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In the annals of Scottish
agriculture, and specially of agriculture as it concerned that limited
district in the north-eastern part of Scotland to which the jottings that
follow will be chiefly confined, the eighteenth century was, throughout
almost its whole course, a period of remarkable stagnation. It opened
inauspiciously, in so far as the close of the preceding century had been
marked by a series of very ungenial seasons, which brought with them
disastrously deficient harvests, and want of food, amounting in many parts
to absolute famine. The method of tillage too, had seen no improvement
from time immemorial; and as a natural consequence of this, the land, even
in ordinary seasons, had in many cases come to yield not more, but less
than it had yielded in the time that had gone before. The system pursued
was one of exhaustion, and the cultivated part of the soil was to a large
extent getting quite worn out. The native cattle were small, ill-grown
animals; and they were
correspondingly ill fed.
The spirit of enterprise was not yet
abroad. For the first thirty
years of the century, that is from 1700 to 1730, "the medium price of
lands sold in the county of Aberdeen did not," we
are told, "exceed sixteen years’ purchase of the then
low rents." It was not always that the lairds could find tenants willing
to "keep in the rigs" at a merely nominal rent, until resort was had to
the practice of stocking farms as occasion required on "steelbow," a
technical term, the signification of which was that the landlord provided
a "stocking" of cattle, corn, and implements, and the tenant became bound
to return to him articles equal in quantity and quality at the end of his
lease, if he could not free himself sooner. A man, if he were so minded,
might readily obtain a "tack" on very easy terms, so far as a money or
other payment was concerned; and that tack to last not for his own
lifetime only, but for the period of one or two lives thereafter of such
persons as he chose to name.
And small in amount as the money
payments to rental were, they were not always, nor indeed generally, made
off the produce of the land. It was chiefly through the manufacture of
home-spun cloths, and the knitting of stockings for exportation that money
came into the hands of the smaller tenants, sub-tenants, and cottar folks;
and it was chiefly through them that it reached both the principal tenant
and the proprietor, other sources of revenue hardly existing for either,
in so far as local industry was concerned.
The roads they had were roads only
by courtesy. Wheeled vehicles were scarcely known, and would have been but
little serviceable if they had been more plentiful. The best frequented
lines of road were not much else than mere tracks, that had taken their
form from the hoof-marks of the cattle that traversed them; a few stones
being sometimes roughly thrown into the bottom of a soft bit, forming a
kind of rude causeway, sometimes not. And thus came the story of a certain
man and his mare. As he plodded along, driving the animal before him, with
the pack saddle on her back, the wary beast boggled at a particular part
in the road, where she had "laired" on a previous occasion, and
fairly refused to go on. But the mare had overlooked the fact that it was
now in the drought of summer, whereas it had formerly been raw winter. And
her master, failing to persuade her that it was safe to hold on her way,
exclaimed "Wae-worth ye, beastie; yer memory’s a hantle better than your
jeedgment." The people dwelt
almost of necessity much amongst themselves, living in a simple, homely
style, on the produce of their own cultivation. Observant strangers, in
speaking of diversities in manners, and style of speech, among the common
people, professed to note specific differences, if not between the
inhabitants of one parish and the inhabitants of another, certainly
between those of one district and those of other districts
in the same shire; and it might be, in some
instances, not half-a-dozen miles apart. The state of matters was not
unfavourable to the growth of certain virtues, such as neighbourliness,
social sympathy, and the like. And along with these there was almost
necessarily contractedness of view and lack of the spirit of progress. It
was equally natural that there should exist a considerable tinge of
superstitious feeling, manifesting itself in such forms as the prevailing
beliefs in fairies, ghosts, witches, and water kelpies, as well as in a
sort of character who seems to have held a midway place between the fully
developed warlock, who had his commission directly from the Prince of
Darkness, and the seer, or person originally gifted, more or less, with
superhuman power which enabled him to cope with certain bodily ailments
and various other of the ills that afflict humanity.
Among the peasantry
generally, as indeed amongst other classes of society during the same
period, religious fouling was in a rather dormant state. The prevailing
sentiment was pretty much that which, at a later era,
came to be described by the term
"moderate," understood in its worst sense. The "Seceder," when, in due
time, he
became an existing entity, here and there, was
ordinarily regarded, and described as a pestilent fanatic simply; the "Missionar’,"
who in his turn was held in similar repute, did not come on the scene till
a later date. It is not very easy, and might not be altogether wise, to
pronounce an explicit judgment on the social morality of the period,
comparatively viewed. In the north-eastern part of Scotland the great
religious movements that accompanied and followed the Reformation, down to
the Revolution of 1688, did not pervade the commonalty to the same extent,
nor stir their feelings to a like depth, as in districts further
southward. How far this may have been significant of, or have tended to
promote, obtuseness of moral feeling in a comparatively rude state of
society, we do not profess to say. But in so far as local records lead us,
there does not at any rate appear to be much ground to believe that the
social morality of the eighteenth century was in many of its phases of a
higher or purer type than that of the century that has followed it.
By the middle of the eighteenth
century, and even a little before it, the subject of improvement in
agriculture had engaged the attention of men of intelligence; chiefly men
of some position, who, while they had a direct interest in the subject as
landed proprietors, were in several cases also actively engaged in
professional life or in commerce. Some of these to advanced theorising
added successful practice in such matters as turnip cultivation and the
establishment of a rotation of crops; and notably also in the planting of
timber trees. But it took long time till their example, in the matter of
improved husbandry, was generally followed by the tenants, who were, as a
rule, equally devoid of means and of the spirit of enterprise. Prejudice
in favour of the old system and against the new was strong, too; and in
some cases manifested itself in direct attempts to obstruct or defeat
efforts toward improvement. Nor need we be altogether surprised at this.
The time had not long gone by, when the highest agricultural wisdom merely
sought to conserve the experience of the past as a creed for the present,
and a guide in the future.
And the changes mooted must have
seemed exceedingly revolutionary. It was not at an early date in the
century, but towards the latter part of it—somewhere between the years
1770 and 1780—that a decent woman in the district of Garioch, in
Aberdeenshire, found herself left a widow, with two sons coming toward
man’s estate. The family had cultivated the same farm for several
generations, perfectly contented with their lot. It was a good farm; but
under a constant succession of cereal crops, with no variation except from
oats to bore every third or fourth crop, even good "intoon" land did not
improve; and now the elder son and heir to the "tack"—like a headstrong
young man, and disregarding the example of his seniors—would follow the
new fashion of husbandry, which some of the neighbouring lairds had begun
to practise. His mother was sadly distressed at the idea; but what availed
it that she had the sympathy of her younger and more timorous son if the
other would have his way; his latest extravagance was the determination to
apply lime-shells as a quickening manure to the exhausted and inert
"rigs." The perplexed widow could only send for a neighbour farmer of
acknowledged sagacity and prudence to decide what ought to be done. The
neighbour, came, duly took note of what was going on, and, seeing the
hopelessness of the case, proceeded to discharge his office of counsellor
faithfully; and of course, very adversely to the youthful improver,
winding up with this deliverance—"Weel, ‘oman, I dinna believe that that
loon ‘ll halt till he herry ye oot at the door, an’ syne gae to the
sodgers." The result of this "finding" was that the hot-headed young man
threw up his birthright and was paid off with the sum of £30 sterling, his
cannier brother assuming the office of farmer in his stead. The wilful
young man did not go to the soldiers, it may be said, but betook himself
to the county town for the purpose of acquiring as perfectly as he could
the handicraft of the blacksmith, then in a rather primitive state in
country districts. And having fairly mastered his business at a somewhat
mature stage of his life, he set up his "smiddy," building his fire wholly
of coals in place of home-made charcoal, and otherwise prosecuting his
calling in accordance with his own advanced notions: although it was not
he, but his son, who followed in succession to him in the same business,
whose services came to be in repute in the first quarter of the present
century as the only blacksmith over a wide district who understood, and
could, with his own hand, fit up all the iron work of the thrashing mill
and winnowing machine, then coming into general use, and if need were of
the "meal mill" as well.
Generally, the latent energies of
the people, which in the early part of the eighteenth century had been
starved down by the meagre style in which physical life was sustained on
the one hand, and the discouragement to enterprise found in the existence
of heritable jurisdictions and the repressive fiscal system of the time on
the other, had been only partially stirred at its close. Old customs; old
habits of life, thought, and speech; antiquated implements, and obsolete
modes of operation still kept their place with a wonderful tenacity; and
the march of improvement, clogged as it was by sundry extraneous
impediments, the weight of which we have difficulty under our greatly
altered conditions in realising, was yet but slow and halting. |
