Evicted By Force - The Tragedy of the Highland Clearances

[Music] Humanity has always strived for the benit of our species and that progress is behind some of our most outstanding achievements but what happens when the cruel or callous impositions of power twist the meaning of progress for profit one horrific example occurred from the late 18th century to the mid 19th century in Scotland a time when families were torn us under were forced off their ancestral lands and watched their homes burned in the name of [Music] progress the Highland clearances is a deeply complex subject so our plan is to set the stage and give you two of the most egregious examples of what happened first let's look at what came before the clan Society of the Highlands a clan was usually led by a chief originally an appointed head of the family this position became increasingly hereditary over time the rest of the kin folk lived on the lands held by the clan and organized into small agricultural townships pretty much collectives or joint tency farms and the Croft was one such unit the chief owned the land and leased it out to taxmen who in turn sued the Farms to tenant Farmers or Coffs Crafters would employ workers or cotters to help cultivate a specific Farm now the clan system was deteriorating well before the Highland clearances it had often come under attack the Highlanders being so far north and isolated had always given those and Power in the lowlands pause as we know very well the Highlanders were often at odds with the southern nobility for instance King James I was so terrified of any Uprising that he systematically called Clan Chiefs into attendant in court he hoped that putting physical distance between the Chiefs and their king would promote loyalty to the crown over their chiefdom the friction between the North and the South was both economic and after the Protestant Reformation often religious it led to the uprisings of the 17th and 18th centuries when Highland Clans supported the Royals that they felt would give them a better deal and preserve their freedoms the stewards this all came crashing down after the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1746 after cadin rebellious Highlanders were explicitly targeted laws were established to diminish the influence of the clan Chiefs and Galla Customs under the heritable jurisdictions act in 1747 men who refused to swear loyalty oath to the hanian government found their land put up for auction this allowed lowlanders and Englishmen to purchase large swaths of the Highlands however many new land owners found that these purch purchases were not particularly lucrative land style organizations and land use was diffuse and vague it had been designed simply to maintain a reliable subsistance for the local population in a harsh environment profit expansion upper money flow had nothing to do with it at its core and to Modern Outsiders this just seemed backwards how could you make the highlands profitable that was the question of the day enter one Sir John Sinclair from all accounts Sinclair was not predatory rather he was a progressive mercantilist in the mode of John Lock Sinclair believed that the solution to improving farming and the standard of living in the highlands was trade and the most powerful trade good in the British Empire at the time was wool everybody needed it at home and abroad and if the highlands could produce it the land would become prosperous and everybody could benefit however the oldfashioned Farms up there didn't house large numbers of sheep as the climate was considered too harsh for the animals so Sinclair proposed that the Highlanders change the breed of sheep that they kept his research suggested that the chiet Sheep commonly found in the border of Scotland and England would be a perfect specimen for adapting to the Windswept climate of the Highlands the first attempt at importing and raising giat was an immediate success with 100% survival of some Clair's Imports The Next Step was to slowly introduce the wool from these sheep into the Highland economy through through considerate and measured changes Sinclair proposed that tenants on small Holdings maintain possession of the area while also pulling their resources together in this way they could build their Investments with larger herds over time at the same time gradually expanding the grazing areas this would result in a slow long-term return on the sheep with monetary gains split between the land owners and the tenants but Sinclair's wellth thought out plans fell on De airs instead land owners hammering money in the highlands heard one message more land plus more sheep equals more profit Sinclair had inadvertently started a wildfire and the real formula became more land plus more sheep minus the people equals profit after all you only need a few Shepherds and you could pay them very very little any other land use was just a drain I mean rent from poor tenants could compete with wool profits the first clearances began in the 1780s and the trend grew throughout the Napoleonic era most landlords sought to retain their tenants but just redeploy them to the unprofitable fringes of the Estates especially coastal areas where they could work in the fishing and Keling Industries it was only later that the landlords started evicting people with little concern for where they ended up one of the earliest and most egregious examples of the clearances occurred on the southernland estate between 1809 and 1821 this 1 million acre estate was owned by George leveson go thanks to his marriage to the cus of southernland initially the state had removed a small number of tenants with an eye towards cutting out the taxmen when the new Duke of suland took control he launched a series of considerable improvements the common term used by the landlords several agents were hired to carry out the evictions the most efficient notorious were William young and Patrick C Patrick C was a Scottish man with a distant relation to the sub late but neither he nor young spoke a lick of Scott scall this was made obvious at the beginning of their rections in 1813 when men from Clan gun came to gby to protest the arrival of massive flocks of sheep young met them with a force of Lackey to break up what he called a mob now none of them spoke to Scott gallik so the gun farmers were more confused than they were afraid as things began to heat up young used his clout to call in British troops from Ireland ironically their experiences on the reverse of the situation when Scottish born troops had suppressed Irish Gatherings made them ideal enforcers the threat of violence sent a clear message to clang gun leave without trouble or else in December of that year tenants from Strath neavor journeyed to gby to hear their eviction notice this time young employed a local Minister David McKenzie to translate McKenzie also supported the evictions through his preaching warning tenants that they would face fire and brimstone if they resorted to unlawful resistance of course during these sermons McKenzie never divulged the sums of money he was receiving or where his church got the new Pulpit from an auction for the soon Tobe vacated land was set to occur directly after the notice and only one person placed a big Patrick Celler the other agent in charge of the evictions this was his second purchase of land on the Southland States and he planned to turn a profit no matter the cost often during the clearances the land was set to fire for two reasons first it cleared the lamb for the Sheep pastures second it ensured that the tenants would have no home to return to in the early days of the clearances many tenants would partly dismantle their dwellings for supplies to build their new homes on the country but things were different in Strath nebor in 1814 the EES were forbidden to dismantle their homes instead the instate enforcers stripped them for firewood now seller did pay the tenants but they were only paid what seller saw as a fair price for the wood the Strath NE tenants who refused to leave had enforcers sicked on them eyewitness accounts record people being chased from their homes even as s and his men set the dwellings on fire one example William Chisum had a Hut and Strath neighbor that his daughter-in-law Janet McKai lived in with her mother Margaret Margaret was a frail sickly old woman when the officials came and started setting dwellings on fire she couldn't move we don't know if the men were fueled by their domination over the town or if they were simply not paying attention but they set fire to chism's Hut with Margaret maai still inside Janet and her neighbors fought the fires to get Margaret out but she has come to her injuries just a few days later Donald McLoud a stonemason who was living in strathnaver when this occurred wrote every imaginable means short of the sword or the musket was put in requisition to drive the naves away to force them to exchange their farms and comfortable habitations erected by themselves or their forefathers for inhospitable rocks on the seashore and to depend for subsistence on the watery element in its wildest mood the country was darkened by the smoke of burnings and The Descendants were ruined trampled upon dispersed and compelled to seek Asylum across the sea McLoud recounts the long Trek that the beaten and exhausted tenants endured pointing out only a few of the children survived deaths that were never counted in official documents two years later C would be tried for Margaret Mai's death and other injuries and deaths caused by his fires with quite a bit of witness testimony against s his defense gathered statements of officials present at the burnings to defend their tactics in the end the judge found s innocent ruling that he was merely performing his duties as the authority of the subtle end State evicting the land in the name of agricultural progress according to John Preble the judge had this to say if the jury had any difficulty in Striking the balance then they must take into account the character of the accused the implication was clearly that against the word of a man so nobly commended as rck seller of what value was the evidence of a card a thief or a bigamist and so seller was free to return to his new state in Strath neighbor where he continued to carry out evictions to expand his sheep pasture the only Chang of's Behavior after the trial was that he would wait to burn people's houses until they were eved now remember this was just one town and one estate during the Highland clearances this was happening all over the Highlands clearances from the Southerland EST State went from 1811 to 1821 and it's estimated that 15,000 people were removed from their land to make room for 200,000 sheep most of the evicted tenants set up new townships on the coastal regions in Scotland here they eak out a living through fishing and kelp farming however over time the kelp prices dropped and the population grew as soldiers returned from the Napoleonic Wars reconstruction would be a slow and tedious process with poverty On The Rise the crofters were about to face another catastrophe the Potato Famine to lessen the threat of starvation the government forced land owners to pay famine charity to the displaced crofters still on the estate controlled lands suddenly no one to Scotland was prospering and a new wave of clearances was about to begin crofters with fortitude and ability began moving to the lowlands where they could find industrial jobs other Crafters went into indentured servitude to avoid starvation land owners who were hammering cash realized it would be cheaper to pay to send crofters abroad than it would be to continue paying charity funds one example was Colonel John Gordon a Scotsman who acquired land in the outer heres from Clan Reynold when the clan Chief went bankrupt in 1838 when the famine hit Gordon was losing money on his investment while also paying for famine relief he turned to forced immigration to solve its Financial issue in 1851 the small Township of balab bodic with less than 30 people was marked for clearance hired thugs ran through the township and dragged tenants to the harbor and fed them to lock boale the tenants were coerced to attend the public meeting by telling them that they'd be tracked down by dogs and fined if they fail to attend at the meeting the tenants were informed they were going to Quebec Canada but they were assured that good living conditions and jobs awaited them there many boarded The Waiting ship the the Admiral willingly full of Hope Gordon's agent in charge of the Endeavor John Fleming cleared thousands of people this way Fleming claimed that everyone will be met on the shores of Canada by immigration services and provided with Farmland now this is a lie as evidenced by the letters between Fleming and the chief immigration agent in Canada AC Buchanan sometimes Fleming didn't even bother to inform Canadian agents until the ships had already departed Buchanan writes that all part parties on the boat were impoverished many of them had insufficient clothing little if any spoke French the native language of Quebec so employment couldn't be provided these immigrants would be forced to trekk to other parts of Canada for work Buchanan informed Fleming that the Canadian government could not afford to quote carry the freight of those who were interested in the removal from Great Britain of poppers and other unprofitable portions of the populations he warned that if Gordon continu to send people he should expect to see no Canadian government assistance for his evicted tenants GM Douglas the medical superintendent in Quebec wrote I have never during my long experience at the station saw a body of immigrants so destitute of clothing and bedding many children of 9 10 years old had not a rag to cover them the force eviction from Gordon's land concluded that year he cleared more than 2,000 people from the outer Hees on fire ships of the 17700 transported to Lower Canada only 600 were accepted as poppers and supported by the colony the rest were reduced to beggy Donald McLoud who had immigrated to Canada before this interviewed the ex Islanders and wrote hear the sobbing sighing and throbbing see the confusion hear the noise the bitter weeping and bustle you're mothers and children asking fathers and husbands where are we going here the reply we know not so there you have two examples of the horrors of the clearances these were especially nasty but by no means were these unique rights and support for Highland tenants would not be achieved until the 1880s en forced eviction wasn't legally eliminated until 1886 through the Crafters Holdings act it was based on a Model created in Ireland by the land League that gave tenants the right to Fair rent to free sale and fixity of tenure in other words only the courts could decide what constituted Fair rent the tenants could bypass the landlords and sell their interest in the land to another tenant and tenants could not be evicted if they paid their rent now it's hard to arrive at an exact number but it's estimated that somewhere around 70,000 people were driven out of their homes and out of their country during the clearances at the start of the 18th century roughly 30 % of Scots lived in the highlands and the islands by the turn of the 20th century that figure was only 8% to this day only a few dozen people own most of the Scottish islands many of the Islands belong to either individuals or corporations in 1993 two Farm families on the aisle of Aaron were evicted and their houses bulldozed to make room for deer there's no real happy ending to this story but I'm going to put an ironic Twist on it for you many of the Eves of the clearances immigrated to New Zealand and as it happened they brought with them one very valuable item sheep today odds are if you wear any piece of tartan whether it's a kilt a Shaw even a necktie the mill who wo it for you probably got the wool from New Zealand a tiny Speck of poetic justice and a horribly tragic tale a

Channel: USA Kilts & Celtic Traditions

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Keywords: where to buy a kilt, usa kilts, formal highland dress, #kilts, #usakilts, how to wear the kilt, wearing kilts daily, kilted American, Victorian Scotland, History bounding, Highland clearances, potato famine, the Highlands, Scottish history, landlords, 19th century capitalism, 19th century land reforms, farmer's rights, crofters, rural Scotland, tenants rights, forced eviction, highland estates, Victorian wool industry, Victorian history

Id: m6yX_gAvtnM

Length: 17min 45sec (1065 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 03 2024