but, in his time, strangers would make larger offers, and the hereditary
tacksman was apt to be dispossessed, with cotters, crofters, and all. As
to the tyrannical and oppressive conduct of the tacksmen, much will be
reported later. According to Young Barisdale’s plea (1754), Old Barisdale
held possession, from Glengarry, without a line of written paper. The
tacksmen, in war, were officers of the Clan regiment, and led, or drove,
the tenants to the field.
Apart from tacksmen and their cotters, were ‘small tenants’ holding
direct from the Chief. They usually occupied, in townships, a farm in
common: the shares may once have been equal, but, by 1738, one man might
hold a fourth, another but a fifteenth. They dwelt in a hamlet near the
arable crofts, of which the division might vary from year to year. They
had also grazing, and, money being very scarce, their chief wealth was
their cattle. Interest and part principal of his patrimony were paid, in
cattle, to Glengarry’s younger brother Æneas.[163] Cotters, who acted as
labourers, were scattered among the little communities of small tenants.
Rents were mostly paid in kind, and in ‘services,’ little money passed.
Another system was that of ‘wadsets.’ A chief simply _pawned_ a farm to
a clansman, say Glengarry to Lochgarry, for a certain period, and for a
certain sum of money. When he repaid the money, he recovered the farm.
The wadsetter might build and improve, but no money was returned on
redemption. The wadsetter sublet to tenants of either class, and either
he or the Chief might make the better thing of the bargain. There were
many poor wadsetters on a small scale. Colonel Trapaud accuses Glengarry
of bullying his small wadsetters in Knoydart out of their wadsetts, and
making them ‘accept of common interest.’[164] ‘The principal wadsetters
refused, on which he ordered them out of his presence.’
Such was the system of a Highland estate; of its working more will be
said later. On Glengarry’s death, his heir was his nephew, Duncan, a
minor: Glengarry and the boy’s mother had been on the worst terms. In
actual money, Glengarry’s rents, at the day of his death, were but
330_l._ yearly. The rent ‘uplifted’ by his wadsetters was larger. There
were heavy debts, both on the estate and personal: the amount of the
claims of Government I have nowhere found stated. Trustees ruled for
the heir, who, however, must have been of age when Morar was sold to
the Master of Lovat (Simon of the Forty-five) in 1768. This cleared the
personal debts. In 1772, the new Glengarry wedded Miss Marjory Grant,
eldest daughter of Sir Ludovick Grant of Dalvey. Mr. Fraser Mackintosh
says that ‘regardless of sufferings, she strove with success to clear off
the debts, to raise the rents, and generally to aggrandise the position
of the Glengarry family.’
The wadsetts were paid off: the wadsetters must now be tenants, on
increased rents, or go. Most of them emigrated to the New England States.
Bad years came: the small tenants fell into arrears. In 1782, a year
of famine, arrived the first sheep farmer from the Border. In 1785,
fifty-five tenants were warned and removed, ‘say 300 souls.’ In 1786, 500
people emigrated under their priest, a Macdonnell of the Scothouse or
Scotos family. They settled in Canada. They had fled from famine, as much
as from increased rents.
Duncan Macdonnell died in 1788; his son was Sir Walter Scott’s Glengarry,
‘the last of the Chiefs,’ in costume and demeanour, but, it seems, a
great evictor. The French war made Highland recruits desirable, and
emigration slackened, but there was an exodus in 1802, the settlers
peopling Glengarry County in Ontario; sentiment apart, a very happy
change.
We have seen Alastair’s free rent in 1761; it was 330_l._ in money.
In 1802 the rental was 5,090_l._! The eccentric history of Scott’s
friend, Glengarry (for whom he wrote a Death Song) is well known. He was
accidentally killed in 1828, and Glengarry was sold some years later.
It has changed hands twice, since the first sale, and, says Mr. Fraser
Mackintosh, ‘It is a fact not less painful than preposterous that at
the present day (1894), some dozen crofters (all remaining) cannot get
sufficient land out of the tens of thousands of acres at Knoydart, to
maintain them, without the intervention of the Crofters Commission.’[165]
Yet in 1753, Lochgarry, perhaps in a sanguine way, reckoned the Macdonald
claymores, ‘by Young Glengarry’s concurrence only,’ at 2,600.[166]
This is a typical specimen of the fortunes of a large Highland estate,
compromised in the Rising of 1745. There are, of course, happier
examples; but, in this instance, we see every stage of the revolutionary
changes in the condition of the Highland people.
Now an Englishman, or a Lowlander, asks himself, did the good old times
contain the germs of these social maladies, exhibiting themselves in
other forms, under other conditions? To this conclusion we appear to
be forced by the evidence. If Chiefs were callous and selfish after
the Forty-five, if the land could not, or did not, support the people
properly after Culloden, these misfortunes, moral and material, existed
before the starving and ill-arrayed clansmen died on the English
bayonets. There had been no reason to expect better treatment than the
Clans have actually received, from several of the powerful families.
Extreme destitution had prevailed; evictions had occurred, and had
sometimes been bitterly avenged. There had been ‘Agrarian outrages’
before Culloden, attacks on men, and mutilation of cattle.
Our evidence, as to the state of the Highlands, comes from various
sources. We have Lowland, English, and Anglified witnesses. The Duke of
Argyll cites a Highlander, Forbes of Culloden, but he was a Whig, and
President of the Court of Session. Yet there was no juster, more fair,
or more wise and tolerant man in the North. We have Captain Burt, author
of ‘Letters from Scotland,’ written between the Rebellions of 1715 and
1745. Some modern Highlanders call him their foe: he certainly looks with
English eyes, but he tries to be fair, and is far from unsympathetic. His
tenderness for the poor is remarkable. We have the Gartmore MSS. (_circ._
1748), which is Whiggish, and ‘MS. 104,’ in the King’s Library. It is,
apparently, of 1749-50. All these witnesses agree as to the oppression
of the people, their involuntary idleness, their dependence on tacksmen,
chamberlains and factors, their destitution, while their liability to
raised rents and evictions are, by some of these witnesses, insisted
upon. But all are writing from the Whig point of view; their desire to
improve the popular condition is part of their desire to reduce the power
of the Jacobite Chiefs.
On the other side is General Stewart of Garth, enthusiastically Highland,
anxious to keep up population for military purposes, as well as from
honourable sympathy, and decidedly inclined to overlook the poverty,
plundering, enforced idleness, tippling, and blackmail of the good old
times. We have also Mr. Fraser Mackintosh, who, while he delights to
tell a story against Cluny, for example, maintains that there were no
evictions before 1745. Unluckily, we have no authoritative treatise from
the Jacobite and ‘old times’ side, written between 1747 and 1790. The
best evidence might be found in Gaelic poetry, which, in general, proves
one important point.
Whatever the material condition of the Highland people, whatever their
lack, in many parishes, of elementary education, they possessed, in
legends, _Märchen_, traditional poems, and the living art of popular
song, a native culture—rich, dignified, and imaginative—which newspapers
merely destroy. This great element of happiness, where it survives, is
the bequest of the good old times.
Such is our evidence; and now, having described its nature, we may turn
to the details.
A considerable portion of the people were terribly destitute. We have
heard what the biographer of Young Barisdale says, about a diet of
shell-fish from March to August, about the faces that never wear a
smile. Franck, writing in 1654-1660, tells us how, when Monk held
Scotland, the Strathnaver crofters bled their cows in winter, and fed
on blood mixed with oatmeal.[167] Burt and Knox testify to the same
practice, a century later and more. ‘This immoderate bleeding reduces
the cattle to so low a plight that in the morning they cannot rise from
the ground, and several of the inhabitants join together to help up each
other’s cows.’[168] ‘The gentry may be said to be a handsome people, but
the commonalty much otherwise; one would hardly think, by their faces,
they were of the same species, or, at least, of the same country, which
plainly proceeds from their bad food....’[169]
The old times were not so good; the peasants, who protected and
concealed him, could not give Lord Pitsligo salt to his porridge:
‘Salt is dear.’ But people who have seen nothing better are not
discontented. The gentry—not chiefs, but tacksmen—as we have said, did
not live luxuriously. Examples may be given. ‘Although they have been
attended at dinner by five or six servants, they have often dined upon
oat-meal varied several ways, pickled herrings, or other such cheap
and indifferent diet.... Their houses are _sometimes_ built with stone
and lime’ (like Barisdale’s palace), but other houses of the gentry
‘are built in the manner of the huts.’ Burt mentions one such house,
with beasts dwelling under the roof of the owner, or tacksman. For many
years Old Glengarry dwelt in a hut, his castle being occupied by an
English commercial gentleman. The laird’s children were ‘dirty and half
naked’—this is on hearsay—and it was a common proverb that ‘a gentleman’s
bairns are known by their speaking English.’ Glengarry’s niece, daughter
of Æneas, shot at Falkirk, ‘had no English,’ when she could not have been
under thirteen years of age.[170]
Thus there was no very great gulf, in some cases, between gentry and
peasantry, where comfort was concerned. The difference of appearance
between them, as between beings ‘of a different species,’ is the less
intelligible. But herrings and game are more nutritious than nettles,
cows’ blood, and shell-fish, especially where all are scarce.
As to rents, payments to chief or tacksman, how did things fare?
Conservatives, like Dr. Johnson and Sir Walter Scott, have written about
the chiefs ‘degenerating from patriarchal rulers to rapacious landlords.’
The Duke of Argyll, on the contrary, speaks of the sub-tenants, in the
good old times, as ‘holding at the will of the lease-holders or tacksmen,
and complaining bitterly of the oppressions under which they laboured.’
This is on the evidence of Sheriff Campbell of Stonefield, speaking of
Mull, Morven, and Tyree, in 1732.[171] ‘It was only beginning to be felt
these poor people that even a bare subsistence could not be secured when
plunder had been stopped, and before industry had begun.’ What were the
‘oppressions,’ not including, of course, such exceptional outrages as
those of Barisdale? Well, Burt tells us that a tenant’s improvements, in
1730-1740, meant an instant rise of rent. ‘What would the tenant be the
gainer of it’ (enclosures and improvements on his farm), ‘but to have
his rent raised, or his farm divided with some other?’[172] The division
would serve to recruit another swordsman for the Chief. The writer of a
MS. of 1747, in the possession of Graham of Gartmore,[173] says, ‘The
practice of letting many farms to one man’ (the tacksman, say Lochgarry
or Barisdale), ‘who, again subsetts them to a much greater number than
these can maintain, and at a much higher rent than they can afford to
pay, obliges these poor people to purchase their rents and expences by
theifts and robberys.’[174]
In the good old days, something like the iniquitous Truck System existed,
we learn from the same authority, on some Highland estates. ‘Some of the
substantial Tacksmen play the merchant, and supply the common people....
As the poor ignorant people have neither knowledge of the value of their
purchase, nor money to pay for it, they deliver to these dealers (the
tacksmen) ‘cattle in the beginning of May for what they have received; by
which traffick the poor wretched people are cheated out of their effects
for one half of their value.’ This is a mournful aspect of the good old
times. The MS. 104 confirms the statements, and describes the thriftless
agricultural methods.
Each of these (the tacksmen) ‘possesses some very poor people under him,
perhaps five or six on a farm, to whom he lets out the skirts of his
possession, these people are generally the soberest and honestest of the
whole. Their food all summer is milk and whey mixed together without any
bread, the little butter or cheese they are able to make is reserved for
winter provision, they sleep away the greatest part of the summer, and
when the little Barley they sow becomes ripe, the women pull it as they
do flax, and dry it on a large wicker machine over the fire. Then burn
the straw, and grind the corn upon Quearns or hand mills. In the end of
Harvest, and During the winter they have some Flesh, Butter, and cheese,
with great scarcity of Bread. All their business is to take care of the
few Cattle they have. In spring, which is their only season in which they
work, their whole food is bread and gruel without so much as salt to
season it.
‘About twenty years ago Lochiel erected two or three Water Mills, but by
reason of the great distance of many of the people from them, and their
natural Laziness, with the prejudice in favour of the old Custom of
burning the straw, they were made very little use of. The custom has been
given up some time except by the Camerons and Macdonalds, some McLeans,
and some of the people of Skye.’
It is not safe, of course, to argue from a report about the state of the
people in one part of the Highlands to a conclusion about their condition
everywhere. A river may divide comfort from destitution. And it is
certain that reports by Lowlanders, Englishmen, or Highlanders, like the
famous Forbes of Culloden, who practically defeated the Rising of 1745,
will not please some Highland reasoners.[175]
Forbes reported in 1737 on the Duke of Argyll’s lands in Morven, Mull,
and Tyree. He speaks of the ‘tyranny’ and ‘unmerciful exactions’ of
the tacksmen, large leaseholders who sub-let to smaller tenants. Hence
the lands lie waste, and ‘above one hundred families have been reduced
to beggary and driven out of the island.’ This is precisely the modern
complaint against the bad new times, a complaint with which we all
sympathise. Tacksmen, according to Culloden, were as bad as factors.
Culloden, therefore, suggested the granting to the sub-tenants of
nineteen years’ leases if they would ‘offer frankly for their farms such
rent as fairly and honestly they could bear.’ Such leases he had power
to offer, and did offer. ‘No takers!’ Culloden was surprised, but he
need not have been. The weight of the tacksmen would be against him;
also the conservatism of the people. A fixed rent was a new crude hard
thing: a system of shuffling along, above all as the general policy was
to find room for swordsmen—was an old endurable thing. Culloden, however,
persuaded some sub-tenants to offer. On the tacksmen he put pressure.
He had with him some tacksmen from the mainland, better acquainted with
farming methods. _They_ offered for the insular tacksmen’s farms, whereon
the insular tacksmen also offered. Fixed now were rents, and fixed the
duration of tenancy.
One Culloden lease to a kind of village community of six people in
portions of land of different sizes is dated April 18, 1739, from Stoney
Hill.[176] The lease of 1739 is for nineteen years, ‘and that in full
satisfaction of all casualitys, and other prestations and services
whatsomever,’ except for services in repairing harbours, mending
highways, or repairing miln-leads, for the general benefite of the
Island (Mull). The tenants were to pay cesses, ministers’ stipends,
schoolmasters’ salaries, &c., ‘freeing and relieving the Duke’ from these
burdens. Failure of rent meant removal, and made the lease null and void;
the tenants having leave, however, to take over the share of a defaulter
or choose a substitute for him.
What the sub-tenants gain is freedom from a tacksman, secure possession
while they pay, and freedom from all but the stated customary services
and ‘casualties.’ One of these was military service in a Jacobite rising.
A tenant in Mull could not now lose his holding if his tacksman ordered
him to join the Prince and he refused. As to the other ‘services,’ the
Duke of Argyll regards them as indefinite and oppressive. He selects
examples from Sinclair’s paper for the Board of Agriculture in 1795.
Rent was mainly paid in kind, chickens, cattle, grain, _plus_ ‘tilling,
dunging, sowing, and harrowing a part of an extensive farm in the
proprietor’s’ (or tacksman’s) ‘possession.’ Peats, thatching, weeding,
cartage, harvesting, and so forth, were exacted, with implements, eggs,
butter, cheese, a tithe of fish and oil, woollen yarn, and so forth.
These services might easily be made oppressive, and did not conduce to
improvement in agriculture.
The exact weight and money value of these services must have varied
widely. The author of MS. 104 proposes that, in future, all services
shall be definitely stated in writing when a tenant takes a farm.
‘Extravagant services are still required’ (_circ._ 1750) ‘and performed,
which the landlord would be ashamed to commit to writing.’ He also,
like Culloden, advocates the compulsory granting of leases for not less
than twenty years. But he has already said that the people, accustomed
to hereditary entry on farms from father to son, refuse to take written
leases.
As to ‘services,’ Mr. Fraser Mackintosh, on the other side, tells us how
the Lochiels, in exile, ‘regularly received part of the rent.’ That he
only sent 100_l._ to Lochiel’s children in France, and made the tenants
work on his lands instead of on the county roads, is a charge made by
Colonel Crawfurd against Lochiel’s brother, Fassifern.[177] Mr. Fraser
Mackintosh comments on the loyalty of Lochiel’s tenants, but adds ‘in
former times rent in the form of money was a minor easy consideration,
the real burden or tax being services’—especially ‘the almost intolerable
burden’ of war. Thus the exile of the Chief became ‘really no hardship
to the people,’ enabling them ‘to pay a double (money) rent now and then
with comparative ease.’[178]
Thus, in this author’s opinion, ‘the real burden or tax’ was ‘services,’
not money rent. Happily he gives a case of commutation of services for
money on Glengarry’s estate. The commutation was ‘apparently quite
disproportionate and oppressive. For instance, in the case of Dugald
Cameron, late cowherd to Glengarry, afterwards tenant of Boline, while
his rent was 11_l._ 4_s._ 3_d._, the converted services amounted to 3_l._
2_s._ 8_d._’ Well, if services were ‘the real burden,’ where is the
‘oppressive disproportion’?[179] This seems absurd.
If it be agreed that ‘services’ were the main part of rent, how
oppressive a hostile tacksman, say Barisdale, might make them is easily
conceived.[180] Whatever we may think of the advantages of a definite
Culloden rent, it is pretty plain that the people did not like it. But
the old kind of rent and services was of scarce any value to a probably
non-resident proprietor, who could get high returns on the new system
from large farmers or graziers. He did not want hens and cheese, and had
now no use for claymores. The consequences were raised rents, emigration,
evictions, the Highland grievances.
But were there no evictions, and removals, and forced migrations in the
good old times?
Mr. Fraser Mackintosh says, ‘The Commissioners on the Forfeited Estates,
or, more properly, their Factors, were the first evictors in the
Highlands, and they were guilty of favouritism to such a degree in
favour of strangers, that many of the tenants emigrated voluntarily.’
Indeed, Glenure was shot, by Allan Breck or another, because, as factor
for the forfeited estates of Lochiel and Ardsheil, he had evicted Cameron
or Stewart tenants, and preferred Campbells. But Mr. Fraser Mackintosh
ought to know that the Commissioners were _not_ the first evictors. Who
drove a hundred families from Mull and Tyree about 1738, as Culloden
tells us? Who ‘removed’ James Stewart of the Glens before Campbell of
Glenure did? Why Ardsheil, whose bastard brother he was. Who evicted some
and threatened to evict all Macphersons from the Duke of Gordon’s lands
in Badenoch in 1724? Why the Duke and his factor, Gordon of Glenbucket.
The story is told in a letter of Cluny to the Earl Marischal.[181]
The Macphersons held lands in Badenoch ‘as feuars, woodsellers, or
kindly tenents to the Duke of Gordon.’ He however ‘vexes and reduces
us by perpetuall lawsuits,’ and ‘_has taken it into his head to root
us intearly out of our own country_.’ He therefore feued most of his
Badenoch lands to Glenbucket ‘for the half of its value, or, I may
say, a third, meerly out of design to take it out of the hands of the
Macphersons.’ Glenbucket, ‘in order to begin the work of extirpating us,
has turned out the tenants of six farms.’ Their high offers of rent
were refused, so they dirked Glenbucket, ‘in a most barbarous manner.’
The operation can scarcely be performed in a gentle fashion. ‘They very
luckily missed their aim by the favour of a buff belt he had about him,’
also by the favour of a claymore that, was lying convenient. The Duke now
threatened to ‘extirpate’ or evict ‘the whole name of Macpherson,’ which
he proceeded to do ‘with a body of a thousand men, foot and horse.’ All
parties were Jacobites, and King James settled _hæc certamina tanta_.
_He_ had no objections to eviction. He writes to the Duke of Gordon,
‘I am far from blaming you for any steps you may have taken which are
authorised by the law of the land, but there are only a few offenders,
and, politically, the _eviction_ disunites loyal clans.’[182]
Indeed the more one thinks of Mr. Fraser Mackintosh’s assertion that
the Commissioners were the first evictors in the Highlands, the more
grotesque does it appear. We turn to the manuscript ‘Letter of a
Gentleman’ whose sympathies are with ‘the wretched commons,’ not with the
Chiefs.[183] ‘The gentlemen of the name of Mackenzie,’ says our author,
‘are frugal and industrious.... They have screwed up their rents to an
extravagant height, which they vitiously term improving their estates,
without putting the tenants upon a proper way of improving the ground,
to enable them to pay that rent, which makes the common people little
better than slaves and beggars.’
No ‘screw’ but eviction could be used by these Mackenzie landlords,
frugal and industrious.
Here is a case among the Camerons from the same MS.:—
‘To shew the present disposition of that Clan,’ described as ‘lazy,
silent, sly, and enterprizing people,’ ‘I will relate an instance of
their barbarity which happened since the year 1725. The possessor of a
farm belonging to the Duke of Gordon, of the tribe of the Macmartins,
about three miles to the North of Fort William, demanded an abatement of
the usual rent, which the Duke refusing, he left the farm, boasting that
no man would dare to succeed in it. For some years it was untenanted,
till at last the Duke prevailed on Mr. Skeldoich, who was then minister
of the parish, who could not find a place to reside in, to take this
farm. The former possessor lay still till the minister had plentifully
stocked the farm with cattle and built a house on it, then, with some
other rogues, finding that the cattle were carefully watched, went to
the place where the calves were kept, and with their durks cut off their
heads, and cut the skins so that they would not be of any use.’