Scotland underwent suffering similar to Ireland’s, the difference being that if Ireland’s woes could be said to have sprung from the humble potato, the woes of Scotland sprang from the simple sheep. In the late 1800s, Catherine MacPhee of Uist wrote the following:
Many a thing have I seen in my own day and generation. Many a thing, O Mary Mother of the Black Sorrows. I have seen the townships swept and the big holdings being made of them, the people driven out of the countryside to the streets of Glasgow and to the wilds of Canada, such of them as did not die of hunger and plague and smallpox going across the ocean. ... I have seen the big strong men, the champions of the countryside, being bound on Loch Boisdale quay and cast into the ship as would be done to a batch of horses and cattle, the bailiffs and the ground-officers and the constables and the policemen behind them in pursuit of them. The God of Life, and He only, knows all the loathsome work of men on that day.
Donald Macleod of Sutherland wrote a series of letters, published serially in the Edinburgh Weekly Chronicle originally as ‘Gloomy Memories* and as a separate volume in 1883, the first of which begins as follows:
I am a native of Sutherlandshire, and remember when the inhabitants of that country lived comfortably and happily, when the mansions of proprietors and the abodes of factors, magistrates and ministers, were the seats of honour, truth, and good example - when people of quality were indeed what they were styled, the friends and benefactors of all who lived upon their domains. But all this is changed. Alas, alas!
I have lived to see calamity upon calamity overtake the Sutherlanders.
For five successive years, on or about the term day, has scarcely
Anything been seen but removing the inhabitants in the most cruel and unfeeling manner, and burning the houses which they and their forefathers had occupied from time immemorial. The country was darkened by the smoke of the burnings, and the descendants of those who drew their swords at Bannockburn, Sheriffmuir, and Killicrankie. . . were ruined, trampled upon, dispersed, and compelled to seek an asylum across the Atlantic; while those who remained from inability to emigrate, deprived of all the comforts of life, became paupers - beggars - a disgrace to the nation whose freedom and honour many of them had maintained by their valour and cemented with their blood.
The great national tragedy being described here is usually called the Highland Clearances. Ever since the Act of Union of 1707 which removed Scotland’s Great Seal and required her to send her ministers to the English Parliament at Westminster; there was political tension between the two countries. The Jacobite rebellions of 1715, defeated at Preston, and of 1745, intended to restore Prince Charles Edward, better known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, to the Scottish throne, ended in dismal failure at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. The Highlands were ruthlessly subjugated by the English in the years following Culloden, and many atrocities were committed by English soldiers on the ordinary folk of the Highlands and Islands. The playing of the bagpipes was forbidden, which led to a curious wordless, rhythmical singing called puirt a bheul, or mouth music, which survives as a part of Scottish tradition to this day. Lords Kilmarnock, Lovat and Balmerino were executed for their part in the uprising, but it was not these comparatively straightforward political and military events which led directly to the Clearances: rather, it was the introduction of a new breed of sheep, the Great Cheviot.
The clan system had been fairly effectively destroyed in the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellions, and the Scottish nobility, who once would have been proud to trace their ancestry back to Celtic kings, became greedy to emulate their English peers in the south. They were land-rich and cash-poor, however. The glens were overpopulated, despite some early emigration, and the thin Highland soils on the mountains supported black cattle poorly. The system of tenants and sub-tenants, originally a relic of ancient Celtic praaice, had become confused and corrupt, with much rack-renting and profiteering by middle-men. By the late eighteenth century, however, modernizing farmers in the Borders had mixed their stock with Lincoln ewes and Ryeland and Spanish rams, and produced the Great Cheviot, a docile and tractable animal which gave good yields of meat and wool and, most importantly, was sufficiently hardy to take the stiff winters of the Highlands. The year 1792 was called Bliadha nan Caorach in Scots Gaelic, meaning ‘the Year of the Sheep’. A landlord who might have made two pence an acre with cattle could now make two shillings an acre, twelve times as much in a year, with sheep grazing the same land. There was a sudden stampede of sheep into the Highlands, and the only way to achieve that was for the local tenants to be evicted, by force if necessary. Force was necessary. The armed gentry employed the Black Watch to suppress local rebellions, many of which were led and fought by women, desperate to keep their homes and feed their families. The work of clearance was frequently put into the hands of English agents, like James Loch, Commissioner to the Marquess of Stafford, who despised the Celtic Highlander as lazy, brutish and ignorant, and not worthy of consideration. The Victorians’ solution was to encourage Scottish emigration, which they did, supplying ships in great number. When the Crimean War began in 1854, Whitehall sent to Scotland, as it had done many times before, to raise fighting men, but recruiters who went to the Highlands and Islands were met by angry men who baa-ed like sheep at them, and said, ‘Since you have preferred sheep to men, let sheep defend you.’
Another great difference between Ireland and Scotland was that the Scottish clans, many of which had been petty kingdoms in their earliest beginnings, survived in name at least, because the English aristocracy tolerated, or even encouraged, the generation of a conservative Scottish aristocracy to keep the ordinary people at bay: the more archaic and feudal, the better. This led to some ridiculous aggrandizement, most notably the perversion of the simple country plaids and styles of dress into great costumes, with plumes and fol-de-rols, frothy ruffs and polished brass buttons, so that the clan chiefs came to look like the peacocks they were. They often spoke with the lordly drawl of Westminster or Whitehall, too.
Nevertheless, the clan names did survive, and they have done much to keep people of Scottish descent in touch with their ancestry. Some of the names have become familiar in their Anglicized forms or spellings. For example, the name Chisholm derives from the original Gaelic Siosalach, and the proper patronymic for the clan chief is An Siosalach (‘The Chisholm’). The principal clans are listed, with notes on clan seats, patronymics, plant emblems, etc., in the Appendix on pages 243-249.
World History
