, calling on him to intervene
and prevent this ‘compulsory emigration’:
Your petitioners are utterly averse to emigrate to America, on
considering their inability to do so arising from these distressed
 conditions of potato failure, low prices for cattle, together with the
numerous privations to which they will be subjected by being cast
pennyless and unprovided for on a foreign shore without any aid
from the proprietor to convey them from the place of their landing to
that part of the country where they could obtain farms.8
Grey refused to intervene, but pointed out that writs of ejectment
were perfectly legal and that no landowner could compel the people
of his estate to emigrate. The only further record of the Strathaird
people came in May 1852 when 148 of them embarked for Australia
under the auspices of the Highland and Island Emigration Society,
with Macalister paying part of their passage.
The papers of the biggest landowner on the island, those of Lord
Macdonald, suggest the estate tended to target the displacement of
the cottar class and for the most part left the rent-paying tenantry
undisturbed. That is one reason why the visitor of today sees a more
populated island with many crofting communities compared to the
empty glens and shores of much of the landscape in Mull. However,
there was at least one well-documented and famous exception to
this pattern. The clearance of the two townships of Boreraig and
Suishnish in the parish of Strath in 1853 attracted considerable
publicity and external comment. Boreraig had a population of 120
men, women and children living in 22 households before the
removals took place. Eight of the families and nine from Suishnish
were resettled in other townships on land left behind by those who
had gone to Australia supported by the Highland and Island
Emigration Society. Most of the remainder of the evicted also sailed
later for the Antipodes in one of the ships chartered by the Society.
But in general tenant removals were unusual on the Macdonald
estate. The surviving rentals suggest continuity rather than change.
In 1848 there were 410 small tenancies paying rents of £10 per
annum or less on the Macdonald lands in the parishes of Sleat and
Strath. Ten years later 387 of them remained on the rental books, a
marginal loss of 6 per cent.
One of the most extensive and best documented series of
removals occurred on the Island of Lewis in three phases between
1851 and 1855. The wealthy owner, Sir James Matheson, the China
opium magnate of Jardine, Matheson & Co., decided to ‘emigrate’
many of his destitute tenants and cottars through a huge programme
of eviction and ‘assisted’ transportation to Canada. No fewer than
2,327 men, women and children were eventually given the bleak
choice of being cleared and left destitute or of boarding the emigrant
ships for supported passage across the Atlantic. This was the
essence of compulsory emigration. In 1851, just before the evictions,
the population of Lewis outside the town of Stornoway stood at
17,320 men, women and children. The proportion ‘emigrated’
accounted for just over 13 per cent of that total. By 1861, after the
clearances and emigrations had come to an end, there were still
1,125 more people in the landward parts of Lewis outside Stornoway
than in 1851. The diary of the estate chamberlain, John Munro
Mackenzie, makes it plain that his programme of eviction was based
on clinical and rigorous selection, in which human feelings or
concern played no part, of those families who had to go. Both within
and between townships those not in heavy arrears and involved in
successful fishing kept their crofts, while the poorest and those who
had laboured in the declining manufacture of kelp were scheduled
for removal. As the tabulations below confirm, summonses of
removal were targeted at specific parishes and areas, with Barvas
and West Lewis coming off worst.
Table 14 Summonses of Removal as proportion of number of households, parish of Barvas
(Lewis), 1848–53
Table 15 Census areas and population, parish of Barvas (Lewis), 1851
 Table 16 Summonses of Removal, island of Lewis, 1848–53

Table 17 Summonses of Removal in kelp parishes, Lewis, 1848–53

 Elsewhere, not all or even the majority of those who suffered
eviction migrated to the Lowlands or emigrated, though some
obviously did so. Others, as will be shown later, were forced to move
to already-crowded settlements in other parts of the estates. Also, in
the wake of the removals, the displaced often sank into the ranks of
the semi-landless cottar class, with the dispossessed gathering in
villages across the region. One contemporary description reported of
them:
The cottars possess nothing but the cottage which shelters them,
and depend on the kindness of neighbours for a few patches of
ground for potatoes, and supply their other wants by fishing, and
such work as they may obtain at home or abroad.
The latter class live at all times in a constant struggle for the
means of bare subsistence, and do not rise above the lowest scale
of living necessary for existence, not to talk of comfort. In some
seasons they are frequently reduced to live upon such shellfish as
they can collect, with a little milk etc.9
Colonies of impoverished cottars were to be found by the 1840s in
Tobermory in Mull, Lochaline in Morvern, Arnisdale in Glenelg,
Ullapool, Lochcarron and Scoraig in Wester Ross, and in other
similar settlements.
On Lord Macdonald’s Skye estates there were 1,300 families who
did not pay rent, ‘chiefly relatives of the tenants, such as sons and
sons-in-law, sometimes two or three of them are on the lot’.10 On
Macleod of Macleod’s property on the same island, it was estimated
that for every tenant family there were two cottar families. In Harris
450 tenants paid rent but a further 400 families existed as cottars on
the estates. Similarly, in Barra more than half of those who held
some land were not recorded in the rental book. In Skye in the later
1840s there were 1,900 crofter families and 1,531 cottars. The
majority of the inhabitants of Glenelg, North Morar and Knoydart
were also nominally ‘landless’. On the Duke of Argyll’s estate in Mull
cottars outnumbered tenants, with 1,455 belonging to tenant families
and 1,533 cottar families. In Tiree 63 per cent of the population
belonged to tenant families and 37 per cent (1,838) to cottar families.
The number of cottars varied significantly between estates, but in
many of the Hebridean islands they often comprised as much as half
and sometimes more of the entire population.
Arguably, then, the real effect of clearance before the 1840s was
not to depopulate the Highlands in the short run, but to increase the
terrible poverty and congestion of those townships which were
spared but forced to accept more and more of the evicted by the
process known as ‘crowding in’. This in turn intensified the splitting of
holdings into ever smaller sizes in order to accommodate the
displaced. As a result the north-west became ever more at risk to the
impact of crop failure and volatility of markets for fish, cattle and
kelp.

3
But for the remarkably rapid spread of the potato crop as a new
source of food in the Highlands after c.1750 there would have been
a much greater flight from the land, especially by the poorest tenants
and cottars. The history of the potato as a food crop in the Scottish
Highlands is well documented. The first specific reference occurs in
Martin Martin’s account of the Hebrides in 1695, although by 1750
cultivation of the crop was still relatively uncommon. The period of
greatest expansion was probably the last quarter of the eighteenth
and first few decades of the nineteenth century. By then potatoes
were being grown widely as a subsistence crop. Their importance
was highlighted during the grain harvest failures of 1782–3, when
they helped to save several communities from near starvation.
Potato cultivation seems also to have developed further after the end
of the Napoleonic Wars. Dr John Macculloch, who travelled annually
in the western Highlands between 1811 and 1821, was one of
several observers to comment on its increasing significance. In 1811,
James Macdonald claimed that potatoes by then constituted four
fifths of the nourishment of Hebrideans.
Potatoes grow in virtually any soil, adjust to different climates, but
flourish best where the weather is cool and moist. They also allow for
a dramatic increase in food supply without the need for radical
changes in traditional methods of cultivation, technology or social
organization. In the western Highlands the crop was grown by the
lazy-bed (feannagan) method. Soil was turned over with the cas-
chrom, or foot-plough. Earth from ditches dug between different
ridges was cast on top, seeds were broadcast and the ridges well
covered with seaweed, of which there was usually an abundant
supply in the maritime districts, as well as animal manure. Once dug
up, potatoes were ready for the pot and unlike grains did not require
any additional labour to make them edible. They were easy to store
but quickly lost their nutritional content if kept over long periods. The
calorific content of a given quantity of potatoes was considerably
less than the same amount of grain, but since potatoes had a much
greater yield, an acre under them gave as much as 3–5 times as
many calories as an acre in grain. They can provide for all human
nutritional needs.
But the widespread adoption of the potato in the Highlands was
not only because it provided more food. Only in the crofting region of
the north-west and islands did potatoes assume overall dominance
in the diet of the majority of the population. This suggests that they
suited not only the natural limitations of these districts but also met
the social and economic needs of the people who lived there. In the
eighteenth century, the inhabitants of the western Highlands and
Islands lived close to the very margin of subsistence. Famine was
always a threat and, in several years, a reality. Any food resource
which would provide more security was a welcome addition. A
significant factor was that oats tended to ripen later in the western
Highlands than elsewhere in Scotland. The earliest potatoes,
however, were available in August, two months earlier than the oat
crop. They therefore helped to fill part of that key gap in the period
between the consumption of the old grain harvest and the harvesting
of the new. Grain crops were notoriously volatile in much of the
Highlands and yields in most areas were relatively low. In 1814 it
was estimated that oat yields in Scotland as a whole varied between
ten and sixteen pecks per boll and in ‘the best cultivated counties’
from thirteen to eighteen pecks per boll. But in the western
Highlands the average was a return of four to six pecks. In this
respect, the potato had a crucial advantage. The produce of grain in
the Hebrides was often no more than one third of land elsewhere in
Scotland, but the return from the potato was equal or superior. The
heavy rainfall and high winds which harassed grain farmers were
often a positive advantage in potato cultivation. They provided a
natural protection against the ‘curl’, the most destructive potato
disease of the eighteenth century. It is now known that the greenfly
which spreads the disease rarely moves from a host plant when the
wind rises above eight miles per hour. Heavy rainfall washes plants
clear of the parasite altogether. The potato was not invulnerable, but
until the partial failure of 1836–7 the crop was only damaged by early
frosts. In the first few decades of the nineteenth century at least it
promised a much more secure return than grain.
Yet the major attraction of the potato lay not simply in the fact that
it lowered the threshold of risk. It also had a remarkably high yield. In
Mull a normal return would be twelve barrels for each one planted. In
parts of Skye it was between eight and ten barrels and in Lochalsh
six to eight. Sir John Sinclair estimated that four times as many
people could be supported by an acre of potatoes as by an acre of
oats. As the greatest yielder of food of any crop known in early-
nineteenth-century Europe it therefore formed an integral part of the
social and economic revolution which spread across the Highlands
between 1750 and 1840. The cultivation of the potato expanded with
such speed not simply because of its intrinsic merits but because the
development of crofting, the movement of communities into areas of
waste and marginal land and the subdivision of holdings could not
have occurred on the same scale without widespread adoption of the
new crop. It was almost a precondition of the social transformation
which swept over the Scottish Highlands in this period.
Four factors were fundamental. First, the minuscule holdings
formed to support kelp gatherers and burners, whisky distillers and
fishermen were only able to provide a subsistence living because of
the high yields derived from potato cultivation. Their work was
seasonal, so potatoes provided food for much of the rest of the year
and especially during the winter and spring months. Second, the
fragmentation of lots among cottars depended on the adoption of the
potato. The evidence suggests that the smaller the holding, the
greater the reliance placed on the crop. Third, potatoes were well
suited to the policies of clearance and relocation pursued by
landlords as they could be grown in all soils except stiff clay. It was
partly because of the potato that new communities could be
established on narrow strips of land on coast, moorland and moss.
One contemporary claimed that ‘It is by the potato crop that all the
wild land has hitherto been reclaimed.’11 The capacity of the potato
to support evicted people on small patches of land helps to explain
why clearance in the western Highlands caused dispossession but
not immediate or wholesale regional depopulation.
Fourth, the potato became even more vital after the Napoleonic
Wars. Sir John Sinclair estimated that the typical crofter had to be
able to obtain at least 200 days of additional work outside his holding
to escape destitution. But external employment within the Highlands
contracted in the 1820s and 1830s in some areas and vanished
altogether in others. At the same time, there was a slump in cattle
prices. The price of a three-year-old, which in 1810 had stood at
about £6, had, by the 1830s, fallen to around £3.10/-. Black cattle
had traditionally been the peasant’s store of value and an important
means of both paying rental and covering the costs of meal imports
in seasons of scarcity. Cattle stocks were diminishing over time and
many small tenants and cottars by the 1830s had only one or two
beasts, or none at all. In a survey of holdings of stock in thirty-four
tenancies, in a wide sample of areas, rented at £6 per annum or
less, the average number of cattle ranged between 2.5 and 1.84 per
holding. This was substantially less than was allowed for in rental
agreements. Almost certainly these problems in the pastoral sector
dictated a greater reliance on the arable patch than hitherto and
hence on the potato as a primary source of food.

4
Like their counterparts elsewhere in Scotland, West Highland
landowners in the eighteenth century remained convinced of the
value of a large population as an economic resource. Their concern
to maintain the people on their estates may have also reflected a
lingering sense of patriarchal obligation to former clansmen who had
served their families loyally for generations. But new economic
incentives for large estate populations also emerged in the later
eighteenth century as Lowland markets opened up even more for
kelp, fishing, distilling and slate quarrying. As with the dispossession
of the cottars in the Lowlands who were relocated in villages, so
small tenants in the Highlands were moved to the coasts from the
glens, where large grazing farms were taking over much of the land.
Eighteenth-century theorists argued that the maritime resources of
the western Highlands in both fish and kelp were richer by far than
those of the soil. It therefore became common to emphasize the
benefits of a division of labour, of a dual economy which would
efficiently combine the pastoral potential of the interior and the quasi-
industrial possibilities of the coast. The impoverished population of
the inland districts should be resettled in the maritime areas, there to
earn a living and generate rental income for the estates by working
in the labour-intensive activities of fishing and kelping. The rich
grazings of the inland straths would at the same time be laid down to
sheep farming.
This programme of action had powerful economic attractions. In
the 1790s and early 1800s demand for Highland kelp, an alkaline
extract from seaweed, used in the chemical manufactures of the
time, reached hitherto unprecedented levels as industrialization
broadened markets and the Napoleonic Wars impeded the supply of
cheaper Spanish barilla (soda ash produced from plant sources).
The herring fishery also flourished as the shoals began to visit the
western sea lochs on a more regular basis. Moreover, laying out land
in individual crofts was in theory an attractive solution to the problem
posed by an increasing population in an era of agrarian
rationalization. It transformed communities likely to be made
redundant by a more profitable form of pastoral husbandry into a
productive resource and a significant source of revenue. There had
been a few crofts in the old society but the idea of a crofting system
was new. It was not in any way an archaic hangover from the past
but judged by theorists to be just as innovative in its way as the
steam engine and the textile mill.
 Crofting had three particular attractions. First, like their
counterparts in the north-eastern counties of Aberdeen and Banff
and some other parts of Lowland Scotland, Highland landlords
viewed the settlement of colonies of crofters, in the first instance at
nominal rents, as an effective means of bringing into cultivation by
spade husbandry the stretches of waste and moor land which
dominated large areas of their estates. It was characteristic of late-
eighteenth-century optimism that those barren tracts were thought
ripe for profitable reclamation by presenting a major opportunity for a
region rich in abundant and underemployed resources of labour but
very poor in arable land. Expansion of smallholdings into waste land
was likely anyway as numbers increased and areas of existing
settlement no longer sufficed for all the additional numbers which
had to be fed.
Second, the increasing prosperity of illicit whisky making in the
later eighteenth century encouraged landlords in districts where it
flourished to divide holdings in order to accommodate a larger
population able to pay higher rents from these ‘industrial’ earnings.
Third, during the wars of the later eighteenth century, there was a
huge expansion in the recruitment of Gaels to regiments of the
British army. Several proprietors became military entrepreneurs,
raising family regiments from the men of their estates in return for
payments from the state. It therefore became common for land to be
allocated in return for service. For instance, one reason given for the
proliferation of tiny holdings on the island of Tiree by the 1820s was
that ‘four fencible regiments of men’ had been raised during the
Napoleonic Wars by the Duke of Argyll. Plots were carved out of
existing tenancies to accommodate those who had served in order to
honour the obligations made by the ducal house.
Between the middle decades of the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, numerous communities were therefore
displaced and moved to the crofting townships which have formed
the characteristic settlement pattern of the western Highlands and
Islands since that time. Since kelp manufacture, whisky making and
fishing were highly seasonal, some land had to be made available to
provide food and fuel for a part of the year. But too much land would
act as a powerful distraction from other tasks. These crofters were to
be labourers first and agriculturists only second. The townships in
which they lived were essentially therefore quasi-industrial
communities where rents were forced up beyond their limited
potential in order to force dependence on the produce of the sea,
loch and shore. The central weakness in the entire system was that
most smallholdings were simply not designed to provide enough for
the needs of a normal-sized family from subsistence cultivation
alone. It was reckoned in the early 1850s that only crofts rented at
£15 per annum could produce secure self-sufficiency from
agricultural activity in average seasons. Yet the overwhelming
majority of holdings in the western Highlands were valued at £10 per
annum or less. Crucially, however, crofting helped to retain people in
the region rather than induce the migration levels of the south and
east districts of the Highlands, where controls over subdivision were
much more rigorous.
Subdivision did not simply help to anchor many of the next
generation on the land. The splitting of croft holdings among younger
male kindred also created the possibilities for more marriages, new
families and the birth of additional children. Partible inheritance,
therefore, became a precondition not only for population retention,
but also, in the longer term, for population increase. This was a
process which would have more than compensated numerically for
those lost to the western Highlands and Islands through clearance
and emigration before the 1840s.
Some estimates suggest that, on average, west Highland mothers
in mid-Victorian times each had around five surviving children. As
one distinguished historical demographer has commented:
On some rather big assumptions, I think it is reasonable to estimate
the average family size of married women who stayed and lived to
age 49 in Rosshire, and were not widowed before then, to be at
about five children.
Evidence at parish level for 1881 suggests that rates were higher
in Skye and the Outer Isles, and in most of mainland Inverness-shire
and a bit lower in mainland Rosshire.12
This perspective once again confirms how crucial the impact of
population change was on the history of Gaeldom in the nineteenth
century.
West Highland and insular landlords had embarked on an
extraordinary collective gamble by completely restructuring their
estates and transforming the lives of the people on them solely on
the basis of high wartime prices for a few commodities which
happened to be in great demand during the conflict with France.
Some historians argue that the implacable influence of objective
market forces made the policy inevitable. But what can easily be
forgotten is that the decisions made at the time were subjective and
consciously carried out by individual factors and owners, some of
whom at least were aware that the rich harvest being reaped from
kelp might prove transitory when hostilities inevitably came to an
end. The potential dangers were spelt out by one of the most
powerful Highland magnates of the age, the 5th Duke of Argyll, in
1794. He heavily criticized his factor on Tiree for allowing the
agriculture of the island to be neglected for the sake of the kelp
industry, so causing rental income to depend on a very risky
enterprise:
In place of recovering the rents from the natural [my italics]
productions of the island as was done before kelp was known, you
have allowed the tenants to drink their barley and squander the other
productions of the land, and taught them to trust the payment of their
rents to the price of kelp, and the consequence is that whenever a
market for an article like that fails I am getting nothing for my land.13
There is little evidence either that the ephemeral flow of income
from kelp and fishing led to social mobility, planned investment or the
emergence of a richer peasant class which might have given the
western Highlands a degree of social resilience in the hard times
after 1815. Instead, landowners creamed off the earnings during the
good times through higher rentals, which were absorbed in their own
consumer expenditure and that of their families. At the same time,
indebtedness on a large scale remained a serious and pressing
problem, even on some of the best-run properties. The 5th Duke of
Argyll, for example, had been a benevolent proprietor who was
interested in improving his vast estate not only for his own benefit,
but also for the people who lived on it. He was succeeded at his
death in 1806 by his son, George, the sixth Duke. He was a dandy,
spendthrift, gambler and familiar of the Prince of Wales. His estates
soon went to rack and ruin and subdivision of land among crofting
families was allowed to run out of control, so that by the 1840s
widespread clearance had to be enforced to reduce the number of
destitute small-tenant and cottar families. It is reckoned that the sixth
Duke had personally reduced the Argyll fortune by something of the
order of £2,000,000 during his lifetime.
By the 1820s the entire economic edifice on which the crofting
system had been built was crumbling rapidly. The renewal of trade
with Spain, allowing the importation of Spanish barilla, cheaper and
richer in alkaline content than seaweed, and the repeal of the salt
duties, leading to production refinements within the chemical
industry, destroyed the prosperity of kelp manufacture. Illicit whisky
making on a commercial scale had virtually disappeared in most
areas by the 1830s as a result of changes in revenue legislation and
more determined measures of enforcement by the excise service.
Earnings from military employment fell away rapidly after 1815 and
instead peace was followed by a considerable return migration of
both demobbed soldiers and sailors, which added further to the
demographic pressures becoming ever more evident in several
districts. Although the herring fishery survived and in some years in
the 1830s managed to equal the good times of the 1790s, it was
much more sporadic, and the erratic shoals could vanish from
several lochs for long periods. By the 1840s the fishing villages of
Plockton, Dornie, Tobermory, Lochcarron and Shieldaig, the fruits of
the era of high optimism in the later eighteenth century and the early
nineteenth, were considered to be among the poorest communities
on the west coast.
Nevertheless, there was still no mass desertion from the land
during the economic crisis which followed the end of the wars. In
1841 there were 85,342 more people living in the west Highlands
than the total recorded in the region in the 1750s, a rise of 74 per
cent over the period. The growth in emigration was significant, but
even in areas of substantial outward movement, such as Skye and
parts of Wester Ross, the numbers continued to rise until the 1840s.
The Sutherland removals achieved national notoriety, but during the
decade of widespread clearance between 1811 and 1820 the
population of the county continued to rise because, as described
above, eviction was followed by attempted resettlement of the
people rather than outright expulsion. Thus the estate records reveal
that 3,331 men, women and children were removed in the year 1819.
The managers reported that of those who could be traced
afterwards, 2,304 (70 per cent) were relocated on the Sutherland
estate and most of the remainder moved to other parts of the county.
Just eighty-three were reckoned to have emigrated. It was only in
later years, as the ambitious programme of transformation collapsed
when the fishery stagnated and peasant families inevitably struggled
to adapt to the challenges of eking out a living on the lotted marginal
coastlands, that the real exodus of people began.
Actual decline in numbers therefore did not normally occur at a
regional level, but instead was unusually confined to districts where
landowners indulged in especially intense programmes of clearance
and did not invest in schemes of resettlement. Thus, while the
population of the Lochaber area in general rose into the 1850s,
parishes such as Morvern, Ardgour and Ardnamurchan, and Sunart
experienced a precipitous fall from the 1830s. In the half-century
before the potato famine, the grip of most of the population on the
land had not been completely broken. Eviction was more often than
not followed by relocation in crofting settlements. Further, no entirely
landless class of any magnitude emerged and the western Highlands
remained a peasant society with the tenacious attachment to land
characteristic of all such societies.
The productivity of the crofts did rise because of potato cultivation.
As one contemporary noted: ‘the potato has done more to prevent
emigration than any device whatever’.14 Temporary migration for
work in the Lowlands also became increasingly important. It peaked
during the months of summer and autumn, the period of greatest
hardship in the Highlands, when the old grain and potato harvests
had often been consumed and the new had yet to be gathered.
While ensuring that there were fewer mouths to feed at this critical
time, temporary migration also produced a flow of cash income into
the north-west (since seasonal migrants had a very high propensity
to save), which was used to buy meal and, to a lesser extent, defray
rental payments. This support of the peasant way of life was,
however, as insecure as any other and income from temporary
migration fluctuated dramatically over time. Those who went south
and east found jobs mainly in casual agricultural or industrial
employment, the very sectors of the labour market which were most
volatile.
The role of the landlord classes was also relevant. Their control
over land was absolute and they were in a powerful position to
promote the movement of people out of the region by eviction,
assisted emigration and control of subdivision. If most landlords had
been intent on maximizing their economic opportunities, the exodus
of people would undoubtedly have been much more rapid and
extensive, as it was only commercial pastoralism which could
guarantee secure rentals in the 1820s and 1830s. If landowners had
placed the profit motive above all else, the crofting sector would
have been crushed to an even greater extent than it actually was in
order to accommodate more sheep. Sheep farming would not simply
have become dominant but, in theory, might have obtained a virtual
monopoly of all Highland land. Emigration did not occur on a greater
scale partly because landlords refused to exploit their economic
opportunities to the full and settled instead for a muddled response
of partial clearance, inaction, resettlement, indirect and direct
subsidy to the people who lived on their estates, and desultory
attempts to sponsor assisted emigration.
The reasons why the élites were unwilling before the 1840s to put
into effect a strategy of fundamental economic rationalization varied.
Some were reluctant for paternalistic and humanitarian reasons or
simply discouraged by the unacceptable social costs and
reputational damage of total clearance. Others could not afford to
incur the expense of supporting emigration to North America. By
c.1830 most hereditary estates in the western Highlands were
burdened with heavy debts, and a process of massive transfer of
ownership from the old proprietors to the new was already underway.
Again, the crofting population had become less vital to the economic
health of most properties. As the sheep economy flourished, so the
small tenants furnished but a small and declining fraction of total
rental. Even this minor contribution fell in real terms as arrears
accumulated among them in times of hardship. Any real pressure to
thin the population in order to reduce Poor Law rates in the western
Highlands only became imperative after the Poor Law Amendment
Act of 1845 and, even more so, during the potato famine a decade
later.
In the event, therefore, some landlords became associated with
policies which indirectly inhibited migration rather than promoted it,
the very opposite of the stereotype in the popular literature. Three
aspects merit comment. First, on several estates there was
considerable tolerance of increasing rent arrears which was in effect
an indirect subsidy to the small tenantry at the cost to them of more
insecurity and indebtedness. In Ardnamurchan, in 1838, total arrears
had reached £7,101, or £133 more than the annual book rental. In
Coigach they ranged between 169 per cent and 121 per cent of total
rental between 1834 and 1841, and had risen to £8,121 by 1839 on
the Skye estates of Lord Macdonald. The widespread incidence of
arrears suggests that a considerable part of the reduction in regional
income after the Napoleonic Wars was being passed on to the
landlord class by the small tenants. Their aspiration remained the
traditional one of maintaining a basic level of subsistence on land
and they were now quite unable to pay sums which could only have
been justified during the wartime bonanza of high prices. Second,
many landlords continued to provide grain in scarce years at cost
price, which was initially credited against the rental account but
eventually became submerged among the mass of arrears. Third,
the decline in the profitability of kelp manufacture did not always
have the expected demographic consequences because, despite
falling returns, kelp continued to be made in several areas until the
1840s. In North Uist, in 1837, 400 families were still engaged in
kelping, and in South Uist 1,872 persons. Production continued in
Tiree, Harris and Lewis on a major scale until the later 1830s. One
commentator explained:
The price of Kelp bounded downwards; but the fall of price did not
tell so rapidly upon the condition of the people as might have been
expected, because considerable quantities were continued to be
made long after it had ceased to afford a fair immediate profit. The
employment enabled the labourer to pay his rent, that rent however
consequently to be paid in work, and not in money. The circulating
medium of exchange has become greatly diminished in the country;
and in many cases the society is gradually going backwards into a
state of barter.15
The maintenance of kelp production in some districts therefore
restricted the outward mobility of the population, and probably also
plagued estates through the perpetuation and intensification of
subdivision. Since labour power paid the rent and kelping was highly
labour-intensive, main tenants had a continued vested interest in
providing a patch of land for kinfolk to augment the labour team.
Landlords were indeed trying to exert some control of subdivision in
Islay, parts of Skye, Coigach, Canna, Loch Broom and Barra by the
1830s, but it continued to flourish in many other areas of the Inner
and Outer Hebrides, not least because kelp manufacture endured
there in several districts. Elsewhere it was alleged that the fall in
cattle prices encouraged many small tenants to break up their
holdings in order to spread the burden of maintaining rent payments.
In western Inverness-shire, ‘when a man becomes unable to pay his
rent or to manage his loss, he seeks to lighten his burden without
parting with all his interest and accordingly takes a partner into the
concern. This is the way in which subdivision has mainly arisen.’16
Proprietors therefore connived at a practice fraught with potential
danger for the future in the hope of extracting a more favourable
return from their tenants in the present. But by allowing many of the
new generation with even a tenuous connection to land they helped
to dissuade large numbers from permanently leaving the Highlands.
The inherent weakness in crofting society was brutally exposed in
1836 and 1837 when two partial but successive failures in the potato
and grain crops pushed many of the population to the very edge of
mass starvation. The deficiency in potatoes ranged from one quarter
to one half of the normal crop, while oats failed from one half to two
thirds throughout the region. This was a classic subsistence crisis
reminiscent of pre-industrial times and entirely alien to the dynamic
world of Victorian Britain, now proudly proclaiming itself the
Workshop of the World. A concerned and alarmed government sent
a special emissary to the north to report on the extent and causes of
the disaster. Their agent was Robert Graham, Whig advocate and
former Treasury Lord. Graham’s detailed letters to the Treasury in
London and his final report provide an authoritative guide to west
Highland society in the later 1830s.
He reckoned that the total population of the distressed districts
was around 105,000 people. Many communities faced the risk of
starvation, though conditions varied markedly between areas and
social groups. Sutherland had escaped relatively lightly, as had
much of Wester Ross. The worst-affected localities were the island
of Skye and the Outer Hebrides. The cottar classes were most
vulnerable, but many small tenant families also suffered to a
considerable extent.
However, Graham recognized that crop failure was simply the
proximate cause of crisis. The more fundamental factors were long-
term. The ‘grand cause of the evil’ was that ‘the Population of this
part of the country has been allowed to increase in a much greater
ratio than the means of subsistence which it affords’.17 Although
emigration was a limited safety valve, numbers in some areas had
continued to grow or did not decline rapidly enough in relation to the
diminished job opportunities available in the 1820s and 1830s. The
people depended on a narrow and fragile economic structure
supported by the potato, subsistence fishing, temporary migration
and occasional landlord assistance. It was a deeply precarious way
of life which did not yield enough savings in good years to provide a
margin of security in bad times. The whole system was likely to be
threatened with total collapse if crop failure, even of a partial nature,
took place. In times of shortage, the majority of the inhabitants of the
distressed districts did not possess the purchasing power to buy
supplies of food from other sources to avoid severe malnutrition. In
the event, disaster was averted in 1836–7 by the combined efforts of
government, landlords and Lowland charities. But that crisis was the
harbinger of an even greater calamity which was to fall upon the
region during the following decade.
 11

Harvesting Men

In 1740 six independent companies of soldiers, established by

General George Wade to police and watch disaffected areas of
Jacobite loyalty in the Highlands, were regimented as the 43rd of
Foot. The formation was soon renamed the 42nd of Foot, but
became more celebrated in fame, myth and story as The Black
Watch, Am Freiceadan Dubh, because of the dark colours of the
regimental plaid which set the rank-and-file apart from the
Saighdearan Dearg, the Red Soldiers, or Redcoats, of the rest of the
British Army. It was an auspicious beginning to a saga of Highland
militarism which helped to transform Gaeldom after the ’45 and
shaped the military history of the British Empire until the late
twentieth century.
The recruitment of Gaels into the military during the three great
wars of the period 1756–1815 is now a familiar story thanks to the
recent publication of important research on the topic. Less well
known, however, are the connections which can be drawn between
the widespread nature of recruiting in the Highlands and the impact
of that process on the development of crofting, dispossession and
subdivision of land holdings in the region.

1
The Black Watch was the first of many regiments recruited from the
Highlands into the armed forces of the crown between the 1750s and
the early nineteenth century. The numbers were so remarkable that
the Highlands quickly became the most militarized region in Britain
with a bellicose tradition even greater than in the last years of
clanship. Boom time for the Highland regiments began during the
Seven Years War of 1756–63 and lasted throughout the American
War of Independence and for much of the Napoleonic Wars. Six
regiments of the line were mobilized between 1753 and 1763,
including Fraser’s and Montgomery’s Highlanders. A further ten were
recruited during the American War. Around 12,000 men were
involved in the Seven Years War, almost the same number as the
Highland army of the biggest rising, in 1715, and more than twice
that of Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s force of the ’45. It was indeed
a great irony that as clanship went into its death throes, the
Highlands became even more militarized than in the recent past. By
the French Wars the number of recruits was unprecedented. The
most recent estimate suggests totals ranging from 37,000 to 48,000
men in regular, fencible and volunteer units. This was an
extraordinary figure, given that the population of the Highlands was
only around 250,000–300,000 during the second half of the
eighteenth century. Not only had the region become the most
intensely recruited region of the United Kingdom, but Scotland had
the highest density of those famous retired veterans, the Chelsea
Pensioners, within the British Isles, and the Highland counties had
the largest proportion of all.
It was abundantly clear that in some districts recruitment had
reached truly massive levels. Between the years 1793 and 1805,
3,680 men were under arms from the Skye estates of Lord
Macdonald, MacLeod of MacLeod, and MacLeod of Raasay. From
1792 that number included no fewer than twenty-one lieutenant-
generals or major-generals, forty-eight lieutenant-colonels, 600 other
officers and 120 pipers. The parish of Gairloch in Wester Ross had
been nearly stripped of all its menfolk by 1799. A survey for the Lord
Lieutenant of Ross-shire arrived at the conclusion that hardly any
adult males could be found there, and for the most part the
population consisted mainly of children, women and old men
because of the sheer scale of recruitment. Another estimate
suggested that within the immense territories of the Earl of
Breadalbane, straddling Argyllshire and Perthshire, as many as three
farm tenancies out of every five had experienced some level of
recruitment in the 1790s. Fort George at Ardersier, east of Inverness,
the most formidable bastion fortress in Europe, built to control the
clans after Culloden, now changed function. By the time of the
American War after 1775 it had become ‘the great drill square’ where
the Highland levies were trained and prepared for war overseas.
Clanship had metamorphosed into imperial service with the Gaels
pioneering a role in the British military later to be assumed by other
subjugated peoples of the Empire with renowned martial traditions,
such as the Gurkhas, Sikhs and Pathans in Nepal and India. But the
dramatic expansion of Highland recruitment was essentially short-
lived. By c.1800 the manpower resources of the region had become
virtually exhausted, not only because of over-recruitment, but also as
a result of death in battle, disease, discharges, natural attrition and,
not least, emigration. Even the most prestigious regiments were
therefore forced to extend the territorial range of their recruitment. At
least a third of the Black Watch who fought at Waterloo were drawn
from the Lowlands, the Border counties and even England. Later,
some regiments were stripped of kilts and sporrans as their rank and
file could no longer be considered authentically ‘Highland’ in social
composition. By the late Victorian era, indeed, Highland regiments
comprised only a minority of Highlanders as mass emigration took its
toll on the region, especially after the potato famine of the 1840s,
which preceded the Crimean War by only a few years.
It was perhaps surprising just a short time after Culloden that the
British state determined to deploy Highlanders as a military
spearhead of imperial expansion. Not only that, but the former rebels
were to be regimented in distinctive and coherent units, officered by
clan gentlemen, permitted to wear the banned Highland dress and
encouraged to develop their own ethnic esprit de corps. These were
privileges not afforded the Irish (who vastly outnumbered Scots in
the military service of empire) or battalions drawn from the Scottish
Lowlands. In fact, the martial value of the Highlander was already
being recognized some time before the Young Pretender landed in
the Hebrides to launch his ill-fated adventure. Just before the ’45,
prominent Whig politicians in the Highlands, such as Duncan Forbes
of Culloden and the Duke of Argyll, had suggested raising crown
regiments from disaffected clans. Officer posts in the British army for
the clan gentry would, it was argued, help to cure them of their
loyalty to the Stuarts. Again, in 1739, one prophetic commentator
had observed:
They [the Highlanders] are a numerous and prolifick People; and, if
reformed in their Principles, and Manners, and usefully employ’d,
might be made a considerable Accession of Power and Wealth to
Great Britain. Some Clans of Highlanders, well instructed in the Arts
of War, and well affected to the Government, would make as able
and formidable a body for their Country’s Defence, as Great Britain,
or Switzerland, or any part of Europe was able to produce.1
But vengeance, subjugation and punishment were at first the
preferred responses after the failure of the ’45. The Duke of
Cumberland spoke for most of the victorious Hanoverians when he
urged mass transportation of the rebels to the colonies rather than
recruitment of the disaffected to the crown. The early history of the
Black Watch, which had been recruited from clans loyal to the British
state, also suggested caution. True, the regiment had distinguished
itself at the Battle of Fontenoy, fought a few weeks after Culloden in
May 1745, in what is now Belgian territory, during the War of the
Austrian Succession. But the decision was still taken not to garrison
it in Scotland but in England south of the Thames, and afterwards in
Ireland between 1749 and 1755. Clearly even loyal Gaels were not
to be fully trusted until long after the ’45. But the idea of recruiting
Highlanders did not fade away. The concept was advanced again in
1754 and 1755, only to falter against the express opposition of the
King and Cumberland. However, attitudes then changed the
following year. The arrival of a new Prime Minister, William Pitt, in
1756 signalled a more overt commitment to ‘a blue-water policy’
which advantaged colonial expansion over European commitment.
An increased supply of fresh and reliable soldiers was thought vital,
not least because of the outbreak of the Seven Years War with
France in 1756, a conflict which more than any before was to be
fought in the colonial theatre. The catastrophic defeat inflicted by the
French and their Indian allies on the forces of General Edward
Braddock on the Monongahela River in Pennsylvania, with the loss
of two thirds of his command killed or wounded, did much to
concentrate Pitt’s mind. The ‘Great War for Empire’ was now going
very badly and the Prime Minister was also known for his resolute
opposition to the use of foreign mercenaries to strengthen the British
military. The only realistic alternative, therefore, was to raise more
troops from domestic sources. By early 1757 even the Duke of
Cumberland had agreed to the employment of Highland levies. Two
additional battalions were sanctioned, commanded by Simon Fraser,
son of the executed Jacobite Lord Lovat, and Archibald Montgomery,
later Earl of Eglinton. By the end of the war ten more Highland
regiments were ready for action. They were the first of many which
served not only during the Seven Years War but later in the
American and Napoleonic campaigns. In 1766 Pitt looked back on
the practice he had introduced in a famous speech:
I sought for merit wherever it was to be found; it is my boast that I
was the first minister who looked for it and found it in the mountains
of the north. I called it forth and drew into your service a hardy and
intrepid race of men, who, when left by your jealousy, became a prey
to the artifice of your enemies, and had gone nigh to have overturned
the state in the war before the last.
These men in the last war were brought to combat on your side;
they served with fidelity, as they fought with valour and conquered for
you in every part of the world.2
Pitt had made the final executive decision but the mass
recruitment of Highlanders was not his own idea. The Secretary of
War, Lord Barrington, had already told Parliament in 1751 that he
was all for having ‘as many Scottish soldiers as possible in the army’
and ‘of all the Scottish soldiers I should choose to have and keep in
our army as many Highlanders as possible’.3 A sea-change had
taken place in government thinking, in part because the destruction
of the Jacobite threat was now recognized to be so complete that the
menace of Stuart counter-revolution had been removed once and for
all. The Highlands, unlike Ireland, no longer posed an internal
security threat and mass recruitment into the forces of the crown
could therefore proceed with all speed. At the same time, however,
the old ingrained fear of disaffection took time to wholly dissipate,
and so Highland troops were not to be allowed to linger long in
Scotland after training but were rapidly despatched overseas. Thus it
was that the Highlanders soon came to be publicly acknowledged as
the crack troops of imperial warfare, with experience of battle in
North America, the West Indies and India, enduring long and
arduous tours of duty in foreign climes lasting over several years
from which many never returned, either dying in service or settling
the expanding Empire in order to avoid the threat of rent racking and
clearance in the homeland.
English perception of the ’45 was crucial to an understanding of
the high levels of recruitment eventually achieved. Highlanders had
first impressed themselves on the British state as warriors, and
formidable ones at that. The terrifying charge and slashing
broadswords which routed Sir John Cope’s regulars at Prestonpans
in less than thirty minutes were not easily forgotten. Even in the
carnage of Culloden the following year it was acknowledged by
officers of the crown that the rebel army had performed with
remarkable fortitude and almost suicidal tenacity. Over time,
therefore, a myth developed and hardened. Jacobite clansmen had
indeed followed the wrong cause but they had done so only at the
behest of their chiefs. Throughout they had displayed not only
heroism in battle but undying loyalty. In bestselling publications like
Young Juba: or the History of the Young Chevalier and Ascanius, or
the Young Adventurer, the story of the ‘Prince in the Heather’
enchanted a growing readership throughout the British Isles. They
told how, after Culloden, Bonnie Prince Charlie was never betrayed
by his followers despite the high price on his head. Government
came to believe that these virtues of loyalty and courage were
founded on the ethic of clanship, of a martial society which had long
ago vanished from the rest of Britain. For this reason the government
tried to keep Gaels together in ‘Highland regiments’ under their
‘natural’ leaders, the chiefs and fir-tacsa. Fraser’s Highlanders (71st
of Foot) had no fewer than six chiefs of clans among its officers, as
well as several clan gentry. Paradoxically, therefore, while the British
government was wholly bent on destroying clanship on the ground
as a menace to the state, it was also at the same time trying to
reinforce clan allegiances through recruitment to clan-based
Highland regiments. The intriguing feature was that clanship was
almost dead by the 1750s, through a cycle of decline which was
soon to accelerate in the later eighteenth century because of
enhanced commercialization of estates and clearance of their
people. But the government continued to hold fast to the belief that
the Highlander was a natural warrior, an assumption also constantly
reinforced by Highland landowners who milked the glamorous and
famed image of clanship in order to win profitable contracts from
government for recruitment into their family regiments.
One of the reasons why Lowland and Border magnates were so
much less successful in the business of eighteenth-century military
entrepreneurship was that they lacked this key marketing advantage
of clan reputation in the competitive bidding process. Another was
that in the 1750s at least they did not benefit from the government’s
policy of using military patronage to draw the teeth of residual
Jacobite disaffection. During the Seven Years War some of this was
targeted on recalcitrant Highland families. Thus Fraser’s Regiment
was not only headed by the son of an executed Jacobite but also
included several kinfolk of notorious rebels among the officers. One
of them was the brother of Ewen Macpherson of Cluny, who had
famously hidden in a specially designed cage on Ben Alder in
Badenoch for seven years after Culloden. He had set up the first
private casino in Gaeldom, before finally escaping into permanent
exile in France. Indeed, some supporters of the ‘old cause’ were able
to successfully rehabilitate themselves in the eyes of the crown by
their loyal service in imperial war. While it would be wrong to
exaggerate the number of former Jacobites in the new kilted
battalions, the presence even of a few of them did give an ironic twist
to the colonial campaigns in America. Several of the line regiments
which had fought against Highlanders during the ’45 now found
themselves as comrades of the former rebels in the war against the
French. Lascelle’s 47th Foot had been shattered by the charge of
the clans at Prestonpans. But on the Plains of Abraham, outside
Quebec, they joined with Fraser’s Highlanders to pursue the fleeing
French in the decisive battle which won Canada for the British.
General James Wolfe, the commander of the army that day, had
himself faced the Jacobite clans on Culloden Moor as a junior officer
in April 1746. He served in Barrell’s Regiment, which was later
known as Duroure’s 4th Foot, and it had suffered the most intense
and violent Highland charge on the left flank of the Hanoverian line
at Culloden. During the Seven Years War, however, it combined with
Highland levies to great effect in the Caribbean campaigns.
The foundation therefore had been laid for greater expansion of
Highland recruitment between 1775 and 1783 and again, and in
even greater numbers, in the French wars between 1793 and 1815.
The higher echelons of the British military now became influenced by
German military dogma which suggested that people of mountainous
regions were especially suited to the martial life. David Stewart of
Garth’s Sketches of the Character, Manners, and Present State of
the Highlanders of Scotland, with Details of the Military Service of
the Highland Regiments, first published in 1822, was the most
influential text on the Highland soldier in Victorian times. Stewart of
Garth contended that the perfect warrior had been formed by ‘nature’
in Highland Scotland:
Nursed in poverty he acquired a hardihood which enabled him to
sustain severe privations. As the simplicity of his life gave vigour to
his body, so it fortified his mind. Possessing a frame and constitution
thus hardened he was taught to consider courage as the most
honourable virtue, cowardice the most disgraceful failing.4
Enlightenment ideas further fortified beliefs. The ‘stage’ theory of the
development of human civilization, propounded by such Scottish
intellectuals as Adam Ferguson and John Miller, fitted perfectly with
the stereotype of the Highlander as an outstanding soldier. It was
contended that the Highlands remained fixed in a period long ago
when militarism was a way of life. Ferguson, for instance, argued
that the Gaels were not interested in the ‘commercial arts’ but by
their very nature were more disposed to making war. A parallel
notion also soon became popular. Highlanders could be easily
spared from ordinary manual labour for the duties of soldiering
because their economy was so impoverished compared with the rest
of the British Isles that the loss in terms of resources to the state was
minimal.
There was more than enough actual evidence during ‘the Great
War for Empire’ to justify beliefs like these. Statesmen who were
accustomed to the slow, hard slog of army and navy recruitment
were astonished at the speed with which the first Highland regiments
were formed. Simon Fraser obtained his commission to raise a new
battalion in January 1757. By March of that year he had already
recruited over 1,100 men under arms and during the war itself the
new formation performed with great distinction. In another alliance
Major Hector Munro won the Battle of Buxar in India in October 1764
with the help of detachments of the 89th Regiment. This was the
victory which effectively completed the British conquest of Bengal.
Munro was no stranger to the Highlands, having once hunted Cluny
Macpherson as a fugitive after Culloden. The Black Watch played a
major role against the Indian nations in the brutal campaign known
as Pontiac’s War in America in 1763. Among other Highland battle
honours were the capture of the great French fortress at Louisburg
on Cape Breton, the key to the St Lawrence river, and Wolfe’s even
more decisive victory over the French.
By 1757 the number of Highlanders had reached 4,200 out of a
total of 24,000 British regulars in North America. Despite only being
a sixth of the whole, they were able to maintain a high profile.
Colonial warfare was different from the formalized rituals of the
European theatre. Guerrilla actions were much more common and
raids, retreats and ambushes were the stock-in-trade of the
Cherokees, Micmacs and other tribal allies of the French in the
wilderness. The Highlanders were not only among the most adept
British troops at responding to these tactics but were also some of
the most ruthless in crushing the Indian enemy. By its nature
wilderness warfare was ferocious, with prisoners and wounded liable
to be tomahawked, scalped and disembowelled. Gaels used the
same techniques of total war employed by ‘Butcher’ Cumberland’s
men after Culloden in genocidal campaigns against the Indian
nations between 1760 and 1764.
But it was not all a series of uninterrupted triumphs. Those
battalions posted to Guadeloupe and Havana lost countless men to
yellow fever and malaria. The habit of using Highlanders as shock
troops in battles of attrition could also sometimes have devastating
consequences. At Ticonderoga on 7 July 1758, the Black Watch,
which formed part of the British force, lost 8 officers, 9 sergeants and
299 other ranks killed, and 17 other officers, 10 sergeants and 306
other ranks wounded. Yet, by these bloody sacrifices the Gaels not
only finally sealed their loyalty to the House of Hanover but ensured
that the Highlands became the government’s favourite recruiting
ground in the imperial wars of the future. The Highland levies had
come to be regarded as the expendable cannon fodder of the
Empire with feared reputations among the enemies of Britain.
Stewart of Garth recalled that to the French they were the ‘Sauvages
d’Écosse’:
they believed that they would neither take nor give quarter, … and
that no man had a chance against their broadswords; and that with a
ferocity natural to savages, they made no prisoners, and spared
neither man, woman nor child … they were always in the front of
every action in which they were engaged.5

2
A long tradition based largely on innumerable regimental histories
has it that the Highland battalions of the later eighteenth century
were the direct heirs of the clans. Their values were also said to be
those of clanship: courage, loyalty, endurance and, above all, an
innate capacity for making violent war. Yet any resemblance
between the old clans and the regiments was at best superficial,
which was hardly surprising since recruitment boomed at the very
time when Highland society was in the process of fundamental
change from tribalism to capitalism. Indeed, the mania for raising
family regiments does not fit into a model of neo-clanship but rather
one of rampant commercialism. Landowners were now military
entrepreneurs rather than patriarchal chieftains. They harvested the
population of their estates for the army in order to make money, in
the same way as they established sheep walks, cattle ranches and
kelp shores. But such profiteering had to be managed behind the
façade of clan loyalties and martial enthusiasms because it was
these very attributes which gave the Highlands a competitive edge in
the military labour market in the eyes of government during the later
eighteenth century. Even sophisticated and cynical politicians like
Henry Dundas were taken in. During the Napoleonic Wars he
exuded praise for the clansmen and their ‘chiefs’, enthusiastically
approved of the great scheme to embody even more of them in
1797, and applauded the Highland warriors for their hostility to the
pernicious ‘levelling and dangerous principles’ of the urban radicals
of the time.6
In fact, recruitment to the army provided many benefits for the
Highland élites. Raising a regiment promised lucrative commissions
not only for a landlord but also for his kinsmen and associates. It
also conferred influence and patronage in the neighbourhood among
other impoverished minor gentry who desperately sought regimental
officerships and the secure incomes and pensions which came with
them. Local power and standing were increased while military
service also consolidated close connections with government. The
rewards could be substantial. Sir James Grant, whose estates were
heavily encumbered with debt, won a sinecure worth £3,000 a year
and the lord lieutenancy of Inverness in 1794. Mackenzie of
Seaforth, who like most Highland landowners suffered from acute
and perennial financial difficulties, did even better. In quick
succession he became Lord Lieutenant of Ross in 1794, Lord
Seaforth in the English peerage in the same year, and, in 1800,
Governor of Barbados. But there were also more direct and equally
desirable advantages. Dividing up lands for soldiers could provide an
estate with more regular rentals than were likely to accrue from the
small tenantry whose payments were notoriously volatile because of
partial harvest failure and market fluctuation. The military had a
secure income not only when on active service but also as half-pay
officers in peacetime and from pensions when they retired. There is
evidence, therefore, that several proprietors showed a clear
preference for securing these ‘martial’ tenants for their estates.
The Warrants or Beating Orders issued by the Secretary of War,
allowing the raising of a new corps, authorized the recruitment of
officers and men, the numbers involved and the bounties to be paid
to recruits when they joined. The cost of bounties rose dramatically
in the later eighteenth century as the army’s needs for more and
more rank and file seemed unending. Average bounty levels for
Highland recruits were £3 per man in 1757 but had climbed to £21–
£30 by 1794. Landlords in the north of Scotland pocketed bounties,
but rather than paying them in full to recruits used land on their
estates as a substitute reward to those who were prepared to join
up. Tenants were also expected to supply a family member or, if not,
a ‘purchased man’, whose bounty was paid by the tenant himself.
Through this mechanism, landlords made huge profits which during
wartime equalled and sometimes even surpassed the income from
their agricultural earnings. Recruitment was indeed ‘More Fruitful
than the Soil’.7 There was also an expectation by landowners that
those who lived on their estates would accept recruitment. When this
did not happen willingly, systematic coercion was employed. Estate
records teem with examples. Alexander Macdonnel of Glengarry
ordered his agent to ‘warn out’ a list of small tenants from his
Knoydart property, they ‘having refused to serve me’. Similarly,
MacLean of Lochbuie, on the island of Mull, threatened to remove
seventy-one tenants, cottars and their families in 1795 because they
had not been prepared to provide sons for service. On several
estates, the tradition of ‘land for sons’ became commonplace. In the
papers of Lord Macdonald covering his extensive lands on Skye, a
document is headed ‘List of Tenants who have been promised Lands
and an exchange of lands for their sons’. These contracts were often
very specific, outlining the length of leases and the tenurial
arrangements related to sons being traded for land. In the long run,
however, they generated angry controversy. Many recruits never
returned and were buried in foreign graves after falling in battle or,
more commonly, dying from disease. To the families, therefore, their
holdings had often been acquired or secured, quite literally, by the
blood of their kinfolk. When these obligations were cast aside, for
whatever reason, the people were likely to feel that a gross breach of
trust had been committed. Lands for sons added an emotional edge
to Highland history which was entirely missing from that of the rural
Lowlands during improvement. This was another factor helping to
explain the different emotional responses in each region to
dispossession.
Donald MacLeod’s Gloomy Memories in the Highlands of Scotland
was just one of several polemics to draw attention in angry and
emotive prose to this aspect of recruitment and which must have
made a powerful impression on his Victorian readership. He
declared: ‘The children and nearest relations of those who sustained
the honour of the British name in many a bloody field – the heroes of
Egypt, Toulouse, Salamanca and Waterloo – were ruined, trampled
upon, dispersed and compelled to seek an asylum across the
Atlantic.’8 Alexander Mackenzie, in his bestselling The History of the
Highland Clearances (1883), also launched a bitter attack on those
proprietors who had perpetuated crimes of betrayal against the
nation’s finest soldiers:
in their names, the fathers, mothers, brothers, wives, of the invincible
‘78th’ [a regiment raised on the estate of the Duke of Sutherland] had
been remorselessly driven from their native soil … were Britain some
twenty years hence to have the misfortune to be plunged into such a
crisis as the present, there will be few such men as the Highlanders
of the 78th to fight her battles if another policy towards the Highlands
is not adopted, that sheep and deer, ptarmigan and grouse, can do
but little to save it in such a calamity.9
It should be remembered also that when Mackenzie published his
powerful condemnation of landlordism in the 1880s, the Highland
regiments were at the very pinnacle of their fame. One historian has
noted that ‘Highlanders were the most fêted of all Victorian soldiers’,
while another described how there was a ‘Victorian cult of the
Highlanders’.10 So potent was their appeal at the time that the
Scottish military in general became Highlandized when Lowland
regiments were ordered to be dressed in doublets and tartan trews.
Military entrepreneurship brought considerable short-term profit to
proprietors but could also lead to long-term loss of public reputation
for some of their descendants. Moreover, the earnings from the
military economy only lasted for a relatively short time from the
1750s to the later 1790s. By that decade the numbers being
recruited in the Highlands were in dramatic decline. Yet, over the
period of good earnings, this ephemeral stream of estate income had
boosted the consumerist culture of many landlords and so
aggravated their long-term crisis of indebtedness.
Promises of land to recruits were also fraught with long-term
danger. Without them recruitment could not have taken place on
such an immense scale as the only alternative was to pay money
bounties to each soldier. But that would have been intolerably costly,
sometimes averaging expenditure up to a third or more of the rental
income of a large estate, to recruit a single formation of regimental
size. Also, in order not to remove the rent-paying tenants from work
on the land, proprietors mainly tended to recruit semi-landless
cottars who paid nothing in rent into the coffers of the estate. But
cottar families then expected to be rewarded with some land in
return for the service of their menfolk. The only way to satisfy these
obligations was to break up larger holdings into crofts, or divide
crofts into even smaller lots. On the Duke of Argyll’s estate on the
Ross of Mull in 1806, a number of those pressing for land were
soldiers and their families. As a result, approval was given to divide
up some of the medium-sized farms. Again, in Sleat on Skye and in
Lewis, several townships were also crofted to accommodate
veterans and their dependants. By anchoring an increasing part of
the population in such semi-economic smallholdings, landlords
reduced the possibility of building up more substantial and resilient
farms. It was the very antithesis of the policy of land consolidation
pursued throughout most of the Lowlands.
The subdivision of scarce land was soon made even worse by
population growth which left large numbers of almost destitute
smallholders relying on the potato crop when bi-employments,
including military recruitment, went into decline or vanished
altogether after 1815. These poor communities, however, did not,
unlike those surveyed in the next chapter, have the resources to
emigrate and so they clung on to their patches of land despite
growing difficulties. Eventually, many landlords came to the
conclusion that they had no alternative but to force them out, if they
were to avoid having to assume responsibility for their welfare, which
might in turn bring financial ruin to themselves and their own
families.
 12

Rejecting the Highlands

Any violent opposition to authorities pursuing removal of tenants

under due legal process would sooner or later lead to intervention by
the forces of law and order and arrest of the offenders. Resistance
must have been thought by many not only pointless but
counterproductive. More effective by far, at least for the period of this
chapter down to 1815, would be to reject absolutely the new ways in
the Highlands by leaving the region. However, both government and
the landed class of the north-west and the islands were implacably
opposed to emigration in the later eighteenth century and early
nineteenth. For the former, it meant the loss of a militarily valuable
population when Britain was involved in two major wars. For the
latter, emigration removed precious manpower from their estates
which were needed for kelp burning, fishing and army recruitment.
An implicit alliance formed of government strategic concern and
landlord vested interest caused emigration to be banned altogether
in 1775. Another attempt at prohibition was made in 1786 by Henry
Dundas, Scotland’s leading political manager of the day. Later,
lobbying by Highland landowners at the height of the kelp boom in
the early nineteenth century led to the passing of the Passengers
Vessels Act in 1803. The legislation was ostensibly humanitarian in
intent as it was purportedly placed on the statute book in order to
improve conditions on board ship for passengers in vessels sailing to
North America. The real objective, however, was to substantially
raise the cost of passage and so deter future emigrants. In some
cases fares more than doubled as a result of the legislation. The Act
remained on the statute book until it was finally repealed in 1826.
Parliament also voted to provide more than half a million pounds for
transport projects in the Highlands, including the construction of the
Caledonian Canal, connecting northern Scotland from east to west,
in order to stem the tide of outflow from the region through the
provision of more employment. Despite these measures, however,
and in the teeth of landlord opposition, emigration from the western
Highlands and Islands reached hitherto unprecedented levels.
Rising emigration was a Britain-wide phenomenon. Numbers were
so great in the 1760s that by 1775 as many as 10 per cent of the
population of the American colonies over the long period of
settlement had arrived there in the previous fifteen years. The
humiliating loss of the thirteen colonies in 1783 confirmed in the
official mind that an empire of colonization was not a good idea and
the effort was redoubled to prevent further movement to the
remaining colonies of British North America, later Canada. The
provincial governors of Prince Edward Island, Cape Breton, Nova
Scotia and Upper Canada were warned by London not to encourage
migration from the British homeland.
These instructions may have partially helped to stem the tide. But
they did not achieve complete success because, as will be shown
later, Highland emigration previously channelled to what was now
the United States began to slowly move north and built up new
connections after 1783 with Britain’s remaining North American
provinces. Indeed, tensions emerged between the interests of
London and those of the governors of the under-populated Canadian
colonies. Immigrants arriving at their ports were not necessarily
turned away or subjected to any significant opposition. For instance,
in 1791 the governor of Nova Scotia provided both food and support
to 650 West Highland emigrants who had landed at Pictou, in a vain
attempt to encourage them to stay on the island and not continue on
the journey to their planned destination in North Carolina. Eventually
the British government did concede that the emigration policy was
failing and tried to compromise by steering settlement towards the
Canadian colonies of the Empire rather than to the now independent
United States.
 Between 1760 and 1815, Highland transatlantic emigration took
two forms which were interconnected. The first consisted of the
movement of civilian families and the second the settlement of
demobilized Highland officers and rank and file who had been
allocated American land grants at the end of service after the Seven
Years War (1756–63) and the American War of Independence
(1776–83). Both emigrant streams were influenced by the attractions
of cheap or free land across the Atlantic and given impetus by the
economic tensions surfacing in the late-eighteenth-century
Highlands. These threatened the grip of the peasantry on the land
and their status as full tenants on the estates.

1
Tracing the migration of Highlanders to North America is not an easy
task for the eighteenth century. Apart from the government-inspired
Register of Emigrants in the years before the American War of
Independence, the numbers involved have to be constructed from
stray newspaper reports and some contemporary comments. We do
know, however, that before the 1760s small numbers of Gaels,
mainly from Argyll, were already moving in family and local parties to
North Carolina, Georgia and New York. But it is reckoned that
migration was limited to fewer than 3,000 leaving over the half-
century from c.1700 to c.1760. Only after the end of the Seven Years
War in 1763 did numbers rise to unprecedented levels, with nearly
10,000 emigrants between the early 1760s and 1775. It was the
scale of this exodus and its local focus on the western Highlands and
Islands which alarmed both landlords and government as to that total
needed to be added the significant number of veterans from the
Highland regiments who decided to remain and take land in America
after demobilization in 1763. The Highland departures accounted for
around 60 per cent of all Scottish emigration, though only 40 per
cent of the Scottish population lived in the Highland region at the
time. Between 1773 and 1776 only London had more emigrants than
the Highlands, with the region having at least 18 per cent of all
emigrants from Britain, and this from one of the most sparsely
populated areas of the United Kingdom. Some contemporaries
claimed that a frenzied emigration ‘mania’ had gripped the north of
Scotland in these decades.
The migrations fell away during the American War and when it
came to an end their orientation changed from the USA to British
North America. Loyalists left the infant republic in large numbers for
the remaining imperial territories to the north. One estimate has it
that Scots, who had provoked considerable enmity for a number of
reasons from American patriots, may have comprised one in five of
the 30,000 loyalists who fled north. Nova Scotia was a favoured area
of resettlement for Highlanders from North Carolina, while Scottish
refugees from New York, many of them recent emigrants from
Glengarry in western Inverness-shire, tended to make for what would
become eastern Upper Canada. Even during the war, Scots families
from the Mohawk Valley in New York had gone in order to avoid the
vengeance of the Americans. The conflict in that area had
descended into a bloody and very violent guerrilla war with savage
reprisals and counter-reprisals on both sides. Highlanders had won a
fearsome reputation both for their ferocity and as first-rate frontier
guerrillas. It would have been suicidal for them to remain among
their former enemies when peace was declared. Instead, they and
the disbanded soldiers of the King’s Royal Regiment of New York
and the Royal Highland Emigrant Regiment sought refuge across the
border in Canada. The Roman Catholic Macdonnels and their kinfolk
formed a new community on the north bank of the St Lawrence River
west of Montreal. One migrant wrote to her family back in Scotland
that the ‘McDonalds hope to found in the new land a new
Glengarry’.1 The name stuck and, over the following decades, the
district attracted numerous emigrants from the western mainland of
the Highlands and the neighbouring islands.
Canada and the maritime colonies now virtually completely
supplanted the USA as places of settlement for the Gaels. Scottish
transatlantic emigration after 1783 was very much Highland in origin,
though the individualized and almost invisible movement to the USA
left little record and its scale has almost certainly been
underestimated. Around 14,000 emigrants may have left Scotland for
British North America between 1776 and 1815 and probably as
many as nine out of ten of them could have come from the
Highlands. But the annual level of emigration was significantly lower
than the early 1770s, almost certainly due to the immense disruption
caused to the traditional migrant routes by war and the subsequent
Loyalist diaspora. Remarkably, however, the connections with the
Canadian areas of settlement were soon renewed, which was
powerful evidence of the dense network of communications which
now spanned the Atlantic and linked communities in the wilderness
areas of the New World with those of their kindred and friends in
remote parts of the Highlands.
Each of the new Canadian settlements became a strong magnet
for people from the coastlands and glens of Gaeldom. Small colonies
from the Uists and Glenfinnan were to be found on Prince Edward
Island, while Pictou, Nova Scotia, was settled mainly from Ross-
shire. In five large emigrations between 1785 and 1793, people from
Glengarry, Knoydart, Morar and Glenelg in western Inverness sailed
to join their families and friends in the new Highland settlement of
Glengarry County in western Quebec. Over 1,200 made the
transatlantic crossing in these years, around 40 per cent of the entire
migrant stream from the Highlands over the period. It was inevitable,
therefore, that these concentrated settlements, often located in
isolated districts, would become enduring outposts of Gaelic culture
for several generations to come.
This was not a flight of the very poor or the dispossessed because
migration by sea followed by resettlement across the Atlantic had
costs. Emigration assisted by landowners, which became more
common from the 1820s, was out of the question in this earlier
period for the reasons already discussed. Indeed, landlords were so
implacably opposed to the departures that in mainland west
Inverness during the 1790s they were even prepared to place
evictions on hold for a time because the recruitment of soldiers from
their estates was providing such attractive returns. McDonnell of
Glengarry offered his old followers a reduction in rental of 10 per
cent if they promised to stay. The offer was rejected. The irony, of
course, was that it was the policies of the landowners which
prompted large-scale emigration in the first place. There were only
two ‘assisted’ emigrations before 1815. One was the support that the
tiny Catholic Church in Scotland gave to its adherents in South Uist
because it feared Presbyterian proselytism in the southern Hebrides.
A second was the formation of a fencible regiment for defence of
Canada which was established in order to steer the exodus away
from the United States by promising free land to soldiers and their
families. The total recruited with dependants eventually reached
2,100 people. The poor could, of course, seek to cross the Atlantic
by obtaining passage as indentured servants. In this system, the
costs of the voyage were paid in advance by masters in the colonies
in return for a period of bonded service. Data on how far that means
of emigration was popular only exist in the customs returns for the
peak movement years of 1774–5. They reveal that only 150 of the
nearly 3,000 Scots documented in the records then travelled on an
indentured passage and the majority of them were from the
Lowlands.
The evidence from other sources is conclusive that it was mainly
those tenants with some resources from the middling ranks of
Highland society who made up the majority of the emigrant parties.
These people had enough livestock to sell off to release cash to
support the costs of the voyage and resettlement. One reason why
the renewal of emigration reached a new peak in 1801–2 was that
cattle fetched good prices in those years enabling them to be
converted into good returns. The social composition of emigrant
parties from western Inverness-shire to Glengarry County in Canada
seems to have been fairly typical of the generality:
three out of five emigrants were farmers, one out of eight was a
craftsman and one out of four was a labourer or servant … the
emigrants are described as ‘the principal tenants’, the better-off
tenants, or (later) ‘the best part of the dregs … of the commoners’.
Clansmen of middling status and resources – tenants and craftsmen
– therefore dominate the emigrant parties but some poorer members
of the community also left.2
 2
The main outlines of the sequence of emigration from the Highlands
in this period are not in dispute. But the reasons why so many
people from this region of Scotland should seek to leave in such
large numbers are far from clear and are disputed by scholars.
Certainly a new transport infrastructure for mass emigration from
northern Scotland was in place by the second half of the eighteenth
century. Also, the growth of Highland communities in North Carolina,
Georgia and New York from the 1730s had laid the foundation for
‘chain migration’ or the development of a long-term connection
between places in the Highlands and North America. The
commercial relationship between Scotland and North America was
also revolutionized by the remarkable success of Glasgow in the
transatlantic tobacco trade from the 1730s. The American trades
helped to provide the transport for large-scale emigration from
Scotland as most Highland communities were within relatively easy
travelling distance of the Clyde ports and vessels were also often
chartered from there to sail to the northern sea lochs to pick up
emigration parties from there. It was, for instance, the growing trade
in Canadian timber to Scotland in the early nineteenth century which
partially helped to offset the impact of the Passenger Vessels Act of
1803 on emigration. The British timber market’s demand for
Canadian lumber radically increased as a result of wartime needs.
The trade needed large vessels but they had low freights on the
outward journey and the emigrant traffic to Upper Canada and the
maritime provinces was therefore an effective means of utilizing
surplus capacity and cutting costs.
The Highlands at all social levels had also become less insular by
the later eighteenth century. Extensive recruitment of Gaels to the
army in the three wars between 1757 and 1815 must have
accustomed Highland society to greater mobility. This was even
more likely when the government started to pay off officers and men
from the army in colonial land rather than cash; in turn, these military
settlements soon acted as magnets to kinsfolk at home. A key
element in this Highland emigration was also the leadership provided
to many emigrant parties by fir-tacsa, tacksmen or lesser gentry, who
had either acquired land in, or had become familiar with, the
transatlantic colonies, as a result of their service as officers in the
British army.
All these influences facilitated mass emigration, but they could not
in themselves cause it to happen. In the age before the steamship,
transatlantic migration by sail was usually tantamount to permanent
exile. Most of North America still remained a wilderness to
Europeans, an alien land thought to be peopled by wild savages
living in impenetrable forests. Few therefore embarked willingly on
the long transatlantic voyage because of the well-publicized risks
and dangers unless they had reasons for doing so because of
pressing circumstances at home. In the search for direct causation,
contemporary commentators and later scholars have addressed both
the impact of conditions in the Highlands and the pull from
opportunities in North America.
Some argue that the increasing volume of emigration reflected the
pressure of rising population, which led, in turn, to an outflow of
‘surplus’ peasants and their families. This is a hypothesis which at
first glance has much to commend it. As noted in earlier chapters,
numbers did increase substantially in northern Scotland in the later
eighteenth century, the Highland economy was indeed poor and
underdeveloped, and, when the emigration of Highland people is
examined down to the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the
Malthusian explanation does have real force. Population loss in the
long run was inevitable because the economy proved incapable over
time of generating an adequate level of employment for those who
lived in the region.
However, the picture in the earlier period between 1760 and 1815
is considerably more complex and it is by no means certain that the
demographic explanation is entirely satisfactory. There are several
problems. First, though numbers were increasing, economic activity
was also expanding. There were indeed difficult years, such as
1772–3, 1782–3 and 1801–2, which were brought about by partial
harvest failure and so triggered emigration. In addition, the vast
majority of the population continued to eke out an existence at, or
only marginally above, subsistence level. Nevertheless, in these
decades, there was also an increase in employment, especially in
the western Highlands and Islands, where most emigrants came
from, in kelp manufacture, fishing, illicit whisky making, the seasonal
migrant economy in the Lowlands and, above all, military service.
Landlord correspondence in these years actually reveals a fear of
labour shortage on some estates, a concern which explains why
most lairds were resolutely opposed to emigration. Second, as
discussed earlier, the majority of those in the emigrant parties were
not the very poorest or those closest to the margins but tenant
families who had enough resources to meet the costs of emigration
and resettlement.
A more convincing explanation can be found in a study of nine
emigrant parties bound for Upper Canada between 1773 and 1802
from Glengarry and Glen Morriston, Knoydart, Eigg and the west
coast, Loch Arkaigside, Glenelg and Lochiel which argues that
‘economic transformation was the key underlying cause … in this
period’.3 Where evidence is available, it shows that nine out of ten of
those who left did so in family groups. Women formed between 44
and 51 per cent of the adults while children under the age of thirteen
were at least 27 per cent on average and up to almost 50 per cent of
passengers in half of these sailings to Canada. The average family
size ranged from 4.6 to 5.7 people. Overwhelmingly, the emigrants
came from contiguous districts and drew on extended networks of
family and association. A community exodus of this kind confirmed
‘the emigrants’ total rejection of the place offered them in the
transformed Highlands’.4 In other words, their decision to leave was
a forced choice. The people would doubtless have preferred to stay
but escalating rentals and the fact or threat of eviction made that
impossible in their eyes. They specifically complained not of over-
population but of losing their land to incomers who would break up
the traditional bailes and merge the lands into single, large pastoral
farms.
It is important to recognize, however, that the people do not seem
to have been opposed to all the new ways per se. An increase in
trading activity had been a fact of life in the Highlands since the
seventeenth century and, later, when settled in Canada, the
emigrants became fully involved in commerce in their new homes.
Rather, they appear to have strongly resented the increased share of
their meagre incomes which they now had to devote to paying
increased rent, the threat of eviction from their holdings, and the fear
of being consigned to the function and status of quasi-labourers in
small crofts. There were other options available to them in addition to
that of emigration, including fishing, crofting or even movement for
wage labour to the cities of the Lowlands. They chose Canada
because it satisfied the peasant aspiration for land and since
emigration allowed the whole community to remain together as a
functioning social entity. In essence, therefore, mass emigration
represented a radical opposition to how Highland society was
changing in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Yet, as an
exercise in collective self-help it was a time-limited strategy. Most of
those who remained after 1815 suffered the full impact of the
postwar collapse in incomes and increasing encroachment of sheep
on land occupied by their cattle stocks. Few had the resources by
that time to follow the example of those who had been fortunate
enough to go before in earlier decades.
The history of the emigrant Gael before 1815 is often in dramatic
contrast to the much gloomier narrative of later times. For a start, the
emigration parties left in the teeth of opposition from both the state
and the overwhelming majority of landowners. They also for the most
part achieved success. Virgin forest was cleared and by the end of
the 1780s the settlements in Glengarry were already dotted with
small log cabins built in tiny clearings. The emigrants had obtained
what they sought: land, freedom from landlord oppression, the
reconstitution of networks of family and friends, and the perpetuation
of their traditional culture. The potential catastrophic loss of land and
social disruption in Scotland had been avoided through the decision
to emigrate. Several of these new Gaelic settlements flourished. By
1832, for instance, the population of Glengarry in Upper Canada had
climbed to 8,500 and doubled again to 17,596 twenty years later.
The vast majority of them were Scottish Gaels or their descendants.
 More highly publicized was the Earl of Selkirk’s settlement at
Baldoon (named after his family estate in Wigtownshire) on Prince
Edward Island. Nearly 1,000 Highlanders left for the area in 1803–4
under his tutelage. But the territory for colonization had been
selected unwisely. The marshlands bred malarial mosquitoes, which
soon spread disease of epidemic proportions. Baldoon languished
until the war of 1812, when it was finally overrun by invading
American forces. Selkirk’s Red River settlement in Upper Canada
did much better. But these colonizations did not bring easy or
sudden riches. The Highland districts were often isolated and located
on marginal arable land. But they did provide a new security at a
modest standard of living, which for the most part was accepted by
communities habituated in the old country to even lower levels of
comfort.
Only through exploring the scattered evidence of correspondence,
oral tradition, song and poetry can we obtain a more realistic picture
of the actual mindset of these emigrant parties. The very fact of the
continuous stream of people who left for the new settlements over
many years suggests an optimism and a strong faith in the benefits
of emigration. Surviving poetry is equally positive. A strong theme
running through the verse is that of liberation from servility, akin to
the exodus from Egypt of the Israelites under Moses. Some songs
do reveal sorrow at leaving home and the fracturing of ancient
connections with beloved landscapes, family and friends. But linked
with this is often a sense of excitement as the bards contemplate a
new life across the ocean. The mood is captured well in ‘Fair is the
Place’ by Micheil Mór MacDhómhnaill’s (Michael McDonald, c.1745–
1815) after his arrival in Prince Edward Island in 1772:
O, ‘S àlainn an T-àite Fair is the Place

A, ‘s àlainn an t-àite Fair is the place

Th’ agam ‘n cois na tràghad I have here by the sea,
‘N uair thig e gu bhith ‘g àiteach ann when it comes time to till it
Leis a’ chrann, leis a’ chrann, O. with the plough.
Ni mi ‘n t-aran leis na gearrain I shall make bread-land with horses
‘S an crodh-bainne chuir mu’n bhaile; and put the cows to graze;
‘S cha bhi annas oirnn ‘s an earrach, we shall not be in want in spring,
Chuirinn geall, chuirinn geall. I wager.

O, ‘s fraoidhneasach, daoimeanach, Sparkling, diamond-like,

Glan mar sholus choinnlean, clear as candle-light,
Am gradan le chuid shoillseanach is the salmon with his brilliance,
Annas gach allt, anns gach allt, O. in every stream,
Mear ri mire, leum na linne Merrily sporting, leaping from the pool

Rory Roy Mackenzie (1755–?) was one of the Earl of Selkirk’s

colonists who first owned land in Prince Edward Island before
migrating subsequently to Pictou. ‘An Imrich’ (‘The Emigration’), was
composed as he prepared to leave Scotland. He laments the new
economic order in the Highlands but looks forward to better times
across the Atlantic:
An Imrich The Emigration

Ma ‘s e Selkirk na bàighe If it be the benign Selkirk

Tha ri àite thoirt dhuinn, who will grant us a place,
Tha mi deònach, le m’ phàisdean, with my children I am eager
Dhol gun dàil air na tuinn. to sail without delay.
Siud an imrich tha feumail It is necessary to emigrate,
Dhol ‘nar leum as an tìr s’ to leave this land immediately,
Do dh’America chraobhach, and go to wooded America
‘S am bi saors’ agus sìth. where there will be freedom and
Faigh an nall dhuinn am botul, peace.
Thoir dhuinn deoch as mu’n cuairt; Bring us the bottle,
‘S mise a’ fear a tha deònach pass a drink around to us;
A’dhol a sheòladh a’ chuain; I am most eager
A’dhol a dh’ionnsaidh an àite to set sail across the sea,
Gus ‘n do bhard am mòr-shluagh; and to go to the place
A’dhol gu Eilein Naomh Màiri, from which many have embarked;
‘S cha bhi màl ‘ga thoirt bhuainn. to go to St Mary’s Isle,
and no rents will be exacted from us.
A dheagh Aonghais Mhic-Amhlaidh,
Tha mi ‘n geall ort ro mhòr, Now, worthy Angus Macaulay,
Bho’n a sgrìobh thu na briathran I will wager
‘Us an gnìomh le do mheòir, that since you wrote the instructions
Gu’n grad chuir thu gu’r n-ionnsaidh and their terms with your own hands,
Long Ghallda nan seòl, you will soon send us
‘Us ruith-chuip air a clàraibh a foreign vessel,
Thar nam bàrc-thonn le treòir. foam on her deck,
Seo a’ bhliadhna tha sàraicht’ rushing powerfully over the waves.
Do dh’fhear gun àiteach, gun sunnd, This is a taxing year
‘N uair théid càch ‘s a’ mhìos Mhàrta for one without a dwelling, without
Ris an àiteach le sùrd. cheer,
Tha luchd-riaghlaidh an àite when in March others go
Nis ‘gar n-àicheadh gu dlùth, to their ploughing eagerly.
‘S gur h-e an stiùuir a thoirt an iar dhi The overlords here
Nì as ciataiche dhuinn. reject us completely.
To turn the rudder westward
Ma ‘s e réiteachan chaorach is the most sensible course for us.
‘N àite dhaoine bhios ann,
Gu’m bi Albainn an tràth sin If it be sheep-walks
‘S i ‘na fàsaich do ‘n Fhraing. which will replace men,
‘N uair thig Bonipart’ stràiceil Scotland will then
Le làimh làidir an nall, become a wasteland for France.
Bidh na cìobairean truagh dheth When the arrogant Bonaparte comes
‘Us cha chruaidh leinn an call. with his heavy hand,
the shepherds will be badly off,
‘S mo ghuidhe ma sheòlas sinn and we will not grieve for them.
Gu’n deònaichear dhuinn
Gu’m bi ‘n Tì uile ghràs-mhor It is my wish, if we sail,
Dh’ oidhch’ ‘s a’ là air ar stiùir, that it may be granted us
Gu ar gleidheadh ‘s ar teàrnadh that the all merciful one
Bho gach gàbhadh ‘us cùis, guide us night and day,
‘S gu ar tabhairt làn sàbhailt to save us and protect us
Do thìr àghmhor na mùirn. from every peril and need,
and to bring us safely
Gheibh sinn fearann ‘us àiteach to the land of good cheer.
Anns no fàsaichean thall;
Bidh na coillteau ‘gan rùsgadh We shall get land and a home
Ged bhiodh cùinneadh orinn gann. in the wilderness yonder;
‘N dràsd s’ ann tha sinn ‘nar crùban the forests will be cleared
‘M bothain ùdlaidh gun taing, though money will be scarce.
‘Us na bailtean fo chaoraich Now we are cramped
Aig luchd-maoine gun dàimh. in gloomy huts without recompense,
and the fields are occupied by sheep
owned by the unfriendly rich.

The final song comes from Anna Gillis of Morar, who sailed from
Greenock to Quebec in 1786 with 500 others to settle eventually in
Glengarry County. ‘Canada Ard’ or ‘Upper Canada’ reflects her views
of the new colony and contains a tribute to Father Alexander
(Scotus) MacDonnell, who accompanied the Knoydart emigrants of
1786 and continued to act as their pastor, leader and counsellor in
Glengarry:
Canada Ard Upper Canada

Ann an Canada Ard In Upper Canada

Tha gach sonas ‘us àgh; there is every joy and delight;
Bidh gach maoin ann a’ fàs ri chéile. all requirements will prosper together.

Gu bheil cruithneachd a’ fàs, Wheat grows

Luchdmhor, lìonte gu’ bhàrr, abundantly, ready to harvest,
Ach trì mìosan thoirt dha de with only three months to bring it to
thearmunn. full season.

Gheibhear siùcar à craobh Sugar may be gotten from a tree

Ach an goc chur ‘na taobh, if a tap be inserted in its side,
‘Us cha dochair sin a h-aon de and not one of its branches damaged.
geugan.
We shall have berries and wine
Gheibh sinn mil agus fion, and all else that we desire;
‘S gach ni eile gu’r miann; we shall lack nothing under the sun.
Cha bhi uireasbhuidh sìon fo’n ghréin
oirnn. Young Father Alexander,
son of Scotus of the banners,
Maighstir Alasdair òg, the holy priest, was full of kindness.
Mac Fear Scotais na sròil,
Sagart beannaicht’ bha mór le Like a saint he brought us out
éibhneas. so that we would be free
as were those who followed Moses
Dh’fhalbh e leinne mar naomh out of Egypt.
Gus ar beatha bhi saor,
Mar dh’fhalbh iad le Maois Eipheit. We got farms of our own
with proprietory rights from the king,
Fhuair sinn bailtean dhuinn fhìn, and landlords will no more oppress
Le còir dhainginn o’n rìgh, us.
‘S cha bhi uachdrain a chaoidh ‘gar
léireadh.

The labour of carving out new communities from wilderness must

have been hard, demanding, exhausting and often discouraging. But
the Highland pioneers of this era had a number of advantages which
at least helped successful settlement in British North America to
progress. The imperial state may have been hostile for a time to the
idea of populating Canada but it did recognize the responsibility to
those families who had sacrificed a great deal in their loyalty to the
crown before 1783. Thus, in June 1784, government bateaux carried
Loyalists from their refugee camps in Quebec to the new townships,
where they not only received land in the better areas but also
provisions for two years, clothing, tools, some livestock and
household plenishings which enabled a good start to be made in
building homes and clearing land. All this then lowered the threshold
of risk for later migrants, who could also hope for food and help in
the crucial early years of resettlement. Moreover, the provincial
governments had a different agenda from London. They saw
colonization as a means of expansion and development and some
governors took the view that the martial traditions of the Highlanders
would also fashion a robust defensive barrier against attempted
armed incursions from the USA. The result was that the local
governments were often more than willing to assist with provisions
and transport within Canada from the port of disembarkation to areas
of resettlement. This was done in Quebec for emigrants from the
Island of Eigg in 1790, in Nova Scotia in 1791 and again in Quebec
in 1794.
In cases where support was not forthcoming, Scottish merchant
houses in Montreal, Halifax and Quebec commonly subscribed
substantial sums to assist indigent passengers on arrival. Eventually,
even the British government conceded that emigration could not be
prevented and so should be directed if possible towards the British
colonies. The outbreak of war with the USA in 1812 and the
attempted American invasion of Canada concentrated the minds of
London politicians and encouraged them to support the settlement of
loyal Highlanders to bolster the colony’s defences. Thus in 1815 a
scheme was established to offer 2,000 free passages to Canada
with bedding and rations. In a sense, however, the state had been at
the heart of the emigration process long before this because only
government could provide land, the vital basis of settlement. For
most of the period of this chapter, crown land in Canada was
available in theory at least as a free grant. Concessions were usually
200 acres per recipient and, in the early years to 1797, even survey
fees were covered by the state. Thereafter, however, full fees were
levied on new settlers who often had to rent land initially or even
share for a time with relatives who already possessed holdings.
The social composition of the emigrant parties was also a critical
factor in adaptation to the colonial environment. This was usually a
movement of entire communities, often several hundred strong. The
people left as the families of those who had lived together for
generations in the same Highland townships. There were large
numbers of women and children who were fundamental if the new
communities overseas were to grow and thrive. For instance, the
emigration led by Archibald McMillan of Murlaggan from the
Cameron country along Loch Arkaig in 1802 included some 448
people. Young children made up 32 per cent of the group and
women over twelve years of age more than a half. Similarly, three
vessels sailed from the small Scottish port of Duchainas in 1790
carrying 405 passengers from adjacent areas of Roman Catholic
loyalty on the coastal mainland of Inverness-shire and the
neighbouring islands. Among them were 111 heads of families and
only twenty-five passengers travelled independently. Most crucially
of all, family heads in virtually all the groups analysed were rent-
paying tenants, the middle rank of Highland society. As long as they
could keep their holdings intact until departure, they would hope to
gain by selling cattle stocks as prices rose, cover the costs of the
voyage and still have enough left over to help with resettlement in
Canada.
Leadership was also vital to plan the ventures effectively, hire
ships and then manage the complexities of land allocation in the
colonies. For all this, the emigrants relied on their traditional leaders.
In the Catholic districts, some were priests, such as the
aforementioned Father Alexander MacDonnell, Maighstir Alasdair.
Leaders were also drawn from the gentlemen of the clans, the
Daoine-Uaisle, or clan gentry, fir-tacsa, and prominent tenants.
These men had the necessary contacts, financial resources and
often knowledge of colonial conditions. Several were half-pay army
officers who had seen active service in the colonies. Above all, the
leadership was held in respect by the people, an important
advantage when difficult decisions had to be made. Their
responsibilities did not end when the emigrants landed. In some
districts, such as Glengarry County, leaders of the emigrant parties
managed to secure positions as land surveyors and members of the
land boards, where they were able to act as mediators between local
crown officers and the people. Like the mass of emigrants they too
had a basic stake in the success of colonization. The gentry of the
clans were being squeezed out by the loss of favourable leases, the
splitting of their holdings to accommodate crofting townships and the
loss of traditional status in the community. Emigration not only
offered them economic independence through landownership but
perpetuated the social leadership they had possessed in clanship.
Canada also held out the prospect of financial gain through
populating their colonial properties with subtenants in the familiar
manner practised in the Highlands for generations. Against this
background, it is scarcely surprising that the survival and growth of
these new settlements depended to a significant extent on the
retention of conservative values and traditional social hierarchies.

3
The two great obstacles to Highland emigration between 1760 and
1815 were government prohibition and the impact of war. In both the
American War of Independence and the French Revolutionary and
Napoleonic Wars, civilian migration across the Atlantic fell away to
very low levels. In the years of temporary cessation of conflict,
however, such as after the Peace of Amiens in 1802, emigration
returned quickly to prewar levels. Paradoxically, however, it was the
colonial wars which gave some Gaels an effective way around
government controls. The state had introduced during the Seven
Years War a system of paying off demobilized soldiers with grants of
colonial land. The policy was refined and expanded during the two
subsequent conflicts of the later eighteenth century. It seemed a very
sensible strategy. Dividing lots from the abundant empty lands of
North America was an economical way of laying off troops, and
thereafter they could also be used as a reserve army garrisoning at
no cost those frontier areas threatened by the French or the newly
independent Americans. As Chapter 11 showed, the scale of military
recruitment in the Highlands was massive. Many of those who joined
the colours never returned home when peace came in 1763 and
1783 but took advantage of the land settlement policies in America.
In effect, they had exploited the opportunities for cheap state-
subsidized emigration and the offer of free grants of land. Key
aspects of government policy, preventing emigration, raising recruits
in Scotland and paying them off in colonial land, were now in direct
conflict with one another. As the leading authority on the subject has
put it, through army recruitment, the Gaels were essentially being
offered ‘a free ticket across the Atlantic’.5
The militarization of the Highlands and the system of soldier
demobilization had a number of effects on emigration. The most
obvious is that a headcount solely of civilian migrants considerably
underestimates the scale of the departures. A proclamation of 1763
awarded captains 3,000 acres of land, subaltern officers 2,000 and
rank and file fifty acres each. As a result, 27,000 acres in New York
colony were divided among the officers and non-commissioned
officers of the 42nd and 77th Highland regiments. The grievous
losses they had sustained in battle cannot alone account for the fact
that only one in five men returned to the Highlands in the years of
peace. Perhaps emigration through the medium of army service
became even greater after the American War came to an end in
1783, because the terms of land grants provided by then were even
more generous and included veterans’ dependants. To take but one
example, the demobilization of four battalions in what was later to
become Upper Canada resulted in awards totalling 256,000 acres to
3,642 former soldiers and their families, numbering 1,056 women
and children. It was scarcely surprising that these concentrations of
Highlanders in North America soon became demographic and
cultural points of connection, in turn drawing more kinfolk, friends
and associates from the old country.
Emigration through military service was depicted in
correspondence from soldiers as a route to advancement. A piper
from Fraser of Lovat’s 71st Highland Regiment wrote home in
euphoric terms in 1778: ‘I am as well as ever I was in my life, my pay
is as good as one shilling and six pence per day and I hope my
fortune within two years will be as good that I will have 200 acres of
free land of my own in this country … if it had not been for this war
this is the best country in the world.’6 The contemporary
commentator on Highland affairs John Knox noted how the military
settlements acted as potent inducements for further emigration. Ex-
soldiers who had acquired land settlements ‘were desirous that their
kindred and friends should come and partake of their good fortune’.7
The movement from Eigg and Arisaig to Canada in 1790, for
instance, was specifically linked to opportunities to join relatives and
friends and secure crown lands close to the original military
settlements. This type of chain migration was facilitated by the
emergence of a corps of entrepreneurs, enterprising half-pay army
officers, often former Highland tacksmen, who came back home to
recruit and organize emigrant parties. They understood that the land
they had acquired across the Atlantic would be of little value if they
could not settle it with people to work their properties and pay them
rents. Contrary to some of the racial prejudice emanating later from
some circles in the Lowlands, the Highlands was plainly not a society
devoid of commercial acumen and enterprise.
 13

Passive Victims?

To many contemporary observers one of the most perplexing

questions about clearances in the Highlands was the apparent
failure of the people to show more resolute and widespread
resistance to landlord policies of eviction. Even sympathetic
supporters of the Gaels were frustrated about what they judged to be
the weakness of protest. Hugh Miller, the famous self-taught
geologist, wrote angrily in 1840: ‘They [the Irish] are buying guns and
will be bye-and-bye shooting magistrates and clergymen by the
score; and Parliament will in consequence do a great deal for them.
But the poor Highlanders will shoot no-one … and so they will be left
to perish unregarded in their hovels.’ One modern scholar raised the
question directly: ‘Why didn’t the Scots peasant shoot his landlord?’1
After all, the local sources of law and order in the Highlands seemed
weak in the extreme, military force could only be summoned from a
distance, and the geography of the Highlands and its scattered
population made effective intervention difficult. What added to the
puzzle was that the Gaels of the nineteenth century were
descendants of the famed warrior race of the clans and in more
recent times large numbers saw active and distinguished military
service in the many Highland regiments of the period between 1756
and 1815. Tough veteran soldiers skilled in arms and used to violent
conflict were common in most crofting communities.
It was significant that during the potato famine in the Highlands of
the 1840s, organizers of relief for the stricken region employed the
stereotype of a peaceful, submissive and stoical people who, though
suffering great adversity, were not willing to break the laws of the
land. The argument therefore ran that they were much more
deserving of philanthropic support than the murderous peasantry of
Ireland. Others asserted from a quite different perspective that the
tranquillity of the Highlands was a great boon for investors as the
real rental of a large Highland estate in 1830 was worth at least 20
per cent more than the nominal price because it had ‘no Tithes, poor
rates or Incendiaries to contend with’.2
It was undeniable that peasant disturbance was more threatening,
organized and enduring in parts of Ireland than in Highland Scotland.
Every decade between 1760 and 1840 was punctuated by at least
one major agrarian rebellion across the Irish Sea. The secret
societies of Rightboys, Whiteboys, Oakboys, Peep O’ Day Boys and
others were formidable associations. In some chronically disturbed
districts, such as Tipperary, Antrim, Kilkenny and Limerick, they
survived all efforts over many years by the forces of the crown,
police and the judiciary to subdue them. They prided themselves as
semi-military formations, bound together by oaths of loyalty and
wearing special clothing to mark them out as outlawed subversives
in open conflict against lawful authority. One government official,
George Cornwall Lewis, described them as ‘protective unions,
steadily, determinedly and unscrupulously working at their objects
but sleeping in apparent apathy so long as their regulations are not
violated’.3 These societies practised systematic intimidation,
terrorism and murder on those, including soldiers, police and
landowners, whom they believed transgressed the peasant codes of
custom.
By contrast with much of rural Ireland, the Scottish Highlands
seem a different world. Long after the major evictions there had
come to an end, one observer found that crofters on the Gordon
estate of South Uist in 1870 were living in such ‘a state of slavish
fear’ that, though they had many grievances, they dared not admit
them to the factor for fear he might drive them off the land. The same
witness also noted how the people of South Harris were so
‘paralysed by terror’ that they were incapable of challenging the will
of the landowner and his estate managers. Even during the land
agitations of the 1880s, one speaker at a public meeting in
Dunvegan, in Skye, openly admitted to his listeners: ‘I am ashamed
to confess it that I trembled more before the factor than I did before
the Lord of Lords.’4
Much Gaelic poetry, especially that from the 1820s and thereafter,
seemed to reflect in its melancholia and nostalgia the weakness of
physical resistance to clearance. Sorley MacLean, the greatest
Gaelic poet of the twentieth century, was withering in his criticism
when he wrote in the 1930s: ‘The Highlanders’ resistance, physical
and moral, was bound to be very weak and the poetry of the period
reflects this impotence.’5 For MacLean the verses were often ‘the
wail of a harassed and dejected people’, such was the sense of
hopelessness and despair that ran through so many of them.6
There has been no shortage of historical theories presented to
explain the apparent fatalism of the crofting population. In England,
too, it was reported that anti-enclosure riots of an earlier era were
rare. Yet, as E. P. Thompson argued, this was not because
enclosure was acceptable but because ‘people learned early that to
riot was hopeless’.7 The same might be said about responses to
clearance in the Highlands. Evictions took place under legal warrant
and were protected by laws and regulations governing the rights of
private property.
It is also sometimes suggested that the collective psyche of the
Gael had been destroyed at Culloden and by the reign of state terror
and the full-blooded attack on clan culture which followed that final
and devastating defeat of Jacobitism. Others contend that the people
were ‘thoroughly perplexed, demoralized and disorientated’ by the
metamorphosis of the clan gentry into commercial landlords.8 It was
not an alien class of landowners who were in the main responsible
for the evictions but the descendants of clan chiefs to whom the
ancestors of the people had given allegiance for centuries. This, so it
is argued, left the people not only leaderless but broken in spirit. So,
as the old warrior spirit was crushed, the people sank into fatalism, a
process then hastened by the enormous appeal of evangelical
Protestantism which completed the transformation of a martial
society into a timorous and God-fearing crofting community.
Remarkably, as late as 1884, the Royal Commission on the
Condition of Crofters and Cottars in the Highlands and Islands could
report that despite all that had gone before in the region ‘there is still
on the side of the poor much reverence for the owner of the soil’.9
That statement implied that many Gaels were still unable to sever
their links with past loyalties and recognize themselves instead as a
coherent class with rights and interests independent of their
landlords. Sorley MacLean made a broadly similar point when
discussing aspects of the poetry of the clearance era. He asserted
that only rarely did landlords attract direct censure on account of
their policies of eviction. MacLean described instead ‘the absurd
tendency to blame the factor more than the landowner and the
continued belief that if proprietors knew of the behaviour of their
managers injustices would be rectified’.10

1
There is now much more scholarly understanding of the constraints
on rural protest, not simply in the Scottish Highlands, but in societies
of a similar kind elsewhere. Studies of peasant revolts in Asia, Latin
America and Eastern Europe have detected common patterns. Small
farmers in general were usually slow to engage in collective protest
and when they did so found it difficult to maintain their campaigns
until their objectives had been achieved. As one scholar has it: ‘the
powerless are easy victims’.11 Protest undertaken by those in a
position of weakness was usually doomed to failure as only those
who possessed some degree of tactical control over their own
resources had the capacity for effective resistance:
The poor peasant or the landless labourer who depends on a
landlord for the larger part of their livelihood, or the totality of it, has
no tactical power: he is completely within the power domain of his
lord or employer. Poor peasants and landless labourers, therefore,
are unlikely to pursue the course of rebellion, unless they are able to
rely on some external power to challenge the power which constrains
them.12
 Consider then the condition of the Highland people during the Age
of Clearances. They were certainly mainly devoid of power as land
which provided their source of subsistence was held only at the will
of proprietors. Landlords could also rely on the support of the legal
authorities and, if necessary, the police or military, at the behest of
local sheriffs, to maintain order. Especially after 1815, any residual
power the people might have possessed as a labour force needed
for kelp burning and herring fishing vanished as those by-
employments collapsed or stagnated in the 1810s and 1820s.
Crofters and cottars were by then judged to be a ‘redundant’
population whose small possessions obstructed the ongoing
expansion of profitable sheep farming. Any possibility of effective
collective resistance across the Highlands was also made difficult
because the small communities were widely dispersed, land
transport was poor, and towns which might have acted as centres of
organization and dissemination of opinion were few and far between.
External support for the plight of the people before the 1870s did
come from a few writers and pamphleteers but none of them had any
real political clout. The spiritual leaders of Gaeldom usually
counselled restraint and moderation, and while some did speak out
in defence of the dispossessed, any breaking of the law or violent
resistance to civil authority was usually frowned upon. This response
was not necessarily the result of some collaborative conspiracy with
landlordism. Ministers were very aware that those who engaged in
civil unrest were certain to be dealt with very severely by the courts.
Imprisonment of the breadwinning menfolk could only compound the
misery of their abandoned families while they served long sentences
in gaol. Naturally, too, the clergy were wont to see injustice from a
spiritual perspective. For instance, in its submission to the Napier
Commission, the Free Church of Scotland, to which the vast majority
of the West Highland and Hebridean crofters had rallied after the
Disruption of 1843, asserted that it was wrong to try to prevent
suffering by sinning. This life was ‘a glen of tears’ which had to be
endured with courage and patience, though, in the end, justice and
salvation would be meted out in eternity to both the bad and the
good on earth.
 The clergy of all denominations tended therefore to be generally a
force for peace and social stability rather than potential leaders of
communal insurrection. But active collaboration by ministers with
estate managers in order to facilitate evictions was not as common
as sometimes supposed, even if they had been appointed to their
parishes through landlord patronage. In the case of the Sutherland
estate, for example, Patrick Sellar wrote: ‘I do not exaggerate the
matter when I say that during the Riots no minister settled by the
proprietors stirred one inch to support the law.’13 He added that in
only one instance did a member of the clergy ‘exhort his flock to
peace and to commune with us’.14 Some of the Lowland press, like
the North British Daily Mail and The Witness, the journal of the Free
Church, could be counted on to show sympathy and were often
deeply critical of landlordism. But no convincing intellectual
challenge was mounted to the economic principles which
underpinned the removals. Most mainstream opinion in Scotland
before the second half of the nineteenth century held to the view that
clearances were a necessary evil, an unfortunate but inevitable cost
of agrarian progress.15
However, some interpretations of so-called Highland passivity are
problematic. For instance, to use the history of Irish rural unrest as a
comparator with the Highlands is to follow a false analytical trail. The
scale and intensity of agrarian terrorism in Ireland was exceptional,
not only within the British Isles but also across most of Western
Europe, because of the very unusual nature of the political and
religious circumstances in that country. The Irish state apparatus
was monopolized by Protestants but the vast majority of the rural
population in the central and southern regions of the country were
Catholic and the penal laws assumed all of them were potentially
disaffected to the state. For some peasant communities these
religious fissures helped to establish a collective bond of union
among the Catholic poor, an ideological cohesion, which helped to
mobilize peasant movements. The Irish landed class was also alien
in terms of both religion and ethnicity. Therefore the élites did not
possess the hegemonic authority or the networks of social influence
in the localities of the kind enjoyed by their counterparts across the
Irish Sea. In mainland Britain rural stability mainly rested not on
draconian law enforcement or military force but on many generations
of family lordship, influence and assured hierarchy among the
population. The Highlands should therefore be best compared not
with Ireland but with the more representative experiences of the rural
Lowlands and the English countryside.
Between 1760 and 1830 the dispossession of small tenants and
cottars in the Lowlands, as argued previously, was a silent process
which did not trigger overt opposition. However, modern scholarship
has now shown that contemporaries may have significantly
underestimated the extent and range of disturbance in the
Highlands. Especially in the early stages of the expansion of sheep
farming in the later eighteenth century, farmers from the Lowlands
and Border country coming on to estates to consider their potential
for sheep rearing were often set upon violently and given a bloody
send-off. The clandestine stealing, maiming, mutilation and slaughter
of sheep by night were, for obvious reasons, relatively risk-free and
were the most popular forms of intimidation and retribution visited on
the flockmasters. Anonymous letters sent to the families of sheep
farmers threatening violent revenge were also common. In the 1810s
sheep thefts on the Sutherland estate rose to around 1,500 animals
a year and led to the formation of a protective organization, the
Sutherland Association against Felony. But the poverty of the people
ensured that these defensive measures were usually ineffective. As
the Rev. Norman MacLeod recorded of Skye in 1841: ‘The flocks of
the large sheep farmers are annually thinned by those who feel the
pinching of famine; and to such an extent is this system carried on
that it has led to the proposal of establishing a rural police
throughout the island.16 Again, on the MacLeod estate on the same
island, inflammatory notices were posted on the doors of churches
which caused numerous sheep to be mutilated or killed. From other
districts came reports of petty violence and simmering hatred of
sheep farmers.
 Yet, even if the vast majority of evictions passed off peacefully with
little dissent or opposition, resistance did take place in some cases
with sporadic but repeated incidents of protest. Thus far modern
research has documented at least fifty such episodes, but that figure
is almost certainly an underestimate because most of those which
have been recorded to date only came to public notice because they
attracted the attention of the contemporary press. However, from the
known examples of opposition, the leading historian of the Highland
disturbances has constructed the following useful typology:
From the many examples of obstruction and resistance emerges an
almost stylised mode of action. Typically the anti-eviction episode
followed a pattern in these four stages:
– The local law officer or the landlord’s agent would attempt to serve
the summons of removal on a village. The first time he might simply
be turned away. The second time he would be subjected to petty
humiliation, usually at the hands of the womenfolk of the village.
They might seize his papers and burn them under his nose.
Sometimes the officer was stripped naked and chased off the land –
or even pushed out to sea in an open boat without oars.
– A posse of constables led by a Sheriff and his assistants would
arrive, often very early in the morning. Real resistance would follow:
they would be assaulted with volleys of stones and sticks from a
massed group of the common people. In the front line of the latter
were, invariably, the women and boys, making most noise and taking
the worst injuries. Sometimes men were reported at the front – often
dressed as women. But most of the menfolk were to the rear,
apparently as a second line of defence. The resistance was usually
sufficiently vociferous and violent to push back the posse.
Meanwhile, the common people might have made an appeal to some
distant authority: the Prince Regent, the press, local worthies or even
the landlord.
– Higher legal authorities would be alerted: the Solicitor General, or
the Lord Advocate, or perhaps the Home Office. Repeatedly the local
landowners, in an advanced state of panic, would attribute the
disturbances to agitators with suspected connections with
‘Radicalism’. Sometimes there was inflated talk of a ‘Northern
Rebellion’ which helped persuade the authorities that military
 intervention was required – from Inverness, Fort William, Aberdeen
or Glasgow.
– The news of impending military intervention was usually enough of
itself to lead to a collapse of the resistance. Troops intervened on at
least ten occasions but were never actually engaged in physical
hostilities. The termination of resistance was frequently facilitated by
the mediation of the local minister who produced a face-saving
formula for the people. It generally took the form of a delay of
removal, but rarely did anything to prevent the eventual clearance.
Most of these incidents show the marks of desperation among the
people – unpreparedness, absence of arms, lack of coordination, no
clear leadership and the final collapse in the face of military
intervention.17
One of the best documented of these episodes took place on the
Argyllshire estate of Neil Malcolm of Poltalloch. He and his family
were natives of the county and had made an immense fortune in the
sugar and slave trades of the Caribbean. At the height of the potato
famine in June 1848, Malcolm attempted to remove the small
tenants of the township of Arichonan in North Knapdale, Argyll. At
the first attempt to enforce the notices of eviction, the sheriff officer,
factor and other employees of the estate were resisted with
considerable violence and the attempt at removal collapsed in
ignominy.
A month later another effort was made. This time the party
numbered thirty-eight men, including a police escort. Even then the
people seem not to have been intimidated: ‘a mob of great number
of evil disposed persons did then and there riotously and
tumultuously assemble with the “common purpose” of opposing the
eviction’, as the report preserved in Justiciary Court Records
described the incident.18 The authorities were routed once again and
forced to release the prisoners they had already taken during the
action. Significantly, too, the inhabitants of Arichonan were helped by
crofters and cottars from elsewhere in the neighbourhood in their
struggle to resist dispossession.
Subsequently, charges were brought against fifteen individuals ‘for
mobbing and rioting, obstructing and deforcing [preventing with force
an officer of the law doing his duty] and assaulting officers’. Most
were tenants and a few others were cottars. Five of the fifteen were
women. All the accused, except for one man who was exonerated,
each received sentences of eight months’ imprisonment.
The high profile of women in the Arichonan incident is intriguing;
indeed, some have suggested that Highland riots were in effect
women’s riots. In a representative sample of thirty clearance and
patronage disputes across the Highland region, women were
involved in nineteen and in many of them they often took the lead
while the menfolk at first held back. This was true of a series of
disturbances at Culrain in 1820; Gruids in 1821; Durness in 1841;
Sollas in 1849; Greenyards in 1854; Knockam and Elphim in 1852;
and Coigach in 1852. Sometimes men appeared as transvestites,
dressed in female clothing. The proactive role of women in peasant
resistance was not unique to the Highlands. It was also an integral
part of popular insurrectionism in Ireland, England, Holland, France
and elsewhere. Wives and mothers were at the heart of the home
and their determination to defend it and their families to the bitter end
is hardly surprising. The loss of earnings of the menfolk by reason of
arrest and imprisonment could condemn wives and children to a life
of penury. Court records suggest there was a belief among the
people that women would not experience prosecution and even if
they did were likely to be treated more leniently by the judiciary. Men
generally did tend to receive longer sentences, but there is no
evidence that the authorities were unwilling to prosecute women with
the full force of the law. If the military was summoned to help crush
riotous behaviour they may initially have been surprised to be
confronted by serried ranks of females pitching stones and
screaming curses at them. But that did not prevent soldiers using
rifle butts and even bayonets against women if those tactics were
thought necessary in order to arrest them.
The example of Arichonan was fairly typical of the Highland riots.
Violence was employed in the resistance, the forces of law and order
were rebuffed for a time, but eventually the perpetrators were
arrested and imprisoned. One exception to the rule was the
attempted clearance of Coigach in Wester Ross in 1852–3. The
officer who attempted to serve the eviction papers was stripped by
the womenfolk and despatched almost naked in a boat across the
loch. Six constables were then ordered to the district but were again
given short shrift by angry women. The dispute lasted for over two
years. Eventually the people were allowed to remain as the
proprietor began to fear the bad publicity that might ensue if he
called in the military to carry out a forced eviction. Coigach may have
been one sign of changing times and of growing sympathy for the
plight of the crofting communities outside the Highlands.
Another important advance in the assessment of protest has been
exploration of the oral tradition, by studying the fragments of Gaelic
poetry which have survived. Verse and song were the main vehicles
of public expression and can provide a fascinating insight into the
emotional world of the people. As noted earlier, some poetry of the
time tended to convey depression and hopelessness. But other parts
of the genre are much more robust and express feelings of rage,
anger and eagerness for revenge on the perpetrators of clearance.
Also, contrary to the opinion expressed by some writers, the verse
does occasionally condemn landlords as well as their factors by
name. Satirical poetry, in particular, that which belongs to the poetic
tradition of aoir, or vituperation and condemnation, can be especially
venomous.19 Two examples are given below:
Aoir air Pàdraig Sellar Satire on Patrick Sellar

Dòmhnall Bàillidh Donald Baillie

Refrain: Refrain:
Hò ‘n ceàrd dubh, hè ‘n ceàrd dubh; Hò the black rogue, hè the black
Hò ‘n ceàrd dubh dhaor am fearann. rogue;
Hò the black rogue, who raised the
Chunnaic mise bruadar, land-rent.
‘S cha b’ fluathach leam fhaicinn
fhathast, I saw a dream,
‘S nam faicinn e ‘nam dhùsgadh, and I would not mind seeing it again;
Bu shùgradh dhomh e rim latha. if I were to see it while awake,
it would make me merry all day.
Teine mòr an òrdagh
Is Roy ‘na theis-mheadhoin, A big fire was ready
Young bhith ann am prìosan, and Roy was right in its middle,
‘S an t-iarann mu chnàmhan Shellair. Young was incarcerated,
and there was iron about Sellar’s
Tha Sellar an Cùl-Mhàillidh bones.
Air fhàgail mar mhadh-allaidh,
A’ glacadh is a’ sàradh Sellar is in Culmailly,
Gach aon nì thig ‘na charaibh. left there like a wolf,
catching and oppressing
Tha shròn mar choltar iarainn everything that comes within his
No fiacail na muice bioraich; range.
Tha ceann liath mar ròn air
Is bòdhan mar asal fhireann. His nose is like an iron plough-share
or the tooth of the long-beaked
Tha rugaid mar chòrr-riabhaich porpoise;
Is iomhaigh air nach eil taairis, he has a grey head like a seal
Is casan fada liadhach and his lower abdomen resembles
Mar shiaman de shlataibh mara. that of a male ass.

‘S truagh nach robh thu ‘m priosan His long neck is like that of the crane,
Rè bhliadhnan air uisg’ is aran, and his face has no appearance of
Is cearcall cruaidh de dh’ iarann gentleness;
Mud shliasaid gu làdir daingeann. his long, sharp-shinned legs
resemble ropes of large sea-tangle.
Nam faighinn-s’ air raon thu
Is daoine bhith gad cheangal,
Bheirinn le mo dhòrnaibh
Trì òirlich a-mach dhed sgamhan. What a pity that you were not in
prison
Chaidh thu fhèin ‘s do phàirtidh for years, existing on bread and
An àirde gu bràghe Rosail, water,
Is chuir thu taigh do bhràthar with a hard shackle of iron,
‘Na smàlaibh a suas ‘na lasair. strong and immovable, about your
thigh.
Nuair a thig am bàs ort,
Cha chàirear thu anns an talamh, If I could get at you on an open field,
Ach bidh do charcais thodharail with people tying you down,
Mar òtrach air aodann achaidh. I would pull with my fists
three inches [of flesh] out of your
Bha Sellar and Roy lungs.
Air an treòrachadh leis an Deamhan
Nuair dh’òrdaucg uad ab cinoaust You yourself and your party
‘S an t-slabhraidh chur air an went up the braes of Rosal,
fhearann. and you set fire to your brother’s
house,
Bha ‘n Simpsonach ‘na chù so that it burned to ashes.
Mar bu dùthchasach don mharaich’,
Seacaid ghorm à bùth air, When death comes upon you,
‘S triùbhsair de dh’ aodach tana. you will not be placed in the ground,
but your dung-like carcase will be
‘S I pacaid dhubh an ùillidh spread
A ghiùlain iad chum an fhearainn-s’, like manure on a field’s surface.
Ach chìthear fhathast bàitht’ iad
Air tràilleach an cladach Bhanaibh. Sellar and Roy
were guided by the very Devil,
when they commanded that the
compass
and the chain be set to [measure] the
land.

The Simpson man behaved like a dog

as befitted the nature of a seaman,
wearing a blue jacket from a shop
and trousers of thin cloth.

It was the black packet of the oil

that brought them to this land,
but they will yet be seen drowned
 [and thrown up] on seaweed on the
Banff shore.

Oran air Fear a bha a’ Fuadachadh Song on One Who was Evicting
nan. Gàidheal Highlanders

An uair a thig an t-eug ort, When death comes upon you,

Leam fèin gur math, O raithill ò. I will think it fine.

Cuiridh sinn air dèlidh thur We will put you on a deal plank
Led lèine bhric, O raithill ò. in your speckled shirt.

Togaidh sinn gu h-uallach thu We will lift you happily

Air guaillibh hear, O raithill ò. on men’s shoulders.

Cha tèid nì air d’ uachdar Nothing will go on top of you

Ach buachar mairt, O raithill ò. except cow dung.

‘S a-chaoidh cha chinn an t-eòinean And never will a daisy grow on you
ort or the clean blade of grass.
No am feòirlinn glan, O raithill ò.
But thistles and nettles will grow at
Ach cinnidh foghanain is feanntag your feet.
Aig ceann do chas, O raithill ò. When a spadeful of earth is put on
top of you,
Nuair thèid spaid den ùir ort, the country will be put to rights.
Bidh an dùthaich ceart, O raithill ò.
Every poor person and weakling
Bidh gach bochd is truaghan will be clapping their hands.
A’ bualadh bhas, O raithill ò.
If you were found on the shore
Nam faighte air an tràigh thu instead of kelp,
An àite stamh, O raithill ò;
there would be one or two people
Gum biodh fear no dhà ann who would laugh out loud.
A ghàireadh mach, O raithill ò.
No coffin or shroud would be put on
Cha chuirte cist’ no anart ort you
Ach lèine bhreac, O raithill ò. but a speckled shirt.
Gu bheil cridhe spìocach There is a miserly heart
Ad chliabh a-steach, O raithill ò. inside your chest.
Tha d’ aodann mar am miaran, Your face resembles a thimble,
A bhlianaich bhric, O raithill ò. made of pock-marked lean meat.

‘S e an t-òr a bha san laoighcionn The gold that is in the calf-skin

Chuir daoine as, O raithill ò; is what dispossessed the people;

Or na seiche ruaidhe, the gold of the red hide,

‘S cha bhuaidh cho math, O raithill ò. and its influence is not so good.

Nan cailleadh to chlach bhuadhach, If you lost the efficacious stone,

Bhiodh d’ uain glè thearc, O raithill ò. your lambs would be very scarce.

Mo mhallachd fhèin thar chàcha My own curse be on you beyond

Gu bràtha leat, O raithill ò. others for ever more.

[Roy: John Roy was land surveyor on the Sutherland estate.

Patrick Sellar: was factor (or manager) of the Sutherland estate from 1811 until
1817 and responsible for several controversial evictions.
Young: William Young was factor of the Sutherland estate, together with
Patrick Sellar, from 1811 until his dismissal in 1816 and also responsible for
several evictions.]

2
The well-known aphorism of the French historian Pierre Goubert that
‘No peasant willingly surrenders land, be it only half a furrow’ is a
reminder that violent response to eviction was not unique to the
Highlands.20 But hostility to dispossession there seems to have been
motivated not simply by fear of the loss of subsistence but by
strongly held beliefs in rights to land. This was the repeated claim
throughout the poetry of the clearances and was also a salient
feature of the evidence given by crofter witnesses to the Napier
Commission in 1882–3. Of principal importance in this respect was,
as discussed earlier in the book, the concept of duthchas. The term
has several meanings but they included the belief in the hereditary
right of possession to land. It was not a legal concept but one based
on custom and derived from the old clan tradition of land given in
return for service. Occupation of a holding therefore was seen as
being justifiable in moral terms and was in explicit conflict with the
legal rights of private property in land. The Napier Commission
recognized the inevitable conflict between the two concepts:
The opinion was often expressed before us that the small tenantry of
the Highlands have an inherited inalienable title to security of tenure
in their possessions while rent and service are duly rendered which
is an impression indigenous to the country though it has never been
sanctioned by legal recognition, and has long been repudiated by the
actions of the proprietors.21
The Earl of Selkirk, who organized several emigration schemes to
Canada from the Highlands, had made a similar point seventy years
before:
According to the ideas handed down to them from their ancestors,
and long prevalent among high and low throughout the Highlands,
they were only defending their rights and resisting a ruinous unjust
and tyrannical encroachment on their property.22 [my italics]
Patrick Sellar, one of the managers of the Sutherland estate in the
early nineteenth century and notorious for being charged with
culpable homicide during an eviction, came up against these beliefs
in the clearance of the Strath of Kildonan in 1812. The delivery of
notices to quit their holdings triggered open opposition from the
people. A petition from the tenants denied that they were in any way
motivated by radical politics, as some might have suspected at the
time. Instead, they contended that ‘Mr Young [Sellar’s fellow
manager] would give us the first offer of our present possessions or
provide us with such larach [holdings] that we may have some Hill
Grass as the Highlanders mostly depends on the Hill Grass.’ Sellar,
who was a native of Lowland Morayshire, was astonished to learn
that the tenants claimed ‘they were entitled to keep possession of
their Grounds and would allow no shepherd to come to the country’.
Another observer at the time described how the Kildonan people had
‘so much of the old Highland Spirit as to think the land their own’.23
The durability of these beliefs in the right to land was remarkable.
As late as 1954 the Royal Commission on Crofting Conditions of that
year noted:
 they have the feeling that the croft, its land, its houses are their own.
They have gathered its stones and reared its buildings and occupied
it as their own all their days.
They have received it from their ancestors who won it from the
wilderness and they cherish the hope they will transmit it to the
generations to come.
Whatever the legal theory they feel it to be their own.24

3
The most successful example of defiance against landlord authority
in the Victorian Highlands before the 1880s was not in the secular
sphere or in resistance to clearance but in the religious sphere and
was occasioned by the Disruption of the Church of Scotland in 1843.
The long-running controversy over landed rights of patronage had
been a source of tension and protest in the parishes of Scotland
since the early decades of the eighteenth century. The evangelical
wing of the established church had always been in strident
opposition to lay patronage as in their view it conferred arrogant and
unacceptable secular authority over Christ’s kingdom on earth. By
the 1830s the tide of opinion in the General Assembly was running
very favourably for the evangelicals and they determined to rid the
church once and for all of this historic grievance. The growing crisis
came to a head in 1842 when the Assembly passed the Claim of
Right which proclaimed that only Jesus Christ had headship of the
Church of Scotland and to recognize any other authority in its
governance was tantamount to heretical rejection of His Divine
supremacy. The Prime Minister, Robert Peel, in early 1843
summarily rejected the Claim as totally unacceptable because it
could only lead to clerical tyranny over the state.
The evangelicals considered that they now had little choice but to
break from the established church. Therefore on 18 May 1843, the
first day of the annual General Assembly in Edinburgh, the retiring
Moderator read out a long statement denouncing the British state for
infringing the spiritual independence of the national Church of
Scotland. He laid the paper on the table and then left the Assembly,
followed en masse into the street by all his fellow evangelical
ministers and elders. Later, they formally constituted themselves as
the ‘Free Protesting Church of Scotland’ and signed the Deed of
Demission by which over 450 clergy resigned from the establishment
and surrendered their churches, manses and incomes in a
remarkable demonstration of the power of religious principle and
commitment.
This historic decision had major implications for the people of the
western Highlands and Islands. By the time of the Disruption the
region had become a stronghold of popular and enthusiastic
evangelicalism with a history of intense and deeply emotional
religious revivals. There was also a recent history of public and
violent opposition by congregations to ministers settled on them by
landlord patrons who were not only considered more restrained and
moderate in their beliefs but were also sometimes viewed as clerical
creatures of landlordism. Indeed, it is possible to detect a people’s
church already emerging out of the established order in parts of the
Highlands before the Church of Scotland finally fractured in 1843. A
key factor in this development was the influence of Na Daoine,
translated as ‘The Men’. They were lay preachers, so called to
distinguish them from the ordained clergy, a spiritual élite, drawn
mainly from better-off crofting and tradesman families, with powerful
personal charisma, deep religious piety, detailed knowledge of the
scriptures and, above all, an ability to blend the appeal of Christian
spirituality with Gaelic tradition and imagery.
Their message gave hope of salvation in the next world and some
consolation in the present to those suffering from the economic
convulsions which gripped the western Highlands. Christian
conversion was only possible through complete submission to the
Will of God and a refusal to accept suffering was to question that
divine authority. Evangelical teaching therefore provided a certainty
amid the trauma of tumultuous social change and at the same time
the promise of eternal reward in heaven for those who lived good
and holy lives despite the travails they experienced on earth.
It came as little surprise then that when the new Free Church was
founded it generated widespread and enthusiastic support among
crofters and cottars. Even before it was established in 1843 the
evangelical leadership in the Lowlands had been preparing the
ground. Pamphlets and broadsheets in Gaelic were widely
circulated. Delegations toured the region to seek popular support
and ministers of an evangelical persuasion were urged to prepare
their congregations for the coming crisis. When the schism finally
came, entire districts quickly separated from the established church,
and ‘The Men’, together with the large numbers of people whom they
had influenced, collectively joined the Free Church. The religious
division soon hardened into class division. The new church was no
friend of landlords whose rights of patronage the evangelicals had
challenged for generations. For their part, landowners, big farmers,
factors and merchants mainly continued to adhere to the Auld Kirk,
the established Church of Scotland. Many of them felt that the
people had carried out an unprecedented act of collective defiance
against their social superiors. For some time afterwards landlords
organized a campaign of harassment and obstruction against the
Free Church which normally took the form of refusing sites on their
estates for church buildings. One magnate, Sir James Riddell,
proprietor of Ardnamurchan, publicly and bitterly denounced those
who had broken off from the establishment and asserted that if the
crofters had shown such defiance in the religious sphere there was
every chance that before too long they would also be likely to
challenge the powers that be in the secular sphere.
It was to be another forty years before any such challenge did
emerge in the crofting districts so one has to be cautious about
drawing a simple cause-and-effect relationship between the
Disruption of 1843 and the successful agitations over land reform
which surfaced in the 1880s. Nevertheless, the popularity of the Free
Church was yet another great breach in the relationship between
élites and people in the western Highlands. Some have also
suggested that 1843 and the aftermath was a collective victory for
the interests of crofters over landlords which generated a stronger
sense of community among the people. Members of the Free Church
throughout Scotland were also committed supporters of the Liberal
Party and they soon began to develop an interest in the plight of their
co-religionaries in the Highlands which was to prove a key source of
influential political support during the Crofters’ War of the 1880s.
There is, however, another side to the issue of the relationship
between the people of Gaeldom and evangelical religion which
makes the discussion more complex. During the period of trauma
and famine as the policy of clearance changed from resettlement to
expulsion between the 1820s and 1850s it can also be plausibly
argued that the religious transformation of that time helped to contain
violent protest and peasant unrest. The people were probably
already disorientated since for the most part the promoters of the
revolution in land holding were their own hereditary leaders. In
Highland Scotland, much of the population must have been in a
condition of psychological confusion as the families of the old clan
élites began to enforce widespread dispossession of peasant
communities. In such a time of social convulsion, religious certainties
could provide some comfort.
This had a number of facets. Patient acceptance of suffering was
nothing less than pious submission to God’s plan. During the potato
famine, the Edinburgh Gaelic Schools Society stated: ‘for He hath
said I will never leave thee nor forsake thee. It is this word that your
teachers are, day and night, occupied in dispensing to the starving
families of the Highland and Islands.’25 The proper response to
suffering was the examination of conscience as a precondition to
repentance. The experience of tragedy in this world could be
explained as the result of personal wickedness and so those who
were the victims of disaster might themselves be the causes of their
own misfortune. This was the reaction, for example, of the people of
Glencalvie in Strathconan who were obliged to seek refuge in the
church at Croick in 1845 after being evicted from their lands. They
scrawled a message on the windowsill of the kirk where they sought
shelter that their plight was a dreadful punishment for sin. Also, the
mighty who had inflicted pain would not go unpunished. But
retribution belonged to God, not man; in one sermon the Rev. John
Sinclair, minister of Bruan in Caithness, made the point explicitly: ‘It
is true that we often see the wicked enjoy much comfort and worldly
ease, and the Godly chastened every morning; but this is a dreadful
rest to the former and a blessed chastisement to the latter.’26 The
doctrines of Calvinism therefore gave spiritual certainty during the
transition from clanship to clearance as the evangelicals
concentrated the minds and emotions of the people on a highly
personal struggle for grace and election. The miseries of this life
were not therefore simply to be endured but were in themselves a
necessary agony for those who wished to attain eternal salvation in
the next.
This compelling set of beliefs had important implications for the
response of the Highland population to the impact of dispossession.
Resistance to clearance did take place but was still limited in relation
to the overall scale of dislocation. But the beliefs disseminated with
such emotional fervour by the missionaries and ‘The Men’ must have
buttressed other forces making for stability and further diluted
influences making for resistance. The evangelical gospel was not a
theology of social justice but a faith designed to promote personal
spiritual growth and commitment. It offered solace and the certainty
of punishment for the oppressor, not by man but by God, and so
deflected opposition in this life to the other side of the grave. The
vision that suffering had to be endured as a necessary preparation
for salvation was an obvious constraint on insurrection, and it was
hardly surprising that the poet Mary MacPherson of Skye eloquently
condemned evangelical preachers for their indifference to the poor
conditions in which the people lived. Their concern with spiritual
challenges and the eternal verities took precedence over mere
secular problems.
 14

Clearance and Expulsion

1
Until the 1860s emigration from the Scottish Highlands was an
important numerical feature of the Scottish exodus as a whole. In the
last four decades of the nineteenth century, however, and thereafter,
the contribution of the region as a proportion of the general outflow
of Scots fell dramatically as the towns, cities and Lowland
countryside became by far the dominant sources of large-scale
Scottish movement across the globe. Yet, for a number of years in
the later 1840s and early 1850s, the Highland diaspora reached truly
unprecedented levels. It is arguable that much of the international
mobility of the Scottish people throughout the nineteenth century
was led by the search for opportunity overseas. But in that period the
great wave of Highland emigrants was primarily driven by
subsistence crisis, clearance and peasant expropriation.
The essential background to the exodus was the lethal impact of
the potato blight which had earlier devastated Ireland and some
other parts of Europe in the years after 1845. The Highland crops
succumbed to the disease from the autumn of 1846, one year after
the beginning of the Irish tragedy. Press reports from the north and
west started to describe the stench of rotting potatoes, the key
subsistence crop of the region, throughout the crofting townships,
particularly those located in the Hebrides and the coastlands of the
western mainland. In that area, with its moderate winters and rainy
summers, the climatic conditions were exactly right for the rapid and
destructive spread of the fungal disease Phytophthora infestans, to
which there was no known antidote at the time. Early estimates for
1846 suggested the potato crop had failed entirely in over 75 per
cent of crofting parishes. The newspaper of the Free Church, The
Witness, proclaimed in apocalyptic terms: ‘The hand of the Lord has
indeed touched us’ and described the calamity ‘unprecedented in the
memory of this generation and of many generations gone by, even in
any modern periods of our country’s history’.1 Unambiguous signs of
famine soon emerged. While burial registers for most Highland areas
in the 1840s are few and far between, in those that have survived
deaths among the old and the very young rose significantly in late
1846 and the first few months of 1847. The Scotsman in December
1846 described how the numbers dying from dysentery were
‘increasing with fearful rapidity among the cottar class’.2 In the Ross
of Mull, government relief officers reported that the mortality rate
during the winter months was three times above the average for that
time of year. Elsewhere in Harris, South Uist, Barra, Skye, Moidart
and Kintail, influenza, typhus and dysentery were also spreading
unchecked among the poor. The awful possibility that the Highlands
might be engulfed in a human catastrophe of Irish proportions
seemed to some observers to be only a matter of time.
But the potential disaster was averted, despite the fact that the
potato blight continued to ravage the Highlands to a greater or lesser
extent for almost a decade after 1846. By the summer of 1847 death
rates had returned to normal levels and the threat of starvation
receded. It seemed as if a terrible mortality crisis had been
contained. The different experiences of Ireland (where over one
million died) and the Highlands in this respect can be explained by a
number of influences. An important factor was scale. In Ireland, the
blight brought over three million people to the edge of starvation. In
the Highlands, on the other hand, around 200,000 were seriously as
risk, and this number diminished over time as the crisis increasingly
centred on parts of the north-western coastlands, the northern isles
of Orkney and Shetland, and the Hebrides. By 1848 only around a
quarter (or fewer than 70,000) of the total population of the Highland
region remained in need of famine relief.
 The map of distress was complex. The southern, central and
eastern Highlands did not escape entirely unscathed, but after 1847
relief operations were already being wound down in most of the
parishes there, reflecting their more resilient economies. Here were
less potato dependency and more reliance on grain and fish; a better
ratio of land to population; and developed alternative occupations,
such as commercial fishing and linen manufacture, in southern
Argyll, Perthshire and eastern Inverness-shire. The concentrated
and relatively small-scale nature of the Scottish famine meant that
the emergency could be managed more effectively by the relief
agencies of the day in contrast to the epochal crisis across the Irish
Sea. The Scottish authorities were dealing with many thousands of
potential victims, their counterparts in Ireland with millions. The
vastly different magnitude of the two famines is best illustrated by the
role of government. In Ireland the state, both local and national, was
the principal source of relief during the crisis, whereas in the
Highlands direct government intervention began in late 1846 and
had come to an end by the summer of 1847. Two vessels were
stationed as meal depots at Tobermory in Mull and Portree in Skye
to sell grain at controlled prices while landowners in the stricken
region were able to make application for loans under the Drainage
and Public Works Act to provide relief work for the distressed people
of their estates.
These initiatives apart, the main burden of the relief effort was
borne by three great charities, the Free Church of Scotland, the
Edinburgh Relief Committee and its Glasgow equivalent, which
came together in early 1847 to form the Central Board of
Management for Highland Relief. The Central Board had the
responsibility for relieving destitution until its operations came to an
end in 1850. The programme of support went through several
phases. First in the field was the Free Church, eager to come to the
aid of its numerous loyal congregations in the north-west and the
islands. The schooner Breadalbane, built to carry ministers around
the Hebrides, was pressed into service to take emergency supplies
to the most needy communities. The Free Church was the only
active agency during the most critical months of late 1846 and early
1847. Through its superb intelligence network of local ministers it
was able to direct aid to those districts where the risk of starvation
was greatest. The Free Church’s relief operation was also free of
any sectarian bias. Grateful thanks for supplies of grain were
received from the Catholic areas of Arisaig and Moidart. Not the
least of the Free Church’s contribution was the imaginative plan to
transport over 3,000 able-bodied men from the Highlands for
temporary work on the Lowland railways.
The Central Board assumed control of relief operations in
February 1847 and by the end of that year had established a huge
fund for the aid of distress of nearly £210,000 (over £16,000,000 at
2017 values). This was probably the greatest sum ever raised in
support of a single charitable cause in nineteenth-century Scotland.
With this substantial resource behind it, the Board divided its relief
responsibilities into two Sections. Edinburgh was entrusted with
Skye, Wester Ross, Orkney, Shetland and the eastern Highlands,
while Glasgow took charge of Argyll, western Inverness, the Outer
Hebrides and the Inner Hebrides, apart from Skye. The distribution
of meal was managed initially under the Sections’ Local Committees,
appointed from each parish or district from lists supplied by local
clergymen. The objective was only to do enough to prevent absolute
starvation and so allowances were limited to only one pound of meal
per adult male per day and half of one pound for each woman. In
order to ensure that the people were not to be corrupted into the
feared state of indolent dependency, anathema to the Victorian mind,
these meagre portions would only be provided in return for hard
labour. So, in the spring and summer of 1847, gangs of men, women
and children could be seen at work all over the western Highlands,
the northern isles and the Hebrides at ‘public’ works, laying roads,
building walls, digging ditches and constructing piers. Several of
these so-called ‘destitution roads’ survive to this day as physical
memorials to the greatest human crisis in the modern history of
Gaeldom.
The relief effort contained the threat of starvation and the spread
of famine-related diseases. In spring 1847, for instance, the Glasgow
Section despatched 15,680 bolls of wheatmeal, oatmeal, peasemeal
and Indian corn to the distressed districts. But critics in the hierarchy
of the Central Board were soon complaining that the Highlanders
were being encouraged to rely on ‘pauperizing’ assistance, the so-
called ‘labour test’ was often ignored, and the distribution of meal
was becoming too lavish. A campaign to establish a more rigorous
system of relief started to gain momentum, partly inspired by the
belief that destitution was likely to last longer than one season, and
so major efforts had to be made to ensure that the Gaels could
support themselves in the future. Latent racism now came more to
the surface. Vitriolic attacks against the ‘indolent’ Highlander who
was being supported by the ‘industrious’ Lowlander began to be
published in the pages of the Scotsman, the Glasgow Herald and
other newspapers. Sir Charles Trevelyan, Assistant Secretary to the
Treasury, the key figure in the famine relief strategies in Ireland, was
now a powerful influence on the men who ran the Central Board.
Trevelyan’s position was unequivocal. He regarded both Irish and
Highland Celts as profoundly racially inferior to Anglo-Saxons. It was
his confirmed view that the potato famine was the judgement of God
on a feckless people. They now had to be taught a crucial moral
lesson in order to transform their values that they might be able to
support themselves in the future rather than rely on the charity of
others. Gratuitous relief was a veritable curse on society; in the
words of Trevelyan: ‘Next to allowing the people to die of hunger, the
greatest evil that could happen would be their being habituated to
depend upon public charity.’3
The outcome was the imposition of the hated ‘destitution test’
throughout the distressed region. By this system of extreme
stringency a whole day’s work was required in return for a pound of
meal, the theory being that only those facing starvation would accept
support on such terms. Trevelyan stressed that ‘pauperism’, or
dependency on relief, could be avoided but by insisting that ‘the
pound of meal and the task of at least eight hours hard work is the
best regime for this moral disease’.4 An elaborate bureaucracy was
set up to enforce this more demanding regime, consisting of an
inspector-general, resident inspectors, relief officers and work
overseers spread throughout all the districts which had been affected
by failure of the potatoes. Most of the functionaries were retired or
semi-retired naval officers (‘heroes of the quarter-deck’, as one
observer put it) who were very experienced in enforcing strict
discipline. Meal allowances were now to be issued only once a
fortnight in order to impose habits of prudence by teaching the poor
to spread their paltry issues of meal over an extended period rather
than relying on being fed on a daily basis. Labour books were kept
by the overseers in which the hours of work of each recipient were
faithfully recorded, the fortnight’s allowance for each family
calculated with care and tickets issued for presentation to the meal
dealers. The destitution test was resolutely imposed by relief officers
who saw it as their duty to teach the people a moral lesson. Not
surprisingly, however, it provoked deep hostility. One critic
commented acidly that the scheme was ‘starving the poor
Highlanders according to the most approved doctrines of political
economy … the Highlanders upon grounds of Catholic affinity, were
to be starved after the Irish fashion’.5 Free Church ministers
protested loudly at the programme of ‘systematized starvation’ which
unleashed angry hostility, particularly among the people of Skye and
Wester Ross. Nevertheless, the test was enforced through 1848 and
into 1849. In essence a great philanthropic endeavour had been
transformed into an ideological crusade to reform a population
judged to be inadequate and in need of character improvement. It
was an extraordinary outcome.
However, the reasons why the Highlands did not starve were wider
and deeper than the relief effort itself. Many landowners were active,
at least for a period, in supporting the inhabitants of their estates in
the early years of the crisis. For instance, only 14 per cent of all west
Highland proprietors were censured by government officials for
negligence, though in some other cases pressure had to be brought
to bear to ensure that landowners met their obligations. In later
years, as described below, estate policy in general became much
less benevolent and more coercive. Civil servants even contrasted
the positive role of Scottish proprietors with the indifference of many
of their counterparts across the Irish Sea. A prime factor in the
Scottish case was that many landlords had the financial resources to
provide support to their small tenants. As described in Chapter 10, in
the early nineteenth century there had been a great transfer of
estates from the indebted hereditary landlord class of the region to
new owners who were often rich tycoons from outside the Highlands.
Over three quarters of all estates in the famine zone had been
acquired by merchants, bankers, lawyers, financiers and
industrialists by the 1840s. The affluent were attracted to the
Highlands for sport, recreation, the romantic allure of the region and,
not least, a basic desire for territorial acquisition. Typical of the breed
was the new owner of Barra and South Uist, Colonel John Gordon,
dubbed ‘the richest commoner in Scotland’, and Sir James
Matheson, proprietor of Lewis and partner in the China opium house
of Jardine, Matheson and Co. The economic muscle of this élite was
able to complement and support the relief programmes of
government and the charities, at least in the first years of the
disaster.
The different stages of economic development of Ireland and
Scotland were also of crucial importance. The Scottish famine took
place in a rich industrialized society with much higher per capita
wealth than Ireland. The proof was the army of Irish immigrants
which had been drawn by this, settling in the western Lowlands from
the late eighteenth century. Scotland had a dynamic industrial
economy which offered a range of jobs in general and casual
labouring to temporary and permanent migrants from the Highlands.
Agricultural work, especially at the harvest, the fisheries, domestic
service, building, dock labouring and railway navvying were just
some of the outlets available in the booming southern economy. By
the 1840s, temporary migration had become a very well-developed
feature of Highland life. Not only did it provide a stream of income
from the Lowlands but the peak months for seasonal movement,
May to September, were also the times of maximum pressure on
food resources when the old grain and potato harvests were running
out and the new had still to be gathered.
 These migration networks were of key importance during the
potato famine. The years 1846 and 1847 were by happy coincidence
a phase of vigorous development in the Lowland economy,
stimulated in large part by the greatest railway construction boom of
the nineteenth century. As a result there was an unprecedented
demand for labourers, but employment in fishing and agriculture,
both traditional outlets for Highland seasonal migrants, was also very
buoyant. The combination of a very active labour market in the south
and the unremitting pressure of destitution in the north prompted a
great stream of people from the stricken region. In a sense, however,
and despite the acute distress suffered by the poor, these first two
years of the Great Highland Famine can be considered the relative
quiet before the real social storm. A wave of widespread clearances
and compulsory programmes of emigration were soon to be
unleashed on the impoverished communities of Gaeldom.

2
The benevolence of urban philanthropists and several Highland
magnates in providing support for the stricken population in 1846–7
cannot be denied. However, voices of disquiet and criticism started
to reach a peak from 1848 onwards. In part this was because the
Scottish economy was plunged into a deep industrial recession in
that year. The depression was accompanied by serious cholera
epidemics in some of the larger Lowland towns. Donor fatigue
started to set in, not least because the question was now raised of
why the Gaels should be offered such ‘generous’ support while many
industrial communities suffered extreme privation with only limited
help. The Scottish Poor Law reform of 1845 had set its face against
relief for the able-bodied unemployed and, as a result, countless
families were now sinking into miserable destitution in the
manufacturing areas.
The Central Board’s attempts to use its resources to invest in
economic improvement in the western Highlands and Islands had
also proven fruitless. The Scotsman editorials thundered that the
charity of industrious, hard-working Lowlanders had been wasted to
support ‘Celtic laziness’.6 On some of the great estates of the
Highlands, where large sums had been spent on both famine relief
and public works, the impact on long-term improvement was indeed
slight. Sir James Matheson had provided over £107,000 in the island
of Lewis between 1845 and 1850, or some £68,000 more than the
revenue derived from his estate over that period. Similarly, between
1846 and 1850 £7,900 was spent on the Tiree and Ross of Mull
properties by the Duke of Argyll on famine support together with
other road and agricultural improvements. Expenditure on this scale
helped to maintain the people, but, to the critics, the continuance of
the crisis into its third and fourth years, despite such levels of
funding, seemed to confirm that deployment of resources alone,
however great they were, could not solve a problem now deemed to
be chronic and deeply entrenched in the very fabric and values of
Highland society.
The decision of the Central Board to give notice of the termination
of its activities in 1850 finally concentrated minds. For the old and
infirm, the only alternative was the Poor Law, which, of course,
meant a considerable hike in the costs to local ratepayers.
Ominously, numbers on the local poor rolls did rise dramatically from
the early months of 1850. Then, an even more worrying scenario
began to emerge. It was rumoured that, with the winding up of the
operations of the Central Board, the government was contemplating
the introduction of ‘an able-bodied poor law’ to combat the threat of
starvation and the continued serious destitution in the Highlands.
Such a decision would have given all those suffering from destitution
the legal right to claim relief. One observer alleged that such
measures ‘were being talked of in high quarters as a remedy for the
grievances’ of the Highlands.7 If implemented, a drastic increase in
poor rates would have had a serious impact on the financial position
of some proprietors. Strategies on several estates now started to
move away from containment of the crisis to systematic dispersal of
the people through mass eviction and forced emigration.
Contemporaries argued that ‘the terror of the poor rates’ and ‘the
retribution of the poor’ were the fundamental reasons for the harsh
measures which would now have to be implemented.8 From his
vantage point in Whitehall, Sir Charles Trevelyan, who still continued
to maintain a keen interest in Highland affairs, agreed that the
possibility of a sharp rise in the poor rates ‘would give a motive for
eviction stronger than any which has yet operated’.9
It did not help that in these shifting political circumstances the
price of black cattle, the main source of income for crofters, fell on
average by more than 50 per cent between 1846 and 1852. The
spiralling increases in tenant arrears could not be halted or reversed
in such market conditions. Ironically, during the same period prices
for both Cheviot and Blackface sheep, which had fluctuated earlier,
now recovered and rose on an upward curve from the later 1840s
until the early 1860s. Market forces were therefore strongly dictating
investment in sheep walks and, with it, policies of clearance of small
tenants and cottars, as the most secure route back to financial
stability.
Another factor was likely to have a key influence on the unfolding
trauma afflicting the people. Some large Highland estates which
were insolvent but not yet sold off were managed by trustees for
creditors of the owner. They included the lands of Walter Frederick
Campbell, proprietor of most of Islay; Norman MacLeod of MacLeod
and Lord Macdonald in Skye and North Uist; Sir James Riddell
(Ardnamurchan); Macdonnel of Glengarry (Knoydart); and Maclaine
of Lochbuie (Mull), among others. Administration of lands under trust
was much more rigorous in law than where a solvent proprietor had
personal freedom of action. When a voluntary trust was established,
the trustee, normally an Edinburgh accountant or lawyer, possessed
all powers of decision making and the owners had to relinquish
control over the entire estate. In law, the single responsibility of the
trustee was to make funds available to begin repayment of creditors,
organize the property to make possible its sale in whole or in part to
pay debts, and maintain the revenue stream at a sufficient level to
cover public burdens, interest payments and the costs of
management. In addition, when an estate was managed under a
judicial trust, the trustee was exempted from any law requiring the
use of estate revenues for the relief of the poor.
Not surprisingly, therefore, most trustees found it difficult to avoid
the removal of crofters and cottars as the conversion of lands to
profitable sheep farming was the surest and quickest method of
maximizing income. As one contemporary newspaper put it: ‘When
the lands are heavily mortgaged, the obvious though harsh resource
is dispossessing the small tenants, to make room for a better class
able to pay rent. This task generally devolves on south country
managers or trustees, who look only to money returns, and who
cannot sympathize with the peculiar situations and feelings of the
Highland population.’10 A similar comment came from Professor
John Stuart Blackie, an influential advocate of the rights of the Gael,
some years later: ‘A trustee on a bankrupt’s estate … cannot afford
to be generous: women may weep and widows may starve; the
trustee must alone attend to the interest of the creditors.’11
Significantly, historians have noted that some of the most heartless
evictions of these years, like those in North Uist and Knoydart, took
place on lands managed by trustees.
In the gathering storm, a deep conflict of values and ideologies
surfaced and became as relevant as economics and law to the final
outcome for the people. Lowland attitudes to the Highlands in the
Victorian era were profoundly ambivalent and varied in tone and
emphasis over time. On the one hand, by the 1840s, the
development of romantic Highlandism had made the region a
fashionable tourist destination for the élites of British society. Also,
the Highlands had become famed as the kindergarten of the kilted
regiments which had brought glory to Scotland and helped increase
the standing of the nation within the Union and Empire. But there
was also a darker side to Lowland perceptions which became
increasingly influential. One of the first works arguing for the intrinsic
inferiority of the Celtic race was John Pinkerton’s Dissertation on the
Origin and Progress of the Scythians or Goths, published many
years before in 1787. He scorned the Celtic peoples as the
aborigines of Europe who were being inevitably displaced by
superior Anglo-Saxon Teutonic peoples. The Celts were therefore in
mass retreat to the very fringes of European civilization in Ireland
and northern Scotland. Pinkerton considered that the expected final
disappearance of the Celtic races was evidenced by the nature of
their poetry and song, which was ‘wholly melancholic’ as might be
expected of ‘a weak and dispirited people’. The culture of Lowland
Scotland by contrast was ‘replete with that warm alacrity of mind,
cheerful courage and quick wisdom which attend superior talents’.12
The correspondence of Patrick Sellar, the notorious land manager of
the Duke of Sutherland and afterwards a sheep farmer, suggests
that his attitude may have been influenced by the writings of the
Pinkerton genre. He too was wont to describe the Gaels as
‘aborigines’.
Pinkerton’s analysis was founded on the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment belief that different races developed over time at
different stages. The new science of anthropology was also
interested in the classification of race and the ways in which the
Enlightenment idea of man as the product of his environment could
best be understood. Even if the views of Pinkerton and his ilk were
shared by only a small intellectual minority in the eighteenth century,
they still helped to lay one of the key foundations for the later
flourishing of racist thought, particularly the assumption that the Celt
was unambiguously inferior to the Anglo-Saxon. By the middle
decades of the nineteenth century in Scotland, this distinction came
to be seen by some as the mark of a profound racial division
between the Highlands and the Lowlands.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, race became an even
more popular part of medical and scientific research. George
Combe’s The Constitution of Man (1828) was one of the bestsellers
of the age and was followed by Robert Knox’s ‘mono-maniacally
racialist and virulently anti-Celticist volume’, The Races of Men
(1850). Knox, one of Edinburgh’s leading medical teachers and
anatomists, had moved south to London in the wake of his notorious
connection to the Burke and Hare murders in the capital in 1828.
The Teutonic–Celtic distinction was becoming further refined, the
former associated with industriousness, a strong work ethic, ambition
and enterprise, the latter with indolence, sloth and dependency. The
remarkable advances which had been made in commerce, industry
and agriculture were surely proof positive of the strong and energetic
racial attributes of the Lowland population. On the other hand, the
economic failures of the Highlands should be primarily explained in
terms of Celtic inadequacy.
The famine crisis made these views even more influential. The two
most important Scottish newspapers of the time, the Scotsman and
the Glasgow Herald, began to give their support, as did the main
Highland journal, the Inverness Courier, an organ which was
traditionally sympathetic to landlordism. In their columns the new
orthodoxy of the famine experience from 1847–8 onwards was
reiterated time and again, and often in the most vitriolic terms. The
Gael was by nature indolent, and his innate laziness had been
fortified by the liberal distribution of charity from the pockets of
hardworking Lowlanders. The failure of the Highland economy to
recover despite such massive dispensation of aid was therefore
absolute confirmation of the racial inferiority of the population of the
region.
Coincidentally, too, the 1840s were, in the view of one historian, ‘a
watershed in the surging growth of Anglo-Saxonism’, as ideas of
Teutonic greatness developed by comparative philologists were
combined with notions of Caucasian superiority in the work of those
interested in the science of man.13 In Scotland these perspectives
were often analysed in territorial and ethnic terms. The London
Times despatched a special commissioner to the north to investigate
why Britain, a country so pre-eminent and advanced, could possibly
contain within its borders an area of such profound poverty and
threatened starvation. His explanation was also couched in terms of
racial differentiation. The journalist was very keen to stress that not
all of the north of Scotland was afflicted by the disease of moral
inadequacy. In parts of the region, ‘the Danish or Norwegian race’ of
Aberdeen, Caithness, Shetland and Orkney was thriving because
they were accustomed to hard work in a challenging climate and
terrain. In a physical sense, they could also be clearly identified by
their fair hair and blue eyes. Despite the bleak and inhospitable
environment in which they lived, there was no famine in these areas.
By contrast, in the neighbouring county of Sutherland, the land of the
Celt, poverty was endemic, the turf huts were filthy and filled with
smoke, and the failure of the potatoes was catastrophic. The
inference was clear. The famine was not the result of biology or
economics. Fundamentally, it came about because of racial
differences of character, values and attitudes.
What had emerged therefore by 1848/9 were irreconcilable
differences between the traditional values of the people and the
prevailing ideologies of much contemporary capitalism, improvement
and Victorian social morality. Those who subscribed to them seemed
to have little comprehension of the Highland labour cycle which
meant great effort in spring, summer and autumn but much less work
during the winter months. These seasonal rhythms were intrinsic to a
pastoral economy, subsistence agriculture and the climatic
challenges of daily life in the western Highlands and Islands. But to
many outside they conflicted with the Victorian belief in the moral
and material value of regular and disciplined toil. Also offensive to
this mentality was the traditionalist expectation of the Celt that his
social superiors had the responsibility to offer support in times of
need. It was a conflict of two world views but in which only those who
were committed to the virtues of self-help, independence and
initiative had the monopoly of power and authority. For, unlike the
pattern in Lowland rural society, where rulers and ruled shared
broadly similar sets of social and cultural expectations, the Highland
experience seems more akin to one of colonial dominion imposed on
the region by outside influences:
Colonialism is a relationship of domination between an indigenous
(or forcibly imported majority) and a minority of foreign invaders. The
fundamental decisions affecting the lives of the colonised people are
made and implemented by the colonial rulers in pursuit of interests
that are defined in a distant metropolis. Rejecting cultural
compromises with the colonised population, the colonisers are
 convinced of their own superiority and their ordained mandate to
rule.14
Of course, there is no exact fit between this definition and the course
of nineteenth-century Highland history. The Gaels were not being
dominated by a foreign power. But there are several aspects of their
experience which suggest the impact of internal colonialism on
Gaeldom. By the early Victorian era most estates were being sold off
to affluent southerners, the élite of big farmers was mainly recruited
from outside the Highlands and the ideology of those in authority
over the people, whether they were natives from Gaeldom or
elsewhere, was shaped by an ethos of market capitalism ultimately
derived from the Lowland and wider British experience. Some
thinkers in the Lowland citadels of learning during the Scottish
Enlightenment had also posited a stage theory of development by
arguing that humans evolved from barbarity to eventual civility over
different phases of time. This concept did not automatically lead to
the racialized differentiation of Celts and Anglo-Saxons but did
provide a foundation for Victorian intellectuals to do so in later years.
Apart from landowners, their factors, and the Lowland accountants
and lawyers who became trustees of insolvent estates, the key
players in the unfolding scenario were two public officials, Sir
Charles Trevelyan and Sir John McNeil. Both had had a major
influence on the policies of the Central Board and even when its
operations ceased in 1850 maintained a strong interest in Highland
affairs. It was McNeil’s Report to the Board of Supervision in
Scotland, published in 1851, which finally and authoritatively
discredited charitable relief as a solution to the Highland problem
and presented a powerful case for large-scale emigration of the
‘surplus’ population as the only possible way forward. The Report led
to the passage of the Emigration Advances Act of 1851, which
provided loans at low interest to those proprietors willing to
‘encourage’ emigration from their estates. This legislation can be
seen as a catalytic factor triggering a major increase in clearance
and ‘compulsory’ emigration. Both McNeil and Trevelyan became
deeply involved in the foundation and then the management of the
Highland and Island Emigration Society, which supported an exodus
of nearly 5,000 people to Australia between 1851 and 1856.
Trevelyan was the chairman and the principal influence on the
Society, while McNeil was his trusted lieutenant.
By 1850, Trevelyan himself had become convinced that mass
emigration, including, if warranted, the use of coercion, was the only
corrective for the deep-seated social ills of the Highlands. The
failures of charity and relief had already inflicted moral damage on
the population: ‘The only immediate remedy for the present state of
things is Emigration, and the people will never emigrate while they
are supported at home at other people’s expense. This mistaken
humanity has converted the people … from the clergy downwards
into a Mendicant Community.’15 He proposed instead a grandiose
programme to ‘emigrate’ 30,000–40,000 of the people of the western
Highlands and Islands. ‘A national effort’ would be necessary in
order to rid the land of ‘the surviving Irish and Scotch Celts’. The
exodus might then allow for the settlement of racially superior
peoples of Teutonic stock in the districts from which the Gaels had
been removed. Trevelyan welcomed ‘the prospects of flights of
Germans settling here in increasing number – an orderly, moral,
industrious and frugal people, less foreign to us than the Irish or
Scotch Celt, a congenial element which will readily assimilate with
our body politic’.16 The Scotsman was in full agreement with the
diagnosis that expulsion was now the only recourse: ‘Collective
emigration is, therefore, the removal of a diseased and damaged
part of our population. It is a relief to the rest of the population to be
rid of this part.’17

3
Over the two decades from 1841 to 1861 many west Highland
parishes experienced an unprecedented fall in population, primarily
caused by large-scale emigration. Uig in Lewis lost almost a half of
its total population, the island of Jura nearly a third, several parishes
in Skye a quarter or more, and Barra a third. In the whole of the
region covering the west coast north of Ardnamurchan and the Inner
and Outer Hebrides, the total population decline averaged around 30
per cent. It was by far the greatest volume of emigration in such a
short period, not only in the nineteenth-century Highlands, but in the
modern history of Scottish Gaeldom. Over 10,000 emigrants were
‘assisted’ to move to Canada, mainly from four great landed estates,
those of the Dukes of Argyll and Sutherland, John Gordon of Cluny
and Sir James Matheson. A further 5,000 left for Australia under the
auspices of the Highland and Island Emigration Society. But these
are the emigrants who can be accounted for because they were
supported by landlords or charities and so feature in contemporary
documentation. The trails of the many who moved overseas by other
means have left little trace in the historical record and remain
anonymous within the overall statistical evidence. We do know,
however, that the exodus of this period was principally from the
Hebrides, and especially from the islands which had suffered most
during the potato famine, particularly Lewis, North Uist, South Uist,
Barra, Tiree, Mull and Skye.
But the famine clearances were not exclusive to those locations.
Research has confirmed they took place in twenty-two Highland
parishes with a population in all of nearly 77,000. Some of them
were on the western mainland and the Inner Hebrides. For example,
between 1847 and 1851 the Lowland lawyer F. W. Clark, the new
proprietor of the island of Ulva, off Mull, cut the population back from
500 to 150 souls through a systematic process of eviction. At
Knoydart, in western mainland Inverness-shire, a series of
particularly brutal removals reduced the numbers on the estate from
600 to little more than seventy over a five-year period.
Coercion was employed widely and systematically. The officials of
the estates reckoned that it was the poorest who were most reluctant
to move, even though they were in the most desperate
circumstances of all. The mechanism employed to ensure that they
went came to be described as ‘compulsory emigration’. Families
were offered the bleak choice between outright eviction or removal
together with assistance to take ship across the Atlantic with costs of
passage covered by proprietors. As the Chamberlain for the
Matheson estate, in Lewis, put it in April 1851: ‘none could be called
to emigrate and they need not go unless they please but all who
were two years and upwards in arrears would be deprived of their
land at Whitsunday … the proprietor can do with his land as he
pleases’.18 Thirty years later a Church of Scotland minister from
Lewis recalled:
Some people say it was voluntary. But there was a great deal of
forcing and these people were sent very much against their will. That
is very well known and people present know that perfectly well. Of
course, they were not taken in hand by the police and all that, but
they were in arrears and had to go, and remonstrated against
going.19
The Chamberlain, John Munro Mackenzie, and his sub-factors had
carried out a thorough examination of the condition and prospects for
each tenant in all the Lewis crofting townships. The exercise
identified around 2,500 men, women and children designated for
emigration. However, of the first 1,512 selected, only forty-five were
willing to take up the estate’s offer of support for the voyage to
Canada. But by 1855 Mackenzie had virtually reached his target of
2,500 men women and children through a combination of threats of
eviction, confiscation of cattle stocks from those in rent arrears and
the suspension of famine relief.
So it was that a huge increase in clearance throughout the region
became linked with a dramatic expansion of emigration. In early
1848, William Skene, Secretary of the Edinburgh Section of the
Central Board, had predicted that the termination of relief operation
proposed for 1850 would immediately cause ‘a very great and very
extensive “Highland Clearing” ’.20 He was soon to be proven correct.
Of the Summonses or Writs of Removal granted at Tobermory Sheriff
Court on Mull, a mere handful were awarded to proprietors in 1846
and 1847. But over 81 per cent of those issued between 1846 and
1852 were granted between 1848 and 1852. This was the typical
pattern elsewhere. The processes of coercion reached
unprecedented levels as the intensity and scale of clearance
became evident. Between 1848 and 1851, Sir James Matheson in
Lewis obtained no fewer than 1,367 summonses of removal against
his tenants. In some districts in Skye it was said that eviction had
become so widespread that men feared to leave their families to go
south to work for the season. The highly experienced government
official, lugubriously named Sir Edward Pine Coffin, who had
experience of famine relief in Mexico and Ireland as well as Highland
Scotland, was so alarmed that he expressed himself in unusually
colourful prose. Coffin condemned the landed classes for seeking to
bring about ‘the extermination of the population’ and asserted that
eviction was now so rampant it would lead to ‘the unsettling of the
foundations of the social system’ and so ‘the enforced depopulation
of the Highlands’.21
According to contemporary reports and evidence later given to the
Napier Commission in the 1880s, some of the most brutal
‘compulsory emigrations’ took place on the island estates of John
Gordon of Cluny in Barra, Benbecula and South Uist. Gordon, of
Cluny Castle in Aberdeenshire, reputed to be the wealthiest
commoner in Scotland at the time, had bought the properties from
the insolvent hereditary owners, the MacNeills of Barra. He was a
former military officer, but his wealth came from the rich farming
lands of the north-east and six slave plantations in the Caribbean
which he had inherited from his father and an uncle. Between 1848
and 1851 the Gordon estates shipped off almost 3,000 destitute
tenant and cottar families across the Atlantic to the port of Quebec. It
was alleged that those who resisted were forced on to the emigrant
vessels. Their very poor and weak condition on arrival was
condemned and reported back to London in angry prose by
immigration officials.
Three key sources provide insights into how the managers of
Highland estates went about the business of removal and
compulsory emigration. The first is the report by Thomas Goldie
Dickson, a trustee of the Ardnamurchan Estate of Sir James Riddell,
written in 1852; secondly, the diary of John Munro Mackenzie, for
1851; and, thirdly, the correspondence of John Campbell of
Ardmore, Chamberlain of the Duke of Argyll’s lands in Tiree and the
Ross of Mull.22
 A striking feature in all three cases was the careful investigations
carried out of the lives and personal circumstances of the people
before any action was taken. The economic conditions of each
tenant and his capacity to pay rent were of paramount concern but
they were by no means the only evidence to be scrutinized before
decisions on which families to evict were made. Character, age and
health were among the other key matters which were given
considerable weight. Each household was visited and detailed
enumerations were collected. On the basis of these facts, the futures
of whole families and communities were decided. The poorest were
always the main targets. The Duke of Argyll put the issue in plain
terms in a note to his Chamberlain in spring, 1851: ‘I wish to send
out those whom we would be obliged to feed if they stayed at home
– to get rid of that class is the object’23 (underlined in source). He
had earlier issued John Campbell with instructions to eradicate and
‘emigrate’ crofters paying below £10 rental as well as all cottar
families on the Mull lands. On Lewis a special feature of the
clearance programme was the emptying of those townships formerly
involved in the now-redundant kelp manufacture and, at the same
time, the building up of other communities on the island which were
committed to the more profitable fishing economy.
But decisions were not simply based on disinterested economic
calculation. Ideologies, values and attitudes were also part of the
equation. Some Lowland trustees, lawyers and accountants, in
particular, came north with a set of social and moral prejudices about
the racial inferiority of the Gael which undoubtedly influenced their
thinking on who should go and who might be allowed to stay. One of
the leading accountants of the day, George Auldjo Jamieson, in an
address to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, had noted the contrast
between the Saxon race of the Lowlands, which he lauded as the
land of independence and progress, as opposed to the Gaelic
Highlands, inhabited by a Celtic race corrupted by dependence on
charity and backwardness. It was also significant that in 1851 Sir
James Matheson advised the Canadian immigration authorities in
Quebec in advance of the arrival of the first shiploads of people from
his estate that they should be dispersed rather than kept together in
the same communities. He contended that would be ‘the best means
of eradicating those habits of indolence and inertness to which their
impoverished condition must in some measure be attributed’.24
These views coloured the decision-making processes to a
considerable extent. Indeed, some estate managers come across in
the sources as rigorous guardians of Victorian morality rather than
as impartial administrators. While the ‘respectable poor’ might be
protected and saved from removal, others were less fortunate. In
April 1848, for instance, John Campbell issued ‘a goodly number’ of
‘removing summonses’. Some were for rent arrears but others were
for such offences as ‘selling whisky’, ‘unruly conduct’, ‘extreme
laziness and bad conduct’. ‘Bad characters’ were also likely to suffer
eviction.25 Thomas Goldie Dickson also made life-changing
decisions for the people of the Ardnamurchan estate on grounds
which were far removed from economic criteria alone.26 Dugald
McDonald, the blacksmith at Sunart, had few rent arrears but ‘was of
intemperate habits’ and so ‘must be removed and another smith
procured’. Another unfortunate was James McMaster, who not only
had substantial rent arrears but ‘was living with a Woman not his
wife’. Even more extraordinarily, Duncan Henderson of Kilmory was
described as ‘a clever man, a little too much so’. The decision was
therefore that he ‘must be sequestrated for safety’. Hugh McPherson
‘does nothing all winter … An ill-dressed and evidently lazy fellow.’ In
this and other estates, managers had total power over the lives of
crofters, who held land on annual tenure, and cottars, who had no
legal rights to land at all. Several used this authority to impose the
virtues of self-help, the work ethic and ‘respectability’ on a population
deemed to be inferior in all these respects. Also striking was the
callousness of the decisions; the very old, the sick and even the
dying were not exempt from the programme of removals.
For a people already brought low by years of failing crops this
must have seemed like a reign of terror and, not surprisingly, long
after these events their infamy lived on among the emigrant
communities overseas. The following satirical poem, suffused with
anger, was penned by Eugene Ross (or Rose), a native of Ardtun in
the Ross of Mull, to mark the death of the aforesaid John Campbell
of Ardmore, known widely as the ‘Factor Mhòir’, the Big Factor,
because of his height. The ‘Big Angus’ referred to in the text was
Angus McVicar, Campbell’s sub-factor. Both were natives of the
island of Islay.
‘Cumha a’ Bhailldh Mhoir’
Uisdean Ros
Tha sgeul an duthaic, s’ tha sin sunndach ga
Gu bheil am Baillidh ‘na shineadh, ’s gun trid air ach leine
‘S e gun chomas na bruidhneadh, gun sgriobhadh, gun leughadh
‘S gu bheil cul-taice nan Ileach ‘na shineadh ‘s chan eirich
‘S nuair theid iaddon bhata ni sinn gair a bhios eibhinn
‘S nuair chruinnicheas sinn comhla bidh sin nag ol air a cheile
Uisge-beatha math Gaidhealach, fion laidir is seudar;
‘Scha bhi sinn tuileadh fo churam on a sgiursadh ‘a bheist ud
Gum bi a’ Factor air thoiseach san t-sloc sa bheil Satan,
‘S Aonghas Mor as a dhearahaidh, ‘s lasair theine ri mhasan,
Leis na rinn thu de ainneart air mnathan ‘s paisdean,
‘S an sluagh bha san duthaic rinn sgiursadh far saile
S’ nuair a chulaig iad an Canada gun do chaidl a’ bheist ud,
Chaidh an tein-eibhinn fhadadh is chaidh bratach ri gugan:
‘S ann an sin a bha lan aighear, s’ iad a’ tachairt ri cheile,
S’ chaidh iad a bha lan aighear, s’ thug iad cliu gun do dh’eug thu.
‘Lament for Factor Mòr’
Eugene Ross
There is news in the land that we rejoice to hear –
that the Factor is laid out without a stitch on him but a shroud,
without the ability to speak and unable to read or write;
the champion of the Islay folk is laid low, and will never rise again.
When they go to the boat we will laugh with glee,
and when we gather together, we will drink toasts to one another
with a good Highland whisky, with strong wine and cider,
and we will not be worried any longer, since that beast has been
vanquished.
The Factor will have the pre-eminence in Satan’s pit,
 and Big Angus will be right behind him, with a flame of fire up his
buttocks,
because of all the oppression that you inflicted on women and
children,
and the people of the country that you drove mercilessly overseas.
When they heard in Canada that that beast had expired,
bonfires were lit and banners were attached to branches;
people were cock-a-hoop with joy, as they met one another,
and they all got down on their knees and praised God that you had
died.27

3
The micro-history of John Campbell’s evictions on the Ross of Mull
and the island of Tiree provide some revealing insights on how they
were conducted and the response of the people to them. Even
before the potatoes failed in 1846, the 8th Duke of Argyll and his
managers had determined by 1840 to carry out large-scale removals
on the Ross and Tiree of crofters and cottars and replace them with
medium-sized mixed farms and extensive sheep runs which would
be mainly rented by Islay kinsmen and associates of his factor, John
Campbell. It was argued that this strategy would finally provide some
economic stability to districts over-populated by impoverished and
destitute families. In the Ross the better land lay to the south and
this was where over 60 per cent of the people lived at the census of
1841. By that year the population of the Ross had risen to 2,500,
more than half of whom were cottars paying no rental or only
minimal amounts. The removals were to be targeted at them in
particular and the settlements of the richer land of the southern Ross
in general. There were ten townships in that area with 167
households and a total population of 928 in 1841. By 1861 three had
been left virtually untouched and the remaining seven cleared in
whole or in part. The number of households fell to ninety-seven and
the population of South Ross to 391, less than half that of 1841.
The first to be cleared was Shiaba, ‘nan sia ba’ (‘of the six cows’),
in the far south-east corner of the Ross. There had been a township
there since early medieval times. Shiaba had some of the best land
in the district and so paid an above-average rental. As well as
houses, byres and stackyards, this substantial settlement boasted
kailyards, stone enclosures, a schoolhouse, shop, fishermen’s huts
and two water mills. The remains of a small medieval chapel were
within walking distance. None of the twelve main tenants were in
arrears and for many years had paid their rents on time. Notices of
eviction were served on them in 1845, before the onset of the potato
disease, and again a second time in 1847 from the Factor Mor
demanding their immediate removal. The news sent tremors of alarm
throughout the Ross as Shiaba was the most prosperous township in
the district, with much arable land for the cultivation of oats as well
as potatoes. It even paid some of the in-kind rental in coal. More
impoverished settlements now looked to their own fate in the future
with dread.
On 1 June 1847 an appeal signed by seven of the tenants was
sent to the Duke of Argyll together with a letter from Shiaba’s oldest
inhabitant, aged nearly 100, Neil MacDonald, who signed himself
‘ex-soldier’:
… having paid rent to your grace’s ancestors for upwards of sixty
years I beg leave to send prefixed a petition by myself and the other
tenants in Shiaba. Trusting that your Grace will give us a favourable
reply to it’s [sic] prayers as it would be a great hardship and quite
unprecedented to remove a man of my age, who, as natural to
suppose, is drawing close to the house appointed for all living.
Trusting that your Grace will order an answer soon.28
The petition itself read:
Unto His Grace The Duke of Argyll
The Petition of the undersigned tenants in Shiaba, Ross of Mull
Humbly showeth
That the petitioners and their forefathers had been tenants in
Shiaba about sixty years and in other estates in the Ross since time
immemorial.
That the petitioners were lately warned to flit [leave] and remove
from their respective possessions, although they were not in arrears
of rent, but, on the contrary, have paid the same regularly, though
 they had large families to support – numbering, including, cottars,
upwards of one hundred persons neither of whom received any aid
or were a burden on the parish.
That the whole farm has lately been let in one lot to one individual
who is not native of the Ross and neither he, nor any of his
ancestors, ever possessed any lands under your Grace’s noble
ancestors.
That a few days ago the incoming tenant came with shepherds
and men to value the sheep belonging to the petitioners without
giving them previous intimation, but as he had not the money and
could not find a cautioner for the payment of the price, and is under
good character – all the surrounding tenants and others being afraid
of him – they would not deliver the stock.
May it, therefore, please your Grace to take our petitioners’ case
into consideration and give instructions whether they are to be
removed under the circumstances above stated – and if so they trust
that they will be accommodated with land on other parts of the
estate. And your Grace’s petitioners beg to pray accordingly.
Writer – Neil MacDonald ex-soldier
Signatories: Alexander MacGillvary, Archie MacGillvary, Donald
McKinnon, John Campbell, John McKinnon, Allan McDougall,
Duncan McCormick29
A tone of deference and even submissiveness runs through the
petition but also articulated is the age-old claim of the people to the
land because of past service to the ducal family and long residence
on the township and the estate. There is no evidence that the Duke
ever replied. The evictions went ahead. Some families who had
decided to go to Canada were taken off by ship from the Traig Bhan,
the beach below Shiaba. Others were moved into townships on the
poorer north of the Ross and an unknown number left for Glasgow. A
cattle dealer from Factor Mor’s home island of Islay became sole
tenant of the virtually deserted lands of Shiaba.
On the neighbouring island of Tiree, the social crisis triggered by
the failure of the potatoes was if anything more acute than in the
Ross of Mull. Population had been rising at an accelerating rate
there: c.1750, 1,509; 1801, 2,776; 1841, 4,900. These were
increases of 84 per cent from 1750 to 1801 and a further 79 per cent
between 1801 and 1841. They were unsustainable even if the
famine had not taken place, especially with the collapse or
stagnation of the by-employments of kelp burning and fishing. The
root cause of the teeming numbers had been the reckless
subdivision of land into crofts which were then fragmented again by
the expansion of the cottar class, who by 1841 comprised over a
third of all the inhabitants on the island. The packing in of small
tenants to provide labour for kelping was a principal factor. Another
had been the long-term effect of soldier recruitment during the
Napoleonic Wars: ‘the minute subdivision of the land was much
increased by the family of Argyll having raised three or four
regiments for government during the last war and residences were
afforded to those soldiers on their return’.30 By the 1840s it was said
that the people of Tiree had become ‘a vast semi-pauper
population’.31 The 8th Duke of Argyll was candid enough to blame
the policies or lack of them by his predecessors since the late
eighteenth century for the social evils which threatened a human
calamity after 1846:
I thought it my duty to remember that the improvidence of their
fathers [of the inhabitants] had been at least seconded, left
unchecked by any active measures, or by the enforcement of any
rules of my own predecessors who had been in possession of the
estate.
I regarded my self, therefore, as representing those who had some
share in the responsibility, although that responsibility was one of
omission and not of commission.32
When John Campbell, the Duke’s chamberlain, arrived in Tiree in
January 1847 the impact of the potato blight on the people was
instantly apparent. The inhabitants were in ‘a state of absolute
starvation’, a judgement later confirmed by relief officials who
considered the island to be one of the most distressed in the
Hebrides.33 In that year alone the estate had to spend £5,403 on
famine relief and employment projects to keep the people alive.
Perhaps predictably, as circumstances improved, the Duke of Argyll
embarked on a large-scale scheme of emigration, especially of the
poorest class. At the considerable additional cost of £3.80 per
person, the estate supported the emigration of 1,354 men, women
and children, principally to Canada, between 1847 and 1851. Many
years later, the Duke considered the investment worthwhile. The ‘old
pauperized class’ had been eradicated: ‘the detritus of the old
subdivided cottars and subtenants … also in great measure the
remains of the old kelp burning population’.34 Strict controls over any
future subdivision were imposed and, as in the Ross of Mull, crofts
were consolidated into larger farms. Controversy remains on the
extent of coercion employed to manage the exodus. Certainly many
wanted to leave and petitioned the estate for help to do so. But not
everyone did. There is abundant evidence in John Campbell’s
correspondence of numerous eviction notices being delivered,
confiscation of cattle stocks from those in arrears and the cutting
back on famine relief to force people out.
Landlords, government officials and managers of estates had, of
course, a quite different perspective from that of the small tenants
and cottars who were ‘emigrated’ to Canada and Australia. For the
élites emigration by coercion was an unfortunate but necessary evil.
From their perspective, by removing the most distressed and
vulnerable people from the Western Isles, a human catastrophe had
been avoided. The potato crisis was not over by the early 1850s, but
relief from the Lowlands had come to an end and opposition to
further charitable support had hardened. Most proprietors were also
hostile to the expenditure of large sums on relief as the famine
entered its fourth year and the future continued to look bleak. For
them, the enforcement of mass emigration was much more
acceptable than risking a major crisis of mortality on their estates
and exposing themselves to bankruptcy and forced sale of their
lands.
In large part it was the clearances of the later famine period that
marked out the experience of the western Highlands and Islands as
different from the history of dispossession in the rest of Scotland.
These removals were unleashed against communities still suffering
from the ravages of a major destitution crisis. They affected many on
the Hebridean islands, were concentrated in both time and space
and for the most part designed to drive out the poorest families and
the ‘redundant population’. Several were enforced by draconian
means with little concern for humanity or the welfare of the people.
Racialist assumptions undeniably helped to fashion those
responsible for the strategy of dispossession.
These evictions by their extreme and often callous nature were
therefore unique in the history of the many clearances that had taken
place over generations in the Scottish countryside since the
seventeenth century. They left a deep mark and their memory
endured, while most of those that had gone before were lost to
history.
 15

Turning of the Tide

1
Mass clearance in the Highlands had ended by the later 1850s,
though some individual evictions continued. Also, in early 1856, after
a full decade of misery, conditions began to improve for the majority
of the population. The potato crop once again regained its former
abundance, though it never regained its former dominance in the
Highland diet. Instead, there was a very marked increase in the
consumption of imported meal. So significant was this that it became
common practice to feed the indigenous grain crop and part of the
potato crop to the cattle to sustain them during the winter months
while reserving imported meal for human consumption. An equally
important expansion occurred in the purchase of tea, sugar, jam and
tobacco. Until the 1850s these articles had mainly been rare and
expensive luxuries, but by the 1890s tea drinking had become
universal in the crofting districts and a familiar part of the domestic
way of life.
These alterations in diet were the most obvious manifestations of
more fundamental changes in the nature of crofting society in the
aftermath of the famine. To some extent, the declining significance of
the potato may have reflected the relaxation of population pressure
in some districts as emigration persisted and the ranks of the cottar
class were thinned in most localities outside the Long Island. But the
new dietary patterns were also to be found in the Outer Hebrides,
where the old problems of population congestion and land hunger
remained. A greater variety in foodstuffs, in fact, was simply one part
of a wider and deeper social transition which affected all areas of life.
In the 1870s and 1880s the majority of the population of the western
Highlands became less dependent on the produce of the land for
survival and even more reliant on the two sources of income and
employment, fishing and temporary migration, which had proved
most resilient during the famine itself. They entered more fully into
the cash economy, selling their labour for cash wages and buying
more of the necessities of life with their earnings rather than
producing them themselves.
Manufactured clothes and shoes, ‘shop produce’ as they were
known in the region, steadily replaced the home-made varieties in
the two generations after the famine. A new mechanism of credit
facilitated these developments. Shopkeepers, merchants and fish
curers supplied credit on which meal and clothes were bought until
seasonal earnings from fishing and temporary migration became
available. The running accounts were then partly paid off on the
basis of these returns, but more often than not debts persisted from
year to year. In Strath in Skye, ‘Every man is in a hurry to get the
spring work past and be off to his work on sea and land all through
the kingdom and when they return, if their earnings have succeeded
well, they pay the shop, and the shopman supplies them on credit,
as they require it.’1 In Lewis, the fishing crews purchased on credit in
the curers’ shops the meal, clothing and other necessities required
for their families. Settlement took place at the end of the season;
fishermen were credited with the price of fish delivered by them to
the curers and were debited with the price of their purchases.
The new structure depended ultimately on five factors: the
recovery of the prices for Highland black cattle; a steep fall in world
grain prices in the 1870s and 1880s; a revolutionary expansion in
steam navigation in the western Highlands; the growth of the
indigenous fishing industry; and a further increase in the scale of
temporary migration and casual employment outside the Highlands.
These specific influences need also to be viewed against the longer
perspective of the decisive change in the economic circumstances of
the west Highland population which took place from the later 1850s
and continued into the 1860s and 1870s. The period from the end of
the Napoleonic Wars to the potato famine had been one of
contracting income and falling employment. Then the three decades
after the crisis saw a significant recovery in both earnings and jobs
which was not wholly offset by either rising costs or new
demographic pressures. Even given the important qualifications
which will be discussed below when living standards are considered
in more detail, there had been a relative improvement in
circumstances.
Price trends, between the 1850s and the 1870s, were to the
advantage of the people in the crofting region. This was a dramatic
reversal of the pattern before 1846. Cattle prices continued the
recovery which had begun in 1852. Crofters’ two-year-old heifers in
Lewis, selling at 30s.–£2 in 1854 fetched £4–£5 by 1883. Those
tenants who possessed small stocks of sheep gained from the
upward swing in prices which lasted until the late 1860s. The fact
that they were much better fed on grain and potatoes during the
winter months added to the marketability of cattle. The principal aim
was now one of maximizing the potential of stock not simply in the
traditional manner to pay rent but as a source of the funds employed
to purchase meal and other commodities.
A further expansion in sea transport facilitated both cattle and
sheep exports and grain imports. In the early 1850s a single small
steamer had plied the route between the Clyde and Portree in Skye
once every fortnight. Three decades later two larger vessels sailed to
Skye and Lewis every week and a further three ships visited Barra
and North and South Uist. These developments in communications
were both cause and effect of the changing way of life in the region
and the basis of the closer involvement of the people in the money
economy. Above all, they allowed the population of more areas to
take full advantage of the sustained fall in world grain prices which
took place after the opening up of the interior areas of North America
by railroad and the new steamship connections established with the
purchasing countries in Europe. In the early 1840s meal imported
from the Clyde sold at an average of £2.2s. per boll in the Outer
Hebrides; by the 1880s average prices were close to 16s. per boll. It
was the enormous decline in costs which encouraged the practice of
feeding cattle on grain produced at home and allowed earnings from
cattle sales and other activities to be devoted to the purchase of
cheap meal from outside.
Pivotal to the whole system of increased trade, credit and money
transactions was a vast expansion in seasonal employment
opportunities. The indigenous white and herring fisheries of the
Outer Hebrides achieved a new level of activity and prosperity.
Fishing stations were set up at Castlebay, Lochboisdale and
Lochmaddy. The number of fish-curing companies increased from
seven in 1853 to fifty in 1880. In the early 1850s about 300 small
boats were active; three decades later around 600. The organization
and capitalization of the industry were dominated by men from the
east coast, but Hebrideans gained from the new opportunities for
seasonal employment. The developing steamer services and the
injection of capital from the east had given the winter white fishery in
particular a fresh and vigorous stimulus. Casual jobs were also
available on the sporting estates as stalkers and ghillies and in the
labour squads needed to build the infrastructure of roads and lodges
of the new recreation economy. There were seasonal opportunities,
too, in sheep smearing, which involved working a mixture of butter,
tar and grease into the fleeces to afford protection against vermin:
‘Since one man could only smear about twenty sheep a day and
since a quarter of a million were annually smeared in Inverness-shire
alone, labour was obviously much in demand … During the 1860s
and 1870s the wages paid for casual labour of this type rose steadily
and more or less doubled between 1850 and 1880.’2
Finally, the expansion in temporary migration which had begun
during the famine was sustained after it. Virtually all sectors –
agricultural work in the Lowlands, domestic service in the cities, the
merchant marine, general labouring (such as in the gasworks of the
larger towns) – produced more opportunities for Highland temporary
migrants than before. Because of this, ‘seasonal’ migration more
often became ‘temporary’ movement with absences extending not
simply for a few weeks or months but for the greater part of a year or
even longer. The seasonality of different work peaks made it
possible to dovetail different tasks outside the Highlands and at the
same time alternate labour in the crofting region with work
opportunities elsewhere.
The classical example of the latter cycle was the interrelationship
between the winter white fishery in the Minch, the spring herring
fishery in the same waters and the east-coast herring fishery during
the summer months. This last was the most dynamic sector and the
source of a great stream of income which percolated through the
entire Inner and Outer Hebrides in the 1860s and 1870s. From 1835
to 1854 the annual average cure in Aberdeenshire and Banffshire
increased moderately from 428,343 to 495,879 barrels. In the 1860s
and 1870s, however, the industry boomed. The average cure rose
from 602,375 barrels between 1865 and 1874 to 902,665 in the
period 1875–84. During the same phase the number of herring boats
on the east coast grew by 51 per cent while the total of fishermen
and boys rose by 60 per cent from 1854 to 1884. An increased field
of employment opened up in consequence for the population of the
western Highlands and Islands. It was estimated that 30,000 men
and women came in a great annual migration to the fishing ports up
and down the east coast from the Gaelic-speaking areas of the far
west. On the surface, therefore, the evidence for improvement in
living standards seemed compelling.
The emigration of some of the poorest classes of Highland society
did allow a more rapid recovery from the trauma of the crisis of the
1840s than would otherwise have been the case. Cottars and
squatters often placed a burden on the over-stretched resources of
crofters and these pressures doubtless diminished when the
numbers of these semi-landless people went into decline during the
famine and its immediate aftermath. The period from 1856 to the
later 1870s did appear to be one of considerable material progress in
the western Highlands. Crofting rents on several estates were paid
more regularly than before and the problem of accumulating arrears
was not as serious. Consumer goods were imported on a much
larger scale. The gathering of shellfish for consumption during the
summer months, a practice which had long been one of the principal
manifestations of the chronic poverty of the region, seems to have
declined, though it retained its importance as a source of cash
income into the second half of the twentieth century. Numerous
contemporary commentators who could recall the deprivation of
earlier times were also sure that a considerable amelioration had
taken place in the decades which followed the famine.
Nevertheless, the majority of the people continued to endure an
existence of poverty and insecurity after 1860. Life was still
precarious and could easily degenerate into destitution if any of the
fragile supports of the population temporarily crumbled. Between
1856 and 1890 there was a series of bad seasons which recalled
some of the worst years of the potato blight. In 1864 ‘the cry of
destitution in Skye has been as loud as ever and yet from no part of
the Highlands has there been a more extensive emigration’.3
Conditions on Mull were at that time also briefly reminiscent of the
tragic days of the 1840s. On the Duke of Argyll’s estate rent arrears
escalated, especially among the small tenants. Food, seed and
labour had to be provided for the people who had suffered great
hardship since 1862. Four years later distress was again
experienced by the population of an island which had sustained a
decline in the numbers of its inhabitants from 10,054 to 7,240
between 1841 and 1861. In the Bunessan area ‘many of the poor are
actually starving’.4 Once again meal was made available and public
works started. It was successive bad seasons in 1881–2, affecting
the whole of the western Highlands, which not only caused much
suffering but also provided the initial economic impetus for the great
crofters’ revolt of that decade. Over 24,000 people received relief in
these years. Conditions deteriorated once more in 1888. In the Outer
Hebrides ‘actual starvation’ was predicted and the inhabitants once
more were supported by charitable organizations from the Lowland
cities. The chamberlain of the Lewis estate himself estimated that
there had been at least nine seasons between 1853 and 1883 when
the proprietor had had to advance varying amounts of seed and
meal to the crofters.
 At best, then, ‘recovery’ was modest and continued to be
punctuated by years of distress. Typhus remained common in some
localities because of poor living conditions and poor sanitation.
Cattle continued to share living accommodation with human beings.
Domestic squalor persisted and disconcerted observers from outside
the Highlands accustomed to higher standards. Mass clearances
were a thing of the past, but insecurity of tenure remained a fact of
life: ‘Others, not a few, continue quietly evicting by legal process and
clearing by so-called voluntary emigration. The lawyer’s pen
supersedes the soldier’s steel.’5 Moreover, the heavy impact of
landlord authority was felt in other ways.
It is known that successful action to control subdivision was
already taking place on some properties, especially along the
western mainland, before the famine. This probably helps to explain
why several parishes in that region had already reached their peak
populations by the census of 1841. However, in most areas of the
Outer Hebrides after the famine, regulations against subdivision of
crofts were still lax. Nevertheless, for the remainder of the crofting
region, there is abundant evidence not only that opposition to
subdivision was more widespread after the 1850s but that the
mechanisms of control had become more efficient. The result was
that by the 1880s, along the west coast north of Ardnamurchan, in
Mull and in other islands of the Inner Hebrides, the cottar class was
disappearing rapidly or had vanished entirely from the social
structure. The fear of the burdens they might inflict on the poor rates,
bitter memories of the famine, and the assumption that the
proliferation of poor cottar families had been a principal and powerful
cause of earlier grievous destitution combined to harden opposition
to them. These influences ensured subletting was often crushed
whatever the human costs. It was yet another sign of the radical
change in landlord policy which had taken place since the early
nineteenth century. The boom in labour-intensive activities
encouraged fragmentation of holdings to c.1820; their collapse or
stagnation thereafter caused a trend back towards consolidation of
holdings into sheep farms which grew stronger during and after the
great subsistence crisis.
Control of subdivision meant that no additional or separate
households could any longer be created within a single tenancy.
Only one member of a tenant or cottar family was permitted to set up
home after marriage on the lot. Even that could only be done by
sharing the father’s house until he died. In practice, however,
regulation was even tighter than this and often designed to reduce
rather than simply regulate the numbers of households. As one
observer put it: ‘landlords … weed out families by twos or threes …
an absolute veto was placed upon marriage … when a young man is
guilty of that he may look for a summons of removal’.6
These were not the exaggerated claims of an over-enthusiastic
pamphleteer. Duncan Darroch, proprietor of the Torridon estate in
Wester Ross, later admitted to the Napier Commission that the
regulations which prevailed on his property meant that the young
emigrated ‘and the elderly members generally go on the poor’s roll
and, as they die out, the cottages are taken down’.7 In Arisaig it was
alleged that the offspring of families who reached the age of twenty-
one had to go and live elsewhere unless allowed to remain ‘with the
written sanction of the proprietor’.8 There had in the past been a
good deal of subdivision of crofts on some parts of the Lochaber
estate of Cameron of Lochiel. By the later 1840s, however, these
practices were outlawed:
The present proprietor is enlarging rather than subdividing and his
regulations against the increase of population are of the most
stringent and Malthusian character. Two families are strictly
prohibited from living upon one croft. If one of a family marries, he
must leave the croft; and a case has even been brought under my
notice, in which the only son of a widow, who is in joint possession of
a croft with his mother, has been told that if he marries he will be
compelled to leave the estate. Severe penalties are also threatened
against the keeping of lodgers. The unlucky crofter who takes a
friend under his roof, without first obtaining the consent of Lochiel,
must pay for the first offence a fine of £1; and, for the second, shall
be removed from the estate.
There is ample evidence in the Cameron of Lochiel papers that
summonses of removal were issued to any crofters who infringed
these regulations.9
Control of subdivision in Lochcarron meant that ‘families as they
grow up are sent out to shift for themselves’. In Ardnamurchan and
Mull landlords not only restricted subletting but also pulled down
houses on the death of the occupants in order to cause ‘a thinning of
numbers’.10 On the Duke of Argyll’s estate in Mull the regulations
against subdivision were also rigorously enforced, and the older
tradition of subletting to kinfolk had disappeared entirely.11 Instead,
the children of tenants had no alternative but to go. At Glenshiel
regulations against subletting were given as the main reason for a
sharp decline in marriages. Attempts to limit subdivision on the
Macdonald estates in Skye had begun before the famine but were
only partially effective. From the 1850s, however, it became the
‘inevitable rule … that subdivision of lands by crofters is rigorously
prohibited’.12 Eldest sons were informed that they alone had the right
to succeed to the croft held by the father on the basis of
primogeniture. It therefore was in their interest to prevent the holding
from being divided among other members of the family. Elsewhere
on the island controls were enforced with equal resolution. One
tacksman on the Macleod estates ensured that at marriage the
couple would have to move. It was alleged that ‘If a son married in a
man’s family, the father dared not give him shelter even for a night.’13
This degree of intervention in family life and the attack on the old
traditions of inheritance ensured that crofting society remained far
from settled in tranquillity in these decades. The simmering tensions
finally came to the surface on the Isle of Skye in 1882. The
disturbances there in that year came to be known as ‘the Battle of
the Braes’. It had several features associated with the sporadic and
familiar outbreaks of lawlessness in the past. The protest began in
the townships of Gedintailor, Balmeanach and Peinchorran, which
constituted the district known as Braes on Lord MacDonald’s estate
on the east coast of Skye, some eight miles south of the island’s
capital of Portree. The crofters petitioned the landlord to have
traditional grazing rights on Ben Lee returned to them. The factor
rejected the request, but the people replied by stating they would no
longer pay rent to Lord MacDonald until their rights were restored.
The landlord then attempted to serve summonses of removal on a
number of tenants on the grounds that they were in rent arrears. On
7 April 1882, however, the sheriff officer serving the summonses was
accosted by a crowd of around 500 people, and the notices were
taken from him and burned. Ten days later, the law returned in force,
strongly supported this time by a force of fifty Glasgow policemen.
They managed to arrest those who had assaulted the sheriff officer
but not before about a dozen constables received injuries at the
hands of a large crowd of men and women throwing stones and
wielding large sticks. The Battle of the Braes was followed by similar
actions of protest at Glendale in Skye at the end of 1882.
These disturbances had several features which recalled the
ineffectual protests against clearance in the decades before the
1860s: the use of rudimentary weapons; the central role of women;
deforcement of the officers of the law; intervention by the police; and
the localized nature of resistance. However, the Battle of the Braes
has come to be regarded as a historic event because it signalled a
decisive change of direction from past episodes of protest. For one
thing, it had been the people who first took the initiative to try to
regain grazing rights which they had lost over seventeen years
before. This disturbance was therefore proactive rather than
reactive. For another, the rent strike, which had been employed with
deadly effect on numerous Irish estates in earlier years, was a new
tactic which proprietors found difficult to combat without
contemplating mass eviction, a policy that was becoming politically
unacceptable by the 1880s. The Battle of the Braes and other
disturbances suggested that landlordism was now encountering a
different type of opposition, but it remained small in scale, confined
to only a few estates in Skye, and at this stage the authorities were
only dealing with a minor land dispute. This soon changed. Previous
episodes of resistance had petered out in failure and imprisonment
for the participants, but the Braes skirmish was the prelude to more
widespread acts of subordination which were sustained on a number
of Highland estates for several years afterwards and involved the
consolidation of rent strikes, occupation of sheep farms, destruction
of farm fences, collective assaults on sheriff officers, and the
mutilation and killing of livestock. The Scotsman reported in some
alarm in October 1884 that:
men are taking what does not belong to them, are setting all law at
defiance, and are instituting a terrorism which the poor people are
unable to resist … Rents are unpaid, not because the tenants cannot
pay them, but because in some cases they will not, and in some
cases they dare not.
The paper claimed that if the law was not enforced quickly ‘the
condition of the islands will soon be as bad as that of Ireland three
years ago’.14
The Scotsman was prone to exaggeration on the issue as a stout
supporter of the landlord interest. There was little ‘Irish’-style
agrarian terrorism in the Highlands at this time, and most
disturbances were confined to a few districts. The western mainland
was peaceful for the most part and even in the Hebrides, where
there was most overt discontent, disturbance was mainly
concentrated in Skye and, to a lesser extent, Lewis. Direct action did
occur in South Uist, Tiree and Harris but tended to be much more
intermittent than elsewhere. In part the notion that the entire region
was aflame and lawlessness everywhere rampant was the result of
the extraordinary success of the publicity given to the disturbances in
the Scottish and English press.
However, the incidents in Skye were deemed so serious that the
government sent an expeditionary force to the island, the first since
the time of the last Jacobite rising in the eighteenth century. The
decision unleashed an almost hysterical reaction from some of the
press. A violent armed confrontation between troops and people was
eagerly anticipated as the North British Daily Mail carried such
sensational headlines as, ‘Threatened General Rising of Crofters’
and ‘Dunvegan Men on the March to Uig’. The sixteen newspaper
correspondents who were sent from the south and two artists from
the Graphic and the Illustrated London News were disappointed,
however, when the expected violent conflict did not materialize.
Marine detachments did stay on in Skye until 1885 and on their
departure from Uig in June of that year they received a friendly
farewell reception from the local people. The troops stationed at
Staffin seem to have developed a particularly close association with
some of the inhabitants. According to one observer they had shown
a considerable interest in the young women of the district: ‘They
gave more of their time to the god of love than to the god of war’!15
In fact, the distinguishing feature of the events of the 1880s, or the
‘Crofters’ War’ as it came to be described, was not so much the
spread of violence, intimidation and lawlessness throughout the
Highlands as the fusion of an effective political campaign for crofters’
rights with a high-profile series of acts of resistance, of which the
refusal to pay rents and the ‘raiding’ of old lands were the most
significant. By the early 1880s a crofting lobby had grown up in the
southern cities consisting of land reformers, Gaelic revivalists,
second- and third-generation Highland migrants, and radical liberals.
From these groups and existing committees there was formed the
Highland Land Law Reform Association (HLLRA), Comunn
Gaidhealach Ath-Leasachadh an Fhearainn, with a strategy loosely
based on that of the Irish Land League. It sought fair rents, security
of tenure, compensation for improvements and, significantly,
redistribution of land. The Association took the motto ‘Is Treasa na
Tighearna’, ‘The People are Stronger Than the Lord’. The
development was crucial. Not only did the HLLRA link the crofters’
cause with external political interests, it also, through proliferating
branches and district committees, helped to end the localism which
had impeded collective action in the past.
The most remarkable example of this new attitude came with the
appointment of a Royal Commission into the condition of the crofters
and cottars in the Highlands and Islands under the chairmanship of
Lord Napier and Ettrick. The government had responded to the
threat of even more extensive civil unrest and growing public
sympathy for the Gaels. The Commission took evidence throughout
the crofting region from spring to the winter of 1883 and its report
was finally published in 1884. When it appeared it was much
criticized, not surprisingly by landlords, who saw ‘communism
looming in the future’ as controls on their powers of private
ownership had been recommended.16 It was also criticized by a
majority of the people because they thought it fell far short of their
aspirations. The recommendations ignored the problem of the
cottars and were confined to those who possessed holdings rented
at more than £6 and less than £30 per annum. Nevertheless, the
Napier Commission’s Report was a symbolic victory for the crofting
agitation as, for the first time, a public body had admitted the validity
of the land rights of the people, even though they were not
recognized in law. The Royal Commission also proposed that the
state should provide a degree of protection for the interests of the
crofters. The report was reluctant to offer perpetual security of tenure
but advocated that government should instead assist crofters to
purchase their holdings. It was a radical change from the kind of
assumptions which had governed external intervention in the
Highlands during the famine years of the 1840s and 1850s.
The subsequent legislation, enshrined in the Crofters Holdings
(Scotland) Act, 1886, differed in some key respects from the
Commission’s recommendations, but it too represented a decisive
break with the past and began a new era of landlord–crofter relations
in the Highlands. Security of tenure for crofters was guaranteed as
long as rent was paid; fair rents would be fixed by a land court;
compensation for improvements was allowed to a crofter who gave
up his croft or was removed from it; crofts could not be sold but
might be bequeathed to a relative and, with certain restrictions, the
compulsory enlargement of holdings could be considered by the land
court.
This legislation did not immediately find favour with the land
reformers, especially since it gave only very minor concessions to
crofters’ demands for more land. But its historic significance should
not be underestimated. The Crofters Act made clearances of the old
style impossible, breached the sacred rights of private property,
controlled landlord–crofter relations through a government body and
afforded the crofting population secure possession of their holdings.
The balance of power between landlords and small tenants had
been irrevocably altered after 1886, but in fact that was already
becoming apparent earlier. In December 1884, Cameron of Lochiel
noted that the current of political and public opinion was flowing fast
against the landed interest. The following month about fifty Highland
proprietors and their representatives met at Inverness to discuss the
crofting agitation and agreed to provide crofters with leases, consider
revision of rents and guarantee compensation for improvements in
an attempt to draw the teeth of discontent. It was a remarkable and
tardy attempt at developing a more benevolent form of landlordism
introduced only because of the weakening position of the landed
élites. The proposals were rejected as the HLLRA decided that they
confirmed that the landowners were finally on the run. As the Oban
Times gleefully reported: ‘the Highland lairds are on their knees’.17
Final victory seemed only a matter of time.
In historical perspective the events of the 1880s are indeed
remarkable. Crofters had not managed to secure the return of lands
from which they had been removed during the clearances; that
would have amounted to expropriation of property and remained
politically unthinkable. Yet by imposing legislation which made the
tenancy of a croft heritable, the state had in effect deprived the
landlord of most of his former rights of ownership. No other class or
group in late-nineteenth-century mainland Britain were given such
protection as were the crofters of the Highlands in this way. How and
why they managed to achieve such privileges is the question which
will be discussed in the final section of this chapter.
The agitation in Skye was triggered in part by economic problems.
The winter of 1882–3 was reckoned to have been one of the worst
since the disasters of the 1840s. The potato crop was partially
destroyed and earnings of migrant labourers from the east-coast
fisheries, a key source of income in Skye and the Long Island, had
fallen dramatically. Problems became more acute after a great storm
in October 1882 which damaged or destroyed many boats, nets and
much fishing gear. The resulting stress may help to explain why no-
rent campaigns became so popular within the crofting community.
Even when there was some recovery from the difficulties of 1882–3,
cattle prices fell throughout most of the remainder of the decade. By
the late 1880s two-year-old heifers which might have fetched £7 or
£8 in 1883 were worth less than £2. The period was also one of
difficulty in sheep farming as the British market for wool and mutton
was swamped by imports from the Antipodes. The big flockmasters
suffered most, with many surrendering their leases and wholesale
conversion of sheep farms to deer forests took place. Small-tenant
income was also affected as, by this time, it was also usual for
crofters to keep a few sheep.
It is very possible these continuing economic difficulties in the
western Highlands fuelled social tensions. Yet there had been bad
times before and little unrest. The people had accepted suffering as
God’s judgement or as part of the natural law, not as a consequence
of the injustice of man. But the difference in the 1880s may have
been partly because the generation of that decade had become
accustomed to the better times of the 1860s and 1870s and might
have felt a sense of frustrated expectations as their living standards
collapsed. Nevertheless, the movement of the 1880s was not one of
the hungry and distressed. If it had been it would probably not have
endured for long. Economic factors, therefore, do not really explain
how a few minor land disputes became the catalyst for a widespread
land agitation which eventually resulted in a political and social
revolution in the Highland region.
One factor was a changing attitude among the people; some
contemporary observers commented that they now had more iron in
their souls. Certainly the Gaelic poetry of the land war period, as
analysed by Sorley MacLean, in the 1930s transmits a more
powerful mood of confidence and optimism, and even before the
Battle of the Braes there was evidence on some Highland estates of
a new level of tenant truculence. By 1880, for example, on the
Sutherland estate, agents were apparently willing to allow rent
arrears and breach of regulations, rather than provoke the people
into further acts of defiance. It is also interesting to note that virtually
all the famous incidents of the Crofters’ War were triggered by the
local populations rather than responses to landlord action as had
been the pattern in the past.
This new-found confidence may reflect the growth of a new
generation in the western Highlands. All commentators stressed that
it was young men and women who were the backbone of protest.
They had been brought up in the better times of the 1860s and
1870s and had not known at first hand the anguish of the famine
decades which had demoralized so many of the generation of their
parents and grandparents. The press often drew attention to the fact
that many of the older people in the crofting townships were
sometimes timorous and meek while the young were bold, defiant
and truculent. A decisive factor prompting them to action was the
example of the Irish. Rural agitation in Ireland had led in 1881 to a
famous victory when Gladstone’s government passed the Irish Land
Act. This granted to tenants the rights known as the ‘3 Fs’: fair rents
determined by a land court, fixed tenure as long as the rent was
paid, and free sale of the tenant’s interest in the farm which allowed
for compensation for improvements. The Irish victory had obvious
implications for Highland crofters. In part, information on the Irish
agitation was conveyed through the regional Highland press,
especially in the columns of the Highlander, edited by John Murdoch,
who had lived in Ireland. Indeed, it was suggested by some that he
devoted most issues of his journal more to Irish than to Highland
matters. Even more important, however, was the personal
connection between Skye and Ireland. From about 1875 many Skye
men became labourers in Campbeltown and Carradale fishing boats
for the summer season in Irish waters, and there can be little doubt
that these annual sojourns gave them experience of such Irish
tactics as rent strikes. Indeed, the Irish connection goes a long way
to explaining why, in its early years, the agitation concentrated
mainly on Skye. In a letter to Lord MacDonald’s Edinburgh agent, his
factor on the island noted:
Shortly before the term of Martinmas a body of young men, the sons
of tenants, most of whom had been fishing at Kinsale in Ireland and
had imbibed Irish notions, came to my office and presented a petition
which they had almost the whole tenants to sign, to the effect that
 they demanded the grazing of Ben Lee in addition to their present
holdings without paying any additional rent.18
But despite the new boldness of the men of Skye the dispute would
probably not have lasted for long if it had not been for significant
changes in external attitudes to the land issue. As late as the 1850s
protests against clearances had been effectively crushed, the law
enforced and the rights of landed property upheld, but such robust
assertions of proprietorial privilege had become politically
unacceptable thirty years later. At first the due process of law in Skye
was followed against assaults on sheriff officers and land raiding.
Both police and military were brought in, but the government
recognized that it could not contemplate the full use of force because
public and political opinion would be hostile to such tactics. The only
alternative therefore, was eventually to concede some of the crofters’
demands in order to restore law and order.
The climate of opinion was already changing in the 1870s. In
1879, for example, the estate of Leckmelm on Lochbroom was
purchased by A. C. Pirie, an Aberdeen paper manufacturer. He tried
to organize ‘improvements’ on his property, which resulted in some
evictions, but even these small-scale removals brought forth a huge
outcry in the Highlands and resounding condemnation from all
sections of the national press, with the predictable exception of the
Scotsman. Four years later the Liberal politician J. B. Balfour
referred to ‘a considerable body of vague and floating sentiment in
favour of ameliorating the crofters’ condition’ which had influenced
several members of the Liberal Party’.19 These feelings were
apparent at the very highest levels of government. They were shared
by the Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone, himself and the
Home Secretary in 1882, Sir William Harcourt. Harcourt had a key
role to play in the unfolding events in the Hebrides as he had spent
many years on yachting holidays there and developed a sympathy
for the condition of the people of the area. His decisions confirmed
that. In November 1882 he refused permission for a military
expedition to be sent to Skye and in the same month suggested to
Gladstone that a Royal Commission be established instead.
Significantly he observed that among ‘decent people’ there was now
a view that the crofters had real grievances, and, in the age of an
extending franchise, such opinions could not easily be ignored. In
1884 the suffrage was extended to men owning at least £10 or
paying the same amount annually in rental. This included many
crofters. A year later five Members of Parliament were elected from
the Crofters’ Party.
These latent sympathies for the crofters were exploited to the full
by pro-crofter propagandists, of whom one of the most effective was
Alexander McKenzie, editor of the Celtic Magazine. McKenzie had
been using this publication to draw attention to the social problems
of the western Highlands since 1877. In 1883, however, he published
his bestseller, A History of the Highland Clearances, which conveyed
in emotive prose the harrowing details of some of the most notorious
removals. It was not a work of historical detachment but a
compendium of landlord misdeeds. Works like McKenzie’s portrayed
Highland proprietors as heartless tyrants who had ruthlessly
betrayed their responsibilities and their people.
The contemporary press also played a key role in publicizing the
crofters’ cause and influencing public opinion in their favour. Here
was a publicity machine with which even the wealthiest landowner
could not hope to compete. As one reporter who covered the events
of the 1880s noted later: ‘Printed paper in the shape of newspapers
proved the most deadly tool against the Highland landowners.’20 The
fact that coverage was so extensive, not only on the part of the
Scottish papers but also in the English press, reflected the deep
interest which existed throughout the country in the Highland
problem. This new awareness was facilitated by the revolution of
communications in the Western Isles. By the 1880s a network of
steamer connections had spread throughout the Inner and Outer
Hebrides. In addition, the telegraph now allowed eyewitness reports
of disturbances to be published soon after they took place, and this
made the Crofters’ War one of the first popular agitations in Britain in
which the media of the day played a significant part not only by
reporting but also by actually helping to influence the course of
events.
External political and cultural forces were also important. Crofter
political awareness was raised by the methods and campaigns of
Charles Stewart Parnell’s Irish Nationalist Party and the Irish Land
League. Though the disturbances in the north were not as some
suggested a ‘Fenian conspiracy’, there can be little doubt about the
general Irish impact, especially through the writings and speeches of
the charismatic John Murdoch, editor of the Highlander, who had
been politically active in Ireland for several years before and was
acquainted with some of the leading personalities of the Irish
agitation. There was also powerful support from the Highland
societies which were now active in the Lowland towns. Until the
1870s they had been almost exclusively devoted to convivial and
cultural pursuits, but by the end of that decade the Federation of
Celtic Societies was being criticized in some quarters as being far
too political. Activists, such as the eloquent and energetic Professor
John Stuart Blackie of the University of Edinburgh, projected a
potent message of combined literary romanticism and political
radicalism. The regional Highland press was increasingly
sympathetic, notably the Oban Times from 1882, when Duncan
Cameron became editor, and provided a faithful and detailed record
of speeches and meetings of the HLLRA at local level which lent
both cohesion and momentum to the agitation. Land reformers in
mainland Britain and Ireland took up the crofters’ cause and it
received particularly important support from reformist sections of the
Liberal Party in Scotland. Second-generation Highlanders in the
southern cities were also deeply influential in certain areas.
This motley alliance came together to become an effective
crofters’ lobby. The people of the disturbed districts had helped
themselves, but they gained a great deal from the unparalleled levels
of external support which provided experienced leadership, political
muscle and organizing expertise. The most remarkable
demonstration of this contribution came in the months after the
setting up of the Napier Commission. Government may have seen
this as a way of defusing tension and deflecting opposition, but
instead it became a catalyst for further agitation and the creation of a
more effective organization, especially when it became apparent that
the witnesses to the Royal Commission would be guaranteed
immunity from intimidation. This was a crucial development since
bitter memories of the reign of terror of the clearance period endured
among the older men whose evidence of past events was vital to the
crofters’ case. Until the Napier Commission sat for the first time in
May 1883 at the Braes in Skye, every effort was made to prepare
evidence. Alexander McKenzie and John Murdoch toured the region
and provided advice, and at the end of 1883 the HLLRA of London
published three pamphlets in Gaelic and English addressed to the
crofting community, highlighting past wrongs and encouraging
agitation in favour of security of tenure, fair rents and reallocation of
land, as well as other aims. Local people were urged to form district
branches and use peaceful and constitutional methods in pursuit of
their demands. When branches were established, rules were drawn
up by central headquarters in London.
But the crofters’ movement did not simply become the creature of
external sympathizers in these years, although they did contribute a
great deal. One of the most significant events in the organizational
process had been the decision taken by west-coast fishermen at a
mass meeting in the port of Fraserburgh in the north-east in August
1883 to form land reform associations on their return home.
Furthermore, subversive and illegal activity on some estates
persisted despite the official opposition of the HLLRA. The
successes achieved represented a joint victory for the crofters and
their new allies, who were able effectively to exploit the new and
more sympathetic climate of opinion which had emerged in the last
quarter of the nineteenth century. It was this which generated the
power and tactical leverage that previous generations had lacked.
 Conclusion

Before the middle of the eighteenth century the vast majority of

Scottish families, whether living in the Highlands or rural Lowlands,
had a place on the land, however small, as tenants, subtenants and
cottars. A century later, and in many parts much earlier, that old
world had passed away into history across the Lowlands and had
also changed radically north of the Highland line.
In the Lowlands by the 1830s only a few had legal rights to land
for specified periods of time as possessors of farm leases. There
was but one regional exception to the pattern – the settlement of
crofter families in the moorlands of the north-east counties as an
economical way of bringing waste land into regular cultivation. But
there, as everywhere else in the Lowlands, the old landholding
population of cottars had vanished. An entire social class which had
numbered between a quarter to a third of the population in many
rural parishes in old Scotland was no more. Those who now worked
the improved landscape were landless wage-earning servants and
labourers. Rural tradesmen with smallholdings within the fermetouns
of the past had abandoned them when they were broken up and
often moved off to neighbouring villages, where they paid rent for
their homes and sold their skills and wares in the competitive market
place for monetary return. In areas of pastoral husbandry like the
Borders, the hill country of southern Lanarkshire and the western
parishes of Angus and Aberdeenshire, the development of large-
scale stock farming for sheep and cattle squeezed out the people
and left whole districts stripped of the indigenous population. In
some parts only the scattered cottages of shepherds and a few
hamlets survived to mark where human habitation had once existed.
The loss of landholding must have caused stress, pain and anxiety
as a centuries-old way of life came to an end within a few decades in
the later eighteenth century. But the majority of the dispossessed in
the Lowlands were spared large-scale destitution or long-term
unemployment because critically the first phase of the agricultural
and industrial revolutions down to the end of the Napoleonic Wars in
1815 significantly increased demand for rural labour. Former tenants
and cottars might have to move and find work in villages, towns and
cities. Many who had once had the status of rent-paying farmers
faced downward mobility into the massed ranks of the landless wage
earners. But there is little evidence that many of them were thrown
on the mercies of the local Poor Law authorities as a consequence
of their displacement. The cushion of rising employment levels
during the period of major structural agrarian change partly helps to
account for the intriguing level of silence and stability in the Lowland
countryside at the time. Nor should the fundamental point be
forgotten that many people in the countryside, and perhaps the
majority, left for the towns and overseas not because they were
forced to do so but because they saw there greater opportunities for
advancement and a better standard of living.
In the Highlands, the patterns of change were more convulsive but
varied across the region. On the fringes, in southern Argyll, Highland
Perthshire, eastern Inverness-shire and Easter Ross, much of the
Lowland style of farming was replicated but to a more limited and
nuanced extent. The great river valleys which breached the Highland
massif from end to end were now by the 1840s for the most part
colonized by sheep walks of immense breadth and extent. The
people whose ancestors had worked the land in these straths from
time immemorial had gone, sometimes across the Atlantic or to the
cities and towns of the south or been removed to live in minuscule
crofts on the coastlands or barren moors in the interior judged by
landowners to have some potential for reclamation by hard labour.
Many of the settlements optimistically planned to support a thriving
fishery for the crofters in the eighteenth century, like Tobermory,
Bunessan, Lochcarron, Plockton, Lochaline, Tobermory, Dornie,
Shieldaig and others, now became slum villages, packed with the
dispossessed and destitute poor in the wake of the extensive
clearances which became common after c.1820.
But it was indeed ironic, in light of the notoriety of the ‘Highland
clearances’, that many crofters still clung on to some land, despite
much trouble, strife and misery, along the coasts of the western and
northern Highlands and on many of the Hebridean islands, at the
same time as total landlessness became the lived experience of the
vast majority of people in the rural Lowlands. At the census of 1861
the four Highland counties, even after famine and clearance, had a
population of nearly 300,000, 36,000 more than in 1801. The
Highland total was also some 20,000 greater than the Border
counties at the same census. Of course, there had been a
substantial haemorrhage of people through migration and emigration
in the intervening years without which the population totals would
have been much higher. But that was the pattern in all rural counties
in Scotland in Victorian times. By the later nineteenth century,
demographic historians have conclusively shown that only a single
region, the west-central counties of concentrated industrialism, was
actually gaining people from elsewhere. All other country parishes
from the far north to the English border by that time were losing their
inhabitants by net out-migration, sometimes on a large scale.
Several of the smaller Hebridean islands like Eigg, Muck, Ulva,
Lismore and Rum had been swept clear of their inhabitants by
clearance. But elsewhere, particularly in the Outer Hebrides of Barra,
Harris, Lewis and South Uist, population recovered after the
destitution, widespread removals and compulsory emigrations of the
famine years. Having a stake in the land, however small, was
actually more common in the Western Highlands and Islands per
head of regional population than in the Lowland counties at the end
of the era of dispossession. And after the passage of the Crofters
Holdings Act of 1886 those who dwelled on these small lots of land
were protected from summary eviction and rack renting.
Clearance is an omnibus term with a whole range of implications.
The forcing out of people by factors, sheriff officers and police in the
Highlands is the most notorious and best documented in press
sources of the time and has by far the highest profile in popular
understanding of clearance. However, a myriad set of influences and
pressures made for loss of land in addition to these familiar and
dramatic events. These included: the impact of increases in rental;
division of larger holdings to impose living space for soldier veterans
among existing tenantry; landlord unwillingness to accept
accumulation of rent arrears; refusal to provide relief when crops
failed; prohibition of working on kelp shores; confiscation of cattle to
meet accumulated arrears; refusal to assign leases to sitting tenants;
relocation of cottars and small tenants to crofting townships and new
villages; punitive prohibition of illicit whisky making so undermining
local peasant economies; rigorous prevention of subdivision of land
among kinfolk; long-run attrition of multi-tenancies until single
occupiers became the sole tenants on compact enlarged farms; and
the combined interaction of internal pressures to leave coupled with
the lure of land overseas or higher wages and better opportunities in
towns. Nature as well as man could also have a critical effect on
migration from those parts where people lived close to the edge of
subsistence. In the Highlands, for instance, serious harvest failure in
1836–7, followed by the even more devastating impact of the potato
blight between 1846 and 1855, must have forced many to flee their
holdings without notices of eviction needing to be enforced. In later
times too it was more common for townships to be abandoned rather
than cleared.
With the exception of the famine, all of these factors to a greater or
lesser extent were common across the length and breadth of
Scotland and not confined to any one region. This, therefore, was
indeed the Scottish clearances. If so, a fundamental question then
comes into focus. If dispossession was Scotland-wide, why has loss
of land come to be exclusively associated in the popular mind with
the Highlands?
Dispossession was undeniably more disruptive in most of
Gaeldom and collective acts of clearance more common and
dramatic. Landowners broke up traditional townships by adding them
to sheep walks and introducing crofting settlements which were often
populated by peasant families displaced to make way for large
pastoral farms. These crofts were not designed to provide a full living
subsistence from land alone. On the contrary, they were shaved
down to a planned minimum size in order to force the occupying
families to labour in fishing and kelp gathering and burning. Many
proprietors also encouraged the unregulated splitting of land among
cottars and squatters by packing more people into their estates to
expand the labour force for these bi-employments.
However, the whole system proved to be not only unstable but
ephemeral, as most growth sectors collapsed or stagnated after the
end of the Napoleonic Wars, leaving a hugely increased population
anchored in pitifully small patches of land, where they scraped a
living from potatoes and meagre earnings from temporary migration
for work in the Lowlands. Eventually, as far as the proprietors were
concerned, only sheep farming offered a viable and long-term
economic alternative. But, tragically, pastoralism offered little in the
way of employment and was more of a mortal threat to the
possession of land by the peasantry. Because of factors outside their
own direct control, west Highland and Hebridean landlords certainly
had fewer long-term options than their Lowland counterparts as no
sustained industrial or urban development became established in the
region which could have drawn people willingly from the land.
Nonetheless, geographical impediment and market influence were
not the only reasons why the region eventually degenerated into an
overpopulated rural slum. Many landowners also bore some
responsibility for this disastrous outcome.
A few years after the potatoes failed in 1846 some proprietors,
especially in the Hebrides, unleashed an unprecedented wave of
larger-scale clearances. Some of them were enforced with casual
brutality by estate factors and sheriff officers on very poor
communities which had not entirely recovered from the hunger and
immiseration of famine. The objective was explicit and overt: it was
once and for all to cut out from the population those families deemed
incapable of paying secure rental, together with many of the cottar
and squatter class which paid nothing at all. To ensure that they
were fully and finally expelled from the Highlands, schemes of
‘compulsory emigration’ were introduced to transport the ‘redundant
population’ across the seas to Canada and Australia, from there
never to return. There can be little doubt that racist dogma also
scarred the history of this period. The correspondence of relief
officials, government servants, trustees of estates and opinion
columns in some Scottish newspapers abound with references to the
lazy, feckless and inadequate Celts, who had to be forced from their
habitual indolence to earn their bread abroad so that the Highlands
might be spared the ‘Leprosy of Ireland’. Nothing close to this kind of
trauma ever took place in the Lowlands during the entire cycle of
dispossession.
There is also the issue of the traditional values of the Gael to be
considered. They included the belief, inherited from the old martial
society, in the right to land and, even after the death of clanship, that
the élites had an obligation to protect the people on the lands in
return for rental and service. It hardly needs saying that forced
eviction was likely to be the grossest violation of that expectation.
Also important was the vexed issue of ‘land given in return for sons’,
a key feature of the recruiting mania during the three great wars
between 1756 and 1815. Sometimes the agreements between
proprietors, tenants and cottars to secure holdings in return for
military service were entered into for fixed periods, but others were
for life. These solemn contracts did lead to the deaths of fathers and
brothers in battle and from disease overseas. When they were
broken and families cleared as landowners went bankrupt in the bad
times after 1820, bitterness, resentment and a sense of betrayal
were likely to be aroused and passed down through the generations
in the oral culture and traditions of the people.
Expectations of this kind had long gone from the Lowlands by the
time dispossession began there in earnest. This is not to suggest
that having a stake in the land was not important to tenants and
cottars elsewhere in Scotland. Before the age of improvement the
connection between land and people was fundamental: to be without
a patch of land in a subsistence-based society threatened not only
penury but survival itself. Yet the values did differ. Traces of
benevolent paternalism existed in the Lowlands after the 1750s, but
essentially the relationship between landlord and tenant had by then
become economic in nature. The land was seen as an asset from
which proper value should be extracted. The tack or lease specified
the length of tenure to a holding for a given period and there was
broad social acceptance that the proprietor had a right to take back
the tenancy at the end of the agreed term of occupancy, or indeed
even earlier if any of the clauses in it were neglected or broken.
By comparison with the north-west and the islands, therefore,
dispossession seems to have caused much less dislocation in most
parts away from the upland districts of the Borders and other zones
of hill country where pastoralism offered the most profitable option by
the later eighteenth century. Indeed, even before the rural revolution
itself there had long been a widespread culture of mobility among
Lowland cottars, servants and small tenants. They seem to have
moved regularly between farms, estates, communities and parishes
within the bounds of traditional localities and regions. Historians of
migration have used this level of short-distance mobility to help
explain the basis of the extensive long-distance movement to
northern and central Europe and Ulster in the early modern period.
In addition, the consolidation of farms under single husbandmen in
arable districts was a gradual and protracted process, mainly carried
out by the normal method of letting and reletting of holdings at end of
term. Cottars were forced to surrender their plots of land, but there
was the possibility of finding work in rural villages and small towns,
which, unlike those of the same type in the Highlands, often had a
sustainable economic future because of the successful expansion of
country textile industries. But the vexatious nature of that process
should not be underestimated. Cottar families left the traditional
townships for an uncertain future in which new opportunities existed
but could not necessarily be guaranteed. The experience was one of
dispersal and not always of carefully planned transfer from an old to
a new environment. The silence of the people should not be
interpreted as the happy acceptance of a life-changing process.
It was, however, their good fortune that during the first stages of
improvement demand for labour on arable and mixed farms
increased and for a time wages of servants and day labourers rose
also in order to secure enough workers. A massive advantage, of
course, was the industrialization and urbanization of the Lowlands,
which took place close to most rural districts. This conjuncture
helped draw people off the land and so made Highland-type
congestion less likely in the southern countryside. The methods of
hiring and housing agricultural labour also ensured that over time a
rough equilibrium of supply and demand for male and female farm
servants was normally achieved in most years. Those unable to gain
a hire at the fairs had to move on. Accommodation went with the job
so to be without a fee was also to be without a place to live. As a
result it was often the slum districts of the cities which became over-
populated with migrants from the countryside, rather than the rural
parishes of Lowlands Scotland.
The issue of comparative chronologies should also be taken into
account. Dispossession in the Lowlands took place in the period
from the later seventeenth century but outside the Borders was
concentrated in the decades between the 1760s and the 1820s. This
was a time when landlord authority and the rights of property were
rarely effectively challenged. When they were, as in the early 1790s
by the forces of French and Paineite-inspired radicalism, the regime
showed tough resilience, and opposition to the rule of the propertied
élite soon disintegrated. This remained a rigidly hierarchical society
and the widespread impact of the writings of the classical
economists like Smith, Ricardo and Mill gave continued intellectual
legitimacy to the rights of private property and freedom of enterprise
within the market.
The earlier time frame of Lowland dispossession also meant that
most of the physical remains of the old townships and cottar huts
had long disappeared by the middle decades of the nineteenth
century. Lowland improvement was nothing if not thorough. The
stoneworks from traditional townships were recycled to create new
buildings and construct the many miles of drystone dykes and walls
which soon stretched unendingly across the countryside. Rural areas
took on an antique mantle as if the farm steadings, roads and fields
created in the age of improvement had existed since time
immemorial. Only in some upland districts in the Borders and a few
other places can some traces still be found of the marks of runrig
cultivation.
 In contrast, the story of clearance and emigration retains a visible
physicality in the Highlands and Islands, with the many ruins of
abandoned settlements surrounded by old cultivation beds covered
in bracken. What happened in the past is much more obvious. In part
this is because clearances in the Highlands had a quite different
chronology from elsewhere in Scotland. They began later than in the
south and still had only limited impact by the last quarter of the
eighteenth century. They also lasted for nearly a hundred years, a
much longer time frame than dispossession in the Lowlands. Not
until the later 1850s did mass removals come to an end in the north-
west Highlands and Islands. Indeed, some of the most controversial
and highly publicized evictions took place earlier in that decade.
Moreover, by the 1840s the climate of opinion in Britain about
unregulated free enterprise was slowly beginning to change. While
laissez-faire ideology remained dominant, a new strain of
humanitarianism started to question some of the established
certainties of economic liberalism. The Victorians were not simply
rigid ideologues obsessed with private interest and material gain as
the stereotype has it. The ‘Condition of England’ question was
coming to the fore and with it a host of social issues such as child
labour, factory legislation, female labour and the plight of the poor.
Larger questions about property and equality and the obligations of
society were also beginning to emerge. It was this mood change
which helped to make the novels of Charles Dickens and his
depiction of contemporary social problems and abuses so popular.
This broader context helps to explain the developing sympathy for
the plight of the Highland people and the vitriolic condemnation of
landlordism published in pamphlets and articles by the likes of
Donald McLeod, Hugh Miller, Donald Ross and others in the 1840s
and 1850s. Crucially, these authors came to describe clearances not
simply as a consequence of economic crisis but as a social and
cultural disaster which threatened the destruction of an ancient
civilization. No charge of this kind was ever levelled at the removals
in the Lowlands during the eighteenth century. The national press
both in Scotland and in England now started to send reporters to the
Highlands who published stories to describe some of the more lurid
clearance events, especially those which took place during the
potato famine. An influential readership existed for these reports
among the upper classes both north and south of the Border since
the Highlands by this time had become a mecca for élite tourism and
deer stalking. Press commentaries, together with political concerns
about the paucity of recruits for the famed Highland regiments during
the Crimean War (1853–6) as a result of rising emigration, attracted
concern for the people suffering from the evictions and their
consequences.
Then, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, ‘the land
question’ came into focus as a paramount issue in British politics.
Landlordism was now under sustained political attack, fuelled in part
by the publication of John Bateman’s comprehensive survey, The
Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland (1883), which showed
in detail the quite remarkable concentration of landed power in the
United Kingdom. The disputes in Ireland and Highland Scotland
came to be publicized as confirmation of the abuses of landlord
authority, especially during and after the Irish Land War and the
crofting agitation of the 1880s. The Crofters’ War and the
subsequent investigation by the Royal Commission chaired by Lord
Napier put the clearances in the Highlands well and truly on the
British political map. Oral evidence collected by the Commission
from aged eye witnesses to the events of the past proved to be
particularly telling. At no time did dispossession in the Lowlands ever
attract even a fraction of this public attention. The Lowland removals
had ended many decades before the 1880s. In the public and literary
domain they were already lost to history. Clearances to the late-
Victorian mind became exclusively associated with Highland
Scotland.
The tide was certainly flowing strongly against Highland landlords
by the later nineteenth century and given powerful additional impetus
by the publication of Alexander Mackenzie’s The History of the
Highland Clearances (1883). Mackenzie, a Highlander from Gairloch
in Wester Ross, was editor of the Celtic Magazine and one of the
most accomplished Scottish journalists of the age. His achievement
was to bring together all the scattered critical reports on clearances
into a single large volume which became the definitive guide to
landlord iniquity and the most widely read handbook about the
evictions. It strongly influenced the modern writings of John Prebble,
Ian Grimble and others who successfully embedded dispossession
of the clansmen at the heart of a Greek tragedy set in the Scottish
Highlands. A famed warrior race which suffered brutal repression in
the eighteenth century by the British state, was first abandoned and
then betrayed by its tribal leaders, to whom they and their ancestors
had given blood loyalty for centuries. The motive of the former clan
chiefs, now landlords, was base: nothing other than the temptation of
greed and the lust for riches. In a final act of treachery, the betrayed
were forced off the land and shipped across the oceans to far-off
countries. They left behind them empty glens and crumbling
settlements as silent testimony of man’s inhumanity to man.
The narrative is compelling and poignant but one in which some
uncomfortable truths rarely intrude: the limitations of natural
endowment in the Highlands; a marked increase of population on
poor land with no long-term alternative for subsistence or
employment for a people who had always lived close to the edge of
subsistence in the old clan-based society; the destruction of infant
Highland manufacturing by Lowland competition; bankruptcy of the
traditional landed class; the overwhelming power of market
capitalism; and the absence of any viable long-term alternative to
pastoral husbandry. These were all factors of fundamental
importance and cannot be ignored in any serious examination of the
history of the Highlands. There is no question, however, that those
who seek to defend the people affected by these forces have in the
main avoided or downplayed them. Instead, they have opted for the
single explanation of human wickedness, a resolution of the problem
which does not fit with the historical evidence which is now to hand.
An impartial verdict on Highland landlordism during the age of
clearances is unlikely to reach clear-cut conclusions. Some of the
wealthier magnates, such as the Dukes of Argyll and Sutherland,
and a few of the new breed of tycoon-landowners, like Sir James
Matheson in Lewis, spent small fortunes for a time in attempts to
bring viable economies and employment opportunities to their
estates, but to little or no avail. Their doctrinaire plans failed to bring
the people with them. Distance from markets and unrelenting
competition from steam- and coal-based Lowland industrialism were
also just too powerful. Some proprietors agonized over decisions
which would lead to evictions. Others avoided clearance for many
years against the advice of their managers, although it was in their
economic interest to have acted sooner. Only when properties
became insolvent and hereditary families had to abandon their
patrimonies did the trustees for their creditors act to enforce the most
draconian removals of all. It is also the case that many Highland
landowners won praise from both government and the Free Church
during the first crisis years of the potato famine for the provision of
relief at their own expense to the starving poor of their estates. Civil
servants publicly congratulated them on their support which in their
view was in stark and positive contrast with the inadequacy of their
counterparts across the Irish Sea. Yet benevolence soon changed to
systematic policies of expulsion as the Highland crisis persisted and
deepened.
Indeed, there is another side to Highland landlordism which
warrants consideration. Human will and subjective decision,
underplayed by some historians in their focus on the power of
demographic and economic forces, must also be considered in any
satisfactory analysis. In the case of most landed families, the
temptations of consumerism seem to have had an easy victory over
financial rectitude. Material display in houses, internal furnishings
and clothing was deemed essential by the Victorian élite to confirm
and perpetuate gentlemanly status and social rank. But many
Highland lairds seem to have been congenitally incapable of trying to
live within their means on a sustained basis and of tailoring their
lifestyles in the southern capitals to the modest incomes of their
properties in the north. There was, for example, the extraordinary
case of Sir Duncan Campbell of Barcaldine, the owner of extensive
lands near Oban in Argyll. His finances had been in serious difficulty
for some time and in 1842 the 30,000-acre estate, in the ownership
of his family for centuries, was sold to pay off debts. Yet, on the eve
of this disaster, Campbell had a huge extension built in the 1830s to
Barcaldine House, which was designed by a fashionable London
architect and intended to provide space for a new library. This in
effect was nothing other than an act of financial suicide.
Moreover, the radical restructuring of their estates by several
landlords in the western Highlands and Islands in the late eighteenth
century led to the widespread introduction of tiny smallholdings
which were not viable in the long run as sources of subsistence and
led to a further splintering of crofts and even more dependency on
the potato crop while population continued to rise. The maintenance
of some connection with the land, however slight, served to impede
permanent migration and instead encouraged reliance on temporary
movement to the seasonal labour markets of the Lowlands.
The objective of this crofting policy was to exploit what some at
least among the landed class knew to be ephemeral wartime profits
from kelp and other enterprises. This can only be described as an
outrageous gamble. The windfall gains were mainly squandered on
servicing debt and consumer expenditure and little on long-term
investment which may or may not have significant long-term benefit.
The croft system which proprietors embedded in the north-west and
the islands also made it impossible for a middling tenant class to
emerge which might have given the region some resilience in the
difficult years after 1815. But, in addition, landlords aided and
abetted the reckless subdivision of holdings among kinfolk and most
took little action to impose effective controls even when the rationale
for packing estates with labour power vanished after c.1820. This
negligence then led eventually and inevitably to further large-scale
clearances as wartime employment and profits dried up in the years
of peace and destitution spread across the crofting townships like a
malignant virus.
 Annex A

The Highland Clearances as Holocaust: Excerpts

from Popular Histories, 1974–2000

1. The victims of the Clearances [were] subjects of intense hatred

such as the gypsies and the Jews were to experience under the
Nazis and other groups in the Western World.
F. G. Thomson, The Highlands and Islands (London, 1974), p. 61.

2. Like the shipping-off of the Polish and other Jews in cattle trucks.
David Craig, On the Crofter’s Trail (London, 1990), p. 72.

3. Sellar’s crimes against the people of Strathnaver, Grimble said,

were to be ranked with those of Heydrich, the man who perpetrated
unspeakable acts against the Jews in Prague in the Second World
War.
Professor Eric Richards, discussing the views of Ian Grimble in
Eric Richards, The Highland Clearances: People, Landlords and
Rural Turmoil (Edinburgh, 2000), p. 10.

4. Sutherland’s managers kept records of their shipments of people

with the obsessional thoroughness of an Eichmann.
David Craig, On the Crofter’s Trail (London, 1990), p. 129.

5. The policy of genocide could scarcely have been carried out

further.
D. C. Thomson and Ian Grimble, eds., ‘Introduction’, The Future of
the Highlands (London, 1968).
Paul Basu, Highland Homecomings (London, 2007), p. 197.
 Annex B

Tenant Structure on Four Lowland Estates, 1675–

1824
Table A Tenant structure: estate of Lord Melville (Fife), 1675–1780
Table B Tenant structure: Panmure estate (Angus), 1728–1824
Table C Tenant structure: Strathmore estate (Angus), 1690–1721
Table D Tenant structure: estate of Earl of Morton (Fife), 1694–1795
 Annex C

Summonses and Decreets of Removal: Selected

Lowland Sheriff Courts, 1662–1800

Cupar sheriff court: Summonses and Decreets of Removal

Dunblane sheriff court: Summonses and Decreets of Removal

Peebles sheriff court: Summonses and Decreets of Removal

Linlithgow sheriff court: Summonses and Decreets of Removal

 Annex D

Estimated Net Out-Migration from Ayr, Angus,

Fife, Lanarkshire, 1755–1790s

The level of migration into or out of any given area over a specific
time period can only be accurately calculated if four vital statistics
are known: the population levels at the start and end of the period,
and the numbers of both births and deaths. The difference between
the latter two reveals the natural rate of increase, while the
difference between the two successive censuses give the actual
change in population level. By subtracting the natural increase from
the actual population change a crude measure of the level of net in-
or out-migration becomes apparent. However, variations in both
nuptiality and fertility ratios can mean that gains and losses may
imply other consequences than simply rates of human mobility.
Demographic data for the eighteenth century are sparse by
comparison with later periods. On a national scale and prior to the
first national census of 1801, only the Webster enumeration of 1755
and that of the OSA in the 1790s are of any use to the historian in
this context. Unfortunately, however, there are no data on fertility and
mortality rates for later-eighteenth-century Scotland comparable to
those of enumeration. Thus, to even approximately measure the
scale of migration, it becomes necessary to estimate the rate of
natural increase. This has been done here by using the crude
national average rate of population increase of 6 per cent per
decade or 0.6 per cent per annum.
Table 1 below together with Tables A–D provide population counts
for the four counties at the two periods followed by the actual change
in numbers. The estimated percentage multipliers on the county
sheets are arrived at for each parish by multiplying the assumed
national percentage yearly rise of population (i.e. 0.6 per cent) of the
appropriate number of years between the two population counts. For
example, a parish which gave 1790 as the date of its OSA report
would have an estimated multiplier of 35 × 0.6 per cent or 21.0 per
cent. Thus, with this estimated natural increase, the estimated level
of net in- or out-migration is deduced as described above and the
figure can then be expressed as a percentage of the original
population level of 1755. The estimated mean percentage multiplier
for each county, as indicated in Table 1, is simply the average figure
calculated from the total of those multipliers of each parish as shown
on the tables for each county in Tables A–D. It should be borne in
mind, however, that local variation in both nuptiality and fertility could
affect these figures.
 Table 1 Estimated net out-migration from the four counties, 1755–1790s

To move beyond the generalized picture, a migration factor

analysis was conducted. From the OSA reports, four independent
factors were examined which might have influenced migration at the
parish level. These were: reduction of cottar numbers, industrial
presence, farm consolidation and the presence of villages or towns.
This exercise deals in the numbers and percentages of parishes in
the four counties examined, not those of population as such. In other
words, the importance of a specific factor, and its impact on
population movements, is not gauged here by the actual size of the
estimated migration flows but by the number of cases of parishes
demonstrating this coincidence of presumed cause and effect. For
example, the absence of some kind of industrial presence was
associated with out-migration in 33.3 per cent of the forty-five
Ayrshire parishes analysed, but this does not imply that the lack of
some kind of industry accounted for one third of out-migration from
Ayrshire parishes.
Tables 2 and 3 lay out the numerical and percentage results of the
single (and in some cases) combined factor analysis for the three
counties. As can be seen, it is divided into two main sections: those
parishes demonstrating net out-migration and those demonstrating
net in-migration. These two groups were isolated in turn from the
database and then checked against the individual factors laid out in
the left-hand column. For each of the two groups in each county the
actual number of parishes with the particular factor present is given
in the first column and this figure is then expressed as a percentage
of the total number of parishes.
It should be noted that in all four counties the denominator used to
calculate percentages is slightly less than the actual total number of
parishes because, in a few cases, there were no usable data given
in the OSA. Note also that only where a particular factor, such as
industrial presence, was indicated in the parish account can the
result be relied upon, since it is possible that in some cases other
factors – assumed here to be absent – were simply not mentioned in
the OSA reports.
These results shown in Tables 2 and 3 give some indication of the
explanatory power of the various factors vis-à-vis the in- or out-flows
of population since they outline the percentage of parishes in which
the specific and presumed causes and effects were associated with
each other.
 Table 2 Estimated migration in the shires of Ayr, Angus and Fife, 1755–1790s: factor
analysis

Tables 4 and 5 attempt to extend this analysis further by

combining the results of both sides of a particular hypothesis. If it is
assumed that in this period the absence of an ‘industrial presence’
from a parish would have acted as a ‘push’ factor and that,
conversely, the existence of some kind of industry would have
functioned as a ‘pull’, then in Ayrshire, for instance, this total
hypothesis is supported by the results from 66.6 per cent of
parishes, and so on. However, given the caveat entered above on
the reliability of presumed ‘negative’ evidence, the hypotheses built
into the ‘migration’ figures, the results of this exercise must be
treated with caution. Nevertheless, both the factor and combined-
factor analysis indicate a broadly similar result. The existence or
reduction of the cottar class was not associated in more than about
one fifth of Ayr, Angus and Fife parishes with a static or increasing
population on the one hand or a decreasing population on the other.
Only the Lanarkshire figures marginally rise above this average. On
the other hand, the industrial village/town and consolidation variables
ranked very much higher as factors associated with mobility. This
short statistical exercise suggests that the results of cottar
displacement were far from simple.
Table 3 Estimated migration in the shire of Lanark, 1755–1790s: factor analysis
Table 4 Estimated migration in the shires of Ayr, Angus and Fife, 1755–1790s: combined
factor analysis
Table 5 Estimated migration in the shire of Lanark, 1755–1790s: combined factor analysis
Table A Estimated net out-migration from Lanarkshire parishes, 1755–1790s
Table B Estimated net out-migration from Angus parishes, 1755–1790s
Table C Estimated net out-migration from Fife parishes, 1755–1790s
Table D Estimated net out-migration from Ayrshire parishes, 1755–1790s
 Annex E

Summons of Removing, Sutherland, 1810

Summons of Removing:
Alex Ross agt.
Johyn Gordon and others
1810
Mandate filed 4 April 1810
Thos. Gunn
Dornoch 23 May 1810
Precept Extracted
By Thomas Gunn

George Cranston Esquire advocate Sheriff Depute of the shire of

Sutherland to ….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….… my
officers in that part Generally and Severally specially Constituted

Greeting

Forasmuch as it is humbly meant and shown to me by Alexander

Ross, Tacksman or Principall Tenant of Navidale, Cain and others
aftermentioned lying in the Parishes of Loth & Kildonan and County
of Sutherland that by the act of Sederunt of the Lords of Council and
Session dated the fourteenth day of December seventeen hundred
and fifty six Entituled Act anent Removings, it is provided that it shall
be lawfull /

lawfull to the Heritor or other Setter of the Tack in his option either to
use the order prescribed by the Act of Parliament made in the year
fifteen hundred and fifty five intituled Act anent the Warning of
Tenants and thereupon to pursue a Removing and Ejection or to
bring his action of Removing against the tenants before the Judge
Ordinary and such action being called before the Judge Ordinary at
least forty days before the Term of Whitsunday shall be held equal to
a Warning exacted in terms of the forsaid Act and the Judge shall
thereupon proceed to determine the Removing in terms of that Act in
/

in the same manner as if a Warning had been executed in terms of

the foresaid Act of Parliament And True it is that John Gordon in
Cain, Elizabeth Sutherland mother to the said John Gordon there,
George Mackay, in Cainmore, Robert Gunn, Gilbert Mitchell, James
Mackenzie, George Mackenzie, Ann Polson, Charlotte MacLeod,
John Murray, Joseph Mitchell, John Sutherland and Bessy Macleod
all in Navidale or in parts or pendicies thereto belong and all
movable tenants at the Will of the Pursuer from their respective
possessions and Occupation and although the Pursuer intends to
have them removed therefrom at the term of Whitsunday next Yet
they mean as /

mean as the Pursuer is informed to keep violent possession and will

not remove unless compelled. Therefore the said John Gordon in
Cain, Elizabeth Sutherland, George Mackay, in Cainmore, Robert
Gunn, Gilbert Mitchell, James Mackenzie, George Mackenzie, Ann
Polson, Charlotte MacLeod, John Murray, Joseph Mitchell, John
Sutherland and Bessy Macleod, Defenders Ought to and Should be
Decerned and Ordained by Decreet and Sentence of me or my
Substitute to flit and Remove themselves, Wives Bairns family,
servants Subtenants and Cottars Defenders and whole good and
effects furth and from

the possession of the said Lands and others at the terms of

Removall after mentioned viz from the Houses Gardens and Grass
at the time of Whitsunday Eighteen hundred /
/ hundred and ten and from the arable land under crop at the
Separation of crop Eighteen hundred and ten from the Ground and
to leave the same Void and ridd to the end the Pursuer or others in
his name may at the forsaid respective terms enter thereto and
peaceasbly Bruil and enjoy the same in all coming hereaftr Conform
to the Laws and daily practice of Scotland used and observed in the
like cases Herefor my Will is and I command and Charge You that
you in his Majestys name and authority & mine lawfully summon
Warn and Charge the said John Gordon, Elisabeth Sutherland,
George McKay, Robrt Gunn, Gilbert Mitchell, James Mackenzie,
George Mackenzie, Ann /

Ann Polson, Charlotte MacLeod, John Murray, Jospeh Mitchell, John

Sutherland, and Bessy MacLeod, Defenders personally or at their
respective dwelling places to compear before me or by Substitute at
Dornoch at Ordinary Court place thereof the thirtieth day of March
current in the hous of Cain with continuation of days to answer at the
Instance of this and pursuand in the matter lybeiled with Certification
as I give According to Justice. The which to do etc. Given under the
hand of the Clerke of Court at Dornoch the Seventh day of March
1810.

Dornoch 30th March 1810 [signed] Wm Taylor

Sh Clk
Lodged with execution with [signed] Wm Taylor
Dornoch 4 April 1810 Sh Sub Judge

The Pursuer compearing by Hugh Leslie writer as his procr as per

lawful mandate who produced summons and execution against the
Defenders and craved decreet and the Defenders being called and
all failing to compear.

The Sheriff holds the Defenders as confessed and decerns against

them in the Removing in terms of the Lybell.

   Rob Mackid
Source: NRS, Sheriff Court Records, SC9/7/60/Bundle 1810E, Item A.
 Illustrations

1 The ruins of Castle Tioram in Loch Moidart in the western Highlands,

the traditional seat of the Clanranald (Clann Raghnaill) branch of Clan
Donald.
2 The Cairn at Culloden Moor commemorating the decisive defeat
there of Jacobite forces by the Hanoverian army on 17 April 1746,
which is often seen as a major turning point in Highland history.
3 The runrigs of Corsehill, Eglinton estate, Ayrshire, 1789, depicted by
John Ainslie, and showing the pre-improvement landscape of
intermingled strips of land rented by different tenants.
4 A view of the Scottish Borders from Carter Bar. This was the first
region in the country to experience substantial loss of population in the
later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the expansion of large
cattle and sheep farms.
5 Horsefair on Bruntfield Links, Edinburgh 1750. It was at a country fair
such as this that the Galloway Levellers first planned their campaign of
resistance.
6 Culzean Castle, Ayrshire. Built in stages between 1772 and 1796
and designed by Robert Adam, this imposing edifice reflected the
growing wealth of the Lowland Scottish aristocracy in the later
eighteenth century.
7 An improved farmsteading of the later eighteenth century, Wester
Kittochside, South Lanarkshire, built in 1782–4, probably on the site of
a traditional longhouse.
8 The village of Tyninghame, East Lothian, built 1761. Numerous new
settlements of this kind were established throughout the Lowlands in
the eighteenth century, providing housing and employment for
displaced small tenants and cottars.
9 Ploughman and horse team, later nineteenth century. Skilled
horsemen were the key workers of the new agriculture.
10 Township of Ormsaigbeg, Ardnamurchan peninsula: a crofting
settlement with individual strips of land running to the sea replacing the
old system of communal agriculture.
11 Private soldier of 42 Regiment of Foot in 1743, which was later to
achieve fame as the Black Watch in the vanguard of British imperial
expansion.
12 The Last of the Clan by Thomas Faed. This famous depiction of
Highland emigration as tragedy does not fully capture the complex
nature of the exodus.
13 The ruins of the township of Arichonan, Argyll, cleared in 1848 and
the scene of a famous act of resistance to eviction.
14 The Hercules, which transported people from Skye, North Uist and
Harris in 1852 to Australia at the time of the Highland potato famine.
Many of the emigrants died of typhus or smallpox during the long
voyage of 104 days.
15 Marines landing at Uig in Skye 1884. Such was the perceived
breakdown of law and order during the ‘Crofters War’ that the
authorities sent troops to the island to restore stability.
 Notes

INTRODUCTION
1. Robert A. Dodgshon, ‘The Clearances and the Transformation of
the Scottish Countryside’, in T. M. Devine and Jenny Wormald,
eds., The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (Oxford,
2012), p. 131.
 1. LAND AND CLANSHIP
1. Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
in 1773 (London, 1870), p. 32.
2. Andrew Simmons, ed., Burt’s Letters from the North of Scotland
(Edinburgh, 1998 edn), p. 74.
3. Cited in T. C. Smout, ‘Tours in the Scottish Highlands from the
Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries’, Northern Scotland, vol. 5,
1983, p. 120.
4. Robert A. Dodgshon, From Chiefs to Landlords (Edinburgh,
1998), p. 21.
5. Malcolm Gray, The Highland Economy 1750–1850 (Edinburgh,
1957), pp. 23–4.
6. OSA, III, p. 90.
7. Burt’s Letters, pp. 191–3.
8. Johnson, Journey to the Western Islands, p. 84.
9. M. Martin, A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland (2nd
edn, Edinburgh, 1970), p. 101.
10. Cited in R. A. Dodgshon, ‘West Highland Chiefdoms, 1500–
1745’, in R. Mitchison and P. Roebuck, eds., Economy and
Society in Scotland and Ireland 1500–1939 (Edinburgh, 1988), p.
13.
11. Cited in R. A. Dodgshon, ‘ “Pretense of blude” and “place of thair
dwelling”: The Nature of Scottish Clans, 1500–1745’, in R. A.
Houston and I. D. Whyte, eds., Scottish Society, 1500–1800
(Cambridge, 1989), p. 181.
 2. THE LONG DEATH OF CLANSHIP
1. A. I. Macinnes, ‘Crown, Clan and Fine: The “Civilising” of Scottish
Gaeldom’, Northern Scotland, 13, 1993.
2. M. Martin, A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland (2nd
edn, ?1716).
3. D. Defoe, A Tour of the Whole Island of Great Britain (London,
1971 edn), p. 663.
4. Quoted in R. Mitchison, ‘The Government and the Highlands,
1707–1745’, in N. T. Phillipson and R. Mitchison, eds., Scotland
in the Age of Improvement (Edinburgh, 1970), p. 31.
5. Allan I. Macinnes, ‘A’ Ghaidhealtachd and the Jacobites’, in
David Forsyth, ed., Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobites
(Edinburgh, 2017), p. 165.
6. D. Stevenson, Alasdair MacColla and the Highland Problem in
the Seventeenth Century (Edinburgh, 1980), passim.
7. Quoted in A. I. Macinnes, ‘Scottish Gaeldom, 1638–1651: The
Vernacular Response to the Covenanting Dynamic’, in J. Dwyer,
R. A. Mason and A. Murdoch, eds., New Perspectives on the
Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland (Edinburgh, n.d.),
p. 84.
8. Gentleman’s Magazine, IX, June 1739.
9. W. A. Speck, The Butcher (London, 1981), p. 183.
10. Cited in B. Lenman, The Jacobite Risings in Britain 1689–1746
(London, 1980), p. 281.
11. Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
in 1773 (Oxford, 1924 edn), p. 51.
 3. BEFORE IMPROVEMENT
1. Citations in this paragraph are from S. G. E. Lythe, The Economy
of Scotland in Its European Setting, 1550–1625 (Edinburgh,
1960), pp. 24–5.
2. Ibid., pp. 3–4.
3. Cited in Peter Aitchison and Andrew Cassell, The Lowland
Clearances (East Linton, 2003), p. 18.
4. Cited in A. J. S. Gibson and T. C. Smout, Prices, Food and
Wages in Scotland 1550–1760 (Cambridge, 1995), p. 231.
5. Sir Robert Sibbald, Provision for the Poor in Time of Dearth and
Scarcity (Edinburgh, 1699), pp. 2–3.
6. Ian Whyte, Agriculture and Society in Seventeenth-Century
Scotland (Edinburgh, 1979), p. 168.
7. NRA(S) 879, Douglas-Home Papers, 55/3, Sir Robert Pollock to
the Duke of Douglas anent his Grace’s estate in Dundee, 7
December 1759.
8. Malcolm Gray, ‘The Social Impact of Agrarian Change in the
Rural Lowlands’, in T. M. Devine and R. Mitchison, eds., People
and Society in Scotland, vol. I: 1760–1830 (Edinburgh, 1988), p.
54.
 4. FORGOTTEN HISTORY: DISPOSSESSION IN THE BORDERS
1. P. H. Brown, Scotland before 1700 from Contemporary
Documents (Edinburgh, 1893), p. 122.
2. Robert A. Dodgshon, ‘Agricultural Change and Its Social
Consequences in the Southern Uplands of Scotland, 1600–1780’,
in T. M. Devine and David Dickson, eds., Ireland and Scotland
1600–1850 (Edinburgh, 1983), p. 51. This seminal essay has
helped to shape this part of the chapter.
3. Ibid., pp. 52–3.
4. NRA(S), Douglas-Home Papers, 256/1, Report of Robert Ainslie,
7 September 1769.
5. Robert Heron, Observations made in a Journey through the
Western Counties of Scotland (Perth, 1793), vol. II, p. 32.
6. OSA, Smalholm, County of Roxburgh, http://stat-acc-
scot.edina.ac.uk/link 1791–99, vol. 3, p. 218. Accessed 18
February 2017.
7. OSA, Kelso, County of Roxburgh, http://stat-acc-
scot.edina.ac.uk/link, 1791–99, vol. 10, p. 87. Accessed 18
February 2017.
8. Cited in Robert Dodgshon, ‘The Clearances and the
Transformation of the Scottish Countryside’, in T. M. Devine and
Jenny Wormald, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish
History (Oxford, 2012), p. 144.
9. ‘Sir John Clerk of Penicuik’s Journie into Galloway in 1721’,
Transactions of the Dumfriesshire and Galloway Natural History
and Antiquarian Society, vol. 41, p. 186.
10. Cited in Peter Aitchison and Andrew Cassell, The Lowland
Clearances (East Linton, 2003), pp. 35–6.
11. A. S. Morton, ‘The Levellers of Galloway’, Transactions of the
Dumfriesshire and Galloway Natural History and Antiquarian
Society, 3rd series, vol. 44 (1967).
 5. RESISTANCE
1. Caledonian Mercury, 21 April 1724.
2. Robert Heron, Observations made in a Journey through the
Western Counties of Scotland (Perth, 1793), vol. II, p. 27.
3. Cited in Alistair Livingston, ‘The Galloway Levellers’, unpublished
M.Phil. thesis by research, University of Glasgow, 2009, p. 61. Mr
Livingston’s work is a mine of useful information on this subject.
4. Cited in Alistair Livingston, ‘Galloway Levellers – 1724’, p. 11,
http://westlandwhig.blogspot.co.uk/2008/03/galloway-levellers-
events-of-1724.html.
5. Ibid.
6. W. Prevost, ‘Letters Reporting the Rising of the Levellers in
1724’, Transactions of the Dumfriesshire and Galloway Natural
History and Antiquarian Society, 3rd series, vol. 44 (1967), p.
200.
7. Cited in Peter Aitchison and Andrew Cassell, eds., The Lowland
Clearances (East Linton, 2003), p. 44.
8. Prevost, ‘Letters Reporting the Rising of the Levellers’, p. 196.
9. Caledonian Mercury, 2 June 1724.
10. Ibid., 16 June 1724.
11. Cited in Ian L. Donnachie and Innes MacLeod, Old Galloway
(Newton Abbott, 1974), pp. 59–60.
12. Ibid., p. 57.
13. Cited in Livingston, ‘Galloway Levellers’, p. 69.
14. Comment by Christopher A. Whatley, cited in Aitchison and
Cassell, Lowland Clearances, p. 50.
 6. TRANSFORMATION AND LANDLORDISM
1. Cited in Eric Richards, The Highland Clearances (Edinburgh,
2000), p. 73.
2. NRS, GD/46/17/36, Lord Seaforth to Colin Mackenzie, 1 July
1811.
3. Stana Nenadic, Lairds and Luxury (Edinburgh, 2007), p. 209.
4. David Stewart, Sketches of the Character, Institutions and
Customs of the Highlanders of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1822), p.
153.
5. Nenadic, Lairds and Luxury, p. 209.
6. Sir John Sinclair, General View of the Agriculture of the Northern
Counties and Islands of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1795), pp. 111–12.
7. Cited in R. A. Dodgshon, From Chiefs to Landlords (Edinburgh,
1998), p. 242, quoting from NAS, GD46/17/55.
8. ‘A Supplement, Containing an Account of the Present State of
Husbandry, and the Improvements recently introduced’, in Lord
Kames, The Gentleman Farmer (6th edn, Edinburgh, 1815), p.
537.
 7. CLEARANCE BY STEALTH
1. Daniel Green, ed., Cobbett’s Tour in Scotland (Aberdeen, 1984
edn), pp. 14–15, 17, 27.
2. NRA (S) 859, Sir Alexander F. Douglas-Home Papers; HPL,
631/1, John Burrell Journals, 1763–1808; NRS, GD 224/590/1,
Buccleuch Muniments, Report concerning the improvements
proposed to be made upon the Duke of Buccleuch’s Estate in the
County of Selkirk, William Keir, September 1802.
3. NRA (S) 859, Sir Alexander F. Douglas-Home Papers, Report of
Robert Ainslie, 7 September, 1769. All subsequent references to
Ainslie’s plan come from this Report.
4. Malcolm Gray, ‘Scottish Emigration: The Social Impact of
Agrarian Change in the Rural Lowlands, 1775–1875’,
Perspectives of American History, VII (1974), p. 135.
5. OSA (Lanarkshire), p. 498.
6. HPL, 631/1, John Burrell’s Journals, 8 July 1777 (1771?).
7. OSA (Lanarkshire), p. 422.
8. Ibid. (Ayrshire), p. 212.
9. HPL 631/1, Journals of John Burrell, Copy Letter, Burrell to Mr.
Barron Mure, 8 January 1774.
10. Ibid., entries for 17 and 27 July 1774.
11. NRA(S) 855, Earl of Strathmore Papers, 160/3, W. Gammack to
A. Burnett, 15 June 1754.
12. W. Fullarton, General View of the Agriculture of the County of
Ayr, Edinburgh, 1793), pp. 69–70.
13. HPL 631/1, John Burrell’s Journals, 18 and 28 April 1772.
14. Ibid., 20 May 1772.
15. There are numerous examples of this in court processes; see, for
instance, NRS SC38/22/6, SC38/22/20, SC38/22/14.
16. NLS, Session Papers, Douglas Collection, vol. 9, Answers for his
Grace Alexander, Duke of Gordon … (1770).
17. Ibid., Douglas Collection, vol. 1, Thos. Baillie of Polkemmet vs.
Wm. Wardrope (1759); Douglas Collection, vol. 4, Petition of
John and Donald Fraser (1762); Douglas Collection, vol. 1,
 Petition of Marquis of Tweedale and Tutors (1760); Hermand
Collection, vol. 1, Petition of John Crediton (1767); Hermand
Collection, vol. 1, Petition of Janet Fulton (1770). These are but a
sample of the much larger number of such cases.
18. The data which follow are derived from OSA parish reports.
19. James Black, ‘Report on Cottage Accommodation in the District
of Buchan, Aberdeenshire’, Transactions of the Highland and
Agricultural Society, 5 (1851–3), p. 93.
20. Malcolm Gray, Scots on the Move: Scots Migrants 1750–1914
(Dundee, 1990), p. 15.
 8. WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE COTTARS?
This chapter incorporates material from Chapter 8 of T. M. Devine,
The Transformation of Rural Scotland (Edinburgh, 1999 edn).

1. J. Naismith, General View of the Agriculture of the County of

Clydesdale (Edinburgh, 1794), pp. 52–4.
2. OSA (Fife), p. 471.
3. Ibid. (Angus), p. 532.
4. Ibid. (Ayrshire), parish of Colmonell.
5. Ibid., parish of Kilwinning.
6. OSA (Aberdeenshire), passim.
7. NRS, Sheriff Court Processes (Hamilton), SC37/8/18, Lybell of
Removing by J. Crawford (1779); SC37/8/20, Lybell of Removing
by M. Baillie (1783).
8. NRS, Dalhousie Muniments, GD45/18/2268, Memorandum on
Edzell Estate (1767).
9. OSA (Ayrshire), parish of Colmonell.
10. NRS, CH2/376/3, Kirk Session of Wiston, 7 June 1752.
11. NRS, HR581/4, Heritors’ Meetings, Douglas parish, November
1764.
12. OSA (Lanarkshire), p. 143.
13. J. Naismith, General View of Lanarkshire, pp. 52–4.
(Clydesdale?)
14. OSA (Fife), p. 372.
15. Ibid. (Ayrshire), parish of Sorn.
16. Ibid. (Lanarkshire), pp. 583–6.
17. C. A. Whatley, ‘How Tame were the Scottish Lowlanders?’, in T.
M. Devine, ed., Conflict and Stability in Scottish Society, 1700–
1850 (Edinburgh, 1990), p. 21.
18. Ibid., pp. 21–2; C. G. Brown, ‘Protest in the Pews’, in Devine,
Conflict and Stability, pp. 83–105, and C. G. Brown, The Social
History of Religion in Scotland since 1700 (London, 1987), p.
104.
19. Whatley, ‘How Tame were the Scottish Lowlanders?’, p. 21.
20. NRS, Sheriff Court Processes (Cupar), SC20/5/29.
21. Ibid. (Dunblane), SC44/22/33.
22. A recent major study of Scottish Criminality, Anne-Marie Kilday,
Crime in Scotland, 1660–1960 (London, 2018), comes to a
similar conclusion.
 9. THE LOWLANDS AFTER DISPOSSESSION
1. J. Black, ‘On the Agriculture of Aberdeen and Banff Shires’,
Transactions of the Highland and Agricultural Society, 1870–1,
4th series, III, pp. 33–4.
2. Cited in David Kerr Cameron, The Cornkister Days (London,
1984), p. 219.
3. Ibid., p. 220.
4. David Kerr Cameron, The Ballad and the Plough (London, 1978),
p. 36.
5. Ibid., p. 214.
6. The Horseman’s Creed as recorded in an initiation ceremony in
Angus. Timothy Neat, The Horseman’s Word (Edinburgh, 2002),
p. 59.
7. Ibid., p. 54.
8. Farmer’s Magazine, XIII (1812), pp. 413–14.
9. Ibid., XXI (1820), p. iii. For other references to stability in the rural
Lowlands in the period 1815–36, see PP, Report from the Select
Committee appointed to inquire into the Present State of
Agriculture and Persons employed in Agriculture in the United
Kingdom, 1833, p. v, QQ.2745–6, 2755; BPP, First Report from
the Select Committee appointed to inquire into the State of
Agriculture and into the causes and extent of Distress which still
presses on some branches thereof, 1836, VIII, QQ.19180, 10367,
12223, 14064.
10. Quoted in R. Anthony, Herds and Hinds (East Linton, 1997), p.
37.
11. Ibid.
12. Cited in T. M. Devine, ed., Farm Servants and Labour in Lowland
Scotland, 1770–1914 (Edinburgh, 1996 edn), p. 108.
13. Ibid., p. 253.
14. M. Harper, Emigration from North-East Scotland (Aberdeen,
1988), p. 22.
15. Cited in Anthony, Herds and Hinds, p. 94.
 10. MORE PEOPLE, LESS LAND
1. PP, VI (1841), First and Second Reports from the Select
Committee on Emigration (Scotland), Evidence of Rev. Norman
McLeod, pp. 115–18.
2. Ibid., evidence of Charles Baird.
3. James Hunter, Set Adrift upon the World (Edinburgh, 2015), p.
235.
4. Cited in ibid., pp. 272–3.
5. Malcolm Gray, The Highland Economy 1750–1850 (Edinburgh,
1957), p. 95.
6. Norman MacLeod, Reminiscences of a Highland Parish (London,
1863), pp. 393–6.
7. Gray, Highland Economy, p. 100.
8. NRS, Lord Advocate’s Papers, AD58/83, Petition of the Tenants
of Strathaird, Isle of Skye, 20 May 1850.
9. Report for 1847 of Central Board of Management of the Fund
raised for the Relief of the Destitute Inhabitants of the Highlands
and Islands of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1847), p. 10.
10. NA, Treasury Papers, T1/4201, R. Grahame to Fox Maule, 14
April 1837.
11. James Macdonald, General View of the Agriculture of the
Hebrides (Edinburgh, 1811), p. 235.
12. Email message to T. M. Devine from Professor Michael
Anderson, 17 July 2017.
13. E. R. Creegen, ed., Argyll Estate Instructions, Mull, Morvern and
Tiree, 1771–1805 (Edinburgh, 1964), pp. 30–31.
14. James Robertson, General View of the Agriculture in the
Southern Districts of the County of Perth (London, 1794), p. 39.
15. NA, Treasury Papers, T1/4201, R. Grahame to Fox Maule, 6 May
1837.
16. North British Daily Mail, 13 September 1847.
17. NA, Treasury Papers, T1/4201, Grahame–Fox Maule
Correspondence, March–May, 1837.
 11. HARVESTING MEN
1. Gentleman’s Magazine, IX (June 1739).
2. Cited in S. E. M. Carpenter, ‘Patterns of Recruitment of the
Highland Regiments of the British Army, 1756 to 1815’,
unpublished M.Litt. thesis, University of St Andrews (1977), p. 33.
3. W. Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England from the
Earliest Period to 1803, vol. XIV (1816), p. 278.
4. David Stewart of Garth, Sketches of the Character, Manners, and
Present State of the Highlanders of Scotland (repr. Edinburgh,
1877), vol. I, p. 303.
5. Ibid.
6. Cited in Robert Clyde, From Rebel to Hero: The Image of the
Highlander, 1745–1830 (East Linton, 1995), p. 187.
7. Andrew Mackillop, ‘More Fruitful than the Soil’ (East Linton,
2000), passim. See also Matthew P. Dziennick, The Fatal Land
(London, 2015).
8. Donald MacLeod, Gloomy Memories in the Highlands of
Scotland (Glasgow, 1892), p. 1.
9. Alexander Mackenzie, The History of the Highland Clearances
(Inverness, 1883), pp. 168–9.
10. Heather Streets, Martial Races (Manchester, 2004), p. 180; John
Mackenzie, ed., Popular Imperialism and the Military 1850–1950
(Manchester, 1992), p. 38.
 12. REJECTING THE HIGHLANDS
1. Cited in Marianne McLean, The People of Glengarry:
Highlanders in Transition 1745–1820 (Montreal, 1991), p. 97.
2. Ibid., p. 209.
3. Ibid., p. 206.
4. Ibid., p. 209.
5. Andrew Mackillop, ‘More Fruitful Than the Soil’ (East Linton,
2000), p. 184.
6. Cited in ibid., p. 185.
7. John Knox, A View of the British Empire more Especially
Scotland (London, 1785), p. 127.
 13. PASSIVE VICTIMS?
1. Cited in James Hunter, The Making of the Crofting Community
(Edinburgh, 1976 and new edn 2000), p. 89; D. G. Macrae,
Review of M. Gray, The Highland Economy, Economica, new
series, vol. 25 (1958), p. 141.
2. Cited in Eric Richards, A History of the Highland Clearances
(Edinburgh, 1985), vol. 2, p. 295.
3. G. C. Lewis, On Local Disturbances in Ireland and on the Irish
Church Question (London, 1836), p. 124.
4. Cited in I. M. M. Macphail, The Crofters’ War (Stornoway, 1989),
p. 120.
5. Samuel (Sorley) MacLean, ‘The Poetry of the Highland
Clearances’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, vol.
38 (1937–41), pp. 296–300.
6. Ibid.
7. E. P. Thompson, ‘English Trade Unionism and Other Labour
Movements before 1790’, Society for the Study of Labour History,
Bulletin 17 (1968), p. 20.
8. Allan I. Macinnes, ‘Scottish Gaeldom: The First Phase of
Clearance’, in T. M. Devine and Rosalind Mitchison, eds., People
and Society in Scotland, vol. I: 1760–1830 (Edinburgh, reprinted
1991), p. 72.
9. PP, 1884, vol. XXXII, Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry into
the Condition of the Crofters and Cottars in the Highlands and
Islands of Scotland, p. 36.
10. MacLean, ‘Poetry of the Highland Clearances’, pp. 296–7.
11. Donald E. Meek, Tuath is Tighearna (Edinburgh, 1995), p. 18.
12. E. R. Wolf, ‘On Peasant Rebellions’, in T. Shanin, ed., Peasants
and Peasant Societies (London, 1971), p. 268.
13. R. J. Adam, ed., Papers on Sutherland Estate Management
(Edinburgh, 1972), Patrick Sellar to James Loch, 7 May 1816.
14. Ibid.
15. Wolf, ‘On Peasant Rebellions’, p. 268.
16. PP, VI, 1841, Select Committee on Emigration (Scotland), p. 80.
17. Eric Richards, Debating the Highland Clearances (Edinburgh,
2007), pp. 70–71.
18. NAS, Justiciary Court Records, JC26/808 Judicial declaration of
Catherine McLachlan, 9 August 1868.
19. Richards, Debating, p. 71.
20. Cited in T. M. Devine, The Scottish Nation (London, 2012), p.
165.
21. Quoted in Charles Withers, ‘ “Give us land and plenty of it”: The
Ideological Basis to Land and Landscape in the Scottish
Highlands’, Landscape History (1990), 12, pp. 45–54.
22. Cited in Richards, History of the Highland Clearances, vol. 2, p.
181.
23. Cited in Withers, ‘ “Give us land” ’, p. 52.
24. PP, VIII (1953–4), Report of the Commission of Enquiry into
Crofting Conditions, pp. 35–6.
25. Quoted in V. E. Durkacz, The Decline of the Celtic Languages
(Edinburgh, 1983), p. 99.
26. Quoted in A. Auld, Ministers and Men in the Far North (Wick,
1868), p. 54.
 14. CLEARANCE AND EXPULSION
This chapter incorporates material drawn from T. M. Devine, To the
Ends of the Earth (London, 2011), Chapter 5.

1. Witness, 21 November 1846.

2. Scotsman, 12 December 1846.
3. NRS, HD6/2, Treasury Correspondence, Trevelyan to Baird, 19
March 1847.
4. Ibid.
5. Thomas Mulock, The Western Highlands and Islands of Scotland
Socially Considered (Edinburgh, 1850), pp. 81–2.
6. Scotsman, 30 July 1850.
7. Anon., The Depopulation System in the Highlands (Edinburgh,
1849), p. 23.
8. D. Clark, ‘On the Agriculture of the County of Argyll’,
Transactions of the Highland and Agricultural Society, 4th series,
X (1878), p. 95; Mulock, Western Highlands, p. 66.
9. NRS, HD7/76, Trevelyan to W. Skene, 26 June 1848.
10. Scotsman, 25 August 1849.
11. Cited in Stephen P. Walker, ‘Agents of Dispossession and
Acculturation. Edinburgh Accountants and the Highland
Clearances’, Critical Perspectives in Accounting, 14 (2003), p.
820.
12. John Pinkerton, An Enquiry into the History of Scotland
Preceding the Reign of Malcolm III (Edinburgh, 1794), p. 339.
13. Reginald Horsman, ‘Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism in Great
Britain before 1850’, Journal of the History of Ideas, XXXVII
(1976), p. 387.
14. Jürgen Osterhammel, Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview
(Princeton, 2005), pp. 16–17. Cited in Iain Mackinnon,
‘Colonialism and the Highland Clearances’, Northern Scotland, 8,
2017, p. 25.
15. NRS, HD4/1, Letterbook of Highland and Island Emigration
Society (HIES) (1), Trevelyan to Miss Neave, 20 January 1852.
16. NRS, HD4/2, Letterbook of HIES (2), Trevelyan to Sir J. McNeil,
14 August 1852 and Commissary-General Miller, 30 June 1852.
17. Scotsman, 26 July 1851.
18. MS Diary of J. M. Mackenzie, 1851, Chamberlain of Lewis, 5
April 1851.
19. PP, Report and Evidence of the Commissioners of Inquiry into
the Condition of the Crofters and Cottars in the Highlands and
Islands of Scotland, 1884, XXXII–XXXVI, Napier Commission,
QQ.1430, 16967–8.
20. NRS, HD7/47, William Skene to Sir Charles Trevelyan, 21
February 1848.
21. Destitution Papers, Second Report of the Edinburgh Section
(1849). Sir E. P. Coffin to W. Skene, 29 June 1848.
22. NRS, AF49/6, Report of T. G. Dickson as acting for the trustee
on Sir James M. Riddell’s estate; Diary of J. M. Mackenzie, 1851;
Inverary Castle (IC), Argyll Estate Papers, Bundles 1522–31.
23. IC, Argyll Estate Papers, Bundle 1558, Duke of Argyll to J.
Campbell, 5 May 1851.
24. PP, Papers Relative to Emigration to the the British Provinces in
North America, XXII (1852), Sir J. Matheson to A. C. Buchanan,
10 October 1851.
25. IC, Argyll Estate Papers, Bundle 1804, List of tenants and cottars
warned of removal, 1850; Bundle 1623, Campbell to Duke of
Argyll, 25 April 1854.
26. All examples come from T. G. Goldie’s report in NS, AF49/6.
27. Donald E. Meek, ed., Tuath is Tighearna: Tenants and Landlords
(Edinburgh, 1995), p. 204.
28. Cited in J. Stewart Cameron, A History of the Ross of Mull
(Bunessan, 2013), p. 250.
29. Scotsman, 8 June 2005.
30. PP, VI (1841), Select Committee on Emigration, 1841, p. 87.
31. The Duke of Argyll, Crofts and Farms in the Hebrides
(Edinburgh, 1883), p. 18.
32. Ibid., p. 64.
33. IC, Argyll Estate Papers, Bundle 1522, J. Campbell to Duke of
Argyll, 21 August 1844.
34. Napier Commission, pp. 22–71.
 15. TURNING OF THE TIDE
1. Napier Commission, p. 386, Q.5265.
2. James Hunter, The Making of the Crofting Community
(Edinburgh, 1976 and new edn 2000), p. 109.
3. Thomas Maclauchlan, ‘The Influences of Emigration on the
Social Condition of the Highlands’, Transactions of the National
Association for the Promotion of Social Science, 1863.
4. IC, Argyll Estate Papers, Bundle 1764, Correspondence of 9
December 1862.
5. Napier Commission, p. 195.
6. Rev. Eric J. Findlater, Highland Clearances: The Real Cause of
Highland Famines (Edinburgh, 1855), p. 9.
7. Napier Commission, pp. 12–13.
8. Ibid., p. 2083, Q.32793.
9. Achnacarry Castle, Cameron of Lochiel Papers, Attic Chest, R.H.
Top Drawer, Bundle 15, E. Cameron to Lochiel, 7 November
1846, 26 March 1847; R. Somers Letters from the Highlands
(London, 1848), pp. 124–5.
10. PP, Report to the Board of Supervision by Sir John McNeill on
the Western Highlands and Islands (1851), xxvi, p. 38.
11. The Duke of Argyll, Crofts and Farms in the Hebrides
(Edinburgh, 1883), p. 23.
12. Napier Commission, p. 2217, QQ.35050, 35057.
13. Ibid. p. 343, Q.6169.
14. Scotsman, 15 and 18 October 1884.
15. Cited in I. M. M. Macphail, The Crofters’ War (Stornoway, 1989),
p. 120.
16. Cited in Hunter, Making of the Crofting Community, p. 225.
17. Oban Times, 24 January 1885.
18. Cited in Macphail, Crofters’ War, p. 38.
19. Cited in Hunter, Making of the Crofting Community, p. 143.
20. Cited in Macphail, Crofters’ War, p. 11.
 Bibliography

MANUSCRIPT SOURCES
National Archives, Kew, London

H045/OS.1794 Papers relating to British Association for the Relief of

Distress in Ireland and Scotland
T1/4201 Papers relating to Distress in the Highlands, 1837, including
correspondence and report of Robert Grahame
HD45/1080 Potato Famine in Ireland and Scotland, 1846–8
CO 384; CO Petitions and other materials relating to Highland emigration
42

National Register of Archives (Scotland)

874 Dr John Berry Papers

859 Sir Alexander F. Douglas-Home Papers
0094 Earl of Glasgow Papers
2177 Hamilton Papers
792 Earl of Southesk Papers
885 Earl of Strathmore Papers

Hamilton Public Library

631/1 Burrell Journals, 1763–1808, 46 volumes

National Library of Scotland

Acc. 4322 Lockhart of Lee Papers
Acc. 5474 Lockhart of Lee Papers
Acc. 5976 Lockhart Papers
Acc. 8217 Stuart of Castlemilk Papers
Acc. 8220 Stuart of Castlemilk Papers
Session Campbell (1717–1816), Douglas (1752–71), Elphinstone
Papers: (1780–81), Hermand (1756–1820), Kames (1752–68),
Kilkerran (1736–57), Meadowbank (1750–1814), and Pitfour
(1740–74) Collections
Dep. 313 Sutherland Estate Papers

National Records of Scotland

SC20/5 Sheriff Court Processes, Cupar
SC44/22 Sheriff Court Processes, Dunblane
SC37/8 Sheriff Court Processes, Hamilton
SC38/22 Sheriff Court Processes, Lanark
SC41/6 Sheriff Court Processes, Linlithgow
SC42/5 Sheriff Court Processes, Peebles
GD16 Airlie Muniments
GD288 Balfour of Balbirnie Muniments
GD5/497 Bertram of Nisbet Papers
GD1/732 Blantyre Papers
RH2/8/75 Cunninghame of Auchinharvie Papers
GD45 Dalhousie Muniments
GD3 Eglinton Muniments
GD179/3697 Handaxwood Papers
GD26 Leven and Melville Muniments
GD150 Morton Papers
GD213/54 Oswald of Auchincruive Papers
GD86/770 Berwick Poll Tax Lists, 1693
E79/8/A Midlothian Poll Tax Lists, 1693
GD178/2 Selkirk Poll Tax Lists, 1893
E70/13 West Lothian Poll Tax Lists, 1693
CH2/35/9 Biggar Presbytery Records
CH2/56/4 Carluke Kirk Session Records
CH2/57/2 Carmichael Kirk Session Records
CH2/60/3 Carnwath Kirk Session Records
CH2/63/2 Carstairs Kirk Session Records
CH2/72/1 Covington Kirk Session Records
CH2/522/1 Crawford Kirk Session Records
CH2/451/1 Culter Kirk Session Records
CH2/953/2 Douglas Kirk Session Records
CH2/115/1 Dunsyre Kirk Session Records
CH2/522/4 Kirkpatrick Kirk Session Records
CH2/404/1 Lamington Kirk Session Records
CH2/301/2 Pettinain Kirk Session Records
CH2/376/4 Roberton Kirk Session Records
CH2/363/2 Walston Kirk Session Records
CH2/376/3 Wiston Kirk Session Records
CH1/2/86 General Assembly Papers
CH1/187 General Assembly Papers
AD58/81 (Lord Advocate’s Papers). Reports on conditions of various
estates in the Highlands and Islands, 1846–7
AD58/82 Free Church Relief Fund, 1846
AD58/83 Threatened Evictions at Strathaird, Skye, 1850
AD58/84 Conditions in the Isle of Harris
AD58/85 Conditions in Barra and South Uist, 1846–9
AD58/89 Miscellaneous letters re. Highland Destitution to Lord
Advocate
AD14/47/628 Precognition as to the alleged death of Widow Anne Gillies
from starvation, 18 March 1847
HD Highland Destitution. Collection of government
correspondence and all material relating to the activities of the
Edinburgh Section of the Central Board, its officers and local
committees, 1846–50
HD4/1–6 Papers of the Highland and Island Emigration Society, 1851–9
AF7/85 Reports by the General Inspector (Fisheries) for the West
Coast, 1845–52
CS 279 Court of Session. Petitions in Sequestrations, 1839–56
CS 277 Sederunt Books in Sequestration
SC59/2/4–14 Sheriff Court Processes, Tobermory
SC9/7/128– Sheriff Court Processes, Dornoch
30
SC32/5/1–2 Sheriff Court Processes, Portree
SC33/17/27– Sheriff Court Processes, Stornoway
34
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CH2/190/7 Presbytery of Inveraray Records
CH2/230/4 Presbytery of Skye Records
CH2/557/10 Synod of Argyll Records
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GD 64 Campbell of Jura Papers
GD 201 Clanranald Papers
GD 305 Cromartie Estate Papers
GD 208 Loch Muniments
GD 221 Lord Macdonald Papers
GD 174 Maclaine of Lochbuie Papers
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AF 49 Riddell Papers
GD 248 Seafield Muniments
GD 46 Seaforth Muniments
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RH 21/44/1 Roman Catholic Register of Baptisms, Deaths, Marriages,
Arisaig, 1839–60
RH 21/48/2 Roman Catholic Register of Baptisms, Deaths, Marriages,
Moidart, 1830–55

OLD PARISH REGISTERS

Ardchattan (504/2); Ardnamurchan (505/3); Barvas (86/2);
Bracadale, Campbeltown (507/6); Clyne; Creich (46/2); Dornoch
(47/2); Edderachillis (49/2); Farr (50/2); Glenorchy (512/3); Harris
(111/1); Iona (538/1); Kilfinichen (542/2); Lochs (87/1); North Uist
(113/1); Portree (114/2); Stornoway (88/2); Strathy (50/2/1); Strontian
(505/2); Tiree (551/2).

CENSUS ENUMERATORS’ SCHEDULES, 1841, 1851 AND 1861 CENSUS

Ardchattan; Ardnarnurchan; Arisaig and Moidart; Gigha; Glenorchy;
Inverchaolin; Jura; Kilchoman; Killarow; Kildalton; Kilchrennan;
Kilfinan; Kilfinichen; Kilninian; Lismore; Morvern; Tiree; Coll; Torosay;
Barra; Bracadale; Dores; Duirnish; Glenelg; Harris; Kilmallie;
Kilmonivaig; Kilmorack; Kilnuir; Kiltarlity; N. Uist; S. Uist; Portree;
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Gairloch; Kintail; Lochalsh; Lochbroom; Lochcarron; Lochs;
Stornoway; Uig; Glensheil; Assynt; Clyne; Creich; Dornoch; Durness;
Edderachillis; Farr; Kildonan; Lairg; Loth; Rogart; Tongue;
Campbeltown; Craignish; Dunoon; Glassary; Inveraray; Kilbrandon;
Kilcalmonell; Killean; Kilmodan; Kilmartin; Kilmore; Kilninver; N.
Knapdale; S. Knapdale; Lochgoilhead; Sadell; Southend; Strachur;
Ardersier; Boleskine; Cromdale; Croy; Inverness; Kingussie; Kirkhill;
Laggan; Moy and Dalarossie; Petty; Alness; Avoch; Contin;
Cromarty; Dingwall; Edderton; Fearn; Fodderty; Killearnan; Kilmuir
Easter; Kiltearn; Kincardine; Knockbain; Logie Easter; Nigg; Resolis;
Rosemarkie; Rosskean; Tain; Tarbat; Urquhart and Logie Wester;
Urray; Golspie; Abbey Parish, Paisley, 1851.

ARGYLL AND BUTE DISTRICT ARCHIVES, LOCHGILPHEAD

CO 6–13 Parochial Board Minutes, Argyllshire Parishes

SCOTTISH CATHOLIC ARCHIVES, COLUMBA HOUSE, EDINBURGH

Oban Letters

MITCHELL LIBRARY, GLASGOW

MS 21506 Letterbook on Highland Emigration of Sir John McNeill,
1852

IN PRIVATE HANDS
Argyll Estate Papers (lnveraray Castle)
Cameron of Locheil Papers (Achnacarry Castle)
Hamilton Muniments (Lennoxlove)
Mackenzie of Gairloch MSS (Conon House)
Macleod of Macleod Muniments (Dunvegan Castle)
Diary of John Munro Mackenzie, 1851 (Courtesy of Ms M.
Buchanan)
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Edinburgh Review
Glasgow Herald
Inverness Advertiser
Inverness Courier
Illustrated London News
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The Scotsman
The Times
Witness

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1826, IV; 1826–7, V
Letters Addressed to Mr F. Maule by R. Grahame relative to the
Distress of the Highlands of Scotland, 1837, LI
Report from the Select Committee appointed to inquire into the
condition of the Population of the Highlands and Islands of
Scotland, and into the practicablity of affording the People relief by
means of Emigration, 1841, VI
Report of the Agent General for Emigration on the Applicability of
Emigration to relieve Distress in the Highlands (1837), 1841, XXVI
Report from the Commissioners appointed for inquiring into the
Administration and Practical Operation of the Poor Laws in
Scotland, 1844, XXVII–XXXVI
Documents relative to the Distress in Scotland in 1783, 1846,
XXXVII
Report from the Select Committee on Railway Labourers, 1846, XIII
Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners, Annual Reports,
1845–58
Board of Supervision for Relief of the Poor in Scotland, Annual
Reports, 1846–56
Reports of Commissioners, Inspectors of Factories, 1846, XV
Papers relative to Emigration to the British Provinces in North
America, 1847–60
Return of Applications for Advances under the Drainage Act, 1847,
XXXIV
Correspondence relating to the measures adopted for the Relief of
Distress in Ireland and Scotland, 1847, LIII
Report to the Board of Supervision by Sir John McNeill on the
Western Highlands and Islands, 1851, XXVI
Copies or Extracts of Despatches relative to Emigration to the North
American Colonies, 1851, XL
First Report of Select Committee on Emigrant Ships, 1854, XIII
Communications with regard to the Administration of the Poor Law in
the Highlands of Scotland, 1854–5, XLVI
Return of Population and Poor Rates, Scotland (1853), 1854–5,
XLVII
Royal Commission on the Employment of Children, Young Persons
and Women in Agriculture (1867), 1870, III
Reports as to the Alleged Destitution in the Western Highlands and
Islands, 1883, LIX
Report and Evidence of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the
Condition of the Crofters and Cottars in the Highlands and Islands
of Scotland, 1884, XXXII–XXXVI
Report on the Condition of the Cottar Population of the Lews, 1888,
LXXX
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Royal Commission (Highlands and Islands, 1892). Reports and
Minutes of Evidence, 1895, XXXVIII–XXXIX
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the Social Condition of the People in Lewis as compared with
Twenty Years Ago, 1902, LXXXIII
Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Lews, 1905, XXXIV

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Glossary
A’ Chlann The clan, literally the children
An Scottish Gaeldom, literally ‘the Place of the
Gaidhealtachd Gael’
Ariage Labour services from tenants
Baile Traditional Highland township or settlement
Bard Poet
Bere Hardy, four-row form of barley
Boll A dry measure; a boll of meal amounts to 140lb
avoirdupois
Bonnage Services rendered by a tenant
Buannachan ‘Household men’; specialist warrior cadre within
clanship
Carriage Labour services involving transport of
commodities
Cas-chrom Foot-plough used for turning rough ground,
where a horse-drawn plough could not easily
work
Ceann-cinnidh Head of the kindred
Cess Land tax
Commonty Rough pasture land possessed jointly by
different proprietors
Cottar Occupier of a small patch of land in return for
providing labour services to a tenant farmer
Cottoun Row of cottar cottages
Croft A small individual agricultural landholding
Crofter Occupant of a croft
Division of Dividing a commonty into individual and
Commonty separate properties by landowners who have
rights to it
Duthchas Collective heritage; obligation on clan gentry to
provide protection to members of the clan in
 return for service
Factor Estate officer or manager
Feannagan See Lazy beds
Fencibles Regiments raised at home and in the colonies in
the second half of the eighteenth century for
home defence
Fermetouns Traditional pre-improvement farming townships
Fine Clan élite; the chief and leading gentry
Fir-tacsa See Tacksman
Heritable Grants of jurisdiction to a lord and his heirs.
Jurisdiction Usually accompanied by feudal tenures and
conferring considerable power on landed
families
Heritor Proprietor of heritable property with land subject
to payment of taxation and other public burdens
Hirsel Number of sheep looked after by one shepherd
Houghing Cutting the hamstrings of livestock
Laird A landowner below noble rank
Lazy beds Parallel banks of ridge and furrow cultivation
with the beds formed into sandwiches of soil
topped with peat and seaweed for fertilizer
Loamings Tracks between cultivated fields
Machair A strip of sandy, grassy, often lime-rich soil just
above the high-water mark on shores; used as
grazing or arable land
Moss Deep basin peatland
Muir Shallow hill peat
Na Daoine Literally ‘The Men’, a lay religious élite
Non-Jurors Those who refused, normally on religious
grounds, to swear allegiance to the monarchy of
William and Mary after the Revolution of 1688
Park An enclosure for animals, grass or crops
Reiving Cattle thieving
Runrig A ‘rig’ was a narrow strip of cultivated land. A
‘runrig’ involved each tenant being allocated
several detached rigs or pieces of land, often on
a yearly basis
Sept Division of a clan
Sliochden Branches of a clan
Sorning Extraction of food and shelter by fighting men of
the clan from the other members of the clan
Souming The limit of number of animals which tenants
could graze on pasture land
Strath Broad river valley
Tack A lease of property
Tacksman Leaseholder of land within the clan structure
which he sublet to clansmen below him in the
social hierarchy; invariably related to the chief
and ruling family
Testificat Certificate, usually of a person’s good character
Thirlage The process by which tenants were bound to
grind their grain at the landowner’s mill
Wadset A mortgage of land to a creditor who was
enabled to draw rents from it as interest on the
money lent. The borrower retained rights of
reversion
 Acknowledgements

I have incurred several personal and academic debts in the course

of researching and writing this book.
My darling wife, Catherine, and all our family, have as usual been
unstinting in their loving and patient support, even when their
husband, father and grandfather drifted off yet again to reflect on
some puzzling questions about the past.
Ideas for this book have been fashioned, rejected and refined over
many years of teaching undergraduates and supervising doctoral
students at three Scottish universities: Strathclyde, 1969–97;
Aberdeen, 1998–2004; and Edinburgh, 2005–14. There is nothing
like daily interaction with bright and committed students to enable
thinking and rethinking on the essential issues of a historical project.
I also wish to extend warm thanks to members of my family,
friends and colleagues who have given me practical assistance
throughout the writing of the book: Professor Michael Anderson
(University of Edinburgh), Noreen Devine, Kathryna Glennon, Sean
Glennon, Dorothy Kidd (National Museums Scotland), Elizabeth
Lyons, Gerry Lyons and James Patrick.
The research on the chapters on Lowland rural transformation and
the history of famine in the Highlands depended to a very great
extent on the impeccable work of two skilled research assistants,
Willie Orr and Peter Clapham, both of whom are my former students.
I acknowledge their invaluable contributions as well as the generous
financial help of the UK Economic and Social Research Council for
both of those projects.
This volume could not have been completed without the superb
technical support and patient work of Margaret Begbie, on whose
support I have long relied over the years and who has never failed
me at any time. Professor Angela McCarthy of Otago University
provided valuable advice and also read the proofs of the book with
consummate care.
Three scholars from the disciplines of anthropology, economics
and history very kindly sent me copies of their research theses. I am
most grateful to Christine B. Anderson, ‘Uncovering and Recovering
Cleared Galloway’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of
Massachusetts at Amherst (2015); Catherine Douglas Shaw,
‘Enclosure and Agricultural Development in Scotland’, unpublished
D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford (2009); and Alastair Livingston,
‘The Galloway Levellers’, unpublished M.Phil. thesis by research,
University of Glasgow (2009).
I wish to thank Stuart A. Paterson for sending me his evocative
poem ‘The fields that once were Home’ and for giving permission to
reprint it in Chapter 5 of the book.
Warm thanks also go to Peter Aitchison and Andrew Cassell,
formerly of BBC Scotland. Their fascinating radio programme ‘The
Lowland Clearances’, transmitted in May and June 2003, was the
first to raise the media profile of a subject long forgotten. It was also
great fun working with Peter and Andrew in the great outdoors during
the project.
I am grateful to the management and staffs of two important sites,
Auchindrain Historic Township near Inveraray and the Highland Folk
Museum at Newtonmore, for information and guidance on their
artefacts and buildings. For anyone interested in the issues covered
in this book, both are ‘must see’ destinations.
The long list of sources in the Bibliography will confirm how much I
have depended on the professional expertise of many archivists and
librarians not only for making available material in their own care but
also for facilitating access to manuscripts in private hands.
I have now worked with Simon Winder, my editor at Penguin, for
nearly twenty years. Each of the five books on the history of
Scotland, empire and diaspora which have been published during
that time bears the imprint of his wise counsel, honest criticism and
stimulating ideas. I could not have wished for a better editor. I also
wish to thank him as a senior figure in a major international
publishing house for his willingness to bring the history of the
Scottish people to a global readership.
Simon’s patient and efficient editorial assistant, Ellen Davies, was
immensely supportive and also found time to take on the role of part-
time picture researcher for the book.
I have also been most fortunate in having a copy-editor for this
book as scrupulous and thorough as Mark Handsley.
The staff at Penguin Random House have once again excelled in
their consummate professionalism. I am especially grateful to
Richard Duguid, Daisy Taylor, Louise Willder, Pen Vogler and
Rebecca Lee for their support. No author could have asked for more.
My agent, Andrew Lownie, has been with me for as long as
Simon. His prudent advice has been a constant feature over the
years as have his faultless negotiating skills in contract after contract
with publishers to our mutual benefit! I will always be greatly in
Andrew’s debt.
Several scholars have built a new intellectual edifice over the past
generation or so which allows a better understanding of Scottish
rural history than hitherto. There are too many of them to mention by
name here, but I do wish to thank all of these fellow labourers in the
field for their many publications which are listed in the Bibliography.
Without their work this book would not have been possible.
Some among them have also by their writings opened up routes to
new insights and fresh perspectives. They include the late Eric
Cregeen, Robert Dodgshon, the late Alexander Fenton, the late
Malcolm Gray, James Hunter, Allan M. Macinnes, Andrew Mackillop,
Marianne McLean, Donald Meek, the late Eric Richards, Christopher
Smout, Ian Whyte and Charles Withers. I am very pleased to publicly
acknowledge their stimulating and pathbreaking work.

This book is dedicated with warmth, respect and admiration to the

memory of a great scholar and modest man, Malcolm Gray (1918–
2008).
Tom Devine
Scoor House
Isle of Mull

July 2017
 THE BEGINNING
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PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published by Allen Lane 2018

Published in Penguin Books 2019
Copyright © T. M. Devine, 2018
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover photograph: Crofting Family Cutting Peat by James Valentine (1815–
1880)/Bridgeman Images
ISBN: 978-0-141-98594-7
 INTRODUCTION

fn1 In Warrior Dreams: Playing Scotsmen in Mainland Europe (2014), David

Hesse identified at least 600 such activities in 2010, stretching from Moscow to
Stockholm, involving ‘affinity’ Scots who had no blood or family ties to Scotland,
with forty-six kilted pipe bands in the Netherlands alone.

1: LAND AND CLANSHIP

fn1 Michael Anderson, Scotland’s Populations from the 1850s to Today

(Oxford, 2018), pp. 25–6.