page_title: Cotter (farmer)
section_title: Scotland
hierarchical_section_title: Cotter (farmer) / Scotland
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Balkhauser Kotten - Solinger Schleifkotten an der Wupper
context_page_description: Cotter, cottier, cottar, Kosatter or Kötter is the German or Scots term for a peasant farmer. Cotters occupied cottages and cultivated small land lots. The word cotter is often employed to translate the cotarius recorded in the Domesday Book, a social class whose exact status has been the subject of some discussion among historians, and is still a matter of doubt. According to Domesday, the cotarii were comparatively few, numbering fewer than seven thousand people. They were scattered unevenly throughout England, located principally in the counties of Southern England. They either cultivated a small plot of land, or worked on the holdings of the villani. Like the villani, among whom they were frequently classed, their economic condition may be described as free in relation to every one except their lord.
  A cottar or cottier is also a term for a tenant who was renting land from a farmer or landlord.
context_section_description: Cottars were between a third and a half of the rural population of the Scottish Lowlands for the 17th and most of the 18th century. They held small amounts of land from lease-holding farming tenants of the traditional fermetouns. They provided labour, especially at the peak times of ploughing and harvest, in lieu of monetary rent. Many were also engaged in trades, such as weaving, or blacksmithing. The agricultural improvement that transformed the rural economy of the Lowlands in the 18th century, created larger farms with fewer tenants. From the 1770s onwards, this left no place for the cottar: many migrated to the nearby developing industrial towns, others became farm servants or day labourers for the new larger farms.
  Highland Cottars (including on the islands, such as Mull) were affected by the Industrial Revolution. Landowners realized that they could make more money from sheep, whose wool was spun and processed into textiles for export, than crops.  The landowners raised rents to unaffordable prices, or evicted entire villages in what became known as the Highland Clearances. This resulted in the mass exodus of peasants and cotters, leading to an influx of former cotters into industrial centers, such as a burgeoning Glasgow.
  Cottars were often idealised in Scottish pastoral poetry of the 18th century, such as "The Cotter's Saturday Night" by Robert Burns and "The Farmer's Ingle" by Robert Fergusson.
caption: A cotter house (Kotten) near Solingen, Germany, used as a vacation home today
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