Helensburgh is a Scottish town whose quiet streets lead uphill away from the North Clyde Estuary. A short walk from the waterfront esplanade, almost hidden behind a naval housing estate (1957), an observant tourist can contemplate the stone remains of Ardencaple Castle, parts of which might date to the thirteenth century but more of which dates to the eighteenth century. Walking near the stone wall which runs parallel to the small street, it is difficult to imagine that a large, imposing, perhaps intimidating, building once stood upon vast grounds, housing the chief of the Clan MacAuley (or Macaulay). Recently, I stood with a friend in the warm September sun looking at the grey wall, trying to imagine the visage and the determination of nineteenth-century watercolourist Kate Macaulay as she might have gazed, sketchbook in hand, at the then extant house, once the property of her dispersed clan. She may have turned her eyes and her pencil away from the house toward the river or toward the rolling, treed and rocky terrain that stretched beyond the castle walls toward Loch Lomond. She, after all, preferred to draw and paint land and water more than the buildings sprouting from the stone and the soil. But she did paint ‘MacAuley’ land, recording numbers of scenes in and around Loch Lomond, Gare Loch and Loch Long, sometimes moving beyond clan boundaries to Oban and Skye or to the area around her own ‘Ardencaple House’ in North Wales.

The agricultural economy of eighteenth-century England exhibited many paradoxes, being in part progressive and even entrepreneurial, yet existing in a legal context which preserved many ancient customs, rights, duties and taxes. Within the one county of Northumberland we find the Culley brothers with their business-like attitudes and innovative and scientific farming methods and, in contrast, antique manorial regimes with courts, fines and heriots, such as prevailed in the manors of Hartleyburn and Bellister. We also find, as throughout England, the ‘contentious tithe’ and what must have been one of the most lucrative examples of tithe-farming, by which one of the North East's leading merchants and its first banker made a considerable part of his fortune out of a lease on this venerable tax from the appropriators, Merton College, Oxford.

The transition to modern, capitalist agriculture is usually marked by the replacement of traditional forms of farm service by a free labour market based on short-term contracts and cash payments. This process is often described in terms like ‘pauperisation’ and ‘proletarianisation’. But, of course, proletarianisation is not an inevitable consequence of the rise of day-labouring in capitalist agriculture; a point emphasized, for example, with particular reference to eighteenth-century Scotland by Alex Gibson and Alastair Orr. Contrary to much of southern England, where the forces of production developed rather fast, in Scotland traditional forms of farm service survived largely intact well into the nineteenth century despite the development of capitalist agriculture. As late as 1861 over 60 per cent of the total agricultural work-force in some Scottish regions were servants on long hires as opposed to day-labourers.

In the introduction to his practical manual on the organisation of friendly societies published in 1851 J.H. James writes:

The character of a nation may be pretty well ascertained from the general features of its public institutions. When these are directed to the morals, social and intellectual training of the human mind, and to the privilege of a cultivation of religious principles we may be sure of the existence of that high degree of buoyancy and healthiness of mental vigour, accompanied by great physical energy not to be found in any other condition of society.

The two major censuses of religion that have most preoccupied historians and cultural geographers have, without question, been the Compton census of 1676 and the Census of Religious Worship of 1851. Over more than two centuries, probably indeed throughout British history, no other religious censuses were conducted to rival these two sources. The religious history of the intervening period has however, been researched by using other documentation, including the Evans list of 1715, the returns of Papists in 1767 and 1780, selected visitation returns, and the 1829 religious returns.

During the last two decades interpretations of agrarian modernisation have been the subject of critical debate. In neo-classical tradition, agrarian economists and economic historians have traditionally laid emphasis on the diffusion of technology and on the commercialisation of production. They have customarily been interested in the development of agricultural output and incomes, and basically understood modernisation as an evolutionary process by which commercial, market oriented production was substituted for traditional, subsistence production. During the 1970s and the 1980s agrarian sociologists and historians posed the question in more social and historical terms, seeking to determine which type of producers, large farmers or family farmers, were the bearers of modernisation. The traditional Marxian standpoint, as is well known, was that capitalist farming — in spite of delays and problems inherent in agricultural production — would come to dominate the agrarian sector through technical innovation and large scale production. Opposing this, neo-Marxian/neo-Chayanovian interpretations claimed that family farming, due to the innate characteristics of that particular production form, provided family farmers with a competitive advantage in relation to large scale production. According to this, more ‘social’ historical tradition, the social organisation of family based production was the key to understanding the viability, or even superiority, of family farming in the industrialised and urbanised societies of western Europe and North America.

This paper has two objectives. The first is to explore the creation of a Highland policy area in the 1880s. Emphasis will be placed on the use of historical arguments by the government in the course of the construction of the Crofters Holdings (Scotland) Act of 1886, especially in the attempt to justify confining the operation of that statute to the Highlands. The second theme, explored in the latter parts of the paper, concerns the strategies which succeeding governments have used to justify the perpetuation of a distinct Highland policy area. An element of continuity in Highland history in the twentieth century has been the special treatment of the area by governments. On the occasions when this has caused resentment in other rural areas of Britain, the Scottish Office response has been to argue that the Highlands are a special case because of the existence of the crofting counties with their special code of legislation. Clearly, this is a tautological argument and it is hoped that this paper, by exploring the period from the creation of the crofting legislation in the 1880s, to the late twentieth century, will shed some light on its origins. It will be argued that this has created a climate of fear in the Highlands and particularly the crofting community, but also, on occasion in the Lowlands. Further, there are occasions when the existence of a special Highland policy area has served to marginalise Highland policy. The paper falls into five main sections: the first will briefly review the literature about the Highland/Lowland division in Scotland, the second will look at the origins of the Crofters' Act of 1886, the third will examine the period from 1906 to 1911 when aspects of crofting legislation were extended to the rest of Scotland; the fourth section will identify the inter war period as an era when Highland policy became more diverse and the final section will scrutinise the impact of that more diverse approach in the years after the Second World War.

In a recent article Willem de Blécourt highlighted how little we really know about cunning-folk in the context of European witchcraft, and stressed the need for further substantial research. The study of English cunning-folk in the early modern period has been well served by the work of Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane, but their respective chapters are, nevertheless, tantalising rather than conclusive. Although in the last twenty-five years early-modern historians have continued to take a strong interest in the witch-trials, and the social dynamics of witch-accusations, cunning-folk have, by and large, been neglected. De Blécourt also remarked upon the paucity of relevant research on cunning-folk in the period after the trials. This observation is particularly applicable to British historiography, and it is the purpose of this present paper to begin to redress this imbalance. Most work on cunning-folk has tended to concentrate on what they did, rather than on who they were.

This paper seeks to explore the relationship between agencies of government and crofting tenantry in the Highlands of Scotland, as manifested in events of popular protest after 1914. These events seem to have received little attention when compared to disturbance of earlier periods, which have been extensively documented, and the period after 1918 in particular has been under represented in the literature. Furthermore the actions of agencies of government were significantly different in this later period. Where before the Great War government actions were wholly reactive, this paper will demonstrate that during the war and after, the Board of Agriculture made significant attempts to be proactive in the face of incipient protest. Yet, conflict, and the resultant acts of protest, continued to be a characteristic element of social relations in the Highlands in the post-war period. This paper seeks to show that whilst the actions of the land-working population were of central significance, this conflict was not solely between the tenantry and landowners or agencies of government but was also within those various groupings. Consequently, it is argued that protest attests to a complex nexus of conflict on both regional and national levels.

On a tour of the Chiltern hills upon the eve of the Second World War the rural commentator Henry Massingham came across a Buckinghamshire farmer. As rural ‘characters’ are wont to do in Massingham's books, the farmer was able to recite a piece of rustic wisdom, on this occasion concerning the type of country worker that he always sought to employ, saying ‘A man as can't do more'n one thing baint good for anything’. As an employer of men the farmer simply meant that all his charges should be of sufficient calibre to prove themselves versatile within an industry that called on them to change tasks by the hour, day, week and season. In short, in the eyes of the farmer an adaptable labourer was an efficient labourer. However, there was another side to this equation, as the aphorism also held resonance with workmen across a wide range of trades and not simply agriculture. For it was the man who was able to vary his work patterns, switching between employment sources, going beyond his central occupation if necessary, that was best able to ride-out the vagaries of the rural labour market.

In 1956 in an international symposium at Princeton on the theme Man's role in changing the face of the Earth, one of the principal contributors, Carl Sauer, reflected that as much as anything it was a festival of remembrance to George Perkins Marsh. Marsh was perhaps the inspiration for viewing man within his natural world, within his ecological setting, but a setting which had evolved as much as anything by the actions of his own hand as it had been by natural agents. Marsh's great work Man and Nature, has been dubbed ‘the fountainhead of the conservation movement.’ Thus Sauer suggests that this study is based on man's:

Raphael Samuel, who died tragically of cancer at the end of last year, was one of the outstanding social historians of post-war Britain. A founding figure of the History Workshop movement as a tutor at Ruskin College, he went on with others from that movement to found the History Workshop Journal in 1976. He was also series editor, as well as an editor and author, for the 30 or so books published in the History Workshop Series between 1975 and 1991.