Scottish society in the early modern era

At the beginning of the period women had little or no legal status, but were increasingly criminalised after the Reformation, and were the major subjects of the witch hunts that occurred in relatively large numbers until the end of the seventeenth century.

Below the king were the great magnates, who by this period were no longer a feudal nobility, whose power was based on territorial landholding, but an honorific peerage, and land had become a commodity to be traded.

[3] Under the magnates were the barons, who held increasingly nominal feudal tenures of which an important vestige was the right to hold baronial courts,[3] which could deal with both matters of land ownership and interpersonal offences, including minor acts of violence.

[13] Below them were the cottars, who often shared rights to common pasture, occupied small portions of land and participated in joint farming as hired labour.

[15] Both merchants and craftsmen often served a long apprenticeship, acquiring skills and status, before they became freemen of a burgh, and could enjoy certain rights and privileges.

[16] There were frequent disputes between the burgesses and craftsmen over rights and political control of the burgh, occasionally bursting into violence, as occurred at Perth in the first half of the sixteenth century.

[27] Because the Highland Clans were not a direct threat to the Restoration government, or relations with England, the same effort was not put into suppressing their independence as had been focused on the Borders, until after the Glorious Revolution.

[30] Economic change and the imposition of royal justice had begun to undermine the clan system before the eighteenth century, but the process was accelerated after the rebellion of 1745, with Highland dress banned, the enforced disarming of clansmen, the compulsory purchase of heritable jurisdictions, the exile of many chiefs, and the sending of ordinary clansmen to the colonies as indentured labour.

[33] After the Reformation there was an increasing emphasis on education, resulting in the growth of a parish school system, but its effects were limited for the children of the poor and for girls.

[41] The elaborate funerals and complex system of prayers for the dead that dominated in late Medieval Scotland were removed at the Reformation, when simpler services were introduced.

This led to the uniquely Scottish solution of adding a fourth aisle to "T"-plan churches, usually behind the pulpit, which were closed off and used for the burial of the families of the local laird.

Estimates based on English records suggest that by the end of the Middle Ages, the Black Death and subsequent recurring outbreaks of the plague, may have caused the population of Scotland to fall as low as half a million people.

The invasions of the 1640s had a profound impact on the Scottish economy, with the destruction of crops and the disruption of markets resulting in some of the most rapid price rises of the century, but population probably expanded in the period of stability that followed the Restoration in 1660.

[52] The first reliable information on national population is from the census conducted by the Reverend Alexander Webster in 1755, which showed the inhabitants of Scotland as 1,265,380 persons.

[53][54] Compared with the situation after the redistribution of population as a result of the clearances and the Industrial Revolution that began in the eighteenth century, these numbers must have been evenly spread over the kingdom, with roughly half living north of the Tay.

[60] In the Middle Ages Scotland had much more limited organisation for poor relief than England, lacking the religious confraternities of the major English cities.

[62] Protestant reformers in the Book of Discipline (1560) proposed that part of the patrimony of the Catholic Church be used to support the poor, but this aim was never realised.

[67] Most subsequent legislation built on its principles of provision for the local deserving poor and punishment of mobile and undeserving "sturdie beggars".

[66] The system was largely able to cope with general poverty and minor crises, helping the old and infirm to survive and provide life support in periods of downturn at relatively low cost, but was overwhelmed in the major subsistence crisis of the 1690s.

[69]Early modern Scotland was a theoretically patriarchal society, in which men had total authority over women, but how this worked is practice is difficult to discern.

By the eighteenth century many poorer girls were being taught in dame schools, informally set up by a widow or spinster to teach reading, sewing and cooking.

There is evidence of single women engaging in independent economic activity, particularly for widows, who can be found keeping schools, brewing ale and trading.

[72] Lower down the social scale, the rolls of poor relief indicate that large numbers of widows with children endured a marginal existence.

Public occasions were treated with mistrust and from the later seventeenth century there were efforts by kirk sessions to stamp out activities such as well-dressing, bonfires, guising, penny weddings and dancing.

[79] The Lutheranism that influenced the early Scottish Reformation attempted to accommodate Catholic musical traditions into worship, drawing on Latin hymns and vernacular songs.

The most important product of this tradition in Scotland was The Gude and Godlie Ballatis, which were spiritual satires on popular ballads composed by the brothers James, John and Robert Wedderburn.

[80]From late Medieval Scotland there is evidence of occasional prosecutions of individuals for causing harm through witchcraft, but these may have been declining in the first half of the sixteenth century.

James became obsessed with the threat posed by witches and, inspired by his personal involvement, in 1597 wrote the Daemonologie, a tract that opposed the practice of witchcraft and which provided background material for Shakespeare's Tragedy of Macbeth.

[84] In the seventeenth century the pursuit of witchcraft was largely taken over by the kirk sessions, and was often used to attack superstitious and Catholic practices in Scottish society.

[86] From this point prosecutions began to decline, as trials were more tightly controlled by the judiciary and government, torture was more sparingly used and standards of evidence were raised.