As a long-time Hibernophile my view of the tragedy of the Highland clearances was formed by reading John Prebble's famous book in the 1970s. It's a devastating narrative of greed and displacement. In some coastal places you can still see the Black houses, so-called because the tenants were said to have been burned out by avaricious southern landlords.
I'm used to the idea that most of the iconic ideas about Scottish history are more or less bunkum, a phenomenon that finds its locus classicus in the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. Bonnie Prince Charlie was not the heir to the throne; he was the son of the heir. He spoke neither English or Gaelic; his first language was Italian. The conflict which followed his landing was not an English / Scottish one; it is better described as a Stuart / Hanoverian, or Catholic / Protestant or Lowland / Highland one. Many of the chieftains who fought with Charles did so reluctantly (as did many of their clansmen). More Scots fought on the government side at Culloden than on that of the rebels.
And so on and so forth. That hasn't stopped the conflict being cast in the popular mind as a product of English wickedness (largely because of the reprisals exacted on the Highlands by the vengeful Hanoverian goverment in London). No doubt it exerts a tendentious mental sway on the Independence movement even today.
But surely the Clearances - that really happened? No?
Well, yes and no. I've just been reading The Highland Clearances by Australian historian Eric Richards, and it's an eye-opener for everyone interested in Scotland, and in this subject. The Clearances did take place, but not in the manner or for the reasons that a resentful national myth perpetuates.
Contrary to popular belief -
- An idyllic agrarian community did not exist in the glens until disrupted by landlords; in fact Highlanders often lived in squalid conditions beset by poverty and famine.
- The property did not belong to the tenants, but to the landlord, who was entitled to remove them upon giving proper notice. Such notice was generally a year.
- The tenants had generally not held their land since time immemorial - on the contrary there was significant turnover.
- Almost always due notice to quit was given.
- In some cases tenants were given years to prepare for removal.
- Many of the people cleared were squatters who had no right to be there.
- In many cases landlords were owed significant arrears of rent, which was often waived upon clearance.
- In some cases landlords spent thousands of pounds providing alternative land by the coasts.
- In many cases landlords spent thousands of pounds trying to set up alternative industries such as fishing and kelp farming.
- Most clearances were not accompanied by violence.
- Property was destroyed or burned after evictions to prevent tenants returning, rather than in order to force them to leave in the first place.
- The only person tried for violent evictions - Patrick Sellar - was accused by a man he had previously caught poaching. Sellar was acquitted by an Inverness jury.
- Many people left the land voluntarily because they could not make a living. One contemporary writer said that even if the land had been given rent free, it would have been impossible to make a decent living there. Even today it is very hard to get by in the Highlands.
- Almost all the landlords were Scots, as were the overwhelming majority of sheep-farmers who replaced the tenants. Some of these were men from the Lowlands, but a significant minority were themselves Highlanders. Almost none of them were English.
- The most significant English participant, the Earl of Stafford, came into the story only because he married the Countess of Sutherland. The Countess had plans for "improvement" but lacked the means to carry them out. Her new husband was wealthy, and together they ploughed what were then vast sums of money (from England, for what it's worth) into the Sutherland estates, believing that new coastal communities would benefit both the estate and the tenants. The Duke and Duchess were horrified by allegations of Patrick Sellar's brutality and he was sacked. The bulk of the money invested was never recovered and by 1820 it had become apparent that the resettlement schemes were a failure.
Of course what is immediately obvious from the above list is that although, for example, "in some cases tenants were given years to prepare for removal", in some cases they weren't. That would also go for removal by violence. Some tenants were violently removed. But overall the picture I have had for years, one in which all landlords behaved dreadfully, is refuted. They did not. They often did their incompetent best in impossible circumstances. The tragedy for the tenants was that there were few other places to go, other than the big cities or, often, Canada.
Moreover the picture Richards paints is of a landscape beset by poverty (as was much of rural Europe), the burden of which in the Highlands fell on the landlord, who was expected to care for his tenants in hard times. And this, incidentally, goes to what I felt was a weakness in the book. Here is a society where the old feudal system of mutual obligation is breaking down. The idea that the relationship with a tenant is a commercial rather than patriarchal one is a modern one. Nowadays for example we are quite used to the idea of a landlord seeking to regain control over his property after giving due notice to quit. Not so in the late 18th century. Where did this modern idea derive? What did people think of it at the time, and how was it formulated?
Nevertheless this is a fascinating story, and a neat marginal destruction of another small piece of the SNP's intellectual jigsaw.
