The Royal Society of Edinburgh RSE @ Dumfries and Galloway The Lowland Clearances and the Transformation of Southwest

Scotland Professor Tom Devine OBE HonMRIA FBA FRSE, University of Edinburgh
Thursday 26 May 2011 Report by Kate Kennedy The Clearances are always associated in Scottish traditional song and story with the Highlands. Modern research has challenged that assumption by demonstrating the extent of removals elsewhere in Scotland. This lecture demonstrated the scale of dispossession of people in one Lowland region and explained how it transformed the way of life in the southwest forever, suggesting why the Highland Clearances are remembered yet the Lowland Clearances are forgotten. The Highland Clearances are an iconographic theme in the history of Scotland. This period of history generates a huge appeal and interest largely, because it is a human story of remarkable tragic intensity that goes to the heart of human experience in terms of suffering, adventure and the loss of home. Professor Devine stated that American Scots overwhelmingly believe their ancestors left Scotland because of the Highland Clearances, even if these ancestors came from nonHighland areas. The extraordinary mythical appeal of the Highland Clearances has been further embellished through the attention of literature, including works such as Iain Crichton Smiths Consider the Lilies and, more recently, Kathleen Fidlers influential work, The Desperate Journey, which is often taught in primary schools. Professor Devine asserted that the person most responsible for driving home the Highland Clearances into the heart of the Scottish intellectual and cultural agenda was John Prebble. His books, Glencoe, Culloden and The Highland Clearances, forming the Fire and Sword Trilogy, argue implicitly and explicitly that in addition to emptying the Scottish glens of people, the Highland Clearances also caused the destruction of a culture. It is only recently that Prebbles notion of Scotland in the 18th and 19th Centuries as the history of victimhood and tragedy has been paralleled by an expansion of literature portraying the Scot as the imperial warrior and adventurer. Professor Devine read from two short texts describing the Clearances. On first hearing, these excerpts are reminiscent of many texts portraying these desperate times; however, these texts were not written about the Highland Clearances, rather they reflect the Clearances sweeping through the Lowlands of Scotland two generations prior to the intensification of the Highland Clearances. Professor Devine considers these texts and others like them as metaphorical memorials to us that we can no longer talk about loss of land, we can no longer talk about depopulation by coercive means, we can no longer talk about the turbulence caused by agrarian change, as something uniquely Highland. Other records containing evidence that the Clearances were not solely restricted to the Highlands include land archives, parish records and maps from the time, in particular those created by William Roy and his fellow surveyors in the 1750s that depicted Scotland in a cartographic presentation of the population. Professor Devine noted that these sources of data show powerfully that the southwest of Scotland was in the vanguard of rural changes occurring throughout the country. There is a great decisive break through most of the rural lowlands in the 1750s, when the rural world we now know of trimmed fields, enclosure,

freestanding and isolated farm steadings, hedgerows and dykes came about. There is, however, also a human variable in this period of change which is sometimes overlooked by history in favour of concentrating on the technological advances of the time rather than the aspects of social change. Estate papers from the mid-18th Century show that agricultural tenants were in sharp decline at this time. Indeed the Buccleuch archive in southwest Scotland shows a decline of 5070 % over a period of 40 years. Professor Devine stated that the substratum of people below those paying rent to the landowner were of utmost importance when discussing the Lowland Clearances. These were a phantom people who are notoriously difficult to trace in history. The prime sources of information about these people are the poll tax records of the 17th and 18th Centuries. Poll tax at this time was based on the ability to pay, and from these records historians can deduce an anatomy of the whole spectrum of rural life in the Old Scotland, from wealthy landowners, through tenants and servants to the day labourers and lowly cotters. In these times the two major demands for labour in the farming year were peat cutting in the spring/summer and harvesting in the autumn. Tenant farmers needed a reserve army of short-term labour for this, and this was provided in the form of the cotters. The cotters were not paid for their work; instead they received small patches of land in return for service at important times of year. Craftsmen, including blacksmiths and weavers, also belonged to the cotters class, as they needed a form of social subsistence from the land to keep them going. Between one third and one fifth of the rural Scottish population prior to 1650 consisted of the cotter class and, as such, these are by and large our ancestors. However, by 1815 no lowland county of Scotland had anything but a tiny remnant of this social tier remaining. Professor Devine purported that there were two prime differences between the Highland and Lowland Clearances. Firstly, other than the Levellers Revolt in Galloway in 1723 and their attempt on a large scale to break down the developing enclosures of the great cattle parks, there were no other occasions of armed or mute revolt between the 1750s and 1830s in the Scottish Lowlands. As such, the Clearances in the Lowlands were silent and this is perhaps one of the reasons why they are now not remembered. The phrase Highland Clearance evokes an automatic and emotive resonance; however, the phrase Lowland Clearances is an historians invention to describe a particular process, there is no particular emotional resonance attached to it. Additionally, the Clearance of the Lowlands left no trace of a folk culture of dispossession or betrayal in subsequent generations. Professor Devine noted that even today, the Highland Clearances in some parts of the Highlands still continue to affect politics and attitudes. The Lowland Clearances are silent and forgotten. Even at the time they attracted very little attention and there was very little protest. Subsequent generations cultural integrity has not been penetrated like in the Highlands. There is little evidence of oral tradition handing down a view of vehement and emotionalised betrayal. There are, however, similarities in the two Clearances. The loss of land is common to both, and all accounts demonstrate that the removal of people from land was part of the new system of agriculture. Scottish rural society experienced an extraordinary path to economic modernity between 1750 and 1850. Unlike England, the Scottish experience of industrial, agricultural and socioeconomic change was revolutionary rather than evolutionary; it was a decisive break with the past. Professor Devine commented that We now know that the rate of urbanisation in Scotland in the late 18th Century was the fastest in Europe. It was the most traumatic in Europe until forced Soviet industrialisation in the 1920s and, therefore, there were massive pressures on food production due to the huge market demand from those living in towns and cities and involved in manufacturing and industry. The subsistence economies of Highland and Lowland Scotland were prized open by market demand. This was the same throughout the nation.

The impact of ideology and the Scottish Enlightenment was also an experience shared throughout the nation. Ideas can be regarded as much more potent than economic forces. The way the mindset changed from one set of aspirations and perspectives to another is very important. By 1800 it was commonplace at landlord and factorial social levels to think change was good and nature was not pre-ordained, but could be changed for the better through human intervention. Professor Devine, likening the field systems of southern Scotland to Edinburghs New Town, suggested that this was evident in the symmetrical landscape of lowland Scotland. This enlightened ideology, particularly practised individualism and the old community husbandry employed from medieval times to the early 18th Century, was regarded as positively harmful not only economically but also morally as it constrained the ambition and competitive instincts of the individual. Also common to both regions was the impact of emigration. Wigtown Countys private census of the 1750s compared with the national 1801 census shows that population fell at the same time as the national population of Scotland was growing. Professor Devine asserted that the only explanation for population stability or decline is migration or emigration, as there is no evidence that the people did not want to produce offspring. There are also strong differences between the Clearances in the Highlands and the Lowlands. By 1700 in Lowland Scotland there was a degree of social stability; the last fortified house in Lowland Scotland was built in 1660 and the Border Reivers were now a memory. Lowland estate leases of this time were exclusively economic in nature. These leases were usually valid for a period of nine to 11 years and tenants were largely secure for the period of the lease and had no military obligations attached to these. Loss of land tenancy became part of the normal leasing and releasing of farms. Additionally, not all leases came up for renewal at the same time and, therefore, when it became obvious leases would not be renewed, this happened over time rather than en masse. Most Lowland tenants, therefore, accepted this as the deal with the landowner. In the Highlands, however, there was still a military requirement attached to leases until the mid 18th Century, meaning that in return for land and succour in hard times, the family would provide armed service when required. Professor Devine described a neo-clanship that was formed after 1760 whereby the landowners, acting as military entrepreneurs, provided young men from their estates for the Highland regiment in return for payment and patronage. Whole parishes were stripped of young men, many of whom never returned. There is a perception that when promises were broken in peace time a bond was broken between the landowners and the people, and this caused an emotional reaction in the Highlands. In most parts of Scotland, mixed farming of grain and animal husbandry had developed by 1760. This was a labour-intensive style of farming and to develop this commercially there was a need to invest in roads, steadings and enclosures. Contrary to this, the western Highlands and Islands were a zone of pastoral farming, a system which is capital and land intensive with limited need for people. Professor Devine suggested that when you have a society where the elites in society are interested in profit rather than benevolence and paternalism, then Clearance is inevitable. What happened to the cotters of the lowlands? There is a common belief that they moved to the expanding cities. Professor Devine believes that this is not the case. Alongside new structures of agriculture sprang up an extraordinary expansion of small-scale urbanism in the form of hamlets and planned villages; by 1750 there were 91 such settlements in Dumfries and Galloway, many of which are still in existence today. Professor Devine purported that the cotters lived on under a different nomenclature and were retained, not on farms, but relocated to villages and employed in other rural crafts and used as labour for busy periods. This, therefore, was not expulsion of the Highland variety but relocation rather than Lowland Clearance. William Cobbett, writing in 1832, said of the Lothians region, everything here is

abundant but people, who have been studiously swept from the land. We are now beginning to realise where these people went. There are also dissimilarities in the history of the two regional economies. The process of modernity did create pain in Lowlands, but the Lowlands did not experience the Highlands catastrophe. Before 1815, the first phase of Highland Clearances was the creation of the crofting system. Crofts, however, were so small that crofters had to find extra employment. John Sinclair in 1799 calculated exactly that crofts only gave subsistence to a certain degree, for the remaining 200 days people had to search for non-land employment. After 1815, nonland employment collapsed. At the same time there was a rising population. Subdivision of land through crofts anchored people to the land. Potato cultivation was the biggest single yielder of food on limited acreage. The first major harvest failure and the partial collapse of the potato crop in 1836 was followed by the Great Highland Famine of 1846 and during this time Clearance once again reared its head. Professor Devine stated that no part of the rural lowlands experienced this, indeed for two years following the Famine, Lowland charities moved in effectively and kept the people alive. There was a huge increase in Summons of Removal by the early 1850s and this coincided with the commencement of compulsory emigration, whereby people were given the opportunity to move abroad supported by landlords funds. Consequentially between 1848 and 1853, 18,000 people from the Hebrides took up this offer and, in the two decades prior to 1861, one third of the 1841 population left Highland Scotland. Professor Devine concluded that although both clearances involved removal, the Highland experience was more draconian and lasted until the 1850s whereas in the Lowlands the process of Clearance had largely stopped by 1810. Highland society was also still far more deferential to their landlords. Society in the mid-19th Century, especially through the critique of the Liberal Party, was becoming much less deferential to the landed establishment and indeed was becoming very critical. The plight of Highland Scotland was used by the hegemonic Liberal Party to demonstrate that landlordism was a negative force in the lives of the Scottish people. Immediately a connection was made between the Highland Clearances, politics and future resonance.