Landlord Policies and Population Change in North-East Scotland and the Western Isles, 1755-1841

Abstract

In recent years considerable emphasis has been placed upon the role of fertility in determining levels of population which, since reproduction was normally confined to those who were married, was controlled mainly by nuptuality. Over most of the world women normally married shortly after they has become sexually mature and few remained unwed. However, in Europe west of a line from St Petersburg to Trieste there was a different pattern of marriage. Here women usually married for the first time between 23 and 27 years (which meant that a woman marrying at, say, 26 years had already lost 40 per cent of her potential fertility) and 10-25 per cent never married at all. The main reason for this pattern is that couples in Western Europe were expected to marry and therefore have children only when, or if, they had acquired the means to establish their own household.2 Scotland was apparently no exception to this demographic system. Following civil registration in 1855, the mean age of first marriage for females in 1861 was 25.4 years and 20.1 per cent of women aged 45 - 54 were unmarried. It is likely that these levels, particularly of celibacy, were not very different for much of the eighteenth century, but this apparent uniformity over time conceals considerable regional variations. In the heavily industrialised and urbanised Western Lowlands (Ayr, Dumbarton, Lanark and Renfrew) the mean age of female marriage in 1861, 25.0 years, was not much below the national level but only 14.6 per cent of women were single at 45 - 54. 3 More surprisingly, there were also differences in nuptuality between predominantly agricultural regions. Although these were to some extent a consequence of cultural and social differences, a key factor in a country where nearly all farms were rented was the role of the landowners or heritors who were able to exert a powerful control over patterns of land occupation and use on their estates. Indeed it has been suggested that they saw the latter as a chess board on which families could be re-located at will in order to increase rentals.4 The form of improvement selected inevitably had repercussions on nuptuality, fertility and levels of population. Thus while the North-east (Aberdeen, Banff and Kincardineshire) grew by only 4 per cent between 1755 and 1801 as against 27 per cent for Scotland, the population of the Western Isles increased by 57 per cent. In the following 40 years there was little difference between the two - 49 per cent in the case of the North-east and 45 in that of the Western Isles - but growth in the former was confined mainly to the city of Aberdeen and the coastal parishes, particularly the fishing communities, while some of the islands continued to experience growth well above the 63 per cent for Scotland.5 How these different levels of growth were achieved can be seen by examining the experiences of the adjacent parishes of Grange and Rothiemay in Banffshire on the one hand and the island of Tiree on the other.