March 28, 2018 • 38 mins
The Highland Clearances were a long, complicated, messy series of evictions in the Highlands and western Islands of Scotland, when tenant farmers were forced from their homes to make way for sheep pastures.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hellow and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. So we
don't typically on the show try to tackle something really
(00:22):
complicated that spanned like a century. It's tricky, it's difficult
to do. Normally. What we do is choose an isolated
piece that's sort of emblematic of the larger story and
put that smaller piece into the context of the bigger story.
That is really hard to do with today's subject, which
(00:43):
is the Highland Clearances, because the Highland Clearances were a
long and very complicated and really messy series of evictions
and the Highlands and Western Islands of Scotland tenant farmers
were forced from their homes to make way for sheep pastures,
and the clearances were at their peak from seventeen eighty
to eighteen fifty five, but they were really part of
(01:04):
ongoing changes in the Highlands and elsewhere really that started
long before that and ended long after that. And they're
also one of those subjects that a lot of people,
especially Scott's and people of Scottish descent already have their
minds made up about even though there continues to be
really extensive debate among historians about how to exactly interpret
(01:24):
what happened, and in a lot of retellings, the Highland
Clearances are presented basically as nothing more than the really
greedy schemings of wealthy landlords to callously strong armed their
tenants off their land and an effort to just eradicate
Highland culture. Some of that is not quite accurate, and
overall it's just a lot more complicated than that, and
(01:47):
any little isolated piece that we might pick to try
to talk about and make it be more emblematic of
the whole, we just reinforced that oversimplified story in this case.
So since the Alley is a lot more complicated than that,
and to be clear, there are definitely tragic and unjust
aspects of the Clearances, they were really a lot more
(02:08):
complicated than a little piece. They're even more complicated than
our our thirty minute ish podcast today. But we're going
to try to to give a better sense of of
the complexities of what happened. We're gonna start with a
bit about what life was like in the Scottish Highlands
before the start of the clearances. By the early to
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mid seventeen hundreds, the Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland were
dramatically different in terms of how people lived and worked.
The Highlands are the northwestern portion of the country and
are sometimes also grouped in with the islands off of
the western coast. The Scottish Highlands were mostly rural, but
the Lowlands, or southeastern portion of the country, were far
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more urban. In a very general sense, people in the
Lowlands of Scotland often spoke English and we're culturally more
similar to England, while people in Highlands of Scotland typically
spoke Scott's Gaelic and had their own unique Gaelic culture.
Scottish Highland society followed the clan system, which was a
semi feudal militaristic system in which each clan was ruled
(03:13):
by a chief. The chief managed a largely agricultural society
and that society was really intensely connected through through both
family ties and a sense of clan loyalty. And to
be clear, there are also Lowland clans, but since the
Lowlands had become so much more urban, they weren't really
following the whole economic and social system that we're about
(03:34):
to talk about. Highland society was highly stratified at the
top where the clan chiefs and their aristocratic family connections,
and then below that was an affluent middle class made
up of tax men who managed tax which were subdivided
pieces of land that were worked by tenant farmers. These
tenant farmers were essentially the peasant class, referred to as
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cutters or smallholders, and they paid rent to the taxman,
either in farm labor goods from that farm, or sometimes
even money, and then the tax men then passed that
revenue up to the chief. There was really not a
lot of social or economic mobility in this system. The
clan chiefs and other members of the upper class were
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often living in castles, while the cutters were living in
turf or clay and wattle huts that had that roofs,
and particularly for the peasantry, this was a really difficult life.
Most tenant families were living at a subsistence level. The
highland soil also was not great for growing crops, and
the Highlands of Scotland saw serious food shortages and famines
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over and over in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Even
when there wasn't a huge famine going on. A lot
of times, individual families and more isolated regions faced a
series of hardships thanks to everything from crop failures to disease.
On average, crops failed in the Highlands every third year.
(04:59):
The it's a really high rate of failure. That's rough, yeah,
especially when you're not you're not producing enough to be
able to to preserve things for later. And at the
same time, prior to the eighteenth century, clan leaders tended
to take a paternalistic attitude toward the clans tenants, so
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the clan chief could expect loyalty from the rest of
the clan, including when it came to mustering a military force,
and the clan members could expect help if they met
some kind of hardship in a time of famine or
these crop failures, the chief might defer the tenant's rent
or provide food from a common store. Naturally, in the
face of such a difficult and uncertain life, people who
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had the means often moved out of the Highlands of Scotland,
and this was typically true among the middle class, who
sent their sons outside the Highlands for their education and
their future work. Families also immigrated to the Lowlands or
to other countries, including the America and colonies in Australia,
if they were able to scrape up the financial means
to do so. In earlier times it might have been
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possible to do this through an indenture, but by this
point in history in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, that
was not so much an option anymore. Sometimes, wealthier clans
would also buy land in the colonies or in other
parts of the British Empire, and then persuade groups of
tenants to emigrate there to work that newly acquired land.
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This exodus got much worse after the end of the
Jacobite Rising of seventeen forty five, and we've talked about
the rebellion in a prior episode of the show, but briefly,
a number of Scottish clans backed Charles Edward Stewart, known
as Bonnie Prince Charlie, in a rebellion intended to supplant
the House of Hanover and return the House of Stuart
to the British throne. The rebellion ended on April sixteen,
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seventeen forty six, with the Jacobite rebels defeat at the
Battle of Coloten. After the end of the rebellion, British
troops moved through Scotland in a really brutal effort to
rouse out all the rebels and anyone else who had
been supporting the Jacobite cause, and the result was devastating.
More than a thousand Highland Scots were killed, and in
some cases entire clans were decimated or forced into exile.
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There were already disarming acts in place forbidding the ownership
of firearms among Highland Scots, and new legislation incorporated the
Dress Act of seventeen forty six. The Dress Act forbade
men to wear Highland dress outside of the context of
military service. A lot of times this is interpreted as
not being allowed to wear tartan at all, and that
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is not quite accurate. The Heritable Jurisdictions Act of seventeen
forty seven also stripped clan chiefs of their already waning
judicial and military power. These actions were motivated by both
pragmatism and prejudice. Multiple Scottish clans had just mounted an
armed rebellion against the House of Hanover and the British Crown.
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This was clearly a three it to the monarchy and
the stability of the kingdom. Simultaneously, the fact that the
Highlands were so rural, so remote, and home to their
own unique semi feudal society meant that they were viewed
as uncivilized, archaic, backward, and in need of modernization and
assimilation with a more English way of life. Afterwards, things
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got a lot harder for everyday people left in the Highlands.
The clans still existed as family and a social units,
but not nearly so much as a as an economic
and political system. The system that replaced it had a
lot of similarities. Though former clan chiefs became private landowners,
and even though they no longer had the same judicial
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and military power that they had before, in a lot
of places, they were still the most powerful people in
terms of their social and political positions. Tax Men were
replaced by factors who did a very similar job managing
subdivided parcels of land, and then the peasantry still lived
on small, all rented holdings which were commonly known as crofts.
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They became more often known as crofters, and they're rented
farms as they had before, combined enclosed areas for growing
crops and common grazing land. No longer bound by loyalty
to the clan, landlords started raising rents and having less
of a paternalistic attitude towards their tenants. Some became increasingly
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focused on profits, regardless of how that affected people living
and working on their land. As this was happening among
former Highland Clan leadership, English and Lowland Scottish landlords withholdings
in the Highlands were similarly becoming more and more focused
on using their land for the most profit as well.
Happening in tandem with all of this were efforts to
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reform and modernize the Highlands. Even when these efforts were
well intended, they tended to bring more chaos and displacement
than actual improvement. This included an expansion and cattle farming,
which caused tenant families to be dis placed. At least
as far back as the seventeen thirties, people who had
survived Colloden and its aftermaths started leaving Scotland in bigger numbers,
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looking for a better life elsewhere. People's reasons and how
much autonomy they had in this was really all over
the spectrum. Everything from landlords who decided to sell what
was left of their estates and immigrate with their families,
leaving their tenants to make their own way to desperately
poor tenant farmers agreeing to work on their landlord's new
venture in Australia because they were coerced into it or
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felt like they simply had no other choice. In seventeen
seventy three, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson toward the Highlands
and the Western Islands of Scotland and they wrote about
the dissolution of clanned loyalties, increasingly mercenary landlords, and a
crumbling social system that was threaded through with abject poverty.
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The clearances started a little less than a decade later,
and we're going to talk about those after we first
have a sponsor break. By the seventeen seventies, it was
clear that the Highlands and Islands of Scotland had a
range of very real economic and social problems, and there
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was huge disagreement among the ruling class over exactly what
to do about it. Traditionalists thought the Highlands could continue
to function as a system of landlords and tenants with
a few changes and improvements, like, for example, cutting out
the middlemen and having tenants worked directly with their landlords
rather than going through factors, but otherwise, a lot of
traditionalists thought that Highland society had been working the way
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that it was virtually unchanged for centuries, there was no
reason to expect it could not just continue. And definitely
on the other side were the improvers, who thought the
Highland way of life was obviously doomed and needed to
be replaced with some other system. Entirely, opinions were all
over the map about exactly what that other system should be.
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And all of this was happening during both the Industrial
Revolution and the Enlightenment, which we're bringing huge changes to
Europe and other parts of the world, and we're naturally
influencing all of these opinions. By the seventeen seventies, the
price of wools started to rise, and by seventeen eighty
the highland landlords realized that their land could be put
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to much more profitable use through sheep farming than through
raising other livestock or crops. Instead of being home to
collectives of tenant farmers who lived on and worked the land,
the estates would become mostly pasture land. The homes and
the other associated buildings would be destroyed to make way
for grazing sheep In the aftermath of the Jacobite Rising
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and the events that followed it, Some of these estates
were already vacant or nearly so. In these cases, the
clearances proceeded very quietly without attracting much attention. Or landlords
waited until their last few tenants leases were up and
then they just went on from there. But a lot
of landlords still had hundreds or thousands of tenants, and
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starting around seventeen eighty they started systematically evicting them as
they converted their tenant farms to sheep farms. At first,
a lot of these landlords expected that their tenants would
relocate elsewhere in the highlands and islands. The most popular
destination was the Scottish coast, where people could work in
the fishing or kelp industries. Of course, fishing was a
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lot more dangerous than working on a farm, and kelp
processing was hard and it was unpleasant work In the
kelp industry, Seaweed was processed through burning to produce things
like iodine and an alkaline product that was used in
the manufacture of things like glass and soap. Kelp processing
had a pretty short working season, but it required a
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lot of labor during that time, so to most tenants
this move to the coast was a huge step down,
on top of being uprooted from land that their families
had often been on for generations. Some landlords also helped
to reset all their tenants, especially those who were old
are sick. Others offered to pay for passage out of
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Scotland to other parts of the British Empire. Some forgave
any rent that their tenants still owed, or bought any
livestock or salable goods that the tenants had to offer
from their farms. So while being displaced to another part
of the country or another country entirely to work in
a different industry would have been difficult and unpleasant, and
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leaving the land that you and your ancestors had worked
for generations could be emotionally devastating, but these early clearances
were really not a matter of just turning people out
of their homes with no resources and no thought about
what they should do. Even in these earlier years, though
there was significant resistance to the clearing of tenant farms
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and the introduction of sheep. In sevente families who had
been evicted from farms in Rosshire and Sutherland rose up
in what came to be known as the Rosshire Sheep Riots,
which included rounding up thousands of sheep trying to drive
them out of the area. The forty two Regiment, also
known as the Black Watch, was deployed to restore order.
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Two was nicknamed the Year of the Sheep. As the
clearances progressed, landlords generally put less and less thought and
fewer resources into what to do with their evicted tenants.
One issue was that even though there were these evictions
going on and people had been leaving the Highlands since
long before the Jacobite Rising, the total Highland population was
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actually increasing. Even in the early years of the clearances.
The population was rising faster than the economy was growing,
so the labor pool was getting bigger as the need
for labor was getting smaller. This started to trickle down
to landlords having few resources and less money available to
try to resettle or redistribute their tenants, especially because some
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of them didn't feel like they could evict their excess
labor pool. One of the largest clearances started in eight
teen oh seven and it actually lasted until eighteen one,
known as the Sutherland Clearance. This displaced about fifteen thousand
people from the estate of English landowner George Granville Levison Gower,
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Marquess of Stafford, who would later become the first Duke
of Sutherland. His estates were at that time likely the
wealthiest in all of Scotland. While his money funded the clearance,
it was his wife, Elizabeth Gordon, who was really the
one pushing for sheep farming. Patrick Seller was the estates
factor and was the one in charge of converting the
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estate and dealing with the tenants. Although the Sutherland Clearance
did include resettling people to the coast to work, Kelp
Seller became notorious for his callous and brutal treatment of
the tenants. This treatment got worse as time went on.
When the tenants resisted moving, he and his meant threatened them,
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destroyed their possessions, and burned down their homes and crops.
While clearing tenants from land and strath nighbor, he allegedly
had a house burned down with somebody still inside. Seller
was arrested and charged with a number of crimes, including
arson and culpable homicide, but was ultimately found not guilty.
The Sutherland Clearances overlapped a major event that influenced how
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the later clearances progressed, and that was the end of
the Napoleonic Wars. The incident in which Seller's men reportedly
burned down a house with someone inside it took place
in eighteen fourteen. In eighteen fifteen, the Napoleonic Wars ended,
which had a huge effect on the Highland economy. The
price of fish started to drop and the kelp industry
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completely collapsed due to cheaper and better products from elsewhere
in Europe, and the price of wools started to drop
as well. With all their money making industries no longer
making so much money, even the landlords who had intended
to help resettle their tenants or to invest in coastal
industries didn't have the money to do it anymore, and
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the kelp industry just no longer existed for them to
invest in at all. Evictions became faster and more aggressive,
with far less help offered to the evicted tenants. In
eighteen fourteen, Seller's treatment of the Sutherland tenants had been
pretty well outside the norm, but after eighteen fifteen, the
clearances in general started to look a lot more like
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what had happened in Sutherland. By the eighteen thirties, the
wool industry had become so powerful in the Highlands that
sheep farmers had leverage over their landlords, doing things like
refusing to sign a new lease unless the landlord evicted
the remaining tenants and converted their former acreage into sheep pasture.
Even though the price of wool was falling, will was
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still more profitable than anything else they might use that
land for Most landlords couldn't afford to lose their sheep
farmers and ultimately gave in to their demands. The eighteen
thirties were also marked by food shortages and famine in
the Highlands and Islands as a result of the displacement
and changes in land use. Some of the most infamous
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clearances took place in the eighteen forties, with some of
that infamy stemming from newspapers publishing stories that were very
sympathetic to the evicted tenants and Glenn Calvy. In eighteen
forty five, massive clearances were publicized by Free Church ministers
who were critical of what was happening. These articles really
focused on the plight of the families and the idea
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that they've been living and farming there for generations. The
Glenn Calvy story was picked up by the Times, largely
in connection to debates that were going on in Parliament
over assistance programs for the poor in Scotland. Another clearance
in Strathconin played out with similar sympathy in the press
in the eighteen forties as well, with the evicted tenants
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portrayed is destitute, devastated and meekly compliant with their landlords.
So when it came to that meekly compliant with their
landlords part, that wasn't exactly true. Tenants resisted being evicted
all through the Highland clearances, including strath Conan. Usually things
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followed a predictable pattern. Someone would show up to serve
an order of removal tenants. Usually the women would say
they'd refuse to go, mocking the person serving the order
and sometimes tearing that order up in front of his face.
Things would escalate from there, with the sheriff arriving with
a posse, often very early in the morning, to evict
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everyone by force. If people still refuse to go, the
sheriff would seek military help. Usually the threat of troops
being deployed would prompt people to leave, but in at
least ten cases troops really did arrive on the scene
to force people to go. The last of the major
clearances were over by about eighteen fifty, although people continued
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to be evicted to make way for other uses of
the land that they releasing until at least the eighteen eighties.
Some of these removals were still quite side sizable. Between
eighteen fifty one and eighteen fifty seven, about five thousand
Highland Scots, most of them living in severe poverty, were
relocated to Australia to try to address a labor shortage
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during the gold rush there, and then throughout all of this,
food shortages and famine continued in the Highlands, including a
famine that started around eighteen forty six and was caused
by the same potato blight that had struck Ireland the
year before. The aftermath of the clearances actually went on
much longer, and we're gonna get into that. After we
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first paused for another sponsor break after clearing the Highlands
of Scotland to make way for sheep, the sheep themselves
did not last for very long. The price of wool
continued to fall after it had started following in eighteen fifteen.
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Eventually sheep farmers in Australia and New Zealand were producing
much higher quality good for much less money, and in
some cases these sheep were even being raised by people
who had been displaced in favor of sheep during the
Highland Clearances as well became less and less profitable. Land
use in the Highlands changed once again, with deer forest
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used for hunting replacing pasture land used for raising sheep.
There are still plenty of sheep farms in the Highlands,
but overall, landlords who had invested all their money into
sheep production didn't ultimately see many returns on that investment.
Although the population of the Highlands had been increasing in
the early years of the clearances, as the evictions became
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larger and more aggressive, the Highland population finally did start
to decline. Soon there were more Highland Scots living outside
of Scotland than living in the Highlands, and by eighteen
fifty the Highlands of Scotland had one of the lowest
population densities in all of Europe. Entire communities, some of
which had been there for centuries, were gone at the
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same time. It's a bit of a misconception that most
of the people who immigrated from Scotland during the Clearances
were people who had been evicted. While there were definitely
crofters whose landlords either paid their way or offered other
assistance to immigrate out of the country, most of the
people who made that voyage were people with more financial means.
In historical documents from the time, people gave reasons for
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immigrating that included increasing rents or the idea that life
would be better somewhere else. The Clearances were definitely part
of the idea of a better life elsewhere, but most
people questioned about their reasons for immigrating didn't say it
was because they had been evicted. By the end of
the Clearances, overall, the Highlands had no more factors. They
had no more midsized tenants who were sub letting their
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lands to other farmers. Most of the former Highland clan
leaders were also gone from the country, and what was
left were predominantly sheep farms, deer parks, and a much
much smaller population of crofters who continued to work on
small parcels of rented farmland. Meanwhile, Highland Scotts who emigrated
from Scotland often faced discrimination and prejudice wherever they settled.
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Which tends to be the case anytime a large population
of people immigrates to a new place. At the same time,
as fiction, poetry, music, news reporting and historical writing began
to take a more nostalgic view of Highland culture and
present its end as a tragic loss, the general perception
of Highland Scotts started to shift outside the Highlands. No
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longer were the Highlands viewed as uncouth and backward. Clan
culture and Highland traditions became heavily romanticized. The Highlands and
Highland Scots became emblematic of all of Scotland, and traditions
from the Highlands became a core part of Scottish national identity.
I cannot exaggerate there are lots and lots and lots
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and lots of novels about Scotland before and during the
Clearance is and overwhelmingly they present the Highland clan lay
way of life in a really romanticized way. The thing
that people probably would come to mind most as outlander.
But I mean that that whole genre goes back, you know,
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more than a hundred years easily, and this is often
written to provoke a sense of injustice and outrage. Over
what had happened. Um. Also, the part where the Highlands
of Scotland became emblematic of all of Scotland reminds me
of when we when I was in college and we
had a visiting professor from Scotland and in the first
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day of class he I don't remember where precisely he
was from, but but he told us where he was
from and showed us a picture of it which looked
like a major city. And he was like, when I
when I say Scotland, you are probably thinking the Highlands
of Scotland. I am from the Lowlands of Scotland and
it looks like this, and we were all like, really,
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where are the pastures? Uh? There have been intentional efforts
to preserve the Highland culture that existed before the clearances,
including songs, customs and languages, and although there has been
a revival in Scott's Gaelic in the twentieth and twenty
first centuries, several dialects of Scott's Gaelic that existed before
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the clearances have been lost. In the eighteen eighties, the
remaining crofters and the Highlands and Islands started protesting increasing rents,
evictions and just the general lack of civil and land rights,
like a lack of tenant protections had been part of
this whole process, and they still did not really have
a lot of protection as tenants. This unrest became really
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violent at times, and as a result. The Napier Commission,
more formally known as the Royal Commission of Inquiry into
the Condition of Crofters and Cotters in the Highlands and
Islands was established in eighteen eighty three. After studying the issue,
the Commission published a report on the situation in eighteen
eighty four, and in that same year the Highlanders established
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the Highland Land Law Reform Association. The Crofters Party was
established soon after, and in eighteen eighty six four members
of that party were elected to Parliament. In eighteen eighty six,
Parliament passed the Crofters Holdings Act, which was the first
of several pieces of legislation meant to make the crofting
system more fair and to offer crofters protections from things
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like unreasonable evictions and unfair rents. By the eighteen eighties,
historians had also started to write about what had happened
during the clearances, and historians interpretations of what happened have
varied wildly since then the storiography of the Highland Clearances
as its own intriguing subject, And if you're not familiar
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with that term, historiography generally means the writing of history,
but it also more broadly includes the theory and history
of that righting itself. There are extensive documents from the
Highland Clearances that still survived today, far far more than
anyone historian could really read through, synthesize and analyze in
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a lifetime. But at this point there's even more historical
writing about the Clearances. In the words of historian Eric Richards,
who has written numerous books on the Clearances, quote, the
historiography of the Clearances and the way it has been
constructed has become a subject with its own fascination, notably
for historians of the public memory with a postmodernist bent.
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For a long time, and really maybe even still, the
most popular book on the Highland Clearances was written by
popular historian John Prebble, and that was first published in
nineteen sixty three. He'd previously written a book called Colloden,
which was about the Jacobite Rising of seventeen forty five.
So Prebble's interpretation of both the Jacobite Rising and the
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Highland Clearances was that they were emblematic of Scottish or
Highland nationalism, and in the book The Highland Clearances he
focuses primarily on greedy, scheming, callous landlords and not really
on any of the other factors that were involved in
the clearances. In the decades after these books came out,
organizations like the Communist Party of Great Britain and a
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range of working class organizations were starting to focus their
efforts related to labor rights and social issues in Scotland
in a more nationalist direction. These books fit right into
that sentiment, and these social influences and John Prebble's works
worked together to cement the idea that both the Jacobite
Rising and the Highland Clearances were part of ongoing systemic
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oppression of Scotland and helped inspire Scottish nationalism. So I'm
glad that popular histories exist and that popular historians are
writing these histories, because for a lot of people that's
their introduction into historical thought. But professional historians have been
strongly critical of Prebble's work, pointing out instances of cherry
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picking the source material and presenting a lot of historical
events without their proper context. For example, the Highland Clearances
largely ignores the fact that the landlords themselves were existing
in and responding to a whole range of other social
and economic factors. They didn't just come up with the
idea of changing their land over to seep out of nowhere.
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And events that made the clearances so much worse, like
the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the collapse of
the kelp industry and the falling wool prices, were sort
of outside the landlord's control, but also had a huge
effect on how things progressed. And there are so many
questions that historians don't agree on how to answer regarding
the Highland Clearances. Are the clearances their own unique event
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or are they just part of a pattern of clearances
happening all over Europe during the Industrial Revolution? How much
was really influenced by anti highland prejudice and how much
was a matter of simple economics. How much did the
overall under development of the Scottish Highlands and the fundamental
problems that really did exist in the Highland economy influenced
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the progress of the clearances and their outcome. The oral
history is full of burned down cottages and farms. But
does the archaeological evidence really support that, And how did
earlier and later clearances, some of which extended into the
lowlands compared to the famous ones. Did the clearances really
play a role in Scottish nationalism or did that really
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come from fictional interpretations and later historical writing. And these
kinds of questions just go on and on and continue
to be debated. You can read ten different books and
find ten different conclusions about how to interpret all of this.
Regardless of all that, though, historians generally do agree that
in the end, the Highland clearances didn't really do anyone
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any good. They forcibly displaced thailand Scott's out of their homes,
sometimes moving them into other industries, most of those industries
later collapsing, and then those who immigrated out of the
country usually endured appalling conditions aboard ship and then judice
and sometimes poverty at their new destination as well. And
then the motivation for doing all of this didn't even
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turn out to be profitable for the people who ordered
the land to be cleared in the first place, so
overall it did not go well for pretty much anyone involved.
We mentioned the Highland Clearances really briefly at the end
of our episode on the Jacobite Rising, and after that
we got an email from a listener who said that
her grandmother, who was from Scotland, had described the clearances
(32:31):
as basically the English rolling through the Highlands and murdering everyone,
and like that's still a common perception, and it's that's
part is not accurate. But the other thing that that
really completely leaves out is that a lot of the
landlords in question, and some of the factors and some
of the incoming sheep farmers were themselves Scots, not all
(32:52):
of them necessarily Highland Scots, but some were Highland Scots
like they were Highland Scots, Lowland Scots and English landlords
all part of all of this us So it's definitely
not something that can be presented as simply as England
did this. Which is the thing that we have heard
in our mail related to this issue before. Speaking of mail,
do you have some sure it is from Bethany. Bethany
(33:17):
wrote about an episode that Holly actually researched, but a
thing I said in it, and we've gotten a couple
of emails on this subject, and so Bethany says Hi, Holly,
and Tracy talks about being a relatively new listener and
loving the podcast. Uh. Then Bethany says, I just listened
to your most recent episode, The Minuscule Science of Anthony
von Leavin Hook. I found it pretty interesting and entertaining,
(33:39):
especially when one of you, I think it was Tracy,
mentioned a book you used to have as a kid
that showed Gooseneck barticles growing into flying geese. I laughed
a lot and then proceeded to consult the Google in
hopes of finding the book or something like it. My
search was semi successful. I found a digital copy of
The herbal or General History of Plants. Imagine that with
(34:01):
some delightful sixteenth century spelling, because that's what it has,
by John Gerard from fifteen forty five to sixteen twelve,
and then there's a link to that. I also found
a couple of blog posts and an article on the
website Wired, which is weird because isn't that like a
tech magazine that talks about early thoughts on geese coming
from Barnacles? And the Wired article they talk about another
(34:23):
writer from seventeen fifty one. He was criticized in the
Royal Society of London for allowing one of their members
to publish something that backed the idea of Barnacle geese.
I included a few links so you can read more
for yourselves if you would like, though they may not
be the best of the best resources. The digital copy
of the herbal is pretty cool. By the way, the
description and discussion of the barnacle gooses in the very
last chapter. It's a little difficult to read, but still
(34:47):
pretty rad. Barnacles are one of my favorite marine organisms
because of how they feed. They're so beautiful waving their
quote legs around trying to getch a meal. Thanks again,
you ladies are great, Bethany. Bethany also notes that there's
a species of goose called the barnacle goose. That made
the search process a little more challenging. Thank you, Bethany.
So we got a couple of emails about the story,
(35:08):
and so to clarify the book that I was looking at.
I am not sure whether it was UM an old
science textbook, because in in our family bookshelf UM we
had a few old textbooks that I think had been
bought at a yard sale or something, or if it
was a science book for kids, that we bought it
like a Scholastic book sale or something similar. Either way,
(35:31):
it was a book intended for kids that was a
science and science history book, and this whole barnacle goose
thing was in a section on people used to think
it worked this way, and it talked about the idea
that that maggots spontaneously generated out of meat, which I
could understand why people would think that because you don't
(35:54):
necessarily you don't really see the eggs that flies lay
on things before the mag it's come. So that to me,
I was like, Okay, I can I can see how
people would think that. But then I had this picture
of barnacles becoming a goose, and I was like that,
how would you get how would you work that math
out in your head? With Barnacles and geese are not
(36:15):
the same thing at all. These are obviously barnacles that
look kind of like geese. Have you ever been bitten
by a goose? No, because that might lead you to
associate them with the scratchy horror of barnacle. Okay, a
goose bite is mean and hard, and they have serrated,
little tiny teeth, so I could see where I mean.
It's still a long walk. I'm not I'm not saying, oh,
(36:38):
this makes total sense, but I could maybe see where
that might be the connective tissue of them thinking that's hilarious. Yeah,
I generally give geese a wide berth because especially when
they're nesting, they can be really kind of aggressive and
and so uh, not so much with the geese, but yeah,
it was baffling to me as a child. So thanks
(36:59):
to all the folks who have sent us various links
about barnacles becoming geese, which is not a thing that
they actually do. If you would like to write to
us about this or any other podcasts or a history
podcast at how stuff Works dot com. And we are
also all over social media missing History, so that is
our Facebook and our Twitter, and our Pinterest and our Instagram.
(37:20):
You can come to our website, which is missing history
dot com, where you will find show notes for all
the episodes that Holly and I have ever done and
a searchable archive of all of the episodes that have
ever existed on the show. And you can find our
podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, wherever else you might
get podcasts. So come and visit us or subscribe for
(37:48):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff works? Dot com
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hellow and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. So we
don't typically on the show try to tackle something really
(00:22):
complicated that spanned like a century. It's tricky, it's difficult
to do. Normally. What we do is choose an isolated
piece that's sort of emblematic of the larger story and
put that smaller piece into the context of the bigger story.
That is really hard to do with today's subject, which
(00:43):
is the Highland Clearances, because the Highland Clearances were a
long and very complicated and really messy series of evictions
and the Highlands and Western Islands of Scotland tenant farmers
were forced from their homes to make way for sheep pastures,
and the clearances were at their peak from seventeen eighty
to eighteen fifty five, but they were really part of
(01:04):
ongoing changes in the Highlands and elsewhere really that started
long before that and ended long after that. And they're
also one of those subjects that a lot of people,
especially Scott's and people of Scottish descent already have their
minds made up about even though there continues to be
really extensive debate among historians about how to exactly interpret
(01:24):
what happened, and in a lot of retellings, the Highland
Clearances are presented basically as nothing more than the really
greedy schemings of wealthy landlords to callously strong armed their
tenants off their land and an effort to just eradicate
Highland culture. Some of that is not quite accurate, and
overall it's just a lot more complicated than that, and
(01:47):
any little isolated piece that we might pick to try
to talk about and make it be more emblematic of
the whole, we just reinforced that oversimplified story in this case.
So since the Alley is a lot more complicated than that,
and to be clear, there are definitely tragic and unjust
aspects of the Clearances, they were really a lot more
(02:08):
complicated than a little piece. They're even more complicated than
our our thirty minute ish podcast today. But we're going
to try to to give a better sense of of
the complexities of what happened. We're gonna start with a
bit about what life was like in the Scottish Highlands
before the start of the clearances. By the early to
(02:29):
mid seventeen hundreds, the Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland were
dramatically different in terms of how people lived and worked.
The Highlands are the northwestern portion of the country and
are sometimes also grouped in with the islands off of
the western coast. The Scottish Highlands were mostly rural, but
the Lowlands, or southeastern portion of the country, were far
(02:50):
more urban. In a very general sense, people in the
Lowlands of Scotland often spoke English and we're culturally more
similar to England, while people in Highlands of Scotland typically
spoke Scott's Gaelic and had their own unique Gaelic culture.
Scottish Highland society followed the clan system, which was a
semi feudal militaristic system in which each clan was ruled
(03:13):
by a chief. The chief managed a largely agricultural society
and that society was really intensely connected through through both
family ties and a sense of clan loyalty. And to
be clear, there are also Lowland clans, but since the
Lowlands had become so much more urban, they weren't really
following the whole economic and social system that we're about
(03:34):
to talk about. Highland society was highly stratified at the
top where the clan chiefs and their aristocratic family connections,
and then below that was an affluent middle class made
up of tax men who managed tax which were subdivided
pieces of land that were worked by tenant farmers. These
tenant farmers were essentially the peasant class, referred to as
(03:56):
cutters or smallholders, and they paid rent to the taxman,
either in farm labor goods from that farm, or sometimes
even money, and then the tax men then passed that
revenue up to the chief. There was really not a
lot of social or economic mobility in this system. The
clan chiefs and other members of the upper class were
(04:18):
often living in castles, while the cutters were living in
turf or clay and wattle huts that had that roofs,
and particularly for the peasantry, this was a really difficult life.
Most tenant families were living at a subsistence level. The
highland soil also was not great for growing crops, and
the Highlands of Scotland saw serious food shortages and famines
(04:39):
over and over in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Even
when there wasn't a huge famine going on. A lot
of times, individual families and more isolated regions faced a
series of hardships thanks to everything from crop failures to disease.
On average, crops failed in the Highlands every third year.
(04:59):
The it's a really high rate of failure. That's rough, yeah,
especially when you're not you're not producing enough to be
able to to preserve things for later. And at the
same time, prior to the eighteenth century, clan leaders tended
to take a paternalistic attitude toward the clans tenants, so
(05:22):
the clan chief could expect loyalty from the rest of
the clan, including when it came to mustering a military force,
and the clan members could expect help if they met
some kind of hardship in a time of famine or
these crop failures, the chief might defer the tenant's rent
or provide food from a common store. Naturally, in the
face of such a difficult and uncertain life, people who
(05:45):
had the means often moved out of the Highlands of Scotland,
and this was typically true among the middle class, who
sent their sons outside the Highlands for their education and
their future work. Families also immigrated to the Lowlands or
to other countries, including the America and colonies in Australia,
if they were able to scrape up the financial means
to do so. In earlier times it might have been
(06:07):
possible to do this through an indenture, but by this
point in history in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, that
was not so much an option anymore. Sometimes, wealthier clans
would also buy land in the colonies or in other
parts of the British Empire, and then persuade groups of
tenants to emigrate there to work that newly acquired land.
(06:28):
This exodus got much worse after the end of the
Jacobite Rising of seventeen forty five, and we've talked about
the rebellion in a prior episode of the show, but briefly,
a number of Scottish clans backed Charles Edward Stewart, known
as Bonnie Prince Charlie, in a rebellion intended to supplant
the House of Hanover and return the House of Stuart
to the British throne. The rebellion ended on April sixteen,
(06:51):
seventeen forty six, with the Jacobite rebels defeat at the
Battle of Coloten. After the end of the rebellion, British
troops moved through Scotland in a really brutal effort to
rouse out all the rebels and anyone else who had
been supporting the Jacobite cause, and the result was devastating.
More than a thousand Highland Scots were killed, and in
some cases entire clans were decimated or forced into exile.
(07:15):
There were already disarming acts in place forbidding the ownership
of firearms among Highland Scots, and new legislation incorporated the
Dress Act of seventeen forty six. The Dress Act forbade
men to wear Highland dress outside of the context of
military service. A lot of times this is interpreted as
not being allowed to wear tartan at all, and that
(07:36):
is not quite accurate. The Heritable Jurisdictions Act of seventeen
forty seven also stripped clan chiefs of their already waning
judicial and military power. These actions were motivated by both
pragmatism and prejudice. Multiple Scottish clans had just mounted an
armed rebellion against the House of Hanover and the British Crown.
(07:58):
This was clearly a three it to the monarchy and
the stability of the kingdom. Simultaneously, the fact that the
Highlands were so rural, so remote, and home to their
own unique semi feudal society meant that they were viewed
as uncivilized, archaic, backward, and in need of modernization and
assimilation with a more English way of life. Afterwards, things
(08:21):
got a lot harder for everyday people left in the Highlands.
The clans still existed as family and a social units,
but not nearly so much as a as an economic
and political system. The system that replaced it had a
lot of similarities. Though former clan chiefs became private landowners,
and even though they no longer had the same judicial
(08:43):
and military power that they had before, in a lot
of places, they were still the most powerful people in
terms of their social and political positions. Tax Men were
replaced by factors who did a very similar job managing
subdivided parcels of land, and then the peasantry still lived
on small, all rented holdings which were commonly known as crofts.
(09:03):
They became more often known as crofters, and they're rented
farms as they had before, combined enclosed areas for growing
crops and common grazing land. No longer bound by loyalty
to the clan, landlords started raising rents and having less
of a paternalistic attitude towards their tenants. Some became increasingly
(09:24):
focused on profits, regardless of how that affected people living
and working on their land. As this was happening among
former Highland Clan leadership, English and Lowland Scottish landlords withholdings
in the Highlands were similarly becoming more and more focused
on using their land for the most profit as well.
Happening in tandem with all of this were efforts to
(09:46):
reform and modernize the Highlands. Even when these efforts were
well intended, they tended to bring more chaos and displacement
than actual improvement. This included an expansion and cattle farming,
which caused tenant families to be dis placed. At least
as far back as the seventeen thirties, people who had
survived Colloden and its aftermaths started leaving Scotland in bigger numbers,
(10:08):
looking for a better life elsewhere. People's reasons and how
much autonomy they had in this was really all over
the spectrum. Everything from landlords who decided to sell what
was left of their estates and immigrate with their families,
leaving their tenants to make their own way to desperately
poor tenant farmers agreeing to work on their landlord's new
venture in Australia because they were coerced into it or
(10:30):
felt like they simply had no other choice. In seventeen
seventy three, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson toward the Highlands
and the Western Islands of Scotland and they wrote about
the dissolution of clanned loyalties, increasingly mercenary landlords, and a
crumbling social system that was threaded through with abject poverty.
(10:51):
The clearances started a little less than a decade later,
and we're going to talk about those after we first
have a sponsor break. By the seventeen seventies, it was
clear that the Highlands and Islands of Scotland had a
range of very real economic and social problems, and there
(11:12):
was huge disagreement among the ruling class over exactly what
to do about it. Traditionalists thought the Highlands could continue
to function as a system of landlords and tenants with
a few changes and improvements, like, for example, cutting out
the middlemen and having tenants worked directly with their landlords
rather than going through factors, but otherwise, a lot of
traditionalists thought that Highland society had been working the way
(11:34):
that it was virtually unchanged for centuries, there was no
reason to expect it could not just continue. And definitely
on the other side were the improvers, who thought the
Highland way of life was obviously doomed and needed to
be replaced with some other system. Entirely, opinions were all
over the map about exactly what that other system should be.
(11:56):
And all of this was happening during both the Industrial
Revolution and the Enlightenment, which we're bringing huge changes to
Europe and other parts of the world, and we're naturally
influencing all of these opinions. By the seventeen seventies, the
price of wools started to rise, and by seventeen eighty
the highland landlords realized that their land could be put
(12:17):
to much more profitable use through sheep farming than through
raising other livestock or crops. Instead of being home to
collectives of tenant farmers who lived on and worked the land,
the estates would become mostly pasture land. The homes and
the other associated buildings would be destroyed to make way
for grazing sheep In the aftermath of the Jacobite Rising
(12:41):
and the events that followed it, Some of these estates
were already vacant or nearly so. In these cases, the
clearances proceeded very quietly without attracting much attention. Or landlords
waited until their last few tenants leases were up and
then they just went on from there. But a lot
of landlords still had hundreds or thousands of tenants, and
(13:03):
starting around seventeen eighty they started systematically evicting them as
they converted their tenant farms to sheep farms. At first,
a lot of these landlords expected that their tenants would
relocate elsewhere in the highlands and islands. The most popular
destination was the Scottish coast, where people could work in
the fishing or kelp industries. Of course, fishing was a
(13:25):
lot more dangerous than working on a farm, and kelp
processing was hard and it was unpleasant work In the
kelp industry, Seaweed was processed through burning to produce things
like iodine and an alkaline product that was used in
the manufacture of things like glass and soap. Kelp processing
had a pretty short working season, but it required a
(13:45):
lot of labor during that time, so to most tenants
this move to the coast was a huge step down,
on top of being uprooted from land that their families
had often been on for generations. Some landlords also helped
to reset all their tenants, especially those who were old
are sick. Others offered to pay for passage out of
(14:05):
Scotland to other parts of the British Empire. Some forgave
any rent that their tenants still owed, or bought any
livestock or salable goods that the tenants had to offer
from their farms. So while being displaced to another part
of the country or another country entirely to work in
a different industry would have been difficult and unpleasant, and
(14:27):
leaving the land that you and your ancestors had worked
for generations could be emotionally devastating, but these early clearances
were really not a matter of just turning people out
of their homes with no resources and no thought about
what they should do. Even in these earlier years, though
there was significant resistance to the clearing of tenant farms
(14:47):
and the introduction of sheep. In sevente families who had
been evicted from farms in Rosshire and Sutherland rose up
in what came to be known as the Rosshire Sheep Riots,
which included rounding up thousands of sheep trying to drive
them out of the area. The forty two Regiment, also
known as the Black Watch, was deployed to restore order.
(15:09):
Two was nicknamed the Year of the Sheep. As the
clearances progressed, landlords generally put less and less thought and
fewer resources into what to do with their evicted tenants.
One issue was that even though there were these evictions
going on and people had been leaving the Highlands since
long before the Jacobite Rising, the total Highland population was
(15:31):
actually increasing. Even in the early years of the clearances.
The population was rising faster than the economy was growing,
so the labor pool was getting bigger as the need
for labor was getting smaller. This started to trickle down
to landlords having few resources and less money available to
try to resettle or redistribute their tenants, especially because some
(15:52):
of them didn't feel like they could evict their excess
labor pool. One of the largest clearances started in eight
teen oh seven and it actually lasted until eighteen one,
known as the Sutherland Clearance. This displaced about fifteen thousand
people from the estate of English landowner George Granville Levison Gower,
(16:12):
Marquess of Stafford, who would later become the first Duke
of Sutherland. His estates were at that time likely the
wealthiest in all of Scotland. While his money funded the clearance,
it was his wife, Elizabeth Gordon, who was really the
one pushing for sheep farming. Patrick Seller was the estates
factor and was the one in charge of converting the
(16:35):
estate and dealing with the tenants. Although the Sutherland Clearance
did include resettling people to the coast to work, Kelp
Seller became notorious for his callous and brutal treatment of
the tenants. This treatment got worse as time went on.
When the tenants resisted moving, he and his meant threatened them,
(16:56):
destroyed their possessions, and burned down their homes and crops.
While clearing tenants from land and strath nighbor, he allegedly
had a house burned down with somebody still inside. Seller
was arrested and charged with a number of crimes, including
arson and culpable homicide, but was ultimately found not guilty.
The Sutherland Clearances overlapped a major event that influenced how
(17:19):
the later clearances progressed, and that was the end of
the Napoleonic Wars. The incident in which Seller's men reportedly
burned down a house with someone inside it took place
in eighteen fourteen. In eighteen fifteen, the Napoleonic Wars ended,
which had a huge effect on the Highland economy. The
price of fish started to drop and the kelp industry
(17:40):
completely collapsed due to cheaper and better products from elsewhere
in Europe, and the price of wools started to drop
as well. With all their money making industries no longer
making so much money, even the landlords who had intended
to help resettle their tenants or to invest in coastal
industries didn't have the money to do it anymore, and
(18:01):
the kelp industry just no longer existed for them to
invest in at all. Evictions became faster and more aggressive,
with far less help offered to the evicted tenants. In
eighteen fourteen, Seller's treatment of the Sutherland tenants had been
pretty well outside the norm, but after eighteen fifteen, the
clearances in general started to look a lot more like
(18:23):
what had happened in Sutherland. By the eighteen thirties, the
wool industry had become so powerful in the Highlands that
sheep farmers had leverage over their landlords, doing things like
refusing to sign a new lease unless the landlord evicted
the remaining tenants and converted their former acreage into sheep pasture.
Even though the price of wool was falling, will was
(18:45):
still more profitable than anything else they might use that
land for Most landlords couldn't afford to lose their sheep
farmers and ultimately gave in to their demands. The eighteen
thirties were also marked by food shortages and famine in
the Highlands and Islands as a result of the displacement
and changes in land use. Some of the most infamous
(19:06):
clearances took place in the eighteen forties, with some of
that infamy stemming from newspapers publishing stories that were very
sympathetic to the evicted tenants and Glenn Calvy. In eighteen
forty five, massive clearances were publicized by Free Church ministers
who were critical of what was happening. These articles really
focused on the plight of the families and the idea
(19:28):
that they've been living and farming there for generations. The
Glenn Calvy story was picked up by the Times, largely
in connection to debates that were going on in Parliament
over assistance programs for the poor in Scotland. Another clearance
in Strathconin played out with similar sympathy in the press
in the eighteen forties as well, with the evicted tenants
(19:48):
portrayed is destitute, devastated and meekly compliant with their landlords.
So when it came to that meekly compliant with their
landlords part, that wasn't exactly true. Tenants resisted being evicted
all through the Highland clearances, including strath Conan. Usually things
(20:08):
followed a predictable pattern. Someone would show up to serve
an order of removal tenants. Usually the women would say
they'd refuse to go, mocking the person serving the order
and sometimes tearing that order up in front of his face.
Things would escalate from there, with the sheriff arriving with
a posse, often very early in the morning, to evict
(20:29):
everyone by force. If people still refuse to go, the
sheriff would seek military help. Usually the threat of troops
being deployed would prompt people to leave, but in at
least ten cases troops really did arrive on the scene
to force people to go. The last of the major
clearances were over by about eighteen fifty, although people continued
(20:51):
to be evicted to make way for other uses of
the land that they releasing until at least the eighteen eighties.
Some of these removals were still quite side sizable. Between
eighteen fifty one and eighteen fifty seven, about five thousand
Highland Scots, most of them living in severe poverty, were
relocated to Australia to try to address a labor shortage
(21:12):
during the gold rush there, and then throughout all of this,
food shortages and famine continued in the Highlands, including a
famine that started around eighteen forty six and was caused
by the same potato blight that had struck Ireland the
year before. The aftermath of the clearances actually went on
much longer, and we're gonna get into that. After we
(21:33):
first paused for another sponsor break after clearing the Highlands
of Scotland to make way for sheep, the sheep themselves
did not last for very long. The price of wool
continued to fall after it had started following in eighteen fifteen.
(21:54):
Eventually sheep farmers in Australia and New Zealand were producing
much higher quality good for much less money, and in
some cases these sheep were even being raised by people
who had been displaced in favor of sheep during the
Highland Clearances as well became less and less profitable. Land
use in the Highlands changed once again, with deer forest
(22:16):
used for hunting replacing pasture land used for raising sheep.
There are still plenty of sheep farms in the Highlands,
but overall, landlords who had invested all their money into
sheep production didn't ultimately see many returns on that investment.
Although the population of the Highlands had been increasing in
the early years of the clearances, as the evictions became
(22:38):
larger and more aggressive, the Highland population finally did start
to decline. Soon there were more Highland Scots living outside
of Scotland than living in the Highlands, and by eighteen
fifty the Highlands of Scotland had one of the lowest
population densities in all of Europe. Entire communities, some of
which had been there for centuries, were gone at the
(23:01):
same time. It's a bit of a misconception that most
of the people who immigrated from Scotland during the Clearances
were people who had been evicted. While there were definitely
crofters whose landlords either paid their way or offered other
assistance to immigrate out of the country, most of the
people who made that voyage were people with more financial means.
In historical documents from the time, people gave reasons for
(23:24):
immigrating that included increasing rents or the idea that life
would be better somewhere else. The Clearances were definitely part
of the idea of a better life elsewhere, but most
people questioned about their reasons for immigrating didn't say it
was because they had been evicted. By the end of
the Clearances, overall, the Highlands had no more factors. They
had no more midsized tenants who were sub letting their
(23:47):
lands to other farmers. Most of the former Highland clan
leaders were also gone from the country, and what was
left were predominantly sheep farms, deer parks, and a much
much smaller population of crofters who continued to work on
small parcels of rented farmland. Meanwhile, Highland Scotts who emigrated
from Scotland often faced discrimination and prejudice wherever they settled.
(24:12):
Which tends to be the case anytime a large population
of people immigrates to a new place. At the same time,
as fiction, poetry, music, news reporting and historical writing began
to take a more nostalgic view of Highland culture and
present its end as a tragic loss, the general perception
of Highland Scotts started to shift outside the Highlands. No
(24:33):
longer were the Highlands viewed as uncouth and backward. Clan
culture and Highland traditions became heavily romanticized. The Highlands and
Highland Scots became emblematic of all of Scotland, and traditions
from the Highlands became a core part of Scottish national identity.
I cannot exaggerate there are lots and lots and lots
(24:54):
and lots of novels about Scotland before and during the
Clearance is and overwhelmingly they present the Highland clan lay
way of life in a really romanticized way. The thing
that people probably would come to mind most as outlander.
But I mean that that whole genre goes back, you know,
(25:15):
more than a hundred years easily, and this is often
written to provoke a sense of injustice and outrage. Over
what had happened. Um. Also, the part where the Highlands
of Scotland became emblematic of all of Scotland reminds me
of when we when I was in college and we
had a visiting professor from Scotland and in the first
(25:37):
day of class he I don't remember where precisely he
was from, but but he told us where he was
from and showed us a picture of it which looked
like a major city. And he was like, when I
when I say Scotland, you are probably thinking the Highlands
of Scotland. I am from the Lowlands of Scotland and
it looks like this, and we were all like, really,
(25:58):
where are the pastures? Uh? There have been intentional efforts
to preserve the Highland culture that existed before the clearances,
including songs, customs and languages, and although there has been
a revival in Scott's Gaelic in the twentieth and twenty
first centuries, several dialects of Scott's Gaelic that existed before
(26:18):
the clearances have been lost. In the eighteen eighties, the
remaining crofters and the Highlands and Islands started protesting increasing rents,
evictions and just the general lack of civil and land rights,
like a lack of tenant protections had been part of
this whole process, and they still did not really have
a lot of protection as tenants. This unrest became really
(26:42):
violent at times, and as a result. The Napier Commission,
more formally known as the Royal Commission of Inquiry into
the Condition of Crofters and Cotters in the Highlands and
Islands was established in eighteen eighty three. After studying the issue,
the Commission published a report on the situation in eighteen
eighty four, and in that same year the Highlanders established
(27:03):
the Highland Land Law Reform Association. The Crofters Party was
established soon after, and in eighteen eighty six four members
of that party were elected to Parliament. In eighteen eighty six,
Parliament passed the Crofters Holdings Act, which was the first
of several pieces of legislation meant to make the crofting
system more fair and to offer crofters protections from things
(27:26):
like unreasonable evictions and unfair rents. By the eighteen eighties,
historians had also started to write about what had happened
during the clearances, and historians interpretations of what happened have
varied wildly since then the storiography of the Highland Clearances
as its own intriguing subject, And if you're not familiar
(27:46):
with that term, historiography generally means the writing of history,
but it also more broadly includes the theory and history
of that righting itself. There are extensive documents from the
Highland Clearances that still survived today, far far more than
anyone historian could really read through, synthesize and analyze in
(28:07):
a lifetime. But at this point there's even more historical
writing about the Clearances. In the words of historian Eric Richards,
who has written numerous books on the Clearances, quote, the
historiography of the Clearances and the way it has been
constructed has become a subject with its own fascination, notably
for historians of the public memory with a postmodernist bent.
(28:31):
For a long time, and really maybe even still, the
most popular book on the Highland Clearances was written by
popular historian John Prebble, and that was first published in
nineteen sixty three. He'd previously written a book called Colloden,
which was about the Jacobite Rising of seventeen forty five.
So Prebble's interpretation of both the Jacobite Rising and the
(28:52):
Highland Clearances was that they were emblematic of Scottish or
Highland nationalism, and in the book The Highland Clearances he
focuses primarily on greedy, scheming, callous landlords and not really
on any of the other factors that were involved in
the clearances. In the decades after these books came out,
organizations like the Communist Party of Great Britain and a
(29:13):
range of working class organizations were starting to focus their
efforts related to labor rights and social issues in Scotland
in a more nationalist direction. These books fit right into
that sentiment, and these social influences and John Prebble's works
worked together to cement the idea that both the Jacobite
Rising and the Highland Clearances were part of ongoing systemic
(29:36):
oppression of Scotland and helped inspire Scottish nationalism. So I'm
glad that popular histories exist and that popular historians are
writing these histories, because for a lot of people that's
their introduction into historical thought. But professional historians have been
strongly critical of Prebble's work, pointing out instances of cherry
(29:56):
picking the source material and presenting a lot of historical
events without their proper context. For example, the Highland Clearances
largely ignores the fact that the landlords themselves were existing
in and responding to a whole range of other social
and economic factors. They didn't just come up with the
idea of changing their land over to seep out of nowhere.
(30:16):
And events that made the clearances so much worse, like
the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the collapse of
the kelp industry and the falling wool prices, were sort
of outside the landlord's control, but also had a huge
effect on how things progressed. And there are so many
questions that historians don't agree on how to answer regarding
the Highland Clearances. Are the clearances their own unique event
(30:41):
or are they just part of a pattern of clearances
happening all over Europe during the Industrial Revolution? How much
was really influenced by anti highland prejudice and how much
was a matter of simple economics. How much did the
overall under development of the Scottish Highlands and the fundamental
problems that really did exist in the Highland economy influenced
(31:01):
the progress of the clearances and their outcome. The oral
history is full of burned down cottages and farms. But
does the archaeological evidence really support that, And how did
earlier and later clearances, some of which extended into the
lowlands compared to the famous ones. Did the clearances really
play a role in Scottish nationalism or did that really
(31:23):
come from fictional interpretations and later historical writing. And these
kinds of questions just go on and on and continue
to be debated. You can read ten different books and
find ten different conclusions about how to interpret all of this.
Regardless of all that, though, historians generally do agree that
in the end, the Highland clearances didn't really do anyone
(31:44):
any good. They forcibly displaced thailand Scott's out of their homes,
sometimes moving them into other industries, most of those industries
later collapsing, and then those who immigrated out of the
country usually endured appalling conditions aboard ship and then judice
and sometimes poverty at their new destination as well. And
then the motivation for doing all of this didn't even
(32:06):
turn out to be profitable for the people who ordered
the land to be cleared in the first place, so
overall it did not go well for pretty much anyone involved.
We mentioned the Highland Clearances really briefly at the end
of our episode on the Jacobite Rising, and after that
we got an email from a listener who said that
her grandmother, who was from Scotland, had described the clearances
(32:31):
as basically the English rolling through the Highlands and murdering everyone,
and like that's still a common perception, and it's that's
part is not accurate. But the other thing that that
really completely leaves out is that a lot of the
landlords in question, and some of the factors and some
of the incoming sheep farmers were themselves Scots, not all
(32:52):
of them necessarily Highland Scots, but some were Highland Scots
like they were Highland Scots, Lowland Scots and English landlords
all part of all of this us So it's definitely
not something that can be presented as simply as England
did this. Which is the thing that we have heard
in our mail related to this issue before. Speaking of mail,
do you have some sure it is from Bethany. Bethany
(33:17):
wrote about an episode that Holly actually researched, but a
thing I said in it, and we've gotten a couple
of emails on this subject, and so Bethany says Hi, Holly,
and Tracy talks about being a relatively new listener and
loving the podcast. Uh. Then Bethany says, I just listened
to your most recent episode, The Minuscule Science of Anthony
von Leavin Hook. I found it pretty interesting and entertaining,
(33:39):
especially when one of you, I think it was Tracy,
mentioned a book you used to have as a kid
that showed Gooseneck barticles growing into flying geese. I laughed
a lot and then proceeded to consult the Google in
hopes of finding the book or something like it. My
search was semi successful. I found a digital copy of
The herbal or General History of Plants. Imagine that with
(34:01):
some delightful sixteenth century spelling, because that's what it has,
by John Gerard from fifteen forty five to sixteen twelve,
and then there's a link to that. I also found
a couple of blog posts and an article on the
website Wired, which is weird because isn't that like a
tech magazine that talks about early thoughts on geese coming
from Barnacles? And the Wired article they talk about another
(34:23):
writer from seventeen fifty one. He was criticized in the
Royal Society of London for allowing one of their members
to publish something that backed the idea of Barnacle geese.
I included a few links so you can read more
for yourselves if you would like, though they may not
be the best of the best resources. The digital copy
of the herbal is pretty cool. By the way, the
description and discussion of the barnacle gooses in the very
last chapter. It's a little difficult to read, but still
(34:47):
pretty rad. Barnacles are one of my favorite marine organisms
because of how they feed. They're so beautiful waving their
quote legs around trying to getch a meal. Thanks again,
you ladies are great, Bethany. Bethany also notes that there's
a species of goose called the barnacle goose. That made
the search process a little more challenging. Thank you, Bethany.
So we got a couple of emails about the story,
(35:08):
and so to clarify the book that I was looking at.
I am not sure whether it was UM an old
science textbook, because in in our family bookshelf UM we
had a few old textbooks that I think had been
bought at a yard sale or something, or if it
was a science book for kids, that we bought it
like a Scholastic book sale or something similar. Either way,
(35:31):
it was a book intended for kids that was a
science and science history book, and this whole barnacle goose
thing was in a section on people used to think
it worked this way, and it talked about the idea
that that maggots spontaneously generated out of meat, which I
could understand why people would think that because you don't
(35:54):
necessarily you don't really see the eggs that flies lay
on things before the mag it's come. So that to me,
I was like, Okay, I can I can see how
people would think that. But then I had this picture
of barnacles becoming a goose, and I was like that,
how would you get how would you work that math
out in your head? With Barnacles and geese are not
(36:15):
the same thing at all. These are obviously barnacles that
look kind of like geese. Have you ever been bitten
by a goose? No, because that might lead you to
associate them with the scratchy horror of barnacle. Okay, a
goose bite is mean and hard, and they have serrated,
little tiny teeth, so I could see where I mean.
It's still a long walk. I'm not I'm not saying, oh,
(36:38):
this makes total sense, but I could maybe see where
that might be the connective tissue of them thinking that's hilarious. Yeah,
I generally give geese a wide berth because especially when
they're nesting, they can be really kind of aggressive and
and so uh, not so much with the geese, but yeah,
it was baffling to me as a child. So thanks
(36:59):
to all the folks who have sent us various links
about barnacles becoming geese, which is not a thing that
they actually do. If you would like to write to
us about this or any other podcasts or a history
podcast at how stuff Works dot com. And we are
also all over social media missing History, so that is
our Facebook and our Twitter, and our Pinterest and our Instagram.
(37:20):
You can come to our website, which is missing history
dot com, where you will find show notes for all
the episodes that Holly and I have ever done and
a searchable archive of all of the episodes that have
ever existed on the show. And you can find our
podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, wherever else you might
get podcasts. So come and visit us or subscribe for
(37:48):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff works? Dot com
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Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
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