The agitation was about excessively high rents, lack of security of tenure and deprivation of de facto rights of access to land.
In the early 1880s agitation began in Skye (then in the county of Inverness) and there it became persistent and threatened to spread throughout the Hebrides and the Highlands.
According to Scottish nationalist, biographer, and historian John Lorne Campbell, the Crofters' Holdings (Scotland) Act 1886 was nothing less than "the Magna Carta of the Highlands and Islands, which conferred on the small tenants there something which the peasantry of Scandinavian countries had known for generations, security of tenure and the right to the principle of compensation for their own improvements at the termination of tenancies.
Nothing was suggested in the report, or contained in the Act, to restrict absentee landlordism or limit the amount of land any one individual might own in Scotland, but for the moment a great advantage has been secured.".
The terms crofter, cottar and Highlands and Islands all lacked clear definition, and the Commission was left to use its own judgement as when, where and from whom to take evidence.
The Commission was aware however that the government wanted a fairly early report, rather than an exhaustive inquiry, in the hope that this itself would help to quell crofter agitation.
For tenants whose holdings had rental values of more than £6 a year he proposed security of tenure in 30-year improving leases and township organisation.