R. A. Houston

Geographical mobility in Scotland, 1652–1811: the evidence of testimonials

Unital recently little was known of the patterns of population turnover in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scotland. This paper uses evidence from testimonials, movement certificates issued by the Scottish church, to uncover features of geographical mobility. It shows that in much of north-western Europe before the Industrial Revolution mobility in rural areas was frequent, short-distance, associated with particular occupations and active at particular stages in the life cycle. The value and limitations of the source material are considered briefly. In conclusion the importance of geographical mobility for Scottish society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is noted and further areas for research are indicated.

Poor Relief and the Dangerous and Criminal Insane in Scotland, c. 1740-1840

The historiography of Scottish poor relief from the latesixteenth to the early nineteenth century conventionally portrays it as anundeveloped version of the English system. It assumes that the lack ofstructured care based on rating (that was the foundation of the Englishmodel) equates to parsimony. By focusing on limited entitlements anddebates on disablement, historians have studied exclusion more thanprovision. This article gives a different emphasis on poor relief in Scotlandthrough a study of a particular group of the deserving poor. Offering ageneral discussion illuminated by detailed case studies, its aim is to locatedangerous insane paupers within the structures of Scottish poor relief andto assess how distinctively they were treated compared with the merelypoor. It also outlines change over timein the legal parameters governingpauper lunatics and particularly the changes in law and practice during the1800s and 1810s. Finally, it seeks to demonstrate the strength of thecommitment to caring for the insane as an element of the deserving poorand to show how a system based more on casual charity than that ofEngland could nevertheless be effective.

Legal Protection of the Mentally Incapable in Early Modern Scotland

Abstract This article deals with legal means of protecting the person and property of those who suffered from an absence of, or defect in, their reason. Topics considered include the appointment and functions of tutors and curators; alternative means of protecting the weak minded or deranged; and how the dangerously insane were prevented from harming themselves and others. The article focuses on Scotland, but also offers comparisons with England, America and the Continent. Approaches to the care of the mentally incapable are used to enhance broader understanding of the individual, family and community in a legal and historical context.

Professions and the Identification of Mental Incapacity in Eighteenth‐Century Scotland

Eighteenth-century Scottish legal procedures to investigate the mental capacity of an individual to manage his or her own affairs are examined to discover the relative significance of different professional and lay groups in identifying disabilities. The role of medical men, lawyers and non-professionals is set in the context of contemporary social and political priorities in order to question simple models of medicalisation. A substantial body of empirical evidence is used to reveal the subtle gradations of power in different domestic, legal and institutional domains.

Clergy and the Care of the Insane in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Writers on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England have stressed the significance of doctors and clergy in the provision of residential care for the better-off mad person. “The private madhouse trade in fact started with the practice of doctors taking private patients into their homes.” So wrote Macalpine and Hunter. According to William Parry-Jones, English “lunatics from the more affluent classes were cared for individually, often in the custody of medical men or clergymen.” The two professions commonly overlapped, meaning that clerics could provide medical care. Andrew Mason has written enthusiastically that “towards the end of the seventeenth-century, so-called ‘clerical mad doctors’ abounded.” As educated men working in an occupation with few barriers to entry, English clergy could “readily take up medicine,” which was just one element of the burgeoning eighteenth-century market place. “Those entering the madbusiness were drawn from … clergymen, both orthodox and non-conformist, businessmen, widows, surgeons, speculators, and physicians.”

Culture and leisure 1700–1840

This iron age departed, we behold, An age of pleasure, luxury, and gold; No more exist those opposites to Life, A social husband, and domestic wife … Triumphal entries and their dull parades, Are chang’d for Op’ras, Balls and Masquerades; No longer Sunday’s dull employment cloys, For Church we substitute politer joys … thus in mildly satirical vein a poetaster of the 1770s described the smart new cultural world of Georgian Britain. The sense of cultural transformation, of the new sociable importance of women, of new entertainments, of the secularisation of social life, is striking, acute – and exaggerated. As we shall see in this chapter, such changes do figure prominently in the dynamic, and increasingly pluralistic, cultural landscape of British cities during the Georgian era, but they were only part of the painting. In contrast to the earlier period, there can be little question that cities and towns after 1700 became vital centres for cultural mixing and dissemination, affecting not only the elite classes but a good part of national society as well. The leading cities, particularly London and Edinburgh, became cultural bazaars, increasingly cosmopolitan, importing and translating cultural ideas, goods and practices from continental Europe and beyond. Urban communities became exposition centres, exhibiting the fashionable models of cultural activity, whether performances of Handel’s oratorios, meetings of a newly established learned society or the latest taste in furnishings, dress or speech. Yet British cities in the Georgian era were more than sites or stages for cultural exchange: they were also seedbeds of innovation.

The Literacy Campaign in Scotland, 1560–1803

The literacy program that was initiated in Scotland at the time of the Reformation and carried through by legislation in the seventeenth century was the first truly national literacy campaign. Some principalities and city states of Protestant Europe had tried to encourage literacy from the beginning of the sixteenth century. However, these initiatives were small in scale and enjoyed little success compared with the Scottish aim to organize education at a national level. Government intervention helped to realize the aim of a controlled and systematized educational network at a much earlier date than in any other European nation state. This chapter assesses the aims, methods and achievements of the Scottish literacy campaign between the Reformation and the time of the French Revolution. Working side by side, church and state sought to create a national, universal, and religiously oriented educational system centered on a school in every parish.1 Legislation between 1616 and 1696 set up the parochial school system, administered by the church in rural areas and by the secular authorities in the towns. It was designed to be available to all children, however poor their circumstances, and was to be paid for by a levy on the more prosperous inhabitants of particular parishes.

Marriage Formation and Domestic Industry: Occupational Endogamy in Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, 1697-1764

This article on Kilmarnock marriage patterns deals, with levels of occupational endogamy at marriage among different sections of the society of the parish of Kilmarnock in Ayrshire during the eighteenth century. It is aimed at the current debate on the social implications of proto-industrialization, and questions certain assumptions in the theories of Medick and others about the novel importance of joint contributions to family budgets.

Rights and wrongs in the confinement of the mentally incapable in eighteenth-century Scotland

Improper confinement of those alleged to be mentally troubled was a prominent issue for the literate and propertied classes of eighteenth-century England and one which has fascinated historians too. In contrast, Scots did not perceive wrongful incarceration of the mentally disabled to be a serious social or legal issue. This article seeks to explain the differences between Scotland and England by focusing on a case where the care of a mentally troubled person was fought over. The article explores the familial settings and relationships involved in the care of the mad and idiotic and it shows medical and lay understandings of mental incapacity. Finally, it gives insights into the eclectic medical regime used to treat the mentally troubled and into the relationship between law, medicine and society. The argument is that different legal and medical structures meant that Scots were much less exercised about wrongful confinement. The article concludes that respect for the transparency of Scottish courts, for their cheapness and for their relative speed helped prevent the development of any extensive critique of improper confinement in eighteenth-century Scotland. Coupled with this was the relative power of the family compared with that of medical practitioners in Scotland.

Paternalism and deference

‘Shadowy figures’, seemingly unimportant to many areas of the economic lives of late-medieval and early-modern people, lords in fact remained central to social and material existence into the nineteenth century.1 Thanks to the imbalance in wealth and power between lord and tenant, the choice of whether to engage in a dialogue lay more with the former than the latter; a common understanding of the power that landowners had pervades petitions. Yet not all inter-personal obligations were optional and, as individuals or groups, tenants could call on their lord to exercise ‘good lordship’. When pledging to support an aristocrat’s ‘interest’, petitioners placed themselves among his servants, able to claim protection and advancement. The whole idea of lordship remained important and, even within the emerging world of social class that William Cobbett identified, there remained the mutual obligations that he himself advocated.2 Rents may have become largely monetarised and landlords increasingly concerned with getting and spending, but the cash nexus did not necessarily kill the notion that rights entailed responsibilities; it simply changed some of the forms that lordship took. The transition from ‘lordship’ to ‘ownership’, ‘the triumph of the legalist over the traditionalist concept of heritage’, or the replacement in Highland Scotland of duthchas (heritable proprietorship) by oighreachd (heritable title) were all prolonged processes.3