This book takes a fresh look at the rural economy of early modern Scotland. The primary focus is on the long period that preceded the rapid changes of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It shows that this period, before the main era of agricultural ‘improvement’, was nevertheless far from static.

It is timely that this topic is being revisited now. Several classic studies of Scottish agriculture were published between the late 1970s and early 1990s, but, as we shall see, this productive period was followed by a gap in which scholarship moved into other areas. This book returns to the topic of agriculture with awareness of more recent scholarship.

Approaches to agriculture often begin with everyday farming practices. The book has much on this, and one chapter even looks at a farmer's own writing. By contrast, landlords and estate management are prominent in several chapters. Some of these chapters show landlords as innovators, while one chapter highlights small tenants’ labour-intensive contributions to ‘improvement’. Not all the chapters bring good news; there is a chapter on Scotland's most disastrous famine, that of 1622–23.

The book is about more than farming practices, though. Social, administrative and economic contexts of agriculture all receive attention. And the book opens with a cultural chapter, surveying the cultural context within which agriculture was ‘imagined’. Some topics are best investigated at local level, and five chapters carry out detailed local studies. An ambitious conceptual chapter on models of capitalism in the ‘mercantilist age’ treats Scotland itself as a local study of a much broader phenomenon. The book concludes with a historiographical overview, contextualising the history of agriculture within the work done on other aspects of Scottish history since the 1990s.

More will be said later about the chapters that follow in the present book, but at this point we turn to a review of the state of research on the history of Scottish agriculture. This review falls into three sections. First there is a section on the early modern period. This is often concerned with eighteenth-century ‘Improvement’ and with the relationship of ‘Improvement’ to what came before it. How should agricultural change be periodised between about 1500 and 1850? Second there is a shorter section reviewing medieval studies, again focusing on questions of periodisation of agricultural change. A third section then reviews scholarship that has followed particular disciplinary and thematic perspectives.

Introduction

As a ubiquitous form of cultural production, music, and more specifically the study of song lyrics, provides a unique entry point in the study of Ethiopian migration. Music not only allows for storytelling and the communication of emotion in a visceral manner, but it generally cuts across generations as it is a form of mass media pertinent to everyone from the very young to the very old. Moreover, music is egalitarian from the perspective of consumers as the means and methods of accessing and listening to music have drastically changed and increased in the last several decades due to improving technologies. As a widespread expressive cultural practice central to social life, music is simultaneously a reflection of the attitudes, beliefs, and value systems of a society as well as a force that can shape and exert influence over cultural perspectives. In the tradition of ethnomusicology, social scientists can therefore systematically analyze music (its content, production, reception, etc.) as an entry point into a culture.

Elsewhere, I have discussed the significance of examining the culture of migration that permeates Ethiopian society using various forms of cultural production in order to provide a greater depth to our understanding. Indeed, “there are very few studies relating Ethiopian politics, history, and society to popular culture.” The Ethiopian politics of music (production, lyrics, performance, dissemination, censorship) is an understudied but potentially infinitely fruitful area of inquiry for social scientists. However, by and large, music remains “one of the most neglected themes” and “among the least explored topics in Ethiopian studies.” In effect, “popular music should give a nuanced understanding of the difference between history as narrated by the political elite and history as lived and experienced by the population.” While Ethiopia's rich musical heritage has received only scant scholarly attention and there are still paths to take within it, recent works have made important contributions in this field. As a field in its infancy, there are significant gaps in the scholarship on contemporary Ethiopian music, and even the “existing scholarly literature remains confined to limited themes.” Shelemay, one of the foremost ethnomusicologists specializing in Ethiopian music, states that “while Ethiopian concepts of migration … have changed over the course of time, … the condition of exile has given rise to rich Ethiopian song repertories.”

The Íslendingasögur (the Sagas of Icelanders) is a generic term which encompasses approximately forty early medieval narratives. Like much of the literature from this period, the Íslendingasögur are thought to have their origins in oral tradition. They were first written down in the vernacular during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but recount stories of people and events from the Viking Age some three hundred years before. They centre on the day-to-day existence of the earlier settlers of Iceland, focusing on legal disputes, social structures and familial relations (the reason they are also referred to as the ‘Family Sagas’). Within these accounts are an abundance of allusions to textiles, but these references are often overlooked or misread. Until recently, it was an accepted belief that descriptions of textiles in the sagas were authenticating details at best, or unnecessary and irrelevant at worst. This chapter will show how and why this is not the case, agreeing with Anita Sauckel's suggestion that textiles in the Íslendingasögur have an important literary function. In order to do this I will first explore the importance of textile terminology in the Íslendingasögur and outline some of the methodological challenges of investigating written textiles. ‘Written textiles’ are defined here as written representations of textile-making processes, such as spinning, weaving and embroidery, and the material results of those processes, such as clothing. I will suggest a potential resolution to the challenge posed by the written – as opposed to the physical or material – nature of textiles, in the form of the Old Norse vestimentary code.

Written textiles have not received as much attention in scholarship as some of their material counterparts, such as the textile fragments from the Oseberg Ship Burial, or even the later Bayeux Tapestry.I argue that Old Norse textile terminology is imbued with a wealth of culturally contingent meanings that, when used in saga narrative, act as signifiers for a broad range of significations. However, examining textile terminology in isolation does not reveal the function of written textiles, but merely illustrates the relationship between written object and an abstract social or cultural phenomenon. In order to ascertain what purpose textiles serve, and understand why they are important devices within literature as a whole, it is necessary to examine the textile terminologies within their Old Norse narrative and cultural contexts.

Fiars prices have long been appreciated as an analytical tool by Scottish economic historians, who have used them to construct price series for grain and meal, and to enable studies in market integration. But the question has seldom been asked in any depth – what were they originally for? How were the fiars used by contemporaries?

Let us first remind ourselves of what the fiars prices were. They apparently emerge in the sixteenth century. Gemmill and Mayhew's account of Scottish medieval prices makes no mention of them, but there is a passing reference in the Register of the Great Seal for 1524 to an annual price known as ‘le feir’ having been used in the Glasgow region for at least ten years beforehand. They were intended to be a factual statement of the average market price of various grains (and of meal) within a county, since the preceding harvest. They were normally ‘struck’ (calculated) by a legal process before a court sitting in February. They are of uncertain origin: the word ‘fiar’ is accepted to be allied to ‘forum’, and to mean ‘market’, so ‘fiars price’ means ‘market price’. Their main legal basis was custom and practice; neither the Scottish parliament, nor, after 1707, the British parliament, ever legislated to make fiars mandatory. However, the fiars acquired a firm institutional basis through becoming attached to various other administrative and commercial procedures. This chapter will investigate those procedures.

Sixteenth-century sources refer to fiars being struck by Commissary Courts, but later the surviving fiars seem invariably to have been drawn up in the Sheriff Courts. For a time in the seventeenth century, Commissary and Sheriff fiars seem sometimes to have been in existence together. Although there are no surviving examples of rival lists, in a case involving the parish of Edrom in Berwickshire in 1696 the Commissary fiars were preferred over the Sheriff fiars because the dispute involved the sale of teinds. The earliest extant fiars series is one for Fife, for the period 1556–86, followed by a gap until 1619. More series follow the reform of the teinds in the 1630s, but only after 1708 do they become general for Scottish lowland counties.

Contemporary scholarship still has a tendency to view female work in industry not as a sizable contribution to economic history but as a social problem. The female worker has not been considered an independent economically active person, but a victim of a defective system. By recreating women of the past into victims, whether of the capitalist system or patriarchal society, we take away their agency. We refuse to allow them to be thinking persons who made rational choices. In doing so, historians play into the hands of the male view of the past. If working women were just victims, they can be relegated to a corner of social history.

Once upon a time, before manufacturing in Europe became history, the author of this book had the opportunity to visit a veneer factory. We were taken through various rooms, ending up in one with only female workers. The noise was incredible. The women cleaned out branches and replaced them with plugs. Two women opposite one another banged away with mallets at sheets of veneer spat out by a machine. We were told that only women could do such work fast enough and without hitting each-others’ hands.

The Finnish factory inspector tells us in her report form 1904 how skill and specialisation was not outside the female scope, when an effort was made to replace women in the factories dealing with small items of wood, the male workers were found to be far less effective. On the other hand, the inspector acknowledges the problem of female mobility in certain industries, resulting in lower earnings, because of employment history. In this connection, she points out that the reason for women leaving was the option of earning more in the summer loading and unloading ships.1 The key piece of information here is that women looked for opportunities to earn and if staying in the factory did not provide chances of advancement, you could just as well look for employment where more money was offered. As female earnings were low, short-term solutions became more likely. Slim chances of advancement also promoted less interest in unionisation. On the other hand, we have evidence that women were not lethargically hanging on to any job but actively looking for opportunities and better pay.

There are two discrete groups of campaign letters from the First Crusade. One is the cluster of four letters, explored in the following chapter, that purport to have been written by leaders of the crusade before the capture of Jerusalem, addressed as open letters to the West or the pope. These ‘collective projects’, Nicholas Paul writes, are distinct from ‘the letters composed by named individual authors to named individual recipients’, that is, the missives of figures such as Stephen of Blois and Anselm of Ribemont. The present chapter examines these narrative letters sent from within the crusader host. We are fortunate to possess five such epistles, including two letters by Stephen of Blois, another two by Anselm of Ribemont, and a single letter from Lucca. These letters are not only rare because the first four appear to have been sent directly from the campaign specifically, but also as epistolary products of their time generally. They belong to the concept of ‘fast historiography’ which Lars Boje Mortensen identifies emerging in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in which the transmission of news from crusade campaigns played a significant role.

As Martha Carlin and David Crouch caution, we must not imagine that relatively ordinary people did not send letters in the Middle Ages; it is merely that they have not survived. As their edition of ‘lost letters’ from thirteenthcentury England reveals, we must imagine a world in which a fascinating gamut of casual and informal letters was circulating, ranging from magnates worrying about wine orders, through students writing to their parents to ask for money and masters instructing pupils to stop wasting time, to gossip about alleged adultery. By their very nature, most of these letters did not concern what contemporaries considered ‘important’ topics worthy of recording for posterity, and this, combined with the fact that parchment was expensive and could be scraped clean to create palimpsests, means that they were not actively preserved.

Though, as count of Blois and Chartres, one of the foremost nobles of Christendom, Stephen of Blois could hardly be counted as ordinary, it is no coincidence that the apparently touchingly personal letters which he purportedly sent from the First Crusade to his ‘dearest wife’ are some of the most well-known of all medieval letters.

What women wanted

During the first week of July, 1900, the First General Meeting of the Unions of Working Women was held in Helsinki. Representatives of 21 women's unions met in the premises of The Worker's Organisation of Helsinki, where the women's section had set up a coffee breakfast for the delegates at 8.00 in the morning. The meeting started at 9.30 in the festival hall, which was, the minutes tell us, decorated with flowers, garlands, birch leaves and banners for the occasion.

The agenda for the three day meeting had 12 points for discussion:

• • How to increase unionisation among women

• • The creation of central organisation of female unions

• • How to achieve a working day of no more than 10 hours for women

• • How to achieve a legal minimum hourly wage for women

• • How to spread information about the need for female suffrage

• • How to achieve unified rules about apprenticeship for women in all sectors

• • The necessity of petitioning the government for a female industrial inspector

• • What could be done about protecting the freedom of organisation and access to information for women in domestic service?

• • How should women work to promote proletarian ideological development?

• • How to get a ban on piece work

• • The importance of starting a fund for economic protection during strikes and lockouts

• • The possibility of starting a newspaper for working women

In the discussion, one of the delegates stated:

The meeting highlighted a number of problems, some serious, in the inspection system. It was said that, even in large factories, there seemed to be information in advance about the arrival of the inspector.