page_title: Scottish society in the early modern era
section_title: Demography
hierarchical_section_title: Scottish society in the early modern era / Demography
caption_attribution_description: English: "The Citie of Edinburgh from the South" (detail) by Wenceslas Hollar (1670). Some artistic licence has been used. For example, no tenements are visible on the north side of the High Street where the slope descends steeply to the Nor Loch. Heriot's Hospital stands east (rather than west) of Potterow Port. This image is annotated on its description page at Commons.
context_page_description: Scottish society in the early modern era encompasses the social structure and relations that existed in Scotland between the early sixteenth century and the mid-eighteenth century. It roughly corresponds to the early modern era in Europe, beginning with the Renaissance and Reformation and ending with the last Jacobite risings and the beginnings of the industrial revolution.
  Scotland in this period was a hierarchical society, with a complex series of ranks and orders. This was headed by the monarch and the great magnates. Below them were the lairds, who emerged as a distinct group at the top of local society was whose position was consolidated by economic and administrative change. Below the lairds in rural society were a variety of groups, often ill-defined, including yeomen, who were often major landholders, and the husbandmen, who were landholders, followed by cottars and grassmen, who often had only limited rights to common land and pasture. Urban society was led by wealthy merchants, who were often burgesses. Beneath them, and often in conflict with the urban elite, were the craftsmen.
context_section_description: There are almost no reliable sources with which to track the population of Scotland before the late seventeenth century. Estimates based on English records suggest that by the end of the Middle Ages, the Black Death and subsequent recurring outbreaks of the plague, may have caused the population of Scotland to fall as low as half a million people. Price inflation, which generally reflects growing demand for food, suggests that this probably expanded in the first half of the sixteenth century. Almost half the years in the second half of the sixteenth century saw local or national scarcity, necessitating the shipping of large quantities of grain from the Baltic. Distress was exacerbated by outbreaks of plague, with major epidemics in the periods 1584–8, 1595 and 1597–1609.
  The population expansion probably levelled off after the famine of the 1590s, as prices were relatively stable in the early seventeenth century. In the early seventeenth century famine was common, with four periods of famine prices between 1620 and 1625. The invasions of the 1640s had a profound impact on the Scottish economy, with the destruction of crops and the disruption of markets resulting in some of the most rapid price rises of the century, but population probably expanded in the period of stability that followed the Restoration in 1660. Calculations based on Hearth Tax returns for 1691 indicate a population of 1,234,575. The population may have been seriously affected by the failed harvests (1695, 1696 and 1698-9) known as the "seven ill years". The result was severe famine and depopulation, particularly in the north. The famines of the 1690s were seen as particularly severe, partly because famine had become relatively rare in the second half of the seventeenth century, with only one year of dearth (in 1674), and the shortages of the 1690s were the last of their kind. The first reliable information on national population is from the census conducted by the Reverend Alexander Webster in 1755, which showed the inhabitants of Scotland as 1,265,380 persons.
  Compared with the situation after the redistribution of population as a result of the clearances and the industrial revolution that began in the eighteenth century, these numbers must have been evenly spread over the kingdom, with roughly half living north of the Tay. Most of the early modern population, in both the Lowlands and Highlands, was housed in small hamlets and isolated dwellings. As the population expanded, some of these settlements were sub-divided to create new hamlets and more marginal land was settled, with sheilings (clusters of huts occupied while summer pasture was being used for grazing), becoming permanent settlements. Perhaps ten per cent of the population lived in one of many burghs that had grown up in the later Medieval period, mainly in the east and south of the country. It has been suggested that they had a mean population of about 2,000, but many were much smaller than 1,000, and the largest, Edinburgh, probably had a population of over 10,000 at the beginning of the era. During the seventeenth century the number of people living in the capital grew rapidly. It also expanded beyond the city walls in suburbs at Cowgate, Bristo and Westport and by 1750, with its suburbs, it had reached a population of 57,000. The only other towns above 10,000 by the end of the period were Glasgow with 32,000, Aberdeen with around 16,000 and Dundee with 12,000.
caption: View of Edinburgh in the late seventeenth century showing the suburbs outside of the city walls
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