The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed, 1600-1900

by T.M. Devine

most parishes in the OSA returns made no specific mention of cottars at all.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The most threatening outbreaks were in the southern and eastern counties of England.

Protest also took place in a few parts of the Scottish Highlands, in rural Ireland and in Wales, but not in Lowland Scotland.

One salient contrast between the two regions was their differing systems of recruiting labour.

The Highlands and Ireland provided a large and growing reserve army of seasonal workers, and the rest could usually be hired from neighbouring villages.

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.

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.

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.

The hunger for a more interesting life was confirmed when the Board of Agriculture helped to establish the Scottish Women’s Rural Institutes.

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.

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.

Some of the leading railway companies in Canada played a vigorous proactive role in the emigrant business.

The mighty Canadian Pacific Railway Company (CPR)

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

‘from the places where there are good schools young men come to Glasgow and Paisley to look for employment’.

Inverness did not do so until after 1841, Sutherland in the decade 1831–41 and Ross-shire only in the early 1850s.

In its scale and ambition the Sutherland strategy was the most extraordinary example of social engineering in nineteenth-century Britain.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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 concer...

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.

In Harris 450 tenants paid rent but a further 400 families existed as cottars on the estates.