Agriculture in Scotland in the Middle Ages
Heavy rainfall encouraged the spread of acidic blanket peat bog, which with wind and salt spray, made most of the western islands treeless.
Farming was based around a single homestead or a small cluster of three or four homes, each probably containing a nuclear family and cattle were the most important domesticated animal.
In the period 1150 to 1300, warm dry summers and less severe winters allowed cultivation at much greater heights and made land more productive.
The system of infield and outfield agriculture, a variation of open-field farming widely used across Europe, may have been introduced with feudalism from the twelfth century.
This encouraged the spread of blanket peat bog, the acidity of which, combined with high level of wind and salt spray, made most of the western islands treeless.
[5] With a lack of significant transport links and wider markets, most farms had to produce a self-sufficient diet of meat, dairy products and cereals, supplemented by hunter-gathering.
Limited archaeological evidence indicates that farming was based around a single homestead or a small cluster of three or four homes, each probably containing a nuclear family, with kinship relationships likely to be common among neighbouring houses and settlements, reflecting the partition of land through inheritance.
[8] Christian missionaries from Ireland may have changed agricultural practice, bringing innovations such as the horizontal watermill and mould board ploughs, which were more effective in turning the soil.
[14] However, the imposition of feudalism continued to sit beside the existing systems of landholding and tenure and it is not clear how this change impacted on the lives of the ordinary free and unfree workers.
[13] However, the predominantly pastoral nature of Scottish agriculture may have made the imposition of a manorial system, based on the English model, impracticable in some areas.
[13] Obligations appear to have been limited to occasional labour service, seasonal renders of food, hospitality and money rents.
[17] These were less rigorously enforced than in England, where the taking of wood and game were strictly forbidden, and all royal forests were on land already in the king's hands.
[20] The system of infield and outfield agriculture, a variation of open field farming widely used across Europe, may have been introduced with feudalism[21] and would continue until the eighteenth century.
[5] Below the husbandmen, lesser landholders and free tenants,[27] were the cottars, who often shared rights to common pasture, occupied small portions of land and participated in joint farming as hired labour.
[32] The rural economy appears to have boomed in the thirteenth century and in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death, which reached Scotland in 1349 and may have killed a third of the population,[33] was still buoyant, but by the 1360s there was a severe falling off in incomes that can be seen in clerical benefices, of between a third and half compared with the beginning of the era.
[34] Towards the end of the period average temperatures began to reduce again, with the cooler and wetter conditions of the Little Ice Age limiting the extent of arable agriculture, particularly in the Highlands.
