Foyster E., Whatley C.A. A History of Everyday Life in Scotland, 1600-1800
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182 Bob Harris
The spoken word was interwoven with the nature of urban life in other
ways. Public notices were delivered by word of mouth. Print barely changed
this, although handbills were on occasion issued by larger burgh authorities
in the face of popular protests, such as food riots as part of efforts to defuse
popular anger.
126
The market cross or market place was often where news was
announced or spread from, although the original source of the news might
be a written or printed report. In 1769, when Ilay Campbell rode back to
Edinburgh with news of the House of Lords decision in the famous Douglas
case, on arrival he went straight to the cross in the High Street, threw his
hat in the air, and cried ‘Douglas for ever!’.
127
From the later seventeenth
century, coffee houses were places where print was regularly alchemised
into ‘common report’, which then travelled through towns and into villages
and rural areas in their environs. Food riots had their origins not just in high
food prices, but in the circulation of information and rumour about specifi c
malpractices or actions by individual dealers, or millers or landowners; this
emanated from a thickly populated realm of talk which is only partially and
occasionally visible in the historical record. In the market place, it was very
often women who gathered and circulated information and rumour about
prices and the behaviour of retailers, bakers and farmers or landowners.
128
As
Bernard Capp has shown in an English context, women in this period tended
to form what he has called ‘gossip networks’, refl ecting their population of
distinct spaces within towns, including doorways and the home, networks
which could be mobilised, as in food protests, to defend communal inter-
ests and values, but which, on a day-to-day basis, served as a crucial form of
support in the struggle against the vagaries and instabilities of life.
129
These
networks might also offer some protection, in the context of a society which
was deeply patriarchal in its customs and beliefs, against attacks on their rep-
utation and person, from neighbours and, indeed, husbands. In rural com-
munities, the kirk and the kirk door could play a similar role to the market
place in the town. Even in the urban political sphere, where print had by
the end of the eighteenth century assumed considerable importance, what is
striking is just how much political talk remained just that. Local affairs – the
politics of the parish and the burgh council – rarely intruded into newspapers
or print; newspapers were read in this period for news of what was happening
in London or Europe or further afi eld. In sum, for the bulk of the population,
despite the growth of print and the increasing speed with which information,
news and people travelled between communities, the world of communica-
tions in 1800 continued to have much in common with that of 1600.
Notes
1. See R. A. Houston, Literacy in Early Modern Europe: Culture and Education 1500–
1800, 2nd edn (London, 2002), ch. 9; Peter Burke, Languages and Communities in
Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2004).
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Communicating 183
2. Julian Goodare, The Government of Scotland 1560–1625 (Oxford, 2004), ch. 10;
Charles W. J. Withers, Gaelic Scotland: The Transformation of a Culture Region
(London, 1988), especially ch. 3.
3. Charles W. J. Withers, Gaelic in Scotland, 1698–1981: The Geographical History
of a Language (Edinburgh, 1984); V. E. Durcacz, The Decline of the Celtic
Languages (Edinburgh, 1983).
4. D. J. Withrington, ‘The SSPCK and Highland schools in the mid-eighteenth
century’, Scottish Historical Review, XLI (1962), 88–99; Withers, Gaelic Scotland,
pp. 120–37.
5. Quoted in Charles W. J. Withers, Urban Highlanders: Highland–Lowland
Migration and Urban Gaelic Culture, 1700–1900 (East Linton, 1998), p. 201.
6. Withers, Urban Highlanders, ch. 6.
7. J. Derrick McClure, ‘English in Scotland’, in R. Burchfi eld (ed.), The Cambridge
History of the English Language, Vol. V: English in Britain and Overseas: Origins
and Development (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 29–93.
8. Quoted in Burke, Languages and Communities, p. 41. For Sheridan’s visit to
Edinburgh and its impact, see Janet Adam Smith, ‘Some eighteenth-century
ideas of Scotland’, in N. T. Phillipson and R. Mitchison (eds), Scotland in the
Age of Improvement: Essays in Scottish History in the Eighteenth Century (Edinburgh,
1970), pp. 110–11.
9. Houston, Literacy in Early Modern Europe, p. 229.
10. Quoted in Charles Jones and Wilson McLeod, ‘Standards and differences: lan-
guages in Scotland, 1707–1918’, in I. Brown, T. O. Clancy, S. Manning and M.
Pittock (eds), The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature Vol. Two: Enlightenment,
Britain and Empire (Edinburgh, 2007), p. 28.
11. As noted in Paul Langford, ‘South Britons’ reception of North Britons, 1707–
1820’, in T. C. Smout (ed.), Anglo-Scottish Relations from 1603 to 1900 (Oxford,
2005), pp. 164–5.
12. Henry W. Meikle, Scotland and the French Revolution (Glasgow, 1912), pp.
150–1; Michael Fry, The Dundas Despotism (Edinburgh, 1992), p. 171.
13. Henry Grey Graham, Social Life of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century (London,
1906), p. 76.
14. See R. Crawford, Devolving English Literature, 2nd edn (Edinburgh, 2000), p. 75.
15. Boswell’s Edinburgh Journals, pp. 469, 548.
16. Quoted in David Hewitt, ‘James Beattie and the languages of Scotland’, in
Jennifer J. Carter and Joan M. Pittock (eds), Aberdeen and the Enlightenment
(Aberdeen, 1987), p. 252.
17. See relevant comment in Jones and McLeod, ‘Standards and differences’,
p. 28.
18. For this, see Burke, Languages and Communities, chs 4, 6.
19. P. J. Waller, ‘Democracy and dialect, speech and class’, quoted in A. Fox, Oral
and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford 2000), p. 53.
20. Quoted in Hewitt, ‘James Beattie’, p. 257.
21. Brian Ward Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford, 2005),
pp. 151–2.
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184 Bob Harris
22. R. A. Houston, ‘The literacy myth?: illiteracy in Scotland 1660–1760’, Past and
Present, 96 (1982), 90.
23. R. A. Houston, ‘Literacy, education and the culture of print in Enlightenment
Edinburgh’, History, 78 (1993), 373–92.
24. See T. C. Smout, ‘Born again at Cambuslang: new evidence on popular reli-
gion and literacy in eighteenth-century Scotland’, Past and Present, 97 (1982),
114–27.
25. R. D. Anderson, Scottish Education since the Reformation (Dundee, 1997), ch. 1.
26. D. J. Withrington, ‘Education and society in the eighteenth century’, in
N. T. Phillipson and R. Mitchison (eds), Scotland in the Age of Improvement
(Edinburgh, 1970), pp. 169–99.
27. Angus Archives, Restenneth, Montrose Burgh Records, EK/6, Petitions etc.
1800–1808, Petition by several inhabitants in the Links requesting ground to
build a new school, 1800.
28. Paula Martin, Cupar: the History of a Small Scottish Town (Edinburgh, 2006),
p. 128.
29. This is also stressed by Smout, ‘Born again at Cambuslang’, pp. 125–6.
30. Anon., ‘Life of a letterpress printer, written by himself’, The Commonwealth, 7
February 1857, p. 3. I am grateful to Vivienne Dunstan for this reference.
31. Anon., ‘Life of a handloom weaver, written by himself’, The Commonwealth, 25
April 1857, p. 1.
32. See the summary of fi ndings on the social composition of university students in
Anderson, Scottish Education, pp. 18–19. See also Houston, Scottish Literacy, pp.
244–7. Houston has emphasised how few individuals went to university in this
period, around 1.5–2 per cent of the relevant age group in the population.
33. Withrington, ‘Education and society in the eighteenth century’, pp. 169–83.
34. Dundee Archives and Records Centre (DARC), Dundee Town Council Minute
Book, entry for 31 January 1780.
35. The fi rst Dundee trade directory, published in 1782, lists nine private teachers
in the town, but gives no indication of what they taught: The Dundee Register of
Merchants and Trades, with the Public Offi cers, &c for MDCCLXXXIII (Dundee,
1782), pp. 38–9.
36. Charles W. J. Withers, Geography, Science and National Identity: Scotland since
1520 (Cambridge, 2001), p. 119.
37. As summarised in Withrington, ‘Education and society’, pp. 184–91; Anderson,
Scottish Education, ch. 2.
38. As emphasised in Keith M. Brown, ‘The origins of a British aristocracy: integra-
tion and its limitations before the treaty of Union’, in Steven G. Ellis and Sarah
Barber (eds), Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State, 1485–1725 (London,
1995), pp. 233–4.
39. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, entry for Cockburn.
40. For one example, see Martin, Cupar, p. 129.
41. See the advertisement for Miss Thomson’s boarding school in Dundee in the
Edinburgh Advertiser, 21 October 1777.
42. Withers, Geography, Science, and National Identity, p. 124.
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Communicating 185
43. See Bob Harris, ‘Towns, improvement and cultural change in Georgian
Scotland: the evidence of the Angus burghs, c. 1760–1820’, Urban History, 33
(2006), 203.
44. D. McMillan (ed.), Queen of Science: Personal Recollections of Mary Somerville
(Edinburgh, 2001), p. 24.
45. For evidence on this in Scotland there is nothing to compare to Raymond
Gillespie’s Reading Ireland: Print, Reading and Social Change in Early Modern
Ireland (Manchester, 2005) or the considerable body of relevant work on
England. For a useful, if rather schematic, summary of existing knowledge,
however, see J. Crawford, ‘Reading and book use in eighteenth-century
Scotland’, Bibliotheck, 19 (1994), 23–43; and R. A. Houston, Scottish Literacy and
the Scottish Identity, (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 163–78.
46. Boswell’s Edinburgh Journals, p. 457.
47. Boswell’s Edinburgh Journals, p. 462.
48. Alistair J. Mann, The Scottish Book Trade 1500–1720: Print, Commerce and Print
Control in Early Modern Scotland (East Linton, 2000), pp. 52, 161.
49. Quoted in Houston, Scottish Literacy and the Scottish Identity, p. 188.
50. See Elizabeth Rose of Kilravock (1747–1815), whose reading list covering the
years 1775–80 is reproduced in H. W. Drescher (ed.), Henry Mackenzie Letters to
Elizabeth Rose of Kilravock: On Literature, Events and People 1768–1815 (Munster,
1967), pp. 229–40; or the commonplace books of Mary Eleanor Bowes
(1749–1800), 9th countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne, which survive in the
Strathmore muniments, Glamis Castle, Angus. For a recent valuable discussion
of one small group of such readers, see Katherine Glover, ‘The female mind:
Scottish Enlightenment femininity and the world of letters. A case study of the
women of the Fletcher of Saltoun family in the mid-eighteenth century’, Journal
of Scottish Historical Studies, 25 (2005), 1–20.
51. See comment in Glover, ‘The female mind’, p. 7.
52. See George Penny, Traditions of Perth (reprinted, Coupar Angus, 1986), pp.
120–2, where Penny notes that Satan’s Invisible World Discovered was commonly
read in the presence of children.
53. Mann, Scottish Book Trade, p. 222.
54. Jonquil Bevan, ‘Scotland’, in John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds), The
Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Volume IV, 1557–1695 (Cambridge,
2002), pp. 698–9.
55. See David Allan, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment and the readers of late Georgian
Lancaster: light in the North’, Northern History, 36 (2000), 267–81; Martin,
Cupar, p. 134; Crawford, ‘Reading and book use’, pp. 34–5.
56. E. Jacobs, ‘Eighteenth-century British circulating libraries and cultural book
history’, Book History, 6 (2003), 19; Crawford, ‘Reading and book use’, p. 33.
57. The Autobiography of a Working Man: Alexander Somerville (London, 1967), pp.
25, 55–6.
58. Keith M. Brown, Noble Society in Scotland: Wealth, Family and Culture from
Reformation to Revolution (Edinburgh, 2000), pp. 219–20; Roger L. Emerson,
‘Scottish cultural change 1660–1710 and the Union of 1707’, in John Robertson
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186 Bob Harris
(ed.), A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the Union of 1707 (Cambridge,
1995), pp. 130–41.
59. Foulis of Ravelston’s Account Book 1671–1707 (Edinburgh, 1894); The Diary and
General Expenditure Book of William Cunningham of Craigends . . . Kept Chiefl y
From 1673 to 1680 (Edinburgh, 1887).
60. This source will be much more extensively discussed in forthcoming work by
Vivienne Dunstan, currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Dundee.
61. Research conducted by David Barrie and Vivienne Dunstan as part of separate
research projects on the early modern history of Dundee and other burghs
in Angus. The results of Barrie’s examination have been deposited with the
Dundee University Archives and Museum Services.
62. National Archives of Scotland (NAS), CC20/7/7, inventory of the personal
estate of John Watt Esq, 1815.
63. NAS, CC3/4/20, 1868–76, articles of roup of Thomas Seaton, physician in
Montrose, 1743.
64. T. M. Devine, ‘The Scottish merchant community, 1680–1740’, in R. H.
Campbell and A. S. Skinner (eds), The Origins and Nature of the Scottish
Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1982), p. 34.
65. NAS, Court of Session Productions, CS96/819, inventory of household fur-
niture and other moveable property, belonging to Thomas Ross, merchant in
Montrose, 27 July 1819.
66. Mann, Scottish Book Trade, p. 217.
67. For Buchan’s Domestic Medicine, see Richard B. Sher, ‘William Buchan’s domes-
tic medicine: laying book history open’, in Peter Isaac and Barry McKay (eds),
The Human Face of the Book Trade: Print Culture and its Creators (Winchester,
1999), pp. 45–64.
68. Penny, Traditions, p. 38.
69. T. C. Smout, ‘Scotland and north Britain: the historical background, 1707–
1918’, in Brown et al., The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, p. 6.
70. One of the earliest, and certainly the most famous and most remarked on, of the
newsrooms was the Glasgow tontine subscription newsroom, which opened in
1781. Commercial reading rooms could subscribe to an equally wide range of
newspapers and periodicals as, for example, in the case of the Trongate Literary
Museum run by John Murdoch, a Glasgow bookseller, stationer and perfumer.
This held eleven newspapers and ten periodicals (advertisement in Glasgow
Courier, 18 January 1800).
71. See Clare Jackson, Restoration Scotland 1660–1690: Royalist Politics, Religion and
Ideas (Woodbridge, 2003), p. 41.
72. ‘News lettres’ were supplied to Montrose Town Council as early as 1654 from
an Edinburgh agent (James G. Low and W. Low, ‘Bibliography of Montrose
periodical literature’, Scottish Notes and Queries, 3, 1889–90). Aberdeen town
council minutes record a payment in 1657 to an individual to supply ‘ane weekly
diurnal’ (W. J. Couper, The Edinburgh Periodical Press, 2 vols (Stirling, 1908), I,
p. 48), while Glasgow had a correspondent in Edinburgh from 1652 and was
receiving a weekly journal from London from 1657 (George Eyre Todd, History
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Communicating 187
of Glasgow, ii, From the Reformation to the Revolution (Glasgow, 1931), p. 258). In
some cases, such arrangements seem to have lapsed, partly owing to their cost
and partly because of a feeling that they were not required in peacetime.
73. William McDowall, History of the Burgh of Dumfries, with Notices of Nithsdale,
Annandale and the Western Border, 4th edn (revised, 1896), p. 514. Montrose
burgh council members were allowed to keep papers for a week in 1694.
74. University of St Andrews Special Collections, MS CS479.A8, Elizabeth
Maitland Household account book, 1767–1803. See also Glover, ‘The female
mind’, pp. 9–10.
75. See Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks 1641–
1649 (Oxford, 1996); Joad Redmond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early
Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003); Carolyn Nelson and Matthew Seccombe,
‘The creation of the periodical press 1620–1695’, in Barnard and McKenzie, The
Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, pp. 533–50.
76. There is no adequate modern study of the eighteenth-century Scottish press
or the nature of news networks in Scotland prior to 1700. See, however,
W. J. Couper, The Edinburgh Periodical Press: Being a Bibliographical Account
of the Newspapers, Journals, and Magazines issued in Edinburgh from the Earliest
Times to 1800, 2 vols (Stirling, 1908); M. E. Craig, The Scottish Periodical Press
1750–1789 (Edinburgh, 1931).
77. Details of one early-nineteenth-century newspaper can be found in National
Library of Scotland, Acc. 10262/2, View of the present state of the Dumfries &
Galloway Courier, 10 October 1811. The paper had 620 subscribers, a number
which had grown by ninety since 1 January.
78. Mann, Scottish Book Trade, p. 148.
79. Karin Bowie, Scottish Public Opinion and the Anglo-Scottish Union, 1699–1707
(Woodbridge, 2007); see also, Karin Bowie, ‘Public opinion, popular politics
and the Union of 1707’, Scottish Historical Review, LXXXII (2003), 226–60; and
Christopher A. Whatley, The Scots and the Union (Edinburgh, 2006).
80. For a general discussion, see Houston, ‘Literacy, education and the culture of
print’.
81. Bob Harris, ‘Scotland’s newspapers, the French Revolution and domestic radi-
calism (c. 1789–1794)’, Scottish Historical Review, LXXXIV (2005), 38–62
82. Some councils continued to purchase papers – Dundee, for example, sub-
scribed throughout the second half of the eighteenth century to the Edinburgh
Evening Courant and the Edinburgh Advertiser – but whether arrangements
for reading them continued in the same way from this period is not always
clear.
83. John Lettice, Letters on a Tour Through Various Parts of SCOTLAND in the Year
1792 (London, 1794), p. 454.
84. Harris, ‘Scotland’s newspapers’, p. 60.
85. See Ned C. Landsman, ‘Presbyterians and provincial society: the Evangelical
Enlightenment in the west of Scotland, 1740–1775’, in John Dwyer and Richard
B. Sher (eds), Sociability and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh,
1993), pp. 194–209; Ned C. Landsman,‘Evangelists and their hearers: popular
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188 Bob Harris
interpretation of Revivalist preaching in eighteenth-century Scotland’, Journal
of British Studies, 28 (1989), 131, 146.
86. See Andrew Noble, ‘Displaced persons: Burns and the Renfrew Radicals’, in
Bob Harris (ed.), Scotland in the Age of the French Revolution (Edinburgh, 2005),
pp. 196–225.
87. These reading societies, which numbered around fi fty, are described in a
remarkable and little remarked on series of articles in the Scots Chronicle, 20
October, 30 December 1796; 20 January, 10 February, 24 February, 4 April, 19,
30 May, 7 July, 10 November, 5 December 1797; 16 February, 16 March 1798.
See also Crawford, ‘Reading and book use’, p. 37, where the author refers to
the Encyclopaedia Club of Paisley, a debating society, which was in existence as
early as 1770, membership of which included a blacksmith, barber and hand-
loom weaver.
88. J. R. R. Adams, The Printed Word and the Common Man: Popular Culture in Ulster
1700–1900 (Belfast, 1987), pp. 39–40.
89. For a European perspective, see Paul Arblaster, ‘Posts, newsletters, newspa-
pers: England in a European system of communications’, in Joad Raymond
(ed.), News Networks in Seventeenth-Century Britain and Europe (Basingstoke,
2006), pp. 19–34.
90. Culloden Papers, Correspondence from 1625 to 1748 (London, 1815), pp. 14–15,
memoir of a plan for preserving the peace of the Highlands.
91. A. R. B. Haldane, Three Centuries of Scottish Posts (Edinburgh, 1971).
92. Haldane, Three Centuries, pp. 108–9.
93. Horse posts, for example, were introduced from the 1710s and mail coaches
from the 1780s.
94. Arblaster, ‘Posts, newsletters, newspapers’, p. 20.
95. Bob Harris, ‘The Scots, the Westminster Parliament, and the British state in the
eighteenth century’, in Julian Hoppit (ed.), Parliaments, Nations and Identities in
Britain and Ireland, 1660–1850 (Manchester, 2003), p. 130.
96. L. W. Sharp (ed.), Early Letters of Robert Wodrow,1698–1709 (Edinburgh, 1937).
97. Rebecca Earle (ed.), Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter Writers 1600–1945
(Aldershot, 1999), p. 2.
98. On this, see relevant comment in Susan Whyman, ‘Paper visits”: The post-
Restoration letter as seen through the Verney family archive’, in Earle,
Epistolary Selves, pp. 15–36.
99. Katrina Williamson, ‘The emergence of privacy: letters, journals and domestic
writing’, in Brown et al., The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, p. 60.
100. Blair Castle, Atholl Papers, 65 (6), 24, 115, 121.
101. For a recent study of such networks, see Douglas J. Hamilton, Scotland, the
Caribbean and the Atlantic World, 1750–1820 (Manchester, 2005).
102. Diary of the Reverend John Mill, Minister in Shetland (Edinburgh, 1889), p. 52.
103. Kate Teltscher, ‘The sentimental ambassador: the letters of George Bogle from
Bengal, Bhutan, and Tibet, 1770–1781’, in Earle, Epistolary Selves, pp. 81, 84–5.
104. Haldane, Three Centuries of Scottish Posts, p. 59.
105. I owe this insight to discussion with Susan Whyman. I am grateful to her for
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Communicating 189
allowing me to read some unpublished work on letter writing and literacy in
northern England in this period.
106. Quoted in Couper, Edinburgh Periodical Press, p. 79.
107. National Register of Archives Scotland, Loudoun Papers, Mountstuart House,
Box 90, bundle 14, ‘A Lover of his Country’ [i.e. Mackintosh of Borlum] to
Lord Loudoun, 18 May 1730.
108. Emma Vincent, ‘The responses of Scottish churchmen to the French Revolution,
1789–1802’, Scottish Historical Review, LXXIII (1994), 191–215. See also Bob
Harris, The Scottish People and the French Revolution (London, 2008).
109. See the discussion of this in Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early
Modern Scotland (New Haven, CT, 2002), ch. 1.
110. Edinburgh Central Library, DA 1861.789, Journal of Andrew Armstrong,
1789–93.
111. See the discussion in Henrietta Harrison, ‘Newspapers and nationalism in rural
China 1890–1929’, Past and Present, 166 (2000), 181–204.
112. See relevant comment in Bob Harris, Politics and the Nation: Britain in the
Mid Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2002), p. 167; Houston, Scottish Literacy, pp.
197–8.
113. Allan Macinnes, ‘Gaelic culture in the seventeenth century: polarization and
assimilation’, in Ellis and Barber, Conquest and Union, p. 164.
114. Autobiography of a Working Man, p. 19.
115. Autobiography of a Working Man, pp. 24–5. For the role of women as conduits
of oral tradition, see Deborah Symonds, Weep Not For Me: Women, Ballads, and
Infanticide in Early Modern Scotland (University Park, PA, 1997).
116. Mann suggests that, along with other forms of cheap print, ‘bawdy ballads’
became much more common in the early eighteenth century (Mann, Scottish
Book Trade, p. 208). In England, printed ballads and broadsheets were very
widely circulated from the sixteenth century.
117. Penny, Traditions, p. 117.
118. For comment on the ‘impurity’ of the Scottish ballad tradition, see Edward J.
Cowan, ‘Hunting the ballad’, in E. J. Cowan (ed.), The Ballad in Scottish History
(East Linton, 2000), p. 9; Thomas Crawford, Society and the Lyric: A Study of the
Song Culture of Eighteenth Century (Edinburgh, 1979), p. 7.
119. For psalm singing, see Todd, Culture of Protestantism, pp. 72–3; Landsman,
‘Evangelists and their hearers’, pp. 144–5. For an example of the use of song in
protests and demonstrations, see Douglas Watt, The Price of Scotland: Darien,
Union and the Wealth of Nations (Edinburgh, 2007), p. 198; and more generally
the singing of Jacobite songs in Murray G. H. Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics
in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 1994).
120. Leah Leneman noted just two cases of defamation involving print in her
‘Defamation in Scotland, 1750–1800’, Continuity and Change, 15 (2000),
209–34.
121. Perth and Kinross Council Archives, Perth, B59/26/11/1/2/23, copy of process
Baillie Scot Ag.t Preston soldier, 29 June 1726.
122. See Leneman, ‘Defamation in Scotland’.
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190 Bob Harris
123. NAS, CC2/2/53/4, Alexander McMillan, merchant & Baillie in Campbeltown
agt William Watson jun there, 5 August 1758.
124. As suggested by NAS, CC8/6/42, Anna Colvill, spouse of Benjamin Bate,
soldier in the 31st regiment of foot, & him for himself agt Ann Dickson & her
spouse, James Dickson, residenter at West Kirk Braehead near Edinburgh, 13
February 1783.
125. The term ‘venomous tongue’ is taken from a case of scandal involving a mother-
in-law alleging an adulterous affair between her son-in-law, who was a portioner
of Drimllilie, and a married woman which was heard before the Argyll sheriff
court in 1769 (NAS, CC2/2/70/5).
126. For one example of this, see Christopher A. Whatley, Scottish Society: Beyond
Jacobitism towards Industrialisation (Manchester, 2000), p. 207.
127. Boswell’s Edinburgh Journals, p. 76.
128. See Whatley, Scottish Society, ch. 5.
129. Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early
Modern England (Oxford, 2003)
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Chapter 7
Order and Disorder
Christopher A. Whatley
INTRODUCTION
Early modern Scotland has been portrayed as relatively well-ordered, rather
authoritarian society. Such an image, however, applies better to the Lowlands
than the Highlands (where feuding lasted longer – well into the seventeenth
century, while cattle raiding carried on until the mid-1700s), and towards
the end of the period under review rather than earlier.
1
But the unruliness
of Highland society can be exaggerated – the last clan battle was fought
in 1688 – as can the contrast with the Lowlands. There were fewer armed
men in the north at the turn of the eighteenth century than has often been
assumed; even in the previous century most clansmen had little more than a
sword.
2
Yet in the early seventeenth century the country had been wracked
by civil war, and later James VII (and II) and his ministers were forced to fl ee
from Scotland. Armed confl ict followed the Glorious Revolution in 1688–9.
There was a further eruption of civil confl ict again in the fi rst four decades
after the Union of 1707. Scotland was not settled until the 1750s, and then
only through the imposition of ‘systematic state terrorism’ was Highland
Jacobitism fi nally defeated.
3
At the century’s end there appeared the chal-
lenge of political radicalism and the French Revolution, although historians
are divided about the degree of support these twin causes attracted, and what
threat to the state they posed in Scotland.
4
However, behind these ideological, dynastic and confessional confl icts,
key structures of Scottish society were in place even by 1600, and fi rmly so
by the end of the seventeenth century, certainly in most of the Lowlands.
These ordering mechanisms were suffi ciently robust to create a somewhat
different pattern of disorder in Scotland than was commonplace in other
parts of early modern Europe. Levels of serious crime appear to have been
lower in Scotland than in England – although an exception may have been
child murder, often by the use of particularly gruesome methods.
5
Even in
Edinburgh, the country’s teeming capital, there appear to have been fewer
violent deaths than might be anticipated – whether by accident, suicide,
execution or homicide.
6
Fewer Scots – again proportionately – were trans-
ported to Australia at the turn of the nineteenth century.
7
But the indications
are that once brought to trial, there was a greater likelihood in Scotland
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