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Edinburgh was far and away the largest town in Scotland. In 1640, it had around 30,000 inhabitants; the population rose to somewhere between 40,000 and 47,000 by 1690. Glasgow was the next largest town, with a population of around 10,000 in 1630; like the capital, it experienced a burst of growth in the second half of the 17th century. By the 1630s, there were only ten towns in Scotland with a population of more than 4,000; an old, established town like Dunfermline had only 220 houses in 1624.
What attracted people to the towns was the range of services and entertainment they provided. Craft workers like wigmakers, silk weavers and confectioners found a clientele for their goods. For the better off, particularly the nobility, a whole range of financial and legal specialists were on tap. The largest occupational group in the towns was domestic servants, followed by tailors.
The social impact of religion
By the time of the National Covenant in 1638 (see ‘The National Covenant’, earlier in this chapter), the Presbyterian Church had established a strong presence in every parish in Scotland, a development that transformed the lives of those in the countryside more than any other economic or social change.
The Protestant faith emphasised that man’s primary loyalty was to God, and no matter what your position was in society, through prayer, you could get direct access to him. This idea was potentially subversive – it was literally saying that in cases of conflict, God’s will overrode loyalty to landlord or monarch.
The necessity of communing directly with God led the Covenanters to stress literacy – you had to be able to
read
the Bible to find the word of God. By the mid-17th century, a good proportion of men could read in Scotland. The purpose was Calvinist indoctrination, but when people were literate, who knows what else they might read?
The Presbyterian Kirk might have had literacy standards, but its impact on the social life of the common people was negative, to say the least. Popular culture in the form of traditional festivals, rituals, customs and beliefs were suppressed as ungodly. How much of traditional peasant culture was destroyed by these zealots is difficult to say, but the destruction was extremely thorough.
The repression went beyond popular culture to virtually all aspects of life and behaviour. There was a particular emphasis on trying to bring the sex lives of the people into conformity with biblical teachings. The Kirk had strict views on incest, extending it to cover relations between a man and a woman with no blood relationship. So, a widow could not marry the kindred of her late husband, and a man couldn’t marry any of his late wife’s kindred.
As to sexual intercourse, it was a pleasure confined to marriage. Fornication and adultery were frowned upon, and the Kirk went to great lengths to root out what it called ‘filthiness’. Those who transgressed against the sexual code were ritually humiliated on Sundays in front of the congregation, or publicly flogged, or banished from the community if they persisted. For those considered guilty of sexual crimes of a deviant nature, capital punishment was imposed.
In 1675, a man convicted of having carnal knowledge of a mare at Inveraray sheriff court was sentenced to death. He was first strangled and then burnt at the stake. The horse didn’t get off lightly either – it was also put to death!
It’s witchcraft
Women (and sometimes men) accused of being witches were put to the stake; around 4,000 people were burnt to death as witches between 1590 and 1662. The Restoration began with the largest witch hunt in Scottish history. Scotland was not alone in this – a general witch craze was afflicting most of western Europe in this period.
But how could you tell who was a witch and who was not? A common way of providing evidence to use against suspects was the Devil’s Mark. When a man or a woman made a pact with the Devil, the Devil supposedly left his mark on them. Professional witch-prickers were employed to search them out. They would prick the suspect, and if the suspect didn’t bleed, he or she was seen to be in league with Satan!
Eventually, witch-pricking came to be seen as fraudulent. After the 1670s, the whole idea of witchcraft was being discredited. Among the elite, there had been growing scepticism, even at the time, that many witch hunts had been about score settling among neighbours and that i
Although in decline, witch hunts were not eradicated as late as 1697. A child made accusations of witchcraft against 20 individuals, 7 of whom were put to death.
Culture and education
The aim of the Presbyterian Church to establish a parish-based educational system available to all may not have been realised in the 17th century, but at least it was a worthy ambition. Schooling did spread – for example, Fife had only 3 schools before the Reformation, but by 1633 it had 43. Even remote counties in Scotland saw a rise in the number of schools. The growth of schools saw an increase in literacy.
‘Literacy’ might only mean that someone could sign his name on a marriage register. How far a person could read or write in sentences is anyone’s guess.
On the basis of these crude literacy tests, Scotland was a fairly literate society, certainly more so than the north of England. Illiteracy was unknown among the male ranks of the nobility; around three-quarters of male craftsmen and tenant farmers could write their names. Illiteracy increased the further you went down the social scale; among women of the lower orders it was pretty much universal.
Scotland also had five universities compared to two in England. Most of the scholars had been trained on the Continent; indeed, more than 50 Scots had graduated from Leiden University in Holland by 1700. Although the main purpose was to train the Presbyterian clergy, the universities also provided an education for the sons of the nobility. The latter were schooled in Latin, history, philosophy and science, allowing them access to a common European culture.
Higher learning created a thirst for knowledge, which laid the foundation for the emergence of the book trade. Most of the published books and pamphlets dealt with religious themes, but after 1680 there was a focus on more earthly issues. Only between 25 and 50 items were published in any given year up to 1695, but in 1695 this number increased to 250. Some of the well-to-do had enormous libraries – Archbishop Robert Leighton of Glasgow owned 4,000 volumes.
Although much despised, James II and VII oversaw the creation of two new cultural establishments that shaped Edinburgh’s development as a centre of the Enlightenment (see Chapter 12): the Advocate’s Library (now the National Library of Scotland) and the Royal College of Surgeons. James also established royal appointments, such as the historiographer royal in 1681 and the geographer royal in 1682. Maybe he wasn’t all bad?
The greatest cultural achievements were in the area of the law. The monumental work of Sir James Dalrymple of Stair, in his
The Institutions of the Law of Scotland Deduced from Its Originals
(1681), codified the civil law of Scotland. Sir George MacKenzie, in his
Institutions of the Law of Scotland
(1684), did the same for the criminal law.
The 17th century may have been a century of major religious and political upheavals, but it also saw a flowering of institutions and learning among the blood and gore, which would lay the foundations of the much more impressive cultural achievements of the 18th century. The country may have been poorer than the major international states such as England and Holland, but compared to countries of its own size, in many ways its experience was fairly similar.
In a European context, Scotland was not the exception to the rule – it was the rule!