The Sun.
London, England, 1846-12-01 00:00:00

THE HIGHLANDS BEFORE THE
ERA OF POTATOES.

(From the Inverness Conrier).
The, most correct, and certainly the most lisealy
and
interesting account of the Highlands, prior to the Te-
he
belliem of 1745 is conineci in the `beettess rom
No•:th of Scotland," understood to written by t:tdl©
Burt, an English officer of engineers,f who waesarssenats
to Inverness in 1726, and resided. here for semi:
ioyn of the
a superintendent or contractor in e
presses his regret
military road's. This gentleman.
that the potato had not beebu
Desirous s;,o know the proba I_, periodlP!",roYduecefditstointthreednucotritnhn.
and the, general condition of the people
knows, amongst them, we have consulted before it was
our old towns-
man, John Maclean, nowin his hundredth year. John
wa's a tailor, often employed
in town and country, in
W orking for families at sixpence
a day ; and the infor-
mation which, in his youth, he could not fail to acquire,
"
his tenacious memory still retains. Tailors, according
to Charles Lamb's humourous essay on the profession,
seldom take that light and cheerful every- day-interest
in the affairs and
goings-on of the world which
makes the barber such delightful company. Tan
country ntry tailor, haw per must 'be considered an
exception from his sedentary brethern in the town,
especially when he was wont to perform his circuit round
the country-side, and gather news in hall and cottage.
Like most old men, our venerable chronicler thinks the
present race has sadly degenerated. The people, he
says,
lived much better, were healthier, and attained to
a gresiter age in former times than they do now. Sea-
son '.3 of famine and suffering no doubt sometimes °c-
osi-red, and were very severe ; but in ordinary years
`the people had more command of the necessaries of life,
and, in their homely way, were more comfortable and
contented. Potatoes, John says, were first planted and
raised here about the year 1756, by " William and San-
ders Dawson, the gardeners." They did well in the
orchard grounds, and some of the neighbours (Job'
Maslean's father amongst the rest) began to plarst a
few. It was long, however, before the, s,otato became
general. "We did not plant many,' said John-, it
was a rare thing to have the last of them for dinner on
Christmas day ; and before that only one or two diets
of them would be taken in tate week. They were mostly
kept in a corner of the Muckle hist, and when they
were done the people seemed nowise disappointed."
The daily food of the common people consisted of oat-
meal porridge, with milk or beer, for breakfast. For
dinner they had sevens (which we may inform our
Inglish friends is v. sort of pudding, very palatable, made
of the fine flour remaining among the seeds of oatmeal)
or kail, with bannocks of barley and peasenseal, and
sometimes fish. The supper was always formed of
porridge and milk. On Sundays there was generally
something extra ; butcher-meat was then cheap, and
seldom sold by weight as it is now. The "big pot"
with the broth was put on the fire in good time on Sa-
turday, as all manner of cooking was strictly avoided on
the Sabbath. A hare or black-cock could always be had
in winter. Nothing was sent out of the country but the
cattle which the drovers took south. Everything was
cheap. " How could it be otherwise," said John, " when
Donald Cameron and his wife, one Friday forenoon, at
the market, bought a leg of mutton, a peck of meal, and
a cart of peats, all for elevenpence, and to make up the
shilling he and the guidwife had a gill of Hollands for
the other penny." Salmon was generally plentiful in
the season, and could be had at about a penny a-pound.
A similar statement is made by Captain Burt, who men-
tions that he had often seen above a hundred large
salmon taken out of the Ness at one haul. He adds—
" The meanest servants, who are not at boord-wages,
will not make a meal upon salmon if they can get any-
thing else to eat. I have been told it here, as a very
good jest, that a Highland gentleman, who went to
London by sea, soon after his landing, passed by a tavern
where the larder appeared to the street, and operated so
strongly upon his appetite that he went in—that there
were among other things a rump of beef and some sal-
mon : of the beef he ordered a steak for himself, ' but,"
says he, 'let Duncan have some salmon.' To be short,
the cook who attended him humoured the jest, and the
master's eating was eightpence, and Duncan's came to
almost as many shillings."
John Maclean states that little or no whisky was in
his early days drank by the townspeople, who preferred
good ale, which they had at threepence the Scotch pint.
The usquebaugh would appear, however, to have been
common in the country ; for Burt mentions that some
of the Highland gentlemen—the tacksmen or duinhe-
wassals—drank it to excess. Old John recollects dis-
tinctly the first time that he participated in the luxury
of drinking tea. The Magistrates were much against
the introduction of tea, as they derived a revenue from
the sale of ale in the burgh ; but the forbidden beve
rage crept into use among the ladies, and from them
descended to the common people. John was invited to
a rustic party, at which a number of women were as-
sembled. They sat round the ingle, and handed about
the tea in a wooden coy, and the " tailor laddie " on the
" creepy stool " got his share of the rare drink, though
he was far from relishing it. "It had a wild, harsh
taste," he says, " for it was just boiled in a pot, the
same as hail or other herbs ; there was not a kettle in
the whole neighbourhood, excepting one that Mrs. Ogil-
vie had." The towns-people of that day acted strictly
on the maxim of " early to bed and early to rise."
By nine o'clock in the evening almost every light was
extinguished, and they were all at work again by skreigh
of day. To the old man's recollection—though in such
matters the memory is apt to be treacherous, and to
dwell only on the pleasant parts of the picture—the
people then had more kindliness and confidence in their
intercourse with each other than is the case at present.
Business was mostly transacted and bargains made by
" word of mouth," or " thumb to thumb" (touching each
other's thumbs, as we see men now shake hands on
closing a bargain). lie recollects horses and cattle being
bought and sold thumb to thumb, and the terms of sale
were always faithfully attended to at the appointed time.
The one or two lawyers in the town were but poorly em-
ployed, and bankers' bills were never thought of by or-
dinary persons. There was only one baner here,
sad while he attended to his other business (which
he considered more important than the bank
matters), his lad was left to act as cashier,
teller, and accountant. "Changed times now !" said
John ; " but though the folk were poor then, they were
better off than they are now. They were more contented
and not so pinched. There were fewer of them, for I
knew every man in the town, and their dogs too." It is
amusing to contrast John's reminiscences with the de-
scriptions of Captain Burt. To his English tastes and
ideas of comfort, the people here seemed steeped in hope-
less poverty—idle, dirty, ill-clad, destitute of trade, their
houses, furniture, and implements of all kinds of the most
wretched sort ; the servants oppressed by the masters,
and the lower classes generally not half-fed, and pos-
sessing neither spirit nor emulation. We are disposed,
however, to believe with old John, that at least
among the frugal and thrifty of the poor, there
was less actual want, eighty or ninety years since,
than is now to be found. There was not such a crowd-
ing and struggling for the bare means of subsistence.
Their standard of comfort was humble enough, but
/hey seldom fell far below it. The natural products of
the river, the wood, and the moor, were not so jealously
guarded, nor the rights of property so rigidly upheld.
The subdivision of labour caused by increasing civilisa-
tion and refinement of taste, the invention of machinery,
and the greatly enhanced value of land, have cut off
many sources of livelihood and support which, in a more
rude and primitive state of society with a scantier po-
pulation were open to all classes.
In the country, the condition of the Highland crofter
and labourer was always a precarious one. Of course,
when clanship was in full vigour, much depended
on the
character of the chief, who was regarded with Oriental
submission, and more than Oriental fidelity and attach-
ment. The military and predatory spirit was too widely
diffused for the successful cultivation of the soil. When
the system of clanship declined, and the chief had no
ambition for a large " following," the tacksman or
middleman became of more importance. The Gartmore
manuscript, written in 1747, and first published by Sir
Walter Scott, describes the state of the Highlands, after
the Rebellion, as wretched and disorderly in the ex-
treme. A creagh, or foraging expedition, was a common
occurrence, and black-mail was regularly levied on the
borders and low country. There was no employment
for the people, and they were driven to desperate
courses. The agriculture, the pasturage, the fishery,
and all the manufactures in the country could be suffi-
ciently managed, this writer states, by one-half of the
population :
" The poverty of the
people is occasioned and conti-
nued by a custom that is presently in use, and hath long
continued in that country, viz , the practice of letting
many farms to one man, who
again subsets them to a
much greater number than they can maintain, and at a
much higher rent than they can afford t°
The rent was often paid in kind or in laboy.ur,'u'r, so that
the tacksman had the business of his own farm per-
formed—his corn reaped and ground, his hay lands
cleared, and his fuel prepared, by his sub-tenants, be-
sides sometimes, from their payments, sitting rent free
himself, One paid in money, another was bound to
shear a given number of stooks, another to lead seaware,
or spread pests, or make hay, while some widow or aged
cottar furnished a certain number of hens and eggs.
There was room for both good and evil in this system,
bat it was a bar to agricultural improvement. The tacks-
man sat easy and had no motive for exertion. lie was
generally of a good family, allied to the chief, and
possessing his confidence. The crofter had enough to do
to scrape up a subsistence. His scanty crop of oats or bar-
ley was often destroyed by frost and mildew, which hung
about the undrained lands like a perpetual pestilence. His
servitude to the tacksman, or the pursuit of illicit distilla-
tion, occupied much of his time, and hence the management
of his croft' frequently devolved on the females of the
family. Many of the young men entered the army, and
in their native regiments proved as brave soldiers as
ever charged an enemy. The people were generally-
congregated in small towns, or townships, each com-
posed of a number of tenants who were sometimes
bound jointly and severally for the payment of the whole
rent of the district. They held the land in common, in
small patches ; and it was not without difficulty that
the present system of independent holdings, each occu-
pier having his own lot direct from the proprietor, was
established over the country. Captain Burt gives a
graphic account of one of these rural towns as they ap-
peared in Inverness-shire about the year 1730 :
" A Highland town, composed of a few huts for dwel-
l_in_gs, barns and stables, and both the latter are of
apiriceordei diminutive size than the former, all irregularly
tance, look like so wmay, some another, and, at any dis-
glens and straths whichalleaps of dirt; these are built in
al are the corn-countries, near
rivers and rivulets', and
also on the aides of lakes, where
there is some arable I,the support of the inhabi-
tants; but I am now to 71e:13A of the manner in which
the lower order of the Hi
with the spring of the year. Highlanders live, and shall begin
" This is a bad season with them, for then their
provision of oatmeal begins to fail, and, for a supply h
bleed their cattle, and boil the blood into cakes,- sv, thiech
together with a little milk and a short 0,1191741 m of