For Highland farmers, the period from the end of the sixteenth down to the early eighteenth century, but especially the years that formed the Maunder Minimum 1645-1715, were exceptionally difficult with phases of poor or failed harvests brought about by prolonged spells of cold or wet conditions at critical times of the year or by extreme climatic events such as exceptional storms. Studies have been published of how ordinary farmers may have been affected by such poor conditions or events but what is still needed is a greater understanding of whether landlords or estates could deploy coping strategies to help counter or mitigate the stress caused by poor or failed harvests. Using data largely for the Breadalbane estate, this paper looks at how landlords may have used four coping strategies: rests of rent, eases or abatements, the extended use of both bowgang and steelbow tenancies, and rent conversions. Examples of these various strategies are presented. However, it is argued that their use needs to be seen not just against a background of outbreaks of poor weather or extreme weather events but also against the background of Highland farm output being increasingly seen as something capable of being marketed with the capital raised helping to offset some of the losses.
This article examines the figure studies executed by Paul Sandby while based in Scotland between 1747 and 1752. It suggests that Sandby was the first artist to give extensive and detailed treatment to the appearance, activities and pastimes of ordinary Scottish people. In a large body of drawings, etchings and paintings Sandby produced an unrivalled visual record of daily life in and around Edinburgh and in the process depicted numerous occupations, entertainments and practices for the first time in a Scottish context. As a result, he provides valuable evidence to illuminate the social history of Scotland in the mid eighteenth century. Beyond this, it is argued that Sandby was a foundational figure in the making of the nation’s genre art. In his rendering of quotidian routines, festive occasions, and interiors scenes, his illustration of Allan Ramsay’s The Gentle Shepherd, and his collaborative relationship with David Allan, Sandby was a key influence on the flowering of genre studies in Scotland over the generations following.
This article examines Shetland's place within the domestic and international world of sport: as a named polity, entity, bureaucracy, or ‘nation’. Shetland sport's relationship with athletes (and governments) outside of Scotland has existed at least since 1929. In the years before the Second World War, Shetland and the Faroe Islands held regular sporting exchanges (particularly within men's football), ostensibly to celebrate the historic relationship of Shetland and Faroese cultures, but also to solidify commercial fishing relationships. Long envious of Faroese powers and amenities, the outset of the oil industry in Shetland during the 1970s, and the creation of Shetland Islands Council (SIC) and the Shetland Charitable Trust saw the construction of state-of-the-art sporting facilities and the co-option of private sporting clubs into the state sector. Meanwhile, Shetland's hosting of the 2005 Island Games, largely considered to be successful, nevertheless reflected tensions around centralised ‘branding’, devolution, and the perceived need to stress a unique identity apart from Scotland.
This article reassesses a major and controversial field, and its remit dictates its length. Firstly, it reviews the scholarship of the Highland Clearances (c.1760-1860) and Land Agitation (1870s/80s) since the 1970s. Secondly, and building on the cultural turn identified in the more recent scholarship, it argues for the primary importance not of demography or economy but ideology: the Clearances and Land Agitation as at root a clash between the political economy and a Gaelic ethical worldview or system which embodied a social contract and bears analogy with E. P. Thompson's 'moral economy'. For all that their collision is taken to explain the peculiar intensity of the Highland Clearances, political economy and Gaelic moral economy are not considered as monolithic or mutually exclusive, and allusions are made to a 'third way' never taken. Recovering and centring the Gaelic moral economy allows for a more holistic envisioning of the period from within and without, and depends upon proper engagement with Gaelic and Gaelic-derived sources: oral tradition, the evidence given to the Napier Commission (1883-4) and especially Gaelic poetry and song, the last treated here as both a living archive of Gaelic ethics maintained by the poets, and a seismograph of social change. Finally, the article draws on the cultural turn and Gaelic sources to reappraise Clearance and post-Clearance society, represented here by proprietors and tacksmen above, the middling factorial class, and 'the people below'. Human relationships within and across these social strata are reconsidered, and human behaviour evaluated to acknowledge diversity born of personality and place, and spectrums of behaviour. Acknowledgement is also made of Gaelic participation and agency at all social levels, and on both sides of the mooted ideological divide.
In the ongoing scholarly debate about the secularisation of Scottish (and British) society, churchgoing is one of the few metrics for which longitudinal data exist, albeit fragmentarily. This article assembles and analyses the evidence about levels of church attendance in Dundee, Scotland's fourth largest city, during the nineteenth to early twenty-first centuries. It draws upon quantitative data (twelve religious censuses, six with varying methodologies between 1836 and 1901, and six with standardised methodology between 1980 and 2016) and some qualitative sources (chiefly local newspapers). Relative to population, churchgoing in Dundee appears to have declined continuously since the mid-nineteenth century, when at least two fifths of Dundonians worshipped on an average Sunday, the equivalent figure c.2023 being just 3.76 per cent. Possible explanations for this decrease are briefly explored.
