6 - In Search of the Scottish Agrarian Problem

Summary

Any one who turns over the Statutes and State Papers of the sixteenth century will be aware that statesmen were much exercised with an agrarian problem, which they thought to be comparatively new, and any one who follows the matter further will find the problem to have an importance at once economic, legal, and political.

This was how R. H. Tawney introduced his seminal work on the ‘agrarian problem’ in sixteenth-century England. I would like to ask: could statements comparable to Tawney's be made about Scotland? The question is a difficult one – but, perhaps for that very reason, an inviting one. Hitherto, the agrarian history of sixteenth-century Scotland has seemed particularly hard to penetrate from an English viewpoint. Work that has been done on subsequent periods of Scottish agriculture, especially the later seventeenth century onwards, has enabled English historians to address it in familiar ways and to incorporate it in broader patterns of agrarian change; but the sixteenth century has remained ‘frustratingly obscure’. An attempt to lift some of this obscurity is surely worthwhile.

The search, as it proceeds, will indeed be ‘economic, legal, and political’. The neglected legal and political aspects will be emphasised, but always with the purpose of relating them to the economy. The results, it will be suggested, indicate some significant parallel processes at work in the English and Scottish agrarian economies.