From Arable Land to Sheep Pastures: The Scottish Clearances
Beatrix Hoffmann-Ihde
BCDSS Exhibition Curator
In 1824, Christina Stewart, who lived in Edinburgh, purchased arable land in the Scottish region of Morvern. She wanted to rear sheep on a large scale there. For the crofters who had lived on and from this land up to then, this meant they had to leave. They shared this fate with many smallholders in the British Isles, who, as part of what were known as the Clearances, had repeatedly experienced eviction since the 15th century.
“Your sheep […] Devour the People Themselves.”[i]
The demand for wool in the British textile industry had grown significantly since the end of the Middle Ages and remained very high for centuries. In all parts of the United Kingdom, this led to extensive conversions from arable land to pastureland, referred to by historians as enclosure. This involved evicting the smallholders who lived on and from this land – they were tenants of the major landowners. Thomas More (1478-1535) (fig.1) addressed this practice in his book ‘Utopia,’ and criticized it with reference to the sheep: “ ‘Your sheep […] that are usually so mild and so meagerly fed become so ravenous and untamed that they devour the people themselves, and lay waste and ravage their fields, homes, and towns.” (More 1982 [1516]: 22) (fig. 2).
Fig. 1: Portrait of Sir Thomas More. Hans Holbein the Younger, 1527 (The Frick Collection, New York, 1912.1.77.)
Fig. 2: Grazing sheep in the Scottish Highlands (photo: B. Ihde 2024).
While enclosure and the Clearances began in England back in the 15th century, they only increasingly took place in Scotland following the unification of the British kingdoms. Only then were the crofters who lived on the land no longer needed to defend it against the hostile English. In the Scottish Highlands, the Clearances mainly took place in the 18th and 19th centuries and led to extreme social hardship. Where once a large family had farmed and lived off the land, only one shepherd was now required to tend to the sheep.
In Morvern, for example, where Christina Stewart purchased land in 1824 (Devine 2018: 229) to rear sheep there, over 760 people, men, women, and children, were evicted over the course of a century from the land that they had farmed (Devine 2018: 233). They made up over 150 families.
The crofters evicted from the Highlands were expected to settle on the coast, for example. Some of them actually made a meager living there from fishing and oyster farming. Others moved to the rapidly growing towns to work in the newly built factories there. There was always a high demand for workers, but the former crofters once again found themselves in strong asymmetrical dependency relationships. Many people, however, emigrated to Australia or North America (fig. 3) to build a new life there that was above all independent of major landowners. Unfortunately, once there, they often continued the practice of eviction themselves and appropriated indigenous land in order to farm it.
Fig. 3: The Emigrants. Memorial to the people who were expelled from their villages and left Scotland during the Clearances for ever. Gerald Laing, 2007, Bronze, Helmsdale, Highland (© the artist’s estate / Bridgeman Images). (photo: C. Flieger / Art UK, 2019).
Further Reading
Devine, T. M. 2018. the Scottish Clearances. A History of the Dispossessed 1600-1900. Penguin Books.
Gaskell, Philip, 1968. Morvern Transformed: a Highland Parish in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Morus, Thomas, 1982 [1516]. Utopia. Leipzig: Philipp Reclam.
[i] More 1982 [1516]: 22.