Pride and Passion: Robert Burns, 1759-1796

by J. De Lancey Ferguson

Outside the cities, as well as in them, Scottish life was beginning to change. Primitive agriculture in the northern kingdom, like the sanitation of Edinburgh, seemed almost to be an effort to demonstrate just how badly a thing could be done. The poorest sorts of oats and barley, the scrubbiest of cattle, were raised by the worst methods. The unfenced fields were divided by a system of ridges and ditches which managed to combine the maximum of soil wastage with the minimum of drainage. The ‘infield’, as this dyked portion of the farm was called, was cultivated with ploughs so crude and awkward that they required four horses and two men to handle them. The ‘outfield’, or pasture, was never cultivated or manured; overrun with moss and weeds it yielded even in summer only a scanty and unwholesome pasturage, with little if any surplus to carry the cattle through the winter. All excess stock was slaughtered in the fall, and for six months of the year the people who could afford meat at all had to subsist like seamen on salt beef and smoked mutton hams. The wretched beasts which were kept through the winter were fed mainly on straw, and frequently by spring were so weak and emaciated that they had to be carried to the pasture.

The owners of the cattle lived in a style which an Iroquois would have thought primitive. Gilbert Burns resented the statement that his famous brother was born in a hovel. The Alloway cottage, he declared, was better than the houses then occupied by many substantial farmers. So it was. It had a chimney, whereas in many a cottage and farmhouse, long after Burns’s youth—Keats saw plenty of them in Ayrshire in 1818—such of the smoke as did not enter the eyes and lungs of the tenants escaped through the door. But even with a chimney the average farmhouse or labourer’s cottage, with its walls of stone or rammed clay, its earthen floor and thatched roof, and with the fire seldom built up except for cooking, had a winter chill and dampness that bred tuberculosis in the young and rheumatism in the old. As at Alloway, the stable was usually under the same roof, and its reek mingled with the dampness and the smell of unwashed humanity. An English proverb in the seventeenth century asserted that the Scots had neither bellows, warming-pans, nor houses of office; and that the proverb still held in the eighteenth is proved alike by experiences of Johnson and Boswell in gentlemen’s homes in the Highlands and by episodes in the chapbooks of Dugal Graham which reveal the same use of the fireplace as Shakespeare records of the inn at Rochester. Outside the door was the midden-dub or glaur-hole, manure-heap of man and beast alike, often so surrounded with stagnant water that the ‘rather pretty’ girl whom Keats saw standing at a cow-house door in the Highlands, ‘fac’d all up to the ankles in dirt’, would in the Lowlands a generation earlier have been a sight too commonplace to excite remark. When the seepage from the midden-dub reached the water-supply the cycle of filth and typhoid was complete. Dead animals which could not be eaten were usually dumped into the nearest stream, so that if the water-supply was not contaminated in one way, it was pretty sure to be in another. But unless the animal were a horse, it had to be very dead indeed not to be eaten. Sheep that had died by accident or disease had a special name—‘braxies’—and were the perquisite of the shepherds; the flesh of diseased cattle was sometimes the only meat farm servants tasted; in Edinburgh young Henry Mackenzie once observed two bakers of cheap ‘mutton pies’ suspiciously engaged by night about the carcass of a horse on the bank at the back of the Castle.

Within doors all domestic equipment was on the same primitive scale as the housing. At meal-times the pot containing the thick oatmeal porridge which was the staple food was placed in the centre of the table, and each member of the family—servants included—fell to work with his own spoon. Barley for broth was prepared on the knocking-stone, counterpart of the Mexican metate. Pewter dishes were a luxury, and crockery ones almost unknown. Wooden trenchers were frequently used even by the clergy, and were the regular thing in farmhouses; the milk was kept in wooden vessels so permeated with dirt and bacteria that it soured in a few hours. The entire family lived and ate and slept in two rooms, with sometimes a windowless loft above as additional sleeping-quarters for the servants or some of the older children. Every cottage had at least one box-bed built into the wall. When the occupants retired and closed the sliding wooden doors they enjoyed a practically airless seclusion amid their own effluvia. The rest of the family slept on rough cots, or even straw pallets on the floor. The popular saying, ‘The clartier [dirtier] the cosier’, was not satire; it was just a matter-of-fact summary of rural living conditions.

In dwellings like these, where a large family was often augmented by several servants, privacy was as impossible as in an army barrack. Any conversation too intimate to be shouted above the uproar of the children into the ears of a mixed audience had to be conducted elsewhere than in the house—in the fields, if the weather permitted; in the stable otherwise. Even so, of course, all the circumstances leading up to the conversation were known to a large and intensely interested group. Hence the young people, making a virtue of publicity, took their cronies into their confidence and employed them to arrange their trysts. Thus if James Smith beckoned Jean Armour or Betsy Miller away from her giggling family it was fairly certain that he was making an appointment for Rob Mossgiel and not for himself; if Burns waited on Jenny Surgeoner it was in John Richmond’s interests and not in his own. It was difficult to surprise, and impossible to shock by any of the normal processes of nature, a people who lived in such conditions. No one had to explain ‘the facts of life’ to the children of that world; they witnessed them daily. It would almost seem that a belief in original virtue, rather than original sin, was requisite to explain why the moral status of the peasantry was often so much less squalid than their physical surroundings.

As the century advanced, however, closer intercourse with England roused ambitious landlords to attempt improvements. Trees were planted on the hillsides and about the naked houses; the ‘infields’ were levelled and enclosed. Yet nine-tenths of the fences in Ayrshire were not built until after 1766, and as late as 1800 two-thirds of Fife was still fenceless. Rotation of crops, better cultivation, artificial grasses, more productive types of grain, were all experimented with. Potatoes and turnips, regarded as garden luxuries in the early part of the century, began to be grown on a large scale for human food and stock feed respectively. John Wesley in 1780 noted that vegetables had become as plentiful in Scotland as in England, though on his first visit, in 1762, he had found none at all, even on noblemen’s tables. Carts were introduced for farm work, to take the place of the ‘creels’ or panniers, in which manure had formerly been borne on horseback to the fields, and of the rough sledges on which the sheaves had been hauled from harvest field to stackyard. The wide use of carts, however, had in many districts to await the improvement of the roads; in some instances, when landlords first offered wheeled vehicles as gifts to their tenants, they were refused because it seemed impossible to drag them through the mud.

Some few of the improving landlords were actuated by disinterested zeal to better living-conditions; their stubborn and superstitious peasants were helped against their will. Many more landlords were motivated by simple greed to improve their rent-rolls. By breaking up small holdings occupied on short-term leases, and throwing several together, they made more profitable farms which were rented for long terms. The consequent evictions, however, produced an over-supply of would-be tenants whose desperate need for land resulted in competitive bidding from those willing to take a gambling chance on getting from the soil more than it really had to give. If they succeeded, it was too often at the expense of the health and strength of themselves, their children, and their servants.

Nevertheless, so far as the improvements in methods increased the productivity of the farms, the new developments were economically sound. But the nation’s increasing foreign trade operated to inflate land values. Merchants who had made money in the Indies wished to retire, and the prestige of setting up as landed gentry combined with the lack of sound corporate investments to bid up the value of land in the more attractive parts of the kingdom to levels where a fair return on the investment was possible only by rack-renting the tenants. Burns himself, and his father before him, were victims of this over-capitalization. They had to pay for marginal lands at rates which would have been fair rentals for the best. And of course speculation in land brought with it speculative banking. In Burns’s youth many of the Ayrshire gentry were crippled or ruined outright by the failure of the Douglas and Heron Bank, which, organized on a lavish scale, quickly got into trouble through excessive loans on real estate. The ruined gentry retired to the Continent, or to lodgings in Edinburgh, and their estates were taken over by nabobs home from the Indies.

All this drama of political corruption and of social and economic change was played against the background of the old religious life of Scotland. Though the intellectual life of the country had never been squalid like its physical life, it had at the beginning of the eighteenth century become torpid. From the time of John Knox until after the Act of Union the real government of Scotland, like that of colonial Massachusetts, was a theocracy. The King and the powers of the state were far off from the life of the average peasant or tradesman, but the Kirk watched all his goings out and comings in. Not only did it administer matters which in other times and other nations have been regarded as spiritual concerns, but it also largely took the place of magistrates and police. Critics of puritanism who have chosen colonial New England as their dire example have made a mistake. They should have chosen Scotland. Whatever the theory of church government in New England may have been, in practice the man at odds with the establishment suffered few real hardships beyond the loss of his vote and a moderate amount of discriminatory taxation—provided he had the discretion to mind his business and keep his mouth shut. But in seventeenth-century Scotland estrangement from the church might mean exile from the kingdom, under penalty of practical starvation if the rebel tried to stick it out at home. Except that it lacked the power to relax its heretics to the secular arm for mutilation or death, the Scottish hierarchy was own brother to the Spanish Inquisition.

In every parish the Kirk Session was supposed to maintain a snooping committee to investigate the conduct of the laity. The reckless parishioner who desecrated the Sabbath by cooking a hot meal, by puttering in his garden, or even by taking a walk, was haled before the Session for discipline, and could be reinstated in the communion only by confession of his sin and payment of a fine. For more serious offences the penalties were proportionately heavier, unless one were wealthy or powerful enough to cow the inquisitors. Burns had painfully intimate knowledge of the cutty stool, or mourners’ bench, whereon those guilty of fornication or other deadly sin had thrice to appear before the congregation while the minister rebuked them at length and with specific detail. Girls sometimes committed suicide or murdered their children to escape the public shame, and the effect of the ordeal on those who submitted was more likely to be hardening than chastening. Many another youth besides Burns inwardly resolved thenceforth to live up to the reputation thus fastened upon him.

The Kirk frowned upon, and tried to suppress, such secular amusements as music and dancing. In spite of the ban, the custom of ‘penny weddings’, whereby impecunious young couples in the rural districts sought, by giving what was in effect a subscription ball, to raise money enough to set them up in housekeeping, still persisted; but even these gatherings had a slightly furtive quality, and in the stricter homes all such things were taboo. The moral results of the policy of repression were almost wholly bad. The older men, in default of other relaxation, devoted themselves to drink; the younger, to the pleasures that give its point to Burns’s simile, ‘as busy as an Edinburgh bawd on a Sunday evening’.