Whitsunday and Martinmas, when the half-starved horses of the tenants were to be seen, in unsteady cavalcade, stumbling slowly along the bridle-paths, one man guiding every two emaciated beasts, which laboured under the burden of one boll each.' 'The grain,' Mr. Graham adds, 'was deposited in the girnal or granary attached to the house, and there remained till it was consumed by the household, or sold in the market to produce the money which was sorely needed for home expenditure; though too often it was spoilt by long keeping, in the hope of getting a better price, or half eaten by rats.' Speaking of the Highlands, Burt says: The poverty of the tenants has rendered it customary for the chief or laird to free some of them every year for all arrears of rent; this is supposed upon an average to be about one year in five of the whole estate;'* and in the Lowlands, Mr. Ramsay reports that in his father's time bankruptcies were not uncommon, and that it was often necessary to have recourse to the law to obtain payment. †

As for the poorer classes, when the century opened, they were living in a state of absolute misery. From August, 1696, and for several years onwards, the seasons were seasons of blight and famine, and for generations they were remembered as the dark years,' the 'ill' or 'hungry years.' By the Jacobites they were remembered as King William's years.' During these disastrous years, as Mr. Graham writes, 'the crops were blighted by easterly haars" or mists, by sunless, drenching summers, by storms, and by early bitter frosts and deep snow in Autumn.' For seven years this went on, and many of the poorer classes died from utter starvation. Describing the conditions of the country, Mr. Graham writes :

The sheep and oxen died in thousands, the prices of everything among a peasantry that had nothing went up to famine pitch, and a large proportion of the population in rural districts was destroyed by disease and want. During these 'hungry years,' as starvation stared the people in the face, the instincts of self-preservation overpowered all other feelings, and even natural affection became extinct in crowds of men and women forced to prowl and fight for their food like beasts. People in the North sold their children to slavery in the plantations for victuals; men

struggled with their sisters for a morsel of bread; many were so weak and dispirited that they had neither heart nor strength to bury their dead. A man was seen carrying the corpse of his father on his back half way to the churchyard, and throwing it down at a farmer's door, he exclaimed— "I can carry it no further. For God's sake, bury the corpse, or put it, if you like, on the dyke of your kailyard to keep out the sheep." On the roads were to be seen dead bodies with a morsel of raw flesh in their mouths, and dying mothers lying with starved infants which had sucked dry breasts; while numbers, dreading lest their bodies should be exposed to the birds, crawled, when they felt the approach of death, to the kirkyard, that they might have some better chance of being buried, when death overtook them. In these very kirkyards, which, owing to their too abundant replenishing, were the only fertile spots in the land, old and young struggled together for the nettles, docks, and grass, in spring; while they gathered greedily the loathed snails in summer, and stored them for the winter's use. Even in the streets of towns starving men fell down and died. "Through the long continuance of these manifold judgments," says the pious, credulous, ungrammatical, but quite veracious historian, Patrick Walker, "deaths and burials were so common that the living wearied of the burial of the dead. I have seen corpses drawn in sleds, many neither having coffins nor winding-sheets. I was one of four who carried the corpse of a young woman a mile journey, and when we came to the grave an honest man came and said, "You must go and help me to bury my son; he is lien dead these two days; otherwise I will be obliged to bury him in my own yard." We went, and there were eight of us had two miles to carry the corpse of this young man, many neighbours looking on, but none to help. I was credibly informed that in the north two sisters on a Monday's morning were found carrying the corpse of their brother with bearing ropes, none offering to help. I have seen some walking about till the sun-setting, and to-morrow, about six o'clock in the summer's morning, their head lying on their hands, and mice and rats having eaten a great part of their hands and arms." These grimly vivid memories gain ample confirmation from the records of the time and traditions of the people that survived for generations.

Besides the classes already alluded to, there was in Scotland a large vagrant class; vagabonds,' says Fletcher of Saltoun, 'who live without any regard to the laws of the land, or even those of God and nature.' During these lean years he estimated their number at two hundred thousand. They swarmed everywhere and were often a terror to honest people. 'No magistrate,' he says in his Second Discourse, 'could ever discover which way

* Vol. I., 147-48.

one in a hundred of these wretches died, or that ever they were baptized. Many murders have been discovered among them, and they are not only a most unspeakable oppression to poor tenants (who, if they give not bread or some kind of provision to perhaps forty such villains in a day, are sure to be insulted by them), but they rob many poor people who live in houses distant from any neighbourhood. In years of plenty, many thousands of them meet together in the mountains, where they feast and riot for many days; and at country-weddings, markets, burials, and other the like public occasions, they are to be seen, both men and women, perpetually drunk, cursing, blaspheming, and fighting together.'

6

The domestic architecture of the period was on a level with the poverty of the people, and generally of a wretched description. Here and there scattered throughout the country were a number of castellated houses dating back to the sixteenth century. Many of them were partially in ruins, and most of them in an uncared for condition. The homes of the greater part of the gentry were plain two-storied buildings, unadorned and unattractive, 'devoid of dignity from the floor to the corbelstepped gable roof,' set down in a hollow or by the side of a hill, where they were sheltered from the fierce winds that swept across the unprotected land, and in some parts planted round with trees for shelter. In many cases these clustered so close to the walls that they blocked out light and air from the small narrow windows, with their tiny three-cornered panes of glass.' The fields were ploughed up to the front door or the gate, though here and there a lawn or avenue added to the amenity. Near every house was the inevitable dovecot,' sheltering clouds of pigeons which fed upon the scanty crop of the tenants, and then went to stock the laird's larder. The houses of the smaller lairds were constructed on the plan of some of the old-fashioned farms which are still to be seen. The courtyard was usually formed by the house having a projecting granary or byre on one side, a projecting stable and barn on the other, while in the open space between stood the midden, in which the midden-fowls feasted and nursed their broods among nettles and docks growing all around.' 'The environs of country seats,' says Ramsay, speaking of the early

years of the century, were abundantly plain and primitive. The consorting of nature and concealing her lesser deformities were then little thought of. On approaching a laird's dwelling, the stable, byre, and dunghill at the very door presented themselves to view; and all around was a plentiful crop of nettles, docks, and hemlock. The unsettled state of the country and the embarrassed circumstances of most country gentlemen, affords however, some apology for their parsimony and slovenliness in this article. Attached to each house was a small and ill-kept garden, where a number of shrubs and flowers, and sweet herbs and 'physick herbs' struggled for existence. Of vegetables kail was the chief; turnips were to be seen only in a few of these gardens, and potatoes only in those of a few rich and enterprising gentlemen. Onions were not grown; all that were used were imported from Holland or Flanders. A few fruit trees were cultivated, and round about the gardens grew the nursery of trees.

Inside the houses were plain, and often damp and comfortless. The rooms were small. The walls were plastered, but paperhanging was unknown; only in the houses of the wealthy was the dingy plaster hidden by tapestry, aras, panels of wood, or leather gilt or embossed. The windows had no sash or pulley, and could not be opened. Whatever ventilation there was, was done by the chimney or open door. Bell-pulls were unknown. Servants were summoned by knocking the floor with the heel or a poker. The furniture was cumbrous. "Tables, chairs, and bedsteads were commonly wainscot or plane-tree, more remarkable for strength than elegance.'† Carpets, except in the houses of the wealthy, were unknown. In 1708 the Town Council of Stirling paid six pounds Scots for two carpets. Thirteen years later the floor of the magistrates' loft, i.e., gallery, in the church of the same burgh was covered with a carpet, but it was deemed so costly that a cover was ordered to be made for it. In 1711, however, the same Town Council, according to the treasurer's account, paid 4s. Scots 'for getting the lend of Crayforth's carpet to set before the Lords.' In the second half of the

century Jedburgh is said to have had only a couple of carpets among all its inhabitants. A friend told Ramsay of Ochtertyre that when a boy at Edinburgh he saw the first carpet he had ever seen in the house of a gentleman who lived much abroad, and in 1716, at Cawdor House, only the King's room' had a carpet. Small and low in the ceiling as they were, every room in each house, except in the great houses, was provided with a bed, even the drawing-room was no exception. Some of the beds stood out from the wall into the middle of the room; others were 'box beds,' i.e. beds standing in a hole or recess in the wall. The first were hung with heavy plaiding, spun by the female members of the household; the others were concealed (hence sometimes called concealed beds,') by curtains or doors, either opening on hinges or sliding. All the same, so small and incommodious were the houses that sleeping room was scarce, and it was no uncommon thing for a couple of gentlemen, quite unknown to each other, to have to share the same bed. The diningroom, adorned with dark and dim portraits, was usually kept locked up. The living-room was a sleeping room, and where the inmates slept there they ate their meals, received their guests, and gathered around the fire at night, the room being lighted with the sombre light of tallow candles, or the blaze of the fire burning in the open chimney in a dog-grate with bars of burnished brass. Few of the bed-rooms had grates, and the sleepers had to gather what heat they could under the heavy load of six to ten pairs of Scots blankets.

Of the dwellings of the laird's tenants and peasantry Mr. Graham has given a very graphic description. After quoting Morer, the English chaplain's account of the dwellings of the latter, in which they are described as 'low and feeble, their walls made of a few stones jumbled together without mortar to cement them, so ordered that it does not cost much more time to erect such a cottage than to pull it down, without chimneys, and only holes in the roofs for smoke to pass through,' he goes on to add:

"This description will apply to the houses of the people through a greater part of the century. The hovels of one room were built of stones and turf, without mortar, the holes in the wall stuffed with straw, or heather,