Foyster E., Whatley C.A. A History of Everyday Life in Scotland, 1600-1800

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of poll tax returns (1694–6) for Lowland areas concluded that there, too,

between a half and two-thirds of touns had cottars present, with lower than

average ﬁ gures for Renfrewshire and upland Aberdeenshire, but higher than

average ﬁ gures for coastal Aberdeenshire, Midlothian and Berwickshire.

Where sources are speciﬁ c, cottars come across as a diverse group. A

detailed listing of cottars occupying cot-houses ‘within [the] farm called the

Plewlands’ in Inverdovart, Fife, 1714, records as many as ﬁ fteen present,

some having a house, yard and one or two acres, others an acre without a

house or yard, and some an acre or two acres ‘Laboured’.

Likewise, a 1739

rental for the Scott of Harden estate in Berwickshire recorded fourteen

‘Coate Houses’ at Mertoun, holding between one and three acres.

Such

arable land formed part of that held by the tenant to whom a cottar was

attached.

Likewise, any right to graze a cow or few sheep would have come

out of the tenant’s soum. For others, their stake in land amounted to no

more than a garden or kailyard, though some might also be given meal and

clothing as part of their contract. As a source of labour, cottars carried out

a variety of work, including basic tasks like ploughing and herding, while

some also carried out the labour services and carriages that tenants were still

burdened with down to the mid-eighteenth century.

The different ways in which these tacksmen, tenants, sub-tenants, crofters

and cottars came together make it difﬁ cult to squeeze the size and composi-

tion of the pre-improvement community into a standard form. However,

what is clear is that for most people in the Scottish countryside, the everyday

was shaped around small communities embracing a number of families. Few

families lived alone, though we can ﬁ nd some one-family ‘touns’.

At the

very least, the typical community comprised a small handful of tenants, their

cottars and their respective families, or a single tenant plus a few cottars and

their families, with the largest having ten or more families and some, many

more. For some Highland areas, if not for Lowland areas, we can actually

quantify their overall size, though the aggregate data presented in Table 1.2

conceals much local variability. What is also clear is that few pre- improvement

Highland or Lowland touns could have formed a community entirely of

equals, made up solely of tenants holding the same amount of land. Instead,

most brought together people with different degrees of resource entitlement,

with ample low-order rungs on the farming ladder for those cottars and lesser

tenants with initiative and enterprise to better themselves.

Yet establishing the scale and composition of touns in this way may still

not be the last word on who exactly came together in everyday routines. This

is because what we ﬁ nd recorded in rentals and listings as forming a ‘toun’

need not necessarily have been the working unit around which communities

organised their everyday. Some touns may, in actuality, have been infor-

mally sub-divided by their occupiers into smaller working sub-touns.

Two

factors encouraged this practice. First, many had arable sectors sprawled

discontinuously over fairly large areas, often with their settlement broken

32 Robert A. Dodgshon

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Everyday Structures, Rhythms and Spaces 33

down into clusters that matched the spread of arable land. Arranging such

arable land into smaller working units enabled tenants to work it more

efﬁ ciently. The desire to create smaller, more manageable units was the

reason for a comprehensive reorganisation of touns into smaller units in

Strathavon during the early seventeenth century.

Secondly, many pre-

improvement touns were held by multiple tenants. In the majority of cases,

formally dividing out the holding of each tenant would have been a regular

occurrence owing to the prevalence of short tenures prior to the improv-

ing movement.

While dividing such shares into runrig was a widespread

choice, it was not one mandated by agreements. It can be no surprise that

some opted to have their shares as separate holdings, a decision that had

a far-reaching impact on their everyday.

What adds extra interest to this

last point is that many touns across east-central Scotland involved large

units of assessment (that is, the ploughgate or davach), whose organisation

into working touns could involve a complex internal division into ploughs,

halves, quarters, etc. When we look at the interlocking pyramid of shares

that could exist, such as with the ‘sixth part of the lands of Nethir Fornocht

called the west half of the middle third part of the lands of Nethir Fornocht’,

1623,

it becomes difﬁ cult to decide at what level such shares were laid out

as runrig shares or as separate touns, but each level must, at some point,

have involved an active decision over the preferred size of the everyday

working community.

Whether the typical pre-improvement toun was ﬂ exible over how it

organised itself raises questions about whether we can identify factors that

bound communities together in their everyday and others that fostered

division. Where odal tenure still existed in the northern isles, the succes-

sive partition of holdings between co-heirs tended to map the close ties of

kinship into local landholding, creating ‘township estates’ bonded through

the ties of a single family, such as the Corrigalls of Corrigall or the Ibisters

of Ibister.

These township estates relied on a continuity of occupation by

particular families combined with the partible inheritance of land. Such con-

tinuity can be found elsewhere, but the absence of partible inheritance meant

kinship mattered to the bonding of communities only when other factors

were at work. Thus, just as landowners in the west Highlands tended to

appoint tacksmen who were afﬁ liated to them, so also could tacksmen look

after their kin when sub-letting land.

Yet we must not overstate the extent

to which working communities were forged through kin ties. Part of the

reason for this is that when we look at Highland toun communities through

rentals, they do not come across as socially stable. The temporariness of

tenure for many Highland tenants fostered a regular turnover of occupants.

Subsistence crises were also disruptive.

The majority of Highlanders may

have lived out their lives in the same district but not necessarily in the same

toun, so that what constituted the everyday for most was subject to continu-

ous renegotiation. Leading tacksmen were an exception to this generalisation,

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34 Robert A. Dodgshon

reinforcing their position with claims of a duthchas or the hereditary right to

their possession,

or by holding a wadset of their land as security for a loan

made to the landowner.

In the Lowlands, some tenants also claimed an

hereditary possession of their land on the basis of kindly tenure.

While,

where it existed, feuing also brought a stability to landholding.

Yet among

ordinary tenants, continuity of occupation by particular families was more

likely within the same estate or barony than within the same toun, as work

on the Panmure estate has shown.

Just as some factors worked to bind communities together, others cut

across them creating tensions and even cleavages. Within some, the posi-

tion of those who held crofts may have been ambivalent. Most formed a

physically and tenurially discrete unit, some even being set down as a private

enclave in the midst of a toun’s runrig arable land. While they were very

much involved in the day-to-day activities of touns, there must have been

a sense in which they were also outside it. This applied particularly to the

service crofts set to millers, brewers and the like. The commonest form was

the mill croft, which were widespread in the Lowlands and across the eastern

and southern Highlands, but thinned as one moved north-westwards, where

the small horizontal or ladle mill and the hand-operated rotary quern took

its place. Where mills existed, touns in the district immediately around it

were thirled to it or compelled to have their grain ground there, the miller

taking a share or multure as payment.

For tenants, this imposed relation-

ship led to endless friction with millers over the quality of the service and its

cost.

Such tension was probably present wherever thirlage existed, but it

must have been a particular problem along the dividing line between those

areas that had vertical mills and those areas that avoided paying multures

by relying on more do-it-yourself forms like the smaller horizontal mill or

quern. In the transitional zone between the two, the inevitable tension is well

captured by bylaws ordering the conﬁ scation of querns.

So-called brew-seats, ailhouses or changehouses were also a focus for a

great deal of tension owing to the way in which some tenants were bound

by their tacks to have their barley converted to malt at those controlled by

estates.

It also arose from the growing involvement of estates in the sup-

pression of illicit distilling.

There was a degree of self-interest here, for

many estates derived rental income from the brew-seats or ailhouses estab-

lished on their land.

As at Snizort on Skye, such brew-seats or ailhouses

had the privilege ‘of brewing, malting, vending and Distilling all sorts of

legal spirits and liquers therein’,

and were the logical precursor for the

inns that spread across the region over the eighteenth century;

places

where the outside world and travellers like Johnson and Boswell touched

the local.

Even over the seventeenth century, the structure of the everyday com-

munity was changing, with tenant numbers in Lowland touns being slowly

reduced.

This creation of larger holdings was probably bound up with a

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Everyday Structures, Rhythms and Spaces 35

shift toward a more commercial orientation of the toun economy, with many

single tenants in fertile areas like the Lothians keeping all the toun in their

own hands and farming it using cottars.

It has been argued that this trend

toward larger holdings amounted to a gradual revolution in landholding, one

that paved the way for the investment and husbandry changes of the improv-

ing movement.

Precisely because of this connection, those touns that still

carried multiple tenants found themselves subject to a rapid catch-up once

the improving movement got under way in the mid-eighteenth century, their

tenant numbers being reduced over one or two leases or, in some cases, over

night.

In fact, contemporary comments on this surge in tenant reduction

compare with what was later said about the Highland Clearances.

However,

not all landowners saw proﬁ t in reducing tenant numbers so as to create

large working units. Where cattle rearing was important, such as in parts

of Aberdeenshire and Ayrshire, landholding was reorganised out of runrig

in a way that preserved the size of holdings that had existed under runrig.

Instead of being part of a larger runrig community, these newly divided

farms were now independent farms based largely around family labour. In

the Highlands, too, some single tenants possessing large tacks by the 1720s

functioned not as tacksmen but as commercial cattle farmers. By the 1750s

though, it was the spread of sheep that started to drive tenant reduction,

runrig touns being cleared to make way for sheep farmers.

Initially, the

touns affected by the clearances were relatively small, as were the sheep

farms that replaced them, but as the process reached north of the Great

Glen, and especially as it spread into Sutherland by the 1790s, we ﬁ nd single

sheep farms displacing a number of runrig touns and whole communities

replaced by a single shepherd and his family.

Given the extent of social dislocation associated with the Sutherland

clearances especially, the scale of public reaction generated by them is not

surprising. However, we must not lose sight of the fact that a great deal of

runrig in the Lowlands was also removed by tenant reduction. When we

ask how this reduction changed the social basis of everyday life for the farm

community, three speciﬁ c changes stand out. First, in many areas, it led to

larger working units held by fewer tenants, with the farming ladder being

simpliﬁ ed by the removal of its lower rungs. Secondly, while the new hus-

bandries that spread across the Lowlands from the mid-eighteenth century

onwards required signiﬁ cant amounts of hired labour, the overall size of

communities shrank in the transition from runrig toun to farm. Part of this

loss was due to the reduction in tenant numbers, but some contemporary

reports also make it clear that the number of cottars also shrank noticeably.

Thirdly, in some areas, the contraction of numbers was more a relocation

than a disappearance, with the growth of planned villages being sustained by

labourers who ‘lived in rural villages while still working on the land’,

and

by the fact that many farmsteads were relocated to sites more appropriate to

their newly laid out farms.

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36 Robert A. Dodgshon

STRUCTURING THE EVERYDAY: THE RURAL ECONOMY

Traditional peasant societies have been described as made up of part societies,

comprising an indigenous cultural base overlain with what was imposed on

them by the linkages and demands of a wider world. The pre- improvement

rural community of early modern Scotland ﬁ ts easily into this model. Yet we

still need to ask how far such wider linkages and demands intruded down-

wards into the everyday life of the ordinary toun-dweller? I want to consider

this question from one particular but vital perspective: was the world of the

ordinary farming community open or closed economically?

The typical fermtoun of the early seventeenth century had a non- specialised

farm economy, geared as much to the production of grain as to livestock and

livestock produce. When we take into account the other ways in which many

farmers answered their own needs – as their own weaver, ploughwright and

even house builder – it raises the question of whether the typical toun sub-

sisted in a relatively self-sufﬁ cient world at this point and whether the pro-

gressive loss of economic insularity and opening up to the market provides

us with an over-arching theme for the period from 1600 to 1800? We can

answer yes to this question, but it needs to be heavily qualiﬁ ed.

Many Lowland touns were already engaged in marketing by the seventeenth

century. However, a signiﬁ cant part of what reached markets, probably the

predominant share during most of the seventeenth century, comprised grain

received by landowners as part payment of rents in kind.

Such payments

meant many farm communities had an involvement with marketing, with

some, such as those on the Mar and Kellie estate in Aberdeenshire,

even

being required to deliver their grain rents to nearby markets or ports, but it

was not yet an involvement driven by a marketing mentality among farmers.

That said, alongside what they marketed through landlords, many ordinary

tenants must have had a small, more direct involvement that addressed their

own needs In some cases, it was the need to raise money for the cash com-

ponent of their rents. In other cases, it was to balance deﬁ ciencies in their

farm economy. In the more marginal areas of the Highlands, grain deﬁ cien-

cies were endemic, so that communities routinely traded what they had in

abundance (for example, cheese) for that in which they were deﬁ cient (for

example, meal). Such marketing was about correcting imbalances in the farm

economy, a trade in use not exchange values.

The distinction being drawn here between the large-scale marketing of

food rents by landlords, a sector probably infused from the outset with a

search for exchange value, and the petty marketing engaged in by ordinary

farmers, a sector infused as much with a search for use as for exchange

value, survived for most of the seventeenth century. The increased volumes

of grain that were marketed over the seventeenth century were, in the ﬁ rst

instance, sustained by that marketed by landlords.

The increased ﬂ ow came

not just from landlocked Lowland touns close to the major urban markets

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Everyday Structures, Rhythms and Spaces 37

but also from touns set at a much greater distance that had easy access to the

coast, including areas as far north as Caithness, Orkney and Shetland.

The

extent to which this trade reconﬁ gured the everyday life of toun is under-

lined by the extent to which toun economies in some areas, like the Lothians,

had become specialised and market-oriented by the end of the seventeenth

century. By this point though, a key change had started to unfold as some

landlords began to convert their rents in kind into cash, shifting the burden

of marketing on to the ordinary farmer.

Farms in parts of the south-west

and southern uplands also became more specialised by the late seventeenth

century, the former feeding steady numbers of cattle into cross-border droves

and the latter supplying sheep.

In both cases, their early shift toward spe-

cialisation was socially disruptive of communities. In the south-west, tenant

numbers were reduced and large cattle enclosures established in response to

the growing market opportunities for stock, the pioneer or ‘chiefe’ enclosure

being at Baldoon in Galloway.

In time, attempts to level such enclosures

became a focus of opposition to the loss of tenancies.

To the east, in the

southern uplands, touns were being converted into more specialised sheep

farms as early as the 1670s and 1680s. Out of 148 hill farms on the Buccleuch

estate, twenty had over 1,000 sheep and forty-seven over 500 by this point.

Again, it was a shift underpinned by a contraction in tenant numbers.

Even in the Highlands, it would be difﬁ cult to support claims that farmers

had a wholly self-sufﬁ cient economy prior to the spread of sheep. In terms of

its basic grain needs, the region mixed areas of surplus with areas of scarcity,

so that most found themselves drawn into the market process, directly or

indirectly. Remarkably, isolated areas, like the fringe of small islands around

the southern and western edge of Harris, such as Killegray and Pabbay,

can be seen handing over substantial payments of grain to MacLeod of

MacLeod in late seventeenth-century rentals.

By contrast, mainland areas

like Glengarry

and Knoydart,

routinely imported grain, offsetting its cost

by marketing livestock products such as butter, cheese, hides and wool. The

vast bulk of such marketing probably involved low value goods traded at low

thresholds. Thus, farmers from Knoydart, most of whom had barely an acre

or two of arable land, regularly sold cheese at markets like Inverness so as to

buy grain. Some were probably among the traders seen at Inverness market

in the 1720s whose marketable goods appeared:

of a most contemptible Value, such as these; viz. – two or three cheeses, of about

three or four Pounds weight a piece; a kid sold for sixpence or Eight pence at

most; a small Quantity of Butter, in something that looks like a Bladder, and is

sometimes set down upon the dirt in the street; three or four Goat skins; a Piece

of Wood for an Axeltree to one of the little Carts, &c.

Most of these transactions would have amounted to an exchange of use

values, with individuals trading in one basic item of necessity so as to imme-

diately purchase another, often bartering one against the other. Indeed,

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38 Robert A. Dodgshon

given the scarcity of money in the Highlands, bartering would have been an

important form of everyday interaction for farmers and cottars. The rise of

the cattle droving trade from the early seventeenth century onwards did not

escape this problem. Outwardly, it served the purpose of providing a source

of cash at a time when landowners were converting rents in kind into cash.

However, when we probe into how droving was organised, we ﬁ nd that a

great deal was organised by estates themselves, working through their agents

or professional drovers. Further, though rents were set in cash, tenants were

often allowed to set cattle against this cash so that responsibility for the

drove passed to the estate.

RHYTHMS OF EVERYDAY LIFE

As with all traditional rural communities, everyday life in the Scottish coun-

tryside from 1600 to 1800 was shaped around the rhythms of the seasonal

calendar and the basic routines of resource exploitation. Three types of

evidence enable us to recover these rhythms. First, there are the calendars

of work disclosed by farm diaries and day books. Secondly, there are the

bylaws passed by local barony or birlaw courts that detail when and how par-

ticular routines should be carried out. Thirdly, there is the documentation,

again in court records, of the disputes that arose over particular routines.

If we look at year-round activities drawn from day books, like that for the

Nethermains of the Monymusk estate in Aberdeenshire, 1749, and for the

Marchmont home farm in Berwickshire, 1758–9, we ﬁ nd some basic routines

spread across the calendar (Table 1.3). Before seeing this year-round spread

as a feature of all touns, we should note that many home farms had started to

acquire enclosed parks, plantations, new roads and open ditch drainage by

the mid-eighteenth century, so there were tasks to ﬁ ll the slack times of year.

Further, home farms used not just hired labour but also the labour obliga-

tions burdened on tenants, such as ploughing and shearing, so their calendar

of work may reﬂ ect a need to work around the commitment that tenants had

to their own holdings. Finally, the Monymusk and Marchmont estates were

in areas where pre-improvement cropping involved winter sown crops so

that we would expect more signs of year-round activity.

If we could reconstruct the seasonal rhythms in fermtouns elsewhere,

we would probably ﬁ nd that pre-improvement labour routines were more

seasonally uneven when compared with the husbandries ushered in by the

improving movement. There are three reasons why this would be so. First,

the narrower range of crops sown (mostly bere and oats) and the depend-

ence on spring ploughing and sowing meant that, for most communities,

the basic routines of husbandry were seasonally conﬁ ned, concentrated

into the months between March and May, with harvest lasting from late

August through to late October for oats. Secondly, stock were notoriously

under-managed in winter, being allowed to forage across different touns over

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Everyday Structures, Rhythms and Spaces 39

Table 1.3 Calendar of work: Monymusk, 1749, and Marchmont, 1758–9. Source:

H. Hamilton (ed.), Life and Labour on an Aberdeenshire Estate 1735–1750,

Third Spalding Club (Aberdeen, 1946), pp. 80–130; NAS, Marchmont Muniments,

GD1/651/17.

Monymusk 1749

January: Ploughing, Threshing, Taking Down Fold Dykes, Building

Fold Dykes, Attending Cattle and Sheep, Threshing, Taking

Malt to Miller, Cutting Broom, Driving Burnet Clay, Making

Ropes

February: Ploughing, Threshing, Harrowing, Drawing and Spreading

Clay, Casting Outﬁ eld Dykes, Building Tathfolds, Digging,

Attending Sheep and Cattle, Sowing, Trenching, Cleaning

Houses

March: Ploughing, Sowing, Threshing, Filling Crown of Rigs

April: Ploughing, Threshing, Harrowing, Rolling, Dunging, Sowing,

Ditching, Gathering Stones, Cleaning Houses and Byres

May: Ploughing, Harrowing, Sowing, Dunging, Mending Dykes inc.

Fold Dykes, Managing Cattle, Carting Hay, Mending Horse

Graith, Making Gates, Making Bridge

June: Ploughing, Harrowing, Dunging, Bleeding Cattle, Smiddie

Work, Mending Graith, Mending Folds, Sowing, Drawing

Stones

July: Ploughing, Harrowing, Dunging, Pulling Thistles, Drawing

Stones, Carting Peats, Preparing Folds

August: Ploughing, Pulling Thistles, Hoeing,Weeding, Mending Stable

and Byre, Filling Holes, Attending Market, Drawing Stones,

Cutting Peats, Casting Feal, Building Byre

September: Ploughing, Drawing Peat, Shearing, Making Ropes and Horse

Graith, Threshing, Attending Market, Drawing Divots

October: Ploughing, Threshing, Stacking, Making Ropes, Drawing

Stone, Attending Market, Pulling Turnips, Drawing Divots,

Cleaning Houses

November: Ploughing, Threshing, Cutting Broom, Cleaning Houses,

Drawing Dung, Harrowing, Fold Dykes

December: Ploughing, Threshing, Drawing Dung, Spreading Dung,

Taking Down Previous Year’s Fold Dykes, Mending Graith,

Dressing and Carting Bear

Marchmont 1758–9

January: Ploughing, Leading Divots and earth, Leading Hay, Felling

Timber, Levelling Dykes, Leading Broom

February: Ploughing, Levelling Old Dykes, Leading Hay, Leading

Timber, Leading Lime

March: Ploughing, Levelling, Leading Timber, Leading Lime,

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40 Robert A. Dodgshon

winter without close grazing management, a neglect addressed by the 1686

Act anent winter herding.

Thirdly, the typical toun faced a summer growing

season that was crowded with vital routines, each competing for labour at

one and the same time. Admittedly, some tasks, like weeding, had little place

in pre-improvement husbandry, despite the fact that its arable land was noto-

riously weed infested.

Indeed, some communities would have seen the pres-

ence of arable weeds as a positive advantage, because of their role as famine

foods

or because, as with the barley crop of Galloway,

they added ﬂ avour

to beer. However, in addition to the standard routines of husbandry, some

pre-improvement communities faced heavy summer labour demands from

the cutting of peat and turf, the harvesting of hay and the gathering of seaweed

and ferns. Where touns had access to summer shielings, then the transfer of

stock to them – along with the herding of stock, milking and the making of

cheese – was a further demand on labour at this time of year. Differences in

labour demand also existed as regards the processing of grain. In the more

fertile, grain-abundant touns, the annual routines of harvesting and thresh-

ing were onerous but, once complete, the burden passed to the miller, albeit

at a cost. By comparison, when we look to north-west Highlands and across

the Hebrides, areas whose ecology favoured the hand quern, considerable

amounts of labour, invariably female, were required to grind corn. On Tiree,

it was said to consume the work of 100 women for an entire year.

Squeezed

in around such tasks were other demands, such as spinning, weaving and

house maintenance. Where the last-mentioned involved perishable raw

materials, like wattle, turf, peat, ferns and heather, then the labour involved

in their regular maintenance would have been signiﬁ cant.

Another way of approaching the rhythms of the pre-improvement toun

Table 1.3 (continued)

April: Ploughing, Sowing, Cutting Up Trees, Rolling Marl, Levelling

Dykes

May: Ploughing, Sowing, Carting and Spreading Marl, Levelling,

Leading Dung, Rolling

June: Ploughing, Leading Dung, Grinding Malt, Drawing Stones,

Making Drains, Hoeing

July: Ploughing, Hoeing, Mowing, Leading Hay, Levelling

August: Ploughing, Mowing, Shearing, Leading Hay, Making Ropes,

Spreading Lime

September: Ploughing, Threshing, Leading Stones, Setting Up Corn,

Spreading Lime, Leading Stones, Leading Timber

October: Ploughing, Setting Up Corn, Spreading Lime

November: Ploughing, Leading Corn, Threshing, Road Making, Lime

Spreading, Clearing Stones

December: Ploughing, Road Making and Maintenance

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Everyday Structures, Rhythms and Spaces 41

is through bylaws enacted by local barony courts. Those rhythms that were

most critical to the smooth running of the toun, and which required an

in-step approach between occupiers, were those most likely to be under-

pinned by such bylaws. To some extent, the need for farmers to work

together, to synchronise their routines of husbandry, was secured by general

acts of good neighbourhood.

In addition to these generic acts, more speciﬁ c

acts targeted a range of practices from stock control to peat cutting. Those

enacted over stock control were usually designed to regulate the movements

of stock. There were three basic expectations: setting the date when stock had

to be moved (that is, beyond the head dyke, to the shielings, or to the tath-

folds on outﬁ eld), binding tenants to move stock in step with the common

herd or ﬂ ock, and binding them to maintain folds and dykes so as to make

the regulations over stock movements effective and secure.

Mundane activ-

ities like the cutting of peat were also regulated through bylaws, some courts

issuing acts that bound farmers to cut their peats progressively along a single

face and to replace the turf cover.

Bylaws were also used to give protection

to those resources over which estates sought to exercise a more exclusive

control, such as deer, game birds and blackﬁ sh, or over which they sought

closer regulation, such as timber.

The careful deﬁ nition of who had right

to what is shown by the regulations issued over roof timbers and doors and

whether tenants were allowed to remove them at the end of their tacks.

Bylaws can be revealing, but what ﬁ lls the court record most is not their

enactment but the evidence for their infringement. Such references high-

light the conﬂ icts that could erupt around the mundane aspects of everyday

routines. In runrig touns especially, the potential for disruption was ever

present. As one late-eighteenth-century source for Netherlone put it:

if man’s dispositions were nearly equal & if they considered their neighbours

good at all times as nearly connected with their own, such a method of carrying

on the works of a farm might do very well, but the Contrary is a fatal mistake . . .

often more time is spent in contending, not only what work is ﬁ rst to be done,

than would actually carry the double into execution, and that none may do less

than his neighbour.

Falling out over basic routines caused many a toun to descend into a chaos of

the everyday, though courts did act to restate obligations of good neighbour-

hood, as at Lude, where, in 1627, it was restated that ‘none within the said

ground pertaining to the said Alexr Robertson brak nytborheid to uthers

efter they have streikit ane pleuche togither’.

Invariably, those who were

most disruptive tended to be disruptive in every way. A Sutherland court

entry for 1782 described a Katherine Gun in Achincoull as ‘Guilty of every

sort of bad Neighbourhood in so far as that, she declines assisting in any

thing that belongs to the Welfare of the place.’

Failure to control stock,

especially stock that could cause damage like goats and swine, was a peren-

nial problem, as when, in 1730, a complaint was made that the possessors of

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