The Early Modern Town in Scotland

Michael Lynch, Michael Lynch

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000394566
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Scottish History

Originally published in 1987, this volume filled a notable gap in Scottish urban history and considers the place of Scottish towns in urban life during the 16th and 17th Centuries. The first part of the book is based on studies of individual burghs (Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Perth) drawing extensively on archival material. The second part includes a discussion of the pressure put upon the burghs by the town between 1500 and 1650, a process which contributed to the destruction of the medieval burgh and examines the burgh during the Scottish Revolution. The impact of war and plague on Scottish towns in the 1640s is also analysed and much emphasis is given to the relationship between town and country.

1
Introduction: Scottish Towns 1500–1700

Michael Lynch

In the sixteenth century the sources for the study of urban history in Scotland suddenly blossom. It is normal by then to find new and substantial urban archives, with some combination of council minute books, burgh court books, accounts of town treasurers or deans of guild, burgh registers of deeds or notarial protocol books, tax rolls and even, on occasion, a muster roll. It is, however, one of the curiosities of Scottish urban history that few extra questions have been asked of the range of new evidence usually available after about 1500¹, and fewer still have been satisfactorily answered. In contrast in the study of the early medieval burgh, where documentary evidence had long since been taken to its cultivation limits, historians have been obliged, with profit, either to turn to other disciplines — such as archaeology — for advice or to ask fresh questions of the limited evidence available. Our understanding of the twelfth-century burgh has been transformed by rigorously applying to it the notion of the market.² The same has yet to be done for the sixteenth or early seventeenth-century burgh. It is important from the outset to understand, however, that although a number of questions can successfully be asked of the evidence, there are others which, given the nature of the evidence available in this period for Scottish towns, are probably unanswerable. It is difficult to examine the notion of a decay of towns in the late medieval period in the virtual absence of tax rolls before 1535; the motor of immigration in increasing town populations is virtually undetectable before the 1690s, except for a few scraps of evidence such as a stray reference to ‘Highland boys’ in Glasgow in the winter of 1649-50 or the use of such flimsy techniques of inquiry as the appearance in the record of non-local surnames; and the prospect of a detailed study of the occupational structure of towns is remote, both because of the pervading presence of the unspecialised general merchant and the scarceness, with a few exceptions,³ of detailed tax records before the hearth and poll taxes of the 1690s.

There has recently been a great deal of research focused on a range of individual towns, especially between 1450 and 1640. Attention has drifted away from institutional urban history, which predominated the thinking of several generations of burgh historians, to the psephological, from the narrowly financial to the political in broad aspect. The institution of the merchant guildry, which long provided the common thread in much burgh history, has had its doors flung open to expose, in fifteenth-century Perth and Dumfermline and sixteenth-century Edinburgh, craftsmen inside it in numbers as well as merchants;⁴ the scrutiny of burgh accounts has given way to questions about the effects on urban society itself and its relations with the outside world of much more taxation. Since much of this work has been concentrated on the habits of urban rulers in the century of the Reformation, new ambiguities have emerged to complicate and, arguably, make more plausible our knowledge of the response to the Reformation: Catholics have been found acting as elders of the new Calvinist kirk session of Aberdeen in the 1560s; a Protestant dean of guild, who numbered among his duties the upkeep of the burgh church, was in charge of the Catholic cult of Edinburgh for much of the 1550s.⁵

The impact of this kind of research on the more general history of Scotland has, however, been uneven. It has tended to cluster around the Reformation, with four recent theses on the largest towns, but has conspicuously avoided the Scottish Revolution of the 1640s. The Restoration period has been largely neglected, except for work on Glasgow. This has been crucial to our under standing of the changing patterns of Scottish overseas trade in the period and an important shift, after 1660, in the economy,⁶ but it has also probably exercised an undue influence on the thinking and approach of historians to other towns in that century. The argument that Glasgow’s rise in the seventeenth century was largely due to the fact that it was, in many respects, exceptional⁷ has, by its very nature, yet to be proved — by a deeper scrutiny of other towns. Different insights may result if the angle of the lens of the microscope on the early modern town is altered from the perspective of the century after 1660 to that of the century before 1640 or that before 1560. One of the propositions contained in this collection is that the early seventeenth century saw a volume of overseas trade and a concentration of wealth and credit in the hands of urban merchants which was greater than later in the century. The significance of the Restoration period thus may lie less in the abandonment of the restrictive features in the institutions and structure of the medieval burgh, as many argue, as in the notion that it was a partial recovery from the mid-century crisis of the Wars of the Covenant.

There has as yet been a natural tendency, apart from in the work based on the wide-ranging evidence which suddenly becomes available in the 1690s, for urban historians of this period to confine their researches to single towns. There has been only one recent study of a craft occupation⁸ but this, because it deals with one of the smallest and humblest of the guilds, has little light to shed on general occupational patterns. More could be done to consider various groups — ranging from lawyers to metal or textile workers or the poor — within urban society as a whole. Most work has concentrated on the merchants and it has revealed that a Scottish mercantile community in a real sense did exist by 1600,⁹ with wide-ranging contacts between different towns and established patterns of business practice. This, in a sense, was not surprising since it is one of the distinctive features of Scottish towns, or at least of the royal burghs, that they did collectively form an urban voice in politics. They were distinctly more integrated into the community of the realm than was the case in England and this made for an extra set of pressures working on them in this period, when the crown began to make many more demands of them. The expectations of the burghs, too, were rising in the later sixteenth century and their social structure was already becoming much more complex. The net result of all these changes was that the burghs probably had a greater impact on Scotland as a whole in the seventeenth century than in any previous one.

It is for this reason that this collection has as one of its aims an effort to integrate the history of urban Scotland into the new thinking, both about government and the other localities, which has so notably marked out the history of early modern Scotland in recent years. It numbers among its authors some who would not regard themselves as urban historians but who have much to say about the wider world with which the burghs had to deal. The volume’s other two aims are simply stated. It is an attempt to draw together the threads of recent research, some of it recent indeed, in what are seen to be the most important areas of inquiry. It is also, it should be said, far from the last word on the subject but it may help set the agenda for future research.

By the middle of the fourteenth century the burghs of Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Perth and Dundee were recognised as ‘the four great towns of Scotland’. The evidence of customs returns for the 1370s confirms their pre-eminence, even if Perth and Dundee were then only narrowly ahead of towns like Linlithgow and Haddington, which had also enjoyed a brief stimulus at the expense of Berwick after its loss to the English in 1334. One of the most obvious, but least recognised, facts of Scottish urban history is the length of time which these four burghs held and consolidated this position. In the 1370s they accounted for 58 per cent of the customs paid in the export trade; in the period 1460-1600, they averaged 80 per cent and their share was increasing almost throughout — despite at least three catastrophic falls in exports, in the 1320s, 1420s and 1540s, and a series of shifts in the patterns of trade.¹⁰ In 1535 their combined share of the national taxation paid by the burghs amounted to 51.5 per cent; in 1583 it was 54.5 per cent and in 1613 53.66 per cent. It was only in 1649 that the ranking of the four top burghs was disturbed, when Glasgow finally rose from fifth place, where it had lain since 1594, to displace Perth. By the next reassessment, in 1670, Glasgow had sharply risen to overtake both Aberdeen and Dundee as well. By 1697 the overall picture had changed as markedly as the ranking of the largest burghs: 55 per cent of taxation was paid by just two burghs — Edinburgh and Glasgow — rather than four. Edinburgh, of course, still predominated — and increased its lead in the 1690s over Glasgow and all other burghs — paying no less than 40 per cent of taxation.¹¹ The break in the stranglehold of the four east-coast regional centres over the Scottish urban economy is as good an indicator as any of the fundamental shift — in patterns of trade and urban wealth — which took place in the second half, and especially in the last quarter, of the seventeenth century. By then, Scottish urban history had become largely a tale of two cities;¹² but for the previous three centuries, ever since the loss of Berwick until well into the seventeenth century, it had been dominated by the same four burghs.

This is a different way of looking at the evidence of the series of tax rolls, which begin only in 1535, giving the percentage paid by each royal burgh. They have often been used to demonstrate the inexorable rise of Glasgow, the ‘boom town’¹³ of seventeenth-century Scotland, and to chart the corresponding decline — in relative if not absolute terms — of Dundee and Perth and, to a lesser extent, of Aberdeen. The sixteenth-century rolls have been studied less closely than those of the seventeenth and tend to reveal more ambiguous patterns, especially amongst middle-ranking towns, which then included Glasgow itself. It was assessed at 2.01 per cent in 1535, rose to 2.56 per cent by 1550, fell back to a fraction over 2 per cent between 1556 and 1574, recovered to 2.225 per cent by 1579, rose quite sharply to 3.5 per cent in 1583 and 4.5 per cent in 1594 but fell back to 4 per cent in 1612. At least a dozen other towns, ranging in size from Ayr to Rothesay and in geographical location from Montrose to Wigtown, reveal a similar pattern of short-term crisis and recovery, which is to be distinguished from a pattern of minor fluctuations within a larger trend, whether of rise or fall.¹⁴ One of the factors to bear in mind in dealing with tax roll evidence is that it was assessed by the burghs themselves, in the Convention of Royal Burghs, which usually lent a sympathetic ear to hard-luck stories. So the assessments, which fluctuate far more in the sixteenth century than the seventeenth, may well reveal, with reasonable accuracy, localised short-term urban crises which were much more characteristic of that century than the one which followed it. They may also reveal how complicated the structure of the regional market was. Rival burghs, such as Glasgow, Dumbarton and Ayr, did not always necessarily profit or lose at each other’s expense. Ayr clearly did prosper at the expense of its near-neighbour, Irvine, whose harbour was progressively silting up and whose tax payments correspondingly remained virtually static throughout the century. But the assessments on Ayr and Glasgow both fluctuate up and down, with little apparent connection between them, until Glasgow took a decisive lead, which it never lost, in 1583. Dumbarton was a more modest rival but its assessments rose in 1579, fell in 1583, and peaked in 1612. The material which can be gleaned from the tax rolls underlines how little is as yet known about the web of relationships which existed between one town and another. This is the case whether they were rivals — in overseas trade or with overlapping rural hinterlands — or satellites of larger centres, which is the theme of Ian Whyte’s essay on the 1690s. The evidence before then is scattered and less full, but it can be worked harder. One of the major tasks that confronts Scottish urban historians is the charting of the shifting boundaries between provincial or regional centres and the various types of smellier market towns around them.

Viewed in this perspective or over a longer time span, the rise of Glasgow seems less certain; it rose above its west-coast rivals only in the 1580s but still does not seem to have escap...