|
|
|
|
|
THE LOWLAND CLEARANCES
Much has been written about the truly awful
and despicable clearances of the people of the Highlands. A process
whereby many of the Clan Chiefs betrayed their own people. A process where many of the
so-called noble families of Scotland proved just how black of
heart and money driven they actually were. They sugar-coated their awful
actions by referring to
the brutal clearance process as 'improvement'. This may have been the inevitable consequence of a move away from an agrarian society to an industrial one, and poverty and even famine may have been endemic in the western Highlands, but wholesale eviction from ancestral lands was never seen as an improvement by the people themselves. What has not been so widely written about is
the fact of the clearances in the Lowlands of Scotland. It wasn't only the
Gaelic speaking Highlander who found himself and his family thrown off the
land they had inhabited for centuries. These Lowland evictions were also tagged as
'improvement' and were to prove the blueprint for the Highland Clearances
that followed. The Lowland Clearances were generally carried out in a less overtly brutal manner, but the evictions were no less devastating for the Cotters (small peasant farmers), who often found themselves destitute and starving and driven into the big cities to eek out a living, or forced onto the emigrant ships. Capitalism and the industrial revolution was no benefactor of the small tenant farmer used to life in an agrarian society, and many were driven from the land. One device used by the landowners was to
draw up new leases for the Cotters and increase rents to astronomical
levels. Five fold increases were not unknown. This drove many poor Cotters
into bankruptcy and they were thrown out of their homes and off the land
that their forebears had dwelled upon for centuries. Their meagre
possessions were also seized and sold, to set against unpaid rent. Just as
in the Highlands, people were left in penury. Tens of thousands of Lowlanders suffered
from the iron fist of the landowners, whose greed and rapacity knew no
bounds. What concern was it of theirs that hard-working people were made homeless
and forced into poverty? The evictions in the Lowlands were often far more
devious than in the Highlands. The landowners also made full use of the
law to achieve the evictions,
rotten and one-sided in their favour as it inevitably was. Many plundering lairds simply stole common land from the people and enclosed it, using laws that were passed by the Scottish parliament in the 1690's. This device deprived the Cotters of common grazing land for their animals, a right they had enjoyed from the ancient past. By 1820 the Cotters
had all disappeared, a third of the rural Lowland population had simply
vanished! This dramatic change to the social strata of the Lowlands simply
could not have happened without compulsion. People were forced off their
land by the rabid excesses of capital and landlordism. Clearing the hills and filling the cities Recent research certainly suggests that more people were forced off the land in the Lowlands than were forced off the land in the Highlands, surprising as that may seem. Aberdeen University's Dr Marjorie Harper has written a book on Scottish emigration. She said: "The analogy I like to use is of the flood and the dripping tap. I think one reason we focus so much on Highland emigration is that it was dramatic. But the dripping tap makes the bath overflow in just the same way as the flood does''. ''What was happening in many parts of the rural lowlands was the constantly dripping tap of depopulation that was going on right throughout the 19th century and the centuries before and after that." So what happened to the Cotters? Many went overseas, to Canada and elsewhere. Many more went to the big cities and towns to seek work in the new industries. Others found work on the new model farms created by the landowners, but as paid labourers only, and not as the free tenants they used to be. The landowners
'improvements' and the dispossession and eviction of the Cotters
accelerated urban and industrial growth in the Lowlands. At the same time,
it handsomely lined the pockets of the grasping landowners and gave them a
developmental blueprint for the Highlands, which they would take to new
levels of callousness and inhumanity. |
