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

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92 Deborah A. Symonds

circumstances, where controls were less severe, or ignored, and illegitimate

births resulted, there existed the possibility of infanticide.

In Argyll

between 1664 and 1742, six illegitimate children were murdered at birth by

their mothers, or in one case by a grandmother. In 1679 Mary M’Millan,

daughter of a tenant farmer in Ardlarich, guilty of fornication with Donald

M’Onlea, son of another tenant in Ardlarich, gave birth to their child near a

burn. She admitted hiding the child under the straw of her bed, and ‘thereaf-

ter delivering his corpses [sic] to her brother to be buried’.

In 1681 Finvall

N’Cannill was indicted for giving birth to a child conceived in an adulterous

relationship. The child was born in her father’s house in Knockhanti ‘in the

end of the said house where she ordinarily sat at her weaving and hidd the

chyld under a turff’. Because this had happened four years before, there was

no means of proving the murder, and she was found guilty of ‘ignominious

burying of her said chyld’, and was sentenced to a public whipping at the

market cross of ‘Campbeltoun’.

Ten years later in Drumseynie, Catharin

N’Inturnor was indicted for the murder of her daughter’s child, conceived in

adultery. N’Inturnor was charged with making a hole in the child’s head and

‘being examined anent the said murder . . . she acknowledged that after the

midwife had given over all hopes she found the said hole in the chylds head

before he was fully borne but cunningly would lay the cryme to the midwifes

charge by which it appeard that she was actor’.

She was found not guilty,

possibly because the men on the jury had little way of knowing, between the

mother, grandmother and midwife, who, if anyone, was to blame.

But in 1705, Margaret Campbell, alias Guinich, pregnant by her mas-

ter’s son James Montgomrie, and questioned according to the evidentiary

demands of the 1690 statute against child murder, was found guilty and

hanged. According to Argyll Justiciary Records:

she at length confessed before the [Kilmichael-Glassary] Kirk session upon the

threttieth day of March last . . . that the said James Montgomerie had gotten her

with chyld in summer last that she concealed all alongst her being with chyld

during the whole space in all the places and to all the persones above mentined

and to all others albeit frequentlie channenged thereupon except the said James

Mongomry [sic] whom she gave up as the father to the chyld and also confessed

she was delivered of the said man chyld in ane obscure place in Barnagadd all alone

in the night tyme and that she buried or hidd the said man child [sic] so brought

forth by her in the same place and covered him with fogg and stone having

wrapped him in a little linnin cloath.

While Campbell never admitted killing the child, she had been wandering

over Argyll, leaving her master’s in Ballimeanoch and staying in Kilberry,

Leckuary, Downan and ﬁ nally Barnagadd, where she was visibly pregnant.

In response to questions from women in each house or village, she denied

any pregnancy, and moved on, until she gave birth in Barnagadd. Both her

death and that of the children mentioned above demonstrate the variety of

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Death, Birth and Marriage 93

ways in which one might unexpectedly die, without famine, war or disease.

But Campbell’s trial and execution also remind us of the kirk’s role in the

formal oversight of both birth and death, through recording, interrogating

and ﬁ nally burying villagers great and small.

Most children did not face such beginnings, and we know about these

exceptional and miserable instances of cruelty, self-interest and desperation

precisely because tenants, villagers and townspeople, often acting through

the kirk, kept a watchful eye on those who might be sexually active outside

marriage, or pregnant. Many more children died of smallpox, according

to the parish ministers who compiled the OSA, although inoculation in

the later eighteenth century was effective in lowering death rates in many

parishes. The minister in Kilmichael-Glassary, the parish where Margaret

Campbell was forced to confess, commented roughly eighty years later that

children had often died from smallpox in the past, but as inoculation was

now practised, it was rarely fatal. At the time he wrote, he calculated that

44 per cent of the population of Glassary was under the age of twenty-one,

few were over ﬁ fty, and 26 per cent were aged ten or less. For all the risks of

childhood, there were always many children to be seen, probably because

the rigours of age were worse. Glassary boasted seventeen persons between

the ages of ﬁ fty and seventy, forty-four between eighty and ninety, and

ﬁ ve between the ages of ninety and one hundred. This gives us a parish in

which those we would consider the elderly were less than 3 per cent of the

population.

CHILDBIRTH EXPERIENCES

One of the eighteenth-century ballads of Anna Gordon Brown, all of

which show the hallmarks of oral composition and traditional transmis-

sion by word-of-mouth, allows us to glimpse one birth, however atypi-

cal.

The ballad is ‘Child Waters’, in which Ellen proves herself worthy

of ‘Lord John’ by her strength, culminating in bearing their child alone,

in a barn:

She’s leaned her back against the wa;

Strong travail seizd her on;

An even amo the great horse feet

Burd Ellen brought forth her son.

Lord John’[s] mither intill her bowr

Was sitting all alone,

Whan, I the silence o the night,

She heard fair Ellen’s moan.

‘Won up, won up, my son,’ she says,

‘Go se how a’ does fare;

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94 Deborah A. Symonds

For I think I hear a woman’s graosn,

An a bairn greeting sair.’

O hastily he gat him up,

Stayd neither for hose nor shoone,

An he’s doen him to the stable-door,

Wi the clear light o the moon.

He strack the door hard wi his foot,

An sae has he wi his knee,

An iron locks and iron bars

Into the door ﬂ ung he:

‘Be not afraid, Burd Ellen,’ he says,

‘Ther’s nane come in but me.’

Up he has taen his bonny young son,

An gard wash him wi the milk;

An up he has taen his fair lady,

Gard row her in the silk.

In fact few children were born in stables, or ‘in ane obscure place in

Barnagadd all alone in the night tyme’ unless they were illegitimate. The

more common birth would have been in a bed, however humble or stately,

attended by women midwives that the village could provide, or the family

afford. Male midwives, or obstetricians, were rare in Scotland until the mid-

to later eighteenth century. The great Scottish anatomist, surgeon and male

midwife, William Hunter, practised in London, not Edinburgh, in the late

eighteenth century, although in the Scottish capital men had been appointed

to instruct female midwives from as least as early as 1726.

Most children, with a little luck, and no great degree of isolation, would

have come into the world attended by one or more older women, not profes-

sionally trained, but accustomed to childbirth. These women learned their

expertise and established their reputations much as those in other trades, by

ﬁ rst assisting others with more experience, and then attending when neigh-

bours called for help. When a young woman in Terregles, near Dumfries, was

suspected of infanticide in 1762, four local women were called to examine

her and the child’s corpse. The ﬁ rst midwife sent for by the minister was

Marion Jardine, an eighty-year-old widow who lived nearby. The second,

Elizabeth Patterson, was ﬁ fty-one, the wife of a tenant farmer in another

parish and referred to midwifery as her ‘trade’. The third was Janet Irving,

another ﬁ fty-year-old tenant farmer, who she said she was not a midwife, but

had had thirteen children. The fourth woman did not testify, but presumably

was also seen as adept in childbirth by her community. All four were called

by men determining if a murder had been committed, so what they had to

say was taken seriously, used in court and probably reﬂ ected the villagers’

belief that any one of them would be helpful at a birth. Terregles was a small

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Death, Birth and Marriage 95

parish, with a population of between 400 and 500 people in 1762, so the

ease with which the minister was able to summon two practising midwives

and two women who would have made good assistants for them suggests

that midwives were available, and commonly called. No surgeons, much

less male midwives were sought, strongly suggesting that they simply were

not available, and possibly not yet seen as authoritative, even near a thriv-

ing town like Dumfries.

Yet training was extending into towns other than

Edinburgh, where there was an unknown number of professional female

midwives who could demand decent fees from their upper- and middle-class

clients, enough certainly to provide them with a living.

It seems likely that

infant mortality was falling in the later eighteenth century before the advent

of the male midwife, and that greater attention to childhood followed in the

wake of children’s improving chances of survival.

A glimpse of the nursery

furnishings of the Drummonds of Stobhall in 1717 shows a stark ‘Nur[s]ery

– an Ovell Table 5s 2 Old Trunks 3s A Cane Chear 2s a furnishd. Bed with

Green hangings £2 a furnishd. Box bed £1[.]’ If this sounds bare, it is a useful

reminder of the simplicity of life, even for the greater nobility.

Contrary to

most of the examples given above, the great majority of children born were

legitimate, and birth brings us to the social institution governing births and

consequently deaths, marriage.

MARRIAGE AND SURVIVAL

Marriage was shaped by custom, law, the kirk and, to a lesser extent, by the

nature of the local economy, with perhaps some room for personal prefer-

ence. For Scots marriage was, under the kirk and by law, a simple contract

made by mutual declaration, in either present or future tense, of the intent to

marry.

Whatever there was of courtship, love and ceremony, in a broader

view marriage represented household formation, with households repre-

senting the basic building blocks of the early modern economic and social

structure. But ceremonial and celebration, with all the implications of alli-

ances and community ties, cannot be overlooked. The following record of

an important wedding early in the eighteenth century makes clear just how

public, raucous and expensive such occasions were:

Sir James Stewart’s marrige with President Delrimple’s [sic] second Daughter brought

together a number of people related to both familys. At the signing of the eldest Miss

Delrimple’s Contract the year before there was an entire hogshead of wine drunk

that night, and the number of people at Sir James Stewart’s was little less.

The marrige was in the President’s house, with as many of the relations as it

would hold. The Brides favours was all sowed [sic] on her gown from tope to

bottom and round the neck and sleeves. The moment the ceremony was per-

formed, the whole company run to her and pulled off the favours: in an instant

she was stripd of all of them.

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96 Deborah A. Symonds

The account includes descriptions of successive suppers and balls, at both

family homes, and then at those of friends and extended family, including

a Sunday parade by twenty-three couples in ‘high dress’ to church. Such a

public performance, lasting for many days was clearly extraordinary, but it

made clear that weddings served to cement bonds among families, generat-

ing alliances of political, social and economic signiﬁ cance. For those lower

down the social scale there was the penny wedding, often attended by large

numbers of paying guests, their shillings contributing to the cost of the fes-

tivities, and perhaps leaving something left over for the couple. The ubiquity

of these ceremonials is underlined by the repeated attempts of the church at

both national level and in the parishes to ban them by restricting numbers

and forbidding the presence of musicians and dancing.

Much has been written about the relationship between marriage, child-

birth, famine and death rates, and the sequence is not surprising. As noted

earlier, for much of the early modern age, mortality crises struck with

some regularity, and in the seventeenth century these regulated the size of

Scotland’s population with grim reliability. In the wake of each crisis, young

couples would take advantage of tenancies fallen vacant and marry; widows

Figure 3.2 ‘The Evening Walk’, taken from John Kay, A Series of Original Portraits

and Caricature Etchings (Edinburgh, 1837–8). Courtship, as shown here in Captain

Justice’s walk with a friend, was a matter for much speculation in novels and ballads, and

probably in everyday conversation. It was an important building block of the early modern

society.

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Death, Birth and Marriage 97

and widowers would reconstitute new families from the survivors; and sur-

viving couples conceived as amenorrhoea dissipated.

But such demographic

determinism, which is integral to studies of weather, crops and epidemics,

tells only part of the story of what was happening in the early modern world.

Human agency may never be more apparent in history than it is in marriage

and procreation, carried on in deﬁ ance of plague, smallpox, war and famine.

For most of the early modern period, those marrying and repopulating their

villages and towns succeeded in replacing lives lost in mortality crises, and in

making bearable lives for themselves and their children.

Between 1649 and the later 1700s, the great diseases waned. Plague disap-

peared in Scotland after 1649, and smallpox was controlled by 1770. The

Poor Law Act of 1649 mandated that the poor should not be left to starve,

although they still would from time to time; the earlier Poor Law of 1574 was

relatively ineffective, given Scotland’s weak central authority. Consequently,

the poor relied on the traditional means of survival: begging; theft on occa-

sion; meagre support from parishes; scraps from the tables of those with a bit

Figure 3.3 ‘Sabbath School’, taken from John Kay, A Series of Original Portraits

and Caricature Etchings (Edinburgh, 1837–8). Moderates, breaking with the rigour and

control of the old church, dominated the Church of Scotland in the late eighteenth century.

If the moderates matched Enlightenment principles, the self-importance of this minister,

compounded by his disconnection from the lives of these very young parishioners, highlights

the disintegration of the old communities and families.

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98 Deborah A. Symonds

left over; and handouts from guilds, great houses and other establishments

with which they had some pre-existing connection.

From 1651 to 1674,

and again from 1700 to 1739, there were no national harvest failures. The

process of agricultural improvement, while patchy and regional, began to

increase productivity even as it limited access to that produce in the eight-

eenth century as landlords, tenant farmers and merchants sought the best

price. And the potato mitigated some of the worst depredations of nature

and landlords. Thus, marriage and the bearing of children, always a basic

constituent of social order, but previously vulnerable to weather, famine and

disease, was about to emerge as a far more important institution as families

were no longer broken so frequently by death.

Human agency, not to mention lust, greed and advantageous family alli-

ances were always at work in the formation of marriages, both ordinary and

noble, although the degree to which the various elements mattered varied

with each union. At the margins, marriage was a ﬂ uid and tenuous arrange-

ment. Marriages not broken by early death could be broken by divorce and

separation, and while the numbers seem to have been low, the possibility was

recognised, and ordinary people, not the gentry or nobility, brought most

cases before the Commissary Court in Edinburgh. Marriage in Scotland

was amenable to individual will at entry and exit, since marriage rested on

consent, followed by sexual intercourse. The kirk added one requirement,

that of public declaration in the form of banns, or announcements read from

the pulpit some weeks before a marriage, with the intention of ﬁ nding out

bigamists, or of otherwise guaranteeing the legitimacy of a marriage. But

retaining such an old consensual deﬁ nition of marriage forced the kirk into a

long-running battle to control other forms of marriage, from hand-fasting to

those blessed by rival faiths.

MARRIAGE ECONOMIC, MARRIAGE ROMANTIC

Marriage, clearly conﬁ rmed as an economic institution for most past

centuries, seems to have been changing, and one might argue that post-

Reformation, choice in a marriage partner became a signiﬁ cant new form of

freedom and independence.

But we should not exaggerate: for many thou-

sands of ordinary people, marriage was an economic necessity, especially for

women, who were lower paid and more likely to be in part-time and casual

employment. Spinsterhood, other than for the daughters of the aristocracy

and gentry, and perhaps better-off merchants, was a bleak proposition, and

single women could ﬁ nd themselves hounded by the authorities who feared

that they would engage in immoral activities. Worse was widowhood, other

than for those women fortunate enough to be able to support an independ-

ent existence. The case of Ann Smith, self-confessedly a ‘poor Disconsolate

Widow’, speaks for many women in similar circumstances: two months pre-

viously the wife of a burgess brewer in Arbroath, but semi-anonymous and

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Death, Birth and Marriage 99

in lodgings in Dundee, in March 1739 she made a second plea to a former

provost of Arbroath that he might intervene and obtain something for her

from the brewers’ poor fund to relieve her ‘very mean’ circumstances.

There were occupations which demanded the different skills and attributes

of a man and his wife and children: coal mining, for example, where males

cut coal and their wives and children acted as bearers; and in farming in the

Lothians, where agricultural servants – hinds – were required to have their

wives to engage in harvest work and other laborious tasks.

There are count-

less other cases where wives made critical contributions to the household

economy.

If cruelty and failure to support a wife had often ﬁ gured – and would

continue as claims made in suits for separation and divorce – emotional

disappointment or dissatisfaction would matter more as people lived longer.

Although we know too little about the expectations and realities of married

life among the lower classes, there are tantalising hints that love was an

important ingredient.

For the upper ranks, romantic love as a factor in mar-

riage appears to have been rare, but not unknown, and certainly fondness

and deep affection were much in evidence even in a society which was both

Figure 3.4 ‘Isobel Taylor’, taken from John Kay, A Series of Original Portraits

and Caricature Etchings (Edinburgh, 1837–8). John Kay was equally interested in the

existence of old women. Of course, given the recording of births, or absence thereof in the

period, Isobel Taylor’s age is somewhat subjective.

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100 Deborah A. Symonds

paternal and hierarchical.

As Elizabeth Mure, writing in 1790, recalled of

her grandfather’s lifetime, ‘Every master was revered by his family, honour’d

by his tenants, and aweful to his domestics.’ She also noted about the same

generation ‘that while that reverence and Awe remain’d on the minds of

man for masters, Fathers, and heads of Clans, it was then that the Awe and

dread of Deity was most powerful’.

But in the eighteenth century, despite

the political contentions of the ﬁ rst half of the century, sentiment vied with

reason in popular representations of courtship; for the middling sorts love

and matrimony were promulgated as a desirable combination alongside the

Enlightenment’s advocacy of reason.

Henry Mackenzie published The Man

of Feeling in 1771, and began chapter thirteen with this description of a young

woman:

She had been ushered into life (as that word is used in the dialect of St. James’s)

at seventeen, her father being then in parliament, and living in London: at seven-

teen, therefore, she had been a universal toast; her health, now she was four-and-

twenty, was only drank by those who knew her face at least. Her complexion was

mellowed into a paleness, which certainly took from her beauty; but agreed, at

least Harley used to say so, with the pensive softness of her mind. Her eyes were

of that gentle hazel colour which is rather mild than piercing; and, except when

they were lighted up by good-humour, which was frequently the case, were sup-

posed by the ﬁ ne gentlemen to want ﬁ re. Her air and manner were elegant in the

highest degree, and were as sure of commanding respect as their mistress was far

from demanding it.

Mackenzie’s sensibilities marked a change from that older literature of

courtship, the Scottish traditional ballads, where one would ﬁ nd in the

ballad ‘Lord Thomas and Fair Annet’ these stanzas describing a young man’s

ruminations on possible brides:

‘O rede, O rede, mither,’ he says,

‘A gude rede gie to mee;

O sall I tak the nut-browne bride,

And let Faire Annet bee?’

‘The nut-browne bride haes gowd and gear,

Fair Annet she has gat nane;

And the little bauty Fair Annet haes

O it wull soon be gane.’

And he has till his brother gane:

‘Now, brother, rede ye me;

A, sall I marrie the nut-browne bride,

And let Fair Annet bee?’

‘The nut-browne bride has oxen, brother,

The nut-browne bride has kye;

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Death, Birth and Marriage 101

I wad hae ye marrie the nut-browne bride,

And cast Fair Annet bye.’

‘Her oxen may dye i the house, billie,

And her kye into the byre,

And I sall hae nothing to mysell

Bot a fat fadge by the fyre.’

Lord Thomas is then advised by his sister to take Fair Annet, but he insists

that he will take his mother’s advice and marry the nut-brown bride. With

this decision, Thomas, Annet and the anonymous nut-brown bride are

doomed. Annet appears at the wedding in stunning array, the nut-brown

bride stabs her, Thomas stabs the bride and then kills himself. The conﬂ ict

between family interest and property, on the one hand, and making a right

choice, a choice ordained in the ballad by romantic love, honour and values

older than wealth, on the other hand, is quite clear in this text. This version

of the ballad was published in 1765, probably after transmission through

several generations of singers. Traditional singers, familiar with its formulaic

phrasing, also understood that they were expressing a very conservative view:

breaking old ties and old contracts lead to death, if not always of persons,

then of a society built on those obligations. This is a far cry from Mackenzie’s

man of feeling, and of the motif of feeling as a newly important aspect of

personality. In ballads love is akin to loyalty and obligation; in novels it was

opposed to the calculations on which marriages had been constructed by the

friends, to use an eighteenth-century word, of the couple. Marriage was at

the centre of many novels in the eighteenth century, and by the end of the

century, two Scots novels, among many in Britain, catalogued the new ideas

of marriage: Susan Ferrier’s Marriage, and Sir Walter Scott’s The Heart of

Mid-Lothian.

Like the classic, and slightly earlier British novel that rede-

ﬁ ned marriage, Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, the new marriage emerged as

companionate, domestic, egalitarian and, compared with the violence, risk

and passion of the ballads, the new marriages were reasonable, loving and

tame – a domesticity based on domestication and mutual affection.

The Scots traditional ballads collected in the eighteenth and early nine-

teenth centuries provide very late early modern examples of the difﬁ cul-

ties of marriage and family life. The ballad found in more variations than

any other by late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century collectors was

‘Mary Hamilton’, which is about infanticide.

Others examine murder,

jealousy, betrayal, incest and parental violence. If we assume that ballads had

remained popular for several generations, up to the time of their collection

and publication, because they offered valuable counsel until a more urbane,

bourgeois population turned to novels and fashionable sermons for advice,

we have a variety of quite gruesome accounts of courtship still circulating

among eighteenth-century Scots, suggesting the memory of a society struc-

tured by force, threat, alliance and compliance with the wishes of others – a

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