Forbes reported in 1737 on the Duke of Argyll’s lands in Morven, Mull, and Tyree. He speaks of the ‘tyranny’ and ‘unmerciful exactions’ of the tacksmen, large leaseholders who sub-let to smaller tenants. Hence the lands lie waste, and ‘above one hundred families have been reduced to beggary and driven out of the island.’ This is precisely the modern complaint against the bad new times, a complaint with which we all sympathise. Tacksmen, according to Culloden, were as bad as factors.
Culloden, therefore, suggested the granting to the sub-tenants of nineteen years’ leases if they would ‘offer frankly for their farms such rent as fairly and honestly they could bear.’ Such leases he had power to offer, and did offer. ‘No takers!’ Culloden was surprised, but he need not have been. The weight of the tacksmen would be against him; also the conservatism of the people. A fixed rent was a new crude hard thing: a system of shuffling along, above all as the general policy was to find room for swordsmen—was an old endurable thing. Culloden, however, persuaded some sub-tenants to offer. On the tacksmen he put pressure. He had with him some tacksmen from the mainland, better acquainted with farming methods. They offered for the insular tacksmen’s farms, whereon the insular tacksmen also offered. Fixed now were rents, and fixed the duration of tenancy.
One Culloden lease to a kind of village community of six people in portions of land of different sizes is dated April 18, 1739, from Stoney Hill.[176] The lease of 1739 is for nineteen years, ‘and that in full satisfaction of all casualitys, and other prestations and services whatsomever,’ except for services in repairing harbours, mending highways, or repairing miln-leads, for the general benefite of the Island (Mull). The tenants were to pay cesses, ministers’ stipends, schoolmasters’ salaries, &c., ‘freeing and relieving the Duke’ from these burdens. Failure of rent meant removal, and made the lease null and void; the tenants having leave, however, to take over the share of a defaulter or choose a substitute for him.
What the sub-tenants gain is freedom from a tacksman, secure possession while they pay, and freedom from all but the stated customary services and ‘casualties.’ One of these was military service in a Jacobite rising. A tenant in Mull could not now lose his holding if his tacksman ordered him to join the Prince and he refused. As to the other ‘services,’ the Duke of Argyll regards them as indefinite and oppressive. He selects examples from Sinclair’s paper for the Board of Agriculture in 1795. Rent was mainly paid in kind, chickens, cattle, grain, plus ‘tilling, dunging, sowing, and harrowing a part of an extensive farm in the proprietor’s’ (or tacksman’s) ‘possession.’ Peats, thatching, weeding, cartage, harvesting, and so forth, were exacted, with implements, eggs, butter, cheese, a tithe of fish and oil, woollen yarn, and so forth. These services might easily be made oppressive, and did not conduce to improvement in agriculture.
The exact weight and money value of these services must have varied widely. The author of MS. 104 proposes that, in future, all services shall be definitely stated in writing when a tenant takes a farm. ‘Extravagant services are still required’ (circ. 1750) ‘and performed, which the landlord would be ashamed to commit to writing.’ He also, like Culloden, advocates the compulsory granting of leases for not less than twenty years. But he has already said that the people, accustomed to hereditary entry on farms from father to son, refuse to take written leases.
As to ‘services,’ Mr. Fraser Mackintosh, on the other side, tells us how the Lochiels, in exile, ‘regularly received part of the rent.’ That he only sent 100l. to Lochiel’s children in France, and made the tenants work on his lands instead of on the county roads, is a charge made by Colonel Crawfurd against Lochiel’s brother, Fassifern.[177] Mr. Fraser Mackintosh comments on the loyalty of Lochiel’s tenants, but adds ‘in former times rent in the form of money was a minor easy consideration, the real burden or tax being services’—especially ‘the almost intolerable burden’ of war. Thus the exile of the Chief became ‘really no hardship to the people,’ enabling them ‘to pay a double (money) rent now and then with comparative ease.’[178]
Thus, in this author’s opinion, ‘the real burden or tax’ was ‘services,’ not money rent. Happily he gives a case of commutation of services for money on Glengarry’s estate. The commutation was ‘apparently quite disproportionate and oppressive. For instance, in the case of Dugald Cameron, late cowherd to Glengarry, afterwards tenant of Boline, while his rent was 11l. 4s. 3d., the converted services amounted to 3l. 2s. 8d.’ Well, if services were ‘the real burden,’ where is the ‘oppressive disproportion’?[179] This seems absurd.
If it be agreed that ‘services’ were the main part of rent, how oppressive a hostile tacksman, say Barisdale, might make them is easily conceived.[180] Whatever we may think of the advantages of a definite Culloden rent, it is pretty plain that the people did not like it. But the old kind of rent and services was of scarce any value to a probably non-resident proprietor, who could get high returns on the new system from large farmers or graziers. He did not want hens and cheese, and had now no use for claymores. The consequences were raised rents, emigration, evictions, the Highland grievances.
But were there no evictions, and removals, and forced migrations in the good old times?