How could a popular delusion of this kind come into existence if the Commissioners of Forfeited Estates were ‘the first evictors in the Highlands’? Demonstrably they were nothing of the kind. There were evictions in the good old times.
On the other hand, evictions had probably not been much practised with a view to obtaining higher rents or making improvements, but for other reasons. Claymores, not money, had been in request from tenants before 1745.
Once more, according to Burt, a Lowland authority, the Chief ‘must free the necessitous from their arrears of rent, and maintain such who, by accidents, are fallen to a total decay.’ Far from throwing a lot of small farms into a large one, or a sheep-walk, ‘if, by increase of the tribe, small farms are wanting for the support of such addition, he splits others into lesser portions, because all must somehow be provided for.’[185]
This policy is the precise reverse of the Culloden lease, which terminates, ipso facto, when rent falls into arrears. A Chief, bound by consanguinity to treat all his tenants as gentlemen, might practise shooting at them, like Clanranald with his famous piece, ‘the Cuckoo,’ but certainly was not apt to evict often for arrears of rent. He lived at home, he built a great castle like Glengarry’s (probably by aid of ‘services’), he fed on the sheep, kine, butter, milk, of his tenants, but he shook them by the hand, perhaps forgave arrears, held clan feasts, and was a god on earth. When he raised rents, united farms in one hand, did not shake that of every clansman, but rather evicted them, discontent was natural, inevitable. Holders of land, proud free men, must emigrate, or become labourers or artisans in towns. Who does not sympathise with their emotions?
On the other side, the Chief must subdivide and subdivide, in the good old times, ‘because all must somehow be provided for.’ But all could not be and were not ‘provided for.’ We have seen the pictures of cruel exquisite poverty from Franck in 1654, to the Gartmore MS. in 1747, and the Culloden Report in 1738, and the ‘Life of Barisdale’ in 1754, and Burt’s Letters of about 1735. It seems reasonable to suppose that all arable lands were eagerly cultivated as far as the implements and skill of the people availed to cultivate them. It was the interest of the chiefs to increase their bands of warriors and the sentiment, if not the interest, of the clansmen urged them to stay on the land.
But the land could not maintain them! The younger gentry pushed their fortunes abroad as men of the sword or in commerce. But the commons were often at the starving point; we hear of famines. Glengarry writes of a great scarcity, when meal had to be bought in the Lowlands. Burt tells of no meal in Inverness. ‘A house, grass for a cow or two,’ and ‘as much land as will sow a boll of oats,’ rocky land, needing spade culture, was a cottar’s ‘only wages of his whole labour and service,’ says the Gartmore MS. The author reckons that there is not in the Highlands employment for more than half the population, even when land has been remorselessly sub-divided. Many earned a harvest wage in the Lowlands. Others ‘sorned’ on their kindred. Armies of tramps were supported by the generosity of the poor; nay, Lowland beggars came North, allured by the open hands of the Highlanders. Whisky shops were everywhere; here men sauntered and drank. Plunder was habitual; a captain of a ‘Watch’ like Barisdale was at once thief and thief-taker. ‘They live like lairds, and die like loons,’ says Franck, speaking not of all the Highlands (as Macaulay quotes him), but chiefly of Lochaber. ‘Upon this fund’—blackmail—the Captain ‘employed one half the thieves to recover lost cattle, and the other half of them to steal.’ Lochiel laboured to reform his clan in this respect. The exactions of tacksmen, ‘sub-letting farms to a much greater number than they can maintain, and at a much higher rent than they can pay, obliges these poor people to purchase their rents and expences by theifts and robberys,’ of cattle; for the Highland honesty about portable property is extolled by Burt.
As to the moral iniquity of cattle robbing, all morality is local, and a man who does not sin against the local standard is no extreme criminal. The Macdonalds held a simple creed of communism. ‘They say that the Cattle are God’s creatures, made for the use of man, for which the earth yields grass and herbs in plenty, without the labour of man, and that therefore they Ought to be common’—that is, ought to belong to the Macdonalds.[186] The same ideas had prevailed on the Border:
If every man had his ain cow,
A richt poor clan Buccleugh’s wad be.
Dr. Carlyle shows that Border cattle thieves, though not encouraged by the gentry, were a powerful class about 1740.