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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.
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?
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.
As will be argued later,
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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.
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.
The regulation of bread prices and artisan wages lingered on in Scotland into the period of the Napoleonic Wars.
However, by 1830 Scotland had become a different kind of society from that of c.1760,
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.
above all, the overwhelming force of market pressures.
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,
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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.
thinkers of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment helped to give intellectual credibility to a system of government dominated by a tiny propertied oligarchy.
As a result, the ‘unreformed’ political system which the magnates controlled was entirely capable of passing and implementing legislation for the advance of capitalism.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
By the middle decades of the nineteenth century over two thirds of Highland estates had changed hands.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
the natural aspiration of man to strive for profit
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.
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.
The population of Scotland rose by more than a fifth between the 1750s and the census of 1801.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It was not a migration of the rootless poor or of unskilled labourers.
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.
