A West Highland Census of 1779: Social and Economic Trends on the Argyll Estate

Abstract

A document from Inveraray Castle, published in 1963 by the Scottish Record Society, and entitled ‘List of Inhabitants on the Argyll Estate, 1779’, is probably the earliest known Scottish census. The List records in varying detail something like 14,000 inhabitants resident on the Duke’s west Highland estate. Tacksmen and common tenants, ministers and cottars, chamberlains and wood-rangers, merchants, paupers and pedlars, ferrymen, bowmen and drovers, weavers, coopers and servants, these men of Argyll appear, most of them by name and age, many with their wives and families in detail, each under his own township and district. The List concludes with the grand sentence: ‘These are independent of His Grace’s vassals in nine different counties, who are very numerous’. The List constitutes an incomparable gazetteer to the communities and to the social structure of the west Highlands in the late eighteenth century, a rich quarry for the genealogist, the historian and the student of philology, and a tribute to the enlightenment of its compiler, John, fifth duke of Argyll. The fifth duke (b. 1723, d.1806) has suffered comparative neglect at the hands of historians. He has been over-shadowed by the massive figures of the second and third dukes, who so dominated Scotland’s life and politics in their time. To be remembered as the husband of a celebrated beauty, Elizabeth Gunning, is a measure of the lack of general recognition for his own great merits. Duke John was in fact a considerable figure in his own right. He was trained as a soldier, served in the ’45 (whilst his father, the fourth duke, exerted and worried himself over the raising and provisioning of the Argyllshire militia), twice commanded the army in Scotland, and rose to the rank of field marshal. At his death he was, with the exception of the Duke of York, the senior field officer in the British Army. Before succeeding to the dukedom he represented the Glasgow burghs in Parliament (1744–1761) and later sat for Dover. But the fall of the Whigs broke