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LOVE, CARE AND THE ILLEGITIMATE CHILD IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SCOTLAND

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2019

Katie Barclay
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Abstract

This article uses a combination of court and Kirk (Church of Scotland) session records, and several sets of letters written by the mothers of illegitimate children to explore how such children were loved and cared for in eighteenth-century Scotland. It argues that legitimacy, as well as class and gender, mattered in the love and care that children received. Illegitimacy also had an impact on who mothered, fracturing the bond between the biological mother and child, for a mothering given by other mothers, including wet-nurses, grandparents and, later, employers. Its conclusion is that how a child was mothered, the love and care they received, were products of a child's positioning – gender, class, legitimacy, parentage – in the world. Love was a social product, framed and shaped by and through the social, economic and legal networks in which the child was positioned. Whilst the legitimate child, both in law and social practice, might have expected its care to be framed primarily through the nuclear family, the bastard child belonged, as the law suggested, to the community, requiring its mothering to be dispersed.

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Research Article
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Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 29 , December 2019, pp. 105 - 125
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2019 

In 1742, George Innes was thirty-nine and still unmarried when Elizabeth Graham became pregnant.Footnote 1 George was the son of an Aberdeenshire merchant, and part of a rapidly upwardly mobile family. He would eventually rise to the position of cashier in the Royal Bank of Scotland and purchase a local estate. Elizabeth was a maid within the household of Lady Whiteford of Blairquahan when she met George, at that time a clerk for Allan Whiteford, Lady Whiteford's brother-in-law. Elizabeth was the daughter of William Graham, a schoolmaster in Ratho, a small village west of Edinburgh. She was likely around twenty-eight years old, and clearly expected George to marry her.Footnote 2 Her pregnancy was made public when the Reverend David Fordyce joked about it over dinner one evening, and it was overheard by the footman and circulated downstairs.Footnote 3 She was dismissed from her job; George apologised to his employer and offered to resign, but was forgiven. A daughter was born in September 1742 and named Jean, probably after George's mother.

Unfortunately, for Elizabeth, she was not the only woman George impregnated that year. Another mistress, with the surname Hamilton, gave birth to a daughter who was named George. George senior had a healthy fear of his own father's wrath and, recognising that he would ‘urge’ marriage, immediately proposed to a third woman whose family could more readily enable his ambition of social mobility, and they married in November. Elizabeth was angry, as were her parents. However, it was too late. George continued to support Elizabeth Graham and both his illegitimate children, as well as the five children he had with his wife. Elizabeth initially moved into the countryside outside Edinburgh to give birth and lived there in the succeeding months whilst her daughter was sent out to nurse. She spent her time avoiding questions about whether she was married; visiting her child; and taking in laundry for work, including George's, which supplemented her allowance.

In August 1743, when Jean was almost a year old, she was reintroduced into her mother's house over several weeks, an experience that was not without difficulty. ‘Your daughter came to me Tuesday Last,’ Elizabeth wrote to George. ‘I belive she will break her heart and mine both before that time for she niver gos to bed nor creddel with out alarming the wholl nightbours in the Land with Craying and sobbing that I think her heart shall burst for want of her nurse.’Footnote 4 Despite this, when Jean returned to her nurse, Elizabeth found that: ‘I think my self much Lonlyer since she is gone then I was before she came being used with her these 2–3 days and she beginning to know me I desin if you please to see her again the end of this week in her owne quarters that her aquentances and mine may not wier out again.’Footnote 5 In October 1743, Elizabeth and Jean moved to her parents’ home in Ratho and Elizabeth actively sought a position in service.

In 1747, Elizabeth Graham died whilst still living in Ratho. Jean's care and education was supervised by her maternal uncle John and her grandfather William. In 1754, her writing was poor, but she had a genius for arithmetic and was learning Latin. She also attended a sewing school, before being apprenticed for three years as a mantua-maker in 1755, when she was thirteen. Jean died in January 1762 in her uncle's house at age twenty, after an illness of several months. Her step-sibling George, known as Joan, had died of consumption in 1752 at her mother's home in Edinburgh at age eight. We know less about her, but that she was ‘comely lookt, genteel of station’ with bad eyes and loved ‘truth & her books, had no bad habits ever I heard of & many of her expression might have well become more advanced years’.Footnote 6

Jean and Joan were relatively fortunate illegitimate children. They had a father, who does not appear to have seen them regularly, but who consistently financially provided during childhood. His provisioning purchased Jean a high-quality wet-nurse that ensured she survived her infancy; it paid for an education that included instruction in Latin, despite her gender, and an apprenticeship as a mantua-maker, a training that marked her status as a daughter of the Scottish gentry.Footnote 7 Importantly, her maternal family's decision to provide this education was not simply about economics. She was raised and personally educated by her grandfather and uncle, who were the local schoolmasters, and they could have provided this education without an external income – yet they had not done so for her mother. Rather, the desire to educate her as a member of her father's class and, in doing so, mark her of that social group, informed their decision-making around her education. They took pride in this act of care, reporting their actions and her successes to her father. It could be argued that it was an act of care that evidenced their love for her. That this family chose to claim this status for this illegitimate child, despite the impact of her birth on the reputation of her mother, their sister and daughter, is suggestive of an affective commitment to her success that could be described as love.

Questions of love also arise in her other caring relationships. Jean spent the first year of her life with another mother, who fed and parented her – a mother whom she was distressed to leave when reintegrated into her biological mother's home. This was a woman for whom there is no record of a continuing relationship in later years, although this was possible in some families.Footnote 8 As a teenager, she was also parented by the woman who gave her a trade, moving into a new household for this stage of her life.Footnote 9 Had Elizabeth Graham found employment after her pregnancy, as was typical, Jean might have had limited access to her biological mother across her life. As it was, her mother died. Was Jean loved in these relationships or only cared for, and whose experience matters here – a toddler's distress may evidence its love for a caring nurse but does it also suggest that the nurse loved in return?

Jean's story is an account that raises questions about the relationship between practices of caring and those of love. When does economic provision or the intimate labours of child-rearing become love? When does caring for become caring about? as the feminist philosopher Nel Noddings famously asked.Footnote 10 For the historian, these questions are inflected through a new history of emotions that highlights the historical contingency of ideas about what love is, how it is practised and how it is related to concepts of care.Footnote 11 This article uses a case study of how illegitimate children were cared for in eighteenth-century Scotland to explore how practices of love and care were inflected by their social status. Many accounts of love in the historiography have interpreted it as something that was applied or not, that was found or absent. Thus, the mother that abandoned her child but enquired into its health has been viewed as ‘loving’, and those that have walked away were not. Yet, perhaps it might be more fruitful to think of love as something offered in degrees, as a social and cultural practice that was highly contextual and situational, and that its situatedness meant that the experience of love could vary enormously across individuals, shaped by their social, cultural and temporal positioning.

Maternal love has not been ignored by historians. If early social historians argued that maternal love was a product of modernity, enabled by material conditions, a reduced child mortality rate and a softening of attitudes towards ‘bastard-bearers’, others have countered with a long history of evidences of parental affection towards children.Footnote 12 A more recent historiography has sought to complicate maternal love, evidencing its different forms at particular moments. Joanne Begiato has highlighted how the cult of sensibility worked to romanticise the parent–child bond, informing social practice.Footnote 13 I and others have highlighted the significance across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of the concept of ‘natural affection’, parental love as an innate human instinct, but one that was practised as a form of duty displayed in provisioning, education and physical care of the child.Footnote 14 As Emma Griffin recently highlighted in her work on Victorian motherhood however, women conforming to gendered expectations of material care for children were not always seen as loving by children, within a context where ideas about loving behaviour were rapidly changing.Footnote 15 The relationship between love and care thus not only evolves over time and place, but across generations, something particularly critical for histories of the parent–child relationship. It can also extend beyond the mother into other relationships, as Jean's experience suggests. Several historians in recent years, typically informed by gender and feminist theory, have directed us to the love offered by fathers and wider society, as methods of decentring the mother in caring practices.Footnote 16 This work has highlighted the significance of the shared and ‘social’ parenting offered by both parents, wider kin, servants and broader society.

Such dispersed parenting was particularly significant for illegitimate and poor children, due to their social and economic precariousness. The experience of love and care in many cultures was shaped by social group. As Kate Gibson has also shown for England, the care received by illegitimate children with at least one middle- or upper-class parent was often of a higher quality – better clothing, food, standard of education – than that of the poor. Yet, such care was often still differentiated from that of their legitimate siblings, who may have received more investment in their upbringing again, as well as being more likely to be raised by their own parents.Footnote 17 More widely, child-rearing practices have been shaped by gender, class and race. That the child of the same man might end up in slavery or of high status, depending on the position of their mother, has drawn attention to how experiences of childhood are inflected by the circumstances of birth.Footnote 18 Individual experiences also mattered. Some parents had ‘favourites’, something associated with sons in the early modern period and daughters in the nineteenth century; conversely, others subjected a particular child to abuse.Footnote 19 Yet, if we recognise that how children were cared for is shaped by their circumstances, how that relates to caring about has been less interrogated. That love itself might take different forms for particular categories of children has received little attention from historians, particularly given an earlier historiography that sought to calculate the economic value of parental investments in children in the early modern period.Footnote 20

This is not to say there is not a historiography of love and the illegitimate child. Indeed, love overshadows the three key historiographies that surround such children in this period. The first is that of the infanticidal mother – the woman driven by shame, and by a desire to protect her reputation, to kill.Footnote 21 If this mother loved her child, it was perhaps a love stifled by the humiliation and risk associated with the loss of sexual reputation. As Garthine Walker suggests, it might nonetheless be a love hinted at in the care offered to the deceased child, its burial in places of personal or cultural significance, in statements of contrition or confession after arrest.Footnote 22 Care and love of the infanticide victim might also be marked by early modern communities, in their enactment of legislation designed to protect such children; in their horror at the crime; and in the care they took when uncovering, moving and reinterring the dead.Footnote 23

A similar mother is presented in the historiography of child abandonment, where women driven by a desire to protect reputations, or by economic necessity in a context where single motherhood was stigmatised or difficult to manage, left their child to the kindness of strangers or to institutions. These histories measure the practical and emotional care offered by foster parents, foundling hospitals, residential care, and religious and state organisations.Footnote 24 They have found continued expressions of caring from mothers who sought to monitor their children's well-being from a distance, or to reclaim children to their care when circumstances permitted. As a strategy of caring used by many pauper families, legitimate or otherwise, such histories also highlight the ways that care for poor children could be fragmented across families and institutions, wet-nurses, different types of kin, employers and more.Footnote 25 This is a history that stresses that many, probably most, illegitimate children were not abandoned or murdered, but incorporated into families if not necessarily in the same way as those born within wedlock. However, the histories of those children and their experiences of love and care are much harder to find.

A final historiography of illegitimate children focuses less on their practical care than on their legal status. This scholarship highlights how the stigma of illegitimacy was enshrined in law, with such children having limited rights to parental property and care, to inheritance, and even to bequeath their own property forward.Footnote 26 At particular times, bastardy could also restrict the rights and obligations of an individual within society, limiting their occupational and political choices. If love arises in such history, it is usually assumed that this legal framing reduced the capacity of society to offer love towards the illegitimate child. Yet, it sits alongside those above that are suggestive that care and affection may have multiple forms. A key question for this article is how this legal status – the locating of illegitimate children as second-class citizens, as stigmas that drove some women to murder – informs their care, their experience of love.

To answer this, this article uses a combination of justiciary and sheriff court records, where illegitimate children arise incidentally in criminal cases and in the civil suits fought to determine their legitimacy or right to alimony, as well as several sets of letters written by the mothers and other relatives of illegitimate children, typically to their fathers.Footnote 27 Most of the latter capture cross-class relationships, but some like George Innes and Elizabeth Graham, or Dorothy Salisbury and Alexander Inglis, reflect connections between servants of similar status (at least when the relationship began).Footnote 28 The article begins by situating the Scottish illegitimate child within its broader affective context, before moving to explore their experience of care. It argues that love was a social product, framed and shaped by and through the social, economic and legal networks in which the child was positioned. Whilst the legitimate child, both in law and social practice, might have expected its care to be primarily through the nuclear family, the bastard child belonged, as the law suggested, to the community, requiring its mothering to be dispersed.

I The affective contexts of the illegitimate child

The experience of the illegitimate child in Scotland was shaped by the broader cultural, social, economic and legal context into which it was born. Illegitimacy was never rare in Scotland; between the 1660s and 1760s, 3 to 5 per cent of all births happened outwith marriage.Footnote 29 As elsewhere in Europe, the latter part of the century saw a rapid increase in the illegitimacy rate to around 10 per cent across the nineteenth century.Footnote 30 These figures hid remarkable regional diversity however, with the north-east and south-west of Scotland known for very high illegitimacy rates, perhaps reflecting the prominence of tenant farmers – and their large numbers of unmarried servants who generally predominate amongst the parents of illegitimate children – in these areas. In contrast, other locations had very few illegitimate births. By the eighteenth century in Scotland, there were few legal impediments placed upon an illegitimate person. Early Church law, following Roman tradition, had separated illegitimate children into categories by the circumstances of their birth: the child of two unwed parents was less problematic than those born in incest or adultery. These categories informed both a person's rights – such as their capacity to enter the Church – and their social standing; illegitimacy was a form of moral corruption and the degree of their parent's immorality shaped the character of the child in the cultural imagination.Footnote 31 If Church and secular courts had largely lost these distinctions by the eighteenth century, they were subtly retained by the Kirk (the Church of Scotland), which issued punishments of differing levels of severity to the parents of such children, largely following a similar moral framework.Footnote 32

The idea of the illegitimate child as a site of moral corruption also continued in Scottish popular culture, which drew heavily on texts from wider Britain, Europe and increasingly the Americas. Older tales that located the illegitimate son – illegitimate women were relatively rare in early modern popular culture – as evil, corrupt or tainted in character continued to circulate, but increasingly competed with newer texts where a person's – both male and female – circumstance of birth was less significant to their character.Footnote 33 Rather their dislocation from traditional familial structures offered them an ‘independence’ that offered narrative opportunities for writers.Footnote 34 The illegitimate child was one that discomforted traditional structures of patriarchal authority, challenged definitions of family, and had the capacity for social mobility or transformation. Native literary productions in Scotland were equally part of this conversation, from the handsome illegitimate sons that appear to trouble marriages in ballads like Child Maurice, and its spin-off play The Douglas Tragedy, to Lucy Sindall in Henry Mackenzie's Man of the World (1773) and the deceased infant of Effie Dean in Walter Scott's Heart of Midlothian (1819).Footnote 35

As important, however, was a body of work that located the illegitimate child as victim of the circumstances of its birth. Children, especially infants, who were murdered by desperate mothers returned to haunt these unfortunate women, or left marks of their existence behind, calling to the world for justice. These children were clearly marked as innocents through their deaths as young children or when older due to their handsome appearances, which signified good character.Footnote 36 It was a representation that coalesced with the Scottish legal protections for illegitimate children in the 1690 ‘Act Anent Murthering of Children’, which required women to declare their illegitimate pregnancies or risk being prosecuted for murder if the child died. Within the law and its articulation in indictments, illegitimate children were deemed as worthy of life and protection from the community, their deaths ‘cruell and barbarous’.Footnote 37

This is not to suggest that illegitimate children were uniformly welcomed. The shame of undergoing public discipline in the Kirk clearly shaped responses to out-of-wedlock pregnancy, marked in attempts to avoid the sessions or in reluctant fathers denying paternity.Footnote 38 The 480 cases of infanticide that came before the courts in Scotland between 1700 and 1820 are evidence of the reputational and practical challenges that illegitimate births brought to parents, families and communities – perhaps especially for mothers, who often found themselves unemployed as a result.Footnote 39 Given that this number was considerably higher than in England and even Ireland (where infanticide rates would be exceptionally high in the following century), as well as much of Europe, it is suggestive that the stigma of illegitimacy remained more significant in Scotland than elsewhere.Footnote 40 Yet, stigma that attached to parents only complexly informed the treatment of illegitimate children, particularly once parents and family had made a commitment to raise them.

Illegitimate children were entitled to provision from their parents. Indeed, Scots law was generous in this regard. Stair's Institutions of the Laws of Scotland (1681), the key text that consolidated Scots law at the end of the seventeenth century, argued that amongst the ‘natural obligations’ of mankind, were the natural affection, education and provision owed by parents to children. He defined provision as including aliment and entertainment in meat, clothes, medicine and burial, obligations due before and after the parent's death (thus enabling provision to be drawn from the parental estate). Drawing heavily on natural law theory, he included illegitimate children under this umbrella, noting that nature did not distinguish between children in regard to parental obligations. As a result of this, illegitimate children were considered to be in the power of their parents throughout their minority, their labour available to the common good of the family.Footnote 41

The key difference between natural and legitimate children was that the former were not entitled to inherit property from their fathers. This was phrased in multiple legal texts as ‘having no father in law’, yet as the former provisions suggested, this was quite particular to inheritance. Illegitimate children could be left property by parents and could succeed to their mother's property if legitimate heirs failed, but could only receive paternal property if explicitly provided for. As they were not formally part of their paternal family, they also suffered restrictions on their own property ownership. Unless they married and had legitimate offspring (or they were legitimated), their property returned to the crown on their decease. This was partly because Scottish succession law followed the paternal line, before it returned to the maternal (so a child with no father had no paternal kin to inherit).Footnote 42 Why a bastard could not leave his property by testament is unclear, but it may reflect that even legitimate individuals had restricted testamentary rights.

As I have argued elsewhere, this legal framework for family relationships and inheritance was underpinned by the concept of natural affection, thought to be an instinctual emotion that family members had towards their kin, particularly children, designed to ensure the survival of the lineage.Footnote 43 Natural affection was said to motivate the fulfilment of parental duties towards their offspring, but also underpinned the obligations of obedience and care from children to parents, and the (positively construed) desire to favour and support siblings over wider mankind. It was associated with charity, and thus can be understood as unselfish or outward-looking sentiment, tied to practical action.Footnote 44 It could also be connected to jealousy – ‘suspicion arising from love’ – such as a husband may have towards his wife, a jealousy that arose from his property in her and particularly her chastity.Footnote 45 As this suggests, natural affection was suggestive of an emotion that extended the self through family members, providing a vested interest in their lives, behaviours and bodies (something that can be directly seen in the right to a child's labour that arose from fulfilling parental duties). If natural affection can be understood as a form of parental love, which I would suggest it is for eighteenth-century Scots as other Europeans, then it was an emotion that both promoted and arose from the fulfilment of practical duties of care; a love that was outward-looking and benevolent in its concern for another.Footnote 46 Like other types of love, it also reinforced patriarchal power and both shaped and was shaped by the economic basis of the early modern household.Footnote 47

This was particularly critical for illegitimate children. If their right to affection, education and provisioning arose ‘naturally’, their property rights were curtailed by their status. The law of the succession was explicitly understood as the imagined ‘will of the defunct’, the expected emotional hierarchies of the ordinary citizen when distributing property. It prioritised children, then siblings, then parents, before moving to wider kin, as natural law suggested this is who they would ‘naturally’ preference.Footnote 48 In refusing bastards this right, so too did the law suggest that their affective connections to their paternal family were reduced or uncertain. This was particularly critical for an imagining of love or affection where economic provisioning – money – was an evidence of love in action. The illegitimate child was prohibited from expressing her or his love through a distribution of property, marking him or her as distinct from the family group. Natural affection was therefore relative; it had different limits for different types of children. It was a logic apparent not just in theory, but applied during legitimacy suits, where the level of provisioning and standard of education offered to a child became central evidences of a child's status.Footnote 49 The love and care offered to an illegitimate child was thus shaped by a larger framework that recognised them as entitled to both physical care and affection and which may have viewed them as relative innocents worthy of family protection, but where they continued to trouble the family through their independent legal status. It was a context that shaped how they were cared for in practice.

II Providing love for the illegitimate child

The close association between caring for and caring about in Scots law ensured that negotiations about how, when and where children should be cared for inflected both the understanding and experience of love during the period. Given Stair's contention that parents owed an obligation of natural affection, education and provision to their children, there was little legal debate during the eighteenth century around whether illegitimate children should receive support. Rather the alimony suits that provide a key evidence of social practices of caring highlight that what was under contest was paternity, where responsibility for physical care lay (with the mother or father) and, if money was owed, how much. Paternity cases were, in some senses, relatively straightforward; men denied fatherhood and the court either took them on oath or heard evidence to prove the mother's claims. If filiation was proved, fathers became responsible for their part of child support. In law, both parents owed their children a duty of care, including financial provisioning. Elite mothers could therefore find themselves obligated to support minor children, and many suits refer to mothers being liable for half of their children's upkeep.Footnote 50 In practice, the ordinary servant women who produced the majority of alimony suits were generally not expected to provide financial support to their children, a claim one lawyer based on a Court of Session (high court) decision but which was certainly commonly accepted by courts.Footnote 51 Mothers who gave their children to their fathers were therefore not liable for costs. Rather it was generally expected that men would pay alimony to mothers to nurse and in many cases support them in subsequent years.

Alimony suits are not especially common, and would have been relatively expensive (although legal aid was available to the very poor), suggestive that most couples came to an agreement out of court. From 1778, this was encouraged by a Court of Session decision that created for the children of labourers a standard baseline of alimony of £3 sterling per annum paid quarterly (a number that followed common practice in earlier decades).Footnote 52 In practice, the amount rose slightly over the next few decades before declining again in the early nineteenth century, reflecting inflation and shifts in the economy – ‘the price of almost every necessary of life is increased to an enormous rate’, one defendant argued in 1800.Footnote 53 Most women coming to court only requested the ‘going rate’.Footnote 54

Despite this, especially at times of economic downturn, fathers were willing to dispute the affordability of payments. Based on the (alleged) earnings of these men, alimony was often around 50 per cent of their cash income – typically around £4 out of £8 sterling, a number that would align with wage estimates for the poorest workers.Footnote 55 As most servants received food, board and some clothing as part of their wage, this request was not considered unreasonable during the period. However, it could cause challenges for men who had more than one child to support, as well as limiting their opportunities for marriage and an independent household.Footnote 56 Many resisted it on the basis that it was too high a claim on their small income. Within a context where economic provisioning was so closely associated with parental love, these were disputes that not only angered mothers but were suggestive of a lack of care, both practical and affective, something that men tried to counter through the frame of affordability.

Mothers replied that the costs of a child did not reduce because the father was poor. Clothing seems to have been a particular issue here, with at least one mother dismissing a defence from the father that he had given some clothing with the remark that his contribution had been negligible, and she was happy to take payment in clothes, the implication being the value would exceed the cash.Footnote 57 In addition to alimony, fathers were expected to pay for lying-in costs and any nurse. Some agreements provided women with a higher alimony rate for the first year of birth. This seems to reflect a broad agreement that nursing was a form of labour that could be recompensed, and which certainly restricted nursing mothers from gaining further employment. In 1763, Clementina Durrand specifically observed in her petition that she should receive her lying-in costs because ‘the mother is above the rank of common servants and nursed the child her self and was detained from doing or gaining any thing to herself during all the eighteen months and for a full month took care of & sat up with the child when bad of a fever’.Footnote 58 Whilst no mothers made a direct claim of payment for nursing, a rebuttal in suits where fathers desired to take custody was that they should instead pay the nursing fee to the mother, a sum that would generally be larger than alimony.Footnote 59 As this suggests, a mother's contribution to the care of the child was also imagined in economic terms, if paid in bodily labour and practical care, rather than money. Love and provisioning intertwined for women, as it did for men.

Mothers were considered the appropriate custodians of illegitimate children by the court. Fathers were typically expected to pay alimony until the child was at least seven or could support itself. Many mothers requested orders that stretched to twelve or fourteen years of age. The cases that reached the higher courts generally ordered alimony until the later age, believing that it was unrealistic to expect children to maintain themselves before that date.Footnote 60 Lower courts were more conservative, limiting provision to age seven, nine or ten.Footnote 61 Some fathers requested custody of their illegitimate children, but generally were refused. In Aberdeen in the 1760s, the erroneous idea that if a father asked for custody and was declined he was no longer liable for alimony appears to have circulated in the community. The responses of mothers suggest a certain dry humour as they reply by asking men to demonstrate their capacity to provide either a nurse or place for a child to stay.Footnote 62 Following common practice for both legitimate and illegitimate children, it was generally agreed children should be raised by mothers until aged seven. But even for older children, mothers were often viewed as the most appropriate carer. This was affirmed by the Court of Session in 1765, a case that highlighted the ambiguity of a father's rights over the person of his illegitimate child. It was a decision that the court made on the grounds of affection: ‘his little connection with the child during its infancy, it is not to be expected he will be very tenderly attached to it. As to the mother there is no uncertainty. The connection with her is strongest.’Footnote 63 There was no reason to think this would change at age seven, observed the mother's counsel.

Despite such rulings, mothers were at lengths to display their competent care when fathers contested custody, framing their mothering in legal terms. As well as nursing, clothing and managing health and well-being (such as through purchasing medicines), mothers of older children often noted their commitment to educating children. Charlotte Keith strenuously denied in 1821 that ‘the boy is at present quite neglected in his education, cloathing and maintenance’, arguing he was as well cared for ‘as any one in his station can be’.Footnote 64 As this suggests, the legal framework of care expected of parents played a significant role in shaping narratives, and presumably practices, of care of children by parents, and so how parental love was articulated within this community. It was a framework that at times encompassed and downplayed caring practices that were considerably more complex.

If mothers brought suits for alimony from their children's father, they often did so as the legal parent who had claim to support. They were not always the primary carer, but rather contributed to the upkeep of the child through their own earnings. Many women returned to work after the birth of their child, leaving her or him in the care of others. Margaret Halcrow was awarded the exceptional sum of £12 yearly to pay the nurse to care for her child with William Halcrow in 1781; William Elliot provided Isobel Goodfellow with ‘a good and sufficient nurse’ in 1801, but (having initially agreed to this arrangement) Goodfellow refused to hand the child over after its birth.Footnote 65 Margaret Young lived with her mother Margaret Baird whilst her child was young; the grandmother cared for the child whilst Young worked and was active in pursuing alimony payments from William Anachie.Footnote 66 Mary Crosbie left her first child with her mother when she returned to service, only to become pregnant a second time to John Raddick in 1801. Ann Hay refused to ask her father for financial support, in lieu of alimony, he having been generous in the past.Footnote 67 Fathers too claimed support of kin. Several men wished to place their children with their mothers, whilst Helen Smith's daughter resided for a time with her paternal grandfather, where she was ‘in such a miserable state both with respect to cloathing and also to its cleanliness that it became absolutely necessary for the pursuer herself to look after her’.Footnote 68

As this suggests, children moved between parental homes, and a number of alimony disputes appear to have arisen because the division of care had not been straightforward. Helen Smith, above, had nursed her own child, but lived and took meat in the paternal grandfather's home. Some time later, she moved with her daughter to lodgings with John Bettie, but as the father, James Fordyce, would not pay alimony, she had to return to work. She therefore gave custody to Fordyce, who lived with his parents. The latter ‘tired of it’ and the child was sent to lodge with Bettie, but again financial support was not forthcoming. Bettie returned the child to the grandparents, who – alleged Smith – treated her poorly. Smith, having married, rescued her and brought her to live with her husband who was ‘very humanely disposed towards the child’. Fordyce disputed that the child was poorly treated, and wished to have her returned to his custody. By the time of the lawsuit, the child was four.

A similar case was presented by Jean Wallace in the same year. Jean lived with her aunt and uncle in the house next door to James Wilson, the father of her daughter Ann.Footnote 69 The properties shared a common yard. The child regularly spent time in her father's house, on the holding he held with his brother. Wilson claimed that after many disputes about alimony payments (between the couple and between her uncle and Wilson) Wallace had given Ann into his custody. The uncle had stolen her back several days later. Wallace claimed this was not the case, but rather on one occasion the child had been late at the house and was asleep. Rather than wake her to return home, Wallace agreed to collect Ann the next day, which she did. Whichever version was true, the case highlighted the often fluid nature of custody arrangements, situated across homes and caregivers, a picture suggested also in the life of Elizabeth Graham and many other accounts of illegitimate and legitimate children during the period where nurses and grandparents feature prominently.Footnote 70 As acts of practical care given by a range of caregivers, the love received by these children was thus distributed across a wider range of ‘parents’, which may have acted to counterbalance absences of affection or physical care in other parts of their lives.

Family was not the only group that took an interest in caring for the illegitimate child. That the court not only heard alimony cases, but provided legal counsel for the poor (in some cases taking suits to the high courts through appeal), is suggestive of a legal system that recognised its role in ensuring at least their well-being. Similarly, the Kirk supported alimony cases; in some instances, they pursued them on their own behalf when children fell on the coffers of the parish. Reverend McNeveson, on behalf of the Session of Penpont, sued Thomas Kirkpatrick in 1801 for refusing to take custody of his child.Footnote 71 His daughter Margaret had initially lived with her mother, but on the latter's death was given to Kirkpatrick. His wife treated her cruelly and Margaret moved in with Kirkpatrick's sister, her aunt. When the aunt left the country on marrying, the father refused to accept her home. Margaret became homeless, living on the streets of Penpont and begging. Several parishioners had given her charity, including clothing. But they all agreed she was filthy and starving, and refused to do further for her while her father was ‘going about like a gentleman’. The Reverend emphasised that if she had been an orphan the villagers were willing to take responsibility. One difficulty that arose was that Margaret was eleven and, her father believed, able to earn her own meat. However, she was also disabled, unable to use a leg and an arm. The Reverend reported she was also the size of a seven-year-old; it was broadly agreed she was not capable of earning for herself. Kirkpatrick eventually took the child into his care, so proceedings ceased. A similar case of the community taking responsibility for an illegitimate child can be seen in the case of John Fee, who at age eight was either abandoned or ran away from his father who used him to beg on the street. He was eventually taken in by a travelling merchant and her husband, a chimney sweep, but not without some reluctance (they claimed at least).Footnote 72 When Fee's father tried to regain custody, the family all attested to affective connections that had developed between them, as the basis of their custody arrangement.

The picture that emerges from this evidence presents a complex model of love and care for illegitimate children, as a particularly precarious category of poor children.Footnote 73 The existence of the suits, as well as the many denials of paternity that appear in them, is suggestive of a refusal of care, usually by fathers; yet, this should not be overstated. If some men rejected their obligations entirely, many others wished to negotiate the terms – particularly financial – of their commitment. For some, this was in a context where they had intermittently held or desired custody. A cynical reading – often taken by their ex-partners – was that a desire for custody was simply a cost-cutting exercise. But both men and women drew heavily on a legal rhetoric of natural affection, maintenance and education that was suggestive that they understood the practical and affective nature of the obligation of parenting. Everyone agreed that these children deserved a baseline of care, a baseline that the court conveniently put a legal financial minimum upon.

Women may have claimed for alimony as mothers, but they too did not always offer care directly. Many returned to service, leaving children with nurses or grandparents. If children died under these arrangements, it was not necessarily due to a lack of parental interest. After returning to service, Dorothy Salisbury regularly reminded the father of her child to visit the nurse where it was placed and to provide her accounts of its well-being.Footnote 74 And this concern mattered to the community. Fathers were quick to point to mothers who had not shown any interest when away from their children. Despite this, some children did fall out of care, becoming homeless or suffering abuse. That so many were part of poor families, were shuffled between carers, and often ended up on the outskirts of the new conjugal unit of their parents, perhaps made this more liable to happen. Yet, at least for those who appear in the historical record, when it happened the community, especially the parish, stepped in to provide care. The question remains as to how many illegitimate children went unnoticed by the authorities when their family arrangements failed. Within this context, love was dispersed across the different dimensions of care – across caregivers, types of care, levels of affection and so forth – produced through their combination and so with differential impacts on individuals.

The significance of money to understanding care should not be ignored. This is a product of the court record, which was trying to place a financial value on care, and which can also be seen in legitimacy suits where the value of care parents provided marked their social status. But it also reflected that children cost money, particularly when very young, and that some people thought pursuing an income to enable them to survive was worth doing. Alimony generally ceased for the poor when children became economically active. This could be interpreted as suggesting that such children could care for themselves, but it was underpinned by a logic that care was less burdensome to provide for older children and so caring for them more desirable. Such articulations of care tightly bound it to household economies, and through them to hierarchies built on land and wealth. Poor illegitimate children could be offered ‘less’ care, in a literal economic sense, because they were deemed to be worth less. If the care offered by parents and grandparents was more generous, more giving of time, concern, anxiety and love than money allowed, if poor families too sought to fill their natural obligations as parents, nevertheless this was a care inflected by the social value placed on these children. Material conditions informed not just how children were cared for, but the extent to which they were cared about.

III Conclusion

What then of parental love? For eighteenth-century Scots, the close association between natural affection and the practical fulfilment of duty – in the case of parents through providing maintenance and education – tied practices of caring into a wider affective regime of love. Yet, if love arose from and motivated care, natural affection was a distinct obligation of its own. That this was regarded as ‘natural’ might suggest that it was an emotion that parents expected to feel, and so most accordingly did. But as Griffin argues and John Fee and Margaret Kirkpatrick's refusals to return to their parents suggest, not all children felt loved by their biological parents or wider kin. This was an experience likely exacerbated by their social positioning, where both the law and popular culture situated such children as somewhat outside or independent of the structures of family. Yet, it would be incorrect to say these children experienced no love or care, and it is particularly problematic to deny the intimate bonds produced even within families which were abusive or cruel. Rather it is perhaps more useful to reflect on parental love as an emotion that involved both affection and various practices of care, where its different dimensions contributed in degrees to its whole.

The economics of poverty thus became significant in offering a framework for how and whether care should and could be offered, with implications for the experience of love. As a multi-dimensional experience, love came to refract broader social and economic beliefs and hierarchies, disadvantaging illegitimate children who had little social status. Some families may have compensated through their own emotional or economic generosity; others may not. Thus, how illegitimate children experienced love varied by situation, by wealth, by the commitment of others to love and care for them, and by the social discourses that taught them how to interpret such practices. Theirs was also a love that could be dispersed across caregivers, an experience not distinct to them, but which was perhaps more common given the circumstances of their birth and more significant due to their dislocation from traditional family structures. Within such a context, a feeling of parental love – a thing that much scholarship has interpreted as present or absent – only plays one part in the experience of love, and may be less significant than the caring practices that may or may not accompany it. Loving the illegitimate child was an ongoing social practice.

Footnotes

David Berry Prize Winner

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments and Jean McBain for her research assistance on this project. This research was funded by the Australian Research Council DE140100111.

1 This case study is developed from a series of letters between the children's mothers and other caregivers and George Innes of Stowe, as well as his accounts of their expenditure. They are found at National Records of Scotland (hereafter NRS), Papers of George Innes, c.1742–1762, GD113/4/165/999-1094.

2 The birth of an Elizabeth Graham, the daughter of William Graham and Margaret Savage, was registered in Mid-Calder (five miles from Ratho) in 1715. They also had a son, John, born in 1720. However these are common names so this identification is not confirmed. Twenty-eight was a fairly typical age for a servant to have their first illegitimate child: Reid, Alice, Davies, Ros, Garrett, Eilidh and Blaikie, Andrew, ‘Vulnerability among Illegitimate Children in Nineteenth-Century Scotland’, Annales de Démographie Historique, 1.189 (2006), 89–113.

3 This appears to be David Fordyce (1711–1751), moral philosopher, and brother of James, the advice book writer.

4 Elizabeth Graham to George Innes, 11 August 1743, NRS, GD113/4/165/1087.

5 Elizabeth Graham to George Innes, 15 August 1743, NRS, GD113/4/165/1086.

6 Note by George Innes re death of George Innes Hamilton, 28 April 1752, NRS, GD113/4/165/1000.

7 Deborah Simonton, ‘Milliners and Marchandes de Modes: Gender, Creativity and Skill in the Workplace’, in Luxury and Gender in the European Town, 1700–1914, ed. Deborah Simonton, Marjo Kaartinen and Anne Montenach (2015), 19–38; Glover, Katherine, Elite Women and Polite Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Woodbridge, 2011).

8 For example Sir Robert Montgomerie of Skelmorlie to John Todd, his gardener, 25 June 1665, NRS, GD3/5/646; for discussion Barclay, Katie, ‘Emotional Lineages: Blood, Property, Family and Affection in Early Modern Scotland’, in A History of Heritage: Emotions in Blood, Stone and Land, ed. Marchant, Alicia (2019), 84–98.

9 Ben-Amos, Ilana Krausman, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (New Haven, 1994).

10 Noddings, Nel, Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley, 1986); J. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (1994).

11 This is a huge literature: Reddy, William, The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900–1200 CE (Chicago, 2012); Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity (1998); Jarzebowski, Claudia, ‘The Meaning of Love: Emotion and Kinship in Sixteenth-Century Incest Discourses’, in Mixed Marriages: Transgressive Unions in Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, ed. Luebke, David and Lindemann, Mary (Oxford, 2014), 166–83; Langhamer, Clare, ‘Love, Selfhood and Authenticity in Post-War Britain’, Cultural and Social History, 9 (2012), 277–97; Barclay, Katie, Love, Intimacy and Power: Marriage and Patriarchy in Scotland, 1650–1850 (Manchester, 2011).

12 Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (1976); Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (1977); Trumbach, Randolph, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family (Oxford, 1978); Classen, Albrecht, ‘Philippe Aries and the Consequences. History of Childhood, Family Relations and Personal Emotions. Where Do We Stand Today?’, in Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: The Results of a Paradigm Shift in the History of Mentality, ed. Classen, Albrecht (Hawthorne, NY, 2011), 1–65; Stephanie Miller, ‘Parenting in the Palazzo: Images and Artefacts of Children in the Italian Renaissance Home’, in The Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior, 1400–1700, ed. Erin Campbell, Stephanie R. Miller, Elizabeth Carroll Consavari and Allison Levy (2013), 67–88; Mathew Knox Averett (ed.), The Early Modern Child in Art and History (2015); Schama, Simon, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (Berkeley, 1988).

13 Begiato, Joanne (Bailey), Parenting in Early Modern England, 1760–1830: Emotion, Identity and Generation (Oxford, 2012).

14 Barclay, Katie, ‘Natural Affection, Children and Family Inheritance Practices in the Long-Eighteenth-Century’, in Children and Youth in Medieval and Early Modern Scotland, ed. Ewan, Elizabeth and Nugent, Janey (Woodbridge, 2015), 136–54; idem, ‘Natural Affection, the Patriarchal Family and the “Strict Settlement” Debate: A Response from the History of Emotions’, Eighteenth Century Theory and Interpretation, 58 (2017), 309–20; Marshall, Sherrin, ‘“Dutiful Love and Natural Affection”: Parent–Child Relationships in the Early Modern Netherlands’, in Early Modern Europe: Issues and Interpretation, ed. Collins, James B. and Taylor, Karen L. (Oxford, 2006), 138–52.

15 Griffin, Emma, ‘The Emotions of Motherhood: Love, Culture, and Poverty in Victorian Britain’, American Historical Review, 123 (2018), 60–85; Bailey, Joanne, ‘The History of Mum and Dad: Recent Historical Research on Parenting in England from the 16th to 20th Centuries’, History Compass, 12 (2014), 489–507.

16 Megan Doolittle, ‘Fatherhood and Family Shame: Masculinity, Welfare and the Workhouse in Late-Nineteenth-Century England’, in The Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain since 1800, ed. L. Delap, B. Griffin and Abigail Wills (2008), 84–108; Strange, Julie-Marie, Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865–1914 (Cambridge, 2015); Premo, Bianca, ‘“Misunderstood Love”: Children and Wet Nurses, Creoles and Kings in Lima's Enlightenment’, Colonial Latin American Review, 14 (2005), 231–61; Broomhall, Susan and Ghent, Jacqueline Van, ‘In the Name of the Father: Conceptualising Pater Familias in the Letters of William the Silent's Children’, Renaissance Quarterly, 62 (2009), 1130–66; Cathcart, Alison, Kinship and Clientage: Highland Clanship 1451–1609 (Leiden, 2006); Harrington, Joel, The Unwanted Child : The Fate of Foundlings, Orphans and Juvenile Criminals in Early Modern Germany (Chicago, 2009), 278–86; Tarbin, Stephanie, ‘Caring for Poor and Fatherless Children in London, c. 1350–1550’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 3 (2010), 391–410.

17 Kate Gibson, ‘Experiences of Illegitimacy in England, 1660–1834’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Sheffield, 2018); Byars, Jana, ‘From Illegitimate Son to Legal Citizen: Noble Bastards in Early Modern Venice’, Sixteenth-Century Journal, 42 (2011), 643–63.

18 Sloan, Kathryn A., Women's Roles in Latin America and the Caribbean (Santa Barbara, 2011), 8; Turner, Sasha, Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing and Slavery in Jamaica (Philadelphia, 2017); Kuznesof, Elizabeth Anne, ‘Slavery and Childhood in Brazil, 1550–1888’, in Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America, ed. González, Ondina E. and Premo, Bianca (Albuquerque, 2007), 194; Susan Staves, ‘Resentment or Resignation? Dividing the Spoils among Daughters and Younger Sons’, in Early Modern Conceptions of Property, ed. John Brewer and Susan Staves (1995), 194–218.

19 Harris, Barbara, ‘Property, Power and Personal Relations: Elite Mothers and Sons in Yorkist and Early Tudor England’, Signs, 15 (1990), 606–32; Castiglione, Caroline, Accounting for Affection: Mothering and Politics in Early Modern Rome (Basingstoke, 2015); Barclay, Katie, ‘Narrative, Law and Emotion: Husband Killers in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland’, Journal of Legal History, 38 (2017), 203–27.

20 Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage.

21 Margaret Brannan Lewis, Infanticide and Illegitimacy in Early Modern Germany (2016); Kilday, Anne-Marie, A History of Infanticide in Britain, c. 1600 to the Present (Basingstoke, 2013).

22 Walker, Garthine, ‘Child-Killing and Emotion in Early Modern England and Wales’, in Death, Emotion and Childhood in Premodern Europe, ed. Barclay, Katie, Reynolds, Kim with Rawnsley, Ciara (Houndmills, 2016), 151–72.

23 Katie Barclay with Kim Reynolds, ‘Small Graves: Histories of Death, Childhood and Emotion’, in Death, Emotion and Childhood, ed. Barclay et al., 1–24.

24 Levene, Alysa, The Childhood of the Poor: Welfare in Eighteenth-Century London (Basingstoke, 2012); Levene, Alysa, Childcare, Health and Mortality at the London Foundling Hospital, 1741–1800 (Manchester, 2007); Holloway, Sally, ‘Materialising Maternal Emotions: Birth, Celebration and Renunciation in England c. 1688–1830’, in Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History, ed. Downes, Stephanie, Holloway, Sally and Randles, Sarah (Oxford, 2018), 154–74; Susan Broomhall, ‘Beholding Suffering and Providing Care: Emotional Performances on the Death of Poor Children in Sixteenth-Century French Institutions’, in Death, Emotion and Childhood, ed. Barclay et al., 65–86; Lola Valverde, ‘Illegitimacy and the Abandonment of Children in the Basque Country, 1550–1800’, in Poor Women and Children in the European Past, ed. John Henderson and Richard Wall (1994), 52–3.

25 Harrington, The Unwanted Child; Maddern, Philippa, ‘Between Households: Children in Blended and Transitional Households in Late-Medieval England’. Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 3 (2010), 65–86; Fildes, Valerie, Wet-Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford, 1988).

26 Levene, Alysa, ‘The Mortality Penalty of Illegitimate Children: Foundlings and Poor Children in Eighteenth-Century London’, in Illegitimacy in Britain, 1700–1920, ed. Levene, Alysa, Nutt, Timothy and Williams, Samantha (Basingstoke, 2005), 34–49; Gerber, Matthew, Bastards: Politics, Family, and the Law in Early Modern France (Oxford, 2012); Susan Marshall, ‘Illegitimacy in Medieval Scotland, 1165–1500’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Aberdeen, 2013).

27 These records are predominantly found in the NRS, although some sheriff and Kirk session records are held in local archives. Their abbreviations are Justiciary Court – JC; Sheriff Court – SC; Kirk Sessions – CH2. The letters have mainly survived as part of collections associated with elite families, again many in the NRS.

28 For more on Dorothy Salisbury and Alexander Inglis, see Barclay, Katie, ‘Gossip, Intimacy and the Early Modern Scottish Household’, in Fama and Her Sisters: Gossip in Early Modern Europe, ed. Walker, Claire and Kerr, Heather (Turnhout, 2015), 187–207. The Innes family have several sets of illegitimate children associated with them: see Barclay, Katie, ‘Marginal Households and their Emotions: The “Kept Mistress” in Enlightenment Edinburgh’, in Spaces for Feeling: Emotions and Sociabilities in Britain, 1650–1850, ed. Broomhall, Sue (2015), 95–111; Barclay, Katie, ‘Illicit Intimacies: The Many Families of Gilbert Innes of Stow (1751–1832)’, Gender & History, 27 (2015), 576–90.

29 Mitchison, Rosalind and Leneman, Leah, Girls in Trouble: Sexuality and Social Control in Rural Scotland (Edinburgh, 1998), 74–8; Blaikie, Andrew, Illegitimacy, Sex and Society: North-East Scotland, 1750–1900 (Oxford, 1993).

30 Blaikie, Illegitimacy, Sex and Society; Peter Laslett, ‘Introduction’, in Bastardy and its Comparative History, ed. Peter Laslett, Karla Oosterveen and R. M. Smith (1980), 1–68.

31 Marshall, ‘Illegitimacy in Medieval Scotland’; Gerber, Bastards.

32 Acts of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, 1638–1842 (Edinburgh, 1843).

33 Michael Neill, ‘“In Everything Illegitimate”: Imagining the Bastard in Renaissance Drama’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 23 (1993), 270–92.

34 Katie Pritchard, ‘Legitimacy, Illegitimacy and Sovereignty in Shakespeare's British Plays’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Manchester, 2011); Gibson, ‘Experiences of Illegitimacy in England’; Katie Barclay, ‘Illegitimacy’, in Early Modern Childhood: An Introduction, ed. Anne French (2020), 217–34; Zunshine, Lisa, Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England (Columbus, OH, 2005). For a discussion of ‘independence’ McCormack, Matthew, The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in Georgian England (Manchester, 2012); and in relation to illegitimate children: Katie Barclay, ‘Family, Mobility and Emotion in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’, in Keeping Family in an Age of Long Distance Trade, Discovery and Settlement, 1450–1850, ed. Heather Dalton (Amsterdam, forthcoming).

35 Symonds, Deborah, Weep Not for Me: Women, Ballads and Infanticide in Early Modern Scotland (University Park, PA, 1997); Baloutzova, Svetla, ‘When a Lass Goes “So Round”, with Her “Tua Sides High”: Oral Culture and Women's Views on Illegitimacy’, in Women in Eighteenth-Century Scotland: Intimate, Intellectual and Public Lives, ed. Barclay, Katie and Simonton, Deborah (Farnham, 2013), 55–74.

36 Symonds, Weep Not for Me.

37 Barclay with Reynolds, ‘Small Graves’.

38 Blaikie, Illegitimacy, Sex and Society.

39 Kilday, A History of Infanticide, 30.

40 Footnote Ibid., 27–31; see also Farrell, Elaine, ‘A most diabolical deed’: Infanticide and Irish Society, 1850–1900 (Manchester, 2013).

41 Dalrymple, James, Viscount of Stair, The Institutions of the Law of Scotland (2 vols., Edinburgh, 1693), I, 37–41; for an extended discussion see Barclay, ‘Natural Affection, Children’.

42 Dalrymple, The Institutions, I, 424–8; MacDowall, Andrew, Bankton, Lord, An Institute of the Laws of Scotland in Civil Rights (2 vols., Edinburgh, 1751), I, 280.

43 Barclay, ‘Natural Affection, Children’; Barclay, ‘Natural Affection, the Patriarchal Family’.

44 Dalrymple, The Institutions, I, 431.

45 Footnote Ibid., I, 24; Johnson, Samuel, A Dictionary of the English Language … (Dublin, 1768), s.v. jealousy.

46 Marshall, ‘“Dutiful Love and Natural Affection”’; it can be fruitfully compared here to the parent–child reciprocity and filial piety found in England: Begiato, Parenting; Ben-Amos, Illana Krausman, ‘Reciprocal Bonding: Parents and Their Offspring in Early Modern England’, Journal of Family History, 25 (2000), 291–312.

47 Katie Barclay, ‘The Emotions of Household Economics’, in The Routledge Companion to Emotions in Europe: 1100–1700, ed. Susan Broomhall and Andrew Lynch (2019), 185–99; Barclay, Love, Intimacy and Power.

48 Siblings are prioritised before parents not because sibling love was greater than a child's love for a parent, but because it was thought the siblings’ shared parents would prefer this distribution to receiving the property. This is likely an example of trying to make old law fit new natural law theory.

49 Barclay, ‘Natural Affection, Children’.

50 Several cases affirm this decision, e.g. Finnie against Oliphant (1631); Children of the Earl of Buchan against Lady Buchan (1666); Simon Ramsay against Rigg (1687); Hay against his grandfather and mother (1729); The younger children of Bissett of Leffendrum against their brother (1748). See Morrison, William, The Decisions of the Court of Session … (Edinburgh, 1811), vol. 2.

51 The lawyer dates this decision to the 1 March 1755, but I cannot identify such a case, Aberdeen Sheriff Court, Ann Hay against William Allardyce (1761), NRS, SC1/11/30.

52 Scott against Oliver (1778): see Morrison, William, The Decisions of the Court of Session … (Edinburgh, 1811), vol. 5.

53 Dumfries Sheriff Court Goodfellow against Elliot (1800), NRS, SC15/10/233.

54 For example, NRS SC15/10/233; Dumfries Sheriff Court Burnet v Johnston (1801), NRS, SC15/10/233.

55 Gibson, A. J. S. and Smout, T. C., Prices, Food and Wages in Scotland, 1550–1780 (Cambridge, 1995).

56 Aberdeen Sheriff Court Wallace against Wilson (1811), NRS, SC1/11/318.

57 Murray against Galation (1829), NRS, Aberdeen Sheriff Court, SC1/11/476; see also Crosbie against Raddick (1801), NRS, Dumfries Sheriff Court, SC15/10/233; Moffat against Stephens (1808), NRS, Edinburgh, SC39/17/539.

58 Durrand against Fry (1763), NRS, Aberdeen Sheriff Court, SC1/11/30.

59 Elite wet-nurses were typically being paid around £10 sterling per annum in the second half of the eighteenth century. See Barclay, ‘Gossip, Intimacy’. One example of a nurse to an ordinary family still saw a claim around £1 per quarter plus food and clothing, a number higher than alimony. Farras against Elmslie and Gray (1752), NRS, SC1/11/5.

60 Graham against Kay (1740); Short against Donald (1765). See William Morrison, The Decisions of the Court of Session, vol. 2.

61 For example: Hay against Allardyce (1761), NRS, Aberdeen Sheriff Court, SC1/11/30; Gordon against Cruickshank (1802), NRS, Aberdeen Sheriff Court, SC1/11/252; Burnet against Johnston (1801), NRS, Dumfries Sheriff Court, SC15/10/233.

62 See Hay against Allardyce (1761), NRS, Aberdeen Sheriff Court, SC1/11/30; Young against Anachie (1761), NRS, Aberdeen Sheriff Court, SC1/11/30; but see also Smith & Williamson against Fordyce (1811), NRS, Aberdeen Sheriff Court, SC1/11/318.

63 Short against Donald (1765), William Morrison, The Decisions of the Court of Session, vol. 2.

64 Keith against Sellar (1821), NRS, Aberdeen Sheriff Court, SC1/11/406.

65 Halcrow denied paternity as the child was born eight days early, Halcrow against Halcrow (1781), Shetland Museum and Archives (hereafter SMA), Shetland Sheriff Court, SC12/6/1781/11; Goodfellow against Elliot (1800), NRS, Dumfries Sheriff Court, SC15/10/233.

66 Young against Anachie (1761), NRS, Aberdeen Sheriff Court, SC1/11/30.

67 Crosbie against Raddick (1801), NRS, Dumfries Sheriff Court, SC15/10/233.

68 Smith & Williamson against Fordyce (1811), NRS, Aberdeen Sheriff Court, SC1/11/318.

69 Wallace against Wilson (1811), NRS, Aberdeen Sheriff Court, SC1/11/318.

70 Blaikie, Illegitimacy, Sex and Society; Begiato, Parenting.

71 McNeveson against Thomas Kirkpatrick (1801), NRS, Dumfries Sheriff Court, SC15/10/233.

72 Thomas Hastings and Ann Anderson for plagium, 1813, NRS, AD14/13/64; Katie Barclay, ‘Family, Mobility’.

73 Social parenting can be observed for other categories of poor children too: Doolittle, ‘Fatherhood and Family Shame’; Begiato, Parenting; Harrington, The Unwanted Child.

74 Barclay, ‘Gossip, Intimacy’.

Ibid
Ibid