When Sheep Mattered More than People

Eric Richards, The Highland Clearances (Birlinn, 2000), but latest edition 2008, 486 pages, $24.95

Bringing civilisation to aborigines, natives, savages. Or, destroying a lovably primitive form of communism among romantically noble warriors. That was two hundred years ago. And now: genocide, holocaust, ethnic cleansing, blot, dark chapter.

No, the comments refer not to Australia’s Aborigines, but to the Highlanders of Scotland, whose numbers declined precipitously in the nineteenth century and fell to a small proportion of the Scottish population, compared with perhaps up to 40 per cent a couple of centuries earlier. Their fate was very different from that of Aboriginal Australia, but there are intriguing parallels, not least in the way outsiders saw it all but also in the pressures on an isolated society.

Unlike the Aborigines and the British, genetic differences between the Highlanders and other Scots and the British were minor—they all looked much the same—and the cultural gap was more manageable. Nevertheless, the way of life in the north and west of Scotland was distinctive for centuries. “Pre-modern” would be one way of putting it.

The Highlanders’ first language was Gaelic, similar to the old Irish tongue, whereas the lowlanders of the south and east had spoken variations of English for centuries and some of them may always have spoken it. The clan system of government prevailed in the Highlands until Edinburgh and London banned and suppressed it—sometimes savagely—after the Bonnie Prince Charlie rebellion of 1745, which attempted abortively to restore the Stuart monarchy in the person of the expatriate Pretender James III, the Bonnie Prince’s father.

In clan principle, the chief was the hereditary father of his clan, with autocratic powers, landlord-in-chief and military leader, but also responsible for the protection and welfare of his clan, his “children”. In turn, they looked to him with affection, awe and reverence, akin to that accorded monarchy until recent times. The system had evolved over thousands of years out of smaller family-based hunter-gatherer bands with a way of life resembling that of tribal Australian Aborigines. It was, in the distant past, the way of the world. In Europe the biggest pressure for change was the arrival of farming, commencing about 5000 years ago as techniques developed in the Middle East slowly spread. Next came the Roman empire but that had limited influence as far away as Scotland and none directly in the Highlands. Nevertheless, even there it drove smaller, more communally governed bands to group together for defence under strong leaders.

This was truest of the Picts, as the Romans called them, who were to become the nucleus of Lowland society. Briefly, the Picts merged politically in the ninth century AD with the Scots, whose elite and language had originated in Ireland and who became the nucleus of Highland society. Both, however, had, like England, a large genetic underlay of ancient Britons and liberal infusions from Scandinavia and elsewhere, so they were not greatly different from each other.

Lowland society developed more rapidly, at a pace nearer that of England and western Europe, while the clan system strengthened in the Highlands, separated by language and geography. Bitter rivalry and petty—but often quite nasty—warfare between clans continued there, as among the Australian Aborigines, though it died out in more modernised parts of Britain and Europe as central government strengthened—as did Aboriginal tribal fighting here. Cattle thieving among clans was a way of life in the old Highlands (and not unknown in more remote parts of the Lowlands). In this regard, colonial commentators often compared the Australian pastoral frontier of the early nineteenth century with the Highlands of a century earlier. Theft (at least in the eyes of the official owners) of livestock (and here by both black and white) was endemic in both societies and a major cause of violence that could become lethal.

The extent to which the old Highlands believed in magic, sorcery and evil spirits has been difficult to assess but it is believed to have been significant, as in most very traditional societies. The prevailing religion for centuries was a mixture of ancient Druidry and early Catholicism. It was badged as Catholic and, after the Reformation, as Anglican-style Episcopalism, but that was a veneer until after 1700. 

The first major catalyst for change was the failed Jacobite risings for the Pretender in 1715 and 1719, in which Highland chieftains were prominent. The Act of Union, passed by the Parliaments of England and Scotland, had come into force in 1707, binding England and Scotland together.

London and Edinburgh decided they had better “do something” about the nest of sedition in the Highlands. A two-pronged approach was to start by building military roads where previously there had been virtually no roads. Then they encouraged missionaries to oust the parochial saints and Druids with no-nonsense Presbyterianism, which had become the official Church of Scotland format in 1690 after more than a century of strife. The Highlanders seemed to gradually accept it, though a few districts had earlier opted for Roman Catholicism or the orthodox Anglican-style Episcopal church. Education and English also began to seep in.

The next blow to the old order came with the defeat of the 1745 rebellion, as the clan armies—known collectively as the Highland Host—were the main rebel power base. It was not so much that the Highlands was avid for the Stuarts as that the chieftains had captive clan armies to put at the young Prince’s disposal and often just wanted an each-way bet on the outcome. The resulting suppression of the clan armies deprived the chieftains of much of their authority and more so that of their tacksmen, the tenants-in-chief and mid-level officers in the armies. Moreover, the chieftains and elite had long been growing apart from their clansmen, with more and more exposure to southern education, wives, language and comfortable living.

The local population began increasing, as it did in much of the world from about 1800 on. Bad seasons came about as often as in Australia—though for the opposite reason, damp and cold—and brought distress and hunger, though the precise impact is not known—as with pre-white Aborigines in drought times.

Then came the four-footed invaders, sheep. The old Highland economy had been based on a traditional breed of primitive black cattle grazing on the hills. Sub-tenants cultivated barley, oats and later potatoes in the scattered glens, or valleys, where they lived. From an economic-rational point of view, the newly bred Cheviot sheep represented an ideal new industry. It was large-bodied for meat but also yielded better and more abundant wool than older breeds. As the Australian Aborigines soon also found out, the new industrial revolution in the north of England and the Scottish Lowlands sent the demand for good wool surging. The Cheviots and their Lowland shepherds, who understood the breed better than the Highlanders, began moving in from the 1760s. Unlike the hardy old cattle, the sheep needed the glens for shelter in the severe northern winters, so they began displacing the cultivators, who had to look for jobs or land elsewhere. Landlords no longer needed people for the clan armies. It was classic competition for limited resources in a remote area.

This was the essence of the notorious “clearances”. The chieftains, now often dukes and earls, sooner or later evicted most of their “children” and often burnt or destroyed the huts where they had lived for generations. A few got jobs or new land locally, went to sea or joined the Scots regiments of the British Army but most left, for the burgeoning new industries of the Glasgow–Edinburgh belt, for England, or for North America and the Antipodes. Some lairds chartered ships to take their tenants to Nova Scotia or other parts of Canada.

The communal way of life proved to have been based on custom, not law. Landlords had dominated the old Scottish parliament and legislated the way they wanted things.

At first the birth-rate was high enough for the total population to remain stable while most young people left, but by about 1850 it was falling precipitously and would continue to do so. The potato blight of the late 1840s, though not nearly as cataclysmic as in densely populated Ireland, was a last straw on the back of the camel of Highland population. Renewed industrial prosperity, better transport and encouraging letters from abroad all added to the diaspora.

Despite the hopeful talk—sounds familiar?—few new real, lasting jobs materialised in so remote and traditional a region. 

Historical writing has tended to a “goodies and baddies” view of these events but the approach now is much calmer. In his systematic book The Highland Clearances, on which part of the above has been based, Adelaide historian Eric Richards says the chieftains/landlords did not have much choice. Some were cynically ruthless or aspired selfishly to more luxurious southern lifestyles but others hung on to their tenants until the prospect of bankruptcy forced them out. In other struggling estates the next generation would not stay.

Some estates came under trustee-accountants, others under wealthy new owners, some of whom had grand plans for becoming new-era chieftains, usually to find it was economically too hard. Richards shows the most notorious clearance, that around 1820 associated with the First Duke of Sutherland (and more precisely his wife), to be, rather than harshly grinding the faces of the poor, more like other grandiose commercial ventures that end in tears.

The problem for all the landlords was that they sooner or later could not afford the expected welfare for a rapidly growing peasant population or the cost of collecting tiny rental amounts from peasants on minute farms who often could not afford any rent at all. And in a region of rocky granite hills there was no more arable land left to sub-divide.

In Ireland, too, where many peasants starved and often died, nearly half the landlords went broke in the 1840s. 

In Australia, much of the main initial dispossession of the old Aboriginal life was also due to sheep, in the south especially in the 1830s and the north in the 1860s. But except in a few areas round Sydney and the Hunter, the land actually was legally communal, based on old English common law, and intended to be shared between incoming grazing and the traditional owners. In 1848, when grazing leases became more formal, squatters were specifically forbidden from driving Aborigines off their runs.

On the face of it, Aborigines settled fairly well into the new grazing industry, though there was often enough some initial lethal violence over who was boss. Gradually the customary ways and ceremony faded out, in favour of a semi-Westernised life. Unfortunately little substantial evidence survives as to what the Aborigines really thought about this rapid, tumultuous change.

The real horror here, however, was the appalling decline in the indigenous population, due to a low birth-rate, some murderous conflict and deadly disease, at least part of it originating with white settlers. In some parts of Australia so few indigenous people remained that it was difficult to sustain an old-style society. This was the opposite problem from that of the Highlands (and Ireland), a rapidly increasing population.

In the second half of the nineteenth century Merino wool, mainly Australian but also in other more temperate parts of the world, squeezed most of the invading sheep out of the Highlands. As Merino numbers and quality increased, the Cheviot wool was no longer fine enough to compete. Merinos did not thrive in that cold climate. Many of the invaded hillsides and glens went over to part-time holiday and shooting estates for the gentry of the British Isles, Europe and America. Later foresters moved in.

After decades of public furore and landlord-bashing, the few tenants who remained got a form of land rights in the 1880s, with Crofting Acts that guaranteed small farming lots and grazing access to traditional occupiers. Economic rationalists, of course, complained that these rights were of doubtful value, as they tended to freeze the economy.

The memory and language lingered on. As the old Highland life disappeared, the Victorian era, led by the Queen herself and the novels of best-selling writers like Sir Walter Scott, reinvented it in a romantic version, replete with kilts, bagpipes and invented clan tartans that became part of modern Scottish identity without always bearing much resemblance to the original. Both the Aboriginal art and reconciliation folk here would do well to have a good look.

The last nails in the coffin of the Gaelic language are said to have been colour television and the internet. 

One of Robert Murray’s great-great-grandfathers was a gamekeeper for the second Duke of Sutherland (a good guy, Eric Richards says). Another brought his brood to Australia after being cleared from a two-acre plot on the Isle of Raasay. Yet another was a Lowland shepherd who went north, but also lost children to Australia.