The historiography of welfare in the British Isles has developed rapidly, if unevenly, over the past thirty years. England has been particularly well served by scholars who have not only sought to add to our understanding of the institutional context of welfare but who are increasingly turning their attention to the experiences of the poor themselves at the level of the parish and (for the post-1834 New Poor Law) the union.Footnote 1 As Tim Hitchcock recently suggested, in England “poor law studies,” broadly defined, is at the forefront of a “new history from below.”Footnote 2 Yet despite these advances we are a long way from a realizing a truly British “welfare history” for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Wales, for example, the little work that has been carried out suggests that the universal application of the tenets of the law came very late and that local application of the poor law was often quite distinct from that in England, even though they shared a statutory framework.Footnote 3 But arguably, the greatest gap in scholarship relates to the experiences of the poor in Scotland, something that was recently noted by Rab Houston.Footnote 4 Studies do exist that address the poor law in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scotland, but Scottish welfare historiography has tended to follow a rather descriptive approach concentrating first and foremost on the intentions of legislators and how these were reflected in official discourse between central and local administrators.Footnote 5 In order to address this gap in the historiography, the present article concentrates on evidence from Tongue, a rural parish in the Scottish Highlands.
Because the legislative framework was different in England and Wales as compared to Scotland, it could be argued that any attempt to apply the same, or even broadly similar, historiographical criteria to the two systems is misplaced. Scotland's Old Poor Law was founded on similar principles to that of England and Wales and had similar early modern foundations, but it retained a separate welfare system even after Union in 1707, with no mandatory tax-funded relief until at least 1845.Footnote 6 Even after reform in that year, and unlike the post-1834 situation in England and Wales, the Scottish Poor Law centered on the parish rather than on the larger administrative unit of the union. Moreover, workhouses were initially neither encouraged nor widely adopted in Scotland so that the relief of paupers took place in their own homes.Footnote 7 In this sense, the Scottish New Poor Law after 1845 had more in common with the Old Poor Law in England and Wales than it did with the New.Footnote 8 Yet even this comparison to the English Old Poor Law is misplaced. For example, the lack of workhouse provision in nineteenth-century Scotland was in large part due to what contemporaries saw as the system's enduring success in an area of policy and practice where the English had largely failed under the Old Poor Law. At no point in Scotland was provision made for relieving the able-bodied poor—that is, anyone theoretically capable of maintaining themselves through paid employment—and the orthodox view is that this rule was almost uniformly applied from the sixteenth century to the end of the poor laws in the twentieth.Footnote 9 There is little doubt that, despite similarities, the architecture of the Poor Law in nineteenth-century Scotland was quite different from that in England and Wales.
But these broad-brush distinctions based on national identities are far from the whole story, especially if we shift our focus away from the administrative intention of the law and on to its local application. The central lesson from the burgeoning stock of local studies in England is that, whatever the practical and ideological intentions of legislators and administrators, poor law practice varied widely, not only from region to region but intra-regionally too. If anything, it was this variation that characterized the poor laws in England rather than their administrative uniformity, and much of this has to do with the local environment within which welfare was negotiated.Footnote 10 In contrast, the Scottish poor laws have suffered from a virtual absence of local studies.Footnote 11
Scotland in the nineteenth century was marked by great geographic, economic, and cultural diversity. Clear fault lines existed between the industrial epicenter of greater Glasgow and the rest of the country, and between pastoral and agrarian regions and the growing central urban belt. But the greatest cultural and economic contrast in nineteenth-century Scotland was (as, arguably, it still is today) between the Anglophone Scots-speaking lowlands and the then Gaelic-speaking Highlands. As scholars have long emphasized, the lives of ordinary Highlanders were almost completely hidden from the Anglocentric administrators of public policy in Edinburgh, let alone from lawmakers in London, except insofar as they represented a “problem.”Footnote 12 Clearly, it was optimistic to believe that a single administrative relief structure could serve the needs of the poor across the whole of this complex and highly differentiated landscape. Yet quite how these differences played out in the practice of the poor laws is almost entirely unknown. In this sense, there is a greater urgency for microstudies to enhance our understanding of local welfare practices in Scotland than there is in England or, arguably, even Wales.Footnote 13
Using contemporary accounts, parish records and a particularly fruitful demotic source, pauper letters, we explore the culture of welfare in the parish of Tongue, in the Sutherland Highlands. Valuable in its own right, given the need for detailed microstudies in order to understand the local dimensions of welfare in Scotland, this study also resonates with a much wider agenda. Local studies in outlying locations from around Britain are needed to challenge an ingrained sense of English exceptionalism in terms of the structure and practice of welfare, and to create a unified picture of similarity and difference across the British welfare canvas. Moreover, there is a real sense in which both the structures of welfare and the experience of being poor in Scotland have much in common with wider northern-European welfare regimes, such that any attempt to conceptualize these European systems in a British context demands more research from Scotland.
Most importantly, this article focuses on the experiences of the poor themselves. As English and European welfare historiography move inexorably to a consideration of pauper agency, the nature of rights, entitlements, and obligations, and to understandings of the pauper “voice,” so we bring this agenda to bear on a parish which might be said to epitomize the Highland experience in the nineteenth century. As we make clear in the first section, Tongue was typical of many Highland parishes in a number of crucial ways: it experienced some of the most brutal and highly publicized clearance activity in the early nineteenth century, and its population of crofters (smallholding tenants) and landless poor was forced from the interior of the country onto inadequate plots on the overcrowded coastal fringe. Yet despite the hardships and disruptions they suffered, until the latter part of the century the relationship between paupers and parish officials remained rooted in traditions of deference and a strictly enforced social hierarchy.
The main source for this study is a significant cache of pauper letters, the very discovery of which is a useful corrective to a so-far decidedly Anglocentric reading of such documents.Footnote 14 These letters offer a unique insight into the experience of being poor in a Highland parish under the Scottish New Poor Law; they also shed new light on the process of negotiation for scarce resources between paupers and parish officials. We argue that, notwithstanding the hardships and structural difficulties they faced, when it came to navigating the formal and informal precepts of the Scottish New Poor Law, the parish poor of Tongue were both astute and rhetorically sophisticated. It is clear that they were far from complacent or passive in their appeals for relief and that they fully understood the protocols that were most likely to lead to success. But it is also clear that at the beginning of the new welfare regime they recognized the limits of their entitlement and the interlocking obligations of parishes and paupers, and they adjusted both the vocabulary and the register of their written appeals accordingly. This register changed significantly in the last decades of the century as paupers, along with Highland crofting communities more generally, shed much of their traditional deference and built on a newly emerging rhetoric of entitlement and desert. Our emphasis on this clear chronological periodization in the letters blurs the conventional boundaries that define the development of welfare systems in Scotland, England, and Wales. These boundaries have arisen because of gaps in the comparative literature; there has, after all, been little work on pauper agency under the English and Welsh New Poor Law outside the work of David Green for London.Footnote 15
THE PARISH POOR OF TONGUE IN THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES
The parish of Tongue is situated on the far north coast of the county of Sutherland, in the Scottish Highlands (Figure 1). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it experienced many of the challenges and disruptions endured by highland society more generally during this period. The majority of its population were crofters, smallholders who eked out an inadequate living from parcels of land let to them first by tacksmen (subtenants of the large highland landholders), and later by estate managers (known in Scotland as factors). In the second half of the eighteenth century the population grew by almost a third, leading to the subdivision of already inadequate smallholdings into even smaller units, and most of the population was clustered into small communities by the coast.Footnote 16 The land was poor, the climate intemperate, and as a result scarcity was the norm and near-famine conditions were not uncommon.Footnote 17 In addition, Tongue's poor still suffered the last remnants of feudal obligation, and crofters were required to work for their tacksmen landlords “to the almost utter neglect of their own small farms.”Footnote 18 Being a coastal parish, the population had access to a ready supply of fresh fish and seafood, particularly important during periods of agricultural hardship, and the widespread adoption of potatoes as a staple foodstuff alleviated some of the worst effects of other types of crop failure.Footnote 19 But life was hard for Tongue's poor parishioners at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and it was set to get even harder.
Outline Map of Scotland, with the Parish of Tongue Highlighted.
By the time the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland compiled the second national Statistical Account in the 1840s, the status of Tongue's poor had declined steeply. The population of the parish had risen still further; the herring fisheries (hailed by many as the salvation of Highland coastal communities) had failed along the whole of the northwest coast of Scotland, and sheep farming, the bane of established Highland communities, had been introduced to the parish on a substantial scale.Footnote 20 The introduction of sheep to traditionally farmed land was at the heart of the much-debated clearances of the Scottish Highlands. From the mid-1700s onwards, whole communities were displaced by extensive sheep farms that were often tenanted by farming entrepreneurs with little connection—let alone a sense of obligation—to the indigenous population.Footnote 21 Strathnaver, the historic territory of the clan McKay that includes Tongue parish, witnessed some of the most brutal and notorious evictions of the Highland clearances between 1813 and 1820, sanctioned by the Countess of Sutherland and implemented by Patrick Sellar, her subfactor.Footnote 22 The result of the clearances in Tongue was not so much the emptying of the landscape (so often lamented in Highland culture) as the further concentration on the coastal fringe of still more crofters and their even more marginal counterparts, landless cottagers or “cottars.”
In his account of the parish in 1841, the then minister, the Reverend Hugh McKay MacKenzie, stated that “The general standard [of living] is … wretchedly low. No doubt a few of [the residents] are comfortable, but the generality seldom can rise above the commonest necessaries of life.”Footnote 23 By this point, 244 crofting families had been joined by 116 landless cottars with no other form of subsistence but “the kindness of their neighbours.”Footnote 24 MacKenzie was in no doubt that the distress of the parish poor was due, in large part, to the “victory of the sheep.”Footnote 25
Some [of those evicted] wandered to Caithness, others sought an asylum in the woods of America, but most, clinging with a passion to their native soil, located themselves by permission in hamlets near the shore. In these places the land, already occupied by a few, but now divided among many, was totally inadequate to the maintenance of all …. The consequences were such as might be expected. Poverty soon overtook them, tending to keep alive their lacerated feelings, and rents, which became gradually extravagant, accumulated into a mass of arrears.Footnote 26
Inevitably, many of Tongue's poor sought alms from their neighbors and the community at large. In 1792, the parish poor of Tongue totaled fifty; by 1841, it had risen to seventy.Footnote 27 Given the wretched circumstances of the post-clearance population, this latter figure seems surprisingly low, but these bare statistics are deceptive. In the early 1790s, those described as the “parish poor” were supported by church collections, but also by large private charitable donations.Footnote 28 In 1841, the seventy listed were only those who appeared on the “poor's roll,” the list of those deemed entitled to relief from church collections on a regular basis (what in England were often called “pensioners”). Many more, perhaps even a majority of crofters and cottars, were in receipt of occasional relief in the form of charitable donations.Footnote 29 Even those entitled to regular relief received inadequate resources through voluntary church donations, as MacKenzie freely acknowledged. “There is no duty more unpleasant than that of distributing money to the applicants for relief in Tongue,” he told the 1844 Scottish Inquiry into the Poor Law:
The funds are so limited, and the cases of distress are so urgent and so numerous, that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to deal with the cases with satisfaction … I am intimately acquainted with the distress of the people, and yet I have no money to relieve it adequately.Footnote 30
These welfare structures, funding routes, and contemporary sentiments would not have looked out of place in many continental northern European communities at the same date, and contrast with much of the established historiography of the English and Welsh poor laws, Old or New.Footnote 31
Clearly, pressure to relieve the impoverished post-clearance population in Tongue was great, but so was resistance to address the problem in any more systematic way. Despite the further devastation of a widespread potato famine in the later 1840s, landowners and their representatives in Sutherland remained firmly against any extension or further formalization of poor relief.Footnote 32 In particular, they resisted any relaxation of the principal excluding the able-bodied from the poor's roll, reflecting a wider negative sentiment toward the entitlement of this group, which was common across European welfare regimes.Footnote 33 Evander McIver, the Sutherland estate's factor in the neighboring region of Scourie, spoke for most Highlanders in his position when he stated that the answer to the impoverishment of the crofter class was emigration, and that a formal requirement to relieve the able bodied out of the poor's fund would “annihilate Highland proprietors.”Footnote 34 But by the mid-1840s, even before the potato blight took hold, many others who were directly concerned with the fate of the poor felt that the old methods of collecting and distributing relief—donations in church supplemented arbitrarily by personal charity, allocated piecemeal according to the current state of funds—were inadequate to meet the needs of a growing and increasingly impoverished population, and the urgent situation of Scotland's poor more generally resulted in the Scottish Poor Law Inquiry in 1844.Footnote 35
As a result of this debate new laws were formulated to govern the administration of relief in Scotland. The Poor Law Amendment (Scotland) Act of 1845 made a number of important changes at every level. A national Board of Supervision was established to oversee relief provision throughout Scotland, and parochial boards and paid inspectors were appointed annually for the better management of welfare in individual parishes.Footnote 36 One important result of the establishment of the Board of Supervision was that external pressure was brought to bear on parishes to ensure that levels of relief were adequate, something which in Tongue was clearly not the case before 1845. This in turn increased local pressure to establish viable methods for raising funds for relieving the poor. Under the Old Poor Law, Scottish parishes had always had the option to impose a local tax for the relief of the poor, but unlike in England and Wales few chose to do so.Footnote 37 Following the passing of the 1845 Act, many more Scottish parishes recognized the necessity of levying a local rate for the poor. Nonetheless a discrepancy remained between rural Highland parishes, which generally resisted compulsory assessment for a local “poor rate,” and lowland parishes, which were more likely to adopt it.Footnote 38 It is therefore important—and rather surprising—to note that the Parish Board of Tongue adopted compulsory assessment for the support of the poor at its very first meeting, in November 1845.Footnote 39 There is little in the records to suggest why this decision was taken, but given the strength of feeling exhibited by the Reverend McKay MacKenzie in evidence to the 1844 Inquiry it seems likely that, as minister of the parish, he was instrumental in pressing for a more effective means of financing relief.
This, then, was the background and the context for the administration of poor relief in Tongue after the passing of the Amendment Act in 1845. Real “pinching and suffering” (to borrow Annie Tindley's phrase) was mitigated by a reformed system of relief raised by local taxation on landowners and occupiers of rented property worth more than two pounds (sterling) per annum.Footnote 40 Relief was to be given half in cash, half in oatmeal.Footnote 41 For those who were deemed sufficiently deserving, relief in Tongue was neither especially generous nor particularly parsimonious in comparison to its immediate neighbors.Footnote 42 These observations notwithstanding, and despite a more formal and reliable foundation for financing welfare after 1845, there is no doubt that those who were in the best position to provide assistance—landowners and factors—still resisted the extension of entitlement to any but the most needy and “deserving” cases. Who was entitled to this relief, how they established that entitlement, and how it was experienced under the Scottish New Poor Law are the questions that will be addressed in the remainder of this article. Initially, however, it is important to investigate further the key source for this analysis: the pauper letter.
PAUPER LETTERS AND THE SCOTTISH NEW POOR LAW IN TONGUE
Essentially, pauper letters were produced to solicit aid (in the form of poor relief) in times of particular hardship. They were usually written in the first person, are typically embedded in a range of parish correspondence from and about paupers, and often contain detailed information about the poor who wrote them, or in whose name they were written.Footnote 43 But, as historians have noted, they are far from simply a reflection of the needs of those whose poverty they describe. In the sense that they were produced at the junction between the needs and expectations of paupers and those of the bodies charged with dispensing relief, they also represent a unique lens through which to view local negotiations for scarce resources.Footnote 44 Up to now, scholarly attention has focused on letters from England. In part, this is because those who have used them have tended to assume that they were a particular product of the English settlement laws. Modified regularly between their inception in the 1660s and their effective abolition in the 1860s, these laws established the criteria by which a pauper might claim to belong to a parish or community. A combination of these laws and the wider statute and local law of the English and Welsh Old Poor Law meant that paupers could only apply for relief in their place of settlement, establishing a de facto citizenship and a means for gaining and changing its locus. For those paupers out of their place of settlement at the time they fell into poverty—an increasing number in England and Wales given economic development and associated migration—applying for relief either meant returning home or writing to settlement parishes requesting they be relieved in their parish or community of residence. The consequent “out-parish” system of relief generated extensive numbers of letters from paupers, from advocates of the poor and between officials in host and settlement parishes.Footnote 45
We now know, however, that pauper letters exist not only for England, but for every region of mainland Britain.Footnote 46 Certainly, they are found in greater numbers for some parishes and regions than others; in part, this may reflect local economic conditions and the operation of settlement rules.Footnote 47 Yet large collections of letters have been found in some surprising places. For example, the greatest number of remaining letters so far discovered for a single parish (496) are from Kirkby Lonsdale, a township in the modern county of Cumbria in the far northwest of England which was otherwise one of the most parsimonious and least document-rich regions of the country in terms of poor law documentation.Footnote 48 This suggests that the survival of pauper letters has at least as much to do with the clerical culture of particular parishes and welfare bodies as it does with the social and economic conditions (or the legal framework) that prevailed at the time, and it raises the likelihood that those pauper letters that have been uncovered so far represent only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the total number that were produced historically. Clearly, pauper letters were an important form of appeal across a range of parish and community types, and even national statutory frameworks.
Although we do not yet have a clear picture of the true number of pauper letters remaining in Scottish archives, substantial collections have been found for Kirkudbright and Sanquhar in the south, and for the city of Perth in the central lowlands, and many appear in the substantial collection of applications for relief in the Inspector's Books held at the Mitchell Library, Glasgow.Footnote 49 One of the richest collections of pauper letters for a single location in the whole of Britain comes, perhaps surprisingly, from Tongue. Here, officials kept relief correspondence from the beginning of the New Poor Law in 1845, through to the end of the century.Footnote 50 In all, 165 letters from paupers themselves are contained in a collection of around 290 pieces of correspondence relating directly to the welfare of paupers. The letters in the Tongue collection are concentrated into two main periods, 1846–52 and 1887–99, with a handful of letters dating from 1854, 1863, and 1887. The most likely reason for this chronological concentration is simply that these were the periods when officials were most fastidious in their record keeping. There does not appear to have been a lessening of pauper letters during the earlier period or a gradual increase in the later years that might suggest rising and falling trends in their frequency.
All of the Tongue letters written in the initial decades of the new Scottish poor law, between 1846–52, were from paupers who were resident in the parish. It has already been noted that parish letters in England appear to have been almost exclusively the product of the “out-parish” relief system which developed in the last years of the Old Poor Law.Footnote 51 Clearly, there is a logic to such an arrangement in a rapidly industrializing economy that required a flexible and highly mobile workforce.Footnote 52 However, this is a practice that is unlikely to have been tolerated in an environment where the able-bodied—those most likely to claim temporary relief and to remain at a distance to take advantage of enhanced employment opportunities—were disqualified from claiming relief in the first place, and there is little evidence so far that it was a common practice in Scotland for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote 53 On the other hand, it is unsurprising to find that paupers or applicants for relief wrote to the parish authorities from within Tongue given that the parish comprised approximately 140 square miles of rough terrain with less than forty miles of road or track in total in 1841.Footnote 54 Maintaining regular face-to-face contact with the inspector or members of the Parish Board would have been extremely difficult, especially as most paupers were elderly, infirm, or otherwise impotent. Yet if considerations of distance and terrain are a proximate explanation for both the number and locus of the Tongue letters, they do not offer a sufficient explanation in themselves. Many northern English, Cornish, Welsh, and Welsh border parishes were extremely large and could boast equally difficult terrain and poor transport links, but there is little evidence of letters written to officials or ratepayers from within these places. On the other hand, the practice of pauper applicants from within the parish addressing their appeals to the Board in writing has very considerable resonance with wider continental approaches to establishing entitlement. German paupers in particular seem to have used written appeals to officials and others they felt could help their cause even if they lived in the same street or district.Footnote 55
A consideration of the rhetorical form of the Tongue letters and the nature of the parochial social order which informed their authors is revealing. The most striking aspect is that 134 out of a total of 165 letters from paupers (or 81 percent) were written in the form of petitions, the most formal variant of written appeals by paupers and one which, though rare in English collections, was the dominant form in Northern Europe until at least the 1860s (figure 2). In fact, 133 out of 139 letters written by paupers between 1845 and 1847 took the form of petitions. The shift away from the petitionary form later in the century is something we discuss in detail below, but its predominance in the period between the 1840s and 1860s is important. Thomas Sokoll describes the petition as “a written plea for assistance addressed to a higher authority,” which obeys “strict formal rules” and is essentially “an act of rhetorical subjection in writing.”Footnote 56 However, as Sokoll also points out, very few English pauper letters were constructed as formal petitions.Footnote 57
Petition to Tongue Parochial Board by Effemy McKay, 1848 (GB0232/R31/1/1, image courtesy of Highland Archive Centre, Inverness).
The preponderance of petitions for relief in Tongue in the first half of the nineteenth century appears to confirm that the relief relationship between paupers and parish authorities was far more formal than it was in England and Wales at the time. It also suggests that what many have identified as a culture of “residual deference” among the Highland poor in the nineteenth century toward landlords and their representatives is closely reflected in the relief relationship.Footnote 58 It has been argued that this attitude was a hangover from traditional clan loyalties which, though perhaps misplaced in an age of widespread clearance and rampant economic and agrarian rationalism, was nonetheless deeply rooted, culturally entrenched and remarkably long lasting.Footnote 59 Rab Houston recently noted that until at least the middle of the nineteenth century, appeals from tenants to the landowners and managers on the Breadalbane estate in north Perthshire were also written almost exclusively in the form of highly stylized petitions.Footnote 60 This again invites direct comparison with continental Europe.Footnote 61 The German experience cannot be explained by clan loyalties, but the shared form of appeal points to an ingrained sense among many of the European poor that they did not have rights to relief, that local elites had an expectation that formal support would be residual, and that law and welfare practice was contestable only at the margins. The contrast with English paupers of the same period, who expected to contest welfare and for whom statute law and local practice were always fluid, is clear.
A consideration of the relationship between pauper letters and official decisions allows us to elaborate this argument further. The Parochial Board in early nineteenth-century Tongue was a place where parochial business and the priorities of the Sutherland estate inevitably came together. One of the most influential members of the new board in 1845 was the local factor, Robert Horsburgh. He and the minister, the Reverend McKay McKenzie, appointed the first inspector of the poor, constituted between them the Cash Committee to oversee all financial affairs, and decided upon admissions to the poor's roll.Footnote 62 As Annie Tindley recently pointed out, it was the factor who bore almost total responsibility for the welfare of tenants, large and small, on Ducal lands; as the subsistence crisis deepened from the 1840s onward, factors were brought into ever more frequent contact with their tenants, whose worsening fate became a major preoccupation.Footnote 63 But Tindley also demonstrates that factors were, on the whole, kept aloof from their charges, both by their excellent salaries and employment benefits, and by a conscious decision to employ men from outside the area in order to forestall undue influence and familiarity between themselves and their tenants.Footnote 64 The Tongue letters confirm Tindley's conclusions in this regard. The social and economic distance between those in authority in Highland parishes and small tenants is also likely to have been exacerbated by the erosion and, finally, the loss (with clearance and resettlement) of older community structures, which inevitably had far-reaching consequences for the treatment of the poor.
Another important consideration is that none of the Tongue letters was written by able-bodied paupers.Footnote 65 Even in the case of the very few letters that were obviously from the heads of nuclear households (that is, households containing parent[s] and children) applicants were anxious to emphasize either their total incapacity for work or some other misfortune which rendered some or all of them impotent: George MacKay wrote that “in consequence of the Petitioners [sic] state of health, his weak numerous family, consisting of eight persons … the age of his children, [and] his other destitution and helplessness,” he required an addition to his monthly allowance; John Munro applied for assistance, not because of destitution alone (he being able bodied) but because of the plight of his son who “at the age of Twenty years … are clean destitute of his rational sences;” and Charles McKay, after mentioning his own unemployment, went on to state “that his eldest child … a girl of 8 years of age is a helpless object dumb and unable either to walk or stand on her feet.”Footnote 66 It is clear that petitioning paupers were aware that their appeal was unlikely to succeed if unemployment was used as the sole point of leverage.
If the pauper petitioners of Tongue were rarely, if ever, the unemployed or able-bodied poor, then who was applying for relief using this method? Predictably, the great majority of petitioners were the aged, the widowed, those who were burdened by severe sickness or disability, or those who had a family member who was so burdened. Unsurprisingly, the needs represented in the letters do not fall quite so easily into one or other of these categories, and the same letter may contain complaints of one or several of these conditions. Nonetheless, the status of pauper letter writers in Tongue does reflect in just about every case this narrow range of misfortunes. In terms of those letters that seek to establish explicit or implicit grounds for deservingness, only sixty-five (or 39 percent) actually point directly towards age as a reason for making the application. In many others (eighty-five letters, or 51 percent of the total) the attendant condition of “infirmity” or “incapacity” (very likely the result of advancing years) is at the heart of the appeal. This makes good strategic sense: even when an applicant was of an advanced age, the Tongue Board was keen to establish whether or not they were in a position to make shift for themselves in any way at all. Descriptions of those in their sixties and even seventies on the poor's roll often list their trade or occupation, give details of what they can do (“can knit a little,” “can knit and spin”), or categorize them as only “partially disabled” from working.Footnote 67
Other explicit reasons for seeking admission to the poor's roll—or for an increase of existing relief—include disability, temporary or permanent sickness, the presence of an “idiot” child or relative, and loss of land or stock. All but the last of these reasons will be very familiar to those working on pauper letters from England. Despite the very different linguistic registers used by paupers in the two countries, there is no doubt that these categories of misfortune were shared as some of the most fundamental markers for establishing deservingness. Yet given the formality of applications from mid-nineteenth-century Tongue when compared to those made in early nineteenth-century England, it is possible to suggest that applications founded on sickness, old age, and disability were framed quite differently and carried very different meanings under the two regimes. In England, until at least the advent of the New Poor Law, paupers had a clear sense that such categories of need conferred an almost unanswerable entitlement to relief, and parishes found it difficult to counter these expectations given the potent mix of customary precedent and legal obligation which surrounded the implementation of relief at the local level.Footnote 68 In Tongue, however, there is very little sense in the early years of the Scottish New Poor Law that incapacity or infirmity in themselves conferred an automatic entitlement to relief, even when they had been clearly established. Such petitions were most commonly made on the basis that “it [would] indeed be an act of charity” for the board to consider them, or in the hope that a pauper's case may “be taken into consideration” or that the board will simply “look into” their case.Footnote 69
The conditions and experiences of infirmity or incapacity might be ubiquitous in pauper appeals, but the loss of land or stock spoke directly to local conditions in the Scottish Highlands. In all, the loss of land or stock is mentioned in twenty-seven letters (or 16 percent of the total) and frequently (more often than not) it occurs in letters from the aged or otherwise infirm. It is rarely advanced as a primary means of establishing deservingness but is often mentioned in passing, as though to emphasize that this particular means of making shift is no longer available. So, for example, Bell Reid first states of herself, that she is “a sickly woman not able to support herself by her labour,” but then goes on to write that “she is quite out of stock (save a two year old Heifer, which she is to sell for the purpose of cleansing herself out of debt),” and is “now deprived of the small Lot of land she formerly occupied, [which was] her only support.”Footnote 70 Land occupation was the primary means by which individuals, families, and communities would have been expected to subsist in the Highlands in the nineteenth century and beyond.Footnote 71 The clearances challenged this basic fact of Highland life by replacing the traditional clan-based systems of apportioning land with crofting.Footnote 72 But, as the Tongue letters demonstrate, they did not fundamentally alter it. New applicants for relief, as well as those who sought an increase to their existing levels, were anxious to emphasize that they had lost the land they had been allotted or that the land they retained was inadequate for subsistence.
On the one hand, we know that the allocation of land to crofters in Sutherland was intentionally inadequate for subsistence in order to encourage them to seek alternative employment. On the other, it was the failure of such alternatives to absorb the excess population which compounded the problem of “poor land [and] small plots.”Footnote 73 This paradox is at the heart of Hunter's seminal work on crofting communities. In particular, he quotes critics of the Strathnaver clearances, where tenants were “thickly settled along the sea coast of the parish, in some instances about 30 lotters occupying the land formerly in the possession of 12,” and around the Kyle of Tongue, where land which had been “occupied by a few” was “divided among many,” making it “totally inadequate for the maintenance of all.”Footnote 74 Yet evidence from the parish records makes it abundantly clear that the poor were still expected to remain largely independent of relief as long as they had access to any land at all. The minutes of the Parochial Board in the 1840s and 1850s frequently recorded the refusal of applications on the grounds that an individual “has land,” or even that a close family member had land and was therefore bound to support them. Alexander Campbell of Braekirkiboll, was “Rejected, being able to work and his father [a] tenant of a good lot of land,” and William McKay's mother was similarly rejected because the “son with whom she lives [occupies] land & [is therefore] bound to support her.”Footnote 75 The continuing assumption that access to land, however inadequate, should equate to subsistence illustrates the “double-bind” in which the Highland poor found themselves after the clearances. Furthermore, without the support offered by an extended social network such land was effectively useless if poor crofters were unable to work it for themselves.
While the clearances may not have been the only reason for the impoverishment of the Highland poor, they were undoubtedly instrumental in loosening the ties of kinship and obligation among displaced communities. Traditionally, close-knit Highland communities had cared for their own, as Hunter points out, not “as a beggar, but as someone ag iarraidh a'chodach, seeking or asking his portion” of the common weal.Footnote 76 In the post-clearance Highlands, even if close neighbors and the wider community were minded to provide assistance, it is unlikely they would have been able to do so. George MacKay and his wife were close to starvation, having had “no food whatever for some days except what they were getting from the neighbours,” despite the fact that they were already receiving a (clearly inadequate) allowance from the parish; and the friends of Mary McKay of Clashaidy wrote that “she is absolutely dependent upon the kindness of her neighbours for what keeps herself and 5 children from utter starvation” but also emphasized that this was now totally inadequate for their support.Footnote 77
Unfortunately, those in authority continued to insist on the obligations of kith and kin as a means of limiting relief and to “sentimentalise aspects of the familial relationship” that were assumed to keep the poor from needing relief in the first place.Footnote 78 For the likes of Christy McKay Down—destitute and blind, and whose daughter had “left for service and cannot attend upon her”—and widow Cathrine McKinzie, seventy-two years of age, who “lives separate from her sons who have families of their own and have enough to do to support them,” such sentimentalism was meaningless.Footnote 79 By the late 1840s it was clear that the largesse of friends and neighbors could no longer be relied upon, something of which Catharine McKay was keenly aware:
[T]he Petitioner is 80 years old; that she is much troubled with the rhumatism and is on that account unable to work or to provide anything for herself—That she has no means and is a burden upon her neighbours—Her husband John McKay alias Downes is receiving 3/- per month which is too little for a man of his age who is upwards of 70 years old—They are both old and are unable to work and are supported by the public—But the people are getting so poor now that they are unable to give to poor people.Footnote 80
PAUPER LETTERS AND CHANGING PARISH RELATIONS IN THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY
The previous section demonstrated that pauper letters can be of great use in illuminating aspects of the relief relationship, particularly in poorly documented regions such as the Highlands of Scotland, where that relationship has yet to be explored through other means. Nonetheless, the content of pauper letters and petitions is rarely, if ever, a straightforward description of the needs of the applicant or of the expectations of the poor law authorities. Peter Jones has noted in an English context that “that the poor were highly self-conscious and discriminating in their requests … filtering their material and practical needs through a fine rhetorical mesh so that such requests to a greater or lesser extent fulfilled, or corresponded to, the expectations” of parish authorities.Footnote 81 Notwithstanding the very different cultural and legal context, evidence for the same kind of “filtering” can be found in the Tongue letters.
Applicants were keen to emphasize those aspects of their hardship that were likely to be considered favorably, such as the loss of or lack of access to land, advanced age and infirmity, and a lack of family or “friends” who might support them; and they were just as keen to downplay those aspects which would disqualify them (access to land if they had it, family or community support, and, above all, fitness for work). However, the Tongue letters also demonstrate some of the more subtle rhetorical devices and strategies found in pauper letters elsewhere. These include the culturally-charged motif of nakedness and lack of clothing in phrases such as “the Petitioner has neither night or day clothing” and “the small sum she is getting it will hardly put on her a pair of shoes … and she is as needfull of clothing and bedcloth as that.”Footnote 82 Paupers also demonstrated a keen understanding of the law as it related to relief when they wrote that a successful application would “render an appeal to the Central Board unnecessary,” or “I pray the Board … will be Pleased to provide me with such things as are alowed [sic] by acts of Victoria + Chapt. 83 Page 79.”Footnote 83 The most pervasive device of all in pauper letters across the board was the threat to leave the object of an application entirely in the board's care, and this is also prominent in the Tongue letters.Footnote 84 Despite the fact that almost all of these early letters to the Parish Board were constructed as formal petitions, in the first decade after the Scottish New Poor Law the Tongue poor appear to have been as rhetorically sophisticated as their English counterparts despite the fact that they wrote within the confines of a more rigid supplicatory form.
Nonetheless, the petition is undoubtedly limited in terms of the scope it affords for the expression of grievance and, in particular, for the development of reciprocity. It necessarily conforms to an inflexible formula that emphasizes the humility of the appellant and the generosity of those to whom the appeal is made.Footnote 85 As a result, the overall tone of these petitions is one of subjection and, notwithstanding the subtle threat to leave the fate of the appellant entirely to the parish, only very rarely does a note of assertion, let alone one of outright defiance, creep in. Widow Gunn's closing salvo—that “I am destitute enough as to meat & clothing, and other necessaries of life [and] therefore Expect that the present allowance may be continued”—is especially notable (and unusual) for its commanding tone.Footnote 86 Importantly, her appeal is one of only five examples from the earlier period which appear in the form of a familiar letter rather than a petition. In the early Tongue petitions the sense of entitlement, and sometimes even open defiance that characterized late–Old Poor Law letters in England is generally absent.
By the late 1880s, however, paupers in Tongue had abandoned the petition as a supplicatory form and almost all written appeals for relief thereafter took the form of familiar letters. Consistent with Widow Gunn's early example, many of these letters were familiar to the point of being perfunctory. William MacKay, for example, wrote that “I am very ill after the influenza and Dr. MacDonald told me that medicine would not do me any good that I would need nourishment and I have no means to get it,” and he signed off his letter with a curt, “we are all unwell and you can place it before the ‘Board.’”Footnote 87 The widow of George Sinclair wrote simply, “Dear Sir, Would you please give me 3 ½ yards of Flannel also a pair of Boots no.9 I shall feel obliged if I get the above before the cold weather comes on.”Footnote 88 Betsy MacKay, having expressed the hope that “you will be as good as supple [sic] me with warm clothing for the winter,” closed her letter, “with great Confidence that you will discuss the matter and allow me some-thing.”Footnote 89
All of these letters date from the 1890s, and the shift in both their form and content is striking: within forty years of the passing of the New Poor Law the deference and supplication that characterized the early petitions had disappeared, to be replaced by a clear sense of entitlement and an expectation that these appeals would be favorably heard. In the narrow context of parish relations, it is possible that this shift had something to do with the extensive charitable response in the Highlands to the famine of the late 1840s, which was extended to all those affected whether impotent or able bodied. Certainly, Sir John McNeill blamed this response for encouraging the poor to develop “exaggerated notions … of the extent of [their] rights” to relief.Footnote 90 It is also possible that it was influenced by a series of mid-century scandals in the Highlands, which widened public awareness of the often brutal treatment of crofters by parochial officers.Footnote 91 But the scale of the shift in the tone and texture of these letters can only truly be understood in the context of the fundamental shifts in social relations which took place more widely in the Highlands during this period.
We noted above that historians have highlighted the deferential nature of crofters in the early nineteenth century and their reluctance to protest openly against the hardships they suffered at the hands of landowners and estate managers. The famine years of the 1840s and 1850s dealt a further blow to already demoralized and unstable crofting communities in Sutherland, so that there was neither widespread appetite nor cultural precedent for an assertion of “rights” among Tongue's poor residents at this time.Footnote 92 The 1860s and 1870s were, to an extent, years of recovery for the Scottish Highlands, and though they were still subject to the social and economic inadequacies of post-clearance conditions, “in comparison to what had gone before and with what was to follow [it was] a prosperous period.”Footnote 93 But a combination of poor harvests and the collapse of wool prices led to “a decade of severe, occasionally chronic, agricultural depression.”Footnote 94 Crucially, however, the Scottish Highlands in the 1880s was a very different place to that of 1840s or 1850s, and its relationship with the world beyond its borders had changed, too. On the one hand, crofters themselves were more aware than ever before of similar battles to their own which were being played out, for example, in Ireland. On the other, those from further afield who were engaged in agitation for reform (either of land tenure or social reform more generally) had begun to take a keen interest in the Highlands as a potential battleground in the fight for improvement.Footnote 95 Finally, there was a concerted effort among radical opinion formers to raise the profile of the crofters' plight, most notably in the press.Footnote 96
The results of this combined agitation led to the formation of the Highland Land Law Reform Association (later more familiar as the Highland Land League) and to the creation of the Napier Commission, which sat to consider both the plight and the growing demands of crofters as a body.Footnote 97 By the late 1870s crofters had begun to find a voice of their own, and by the early 1880s they were protesting openly and with increasing vigor for a raft of reforms, including security of tenure, reasonable treatment by landlords, and land reform in the shape of larger holdings. The Crofters' Holdings (Scotland) Act of 1886, though largely silent on the subject of land reform, addressed the first two concerns directly; it guaranteed security of tenure and the right to bequeath a holding to a family member, and established a land court to oversee and administer the Act and to fix fair rents.Footnote 98
Agitation did not end with the 1886 Act, but it is clear that crofters and the Highland poor more generally had by then moved some distance from the overarching influence of landlords and their once all-powerful estate managers. It is to this, more than to any other single factor, that we must attribute the dramatic shift in tone of the pauper letters from Tongue. Hugh MacKay did not so much request the Parochial Board's assistance as demand it when he wrote that, “my house is in a very bad condition and some thing will have to be done about it.” Robert McLeod was even more forthright when explaining that he could get no-one to carry his fuel for him: “I did offer them 3d. a day but could get no one. So you must look into it.”Footnote 99 When James McKay wrote that he could no longer support his elderly father, despite having a croft of his own, there was no hint of resignation or apology. Instead, his message was clear and unambiguous: “I am unable to support him any further, and if the Board refuses to give him some aid they are to be held responsible for the consequence.”Footnote 100 Far from the supplicatory and apologetic tone of petitions sent in the 1840s and 50s, these letters demonstrate a keen sense of entitlement and a belief that the welfare of the Highland poor was not merely their own affair or that of their immediate kith and kin, but was a matter of civic duty on the part of the parish as a whole. It is true that this new linguistic register of entitlement, civic obligation, and defiance was still written largely by, or on behalf of, those who were no longer able to support themselves, either by farming the land or any other means. In common with most Highland parishes—indeed, most Scottish parishes overall—it remained common practice in Tongue to relieve only those who were unable to make shift for themselves.Footnote 101 Nonetheless, it was a register that echoed the newly assertive tone of crofting communities more widely, not least in the evidence they gave to the 1883 Crofters' Commission.Footnote 102 Crofters used their newfound voice to good effect over the next twenty years, ratcheting up the pressure on landlords, not only for fairer treatment as tenants, but for a complete overhaul of the nature of land settlement in the Highlands.Footnote 103 Highland paupers, on the other hand, were less successful in their demands for relief. It is an unhappy irony that this appears, in large part, to have been due to the very success of the wider campaign for land reform. One of the results of escalating agitation was that rents often went deliberately unpaid and this, in turn, led to the non-payment of rates—including poor rates—by landlords and other occupiers.Footnote 104 By the late 1880s, the Board of Supervision in Edinburgh was in no doubt that, as a consequence, there had been a “collapse of the whole system of administering relief to the poor in [the] Highland districts.”Footnote 105 Certainly, the finances of the Parish Council of Tongue were in a permanent state of crisis by the end of the century, and the pursuit of ratepayers for nonpayment was a routine aspect of parish business.Footnote 106
In other words, despite the altered tone of the later Tongue letters, paupers appear to have fared little better in material terms in the last years of the nineteenth century than they had in the 1840s and 1850s.Footnote 107 Despite the unambiguous demands of the elderly and impotent for assistance, Tongue remained a poor parish packed with struggling crofters and impoverished cottars, and by now another crisis in funding (albeit for very different reasons) had taken hold. Indeed, it was almost certainly a recognition that growing need was outstripped by available resources, rather than any great reforming zeal, that led the Parish Council into an unlikely alliance with crofters who were demanding land reform; for in its minutes for 28 February 1899, it recorded,
Knowing that applications are being made by crofters and cottars in this parish to His Grace the Duke of Sutherland to form in conjunction with the Congested Districts Board and the Crofters Commission into fairly sized Holdings to suitable tenants that part of Strathnaver at present out of lease, the Council in view of the congested state of the parish agrees to support the applications for such an arrangement or any other that may be found better.Footnote 108
Echoing earlier sentiments, the parish authorities once again emphasized a belief that access to land was the best route, if not to prosperity in the Highlands, then at least to a subsistence living. But in contrast to the early years of the Scottish New Poor Law, they were now forced to recognize that existing allotments were inadequate to keep even the most deserving crofters off the poor's roll, and that the continued denial of adequate provision for even the most industrious crofters was detrimental to the fate of Tongue's poor overall.
CONCLUSION
The Tongue letters illustrate a number of interlocking themes that in some ways reinforce, and in other ways challenge, our view of how the New Poor Law operated in Scotland after 1845. On the one hand, they seem to confirm the view of contemporaries and historians that the authorities in Scotland were unwilling to subsidize those who, they believed, should be able and willing to look after themselves. Nowhere was this more marked than in the Sutherland Highlands, where crofting communities were deliberately engineered in the first half of the nineteenth century so as to be independent within a mixed economy of smallholding and industrial endeavor. On the other hand, these letters indicate that those who were considered eligible for consideration under the new laws were far from passive, and were able to navigate both the statutory rules and the customary expectations governing entitlement to relief with some success, even in the early days. Overall, it seems that they were rhetorically sophisticated, albeit within a constrained and hierarchical welfare tradition. This indicates that paupers in the far north of Scotland in the 1840s and 1850s did have limited influence over negotiations for relief, rather than simply being the victims of administrative procedure or authoritarian (Presbyterian) dogma. Nonetheless, the relationships between paupers and parish officials in Tongue immediately after the implementation of the Scottish New Poor Law mirrored wider social relations on the Sutherland estate in that they were defined by strict formality and rigid social boundaries which precluded any close familiarity.
By the end of the century, the epistolary relationship between paupers and the parochial authorities in Tongue had changed dramatically. The deference and stiff formality of earlier appeals all but disappeared, to be replaced by assertion, familiarity, and a clear sense of entitlement. This is forcefully illustrated in the shift away from the rigid supplicatory form of the petition and towards the less formal, more flexible familiar letter. To a large extent, this rhetorical relaxation mirrored the erosion of deference elsewhere in crofting communities; it was almost certainly related to the growth and success of crofters' movements for reform from the 1870s onwards. In the 1880s and 1890s, paupers expected their voices to be both listened and attended to, and they conveyed a sense of entitlement and expectation in their written appeals. Despite the newly assertive tone of the letters, however, neither paupers nor parochial authorities appear to have subscribed at any point to the belief that the customary principles governing who should and should not be entitled to relief should be relaxed.
Parish officers, on the other hand, were constrained both by custom, and a lack of adequate resources in their response to paupers' appeals for relief. There is little in the written records of the Parish Council to suggest how the changing tone of the letters was received by its officers, but there is no doubt that they were frustrated by their inability to provide further funds for the poor, largely because of the recalcitrance of wealthier ratepayers to fulfil their pecuniary obligations.Footnote 109 The parish's support for crofters who campaigned for more adequate landholdings from the Duke of Sutherland can therefore be read in a number of ways. It could be that it was largely expedient, a recognition that a crofting community with sufficient land could reduce pauperism by adequately supporting its own aged and infirm members. It might be that it was a mark of frustration with landowners and others who hampered its work by inadequately attending to their duties as ratepayers. It may even be that those who now constituted the Parish Council felt a degree of sympathy with crofters and cottars who, despite fifty years of promises following the bleakest days of clearance and famine, still faced hardship and penury without adequate support from their wealthy neighbors. The most likely explanation is a combination of all three. Much more work needs to be done on other parishes in Sutherland and across the Highlands to determine whether these conclusions hold true across time and space; but the very fact that written appeals for relief in Tongue appear to have shifted so quickly, between 1845 and 1900, from supplication by petition to assertive demand by familiar letter, suggests that, whatever the end result, those negotiations were far from one-sided.
