Some years ago, when fishing in Loch Awe, I found a boatman, out of Badenoch, who was a charming companion. It may be the experience of others also that an English keeper usually confines his conversation, at least with strangers, to the business in hand, whereas a Scottish or Highland attendant will talk about Darwinism, Mr. Herbert Spencer, history, legend, psychical research, religion, everything. The boatman had a store of legends, and one day we fell to conversing on the old times, in the Highlands, and the new. He voted for the old. Among the advantages, he mentioned the game; and then, with sparkling eyes, the plunder! Property, of old, had been les vaches d’autrui, the cattle of Lowlanders and of other clans.
Often, since that day, one has reflected on the old times and the new. The old were not wholly what is supposed. Thus Mr. Mackenzie, in his ‘History of the Camerons,’ contrasts the manly sport of the past with the modern driving up of deer to be shot down by ‘drawing-room’ gunners. Stalking is more common now, but the drawing-room way was the old way! ‘The tenants drive everything before them, while the laird and his friends are waiting with their guns to shoot the deer.’ So writes Burt, between 1726 and 1740. ‘When the chief would have a deer only for his household,’ he does not stalk it himself; ‘the gamekeeper and one or two others are sent into the hills, ... where they often lie night after night to wait an opportunity of providing venison for the family.’[159]
I have seen in the Highlands heart-breaking destitution. I have seen an old shivering woman gathering nettles for food near Tobermory. On one side of a river I have seen scantily clad girls hanging about listless, in the rain, beside hovels more like the nests of birds than human habitations. On the other side of the water were comfortable cottages and thriving crops. The former was the Protestant, the latter the Catholic side of the stream, which the Reformation did not cross. In the bleak cold of June, on Haladale, I have said, ‘Who would stay here that could go away?’ The gillie observed that he had been in America, running the blockade, but he vastly preferred Haladale. He numbered his horses and kine; he was a man of substance. But, poverty for poverty, give me nettles and shell-fish in the North, before fried fish (and too little of that) in the New Cut.
Moved by the extreme wretchedness in which some Highland cotters seem to live, by the cry of ‘congested districts,’ by the laments of the evicted, and by the belief in ‘good old times’ behind the Forty-five, a Lowland observer naturally asks himself if the old times were really so good? In one respect, and that essential, they bear the palm: the people, as a rule, loved and revered their Chiefs, and the Chiefs adopted at least the airs of popularity among the people. Even Young Glengarry, not a model Chief, resented the oppression of tenants falsely accused, as he maintained, of being deserters.[160] Moreover, the poor did not live, generally speaking, in view of the luxurious rich. Clanranald and Glengarry had castles which must have been built at the expense of the undefined ‘services’ of their people long ago; but the warrior Glengarry of Killiecrankie discouraged refinement and delicacy of living. The smaller lairds lived plainly, even poorly. Occasional feasts were given to the Clan. Every man ‘was treated as a blood relation.’ Consequently, if destitution existed, it did not provoke social hatred and discontent. This, at least, is quite certain.
On the other hand, the presence of extreme poverty, of famines, by no means rare, of exactions which Lowlanders considered tyrannical, and the occurrence of evictions, before 1745, seem equally well established. Ignorance was one safeguard against discontent, and in the absence of schools, in the rarity of the Presbyterian clergy, with their innate democratic ideas, ignorance flourished. Over-population was encouraged, by minute subdivision of lands, for the purpose of increasing the Chief’s military following. Thus poverty was artificially fostered, and, with it, idleness and habits of plunder and of tippling.
This little picture of a Highland home is given in a book of 1747:[161] ‘I have seen in their Huts, when I have been walking, and forced to retreat thither for Shelter from the Rain, their Children, sometimes many in a Hut, full of the Small Pox and [at?] their Heighth, they having been lying and walking about in the Wet and Dirt, the Rain at the same time beating through the Thatch with Violence; so that I used to get from one End of the House to the other to keep dry; but it was all in vain, the Rain soon following me. These children at the same time seemed hearty, drinking Whey and Butter-milk, Wet and Cold with the Inclemency of the weather, and yet so well!’
This sketch was drawn somewhere in the country between Inverness and Fort William, after Culloden.
The raising of the early Highland regiments (1756-62) relieved the population, but also diffused knowledge, while the Chiefs’ power, as sanctioned by law, was destroyed. The soldiers, who had seen the New World, whether gentry and officers or privates, did not incline to stay at home when rents were raised. They emigrated to America, almost by clans, in years of famine, as in 1782. The Chiefs were alarmed and indignant; they were also needy. They screwed up rents, introduced sheep, moved populations to the coast, or evicted them. Voluntary emigration (the wisest policy) was succeeded by the removal of clansmen who were reluctant to go, or who could not afford to go, their poor goods not being marketable. Many even sold themselves into voluntary slavery for their passage fare.
Some chiefs became opulent for a generation; their families were ruined by their following of George, Prince Regent; their estates fell into English hands, and forests were made at the expense of new evictions.
This is a brief and gloomy account of what followed Culloden. An example may be given in the case of the great Glengarry family.
On the death of Glengarry, in 1761, his affairs were found, as was natural, in a lamentable condition. To study them and the later changes on his estate is to gain a view into the heart of Highland grievances. Fortunately materials for this examination exist, and have been published by Mr. Fraser Mackintosh in his ‘Antiquarian Notes’ (1897).
Perhaps it may be best to begin by giving a brief account of the way in which such estates as Glengarry’s were usually occupied by the clansmen. The Chief let to tacksmen, or leaseholders, gentlemen of his clan, part of the lands which he did not hold in his own hand. Part of his ‘tack,’ again, the tacksman cultivated; part he let out to cotters, ‘under which general term may be included various local denominations of crofters, mailers, &c.... Frequently they have the command only of a small share of their own time to cultivate the land allowed them for maintaining their families. Sometimes the Tacksman allows a portion of his own tillage field for his cotter; sometimes a small separate croft is laid off for him, and he is likewise allowed, in general, to pasture a cow, or perhaps two.’[162]
‘The Tacks,’ says Dr. Johnson, ‘were long considered as hereditary,’ 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 330l. 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 330l. in money. In 1802 the rental was 5,090l.! 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 100l. 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 11l. 4s. 3d., the converted services amounted to 3l. 2s. 8d.’ 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.’
They also destroyed the Duke’s salmon nets on the Lochy. Later, watching till the minister chanced to be away from home, ‘they pulled down part of his house, and fired several shots towards the place where his wife lay.’ The worthy clergyman then thought it time to move into Fort William. Our author adds that cadets of Highland houses have possessed farms ‘for ages’ without leases, and when they are not able to pay their rents, and are turned out, they look upon the person who takes the farm after them as usurping their right. These people have often refused to take a written lease, thinking that, by so doing, they gave up the right of possession.
All this, written about 1749, is hardly congruous with Mr. Fraser Mackintosh’s bold statement that the Commissioners of Forfeited Estates were the first evictors in the Highlands. We learn that, ‘by reason of the great poverty and slavery of the commons,’ on the Mackenzie estates, out of the clan levy of 3,000 men, ‘a third are but dross.’ Let us add that the Campbells evicted the Macdonalds from Kintyre, by cutting their throats; that every defeated clan was likely to be, more or less, evicted; and that all the Macgregors were evicted. These were operations of clan warfare, though not much more enjoyable for that. But when a sub-tenant held from a tacksman, on a ‘precarious tenure,’ does Mr. Fraser Mackintosh maintain that he was never evicted? Why did Robin Oig shoot Macfarlane at the plough tail? He did so simply for the old agrarian reason.
In Prestongrange’s speech for the Crown, at the disgraceful trial which ended in the judicial murder of James Stewart of the Glens, he says that ‘a delusion in a peculiar manner prevailing in the Highlands,’ is that ‘a cause of mortal enmity arises if a man should be removed by another from his farm or possession which he hath no manner of title to hold or retain.’[184] ‘The delusion,’ he says, ‘prevails elsewhere,’ but is ‘in a particular manner prevalent in the Highlands.’
How could a popular delusion of this kind come into existence if the Commissioners of Forfeited Estates were ‘the first evictors in the Highlands’? Demonstrably they were nothing of the kind. There were evictions in the good old times.
On the other hand, evictions had probably not been much practised with a view to obtaining higher rents or making improvements, but for other reasons. Claymores, not money, had been in request from tenants before 1745.
Once more, according to Burt, a Lowland authority, the Chief ‘must free the necessitous from their arrears of rent, and maintain such who, by accidents, are fallen to a total decay.’ Far from throwing a lot of small farms into a large one, or a sheep-walk, ‘if, by increase of the tribe, small farms are wanting for the support of such addition, he splits others into lesser portions, because all must somehow be provided for.’[185]
This policy is the precise reverse of the Culloden lease, which terminates, ipso facto, when rent falls into arrears. A Chief, bound by consanguinity to treat all his tenants as gentlemen, might practise shooting at them, like Clanranald with his famous piece, ‘the Cuckoo,’ but certainly was not apt to evict often for arrears of rent. He lived at home, he built a great castle like Glengarry’s (probably by aid of ‘services’), he fed on the sheep, kine, butter, milk, of his tenants, but he shook them by the hand, perhaps forgave arrears, held clan feasts, and was a god on earth. When he raised rents, united farms in one hand, did not shake that of every clansman, but rather evicted them, discontent was natural, inevitable. Holders of land, proud free men, must emigrate, or become labourers or artisans in towns. Who does not sympathise with their emotions?
On the other side, the Chief must subdivide and subdivide, in the good old times, ‘because all must somehow be provided for.’ But all could not be and were not ‘provided for.’ We have seen the pictures of cruel exquisite poverty from Franck in 1654, to the Gartmore MS. in 1747, and the Culloden Report in 1738, and the ‘Life of Barisdale’ in 1754, and Burt’s Letters of about 1735. It seems reasonable to suppose that all arable lands were eagerly cultivated as far as the implements and skill of the people availed to cultivate them. It was the interest of the chiefs to increase their bands of warriors and the sentiment, if not the interest, of the clansmen urged them to stay on the land.
But the land could not maintain them! The younger gentry pushed their fortunes abroad as men of the sword or in commerce. But the commons were often at the starving point; we hear of famines. Glengarry writes of a great scarcity, when meal had to be bought in the Lowlands. Burt tells of no meal in Inverness. ‘A house, grass for a cow or two,’ and ‘as much land as will sow a boll of oats,’ rocky land, needing spade culture, was a cottar’s ‘only wages of his whole labour and service,’ says the Gartmore MS. The author reckons that there is not in the Highlands employment for more than half the population, even when land has been remorselessly sub-divided. Many earned a harvest wage in the Lowlands. Others ‘sorned’ on their kindred. Armies of tramps were supported by the generosity of the poor; nay, Lowland beggars came North, allured by the open hands of the Highlanders. Whisky shops were everywhere; here men sauntered and drank. Plunder was habitual; a captain of a ‘Watch’ like Barisdale was at once thief and thief-taker. ‘They live like lairds, and die like loons,’ says Franck, speaking not of all the Highlands (as Macaulay quotes him), but chiefly of Lochaber. ‘Upon this fund’—blackmail—the Captain ‘employed one half the thieves to recover lost cattle, and the other half of them to steal.’ Lochiel laboured to reform his clan in this respect. The exactions of tacksmen, ‘sub-letting farms to a much greater number than they can maintain, and at a much higher rent than they can pay, obliges these poor people to purchase their rents and expences by theifts and robberys,’ of cattle; for the Highland honesty about portable property is extolled by Burt.
As to the moral iniquity of cattle robbing, all morality is local, and a man who does not sin against the local standard is no extreme criminal. The Macdonalds held a simple creed of communism. ‘They say that the Cattle are God’s creatures, made for the use of man, for which the earth yields grass and herbs in plenty, without the labour of man, and that therefore they Ought to be common’—that is, ought to belong to the Macdonalds.[186] The same ideas had prevailed on the Border:
Dr. Carlyle shows that Border cattle thieves, though not encouraged by the gentry, were a powerful class about 1740.
This is not a picture of a golden age, and Bailie Nicol Jarvie, in ‘Rob Roy,’ sums up this theory of what the age was really like. But, if we turn to Stewart of Garth,[187] we find the real condition of the Highlands in times past revealed in a rosy haze. Blackmail is only extorted from Lowlanders, as if Barisdale had Lowland neighbours![188] The game and fish were ‘free to all’—a palpable error as regards salmon, at all events, while one doubts if every clansman was made free of Cluny’s forest. We do not read of grouse and venison in cotters’ huts. ‘Cottagers and tradesmen were discouraged from marrying.’[189] Yet the surplus population was very large. A young amorous Highlander set himself up for marriage by ‘thigging’—that is, by begging among friends for cows, sheep, and seed-corn.[190] They did not discourage him. ‘The extinction of the respectable race of tacksmen ... is a serious loss to the people.’[191] Mr. Fraser Mackintosh, however, speaking of Skye, says, ‘large tacksmen ... could be relied on to assist (each other) or keep aloof, if the oppressed were below their class or set.’[192] The author of MS. 104 would reduce the power of tacksmen by making all tenants leaseholders for terms not under twenty years, and would pay off all wadsetts on forfeited estates, ‘because the gentlemen who had them were great oppressors of the Poor, and most of them, though they did not themselves take arms, were very active in forcing the people into the late Rebellion.’
An association had been made by Sutherland farmers in General Stewart’s time to suppress sheep-stealing. He objects to the new social state which made this association necessary. Previously ‘crimes had been so few that, from 1747 to 1810, there was only one capital conviction for theft.’ This may have been so in Sutherland, and the MS. Letter already cited makes it probable. ‘The Mackays of Lord Reay’s country,’ though previously reckoned ‘the wickedest clan,’ now ‘abhor thieving.’ But ‘the common people who dwell along the East Coast are next to the Caithness people for poverty, slavery, and dwarfish stature, while the people further up the country towards Strathnaver’ (where Franck found them bleeding their cattle for food) ‘live better.’ A third of the Earl of Sutherland’s levy ‘are mean, despicable creatures.’ Thus one county showed very different conditions: however, like the Mackenzies, the Sutherland men ‘abhor thieving.’ Elsewhere in the Highlands, hangings for theft occupy a good deal of the old Scots Magazine. Many pretty men ‘died for the law,’ as every one knows.
General Stewart, objecting to the new farmers’ association, seems not to have observed that blackmail and ‘Highland Watches’ were old-fashioned associations for protecting property.’ Complaints are made by him of ‘cutting down farms into lots,’ as if the old Chiefs had not infinitely subdivided the soil.[193] The old extreme poverty is left out of notice by General Stewart, with the old tippling, loafing, ‘sorning,’ thieving, ‘thigging’ habits. Much land could be and was cultivated, he says, which is now pasture, the harvest only failing ‘in cold and wet autumns.’[194] These not being unknown in the Highlands, but, on the other hand, very common, famines followed often, notably in 1782.
If the Lowlanders, the English, and the Anglified Highlanders, like Culloden, paint too gloomy a picture of the good old times, General Stewart may be regarded as erring in the opposite direction. His charge against the new Chiefs and landlords is the callous hurry with which they seized their pecuniary advantage, ‘which proved ruinous to their ancient tenants.’[195] This is also Scott’s opinion, in his Quarterly Review article of 1816. He, too, a Tory of the Tories, condemns the heartless greed of evicting landlords.[196] General Stewart records cases of delicate consideration and honourable sagacity on the side of the landlords. But often we find either a well-meaning hurry to make sweeping ‘improvements,’ and benefit people in a way they detest and do not understand (as by giving them leases), or a mere hasty desire to save such a ruined estate as war had left to Glengarry, by raising rents, causing, with the aid of frequent famine years, wholesale emigration. This policy was, indeed, far unlike what Burt reports: ‘the poverty of the tenants has rendered it customary for the Chief, or Laird, to free some of them every year from all arrears of rent; this is supposed, upon an average, to be about one year in five of the whole estate.’
These habits vanished with the change in the Highlands; the old ‘arts of popularity’ were no longer practised by the Chiefs: clan affection became clan hatred. If we may believe a tithe of our Whig or Lowland information, it should have done so long before 1745. Cattle, sheep, red-deer, grouse, now occupy the place of the swords of the North: the banker, brewer, or upholsterer shoots the Chiefs game, or misses it.
Truly money is the root of all evil. When specie was scarce in the North, a guinea a thing seldom seen, the fatal treasure of Loch Arkaig produced, or evoked, the moral consequences of hatred, malice, treachery and slander. Twenty years later the lack of money hardened the hearts of Chiefs (which had not been so very soft before). Clansmen had to emigrate, and they were wisest who sailed first from a land of famine. Their descendants, or some of them, dwell happily in a realm of forests, hills, and streams, deer and salmon, still retaining Highland courtesy, Highland speech, Highland courage, and Highland hospitality. They seem to have chosen the better part, and to be more fortunate than their cousins in the new times, or their fathers in the old days that were not really golden.
On the whole, a distressed Highlander need not, it seems, conceive that the old times were free from distress, or that Chiefs were really always humane. They acted in accordance with their immediate interests. They kept rents low when it paid to have a following, and they screwed rents up when money was more desirable than men. The two policies might be contemporary; this among Mackenzies, that among Macdonalds. Ensign Small reported[197] that, among the Macdonalds, ‘the gentry are fond of a rising, the commoners hate it.’ The author of MS. 104 represents the Macdonalds as ‘cursing their Prince and their Chiefs.’
The world, to its disadvantage, allows interest to override sentiment, which we only find here and there, as in the noble words of Lochiel. When he arrived with Prince Charles in France, in the autumn of 1746, he was, of course, very poor. The Prince, according to Young Glengarry, in a conversation with Bishop Forbes, was obliged to give Lochiel a full security for his estates before the Chief would raise his clan. Consequently Charles felt bound, said Glengarry, to secure a French regiment first of all for Lochiel. This, in Lochiel, would have been a singular piece of caution! But let us hear his own words, in a letter to King James.[198] ‘I told H.R.H. that Lord Ogilby or others might incline to make a figure in France, but my ambition was to serve the Crown, and serve my Country, or perish with itt. H.R.H. say’d he was doing all he could’ (to return with forces to Scotland), ‘but persisted in his resolution to procure me a Regiment. If it is obtained, I shall accept it out of respect to the Prince, but I hope Yr. M. will approve of the resolution I have taken to share in the fate of the people I have undone, and, if they must be sacrificed, to fall along with them. It is the only way I can free myself from the reproach of their blood, and shew the disinterested zeal with which I have lived, and shall dye, Your Majesty’s most humble, most Obedient, and most faithfull subject and servant,
‘Donald Cameron.[199]’
There speaks a man who makes real the ideal of the Clan system. But the ideal, though a hundred times illustrated in the conduct of the commons, has left less conspicuous examples in the behaviour of some Chiefs. ‘My brother-in-law, Major Grant, pretended that the man,’ (a recruit) ‘I sent from this country, I sold, which is false,’ says Old Lovat to Cluny.[200] Major Grant, his brother-in-law, knew Old Lovat. He, like Barisdale, was an example of the kind of chief who, till after 1745, was not impossible. He throve wickedly on the survival of a kind of society, the tribal society with its usages, which was in no sense exclusively Celtic, but originally prevalent all over Europe. In parts of the Highlands tribal society outlived its day, and gave to Lovat the opportunities which he abused.