page_title: Agriculture in Scotland in the Middle Ages
section_title: High Middle Ages
hierarchical_section_title: Agriculture in Scotland in the Middle Ages / High Middle Ages
caption_attribution_description: English: Medieval plowing with oxen (from a 14th century manuscript)
context_page_description: Agriculture in Scotland in the Middle Ages includes all forms of farm production in the modern boundaries of Scotland, between the departure of the Romans from Britain in the fifth century and the establishment of the Renaissance in the early sixteenth century. Scotland has between a fifth and a sixth of the amount of the arable or good pastoral land of England and Wales, mostly located in the south and east. Heavy rainfall encouraged the spread of acidic blanket peat bog, which with wind and salt spray, made most of the western islands treeless. The existence of hills, mountains, quicksands and marshes made internal communication and agriculture difficult. Most farms had to produce a self-sufficient diet of meat, dairy products and cereals, supplemented by hunter-gathering. The early Middle Ages were a period of climate deterioration resulting in more land becoming unproductive. Farming was based around a single homestead or a small cluster of three or four homes, each probably containing a nuclear family and cattle were the most important domesticated animal.
context_section_description: In the period 1150 to 1300, warm dry summers and less severe winters of the Medieval Warm Period allowed cultivation at much greater heights above sea level and made land more productive. Arable farming grew significantly, but was still more common in low-lying areas in the south and east than in high-lying areas such as the Highlands, Galloway and the Southern Uplands. The feudalism introduced under David I, particularly in the east and south where the crown's authority was greatest, saw the placement of baronial lordships. Land was now held from the king, or a superior lord, in exchange for loyalty and forms of service that were usually military. Barons, who held feudal tenures, had the right to hold baronial courts, which could deal with matters of land ownership. However, the imposition of feudalism continued to sit beside the existing systems of landholding and tenure and it is not clear how this change impacted on the lives of the ordinary free and unfree workers. In places, feudalism may have tied workers more closely to the land. However, the predominantly pastoral nature of Scottish agriculture may have made the imposition of a manorial system, based on the English model, impracticable in some areas. Obligations appear to have been limited to occasional labour service, seasonal renders of food, hospitality and money rents. They usually included supplying oxen for ploughing the lord's land on an annual basis and the much resented obligation to grind corn at the lord's mill.
  Hunting reserves were adopted by Anglo-Norman lords and then by Gaelic ones, creating large tracts of land reserved for the leisure of the aristocracy and nobility. These were less rigorously enforced than in England, where the taking of wood and game were strictly forbidden, and all royal forests were on land already in the king's hands. The introduction of new monastic orders such as the Cistercians in this period also brought innovations in agriculture. Particularly in the Borders, their monasteries became major landholders, sheep farmers and producers of wool for the markets in Flanders. These were organised in granges, monastic farms run by lay brothers of the order. Granges were theoretically within 30 miles of the mother monastery, so that those working there could return for services on Sundays and feast days. They were used for variety of purposes, including pastoral, arable and industrial production. However, to manage more distant assets in Ayrshire, Melrose Abbey used Mauchline as a "super grange", to oversee lesser granges. Some abbeys like Melrose had at least 12,000 sheep in the late thirteenth century.
  The system of infield and outfield agriculture, a variation of open field farming widely used across Europe, may have been introduced with feudalism and would continue until the eighteenth century. This expanded from the use of small enclosed fields, which continued from the prehistoric era. The infield was the best land, close to housing. It was farmed continuously and most intensively, receiving most of the manure. Crops were usually bere (a form of barley), oats and sometimes wheat, rye and legumes. The more extensive outfield was used for largely for oats. It was fertilised from the overnight folding of cattle in the summer and was often left fallow to recover its fertility. In fertile regions the infield could be extensive, but in the uplands it might be small, surrounded by large amounts of outfield. In coastal areas fertiliser included seaweed and around the major burghs urban refuse was used. Yields were fairly low, often around three times the quantity of seed sown, although they could reach twice that yield on some infields. The main unit of land measurement in Scotland was the davoch (i.e. "vat"), called the arachor in Lennox. This unit is also known as the "Scottish ploughgate". In English-speaking Lothian, it was simply a ploughgate. It may have measured about 104 acres (0.42 km²), divided into 4 raths or eight oxgangs, the area that eight oxen were said to be able to plough in one year.
caption: A four-ox-team plough, redrawn from the Luttrell Psalter, an English illuminated manuscript, c. 1330
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