|
North-eastern commerce and
agriculture—Trade of Aberdeen with Flanders, Holland, and the Baltic—Its
connection with Campvere—Aberdeen merchants in
Poland—Rise of textile manufactures—Extent of the cloth and hosiery trades
of Aberdeen—Why the Aberdeen trade flourished—The trade of Banff--The linen
manufacture in Aberdeenshire—Backwardness of husbandry till after
Culloden—The early improvers of agriculture—Sir Archibald Grant: The Earl of
Findlater—Dr James Anderson—Miraculous transformation round Aberdeen —
Beginning of turnip husbandry and the fat cattle trade—Cattle-breeding a
speciality of Aberdeenshire—Improved communication and transport—The
fisheries—The granite trade.
All through its history the town of Aberdeen had
been a place of considerable trade. From the days of its early Flemish
settlers and of the Northern Hanse of the thirteenth century it had been the
commercial capital of the north of Scotland,—the centre to which the produce
of the adjacent country was forwarded for sale and export, and from which
the merchandise brought from Flanders, Holland, and the Baltic was
distributed. It had not, indeed, an entire monopoly of the northern
sea-trade, for other ports, especially Banff and Inverness, had likewise
commercial relations with the Continent ; and as the staple articles of
export were few, consisting chiefly of hides, furs, wool, and salmon, so the
transactions of the merchants were on a very minor scale as compared with
present-day standards. The northern commerce with the Low Countries and with
Danzig and Poland was carried on through Aberdeen merchants and agents
abroad, to whom the exported commodities were consigned. Besides sending
their own countrymen to act as intermediaries with the foreigners, the
Scottish merchants had their staple port or emporium, under an arrangement
with the local authorities, whereby protection of goods and exclusive
privileges of trading were secured. After being fixed at Bruges, the
Scottish staple was transferred to Campvere, in the island of Walcheren, on
the marriage in 1444 of one of the daughters of James I. of Scotland to
Wolfaert van Borselen, Lord of Campvere and Earl of Buchan. For three
centuries and a half, by contracts renewed from time to time between the
United Provinces and the Royal Burghs of Scotland, sometimes after a brief
trial of another port, Campvere was the seat of the Scottish staple, where
authorised factors, under the supervision of a Lord Conservator of Scottish
Privileges as supreme judge, sold the goods of their Scottish principals.
The trade of Aberdeen was on a relatively extensive scale in the seventeenth
century, and Sir Patrick Drummond,. one of the Conservators, reports that
Aberdeen brought more money into Scotland than all its other towns.1
Similarly Sir Samuel Forbes of Foveran, in his ' Description of
Aberdeenshire,' written about the date of Mar's rebellion, states that no
city in Scotland sent to the sea ships and cargoes of greater value and
brought home more money in return, and that the loss of a single Aberdeen
ship was more serious than the loss ot ten ships of other towns. Exports
greatly preponderated over imports, and the balance being adjusted by
shipments of money, the silver currency of Holland passed into circulation
in the north of Scotland. The Records of the Convention of Burghs bear
witness to the constant interest that was taken by the commercial community
of Aberdeen in the trade and privileges of the staple port, and members of
burgess families —Skenes, Gordons, Gregorys, Lumsdens, and Allardeses— held
from time to time, or in contihuous succession, the coveted and lucrative
office of factor.
The trade with the Hanseatic
seaport of Danzig and with Poland likewise dates from an early period, and
in the sixteenth century Danzig was resorted to by Scottish
merchant-adventurers of all grades, from the wholesale dealer to the humble
packman or pedlar. From the great Baltic port these Scotchmen passed inland
to the Polish provinces, which for a time extended all the way from the
Baltic to the Black Sea; and when Sir John Skene speaks of seeing multitudes
of them at Cracow in 1569, and William Lithgow about the same period states
the number of Scottish families in Poland at 30,000, we must conclude that,
however this number may exaggerate, the migration had become a highly
significant fact in the life of both countries. The population of Poland
consisted of a small ruling class and a large body of serfs of the soil,
without any intervening middle or commercial class; and the Scotchmen
stepped in with their greater faculty for trade, and found scope for its
exercise in supplying the few wants of a numerous if indigent people, and in
purchasing and exporting the corn and the malt, flax, and fruit which the
country produced.
Of the active participation
of Aberdeen merchants in the Baltic trade of the latter part of the
sixteenth century we have evidence in the number of names connected with
Danzig in the burgess-roll. A fee was exigible from burgesses for admission
to the privilege of tins trade, and in 1566 a special duty was imposed on
all goods from Danzig for the expense of " the great light on the gable of
St Ninian's Chapel" on the Castle Hill, which had become part of the
equipment of the port of Aberdeen. The articles of export were few, but the
Scottish merchants in Danzig entered into commercial relations with their
fellow-countrymen at Campvere, and thus became dealers in all the
commodities for which there was a market. That the Polish trade was on a
large scale is shown by the fortunes which it enabled some of the
Aberdeenshire merchants to amass. Two of the families largely concerned in
it for generations were the Aedies and Skenes, who prospered sufficiently to
become the purchasers of landed estates in their native country. Sir George
Skene of Rubislaw, a retired Danzig merchant, was for years at the head of
the municipality of Aberdeen; and members of both families, after their
return from Danzig, took an active part in political as well as municipal
affairs. So successful as a Danzig merchant was William Forbes, the founder
of the Craigievar family, that he accumulated such riches as enabled him to
acquire his numerous estates in Aberdeenshire and elsewhere. At a somewhat
later date the estates united under the name of Turnerhall, in Buchan, were
acquired with the fortune of John Turner, a Danzig merchant, who was also a
benefactor of Marischal College. Another Danzig merchant was Robert Gordon,
of the Straloch family, the founder of Robert Gordon's Hospital (now
College), whose fortune may have been partly acquired in the corn - trade
during " King William's dear years." Fergusons of a well-known Aberdeenshire
family were largely concerned in banking and other enterprises in Warsaw.
Robert Low, merchant and postmaster of Danzig, was brother-in-law of the
first provost, James Morison of Aberdeen, and uncle of the provost who
withstood the Jacobites at the Market Cross in 1745. Leslies and Farquhars,
sons and other relatives of the Covenanter provosts, with Chalmerses,
Couttses, Burnets, and Barclays, Mores, Blacks, and Abercrombies, are among
the other Aberdeenshire names connected with the trade in Poland. The
Scottish merchants engaged in this trade sent ^10,000 to Charles II. when he
was in exile; and in 1700 the Aberdeenshire communities in Danzig and
Konigsberg were important enough in respect of numbers and wealth to be
specially appealed to by the principal and regents for aid in defraying the
cost of new buildings at Marischal College. A document preserved in the
University archives gives the names of fifty-four Aber-donians resident in
Konigsberg and twenty-one in Warsaw who contributed to the fund, and the
Danzig merchants appear also to have responded in a liberal spirit to the
appeal.1 Numbers of Aberdonians and other Scotchmen were settled at Cracow,
Posen, Kulm, Thorn, Plock, Lipno, and all centres of population. When
General Patrick Gordon of Auchleuchries went from Aberdeen to Danzig as a
young adventurer and soldier of fortune in the early days of the
Commonwealth, he found his own countrymen everywhere as he travelled through
Poland. This state of things continued into the first half of the eighteenth
century, when anarchy and war rendered the Polish cities and provinces
untenable by their foreign merchants.
To the short list of
commodities exported from Aberdeen in early days others were added in course
of time. Aberdeen pork had a great reputation in the seventeenth century.
Such was the market for it at Campvere, for the victualling of Dutch ships,
that an extensive curing industry was carried on in Aberdeen, where there
was no local consumption of the article, and large numbers of pigs were
raised by the farmers and millers of the two counties. After the Union, when
the Dutch trade had fallen away, the victualling of the British navy
afforded support for the pork industry, but it gradually shrank into
comparative unimportance. The extent of the trade in lambskins may be
estimated from the fact mentioned by Alexander Skene, that in the second
quarter of the seventeenth century he knew an Aberdeen merchant who sent
30,000 to Danzig in one year; and, following the requirements of the climate
and of fashion, one of Patrick Gordon's first acts as winter was approaching
was to get his cloak transformed into a "Polish overcoat lined with
sheepskins."
By this time, however,
Aberdeen was carrying on an extensive manufacture of textile fabrics.
Weaving, as we have seen, was practised in the town and county by the early
Flemish settlers, and the websters or weavers are mentioned from time to
time in the early documents as members of an organised guild. They produced
coarse linens and wuol-lens until the end of the sixteenth century, when
Michael Wandail, a Fleming, received permission to settle in the town and to
manufacture " grograms" and worsteds, on condition that he took into his
employment an Aberdonian apprentice. This seems to mark a new point of
departure in the Aberdeen trade, and within the next few years the
Government was pressing the Convention of Burghs to follow up the initiative
taken by the northern city. Proceeding on an Act passed by the Estates, the
Convention sent commissioners to England, Flanders, and France to bring
clothmakers to Scotland and establish " the art of making broadcloth,
flemm;ngs, frieses, grograms, and other stuffs " such as were made in
Flanders of Scottish wool. One manufacturer was induced to come from
Norwich, and after delay a few were brought from Flanders. The Privy
Council, which had to complain of the want of zeal shown by the burghs,
ordered that the small body of strangers should be kept together in the
capital, where, however, they soon had to appeal to the Privy Council, as
they did successfully, against local pressure to enter the guild of weavers.
The burgesses were more zealous for the protection of their own privileges
than for the expansion of trade and industry, and the Government, in the
hope of promoting manufacture, issued a prohibition against the exportation
of wool. An indication of the prevalence of home manufactures is given by
Taylor, the London "Water Poet," who visited Braemar and other parts of the
north of Scotland in 1618, and who asserts that the northern laird's linen
was made from flax grown on his own land and spun by his family and
servants, and that his hosiery was made from his own sheep's wool. Home-made
linen was an item in Huntly's rental paid in kind in 1600.
Another contrast between
public spirit in Aberdeen and the restrictive policy generally pursued is
seen in 1636, during the provostship of Alexander Jaffray, the elder, when
it was resolved to establish a " House of Correction," or prototype of the
prison, reformatory, and industrial school of later days, where sturdy
rogues and beggars, disobedient servants and children, and disorderly
persons were to be employed on the manufacture of broadcloth, kerseys, seys,
and other cloths as at " Saint Paul's Work in Edinburgh." A joint-stock
company was formed to carry on the enterprise, and the magistrates agreed to
contribute 2000 merks of tax-money to assist in providing and furnishing
premises. At the House of Correction, which gave its name to Correction Wynd,
beside St Nicholas' Church, the business of spinning and weaving seems to
have been carried on from the first on a scale of some importance, and
during the Troubles the place was repeatedly plundered by warriors or
camp-followers of the dominant faction. Some of the ideas of Jaffray and the
other promoters of the House of Correct on were adopted by Robert Johnston,
an Aberdonian settled in London, who in 1640 bequeathed £600 sterling to the
magistrates of Aberdeen to be employed in perpetuity as a capital sum
whereby the aged, blind, lame, and impotent might be employed in trade and
manufacture. In 1703 the trustees invested this sum in a joint-stock
company, of which a member of the Marischal family and the second Robert
Barclay of Ury were promoters, formed for the purpose of carrying on woollen
manufactures on a large scale at Gordon's mills on the Don, where there had
been a fulling-mill for generations if not for centuries, and where the
manufacture of paper had been started a few years before by Patrick
Sandilands of Cotton, who may be regarded as the pioneer of this
characteristic industry of Lower Donside. The Gordon's Mills Company
developed the manufacture of the higher qualities of cloth, including
half-silk serges, damasks, and plush; and skilled workmen were brought from
France for the bleaching and other operations.
In the seventeenth century
there was no district in Scotland that surpassed or even rivalled Aberdeen
in the manufacture of cloth. Thomas Tucker, who reported to Cromwell's
Government on the settlement of the Scottish customs and excise, states that
plaidings were " made hereabout in greater plenty than in any other place of
the nation whatsoever "; and in 1651 the export of this commodity to
Campvere and Danzig was 73,538 ells, while a beginning had been made with
the hosiery trade, which was to be the main resource of Aberdeen for many
years after the demand for these fabrics had ceased. The trade in plaidings
and fingrams seems to have been stimulated by a temporary demand by the
Dutch West Indian Companies, in connection with the Brazilian plantations
which they held in Tucker's time. The loss of these plantations by the
Dutch, according to the contemporary testimony of Skene, was a "
considerable cause" of decline in the trade, and another cause was the
"insufficiency" or indifferent quality of the goods. The municipal
authorities had exercised a certain supervision over articles for the export
trade, which had in all cases to pass through the town's weigh - house and
pack - house, the erection of which, in 1634, marks the growth of this
trade.
The history of these
industries reveals some significant facts in relation to the development of
the social life and character of the people. The cloth for the home market
was mainly a product of domestic industry. The wool was spun in the farmer's
household into yarn, which was sent to country weavers of the neighbourhood
to be made into cloth ; and Aberdeenshire serge fabricated in this way was
sold at fairs and by travelling packmen. Domestic industry also had its part
in the manufactures for the export trade. Alexander Skene records an
incident throwing much light upon the conditions under which the Aberdeen
trade wTas carried on, and why it held its ground against southern
competition. An Edinburgh merchant named Barnes, seeing the great extent of
the plaiding export, and that the Aberdeen merchants purchased most of their
wool in the south of Scotland and resold at a profit to the spinners and
manufacturers, thought that by saving intermediate profits and expenses he
would be able to undersell the Aberdonians in the Dutch market. Accordingly
he proceeded to set up his manufacture in Edinburgh and to export the
product to Holland, but only to find that the Aberdeen goods were being sold
below the cost-price of his stock. On mention., lg the matter to one of the
principal Aberdeen merchants, he received the reply that the people engaged
in producing the Aberdeen plaidings " had not by far such entertainment" as
the Edinburgh workers had, and drank pure spring water oftener than ale, and
that this was the reason why the Aberdeen plaiding controlled the market.
Barnes soon gave up the manufacture; but Skene goes on to say that, "
notwithstanding that our commons live at such a sober rate, they are so set
at work that in former years the product of their labours hath brought into
this kingdom upwards of a hundred thousand rix-dollars for many years
together. Without this the nobility and gentry in these parts could not get
their money rents well paid."
The hosiery trade was still
more distinctively a domestic industry. By means of " rock and spindle "
(for the spinning-wheel did not come into vogue till towards the middle of
the eighteenth century) the wool was made into thread or worsted, which was
knitted into stockings by the women and girls of the rural population. In
the Cromwellian and Restoration periods the great promoter of the stocking
trade in Aberdeen was a spirited citizen named George Pyper, who directly
employed about 400 knitters and spinners, and attached a large number of the
country people to his interest by giving them small advances of money or of
linen goods. In an account of Buchan written about 1680, and attributed to
Lady Anne Drummond, Countess of Erroll, it is stated that the women of
Aberdeenshire were mostly employed in spinning and working stockings and
making plaid-ing webs, which were exported by the Aberdeen merchants : " And
it is this which brings money to the common people; other ways of getting it
they have not." In the latter half of the eighteenth century, when the
hosiery trade was at its height, it brought from ^100,000 to ^120,000 into
Aberdeenshire every year. The remuneration of the spinners and knitters at
this time came to about two-thirds of the price of the goods, or over
,£70,000. The greater number of hands were employed on ordinary commercial
goods, but the arts of the spinner and knitter were occasionally carried to
a remarkable degree of elaboration. Pyper had samples of stockings of such
fineness that they cost him over twenty shillings a pair; and a hundred
years later Dr Anderson 1 mentions instances investigated by himself in
which the workmanship with fine thread from the delicate fibres of Highland
wool ran up the cost to four or even five guineas. A pair presented to
Field-Marshal Keith are said to have been knitted of thread spun to such
fineness that twenty-four miles of it came from a single pound of wool, and
much greater fineness even than this is said to have been attained. Ladies'
gloves at three guineas a pair were other products of the Aberdeen hosiery
trade before the fine-fieeccd native sheep was superseded in the hill
districts by the hardier and more profitable breeds from the south of
Scotland, or gave place to cattle in the low country.
Twenty-two mercantile houses
in Aberdeen were engaged in the hosiery export trade in 1771. The merchants
attended at the weekly market and country fairs and bought the products of
the knitters' labour, while the Dean of Guild looked round the stalls and
confiscated defective goods. Numbers of the spinners and kniiters were also
directly in the employment of the merchants. So important was this trade as
a source of income to the rural population, that it led to agricultural
holdings being broken up and multiplied, and according to Dr Skene Keith it
was the means of adding more than a third to the land rental of
Aberdeenshire.
After the special connection
of Aberdeenshire with Danzig and Poland had ceased, the hosiery trade with
Holland continued to extend until the stocking-frame impaired its re-munerativeness
to the hand-knitters, and the wars of the French Revolution closed the
staple port (1795). To a certain extent there was also an export to England,
Portugal, and America, but it did not attain to great proportions or long
survive the introduction of the frame.
Banff had participated in the
hosiery trade, and for a lime it had a large export of thread to be
manufactured into hosiery at Nottingham and Leicester. The local firm of
Robinson & Co., which had developed the thread business, introduced an
improved stocking-frame and carried on an extensive manufacture of silk,
cotton, and worsted hosiery; but under the influence of English competition,
and of further improvements in machinery and increased use of cotton, this
manufacture was discontinued about 1816. By this time the Aberdeen hosiery
trade had shrunk into small proportions, and 14,000 persons were employed in
the linen, cotton, and woollen manufactures of Aberdeensh;re, chiefly in the
large factories of Lower Donside and the town of Aberdeen. Fifteen hundred
children, from nine to fifteen years of age, were employed in 1810 in the
cotton factories of Aberdeen and Woodside.
The first notable step in the
great expansion which the linen trade received in the north-east was taken
at Huntly about 1737, when Hugh MacVeagh, from Ireland, under the
encouragement of the Duke of Gordon, started the manufacture of yarn, which
so developed under his competent management that after a time he exported
large quantities to London, Nottingham, Manchester, Glasgow, and Paisley,
besides manufacturing a portion of his output into cloth. Another of
MacVeagh's products was silk stockings. The records of Banff show that town
to have been also responding, through recommendations of its public
authorities and by the action of some of its inhabitants, to the initiative
of the Board of Manufactures ; and Bishop Pococke reports in 1760 that it
subsisted by linen-yarn and shops. Aberdeen made application to the Board,
after Culloden, for a woman qualified to instruct others in the art of
spinning linen-yarn, and such progress was made in the art that before the
end of the century more thread was made in Aberdeen than in any other town
in Scotland.1 Great linen works sprang up on the Don — the first and largest
being the establishment of Leys & Co., at Gordon's Mills, and afterwards at
Grandholm Haugh ; and in Aberdeen, where the chief pioneer of the linen
trade, as of local banking, was Provost Alexander Livingston, who had gained
a fortune as a merchant in Holland, and lost it through too great devotion
to the interests of the city. Aberdeen had its speciality in sewring-thread
and in yarn for manufacturers in England and Scotland, and it suffered
greatly in the days of " Grattan's Parliament" by the bounties which enabled
the Irish manufacturers to undersell even in the Scottish markets.
The linen trade in the form
of spinning and handloom weaving was carried on in most of the towns and
villages in the two counties, and under its stimulus, with such other
advantages as proximity of peat-fuel and allotments of land on favourable
terras, several new villages were erected by spirited proprietors in the
second half of the eighteenth century, as Cuminestown, New Byth, Mormond
Village (Strichen), New Keith, New Pitsligo (originally Cavoch), Stuartfield,
and Fetterangus. Tomintoul in Upper Banffshire dates from the same period,
but manufactures never had much part in its economy—except illicit
distillation of whisky. Much flax was grown in the counties for a time, but
as fibre imported from Holland was preferred by the manufacturers its
cultivation fell off. Yet the spinning of linen-yarn was widely practised as
a domestic industry when the woollen trade began to decline.
Though agriculture, including
pasturage, was the mainstay of Aberdeenshire all through these troublous
centuries, it had been carried on under circumstances of the greatest
disadvantage, the people distracted from its pursuit by ever-recurring
turmoils, and their possessions subject to the raids of the Highlanders and
the burnings and ravages of pol'tical or baronial strife. The backwardness
of tillage, which was characteristic of the whole country, was perhaps all
the greater in the north-east by reason of the political energy so
distinctive of its history. The seven seasons of crop - failure, distress,
and famine, with which the seventeenth century closed, had the effect of
reducing the condition of the landed interest and the numbers of the rural
population, many of whom perished of hunger in some of the poorer districts,
so that farms occupied by several families as joint tenants were left
vacant.1 Sheep-farming prevailed at this period under the stimulus of the
demand for wool in connection with the hosiery and other woollen
manufactures, but the flocks were depleted for food during the famine years,
and had only just recovered when the fiscal arrangements of the Treaty of
Union stopped the exportation of Scottish wool to the profitable foreign
markets, and so depreciated the price of the commodity all over the country.
The counterbalancing rise in the price of cattle, through the opening of the
English trade by the treaty, was not of much benefit to Aberdeenshire until
the middle of the century, when the practice of " droving" from the
north-eastern counties to the southern markets began. By this time a strong
movement in the direction of agricultural improvement had set in. It was
manifested first in some of the counties farther south, and notably in
Haddingtonshire; but if Aberdeenshire cannot lay claim to priority in the
march of agricultural improvement in the eighteenth century, it had among
its newer landowners and those who had seen the world several energetic men
who laboured zealously to bring it abreast of the most advanced practice.
One of the earliest and most
influential of the north-eastern improvers was Sir Archibald Grant, to whom
we are indebted for a vivid account of central Aberdeenshire in the period
immediately following the rebellion of 1715. Land improvement at this time
was little thought of anywhere in Scotland. Drainage was unknown, enclosures
were rare, and the immemorial system of infield continuously under crop and
outfield cropped occasionally, and of runrig and "baulks," everywhere
prevailed. Sir Francis Grant, one of the Senators of the College of Justice
(Lord Cullen), had acquired the old Forbes and Priory lands of Monymusk in
17x2, and a few years afterwards he gave over the management to his son. At
that time no part of the estate was enclosed, and there was no timber upon
it except a few elm, sycamore, and ash trees about a small kitchen-garden
adjoining the house, a few straggling trees at some of the farm-yards, and a
dwarfish copse. All the farms were "ill disposed and mixed, different
persons having alternate ridges." Such land as was m culture belonged to the
farms, and was " raised, uneven, and full of stones," the ridges crooked,
and the land full of weeds and worn-out by cropping without proper manure or
tillage. The people, Sir Archibald Grant goes on to say, were poor,
ignorant, and slothful, and engrained enemies to planting, enclosing, or any
improvements, or cleanness. There was no keeping of sheep, or cattle, or
observance of roads except during four months when oats and bere were on the
ground. The farm-houses, and even corn-mills, and the manse and school, were
dirty huts, pulled in pieces for manure, or falling of themselves almost
each alternate year.
In another paper Sir
Archibald Grant puts on record the facts that in his early day s, soon after
the Union, husbandry and manufactures were in low esteem; turnips raised in
fields for cattle by the Earl of Rothes and some other improvers in the
south were "wondered at." Colonel Middleton was the first who used carts or
waggons about Aberdeen, and he and Sir Archibald, with the Duke of Gordon,
were the first in the north who made hay. Aberdeen, this interesting
narrative informs us, was then poor and small, having some Dutch and French
trade in salmon, stockings, serges, and plaiding; it had (apparently through
its Dutch trade) the first use of tea, "then very scarce and little used in
Edinburgh"; and it supplied Edinburgh with French wines. "All improvements
of security, husbandry, manufactures, or commerce," it is added, "are since
1707, with which literature, except school jargon, hath kept pace."
John Wesley visited Monymusk
in 1761, and again in 1764, and in his Journal he gives a very different
picture of the place. He describes it as ljing in a fruitful and pleasant
valley, in which Sir Archibald Grant had reclaimed a large area of waste
ground and planted millions of trees, and states that the cultivation,
especially near the manor-house, would compare favourably with that
prevailing in England. "Certainly," reflects Wesley, "this is a nation swift
to hear and slow to speak, though not slow to wrath ;" and he mentions that
Grant had given much attention to the improvement of church music, and that
after sermon thirty or forty persons sang an anthem with such voices, as
well as judgment, as could hardly have been excelled at any cathedral in
England. A more practical observer than Wesley, namely Andrew Wight, a
skilled farmer in Haddingtonshire, who was appointed surveyor to the
Commissioners of the Annexed Estates—the body charged with the
administration of the estates forfeited after the rebellion of 1745— visited
Monymusk in 1779, and reports that the culture of the home-farm was equal to
any he had ever seen. A skilled overseer from East Lothian had been placed
in charge of it, and had received leases on his own account of two other
farms on the estate in order that he might give an example of good husbandry
to the people around him.
But it was only after great
pains and many discouragements that these brilliant results had been
achieved. It was the common experience of the early improvers, who were not
few, and of whom Sir Archibald Grant must be regarded as a leader and type,
to have many obstacles and obstructions to contend with. The farmers were in
nearly all cases slow to abandon their old ways, and a stirring address
which he delivered to his tenants at the beginning of 1756 has been
preserved, wherein he endeavours once more to rouse them to a serious
consideration of their own interest. In their resistance to the enclosing of
land, on the ground apparently of its interference with the old system of
common pasturage, they had thrown down fences and wantonly destroyed young
trees and crops, and he lectures them on this foolish display of militant
agrarianism, and, as a man of business who had gained costly experience in
great enterprises and in the London world of finance, he tries to impress
them with such considerations as that some who were diligent misapplied
their labour by clinging to the old ways, and that others spent much time in
sauntering about, or on trifles, and even when ostensibly at work were "as
if half-dead or asleep."
The pioneer of agricultural
improvement in Banffshire was the Earl of Findlater, long the most active as
well as the most sagacious nobleman in the north-east, and patron of the
city of Aberdeen. As Lord Deskford he went to reside on bis estate near
Banff about 1754. Taking one of his farms into his own occupation, he
proceeded to cultivate it in accordance with the best agricultural practice
of the day. After a t'me he placed three experienced " overseers" from
England on farms in different parts of Lower Banffshire, where they
introduced a style of agriculture hitherto unknown in the district: and
further to carry out his schemes, he consolidated several small holdings
into single farms and let them on long leases, binding the tenants to
enclose and divide the land with stone or other fences and pursue a certain
style of cropping. Lord Findlater was the first to introduce the turnip
husbandry and sown-grass into his county, and by example and precept he
succeeded in effecting a revolution in the agriculture of Banffshire. As
head of the Board of Trustees for Manufactures, and otherwise, he also did
much to develop the linen industry in his own county and elsewhere.
Among those who rendered
conspicuous service to agricultural progress in Aberdeenshire was Mr
Alexander Udny of Udny, the representative of one of the oldest landed
families, who was a Commissioner of Excise for Scotland, and in emulation of
well-managed estates in the south brought the land around his residence into
the highest order, divided it into square fields, enclosed by hedges, behind
which were lanes or "walks" planted with four rows of beech and elm, and
erected commodious farm-buildings which he filled with a select herd of
cattle, partly from Berwickshire and England and partly of the indigenous
breed, and with a stud of horses " full blood on both sides." By
consolidation of several holdings he formed the large farm of Monkshill, on
another part of the estate, and let it at a very moderate rent to Mr James
Anderson, a young man of good family in Mid-Lothian, afterwards widely known
as a political economist and agricultural writer, a Doctor of Laws and
Fellow of the Royal Society, and in practical agriculture the inventor of
the small two-horse plough without wheels. To Dr Anderson, who marred the
heiress of the Aberdeenshire family of Seton of Mounie and assumed her name,
we are indebted for an exact and contemporaneous account of the rise and
early progress of the new husbandry in Aberdeenshire.
One of the wonders of the new
era was seen in the neighbourhood of the city of Aberdeen, where a bleak and
stony wilderness was converted into fertile fields and luxuriant gardens. Up
to the middle of the eighteenth century the cultivated land about Aberdeen
consisted almost exclusively of sandy tracts near the sea and the rivers,
which under the stimulus of heavy manuring yielded abundant crops of
garden-stuffs and barley. The land being scarce and its rent very high, the
great aim was to extract from the soil the maximum of produce, and a kind of
culture was introduced which, according to Dr Anderson, was greatly superior
to what could be found in any other part of Scotland.
Aberdeen was bounded on the
one side by the sea, and for the rest by a broad tract of barren moorland,
hitherto deemed incapable of cultivation. By means of drainage some swampy
ground, called the Provost's Mire, had been reclaimed by Provost Fordyce, at
a somewhat earlier date; and when the era of land improvement was beginning,
Provost Alexander Robertson, by way of example, leased from the town and
drained a small part of the Lochlands (now covered with streets and houses),
and where malaria had hitherto reigned he began to raise crops of
astonishing richness. The rough land about the Gilcomston and Ferry-hill
suburbs—consisting of boulder-clay, with stones more abundant on the surface
than herbage—had been let to five tenants, three of whom became bankrupt
while the other two were following suit, when, under the initiative of such
men as Provosts Robertson and Livingston, the municipal authorities resolved
to dispose of the barren lands about the town in permanence at a fixed
yearly feu-duty.
The first result of this step
was a great increase of revenue. Several of the wealthier citizens acquired
land for suburban residences, and presently it was found that an "enthusiasm
of agriculture" had broken out. The feuars cleared and trenched their
grounds at great expense, which, on the opportune rise of the demand for
granite paving-stones in London, was partly reimbursed from the sale of the
immense crop of rock and boulders with which the surface was covered. Thus
thousands of acres were brought under cultivation and let at rents of from
five to eight pounds an acre. " In any other part of the world which I have
seen," writes Dr Anderson in 1775, "I would be reckoned impossible to
convert such soils to any valuable use, and the most daring improver I have
met with anywhere else would shrink back from attempting to cultivate a
field which an Aberdeen man would consider as a trifling labour."these lands
in some cases was as high as ^100 an acre, a fourth part of which would be
recovered by the disposal of the stones for shipment to London. These lands,
moreover, continued to be cultivated with care and attention, and according
to Anderson the crops were better and the rents were higher than in any
other part of Great Britain.
On this striking passage in
local history, which is not only worthy of attention in relation to general
economics, but presents a condensed and typical view of the process by which
a large part of Aberdeenshire was transformed from waste into agricultural
land, we have not only the testimony of Dr Anderson but also that of Andrew
Wight, who in his official capacity of agricultural expert and surveyor
visited the county after he had carried out his inquiries in many other
parts of Scotland, and bears witness that " there is perhaps no place in the
world where a spirit of husbandry has made such a figure as about Aberdeen."
This new departure had hardly begun at the middle of the century, and within
thirty years Wight could report that, "as far as one can cast his eye round
Aberdeen, there is not a vestige of the moor remaining."
In the general report
summarising the result of Sir John Sinclair's great inquiry into the
agriculture of Scotland at the close of the eighteenth and beginning of the
nineteenth century, it is stated that the most striking feature in the
cultivation of the north-east Lowlands was this reclamation of barren land
in the neighbourhood of Aberdeen, but that the district in general was
distinguished by the very great perfection to which the turnip husbandry,
with artificial grasses, had been carried, and by the great numbers of
excellent cattle which it was rearmg and sending to England. About a third
of the population resided in towns, and though there was no coal in the
district, and nearly one-half of the lime which was extensively applied to
the land had to be imported, yet by the exportation of cattle, fish, pork,
and occasionally grain, and by the demand in the populous manufacturing city
of Aberdeen for the produce of the soil, Aberdeenshire was enabled to carry
on its expensive agricultural improvements.
The new "green crops " were
introduced into Aberdeenshire by the improving landowners—Sir Archibald
Grant, Burnett of Kemnay, and others—about 1750. The grass - husbandry
rapidly spread ; but as turnip culture involved much more labour and a
greater change of system, it made little progress till after the famine of
1782. Robert Barclay of Ury, great-grandson of the author of the 'Apology'
for the Quakers, having studied agriculture among his friends in Norfolk,
became, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, the most effective
leader of improvement in these parts. While other landowners worked through
managers and overseers, or by inducing skilled farmers to settle on their
estates, Barclay was his own captain of industry; and though he brought some
labourers from Norfolk, he showed, and even enforced by his own hand, how
such novel work as hoeing should be done.1 He employed from forty to sixty
labourers, many of whom carried their training and knowledge to other
places, and in this way, as well as by his splendid agricultural results, he
stimulated improvement and energetic industry all over the north-east. In
Aberdeenshire, as throughout Scotland, the landowners were still the great
promoters of progress in the art and practice of agriculture. They pressed
it forward at first upon a reluctant population, but ultimately the farmers
were enlisted, and in the nineteenth century the reclamation of land from
bog and moor has been almost exclusively carried out by them. The distress
of 1782-83 carried its lessons home to the farmers, and led to an immediate
abatement in their adherence to the old ways, and henceforth stock-raising
assumed a new importance in the rural economy of the two counties. Dr Skene
Keith was minister of Keithhall at the time of this famine, and taking a
retrospect of all that had passed under his observation during the eventful
quarter of a century that followed, he remarks that the calamitous season of
1782 compelled such of the farmers as were not ruined by it to abandon their
old system of husbandry and introduce turnips and sown grass; while the
landed proprietors saw that it was necessary to select good tenants for
vacant farms, and either to induce or oblige them to improve the land. From
this famine dates the rapid start forward of the new husbandry that was to
place Aberdeenshire and Banffshire at the head of beef - producing counties.
Hitherto there were not two hundred acres of land put under turnips in any
year by the farmers of Aberdeenshire, as distinguished from the proprietors,
but in a few years the area devoted to this crop was 20,000 acres. Hitherto,
also, the heavy work-oxen, used in teams of ten or twelve for ploughing, had
been imported from the Lothians and Fifeshire, but now nearly all the cattle
in the county were raised at home, and Aberdeenshire began to have a large
export trade. Dealers from the south had been buying a few store cattle from
the county for nearly twenty years, but now the output began to assume
extensive proportions. Ploughing with these costly teams was gradually
abandoned in favour of the improved plough drawn by a pair of horses or of
oxen ; but the old lumbering plough and team were still common in
Aberdeenshire in 1794, though they had disappeared in other regions of
improved agriculture.
The extension of the
cultivated area was greatly encouraged by the high prices that prevailed
during the long war-period, and the usual arrangement was that the
tenant-farmers, for a certain number of years, received the use of the new
land they brought under the plough at a nominal or very moderate rent. In
many cases the stone fences with which the farms were enclosed and their
fields divided, and even the farm buildings, were erected by the farmer, and
represented so much sunk capital which he was to recover either from his
successor in the tenancy or from the landowner. Thus the security afforded
by leases became the basis of land improvement throughout Aberdeenshire, and
the work of improvement was energetically taken up by the class whose
predecessors had been so slow to move.
These two counties are
pre-eminently the counties of small farms. Comparatively few agricultural
holdings in Aberdeenshire and Banffshire are so large as to yield a rent of
£200 per annum. "Crofts" and farms under ^50 of rent are by far the most
numerous class of holdings, and of those above this limit a large majority
are under £100. Many of these farms have been formed by consolidation of
still smaller holdings, and are a result of the persevering and self-denying
industry of men whose recompense was miserably disproportionate to their
exertions.
The cattle trade was placed
on a greatly improved footing when the new root-crops put an end to the old
difficulty about the wintering of cattle, but during the first quarter of
the nineteenth century the surplus stock of the two counties was for the
most part sent in a comparatively lean state in "droves" to the south of
Scotland or to England. In 1810 this surplus numbered about 12,000 animals,
and brought in a revenue of nearly 50,000. It was not until 1827, when steam
navigation provided direct access to the London market without the " loss of
condition" and other drawbacks incidental to droving, that the trade in fat
cattle was established on a considerable scale, and years were still to
elapse before Aberdeenshire acquired its reputation as purveyor of " prime
Scotch" beef to the Metropolis.
Turnip-culture, on which this
trade depended so much, was greatly advantaged by the introduction of
crushed bones and guano—manures that specially suited Aberdeenshire soils
and greatly enhanced the crop. But quite as important an element in the art
of beef-production as practised in these counties is the careful attention
paid to the quality of the animals and to the special art of
cattle-breeding. Another Barclay of Ury— Captain Robert Barclay-Allardice,
the famous athlete and son of the agricultural improver already
mentioned—formed about the date of the opening of steam navigation a
magnificent herd of Durham or Teeswater cattle, from which drafts of
breeding-stock were sold off at high prices every year, many of the animals
passing into Aberdeenshire. Several of the Aberdeenshire agriculturists
began shortly afterwards to give close attention to this subject of
cattle-breeding, and in particular Mr William M'Combie of Tillyfour, and the
brothers Anthony and Amos Cruickshank—M'Combie experimenting with the native
Aberdeenshire black polled or hornless cattle, and the Cruickshanks with the
Durham short-horned breed. Through these famous breeders and others a great
improvement began to be apparent not only in the symmetry but likewise in
the beef-producing qualities of the Aberdeenshire ox. The short-horned and
black polled breeds, and first crosses between them, nourished on
feeding-stuffs the chief of which were the root-crops supposed to derive
special qualities from the soil of Aberdeenshire, were found to produce beef
of the best quality in a minimum of time. The north-eastern farmers devoted
themselves with pre-eminent success to cattle-breeding and cattle-feeding,
the fame of their herds extended far and wide, and no county in the kingdom
produced beef commanding so high a price in the Smithfield market. The
rapidity of railway transit was another gain to the cattle trade, and
latterly much of the beef of Aberdeenshire has been sent to England in the
form of dead meat.
Altogether, it is computed,
the beef of at least 60,000 cattle leaves the two counties every year as
their contribution to the food-supply of the great towns, and chiefly
London, yielding a return to the farmers which is roughly estimated at
£1,500,000, or little short of twice the agricultural rental. And this is
after meeting the greatly increased consumption in the city of Aberdeen,
with the residential district of Deeside, and the numerous smaller towns
throughout the counties. The stock of cattle in the two counties is 28 for
every hundred acres of arable land, whereas in Norfolk the proportion is
only xi.5. Cattle-raising and cattle-feeding are the basis of northeastern
agriculture, and the chief business of the Aberdeenshire farmer. Large
flocks of sheep are kept in summer on the hills not reserved for deer, and
are wintered in the low country. The corn crops are oats and barley, very
little wheat being grown. But it is by their cattle that the agriculture of
the two counties flourishes.
How very modern much of our
progress is, may be illustrated by such facts as that not only the electric
telegrapn and the railway, but even steam navigation, had its practical
origin within the range of living memory. In the early part of the
eighteenth century, as we have seen, wheeled vehicles were unknown in
Aberdeenshire. Except for the military roads, one of which entered the
county by the Cairnwell, and passed by way of Castleton of Braemar,
Glengairn, and Corgarff into Banffshire, and another by the Cairn-a-Mounth,
Alford, and Huntly, both constructed after the battle of Culloden, roads in
the modern sense were almost unknown m the two counties until about the
close of the eighteenth century. Yet in 1810 Ur Skene Keith could say that
no other county in Great Britain had laid out so much money as Aberdeenshire
on roads of all descriptions.1 Within fourteen years 300 miles of turnpike
road had been constructed, and " commutation " or " statute labour" roads
had been made in all directions from these main thoroughfares. It was in
1765 that the judges of the Circuit Court of Justiciary first travelled to
Aberdeen in chaises instead of on horseback, but the first mail-coach from
the south did not arrive till 1798, performing the journey from Edinburgh in
twenty-one hours, and it was not till 1811 that coaches for the conveyance
of passengers were finally placed on the new road between Aberdeen, Huntly,
Elgin, and Inverness. With the road came the cart, and an enormous advance
in the means of transport; and the Aberdeenshire Canal, designed by Telford,
and opened for traffic in 1806, provided water-carriage between the harbour
of Aberdeen and the centre of the county at Inverurie. The canal continued
in operation, to the great benefit of the district, until the railway was
constructed in its track.
After agriculture the most
important industry of the two counties is their fisheries. Since the
introduction of trawling by steam-vessels, about 1882, Aberdeen has become
the chief centre of the Scottish fish-trade. The value of the fish
discharged on its quays is three times that of the produce of the sea at any
other Scottish port, and almost as great a value accrues to Aberdeenshire
and Banffshire from sea-fisheries as to all the rest of Scotland, with its
islands. The herring-fishing was prosecuted off the Scottish coasts by the
Dutch for centuries before Scottish fishermen could be induced to
participate in it except on the most insignificant scale. Much resentment
was excited against the strangers, who were accused of despoiling Scotland
of the wealth of its seas, and many efforts were made by the Government and
local authorities, by means of bounties and otherwise, to stimulate
effective competition with the fishermen of the nation whose chief city was
said to be founded on herring bones. In 1612 the magistrates of Aberdeen
purchased a fully equipped fishing-vessel in Holland, and engaged a Dutch
master, who was to take charge of it and indoctrinate the Aberdonians in the
catching and curing of fish, but nothing more is heard of the matter; and
half a century afterwards we find Gordon of Straloch rebuking his countrymen
for their want of enterprise, and pointing reproachfully to the fleets of
Dutch busses that were busily at work within sight of the shores of
Aberdeenshire.1 Except in the western sea-lochs few herrings were caught by
Scottish fishermen before the present century, and Adam Smith tells us that
in h;s time it was too common for vessels to be fitted out for the purpose
of catching not the fish but the Government bounty on the tonnage of the
vessels. The herring fishery was introduced at Peterhead in 1820, when
Fraserburgh had just begun to prosecute it on a moderate scale. The first
systematic attempt to establish this fishery in Aberdeen took place in 1836,
but it was not developed here to any great extent till after 1870. Wick was
long the headquarters of the henvig fishery, and the most important fishing
town in Scotland; but when, in 1S70, the fishing began generally to be
carued on in the deep sea, and large decked vessels took the place of the
old-fashioned boats that never went far from the land, the three
Aberdeenshire ports, with their large harbours and their advantageous
geographical position in relation to the open sea, became the great seats of
this fishery, and the resorts, during the season, of boats from all the
minor ports and from England, and of large numbers of men and women—chiefly
from the Hebrides—for temporary employment in connection with the fishing
and curing operations.
Through the herring trade the
old commercial connection between the north-east of Scotland and the Baltic
is continued, the cured fish being, for the most part, consigned to German
and Russian ports. Fraserburgh depends almost exclusively, and Peterhead to
a large extent, on the trade in cured herrings ; while the development of
the general fish-trade, chiefly in connection with trawling and by means of
rapid transport by railway, has in recent years contributed much to the
prosperity of Aberdeen. The salmon-fisheries of the Dee, the Don, the
Deveron, and the Spey long yielded the article of export for which Aberdeen
was principally famous. These fisheries, which have been carried on from
time immemorial, are probably as productive as ever, but they have lost
their relative importance as a source of wealth.
The granite trade is another
characteristic industry of the north-east of Scotland. " Granite is the most
valuable mineral in this county," wrote Dr Skene Keith in 1810, "and has
brought gold into Aberdeen " : but quarrying of granite even for local use,
in common with the cattle trade and the highly developed sea-fisheries, is
of comparatively recent origin. For architectural purposes, as in the
building of the older churches in Aberdeen—the Cathedral of St Machar, the
old Church of St Nicholas, and the Greyfriars' Church—freestone was brought
by sea from the Morayshire coast and the Firth of Forth ; and so far as
granite was used at all in building, it was taken from the abundant supplies
scattered over the surface of the ground in the form of boulders. In 1604 a
patent was granted for five years for opening a quarry in the freedom lands
of Aberdeen to supply the inhabitants with lintels for doors and windows,
but it was not until the period between the two Jacobite rebellions that
James Emslie, of Loanhead, initiated systematic quarrying. The superiority
of the stones from the Loanhead quarries was so manifest in the buildings
erected at this time that quarrying was henceforth an established industry
in the neighbourhood of Aberdeen, which now began to assume its modem aspect
as "the Granite City." Between 1780 and 1790 about six hundred men were
employed in the Aberdeen quarries, chiefly in connection with the demand
from London for paving-stones. Union Bridge, with its great span of 130 feet
and its rise of only 29 feet from the spring of the arch, designed by
Telford, and completed in 1803, is a striking memorial of the perfection to
which granite working had been carried by that time. Great works of local
improvement involving the use of granite— street-making and pier and harbour
extension—were carried out on such a scale as to land the town in temporary
financial embarrassment in 1817, the works being costly and not immediately
remunerative, though the improvements were sound in themselves and for the
ultimate benefit of the city. Large blocks of granite from Aberdeen and
Peterhead came into demand for engineering works, such as the Bell Rock
lighthouse, the foundations of Waterloo Bridge and London Bridge, and
generally where great strength and durability were required. Granite
polishing, which had its beginnings in the workroom of the lapidary, was
begun on a considerable scale for monumental purposes and structural
ornamentation about 1820 by Mr Alexander Macdonald, who thus initiated a new
industry which was to grow and prosper and to form the basis of an export
trade from Aberdeen to all parts of Britain, and to America and the
Colonies.
The several textile trades
are represented in Aberdeen by woollen, linen, cotton, and jute
factories—some of them on a large scale; and the woollen manufacture is also
carried on to an important extent at Keith and on the Ugie. Of comb-making
the city has an almost complete monopoly, paper-making is carried on at four
large establishments on the Don and one on the Dee, and the shipbuilding and
engineering trades are likewise firmly rooted. From the variety and
multiplicity of its interests, Aberdeen suffers less from depressions of
trade than large towns dependent upon a single great industry. It is the
headquarters of two banking establishments, of one of the large fire and
life insurance offices, and of the railway system of the two counties, while
it is the northern terminus of the East and W est Coast railway services
from London. Distillation of whisky is extensively carried on in both
counties, particularly in Banffshire. Agriculture, however, continues to be
the leading industry, and. nowhere is it carried on to better purpose in all
that pertains to the raising and feeding of cattle. |
