Population

It is important to remain optimistic about the possibilities, because the hard evidence for one of the most fundamental of economic topics, population, is frankly discouraging. Almost nothing is known about Scottish medieval demography. While many economic historians elsewhere in Europe regard demographic change as perhaps the dominant driving force in the medieval economy, the lack of evidence about Scottish population has reduced Scottish medieval demography to little more than guesswork. Unsurprisingly, the guesses have been rather varied, with figures ranging from a million to half a million c.1300 being hazarded with little supporting evidence. Broadly speaking, since Scotland possessed about one-sixth the area of reasonable agricultural land found in England and Wales, a similar ratio may have applied to population levels.8 If the high point of English medieval population stood at some 5 or 6 million (and there is of course much debate about this), Scottish population may have peaked at about a million. It may also be reasonable to assume that about 10 per cent of the Scottish population lived in towns by around 1300. (A figure as high as 20 per cent for urban population in England by this time has been authoritatively suggested by Dyer.9) With a Scottish urban population of about

100,000 we might be looking at about fifty burghs each averaging about 2,000 people, though most would have been much smaller. Perhaps the top ten Scottish burghs C.1300 may have ranged from around 10,000 down to about 5,000, when London may have reached 80,000, Norwich 25,000, Dublin 11,000 and Winchester 10,000.10

Important advances in the archaeology of Scottish towns have been made in the last decade, which have contributed to our knowledge of population. Major excavations have been carried out in Aberdeen and Perth, but the interpretation of this work reveals a complex and varied picture. In Perth evidence of the subdivision of plots has been found which may confirm an impression of overcrowding and of population pressure, but little evidence of crowding has been found in Aberdeen.11 Clearly the particular circumstances of each site have to be taken into account. The recent Scottish Burgh Survey collects what is known of the basic documentary and archaeological evidence for individual Scottish towns, as a starting point for further research, but as yet the demographic implications of this work remain inconclusive.12

The interpretation of research into settlement patterns and the archaeology of habitation and cultivation in the countryside is also complex. The distinctive pattern of Scottish agriculture was based on touns, i. e., clusters of farmsteads with associated outbuildings accommodating around two to six tenant families. These families may have exploited either open-fields (runrigg) or consolidated holdings in combinations of infield and outfield cultivation.13 However, medieval documentary evidence (e. g. Auchencrow, Berwickshire) is scarce, and the archaeology of rural sites (e. g. Lix, Perthshire) has yet to build up into a significant body of knowledge.14 This type of research is not yet sufficiently developed to contribute much to our ideas about population. Even such apparently clear-cut indications of population pressure as the cultivation of arable crops at high altitudes, for example Kelso Abbey’s arable fields at over 1,000 feet, may be more indicative of climatic change than of overpopulation.

Map 6.2 Scotland: burghs in existence by 1300.

Certainly there is evidence that Scotland, like the rest of northern Europe, enjoyed favourable climatic conditions allowing arable cultivation at higher altitudes in the period from c.970 to about the end of the thirteenth century.15

Towards the end of our period, around 1500, English population stood as low as

2.5 million or less, perhaps suggesting that at its low point Scotland’s population was about half a million. In the sixteenth century we meet the first securely based figures for Scottish towns. Edinburgh had some 12,500 inhabitants c.1560, rising to over

20,000 by 1635.16 Normally this might be thought to give a guide for early fourteenth-century town populations, which usually exceed sixteenth-century totals by a large margin, but Edinburgh grew in the later middle ages, while most town populations fell.

Such guesstimates of course assume huge loss of life due to plague. There is a good deal of evidence for the ravages of plague in later medieval Scotland, but by a curious quirk of the evidence the surviving sources say very little about the first devastating outbreak of 1349.17 The first surviving set of Exchequer Roll post-plague Sheriffs’ accounts, which were not rendered till 1358/9, make no explicit mention of plague, but they describe an impoverished landscape. They are full of references to land no longer yielding income to the crown because it was vasta. Some of this waste land had no doubt suffered through warfare. But the impact of medieval war was not generally so long-lasting; Aberdeen was sacked by the English in 1336 but was back in business, apparently unaffected, in the early 1340s. Froissart observed that Scottish homes were so basic that they could be very quickly rebuilt. Moreover, the areas of waste recorded in the Exchequer Rolls extended far beyond the contended regions. From Forfar, Kincardine, Ayr, Kinross, Stirling, Clackmannan, Roxburgh, Peebles, Kinghorn, Fife, Perth and Banff, there is evidence of fishings, ferries, lands and brewhouses without tenants, or let only on temporary leases at low rents, because better tenants could not be found. The Coldingham priory accounts do mention plague in 1362-3, when a large number of mortuary beasts escaped into corn fields, but the falling demesne acreage and the mounting arrears totals caused by unpaid rents give further indication of the economic impact of plague mortality.18 There seems little doubt that Scotland suffered severely. Grant, who thought Scotland may have been less severely hit than some other countries, still regarded the plague as ‘the worst disaster suffered by the people of Scotland in recorded history’.19 Crawford concurs, basing her argument on the impact of plague in Scandinavia which suggests that altitude and northern latitude were no protection from the disease.20 Fitch has even argued that the colder, damper climate may have increased the incidence of the more deadly pneumonic plague.21 Thus despite the absence of direct and quantifiable evidence of the type readily available in England, there can be little doubt about the seriousness of the impact of plague in medieval Scotland. This demographic catastrophe was, in Scotland as in the rest of Europe, unquestionably the single most important determining factor of the later middle ages.