Gaelic Scotland by Charles W J Withers

Author:Charles W J Withers [Withers, Charles W J]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Human Geography, Science, Earth Sciences, Geography
ISBN: 9781317332800
Google: NqE0CwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-12-14T04:16:24+00:00

* SRO, GD221/90/2; GD221/78/35

A fall in prices on one hand and, on the other, fixed monetary obligations amongst an under-capitalised tenantry led to an increasing hardship in the Highland economy after 1815. Falling prices did not, however, cause immediate collapse in peasant living standards: ‘Having no margin of trivial or luxurious expenditure, tenants passed the deficiency on to what had always been the residual item of expenditure – the rent; the immediate symptom of any drop in income – through, for example, a fall in cattle prices – was a growing list of tenants in arrears’.126 Landlords had little choice but to accept these shortcomings whilst tenants became seriously indebted. If incomes did increase, amounts added were likely to be used to pay off debts; the great part of the fall in money income was passed on to landlords for whom expenditure on the estates was likely to increase given the reasons outlined above. The result was sale of estates, a shortage of capital as restrictive as the shortage of land and continued processes of sub-division, and perhaps, too, a sense of helpless dependency amongst a population whose tenurial position permitted little advance and no sustainable profit.

The gap between rent owed and level of arrears was greatest in the north and west. In places, rental levels diminished, as in part of the Reay Estates in Caithness where rents ‘fell a fourth at least’ between 1818 and 1828,127 but more common was the build-up of arrears to a level equal to or greater than the annual rent: even if the whole rent had been paid off in any year (impossible for most tenants), debts would have remained. Table 4.5 shows the relationship between rents, payments, and arrears on the MacDonald Estates on Skye in the period 1823–4 to 1844–5. In Snizort, Portree, and Kilmuir parishes, the sum of arrears owed in 1823–4 suggests a serious depletion of cash income for landlords and total indebtedness for the tenantry. A ‘List of Arrears due by the Tenants’ on these estates drawn up in August 1839 distinguishes between those ‘recoverable, doubtful and irrecoverable’. In Sleat parish, 10 per cent of total arrears was considered ‘doubtful’, 3 per cent ‘irrecoverable’, and the remainder ‘recoverable’. In Portree and Snizort, however, over 30 per cent was reckoned ‘doubtful’, and in the case of the latter parish (then hard hit by potato blight in addition to the causes outlined above), 16 per cent of arrears was deemed ‘irrecoverable’.128 Similar patterns were to be found elsewhere. In Lewis over the period 1814 to 1856–7, for example, rents fell for most of the farms (an average of 52 per cent over the period), but arrears persisted even after the decline (Table 4.6). And in Easter Ross, where a drop in grain prices exacerbated the effect of a fall in cattle prices, rent levels persisted whilst arrears amongst tenantry built up, although the switch in barley for use in distilling diverted the more severe effects of deflation evident in the north and west.

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