Foyster E., Whatley C.A. A History of Everyday Life in Scotland, 1600-1800
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162 Stana Nenadic
38. Henry Grey Graham, The Social Life of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols
(London, 1900), vol. 2, p. 217.
39. Burt, Letters, p. 235.
40. National Archives of Scotland. (NAS), GD170/314. Campbell Family of
Barcaldine Papers, accounts for clothing and tailoring.
41. John Ramsay, Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols (Edinburgh,
1988) vol. 2, p. 83.
42. Nenadic, Lairds and Luxury, ch. 7.
43. NAS, GD170/1213. Campbell of Barcaldine family papers, letter from James
Erskine to Duncan Campbell of Glenure, 22 November 1748.
44. Ronald Black, An Lasair: Anthology of 18th Century Scottish Gaelic Verse
(Edinburgh, 2001), p. 189.
45. See, Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the Ancien Regime
(Cambridge, 1994).
46. See, G. Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness. Changing Attitudes in France Since the
Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1988).
47. Tobias Smollet, The Adventures of Roderick Random (Oxford, 1969), p. 31.
48. OSA, vol. 21, p. 143.
49. Ramsay, Gentle Shepherd, p. 540.
50. Burt, Letters, p. 235.
51. Ramsay, Gentle Shepherd, p. 588.
52. Georgio Riello, A Foot in the Past: Consumers, Producers and Footwear in the Long
Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2006), p. 63.
53. Peter McNeill and Georgio Riello, ‘The art and science of walking: gender, space
and the fashionable body in the long eighteenth century’, Fashion Theory, 9:2
(2005), 175–204.
54. James Cleland, Statistical Facts Descriptive of the Former and Present State of
Glasgow (Glasgow, 1837), p. 39.
55. See, Eighteenth-Century Studies, (2004), 38:1 Special Edition, ‘Hair’.
56. John Galt, The Provost (Oxford, 1982), p. 72.
57. Edward Topham, Letters from Edinburgh (London, 1776), p. 161.
58. Topham, Letters, pp. 157–61.
59. Topham, Letters, p. 67.
60. OSA, vol. 5, p. 84, Logierait, County of Perth.
61. Topham, Letters, p. 229.
62. Beverly Lemire, ‘Developing consumerism and ready-made clothing in Britain,
1750–1800’, Textile History, 15:1 (1984), 21–44.
63. Riello, A Foot in the Past, pp.18–22.
64. OSA, vol. 20, p. 480, Dowally, County of Perth.
65. OSA, vol. 10, p. 245, Cluny, County of Aberdeen.
66. Adam Petrie, Rules of Good Deportment or of Good Breeding for the Use of Youth
(Edinburgh, 1720).
67. OSA, vol. 21, p. 144.
68. C. A. Whatley, ‘The Union of 1707: integration of the Scottish burghs: the case
of the 1720 food riots’,
Scottish Historical Review, 78 (1999), 192–218.
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Food and Clothing 163
69. OSA, vol. 14, p. 482, Wigton, County of Wigton.
70. OSA, vol. 9, p. 595, Crieff, County of Perth.
71. OSA, vol. 5, p. 227, Mains of Fintry, County of Forfar.
72. NLS, MS16871, f.171.
73. OSA, vol. 14, p. 482, Wigton, County of Wigton.
74. Gibson and Smout, Prices, pp. 242–3.
75. Youngson, Beyond the Highland Line, p. 151.
76. OSA, vol. 9, p. 527, Graitney, County of Dumfries.
77. OSA, vol. 9, p. 502, Caputh, County of Perth.
78. Beverly Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite: the Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain,
1660–1800 (Oxford, 1991).
79. Dunbar, Highland Dress, p. 201.
80. David Stewart, Sketches of the Character, Institutions and Customs of the Highlanders
of Scotland (Inverness, 1885), p. 94.
81. They were stock characters for both John Galt and Susan Ferrier.
82. J. G. Lockhart, Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1819), vol. 3, pp.
169–70.
83. Lockhart, Peter’s Letters, vol. 3, pp. 172–3.
84. William Macintosh, Essay on Ways and Means for Inclosing, Fallowing, Planting
etc. (Edinburgh, 1729), p. 229.
85. NAS, GD170/329, Campbell Family of Barcaldine Papers, inventory of Glenure
House, Argyll, 1752.
86. James Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson (New York,
1936), p. 120.
87. See, Stana Nenadic, ‘Middle rank consumers and domestic culture in Edinburgh
and Glasgow, 1720–1840’, Past and Present, 145 (1994), 122–56.
88. Stana Nenadic, ‘The Highlands of Scotland in the fi rst half of the eighteenth
century: consuming at a distance’, British Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies, 28
(2005), 215–28.
89. Macintosh, An Essay, p. 231.
90. Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping and Business
in the Eighteenth Century (Columbia, NY, 1997), pp. 19–36.
91. Allan Ramsay, The Tea-Table Miscellany: or, a Collection of Choice Songs, Scots and
English (Glasgow, 1753).
92. OSA, vol. 12, p. 55, Coldingham, County of Berwick.
93. OSA, vol. 18, p. 121, Gargunnock, County of Stirling.
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Chapter 6
Communicating
Bob Harris
INTRODUCTION
Early modern Scotland, along with the rest of the British Isles and much of
Europe, saw far-reaching changes to technologies and means of communicat-
ing, notably through the growing reach of print in its myriad and proliferat-
ing forms, but also through the increasing habit and practice of letter writing.
Communication between individuals across Scotland (and indeed between
Scotland and places well beyond its borders) quickened, as well as increased,
owing to improvements in transport – new and better roads, and also sea
traffi c – the continuing and often growing mobility of large sections of the
population and the growth of postal, carrier and coach services. Yet, for all
these undoubted and often very important changes, much of the following
chapter might equally well be written around the themes of slow evolution,
the mutual dependencies of print and oral cultures, and the continuing cen-
trality in many contexts of the spoken word. Scotland in 1800 remained a
society in which many vital elements of communication were oral. This was
the case, moreover, not just in the Highlands or rural areas, but also in the
fast-growing towns of the later eighteenth century. The market place and the
churchyard and church door, the doorway, close and street were still, as they
had been in 1600, pre-eminent sites of public and much private communica-
tion, and towns continued, as they had done for centuries, to act as nodal
points in circuits of communication which were formed in the main by per-
sonal interaction and mobility, by people moving to and from, within and
through towns for different, although frequently overlapping, reasons. Print
and other forms of written communication, such as letters, became infused
into this set of realities and habits rather than transforming them.
LANGUAGE AND ACCENT
However, our starting point must be language, the basis of written and verbal
communication. In contemporary European terms, early modern Scotland
was linguistically relatively united.
1
The salient word is relatively, however;
language played a central role in this period in dividing Scots, by area and
region, by social rank and, increasingly, by age.
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Communicating 165
Gaelic had since at least the sixteenth century attracted the opprobrium
of the Lowlander, and extirpating its use had become towards the end of that
century an important element of state-sponsored efforts, albeit these were
intermittent in effect, to impose civility and loyalty on the Highlander.
2
The
decline of Gaelic was long-standing, being especially marked in areas which
spanned the Highland–Lowland border. The main causes were two-fold:
commercial pressures – the language of commerce was English; and popula-
tion mobility – as a result both of temporary and permanent migration. In
the eighteenth century, the pace of the decline accelerated. The main reason,
apart from the continued operation of the causes already mentioned, was
education.
3
In 1709 the Scottish Society for the Propagation of Christian
Knowledge (SSPCK) was established in Edinburgh. Emerging out of the
Reformation of Manners movement which had taken root in the capital from
1699, the SSPCK sought to establish schools in the Highlands which taught
only in English, the language of civilisation and loyalty, as well as commerce.
4
Although their teachers did not always share the parent body’s anti-Gaelic
purism, this policy was reaffi rmed in 1723, and even tightened in 1750, when
it was ordered that children should speak English to the complete exclusion
of Gaelic in school and also when playing around school premises. The
mid-1750s, however, saw a sudden shift in attitudes, with the SSPCK com-
missioning its own Gaelic New Testament in 1754 – a work which eventually
appeared in 1767 – and from 1766 Highland schoolmasters were allowed to
‘teach their scholars to read both Erse and English’. The basic goal remained
the same, however, to ‘wear out’ the use of Gaelic and ensure the supremacy
of English. Over time, the effect of these policies was, in areas where such
schools were established, to entrench and widen a generational divide along
language lines. In 1794, the minister of Comrie, Perthshire recorded: ‘The
common language of the people is Gaelic. All the natives understand it; but
many, especially the old, do not understand English well. All the young
people can speak English.’
5
Within fast-expanding towns of the later eight-
eenth century, the linguistic division between the generations could prove
starker still. In these places, a new generation of Highland descent were born
who spoke and, it seems, commonly only understood English, while their
parents spoke only Gaelic.
6
Outside the Highlands, prior to the eighteenth century most people prob-
ably continued to speak in vernacular Scots or English spoken with a broad
Scots accent.
7
Incorporating union with England, however, made speech,
specifi cally speech in English, a much more urgent matter, creating strong
pressures for cultural assimilation with an English metropolitan culture
which threatened to achieve, even if it did not actually do so, hegemonic
status in the eighteenth century. How one spoke became a vexed issue, which
was all the more vexed because it was so singularly bound up with unwanted
feelings of provincialism. As part of the same process, speech became
freighted with new social, as well as national cultural, signifi cance, in that
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166 Bob Harris
it also became an important badge of civility among elite men and women.
The elder Sheridan, who sent the Edinburgh Moderates into such a frenzy
of hope and anxiety when he arrived in 1761 to deliver his lectures on elo-
cution, argued that what he termed ‘court pronunciation’ was no less ‘than
a sort of proof that a person has kept good company’; ‘rusticity of accent’
was at any event defi nitely to be avoided.
8
Whether much beyond a narrow
social stratum, people’s speech began to change under the impact of becom-
ing British (as well as Scottish) and aspiring to polite manners is diffi cult to
say. Although it has been asserted that, ‘English rather than Scots became the
tongue of Scotland’s landed, professional and aspirant mercantile classes’,
9
pronounced Scots accents continued to be commonplace, even in the second
half of the eighteenth century. In 1757, James Buchanan declared that Scottish
English was that ‘rough and uncouth brogue which is so harsh and unpleas-
ant to an English ear’.
10
Even Scots who succeeded at the very heart of the
British state and empire – Henry Dundas, to take the most obvious example
– did not relinquish their native pronunciation.
11
In Scotland, coarseness
of manners and a broad Scots accent presented no impediment to Robert
McQueen, Lord Braxfi eld, rising to the top of the legal establishment. The
Lord Chief Justice may have become a source of embarrassment in offi cial
circles for his conduct in political trials in 1793 involving radicals, but the
accent in which he delivered his extreme anti-radical pronouncements in
open court was not the problem.
12
In elite circles, talking with a pronounced
Scots accent could become a defi ant badge of age, as the Whig lawyer, Henry
Cockburn, was to recall in the middle of the nineteenth century in relation
to ‘a singular race of excellent Scotch ladies’.
13
How one spoke also no doubt depended signifi cantly on context and to
whom one was speaking. James Boswell continually swithered about whether
he should pursue a career at the English bar, and immerse himself perma-
nently in his beloved London, but felt peculiarly self-conscious about the
Scottish tone of his pronunciation.
14
In 1794, he was disappointed at his son,
Sandy’s, ‘loud familiarity of manner’ and ‘very broad pronunciation’, habits
picked up while studying law at the University of Edinburgh.
15
John Ramsay
of Ochtertyre summed up the uneasy linguistic equilibrium which prevailed
toward the end of the eighteenth century in the following terms:
Besides the colloquial Scotch spoken in good company, there was likewise the
oratorical, which was used by judges, lawyers and clergymen, in their several
departments. In this, perhaps, there was greater variety than in the other; but it
may be concluded, that such as wished to excel in their public appearances, strove
to bring their speeches or sermons some degrees nearer pure English than their
ordinary talk (emphasis added).
16
As Ochtertyre’s remarks imply, even among the elite the common result
was a ‘tempered medium’, a form of spoken English distinctly infl ected by
Edinburgh or Scottish norms.
17
This presumably is what Boswell spoke.
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Communicating 167
Polishing away provincialism was a British and not merely a Scottish pre-
occupation in the eighteenth century, while the drive for linguistic and gram-
matical standardisation was a feature of a number of European countries in
the early modern period.
18
The broader effect was for language and accent
to become ever more strongly a marker of social rank and social aspira-
tion. Language, it has been remarked, was ‘a vehicle of communication and
excommunication’; and to a greater extent than hitherto this was becoming
true during this period.
19
A hierarchy of forms of speech was one of the
early modern era’s strongest contributions to a more class-based society,
something underlined by the fact that throughout the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, and indeed some way beyond that, Scots continued to
be the native tongue among the lower orders in the Lowlands, and Scottish
dialects continued to be strongly regional. James Beattie, the Aberdeen pro-
fessor, who had a keen interest in such things, claimed to be able to ‘know
by his speech, a native of Banfffshire, Buchan, Aberdeen, Dee-side, Mearns,
Angus, Lothian and Fife, as well as of Ross-shire and Inverness’.
20
Scotland
was yet to become a unifi ed nation at least at the popular level, but com-
prised a dense patchwork of communities divided by language and different
ways of acting and perceiving.
LITERACY
If how one spoke served, increasingly, as a powerful badge of social identity,
literacy created another set of divisions. The precise location of these is, none
the less, elusive. As Brian Ward Perkins has written recently in a very differ-
ent context, but in terms which can be applied equally well to early modern
Scotland: ‘it will never be possible to come up with reliable fi gures for the
number of people comfortable with literacy, let alone provide a nuanced
view of what level of literacy they had attained’.
21
In default of the existence
of such fi gures, historians have focused on the ability to write one’s name,
partly because this has left obvious traces in the historical record. Defi ned
in this way, literacy levels have been shown to correlate strongly with the
rural–urban divide, social status and gender. By the end of the seventeenth
century a majority of the male population were able to sign their names (one
estimate puts this as high as 75 per cent in the 1710s), while female literacy
was signifi cantly lower (at 25–30 per cent).
22
Within individual communities,
distinctions were even more fi ne-grained, depending on trade and occupa-
tion, as well as place of residence.
23
Being able to write, however, was not the same thing as being able to read.
There is plenty of evidence that reading was often taught before writing,
through, for example, women teaching children to read in the home often
using the Bible. This means that fi gures such as those cited above almost cer-
tainly misrepresent levels of literacy, especially so in relation to women.
24
How, then, did most people learn to read? In the fi rst place, this was at
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168 Bob Harris
parish or burgh schools. The seventeenth century saw the development of
a network of parish and burgh schools, partly funded by landowners and
burghs and partly by fees.
25
By the early 1690s, in the eastern Lowlands and
the southern and eastern Highlands, most parishes (perhaps around 90 per
cent) had an offi cial school and a schoolteacher. While this network was
probably weakened by the effects and disruptions of the famines of the
second half of the 1690s, renewed efforts were made to ensure provision
in the aftermath of further legislation in 1696.
26
Beneath and around these
offi cial establishments there developed a large number of private schools in
towns and rural areas, the rise of which also suggest the existence of a genu-
inely popular desire for literacy in this period. Parents frequently clubbed
together to hire a schoolteacher, as occurred in the later eighteenth century in
the Links, an area on the outskirts of Montrose.
27
By contrast, in the central
and western Highlands provision of schooling remained very patchy, refl ect-
ing, on the one hand, the very slow and uneven penetration of that region by
the kirk state and, on the other hand, cultural separation and distance.
Although information on what school was like for most people is scant,
we do know that in rural areas schooling had to fi t around the seasonal
rhythms of agriculture and the periodic demands this created for child
labour. Full-time schooling was of short duration and limited in summer.
Older children returned to study in the evenings and in winter. Attendance
could be of equally short duration in urban schools. In the burgh school in
Cupar, Fife, half of attendees present between 1774 and 1778 were in school
for a year or less, and 80 per cent three years or less. The attendance of girls
was especially sporadic.
28
Kirk sessions in rural parishes and burghs regu-
larly paid the fees of poor pupils, while the fees themselves were kept at a low
level. This in itself is a measure of contemporary determination to ensure
that schooling was available to as many people as possible, and was despite
the adverse impact this had, especially in the second half of the eighteenth
century, on the incomes of hard-pressed schoolmasters.
If schooling formed part of the lives of most of the Lowland population,
at least for a brief period, a great deal of learning probably took place inside
the home or in other, informal ways.
29
People’s fi rst experience of reading
may well have been learning to read from the Bible at home under instruction
from their mother, although nineteenth-century autobiographies of working
men – one of the few sources which shed light on this – can be very vague
on this point. ‘At six’, wrote the author of one, ‘I was able to read the Bible
pretty well, but the initiatory process has quite escaped my memory.’
30
The
inference is that it was not as a result of formal schooling. Another records
having been to school briefl y from the age of fi ve, but who was afterwards
‘caused to improve what little [education] I had received by reading a portion
of some easy book by my mother every day. It was not very long till I was
able to read the Bible, and my task then was to sit down by her side and read
three chapters daily.’
31
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Communicating 169
The next stages of education – still the parish school in rural areas, the
grammar school and private schools in towns, and beyond that university
and during the later eighteenth century academies – furnished an ever nar-
rowing, although still socially quite mixed, section of society with more
advanced skills in literacy and numeracy.
32
From the later seventeenth
century, the range of subjects taught widened signifi cantly in response
to new demands and cultural imperatives created by a commercialising
economy.
33
In smaller burghs, new subjects – book-keeping or geography,
for example – were added to the curricula of the grammar schools from at
least the 1720s, albeit in haphazard, piecemeal fashion. In Dundee, despite
the rapid mid-century expansion in its international and domestic trade and
manufacturing, the addition of geography came only in 1780, and followed
a petition ‘by a number of inhabitants of Dundee having children at the
Grammar School’.
34
On the other hand it is likely that – given the signifi cant
presence of merchants and ships’ captains – there were private schools in
the town offering modern, more narrowly vocational subjects which remain
hidden from our view.
35
Using advertisements and notices placed in the
press, Charles Withers has counted sixty-four public lectures or classes in
geography across Scotland between 1708 and 1830.
36
Although the bulk of
Figure 6.1 Self-portrait of artist and his mother and sister by Alexander Carse. Women
appear to have played an important role in teaching their offspring about the Bible
and aspects of Scottish history. Although literacy levels were lower among females than
males, women from the middling ranks were frequently avid readers and writers of letters.
Reproduced by permission of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
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170 Bob Harris
these were in Edinburgh and Glasgow, this may be partially misleading in
that it could simply refl ect the relative lack of papers elsewhere before the
early nineteenth century. Alongside geography, these private teachers usually
taught navigation, astronomy, geometry, mathematics and arithmetic.
Across the country, the precise pattern of educational provision which
emerged depended, to a signifi cant extent, on a town’s size and the density of
the local population on which schools could draw for pupils. In Edinburgh
and Glasgow, the grammar schools continued to confi ne themselves in
the eighteenth century to a classical education since they had no diffi culty
attracting a suffi cient number of pupils to make this approach viable; sepa-
rate establishments existed to deliver other subjects. When Henry Cockburn
went to the High School in Edinburgh in 1787, the only additional subject,
apart from Latin, was Greek. The era, meanwhile, of the separate academy,
designed to provide instruction to the sons of the mercantile and profes-
sional classes as a cheaper, hopefully (for the parents anyway) more moral,
alternative to university, was relatively short-lived, lasting from 1760 with
the formation of the Perth Academy to around 1800. One reason why the
movement faltered was that the universities took growing steps, especially
from mid-century, to revise and liberalise their curricula.
37
Little is known about the actual experience of schooling at the level of the
grammar school. After 1707 – but not generally before then
38
– the highest
ranks of the landed classes tended to send their sons south to English public
schools – notably Eton. Middling rank families continued to entrust their
children to the burgh schools, which suggests the enduring appeal of such
institutions. On the other hand, school could, it seems, be a rather brutal,
uninspiring environment. Certainly, this was Cockburn’s recollection of
Edinburgh High School: ‘kept about nine years at two dead languages,
which we did not learn’.
39
Flogging seems to have been rife in some schools,
although burgh councils sought to keep such tendencies in check.
40
During the eighteenth century, there was also a strengthening and broad-
ening demand for education for the daughters of the elites and prospering
middling sorts. Largely confi ned in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries to Edinburgh and one or two other places, in the later eighteenth
century girls’ boarding schools spread more widely, refl ecting the diffusion
of genteel culture and aspirations throughout propertied society. These
schools taught an array of accomplishments, including foreign languages,
music, belles lettres, needlework and drawing.
41
By the middle of the eight-
eenth century women might also gain access to private lectures in geography
and other subjects, while some classes in the capital were specifi cally aimed
at women.
42
By the early nineteenth century, most sizeable towns boasted a
growing range of music teachers and drawing masters, again usually catering
(although certainly not exclusively) for the instruction of young women.
43
In broad terms, therefore, education, like language, underpinned, fi rst,
social hierarchy, although less so perhaps than in countries where there was
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Communicating 171
no public provision of schools, and where access to university was impos-
sible for members of the lower and lesser middling orders, and, secondly,
gender differences. Instruction in the classical languages, Latin and Greek,
was entirely a male preserve, as Mary Somerville, the astronomer, mathema-
tician and writer, was to discover in the later eighteenth century.
44
READING
What people read was obviously dependent on what was available, its cost
and what they wanted and had time to read. Clearly, from the early sev-
enteenth century, and even more so from the middle of the seventeenth
century, a growing number of people read avidly and regularly, although
such individuals were a sub-section of the elites, including professionals,
ministers and members of the landed classes. The bulk of the population
simply did not have the time to read except in stolen moments – in the work-
place or the fi eld – in childhood as part of their education, or on Sundays,
although weavers might read or be read to in weaving shops as might women
at the spinning wheel.
45
It is in contemporary diaries and journals that we
occasionally glimpse individual readers. Boswell tended to read on Sundays,
when ill in bed, or, when not dining or carousing, admittedly not that
often, in the evening, unsurprisingly a common time for reading.
46
On the
odd occasion, he is to be found reading aloud to his wife or her to him, or
with a friend or acquaintance. In June 1782, he read Fielding’s Tom Jones to
his wife, a book she did not care for as much as her husband, disliking the
novelist’s ‘turn for low life’ and regarding Sophia, the heroine, as ‘not quite
refi n’d’.
47
Sunday was more likely to involve reading from the Bible or other
devotional works, often aloud. At different times in the seventeenth century
(1622, 1625, 1642 and 1663), legislation sought to prescribe the possession
of Bibles and psalm books in households above a certain rental value, while
similar orders were issued periodically at the local level.
48
In January 1648,
the minister and elders of Lasswade parish admonished a group of boys who
guarded the cattle in Loanhead ‘for comeing together and playing on the
Sabbath day and not exercising themselves in reading or other godlie exer-
cises’.
49
Female readers are less visible in the historical record. Some women
clearly read very widely, although most of our information concerns elite
women.
50
How far women’s reading differed from men’s, if at all, is unclear,
although it has been argued recently that women’s reading was more likely
to be a social activity. The truth is that currently we do not know enough
to say one or the other, although male reading was certainly not always soli-
tary and ‘associated with the study’.
51
Similarly, how far reading aloud was
usual is hard to say, apart from reading from the Bible. Reading to children,
however, seems to have been common at all social levels, albeit that what was
being read almost certainly varied signifi cantly according to social rank.
52
Access to books and other forms of print increased very signifi cantly
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