Scotland before the Industrial Revolution

An Economic and Social History c.1050-c. 1750

Ian D. Whyte

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317900016
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Grande-Bretagne

This splendid portrait of medieval and early modern Scotland through to the Union and its aftermath has no current rival in chronological range, thematic scope and richness of detail. Ian Whyte pays due attention to the wide regional variations within Scotland itself and to the distinctive elements of her economy and society; but he also highlights the many parallels between the Scottish experience and that of her neighbours, especially England. The result sets the development of Scotland within its British context and beyond, in a book that will interest and delight far more than Scottish specialists alone.

Chapter 1

The Making of Medieval Scotland

‘Till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane…’ In 1054 an event occurred which, thanks to Shakespeare, has become the most celebrated popular image of early-medieval Scotland. King Edward of England ordered Siward, Earl of Northumbria, to invade Scotland and drive out the usurper Macbeth so that his protégé Malcolm, in his view the rightful heir to the kingdom, could be installed. In a battle at Dunsinnan Hill, near the ancient royal centre of Scone, Macbeth was defeated. The accession of Malcolm III has been seen as a turning-point in Scotland’s history. Brought up at the English court he later married Margaret, sister of the Saxon prince Edgar. Their marriage has been seen as marking the start of a reorientation of Scottish society in which English and continental influences were prominent. Three of their sons, Edgar, Alexander I and David I, were successively kings of Scotland. Under all of them, but especially under David, the introduction of Anglo-Norman influences was accelerated. The accession of Malcolm III provides a suitable point from which to begin a survey of the economic and social development of medieval Scotland. About the same time – possibly in 1057 – Thorfinn, Earl of Orkney died. His reign marked the apex of Norse power in northern and western Scotland. His death heralded the start of a decline in Norse influence which allowed the medieval kingdom of Scotland to expand to its full territorial limits.

Malcolm’s accession was more complex than Shakespeare’s compelling but simplified image. The victory at Dunsinnan was only a partial one. For Macbeth was not killed. He retreated beyond the mountain barrier, known as the Mounth, which pinches the coastal plain of eastern Scotland into a narrow pass north of Stonehaven. For another four years Malcolm ruled only Lothian and Strathclyde. When Macbeth was finally defeated and killed in 1057, at Lumphanan beyond the River Dee, his supporters set up his stepson, Lulach, in his place. It was not until the following year, after Lulach was killed, that Malcolm truly became king of Scots.

Although Malcolm can be seen as the king who began the reorganisation of Scottish society along Anglo-Norman lines, it was Macbeth who, at Dunsinnan, strengthened his army with a force of Norman mercenaries. The tenacity of support for Macbeth north of the Mounth following his initial defeat indicates that far from being the usurper of popular history he may have had a legitimate claim to the throne. He had been mormaer (great steward) of the province of Moray, in earlier times a kingdom in its own right. Behind his bid for the throne lay rivalry between different lineages which extended back for centuries. These tensions may have been superimposed on a north–south division of power across the Mounth which can be traced back to Roman times.

A focus on the accession of Malcolm III encourages us to look forward to the social and economic changes which occurred in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Scotland, yet on probing deeper into the events of 1054–58 we are also drawn back into Scotland’s pre-medieval past and into a consideration of important elements of continuity in Scottish society. A starting date of around 1050 is a convenient but arbitrary benchmark and we need to consider Scotland’s society and economy in earlier centuries as a foundation on which to build. The introduction of Anglo-Norman feudalism in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was superimposed on, and integrated with, frameworks of social structures, territorial units and settlement patterns whose origins take us far back beyond the reign of Malcolm III. Historians now emphasise the period from the ninth to the eleventh centuries as one of consolidation within the Scottish kingdom. In seeking the origins of the structures of medieval Scottish society, as they start to become evident with more detailed documentation in the twelfth century, we need to go back beyond the dynasty founded by Kenneth mac Alpin in the mid-ninth century. In doing so we enter a period for which surviving documentary sources are limited, laconic and usually ambiguous. To fill in more of the picture we need to turn to evidence provided by archaeologists and place-name specialists. The information they provide is equally difficult to interpret and sometimes conflicts with what we know from historical sources. Therein lies much of the fascination and the frustration behind the search for the origins of medieval Scotland.

A Multiplicity of Peoples

An unwary reader who ventures into the history of the area we now know as Scotland between the fifth and eleventh centuries is liable to emerge bewildered by the multiplicity of peoples involved – Picts, Scots, Britons, Northumbrians, Norse, Danes, Cumbrians, Gall-Gaedhil – and the complexity of their political relations. Presented baldly, much of the known history of this period appears as a tale of campaigns mounted by outlandishly named warlords for obscure reasons, punctuated by battles and sieges in uncertain locations. There is plenty of scope for theorising on the basis of limited evidence concerning how these peoples became integrated into what was to become the kingdom of Scotland. Nowhere is this more evident than in ideas about the Picts.

Most of what we know about the Picts comes second-hand from records produced by other peoples. As a result Pictish history has been written largely by deduction. This helps explain why they are such a mystery and why differences between them and the other peoples of early-historic North Britain have been emphasised rather than similarities. A tendency to see the Picts as a problem or a curiosity has led to their contribution to the making of medieval Scotland being marginalised. Only in recent years have the Picts been rediscovered as a Celtic people and their role reassessed. The origins of the Picts are uncertain. ‘Picti’, a nickname meaning ‘painted people’, is first recorded by a Roman author in AD297. A century earlier the tribes of eastern Scotland north of the Forth had coalesced into two major groups, the Caledonii and the Maeatae, their territories probably separated by the Mounth. Gradual consolidation under over-kings in northern and southern Pictland and the development of a single monarchy ruling the whole of Pictland emerges only indirectly and indistinctly from the sources. Nevertheless, this process provided the foundations for the later Scottish kingdom. Pictland remained a remarkably stable unit. The Picts beat off the Northumbrian threat to their southern frontier and it was only with the settlement of the Norsemen in the Northern and Western Isles that they were forced to cede territory.

Three elements of Pictish distinctiveness have been emphasised by scholars. First was their use of a different P-Celtic language from that spoken by the Britons of southern Scotland, as well as the existence of an earlier pre-Indo-European tongue, thought by some to have been the language used in Scotland before the arrival of the Celts. Next was a matrilineal system of succession to kingship unique within Britain. This was also thought to have had ancient non-Indo-European origins. Finally, more tangible but no less enigmatic, were the Pictish symbol stones. Recently the reality of the first two of these hallmarks of Pictish individuality has been questioned.¹ Doubt has been cast on the survival of a pre-Celtic language among the Picts, the evidence for which was a limited number of unintelligible ogam inscriptions. Place-name studies have shown that a number of name elements were shared between the Picts and the Britons south of the Forth suggesting that linguistic differences between them may have been less than once suggested. Increasing evidence of intermarriage between the royal houses of Pictland, Strathclyde and Dalriada indicate that linguistic barriers between them were not insuperable.

The existence among the Picts of a markedly different system of succession to the kingship has also been challenged and the evidence – principally a list of Pictish kings – re-interpreted. The matrilineal argument was largely based on the fact that while brother sometimes succeeded brother, son did not follow father until the very end of the Pictish period. This was thought to indicate that the right to kingship was vested in the sons of a royal mother and that in the next generation it passed to the sons of their sisters. These king lists have been assumed to chronicle a single dynasty of kings succeeding through a matrilineal system. It has, however, been suggested that they refer to an over-kingship which was open to claimants from a number of lineages ruling sub-kingdoms, similar to contemporary systems elsewhere in the Celtic world.² Under such circumstances it would have been almost impossible for a son to succeed his father in the kingship. Interpreting the evidence so as to draw parallels between the Picts and neighbouring societies seems more realistic than adopting a theory which places them in a unique category.

To the west of Pictland were the Scots. Migrating from Ireland they established the kingdom of Dalriada around AD500. From an initial base in Cowal, Dalriada expanded to include most of later Argyll. The boundary between Pictland and Dalriada was Drumalbyn, the main West Highland watershed. How far the influence of Dalriada had spread northwards towards Skye and the Outer Hebrides before the arrival of the Norse is not clear. Although speaking a different version of Celtic from the Picts the Scots shared a similar society based on tribal kingdoms controlled by warrior kings and their war bands. Within Dalriada three main lineages occupying distinctive territories can be recognised; the Cenel nGabrain in Kintyre, Cowal and mid-Argyll, as well as Arran, Bute and Jura, the Cenel Loairn in Lorn, Ardnamurchan and probably Mull and Tiree, and the smaller, less important Cenel Oengusa based on Islay. Each lineage had its own ruler and the kings of the two more powerful ones competed for the over-kingship of Dalriada.

South of the Forth and Clyde were other Celtic peoples who can be termed Britons. In the Lothians the kingdom of Gododdin was overrun by the Northumbrians during the seventh century. In the west was the kingdom of Strathclyde, with one of its major centres on Dumbarton Rock. The Strathclyde Britons have, like the Picts, been underrated in the past because most of the surviving sources that refer to them were generated elsewhere. Strathclyde was powerful enough to keep the Scots in check and possibly at times to impose kings on southern Pictland. Until their fortress on Dumbarton Rock was besieged and captured by the Norse in 870 the military strength of Strathclyde remained considerable.

In south-west Scotland the political structure is less clear. In post-Roman times the British kingdom of Rheged extended north of the Solway and may have included most of Galloway. This region was to become a cultural melting-pot. Place names indicate an influx of settlers from Ireland roughly contemporary with the foundation of Dalriada, and a later phase of Gaelic immigration, perhaps from Dalriada itself around 800. There was an infiltration of Anglians into Dumfries-shire in the early eighth century, a later wave of Norse and Norse-Gaelic incomers from the west and north, and a Danish element from the south. In the early tenth century the sub-kings of Strathclyde pushed southwards into Cumbria annexing the Solway Lowlands and the Eden Valley. What languages the inhabitants of Galloway spoke at any time, which culture they identified with and whose leadership they accepted is something of a puzzle.

What we know of the political history of the Picts, Scots and Britons tends to emphasise the differences between them but their similarity as Celtic peoples should not be forgotten. In terms of material culture and social structures they had an essential unity which was to persist for centuries. Against them impinged two different groups, the Angles of Northumbria and the Scandinavians. In the seventh century the Anglian kingdom of Northumbria expanded northwards through the Merse and into Lothian. British strongholds at Edinburgh and Stirling may have fallen in 638 and 642. Only a little later the dynastic takeover of Rheged gave the Anglians an entry into Galloway. The Northumbrians pushed beyond the Forth in 658 and for a brief period dominated southern Pictland. In 685 at Nechtansmere near Dunnichen in Angus, an Anglian army was defeated and its leader, King Ecgfrith, killed. The frontier between Pictland and Northumbria then seems to have been pushed back to the Lothians, possibly marked by the line of the Pentland (‘Pictland’) Hills but Northumbrian influence in East Lothian and the Merse persisted for three centuries.

To what extent the Anglian occupation of south-east Scotland involved a takeover of existing settlements and territorial units by an incoming aristocracy, or was accompanied by a substantial influx of population has been debated. That estates and their centres were transferred as going concerns is suggested by the site at Doon Hill above Dunbar where a timber hall belonging to a British landholder was destroyed and replaced by an Anglian one. By Ecgfrith’s reign Dunbar itself was a Northumbrian royal centre but the name suggests that it had originally been a British stronghold. The distribution of places whose names contain Anglian elements suggests an initial zone of occupation in the Merse and then East Lothian. This was followed by an intensification of settlement in these areas and penetration up the valleys of the Tweed and its tributaries. Anglian names are scarcer in Midlothian and rare in West Lothian, suggesting that the Northumbrians’ occupation west of the River Almond was short-lived. In the Tweed basin British landholders may have remained in possession of the upland areas. Fragments of linear earthworks like the 20 kilometre Catrail may be the remains of territorial divisions between Anglians and British.

In the north the Viking age opened abruptly, as elsewhere in Britain, with a series of raids in the 790s including one on Iona in 795. There is no indication that permanent settlement in the Northern Isles preceded or accompanied these first raids. Any occupation is likely to have involved ‘ness-taking’, the temporary fortification of promontories by raiding bands. Permanent settlement of the Northern and Western Isles was under way during the first half of the ninth century and around 870 the establishment of the Earldom of Orkney gave the new arrivals some political coherence. The Norse takeover of the Northern Isles was once thought to have wiped out the indigenous population. Recent excavations have suggested that there was a greater mixing of Norse and Pictish cultures. The Norsemen brought their own styles of houses, weapons and ornaments but adopted other elements of the local material culture. Even if a substantial element of the Pictish population did survive their language was submerged fairly quickly. In the Western Isles the preponderance of Norse names for settlements alongside a predominance of Gaelic ones for topographical features may hint at the survival of a subjugated Celtic stratum in the population doing much of the menial work such as herding livestock and cutting peat.

Further south Pictland, Dalriada and Strathclyde all suffered from Norse raids and invasions. Olaf, Norse king of Dublin, devastated Pictland in 866 and appears to have occupied part of the kingdom for some time before going on, in 870, to destroy the British citadel on Dumbarton Rock. Norse pressure may have pushed the Scots eastwards and led to Kenneth mac Alpin’s takeover of Pictland. By the end of the tenth century the Earldom of Orkney had expanded to become a major power under Earl Sigurd and his son Earl Thorfinn. At its peak the earldom controlled the Northern Isles, the Western Isles as far south as the Isle of Man, substantial areas of Caithness and possibly some of the West Highland mainland as well.

Place-name scholars have worked out a sequence which appears to reflect various phases in the expansion and consolidation of Norse settlement. Primary settlement on the best land in the Northern Isles was followed by the infilling of less favourable sites and an expansion into new areas. In the Northern Isles, where the Norn dialect continued to be spoken for centuries, modern place names are overwhelmingly of Norse derivation but in the Western Isles there was a resurgence of Gaelic speech and culture by the twelfth century. In the Hebrides the adaptation of Norse words by Gaelic speakers distorts Scandinavian place names. Despite this, indications are that the initial Norse settlement in the Outer Hebrides was dense. There are no indications of any Celtic place names that have survived from before the Norse settlement and in Lewis out of 126 settlement names 99 are pure Scandinavian in origin and another nine partly so.

In the north Scandinavian settlement names occur on the mainland as far south as the Black Isle. Norse settlement in the Western Isles seems to have been fairly dense as far south as Islay and then to have tailed off. The ratio of Norse to Gaelic place names falls from around 1:2 on Islay to 1:8 on Arran. On the West Highland mainland Norse settlement names are rare but topographic elements such as ‘dale’, a valley, are widespread. It has been suggested that such names delimit a Norse sphere of influence beyond the area of direct settlement, or that Scandinavian settlers in the islands may have used the mainland valleys as summer pastures for their herds. On the other hand it would have required a lot of influence to cause the inhabitants of an area to accept new names for major landscapes feature like valleys, so that it is possible that the Norse had some permanent presence here. In south-west Scotland the place-name evidence suggests a complex mixture of peoples with a movement of Danish speakers from the northern Danelaw bringing settlement names ending in -byr (a farmstead) as well as an influx of Gall-Gaedhil, people with a mixed Norse/Gaelic background, giving rise to Norse place names with a Celtic word order. Small clusters of places and isolated settlements with Scandinavian names in parts of eastern Scotland may indicate pockets of Scandinavian settlement.

The Creation of Alba

The earliest date in Scottish history which every schoolchild north of the Border was once expected to remember was 843, the union of Pictland and Dalriada (or, as it was often termed, the Picts and Scots), under Kenneth mac Alpin. As with the downfall of Macbeth, neither the date nor its significance as a watershed in Scottish history is as clear-cut as was once believed. The events and the circumstances which helped determine them are uncertain. The end of the Picts as a separate people, as a result of Kenneth’s takeover, is as obscure as their origins.

Around 840, Kenneth mac Alpin, an upstart from a fairly undistinguished lineage, became King of Dalriada. Between about 843 and 847 he took over the Pictish throne and brought the two kingdoms under his rule. Within two or three generations the distinctive elements of Pictish culture seem to disappear and the Picts vanish from history. There is evidence of a large-scale penetration of Gaelic influences into eastern Scotland after Kenneth’s takeover and later sources suggest that there was a substantial migration of population from west to east as well. Later medieval traditions claim that Kenneth secured his position by the treacherous slaughter of Pictish nobles. Whether or not this was true, Gaelic influences seem to have spread rapidly through Pictland under Kenneth and his successors. Even if there was no larg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Maps
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Chapter 1. The Making of Medieval Scotland
• Chapter 2. The Introduction of Anglo-Norman Feudalism
• Chapter 3. Medieval Economy and Society
• Chapter 4. Medieval Towns
• Chapter 5. Late-Medieval Scotland: Economy and Society in Transition
• Chapter 6. The Reformation and its Impact
• Chapter 7. Population c1500–c1750
• Chapter 8. The Countryside c1500–c1750
• Chapter 9. Lowland Rural Society c1500–c1750
• Chapter 10. Urban Development c1500–c1750
• Chapter 11. Urban Economy and Society c1500–c1750
• Chapter 12. Law and Order, Crime and Violence
• Chapter 13. Culture, Education and Literacy c1500–c1750
• Chapter 14. Highland Society and Economy c1500–c1750
• Chapter 15. Trade and Industry in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
• Chapter 16. The Union of 1707 and its Impact: The Scottish Economy in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century
• Chapter 17. Towards Improvement and Enlightenment
• Conclusion: Scotland c1750: Towards Improvement and Industrialisation
• General Maps
• Glossary of Terms
• A Guide to Further Reading
• Index